Academic Circles

I would consider myself to be an educated man; I'm just not college educated. A friend of mine and his wife are both taking college classes from a popular on-line university. She's in Ph.D. program along with being employed full time and 8 months pregnant. Needless to say, she needs a little help with her school work because she's carrying a heavy load (pun intended). Aside from his school work, her husband does web development (from home) takes care of their daughter and is doing massive upgrades on the fixer-upper they recently purchased.

They have asked me to help them out a little bit with some of their homework. He's got a database class and she has **irony alert** an ethics class.

Since I have not been exposed to college level course material before, I thought I'd present my findings in this area.

Acadamia is full of pseudo-intellectual, self-congratulatory wannabes. The required reading material seems to be generated straight out of the post-modern generator or something like it. Most of it is utter nonsense. The authors of the course material cite other authors of course material and peer-review papers that no one but the afformentioned pseudo-intelectuals read anyway. The instructors participate in this madness by expecting that the students learners write essay material in the same mold. Fortunately, I'm a competent enough writer to create Ph.D. level nonsense.

I'm sure those of you that were foolish enough to waste their money on a university degree program could tell me horror stories of some of the horrible reading material you had to pay for.

I had to read a chapter in a book about Cyber Ethics that was incredibly stupid. In making comparisons to changes in monetary systems and warfare as a preface to policy changes in cyber ethics, the moron said, "Perhaps the 'gun standard' will fade away just as the gold standard did." Huh? Where does that fit in a discussion on being "informationally enriched" (whatever that means)?

Some other gems from the chapter:

"If we respect the core values of everyone, then we have some standars by which to evaluate actions and policies."

"Because the computer revolution has the potential of having major effects on how we lead our lives, the paramount issue of how we should control computing and the flow of information needs to be addressed on an ongoing basis in order to shape the technology to serve us to our mutual benefit. **here comes the good part** We must remain vigilant and proactive so that we don't pillage the global village." -- Either this guy takes himself far too seriously or he's kicking back with his buddies having a beer and laughing about the ridiculous material that was actually accepted for publication and distributed on campuses across the nation.

There were many other examples just like it. The chapter made thinly veiled arguments for global governance, abortion and a one-world religion.

The friends that I'm helping out with this stuff realize that it's load of manure but they see their degrees as a means to an end.