At last college professors have found a way to supplement their income, and perhaps to steal back some of the tuition dollars that traditionally head right to the pocket of deans.
The new method is this: assign essays, threaten to use Turnitin, software (which did not exist in pre-Biden days) which exposes plagiarism and thus encourages original writing, and then hope the kiddies find their way to UnemployedProfessors.com, a site which sells original essays written by professors to students who are too busy acquiring “social knowledge”, as one school put it.
Incidentally, besides checking for cheating, Turnitin also automatically grades papers, relieving professors of that dull duty, too.
“Unemployed” Professors is unabashed in its description. Step 1 of the process is to “Get a lame-ass project from your Professor,” an acknowledgement that much of college life is mere time filling. Step 2 is to enter the project into the site. Step 3 is “PARTY!”, which by coincidence is also Step 5.
They will write essays, lab reports, even dissertations. They will do math, physics, and statistics homework. They will write computer programs and then claim that, as they write your resume, that you know how to write computer programs. The student is left only one chore: clicking the payment button. Burdens!
The site has a blog which tells prospective clients why its services are superior to its many competitors. It has such entries as “Don’t Hate Da Playa; Hate Da Game” and “How to Sleep with Your Professor.”
It should be obvious that we have Reached The End. There is nowhere left to descend to. Some thought the nadir was in the student riots of the 1960s. Some pointed to the open enrollment policies of the 1970s. Others posited the creation of “Studies” degrees (Gender studies, Black studies, etc.) in the 1990s. But the end was not yet.
It must now be clear that when professors both assign and perform the work (while automatically grading it), and charge for both, we have bottomed out.
Therefore, it is time to admit that classical “liberal” education is finished.
The solution is obvious. Beginning in 2016 (to allow everybody now in time to finish), every high school graduate is to be automatically awarded, by our most beneficent government, a diploma stating that he or she has completed college. The diplomas shall all read “Harvard”, so that nobody can be accused of class bias. The student must only foot the printing and shipping and handling charges of their degree.
Think of the vast savings! Upwards of a quarter-million dollars per student, all of which can be left in their and in their parents’ pockets, to be spent on less moribund areas of our economy.
The majority of our children will be satisfied with their well deserved degrees. And kids who still want to learn what a quark is, or how to titrate, or why Socrates is mortal, or how Constantinople derived its name, or what a div, grad, and curl are, can enroll in the one- to two-year trade schools which teach these subjects, schools which will be created from the remnants of the old colleges and universities, institutions which will not award “degrees”, but will issue letters swearing their students know the material.
And what of the mass of then truly unemployed professors of “Theory”, “Studies” and the like? Ship them to, say, Egypt and Libya and make them members of its bureaucracy. What better punishment for their recent ill behavior?
Nothing shocks me any more. But now we can move to entrance exams which are much superior to the exit type. I am referring to entrance to a profession as administered by those with a stake in the skills required (i.e. the employers). Want to be a lawyer, engineer, teacher, plumber, etc: write this bar exam and maybe work as an apprentice (intern) for awhile and then we will think about hiring the best of the lot. How you get your skills is up to you and whatever prep school is up to the task. Oral exams have also been suggested as an improvement over the written kind.
From the age of ten I had to do both oral and written exams in every subject all trough the years. Except in phys-ed. In that inconsequential central European country. Worked very well.
“Professor” is a job title not a profession, so there is no such thing as an “unemployed professor”. Unemployed ex-professor maybe; unemployed teacher, and unemployed statistician are also quite plausible. But not “unemployed professor”.
Rodney Dangerfield foretold this in Back to School…
Don’t forget the shirts. You have to have tee-shirts and sweat shirts. Just print Harvard on the front.
bob,
Excellent idea. Like vanity license plates: another form of voluntary taxation, the best kind.
Yes, certainly professors, and mass education, are becoming rather superfluous in the kind of society that is shaping up. But one reason professors are superfluous may be that the range of permissible discussion in most disciplines has become narrower and narrower. If this table is the available surface of discussion, you reduce it to a square inch at the lower right hand corner. The rest is out of bounds, or the domain of official lunacy. But within that square inch, let the debate rage! Professors are household servants of the system. Given the narrow confines within which they are allowed to dance (no funding for unorthodox or threatening explorations) it is no wonder they engage in tons of abysmally silly exercises. Professor Stephen Lewandowsky of the University of Western Australia receives grants of 1.7 million dollars to engage in totally absurd research, such as “psychological†internet surveys attempting to demonstrate that belief in the fakery of the moon landings is related to skepticism on climate change alarmism. I suppose there are all kinds of professors doing these kinds of things in all fields just because that’s where the grant money is.
This is by no means limited to climate. In economics, if you try to depart from the allowed square inch of doctrinal “free market†pieties, you get no money and no job. In physics, you are much better off following the strings. In petroleum geology, don’t even think of asking for money to research the perfectly plausible theory of abiotic hydrocarbons (read for example The Hot Deep Biosphere by the brilliant Thomas Gold).
