End the University as We Know It | Hacker News Reader

End the University as We Know It

nytimes.com

39 pointsmjfern26 comments

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

Interesting list. Unfortunately for the author, the people who will actually solve the problem - the engineers - already have their act together and aren't particularly interested in what sociologists and theologians have to say about desalination plants...

You miss the point exactly. Solving the water problem is not just an engineering issue, but a geo-political issue as well.

No, really, it's not. It's an engineering issue.

Wait, did you consider how this impacts the gender identity of hydrogen ions? Isn't ionization just another word for racism? Etc etc.

LOL. Funniest thing I have read in a while. Would be funnier if it weren't true that the retarded postmodernist pussies in certain academic departments actually do think along those lines...

Engineers will solve these problems. Politicians will define them.

The problem of whether the irrigation ditch is dug on your land or your neighbor's land is a political problem. The problem of how the water is priced (heavily subsidized by taxpayers, or with full cost of delivering the water passed on to the consumers) is a political problem. Both of these can also be legal problems. Engineers might enjoy their work better in many cases if they understood more about the constraints on their work imposed by other issues dealt with by other specialists.

No, its a political problem because it is a money issue not a technology issue.

We can have infinite water if we have nuclear powered reactors running massive desalination plants on the coasts with big pumps pushing it through huge pipes to anywhere you need it.

At the minimum -

- But we can't get past political opposition to nuclear power

- Not in my bad yard! (Desalination plant * nuclear)

- Who is forced to have the pipe run under their home (plus eminent domain issues)

- Are the states paying for it? The federal government?

- Why should I subsidize the people living in the dessert?

How do theologians and social workers help with that, exactly?

I think we'll see more and more legal frameworks such as the Great Lakes Compact where the export of water from the region is illegal. Our water-rights laws in the US are totally messed up. For example, in CO (where I live) and UT, it is illegal for you to collect the rainwater that falls on your roof: it belongs to someone else.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Compact

Solving the upcoming water problems is a wholly political problem and not one of engineering.

http://anthropik.com/2006/08/israels-water-wars/

Solving the upcoming water problems is a wholly political problem

Agreed, but effective politics is a rigorous Machiavellian exercise. Perhaps political science majors would be useful, but again, theology and what not brings nothing to the table.

>Solving the upcoming water problems is a wholly political problem and not one of engineering

I'm not sure I understand this. Maybe in the sense that if there was peace among nations it would easier to apply the engineering solutions that would solve the water problem?

Even so, directing more resources to water engineering research can be reasonably expected to result in some useful solutions. Few will claim that strengthening political science depts would yield more world peace.

(BTW, the 2nd article contains Reddit-level nonsense. That it is published by academics - I assume? - says more about academia than its subject matter)

The phrase often attributed to the water problem is

"Water flows uphill towards the highest concentration of money"

No, peace isn't the solution. In the western states, such as CO and UT, the water-rights laws are tangled, messy and arcane. They even predate the statehood and are embedded in the state constitutions.

Effectively, once you turn a pipe on, you can never turn it off. People who have "senior water rights" are allowed under those state laws to make people "upstream" not only stop using water from rivers, but replace the water that they had been using.

Canada has a large number of rivers that flow north into the Arctic sea. From the US perspective, that water is wasted. "We" would like to see it pumped south. However, we wanted a uniform framework of laws governing that. So we forced the Canadians into accepting water-rights laws substantially similar to the western states' laws. Consequently, the Canadians banned such water exports.

If you want to see how screwed up water distribution is in the US. And how political the mess is, then I recommed that you read the book Cadillac Desert.

http://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing-...

And as for the anthropik article, several of the points made in that article (and yes, I know it rambles too much) have to do with how Israel needs the water, and how that water is critical to the security of their nation. When the water being pumped out of the aquifers in Gaza became too contaminated for agriculture, then Gaza ended up getting returned to Palestinian control (and now about all that grows are flowers and hatred). If you look at the "security barrier" on the West Bank, it seems to follow no political nor demographic map. When you map that security barrier against the aquifer's boundaries, then you get a match.

