Jacob Christensen

Apologies to Brian Leiter for simply stealing an entire post but it is short and he is spot on here:

UK Philosophers Tackle the “Business Model” Being Forced on British Universities

Their blog is here. It deserves a wide readership; the issues it raises are not peculiar to the UK, though, ironically, because there is no meaningful private sector in higher education in Britain it is proving far easier for the government there to enforce the ‘business model’ on all universities. In the U.S., at least, the elite private universities can actually exploit their market position (in the market for prestige and certification) to uphold non-business models of learning, and by doing so they create some pressures for the elite public sector of higher education to do the same.

The blog Leiter refers to is here. A Danish parallel is here.

I totally agree with Leiter. When European politicians have called for, and implemented, an “Americanisation” of research and higher education, they have focused on the narrowly business-oriented aspects – valuable research is applied research, higher education is vocational education. There is nothing wrong with research being applied in real life (this is written on a computer, m’kay?) or students gaining real-life qualifications, but the point of having universities instead of R’n'D departments and vocational colleges disappears when public universities are put under a top-down market-focused management regime.

Equally, nobody considers that Yale, Harvard and the like are not typical US institutions of higher education – the question of the proper role of colleges and what our friends in the US call teaching universities are never addressed. Heck, unlike European university managers the Americans even talk about liberal arts colleges.

But enough of the yammering. In a few years time, there should be plenty of work to do for adventurous (American) policy analysts in doing post-mortems on European higher education policies.

This just keeps getting better and better: Now Jesper Langballe, MP for the Danish People’s Party explains that the party isn’t anti-Muslim but anti-Islamic.

Er, yes. Let us do a search for “Muslim” on Wikipedia:

A Muslim (Arabic: ?????) is an adherent of the religion of Islam.

And if you do a search for Islam, this is the result:

An adherent of Islam is known as a Muslim, meaning “one who submits (to God)”

If you try Langballe’s argument on Christianity and Judaism, you get this:

I’m not anti-Semitic, just anti-Jewish

and even better

I’m not anti-Christian, just anti-Christian

The Humpty-Dumpty approach will not work here – especially not as the DPP, as noted elsewhere, usually conflates Islam, Islamist and Fundamentalist (Muslim). In the real world there are lots of issues about Christianity, post-Christianity, Islam and the like to discuss, but for now I am grateful to the good people of Crooked Timber for the tag “boneheaded stupidity” which I hope they won’t mind me borrowing.

• Yoonsoo Lee – Beth Mowry: Gender Differences in Employment Statistics :: Yoonsoo Lee and Beth Mowry :: Economic Trends :: 05.13.08 :: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland
  [The unemployment rate] does not account for discouraged workers, workers who want a job but are not currently looking due to adverse job market conditions, or part-timers who would like full-time work if it were available.
  (tags: usa labourmarket research economics)

Boy, this is getting funny: In an op-ed in Jyllands-Posten Ralf Pittelkow calls for integration minister Birthe Rønn Hornbech to resign. And as everybody in Denmark knows, Pittelkow is Mr. Karen Jespersen.

She is the welfare minister, in case you wondered. Representing the Left Socialists Social Democrats Liberals.

The question is who the mysterious link is. I know Kurrild-Klitgaard in real life, but is the link also a real life connection? In real life, I need three intermediate links to get to George W. Bush. Strange, but true.