January 20, 2007

Reports are exaggerated...

"...the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated..."

Mark Twain: published in the New York Journal

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

I should go cancel the order for lilies so....

Anonymous said...

Carl Goldman, a civil engineering professor at Concordia, was quoted on the Valery Fabrikant's affair “Professors have become entrepreneurs of a sort,” he said. “They go to the government to get money for research, hire juniors to do the work and then put their names down on the papers. It is a practice that has corrupted the entire educational system across Canada, but Concordia engineering is probably the worst example you can find.”

From the investigation into the Valery Fabrikant affair

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said...

About the lilies... Don't cancel them. Somebody else may need them : )

Anonymous said...

I have come out of a meeting today with several academics. My manager couldn't stop boasting about 'his' cutting edge research proposals. The proposals were purely mine. Towards the end of the meeting, the manager declared that his underperforming student, whom he has been supervising for the past 3 years, will be executing the proposals to add an 'element of novelty' to an otherwise ridiculous piece of work. The manager bestowed on me the honour of helping his student and being part of this novel work. This is not the first academic institution that exploits me this way, the more this happens, the less I am likely to get out of this cycle of exploitation.

The Fabrikant scenario is becoming more and more appealing. I have had a enough.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said...

Hhhmmmmmmmmm...

- What next?
- How can we help?

Anonymous said...

Our very own University Chief Executive, Gerard Wrixon, had an interesting remark about troublesome staff interfering with his modernising reforms by alleging various "corrupt" financial and governance practices:

President Wrixon: The question of dissent is an interesting one. As I stated in reply to Deputy Boyle, universities in the knowledge-based society of the 21st century are places where knowledge is created. They are becoming central not only to economic development but also to social and cultural development. To a certain extent, in the distant past they were places where things were done in a certain traditional way — one thinks of quiet ivy groves in this regard. When one is trying to change a very traditional institution into one that makes the kind of contribution to development made by institutions in other countries, many changes must be made, some of which are more palatable than others. The result of this is a certain amount of dissent. We are dealing with very clever, imaginative and innovative people and they can write letters to where they feel they will matter the most. (Public Accounts Committee, 1 December 2005 - President Wrixon subsequently retired unexpectedly, May 29 2006)

So why is he trying to marginalise, discipline and sack all these "very clever, imaginative and innovative people" instead of profitably managing them?