https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_G._Martin_Center_for_A... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_William_Pope_Foundation
University administration is a juicy target and I’m certainly not defending them wholesale. But the article’s written by rich people who want to lower state taxes.
If universities have a massive, bloated and overly expensive legion of administrators, does it matter if the person pointing that out is doing so because they want to reduce the burden on students who are forced to take out massive loans or to reduce the burden on the taxpayers who ultimately pay those loans when the government "forgives" them?
But when the person you are arguing with has a permanent bent that will distort & warp every argument, it's just a defense of open society to call the person out on that bias, on their forever grinding that axe.
This mention was an excellent & valuable warning to me. That it happens to resemble an attack to some people, is, in my view, far secondary to the broad public good this post served.
No, this is changing your standards of logic to support intolerance. You don't get to decide people's motivations against their will, or accuse them of bad faith without an example of the display of that bad faith.
I have significant reservations about my statements on when ad-hominem is ok or not. I think there's more than the logic of debate that is important: that I re-affirm. But how & when & where the things beyond the logic happen is still a big question for me. In this case, I think this is pretty core & vital context that everyone is going to have to parse & interpret for themselves.
Running into an article like this online & not knowing the context isn't good. The meat of the top post here, to me, set some basics about who this group is & linked some wikipedia articles. This is obvious public benefit. The top post & I both have additional editorial things to say, that these people are actively detrimental to society for their own good & we should be careful reading this. That's a bit of an attack, but neither of us have said to reject the article or disbelieve it; we have not put to the audience logical conclusions; there is context (who the carrier is), and (designated opinioned) caution/hazard about the meta-message being delivered.
Without making any value judgements about the comment in question, it’s worth noting that it is possible to be both against rent seeking and take issue with the source.
These are not mutually exclusive, and the accusation is unnecessary.
There are also people who do not want to be informed if the source is “bad,” but they’ll never admit it so shouldn’t be asked, and I don’t think OP or most people here are that entrenched.
This is important because many of these conservative groups focus on making education cheaper for students, and their families, who are already wealthy. This should be acknowledged when looking at their solutions because they don’t count many Americans as their stakeholders.
What we’re talking about is discouraging people from growing their skills and contributing to society.
I can’t say why that makes sense to other people. I suppose one assumption where asking individuals to pay some minimum amount would make sense is that education is perceived as a privilege that specifically benefits individuals, so individuals should not receive such benefits for free.
However, corporations require bachelors degrees for professional positions. Therefore having employees with bachelors degrees must also benefit them in some ways as well. However they would not be the ones taking out loans, risking dropping out and still needing to pay those loans, nor risking defaulting on those loans. However they will receive a pool of self trained employees for them to pick from to fill their ranks at their convenience.
We’d be shifting risk from institutions onto individuals. I don’t see a positive impact emerging from that.
We're talking about discouraging people from taking three or four years off on society's dime that won't contribute anything to society. A degree like that certainly seem plausible, and the individual is probably in a position to spot cases that higher-level oversight might miss.
> However, corporations require bachelors degrees for professional positions. Therefore having employees with bachelors degrees must also benefit them in some ways as well. However they would not be the ones taking out loans, risking dropping out and still needing to pay those loans, nor risking defaulting on those loans. However they will receive a pool of self trained employees for them to pick from to fill their ranks at their convenience.
Sure, and those corporations share in the tax burden that supports people in getting degrees.
there's a tendency to fall into a fallacy of thinking an argument must be wrong because it's invalid. in real life, everyone does actually care what the objects being discussed are, and restricting yourself to logical validity would constrain your thinking to the point of uselessness. by dismissing a logically invalid argument out of hand because it's logically invalid, you're falling into your own fallacy, because to assume what's being claimed is false just because what's being claimed doesn't hold for everything itself doesn't hold for everything. for instance, if i tell you not to believe someone's claim because they cheat on their spouse, you can't assume they are lying about that claim, but you also can't assume they aren't lying about it.
so if someone tells you a person is motivated by greed to make an argument, yes, it isn't necessarily true that their argument has to be wrong--here's a cookie--but that also doesn't mean they aren't decieving you. what do you know about the subject other than what this potentially interested party just told you?
anyway, pay attention to when you fall for the fallacy fallacy, it's a window into your own ideology.
