Tag Archives: University

Commentary

Does going to university necessarily educate you and provide you with job skills?

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The Heritage Foundation explains why universities don’t necessarily provide students with a useful education, at least in the non-STEM areas.

Excerpt:

Guess how many top-tier universities offer a course on Lady Gaga? Four! The University of Virginia, the University of South Carolina, Wake Forest University, and Arizona State University all now offer semester-long explorations of Lady Gaga’s apparently profound influence—since 2007—on music, fashion, and the LGBT lifestyle. Yet none of these universities requires students to take a course in U.S. history before graduation. Professors and faculty at top-ranked institutions are giving preference to frivolous classes at the expense of true education.

In a new study by the National Association of Scholars, only one in 75 top universities required students to study western civilization. In 1964, more than half required students take a two-semester course that covered the history of western civilization from Greece to the modern era. The other half of universities required courses that guaranteed graduates understood the history of their society. But studying the foundations of our society no longer seems to be a priority for American universities.

It is not just studying western civilization that has been tossed out the window. There is a dearth in all general requirements. Asking “What Will They Learn,” the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has found that only 20 percent of universities require students to take a U.S. government or history class. Only 5 percent require students to take a class in economics. Many, including top liberal arts colleges, have no general education requirements. With this setup, it is increasingly unlikely that college graduates will leave their alma maters even grasping the basics.

I recommend going to university and I have the BS and MS in computer science, myself.  But if, you have a child in university, my advice is to 1) monitor every course they choose, and 2) have a career mentor meet with them periodically to make sure that what they are learning is what is actually needed in the field.

Regarding the general need for history and economics, I think this is something that it might be better for students to learn before they get to university. It’s probably safer to learn history on your own, and then just take economics. I would try to avoid any course where the teacher can teach their point of view and isolate it from reality. Stick with math, science, engineering and physics.

News

Gay student gets Christian campus club suspended at SUNY Buffalo

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From Christian Post.

Full text:

The State University of New York-Buffalo (SUNY Buffalo) is looking into allegations that a Christian campus group is in violation of school policy and the law by requiring its leaders to sign a faith-based statement.

This week’s investigation by a committee of the Student Association comes after sophomore Steven Jackson stepped down from a leadership position with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship over differing views on sexuality.

JoAnna Datz, president of the Student Association at SUNY Buffalo, told The Christian Post Wednesday that “the [investigative] committee has been meeting and collecting objective information, reviewing the Student Association Constitution, clubs documents, and just collecting information.”

She said there is a lot of information that the senators need to be educated on regarding what happened between Jackson and the club.

On Friday, the university’s newspaper, The Spectrum, reported on a letter sent to InterVarsity’s executive board informing the group of its suspension. It stated: “All peripheral privileges afforded to Student Association clubs are revoked for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship until further notice.”

[…]Jackson served as InterVarsity’s treasurer and is openly gay.

Datz told The Christian Post that when a club is formed at SUNY Buffalo their constitution is reviewed before they can become recognized. So originally InterVarsity’s constitution was approved. But if they made any changes since its inception, none of those have been reviewed by the SA. It wasn’t until last year, Datz said, that a rule was put in place that any changes to club constitutions must be reviewed.

The investigation committee will be looking over InterVarsity’s constitution. The campus group requires leaders to be in agreement with its doctrinal statement, purpose statement, and living a life of Christian integrity. Membership, however, is open to all.

The requirement that leaders sign a certain set of beliefs is at the heart of the controversy. Datz said this week they have also been debating the differences between membership and leadership in this particular case.

Jim Lundgren, director of Collegiate Ministries for Intervarsity, stressed to The Christian Post that the organization does not discriminate based on sexual orientation. In Jackson’s case, however, “he decided to pursue a sexually active homosexual relationship” and InterVarsity doesn’t affirm a sexually active relationship outside of marriage.

SA’s executive board is expected to make a decision this coming Sunday at their meeting.

If InterVarsity is found to be in violation of antidiscrimination policies, Datz said the senate could choose to derecognize them as a club, take away their funding or require that they change their constitution.

But now I turn to the underlying problem.

Some Christians don’t think there is a problem with that

The Biblical standard is no sex before or outside of marriage and marriage is defined as being between one man and one woman. In general, even divorce isn’t permitted. That’s what Christians believe about sex. So what happens when someone who doesn’t believe that wants to join a Christian organization in a leadership capacity?

Christians are not being mean when they exclude a person from an assembly of Christians because of a public, unrepented, sinful lifestyle.

