Six Years and Counting:

This marks the sixth anniversary of my first entry on the site. Happy anniversary, Jim! ("You blowhard!" I'm quoting my father here.)

Currently, we are waiting for something important to happen, but because it is president's day—is that a real holiday—nothing will happen until tomorrow. Fortunately, the banks were closed and couldn't do anything untoward to further alienate us from our economy.

Stanley Fish's blog is online, but it isn't accepting any more comments at this hour, so reading it now is just an exercise in frustration. Prof. Fish has been trying to explain academic freedom to his readers but seems to have only fogged up the issue, despite the pleasure some of his commentators evidently take in his erudition.

The good professor has just published a book entitled Save the World on Your Own Time, which I have vowed never to open. The notion of academic freedom is primarily an illusion that receives more air time than it warrants.

If Prof. Fish were truly interested in matters of higher learning, he would focus on the two most important changes that have been occurring: 1) the massive influx of students into colleges and universities over the past thirty years (nearly 67 percent of high school graduates now attend college) and the effects that has had on what takes place in the universities and colleges; and 2) the financial costs of education, especially the massive indebtedness that students are now leaving college with.

Something stinks in this Denmark, and it ain't the rare wacko professor who decides to preach Marxism instead of physics.