251–260 of 551 posts
Colleges and universities are like little countries, rarely answer to anyone and focused on their own insular practices.
That's true of a lot of things. You really can't allow a system to police itself. Once you allow that, you've essentially given them carte blanche to run a fiefdom.
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The problem is that all hosting is done by companies trying to make a profit. When you say host it yourself, likely you mean - Build your own website. A few issues with this line of thinking - Web hosting companies are attacked for hosting controversial speech all the time (AWS stopped hosting Parler when they were put on blast) - The infrastructure required for hosting large controversial websites can also be made u…
I disagree with this sentiment: At some point our governing body, which exists to shape society according to our collective wishes, needs to step in and hold the hands of these companies and make them behave in accordance with American values There is a list of things the government should to. "Shape society" is not one of them. At the end of the day, companies can and will decide what's profitable for them to do. If…
All actions of government shape society. Tax break for charitable contributions? Laws permitting or forbidding certain medical procedures? Drawing lines for voting districts?
A completely laissez-faire attitude leads to landlords not renting apartments to people explicitly because of their skin color and blatant, explicit discrimination in hiring.
I don't want to live in that world.
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A lot of people are looking for an all controlling force in the country or world instead, I see a lot of demigods that rule their domain, curating complete autonomy as long as they stay within the confines they finessed
Anybody working in University IT can attest to this :-)
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My partner works at a major U in the US. Top 200ish. They are solely focused on revenue. Teacher pay rarely raised, but that new upgrade for the stadium at a cool $120m, seems like a great idea. FFS, her dept went past the paper budget for one semester, about 5 years ago. The resolution? Do without paper until the next semester. That's what students insane tuition prices bought them. Apathy over education.
Why are they so focused on that? It seems like a great way to drive a school into the ground.
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My partner works at a major U in the US. Top 200ish. They are solely focused on revenue. Teacher pay rarely raised, but that new upgrade for the stadium at a cool $120m, seems like a great idea. FFS, her dept went past the paper budget for one semester, about 5 years ago. The resolution? Do without paper until the next semester. That's what students insane tuition prices bought them. Apathy over education.
> Teacher pay rarely raised There's an oversupply of most PhDs, so there's no need to raise their pay. And that's for professors. Grad students that teach are practically free.
Colleges and universities are like little countries, rarely answer to anyone and focused on their own insular practices.
A lot of people are looking for an all controlling force in the country or world instead, I see a lot of demigods that rule their domain, curating complete autonomy as long as they stay within the confines they finessed
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There's a joke from a comedian I forget if it is L̶o̶u̶i̶s̶ ̶C̶K̶ George Carlin o̶r̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶. But basically is along the lines that you don't have explicitly collude when you all come from the same backgrounds. The interests are aligned already. It's pointing out that representatives need to actually be from representative populations of people. But he did it in a funny way, this comment really isn't. Edit: thanks lo…
George Carlin, and he wasn't joking. This was a point he made during an interview in all seriousness.