2theadvocate.com | News | State colleges may lose some degree programs — Baton Rouge, LA
A case right out of Shock Doctrine (a political must-read by Naomi Klein.) We created the state shortfall last year when Jindal pushed through tax cuts. The shortfal is exactly the amount of the cuts. Now we can use that crisis as an excuse to get rid of iritating programs, James Wharton has the ax out for graduate education in Louisiana.
One of my contributors pointed out that while Wharton NOW wants to close "programs that have nothing to do with that region of the state," a while back he was a big promoter of LSU's LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in Livingston Parish. What, Dr. Wharton, does LSU, Louisiana and Livingston Parish have to do with gravity waves? Does Louisiana have a space program I don't know about? Of course, the LIGO project is one worthy of state support, and Wharton's past support for it shows the hypocrisy of his very parochial and provincial stance now.
Commission member and former LSU Chancellor James Wharton pushed three other recommendations approved Tuesday.
“There may be graduate programs that don’t have anything to do with that region of the state,” Wharton said. “Should the state support graduate programs that don’t have anything to do with the region?”
Commission member Belle Wheelan, who is the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools president, said some of the bachelor’s degree-focused universities “grew too far.”
Commission member Mark Musick, the Southern Regional Education Board president emeritus, said regional universities should focus more on teaching undergraduates, while LSU must do a better job of attracting and educating graduate students.
Wharton has complained, for example, that too many public schools have specialized engineering programs. LSU, Southern University, the University of Louisiana at University, Louisiana Tech University and the University of New Orleans all have multiple engineering degree programs. McNeese State University has a general engineering technology program.
Wharton on Monday and Tuesday has mentioned the University of Louisiana at Lafayette when discussing the outgrowth of regional universities and degree programs.
A case right out of Shock Doctrine (a political must-read by Naomi Klein.) We created the state shortfall last year when Jindal pushed through tax cuts. The shortfal is exactly the amount of the cuts. Now we can use that crisis as an excuse to get rid of iritating programs, James Wharton has the ax out for graduate education in Louisiana.
One of my contributors pointed out that while Wharton NOW wants to close "programs that have nothing to do with that region of the state," a while back he was a big promoter of LSU's LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) in Livingston Parish. What, Dr. Wharton, does LSU, Louisiana and Livingston Parish have to do with gravity waves? Does Louisiana have a space program I don't know about? Of course, the LIGO project is one worthy of state support, and Wharton's past support for it shows the hypocrisy of his very parochial and provincial stance now.
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1 comment:
I learned a regionalism without even having to go to school:
Crawfishing.
That is what they are doing. It is a gesture of irrational desperation.
So, if we go by their guidelines, soon enough I will be able to major only in trawling, oil field maintenance, oil field sample-taking, oil field communication, oil field transportation, or careers in public service (state employee, namely, secretary who spends 95% of her time sending snarky and borderline racist e-mails to like-minded state servants). Coincidentally, these are the same mannequins who keep these dissemblers and thiefs in office.
What testifies to their profound ignorance is that they aren't stunned by the absurdity of their illogic. If people only study and specialize in what people already have, regionally speaking, when will there ever be new fields in which we can experience "jobs and growth"?
Or is this yet another Republican attempt to keep us in the south moronic enough to never rise above their weak rhetoric and see it for the craven opportunism that is really is?
-Recondite
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