Ad hominem (Latin for 'to the person'), short for argumentum ad hominem (Latin for 'argument to the person'), refers to several types of arguments, most of which are fallacious.
Typically, this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself.
Ad hominems, even when not fallacious, don't tend to contribute to the discourse. If you don't have a good rebuttal to the argument, saying that the person who wrote it did so because they have an agenda is inane. Of course they had an agenda: they wrote an essay!
So it is ad hominem, but maybe by accident if you want to be very generous.
I’ve certainly had friends with soul-crushing experiences in academia and I’m well aware there are cost disease concerns about academia. At the same time, state universities allocations from state government have been greatly reduced over the past few decades. I think attacking university administration is an easy target, but is it, perhaps, a target in support of a larger goal of defunding public education?
I don’t think this article’s really worth much intellectual engagement, and I think it’s generally helpful for readers to understand authors’ policy agenda — I’m old enough that this was called “critical thinking” when I was in school.
It sounds like you are trying to make a bad-faith argument here and this absolutely is an ad hominem fallacy (regardless of how well you cloak it in Wittgenstein).
Some of these organisations have a long history of producing misinformation, pay-to-play commentary (oil companies, tobacco companies) and outright lies in defence of their ideology. There is no way to read anything from thie cluster of bullshit factories like heritage.org (for example) without questioning their motives, because they are obviously compromised and will go to extremes to push an agenda.
We all know information sources like this and it saves a lot of time to simply dismiss everything they have to say about anything, because if you can't trust them to be truthful on one subject, why would they be truthful about anything?
The right love to call this kind of wholesale dismissal "cancel culture" but really, it's just the natural filtering of bullshit that everybody should do.
At the very least, you’re comfortable with knee jerk judgements based on personal ideology, and I don’t think that’s good for any discussion.
How is that a reasonable way of thinking? Unless you're one of those people that assume "All Republicans/Democrats/Libertarians/Communists are lying thieves, except members of $MYPARTY."
I will say I block everything Murdoch. At this stage, the chaotic evil of Murdoch news sources is not just noise any more, it's deliberately disruptive.
Now, I could picture a different situation, one where, say, I have thought a lot about academic administration, what purpose it serves, how it could be better. Where I have studied the available data on the topic and formed opinions. Then, I would read the argument despite the expectation of bias, because I want to use all the information I can find, and engage with all the arguments that other people are making, even the ones that are pushing an agenda I disagree with. Maybe I would even read it and find I agree with the argument, and update my beliefs. Maybe I would come to the comments to post how my experience and knowledge fits the argument, or conflicts with it. But that is not me, so I'm trusting the expectation of bias and moving on.
They care about power.
So here's the flaw: They label things "bloat" without explaining WHY it is bloat. They just wave their hands and say "BLOAT! BE OUTRAGED!"
What is a proper level of administration?
Where are other systems with more or less and how do they perform compared to UNC?
They claim "At NC State, in 2020-21, no less than $131 million more was spent on administrative (i.e., non-teaching) positions than on teaching ones."
Where? How? Why? Who?
They can show, but don't. That's suspicious. Especially with the adjectives they use elsewhere in the article.
For all we know the entire budget of the library ($43 million) counts as "administrative".
There is a grand total of ONE (1) hyperlink in that article: TO A WEBSITE WHERE THEY'RE SELLING A BOOK.
It's bullshit.
Anyone who falls for it is fucking stupid.
Here is access to more actual data in one hyperlink than they presented in their screed:
https://budget.ncsu.edu/budgetcentral/
This is 0% about money or bloat or whatever as they frame it, and 100% about being angry that they're not allowed to ridicule transsexuals in public anymore without being "cAnCeLlEd".
Note here that B did not claim that argument x was wrong. You're fallacy hunting and you missed.
They're saying the more government funding is needed to avoid needing all the administrators
Yes? Are you saying that's bad? Because it would have made sense if you'd argued that they just want to cut costs in a way that won't work or that will have outsized problems associated with it, but it kind of sounds like you're complaining about a good thing.