> Alan Rudy wrote:
>
>> What struck me about the quote, and the context added by others, is it
>> sounds an awful lot like the sciency-mathy-techy,
>> anti-humanities-arts-and-social sciences terrain of the vast majority
>> American educational leaders. I guess "American democracy" and the
>> "Iranian
>> Revolution" each need (and don't see the need for) the same stuff to
>> succeed, a sad comment on both.
>>
>
> I'm not sure who you who consider "American educational leaders", but very
> few top-level administrators in our educational system have graduate degrees
> in science or math. Frankly, I wish we had more "sciency-mathy-techy"
> people leading our educational institutions; there would be far more
> decisions based on critical analysis of relevant data.
>
> Let's be clear: the whole NLCB high stakes testing thing is not driven by
> sciency-mathy-techies. It's driven by political hacks who are more or less
> ignorant about good scientific measurement practices.
>
> Miles
>
>
I'm not anti-science, math or tech and couldn't agree more that better
education in these areas would be faboo. Nor do I disagree that US ed
leaders are generally not from the sciences, maths or techs. At the same
time, I think those hacks listen a great deal to political and economic
leaders who believe that science, math and tech are the keys to progress...
and to faculty, representatives, business leaders and pundits who believe
science and tech education is far far more important to a globally
competitive and dominant nation than the social sciences or humanities.
On that front, knowing a whole raft of science and tech faculty from my time at MSU, my work on the Imperial Valley and my study of the Berkeley-Novartis agreement, I have absolutely no idea why you have faith in science, math or tech people defining "relevant data" properly. The folks in leadership academic and administrative positions I've worked with and interviewed prioritize grantwriting, bringing in overhead costs, mainstream publication, normal science, technology transfer and buying out teaching time while arguing for greater institutional prioritization of scitech infrastructures and greater power for scitech, engineering and applied disciplines and colleges. Perhaps at MIT, CalTech and the University of Chicago scimathtechies appreciate a diverse curriculum, at most places I know (and many where I've interviewed across the Research I-to-liberal arts college spectrum) this has clearly not been the case.