Lawrence Krauss: "Universities have become big businesses... As a result, university administrators are chosen based on fundraising and public relations skills rather than intellectual backbone. They thus tend to be less inclined to buck the enormous pressures challenging academic integrity."

https://www.pairagraph.com/dialogue/a4ddd0eddd034bc7aacc32af36bf4c88/3

Lawrence Krauss: "One of the biggest pressures on administrators is the need to maintain bloated self-perpetuating bureaucracies. It is not uncommon for a university's administrative budget to exceed the budget for faculty salaries, or student support.

What can be done to reverse this slide? Fewer Universities, with far smaller bureaucracies would reduce competition for scarce funds and the need for administrators to focus on fund raising rather than academic integrity. Also, as the recent pandemic has made clear, many students would benefit more from going to community college rather than spending 4 years not being intellectual challenged at universities from which they may graduate with few practical skills. Universities should not be diploma mills, with budgets driven not by the demands of research and scholarship, but by, say, football revenues.

Openly reaffirming that Universities are communities of learning and research excellence, driven by free inquiry—no matter what—is a good first step, followed by promoting educational leaders who are up to the task of defending these communities. Students' intellects need to be challenged, at the expense of comfort, if necessary. We must not cancel Beethoven or Newton or Feynman, but instead freely debate and explore the full canon of humanity's greatest ideas and discoveries."

Submitted September 26, 2020 at 11:42AM by lawschool33 https://ift.tt/3mTY8Zo