I’ve just read this letter by a Russian who recently emigrated to the US, to another ex-Russian (blogger Dmitry Orlov) who emigrated to the US at the age of 12, right before the collapse of the USSR. Originally written in Russian, it was translated and published by Orlov on his site. Despite the fact that I don’t necessarily agree with the resource-depletion scenario they believe in as a cause for impending societal collapse in the US, I do agree that some kind of societal collapse appears to be underway, and it seems to me the main causes are economic ideology and the unhinged glorification of primal greed as the only regulating mechanism. Some kind of insanity seems to have gotten hold of the system at the top. The goal seems to be attaining the models proposed by some developping nations where the wealthy live in fortifications with private armies. But the correspondent who writes to Dmitry concentrates on his observations about madness at the bottom, which is what he can observe first hand. This is a very interesting letter, if only because it affords the pleasure of crystal clear eavesdropping on how an immigrant talks to a fellow immigrant from the same country about his impressions of their adoptive country.
I am copying it below.
http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2010/03/corn-madness.html
Another guest post. Translated from the Russian by Your Humble Narrator. It’s a letter sent in by one young, once optimistic Russian who finds himself marooned in some blighted Boston exurb in southern New Hampshire.
Dear Dmitry,
I hope you don’t mind that this is in Russian. I think that this way I can be more completely honest. I am a relatively recent graduate of one of the many faceless post-Soviet institutions of higher learning, with a degree in philosophy. Last year I moved to the USA and married an American woman.
The question of when the modern capitalist system is going to collapse has interested me since my student years, and I have approached it from various directions: from the commonplace conspiracy theories to the serious works of Oswald Spengler and Noam Chomsky. Unfortunately, I still can’t fathom what it is that is keeping this system going.
My wife is a very pleasant woman, but a typical white conservative American. Whenever any political question comes up, she starts ranting about the Constitution and calling herself a libertarian conservative and a constitutionalist. I used to think that she is well-educated and understands what she is talking about. In fact, she is the one who introduced me to the US, and I once believed everything she told me about it. But as I found out later, she understands nothing about politics, and just repeats various bits of populist nonsense spouted by Severin, O’Reilly, Limbaugh and other mass media clowns. Well, I am not going to try to prove to my wife that she is wrong on a subject that I don’t quite understand myself. After all, she is a good wife. And so I try to steer clear of any political questions when I am with the family, although I do not always succeed. Perhaps if I had a copy of your book, it would help me explain myself to her better, but our family was one of the first to be flattened by the real estate market collapse. My wife went bankrupt, lost her bank account, house, job and the rest a while before I came here, and so we can’t buy anything online.
In the talk you gave at the conference in Ireland you mentioned that there are certain regions of the US where the common people only eat garbage food from places like Walmart, which consists of artificial colors and flavors and corn, and that such a diet makes them “a little bit crazy.” To my utter disappointment, I have to entirely agree with you. Various witty Russian commentators love to heap ridicule on the “dumb Americans” and on the USA as a generally stupid country. But if they spent a bit of time living here and paid closer attention, they would realize that it is not the low cultural level that distinguishes Americans from, say, Russians: both are, on average, quite beastly. But even when I’ve visited here before, as a student, my first impression was of a country that is full of madmen, ranging from somewhat mentally competent to total lunatics. And the further south I traveled, the more obvious this became. At first I even marveled at this, thinking, look at how intoxicating the spirit of liberty can be! But now I understand that this is a catastrophe, that American society is brainwashed and alienated in the extreme, and that all that’s left for Americans to do is to play each other for the suckers that they have become.
Unfortunately, I feel the pernicious influence of all this on my own family right here and now. You don’t have to be a brilliant visionary to realize that in the current situation all these endless suburbs, built on the North American model, are slowly but surely turning into mass graves for the millions of former members of the middle class. Those that do not turn into mass graves will become nature preserves – stocked with wild animals that were once human. My family is turning feral under my very eyes. Lack of resources has forced us to live according to the Soviet model – three generations under one roof. There are six of us, of which only one works, who is, consequently, exasperated and embittered. The rest of the household is gradually going insane from idleness and boredom. The television is never turned off. The female side of the family has been sucked into social networks and associated toys. Everyone is cultivating their own special psychosis, and periodically turns vicious. In these suburbs, a person without a car is as if without legs, and joblessness does not allow any of us to earn money for gas, and so the house is almost completely isolated from the outside world. The only information that seeps in comes from the lying mass media. And I understand that millions of families throughout America live this way! This is how people turn into “teabaggers,” while their children join street gangs.
For me, as for you, this is the second collapse. You had left USSR before it happened, while I was there to observe it as a child. I saw what happened when people were finally told that they were being had for seventy-odd years, and were offered a candy bar as consolation. Now, after all this, Russian society is finished. It grieves me to see the faces of Americans, who still believe something and wave their Constitution about, and to know that the same thing is about to happen to them. I think that the model which you have proposed will allow us to confront and to survive this collapse with dignity.
Yevgeny
New Hampshire
“every high school graduate is to be automatically awarded, by our most beneficent government, a diploma stating that he or she has completed college. The diplomas shall all read “Harvardâ€, so that nobody can be accused of class bias.”
That would be fair.
“The student must only foot the printing and shipping and handling charges of their degree.”
Goodness! Don’t you realize how discrimintory this policy is!
When existence becomes subsistence resistance becomes non-existent.
If you act now, for no extra charge, only shipping and handling, you can get a master degree. But wait! Order in the next half hour and we will add a phd at no extra charge, just shipping and handling.
The school idea has already, pretty much, been dreamed up already (by Fr. Guido Sarducci): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO8x8eoU3L4
This might be a sting operation.
If it isn’t, it should be.