You Call That a Defense of Marriage?

Anyone how has taken a class from me knows that their arguments for anything will be parsed for quality.  Sloppy arguments come from sloppy thinking and sloppy thinkers make poor scientists, politicians, and citizens.  Sometimes I wonder where my students learned such sloppy thinking.

Today I heard a news report about the arguments being put forward before the court looking into the constitutionality of California's proposition 8 which is supposed to "defend marriage" by defining marriage as being between one man and one woman only.  My position on the issue does not matter as the point of today's blog is ineffectual (and unintentionally humorous) arguments.

It appears from the radio news piece that the argument by the "defense of marriage" lawyers is that the purpose of marriage is to create children and raise them in a household containing a mother and father.  Ignoring the circular argument, this view also allows for the invalidation of numerous marriages between heterosexuals.

Based on this argument, people how can't have children for medical reasons can't married or are not married.  If one partner or the other has rendered themselves incapable of having children, they dissolved the marriage, with potential legal liability for breaking the marriage up.

Hey guys, wife reaches menopause and kids out of the house, you don't need to divorce.  If she can't have kids the "defense of marriage" folks have just dissolved your marriage.  Marry that 23-year old without alimony to the former wife.  You will be defending marriage because you can now start family 2.0.

Be it our national dialogues or our teaching of the next generation such obviously flawed arguments should not be allowed to stand, and should be ridiculed publicly.  If I were the judge I would have to find against the "defense of marriage" argument with the admonition that gay marriage has nothing to do with the decision.  If the "making babies" argument is the best argument they can come up with they should pay all the court costs for wasting the time and money involved in the case.

Getting back to the pedagogical point, in class this means that my students get one point for making an argument but don't get the rest, for making a logically invalid argument.

T.S. Hall

E-Mail Virus Alert - Forward to Everyone

Be forewarned!  There is an insidious virus being spread via web mail.  

It incapacitates logic filters and renders the reader incapable of recognizing spin, faulty logic, false extensions of trends, and other tell tail signs that the authors are raving crackpots.  These messages can take the form of far right or far left political speech, appeals to patriotism and/or nationalism, environmental and/or health warnings, economic conspiracies, moral causes, crazy virus alerts suggesting that if you open your mail your toaster will attack you, prayer chains, etc.

A secondary effect of this virus is the compulsion to forward the virus containing messages to everyone in your address box thus suggesting to your friends and children that you are indeed loosing it.  

There is a cure!  Don't forward any e-mail unless you have first checked the facts contained in the e-mail.  If you still feel compelled to share the wacko-doodle nonsense show some self control and start a web blog like a normal person.

T.S. Hall

P.S.  (Not that is has anything to do with this post) Hi Pop!

University Staff

There is some hubbub in the academic ranks over the last week or so about a study from the Center for College Affordability that shows over the last twenty years the growth non-instructional staff of colleges and universities have out striped the growth in instructional staff and students.  The instructional staff are up in arms over this, feeling that the increasing number of instructional staff should come first.

I am in favor of increasing the number of instructional staff.  The number of students in my lectures has more than doubled over my nineteen year career and has only stopped growing because there are no larger classrooms on campus to herd the students into.

Over the same nineteen years I have seen the concept of shared governance erode as faculty avoid committee work in favor of having administration and staff members run the day-to-day operations.  Universities "professionalize" advising by hiring staff to take over for faculty.  Likewise as universities have increasingly pushed externally funded research technical staff are needed to maintain increasingly sophisticated equipment.  The push to on-line learning and paperless libraries make it necessary to have IT departments that did not previously exist.  Students and their parents demand career councilors, and directors of study abroad programs, and expanded health facilities.  All these are staff positions.

The problem with higher education funding is the same as the problem with funding the government.  We want the latest technology and the best services, but we don't want to pay for them.  Too many faculty think they are they only ones who count at the university and that everyone else is overpaid and under worked.  In reality, the staff do the jobs faculty walked away from.  If you want more faculty and less staff you need to go back to doing the work the staff do.  And don't forget, you claimed to be able to do it better.  So, back off!

Oops, slipped into a rant there.  Better see if the pub is still open.

T.S. Hall

Unfunded Mandates

Yes, I know I promised to finish one of those topics in the pile, but when outrage takes over the bile must flow.

I have been informed that back at the ranch a new edict has come down indicating that faculty must now pay for all long distance calls.  For context, in the region I live there are so many people and area codes that a place ten minutes drive from your office or house is probably a long distance call.

Department operating and expense budgets have been cut back so frequently that in most years the department has to use donations from alumni and industry support for basic operations like the copier.  Any time there is any disruption of normal starvation funding the State provided operation and expense budget disappears all together.

Since student lab fees may only be used for "consumables" things like balances, hotplates, stirrers, pH meters, heating mantles, and stuff like that must be purchased from O&E money, which we don't have.  So, every year the equipment gets in poorer shape, but we can't replace it.  In the end we can't do the job mandated by the state, because the state won't provide the resources needed.

When you need to ask for grant money for stirrers, mantels or rotovaps you get comments about how the university should be providing this basic laboratory equipment.  Well, not when they can't afford copier paper or white board pens for your classes.

Some years ago I switched to exams in blue books because I could save paper by eliminating all the spaces on the page that student would write the answers in.  Unfortunately this means that the students often need to redraw structures, which reduces the number of questions I can ask in an exam.  But I saved money.

I was never provided an office phone and had to go buy one.  It peeves me to now have to pay for the privilege of returning calls to students.   So, next Fall I will put in to my syllabus that I can't return student calls unless they are local calls, and that the reason the lights are off in my office is to keep my office electric bill down.

If you own a dairy and you don't feed the cows well enough you will only get a small quantity of poor quality milk.  At some point you need to either feed the cows better to get the milk that provides the money to buy feed and other things, or shoot the cows and stop buying feed.  Of course in the latter case you don't have cows any more, so tomorrow you have no source of income.

We need to balance our budgets, but across the board cuts only make it so everybody fails to meet their mission and never gets us out of the problems we are in.  The question must be asked as to which things we should continue to do well and which we should allow someone else to do.  Isn't this the point of having university system offices?  We don't need to get rid of the same things everywhere.  We need to build areas of excellence at each institution in the system so that over the entire system all resources are available, even in though times.  In better times, everybody can do everything.