Water is life. And the Babylonians had to struggle with salt deposits in their cropland. As their fields got too salty for high yielding crops like citrus and wheat, they had to switch to lower yielding grains like emmer (good luck finding that outside of a health food store) and barley. Some of those fields ended up so salty that they shine in modern day Iraqi sunlight: those are salt deposits from more than 2000 years ago.

Food is life. Water is life. Without both, we die. Therefore they become political.

Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Mass. (alma mater of a handful of YC team members) has taken several of these ideas to heart.

http://www.olin.edu

No tenure, collaboration with nearby institutions to share courses, encouragement for all community members to contribute to developing and changing all aspects of the college at any time, and no separated academic departments. The list goes on and on.

It's a great place for entrepreneurially-minded students to find an atmosphere that allows them to build up their skills without having to settle for university-level bureaucracy.

I was admitted but at the time it was very new, I really wish I had went

Part of the division into departments is a good thing because it reflects a separation of concerns. A philosophical question (what is our ethical duty as human beings, which methods of argument and reasoning provide valid conclusions under which sets of assumptions, what conceptions of free will are compatible with metaphysical determinism) can't be meaningfully answered from a scientific or artistic approach though scientists and artists are both capable of philosophy to some extent, and in fact it would be good to see academics publishing across related fields more often. I could easily imagine epistemologists, philosophers of science, and scientists productively publishing together in methodology-of-science journals and attending methodology conferences.

Furthermore, departments allow for a deliberate separation of fundamentally incompatible approaches. Some people who take up the dubious academic pursuit of seeing everything from the perspective of feminism or race go to the Women's Studies and Ethnic Studies departments, and the rest of us are often better off without them. If we tried to close or ban the Women's Studies or Ethnic Studies department, people would be taking that crap back into other fields, so as a political compromise we have those departments as a containment field (though I am speaking too harshly, there are certainly benefits for the academics in those fields as well).

I haven't read the article, but regarding your comment you are treating the departments as if they are completely isolated. I do psychology and it contains many sub-fields such as political psychology, social psychology, biological psychology which basically can be considered as inter-disciplinary fields, bringing these departments together.

I am sure many other subjects have such inter-disciplinary field, sure maths may not go with psychology (although psychologists do need to do statistics) but it goes quite well with physics, chemistry with biology etc. so these departments are not islands on their own isolated from the other fields, each field has much to contribute to other fields.

To expand on the second point a bit more: one of the virtues of the department model is that (most) departments teach a particular way of approaching problems, a "discipline" if you will. They teach you to "think like a [computer scientist|chemist|psychologist|etc]".

Certainly, there's often a great deal of value in breaking down these disciplinary barriers and attacking the problem holistically - which is why many institutions have interdisciplinary programs and the like. But there's also a value in fields of study retaining some identity as disciplines, with particular methodologies, mores and so forth.

What about CS grad school? Don't research labs take the pressure off of PHD candidates to find tenured positions?

(Disclaimer: This is an actual question, not 'fightin words')

Actually, the pressure is pretty high for CS PhD students. It is a very competitive field. Nevertheless, in terms of "actually finding a job" the prospects are pretty good for CS PhDs ... I've never heard of any having problems. Honestly, I don't know any masters students having issues with this.

The knowledge is not for free. But you cannot buy it with money, as the university model is stating, but with time, the learning time.

Anyway time is money

Hm ... A religion professor feels like current university system is useless and antiquated... Perhaps it is really his own field that is useless and antiquated.

You should check out his writings-- I doubt he's the kind of "religion professor" you suspect he is.

For example: http://www.amazon.com/After-Religion-Postmodernism-Mark-Tayl... http://www.amazon.com/Erring-Postmodern-theology-Mark-Taylor... http://www.amazon.com/About-Religion-Economies-Virtual-Postm...

Well, actually know he's exactly the kind I suspected. I'm as nonplussed by his work as I am by Rorty. Nevertheless, I stand by my assertion. If I want to read about deconstruction I'll read someone who knows something about it like Derrida. This argument for things like a Water department is pretty lackluster at best.

School sucks!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com