Look at 1 Cor 5:

1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man is sleeping with his father’s wife.

2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?

3 For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this.

4 So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit, and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5 hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

 6 Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?

7 Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed.

8 Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

 9 I wrote to you in my letter not to associate with sexually immoral people— 

10 not at all meaning the people of this world who are immoral, or the greedy and swindlers, or idolaters. In that case you would have to leave this world. 

11But now I am writing to you that you must not associate with anyone who claims to be a brother or sister but is sexually immoral or greedy, an idolater or slanderer, a drunkard or swindler. Do not even eat with such people.

 12 What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? 

13 God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”

So, this might be a surprise to many of you, but there is actually a lot of support for the idea of shunning someone who claims to be a Christian, yet who openly commits to a lifestyle that opposes the Bible’s moral standards. 1 Cor 5 actuallysays that it is ok to get along with non-Christian sinners, and not OK to get along with people who claim to be Christians but who are in some serious sinful situation that they are not sorry about at all. I think it’s a great idea to be friends with people who are non-Christian, and to treat them nicely, so long as they know that we disagree with them on certain issues and they are OK with letting us do that. Everyone sins – but Christians shouldn’t sin unrepentantly and repeatedly and then try to justify it as consistent with Christianity. But non-Christians are exempt from Christian moral rules, obviously.

What annoys me is when nice “Christians” try to make me feel guilty for taking the Bible seriously on sexual morality. Just because you want to think of yourself as “nice” according to the standards of the age, and you want non-Christians to like you and ask you out with them to movies, it doesn’t mean that suddenly it has become OK to redefine the Bible to mean what you want it to mean. Those rules are there for a reason, and your job is to adapt your views and defend them. You aren’t in charge.

The problem is that Christianity has been redefined so that people in the Church now think that their job is to sing happy songs, feel good, and then go out into the world telling everyone that the Bible has nothing at all to say about right and wrong. Instead of telling people “you are free to do what you like, but doing X is not wise or moral”, now we say “whatever you want to do is fine with me, as long as you feel good”. We want to be liked by men more than we want to be liked by God.

Commentary

Law schools are not preparing law students to practice law

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The New York Times explains why law school may not be worth the money.

Excerpt:

 The lesson today — the ins and outs of closing a deal — seems lifted from Corporate Lawyering 101.

“How do you get a merger done?” asks Scott B. Connolly, an attorney.

There is silence from three well-dressed people in their early 20s, sitting at a conference table in a downtown building here last month.

“What steps would you need to take to accomplish a merger?” Mr. Connolly prods.

After a pause, a participant gives it a shot: “You buy all the stock of one company. Is that what you need?”

“That’s a stock acquisition,” Mr. Connolly says. “The question is, when you close a merger, how does that deal get done?”

The answer — draft a certificate of merger and file it with the secretary of state — is part of a crash course in legal training. But the three people taking notes are not students. They are associates at a law firm called Drinker Biddle & Reath, hired to handle corporate transactions. And they have each spent three years and as much as $150,000 for a legal degree.

What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”

So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime.

“The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. “They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.”

[…]Consider, for instance, Contracts, a first-year staple. It is one of many that originated in the Langdell era and endures today. In it, students will typically encounter such classics as Hadley v. Baxendale, an 1854 dispute about financial damages caused by the late delivery of a crankshaft to a British miller.

Here is what students will rarely encounter in Contracts: actual contracts, the sort that lawyers need to draft and file. Likewise, Criminal Procedure class is normally filled with case studies about common law crimes — like murder and theft — but hardly mentions plea bargaining, even though a vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by that method.

[…]“We should be teaching what is really going on in the legal system,” says Edward L. Rubin, a professor and former dean at the Vanderbilt Law School, “not what was going on in the 1870s, when much of the legal curriculum was put in place.”

This is one of the reasons why I give the advice I do about studying STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Universities are politicized. They are run by people who want to push a secular leftist ideology. For such people, the more isolated you can be from feedback from the real world, the better. And that is why it is often (but not always) useless to study anything that isn’t STEM. If you’re going to the university at all, study STEM areas. That is, if your goal is to actually make money so you can support a family.

So you have two choices, in my view. Trade school/apprenticeship right out of high school. Or study STEM areas in university. That’s it.

A friend of mine who is a software engineer was thinking of doing an MBA a while back, and then decided on a Masters in securities and investing. I think that’s the right way to go. Stay as far away from anything that can be politicized as possible. Don’t give people who are embarked on perpetual adolescence any of your money (than they already get through taxpayer-funded research subsidies).