Wednesday, October 07, 2009

New Nutty Northwestern Criticism of Academia

Yesterday, the Northwestern ran an editorial that is a tongue-in-cheek criticism of a UWMadison business professor who bought DVDs to show in his class.

The jocular nature of the commentary--ha-ha Seinfeld would be better--covers another slam of our profession.

They have no idea about what the prof. teaches, but only see fit to cast aspersions. As you can see from the few comments here is that you get outrage that professors waste "our" money like this.

It is a far cry from equating professors to Jeffrey Dahmer, but it continues their theme of anti-intellectualism.


Edit: Link is now fixed! Thanks to the commenter who noticed!

2 comments:

XBadger said...

The link to the editorial is broken.

Douglas McCloud said...

Winneblogo:

C'mon, the editorial isn't a slam professional educators, it is a slam on the questionable purchasing practice of an educator. The NW could've picked damn near ANY profession and highlighted questionable spending practices. Higher ed is just the low hanging fruit.

But really let us be objective about teaching 'business and management' as this prof said he/she needed dvd's of Get Smart, The Love Boat, Family Ties: there is a point where our teaching freedom strains public credibility and this is it. Show me the relevance of a 40+ year old comedy to teaching current trends in business and I'll stifle (might just as well reference another old comedy).

But as I'm not in COB perhaps Al, Burk or Brian might want to cast an opinion on this.