Anyway, if there is thing I hate is the concept of sustainability. My wife's fishwrap, HaAretz, details the new curriculum. It will be built around long term planning of ... water. What is the meaning of sustainable management of water resources when the our main source of water are water factories? Why not study the sustainability of some other factory made product based on unlimited raw material, like liquid nitrogen made from air, table salt made from sea water and so on? Even if water should be a legitimate subject (which is not), how it will be studied in a non technical social sciences college specializing in public law, environmental issues and political sciences? Water is now the favorite subject of all kind of vaporous environmental sustainibility bullshit, the main subject-matter in the new religion of greenness. Now you can get a diploma (after paying the tuition) in the Herzliya Interdisciplinary.
As for me, instead of ranting I wonder if me and my camel should join the caravan. Teaching for pay has a long and honorable history: Athens's Academy was a capitalist enterprise of Plato, and was inherited by his niece. Medieval universities (pic) were organized on the corporative model of a collegium (association) of free-lancing teachers. A college will teach everythng there is demand for. The Herzliya people sure made a market research and found that a course in Sustainability will sell, provided it is math free and without complex equations and computer models. Global warming (sans actual atmospheric modelling) is - I presume - another fundamental component in the Sustainability curriculum. Am I against making easy money? Am I not a Mensa Whore? As a bona-fide, published, experienced water professional and teacher, probably I could get a piece of the action. Hmm.
14 comments:
I have friends who have TAed at the IDC and they all report that its students are, to be blunt, the dumbest motherfuckers that ever lived.
To be specific, they are dumb rich kids. בנים של אינסטלטורים
On the hiring climate in Hungary:
This Is Why I Don't Give You A Job
With a follow up post after the backlash:
Am I being antisocial?
Yes it's off topic, but since it's about Hungary...
I don't know if things are going to hell there
or just reverting back to the normal state...
in the nothing ever changes kind of way.
The US has the same problem - (non-Asian) students reject technical curriculums in favor of faddish touchy feely courses that have a "green" or other PC spin and that are very easy to boot - you just write essays spouting back the Party line and you receive top marks. No math required.
When my daughter was touring colleges to decide where she wanted to attend, we visited both Harvard and MIT. At MIT the student tour guides almost all were studying "real" subjects - engineering, physics, etc. At Harvard, almost everyone we talked to had some kind of "soft" liberal artsy or pseudo-scientific major such as sociology. One student mentioned that she had a friend studying physics but that he had written a musical play about physics - apparently just studying physics is not "artsy" enough for Harvard. I get the feeling that universities in China, India, etc. have no problem with students studying purely scientific/technical fields and that as a result they will eat our lunch in the next generation of technology.
K
I am not complaining that half of the students wastes time in soft banalities. I am protesting that will learn sustainable water management in an era when water resources are NOT finite but infinite, and the very concept of water sustainability is meaningless. And that they are pretending to manage Israel's complex water supply system in the abstract, without learning the basics of Maths and Statistics, Fluid Mechanics, Hydrology, Computer Modelling, NPV, IRR, etc.
Don't worry - if you give the water sector to these socialist minded people to manage, the supply will NOT be infinite. Look at Cuba - the place was knee deep in sugar but by the time the Castro brothers are done they will be importing sugar.
K
K,
Student tour guides are both self-selected and selected by the university. They tend to be extroverted, cheerful, social types, and those qualities are better represented in the students of soft fields. I knew a few people who majored in hard sciences at Harvard, and none of them chose or were asked by the university to be tour guides as they tended to be more introverted and nerdy. Also, unlike MIT, Harvard has excellent (though left-leaning) humanities faculties in addition to excellent pure science faculties (only decent engineering faculties), so the place does attract more non-technical students. Why would one attend MIT to major in English literature?
Don't worry - if you give the water sector to these socialist minded people to manage, the supply will NOT be infinite.
I feel in my bones that you are right. But how could they turn sea water into a finite resource? They could, for example, limit pumping "to save the dolphins".
Yes, they definitely will find the way to make water a scarce, rationed, expensive commodity once more.
There is no chance in fighting them. Better I'll join the sustainability train.
I'll be more extremist than they currently are, so I'll be salient and noticed. For example, I'll propose to limit deep breathing, to reduce CO2 pollution and inevitable, fatal, terminal earth warming.
I am already believing in it. I'll bring a carbon di-oxide measuring thing to class, to demonstrate how much the students are polluting Earth and how much could they help Earth by breathing in the yoga way. I'll be famous and will ask for more money for my lectures.
You wouldn't last a week. Your tongue would get you into trouble.
Anon.
They may be too dumb to notice that I shall be teaching "tongue in cheek".
No, on second thought, I cant do it credibly. I cant forbid urinating in the sea because it may be endangering the dolphins.
Where do the dolphins urinate, by the way?
You might point that out.
Anon.
Sacred dolphins's urine purifies seawater, only humans pollute Earth.
Sacred dolphins's urine purifies seawater, only humans pollute Earth.
Correction: Only white humans pollute the earth.
Anon.
Correction accepted. Natives shitting in the river, say 80 million Egyptians in the Nile, 500 Hindus in the Indus, 100 million Nigerians in the Niger, are only adding natural fertilizer to the ecosphere.
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