In academia, it seems, nothing succeeds like failure.
Of course, the remedies for the maladies that afflict us are concocted within academic walls. Unfortunately, once they are tried and fail, adding to the dilemmas, they get recycled on campus even as the failed theories accumulate negative repercussions when put into practice in the real world.
For example, my alma mater, the University of Scranton, is hosting as a guest lecturer the author of Why Nations Fail, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu, whose suggestions for avoiding failure are to:
- Encourage skilled foreign workers to work and settle in the United States.
- Foster the commercialization of innovation. (He means academic innovation.)
- Focus on green technology, the next area that has the best promise of creating a platform for more innovation.
With all due respect, we’ve been actively engaged in all of the above:
- We’ve been importing guest workers to fill manufacturing jobs that are going begging even in the midst of unprecedented unemployment, according to a spokesperson from the Department of Labor with no appreciable impact on either employment or innovation, save for innovatively bypassing the America’s labor force to solve a hiring shortage. “There are 12 million manufacturing jobs, most of them unfilled, because people don’t have the skills,” Jay Timmons of the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) said at The Atlantic Forum. Indeed, Jane Oates, Assistant Secretary at the U. S. Department of Labor (DOL) claims that guest workers from abroad are filling some of those jobs.
- 2. “University engagement in commercial activities could be called the ‘Gatorade Syndrome,’” John Palateillo pointed out in a special report for Accuracy in Academia. “Ever since professors at the University of Florida invented the popular sports drink to hydrate football players practicing in the heat, academicians have been trying to find the next big discovery. Most simply consume tax dollars, divert scarce resources including tuition, and fail to turn profits. These university-sponsored enterprises have cost their schools millions, exacerbating an unaffordable tuition system that has made a college education a financial burden, if not impossibility, for most students and their parents.” Palatiello is President of the Business Coalition for Fair Competition, a coalition of firms, organizations and individuals fighting unfair government-sponsored competition with private enterprise.
- 3. Think Solyndra. Moreover, we pointed out last April that the green jobs universities are promising their students don’t exist no matter how far you take the “if you build it, they will come” approach with stimulus funding. “And I have to tell you that there is anger [among students] when we tell them that green jobs are going to be there and they aren’t,” Robert Templin, president of Northern Virginia Community College said last week. In a recent appearance here at the Mayflower Hotel, U. S. Senator Jim DeMint, R-S. C., asserted that solar companies could make it in the free market. When pressed, Senator DeMint admitted that he based his assertion on conversations he has had with solar company executives.
Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.
If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail mal.kline@academia.org
