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2 responses to “Thinking on a Higher Plane about Higher Education”

1. 

   CrazyJD

   June 21, 2017

   Government generally is very much like the military: They both fight the last war, not the current one. With few exceptions, the incentives in public service are against up-to-date thinking. The private sector can on occasion be as bad, particularly in near monopoly situations. You will remember the old saw among IT procurement professionals: “Nobody ever got fired for buying Big Blue.” Like Microsoft Windows, however, the near monopoly enjoyed by Big Blue had more to do with the establishment of a vast user base rather than any monopolistic practices, as proven by the demise of DOJ’s anti-trust case against Big Blue. The free market and lateral thinking (small decentralized PC’s and networks instead of mainframes) was more responsible for Big Blue’s downfall as a major player than anything else.

   See also, Jason Riley’s interview with Ben Carson in today’s WSJ. Carson encountered huge resistance when he advocated and tried new approaches to surgery for babies born with achondroplasia, a common form of dwarfism. Other doctors complained that he was a wild man. His approach is now standard procedure. Carson’s comment: “People don’t like change”. Quaere: would he have been allowed to do what he did under a single payer government system?

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2. 

   Reed Fawell 3rd

   June 21, 2017

   This is a very fine article. Mr. Moret, who we have encountered here recently before, is obviously a very talented, out of the box practical thinker and doer. The increasingly rare public servant who focuses on what is going on in the real world so as to devise ways to fix real everyday problems that afflict everyday people. This is an exceedingly rare commodity today.

   In fact, for example, most leaders of the higher education establishment today in far too many institutions have largely abandoned the education of the students at all levels in order to shift institutional resources, including their own time and effort, to pursue their own personal gain. This, for example, was obviously the primary motivating force behind the recent short sighted and extremely unbalanced focus of STEM “education” at UVA found in a cooked up report that had little to do with educating students to deal with the real world but rather to promote the personal interests, advancement and promotion of special interests within the Higher education establishment, namely the private interests of a growing segment of senior faculty and administrators and their sponsors and abettors (who too often are private commercial and political interests) trying to hijack public policy and monies for private gain. And these interests at the moment are winning big time.

   Consider that the privately funded study likely done at the instigation of UVA senior Administrators concluded that the teaching of English writing, English literature, History, and philosophy was inefficient and counter-productive because in forced students and faculty to teach how to use and deploy words, and think in words, instead using the “far more efficient” numbers. Hence UVA’s resources (money, people, time and attention) should be reallocated from Traditional undergraduate arts and sciences to STEM research, and Big Classroom teaching promoting it through focus on numbers and equations instead of words. Contrast that to Moret’s thinking and approach as explained in above article.

   Of course Moret’s thinking goes far beyond this narrow misguided report on the efficiency of education students in STEM. Its as if he has spent some time on a military learning how the military, the Marines anyway, teach young people to do meaningful work, that is perform at a very high level jobs critically needed to keep our nation safe. Virginia is lucky to have Mr. Moret aboard.

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