<story><title>Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703720504575377140202306852.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexandros</author><text>&quot;A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this &quot;research&quot; is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild&apos;s need to credentialize its members.&quot;&lt;p&gt;A glance? Really? Judging the life&apos;s work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a &apos;glance&apos;? It&apos;s interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I&apos;ve never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pragmatic</author><text>See another article currently on the front page:&lt;p&gt;Realtime Linux: academia v. reality &lt;a href=&quot;http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/397422/27eef125e03b8a2d/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;&quot;I actually took the time to spend a day at a university where I could gain access to IEEE papers without wasting my private money. I picked out twenty recent realtime related papers and did a quick survey. Twelve of the papers were a rehash of well-known and well-researched topics, and at least half of them were badly written as well. From the remaining eight papers, six were micro improvements based on previous papers where I had a hard time figuring out why the papers had been written at all. One of those was merely describing the effects of converting a constant which influences resource partitioning into a runtime configurable variable. So that left two papers which seemed actually worthwhile to read in detail. Funny enough, I had already read one of those papers as it was publicly accessible in a slightly modified form.&lt;p&gt;That survey really convinced me to stay away from IEEE forever and to consider the university ranking system even more suspicious.&quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>Colleges Serve the People Who Work There, Not the Students</title><url>http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703720504575377140202306852.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_h</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>alexandros</author><text>&quot;A glance at scholarly journals or university-press catalogs might make one wonder how much of this &quot;research&quot; is advancing knowledge and how much is part of a guild&apos;s need to credentialize its members.&quot;&lt;p&gt;A glance? Really? Judging the life&apos;s work of a few thousand people who got into academia to do research is easily judged in a &apos;glance&apos;? It&apos;s interesting that some would like universities to be little more than vocational training programs, but I&apos;ve never seen such dismissal of the work produced by academia in such a high profile outlet, with no evidence to back it up whatsoever.&lt;p&gt;EDIT: Reading further, I see that they did look more closely.. at sociology journals. Why the strange choice? Biology, computing, medicine, physics not interesting enough?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>scott_s</author><text>I noticed that too, and I wondered if they were even capable of making that judgement. I looked up their backgrounds: the review writer is an English professor at Emory; one of the book authors is a Professor Emeritus in the Political Science Department at Queens College in NY.&lt;p&gt;This continues the tendency I&apos;ve seen elsewhere, which is to lump science and engineering education and research in with humanities when criticizing higher education.</text></comment>