Academia

Let’s graduate high school and enroll in college, where we find an entirely different class of Paraducer, the academic Paraducer. These Paraducers use tenure, political correctness and government money to burrow deeper than a tick on a hound dog. I could write an entire book filled with funny stories about college professors.

How about the 26 year old PhD teaching a course about microcomputers? I had been doing that type of work for several years (I was 24), and since I had a 40 mile drive to class three times a week, I approached him about doing an independent study project to demonstrate my command of the subject, skipping the lectures. He agreed, and asked me to build one of those scrolling display signs, like the small ones you see in restaurants today (they were not common in the 1980’s). He wanted to put it in the rear window of his car to send messages to stupid drivers and tailgaters. I agreed, but I thought privately he was going to eventually get pretty beat up using that thing in traffic!

I disappeared for about ten weeks, working on that project and my other coursework. He had an expectation that I would fail miserably, but seemed to play along for some reason.

So I designed the display, ordered the parts, put it together and wrote the software. It took some work, but it functioned perfectly when I was done.

When I walked into his office at the end of the term and turned the display on, his mouth fell open in shock. It worked! I was surprised at his surprise, learning only later that he had a PhD, but had never built a working computer product of the kind he was teaching about! Nice guy, but what kind of interview questions do the university Paraducers ask before hiring these PhD’s? Nothing too meaty it seems. Nothing like, “Can you use what you know to solve real world problems?”

Then there’s the assistant department head who taught a sophomore level class in a large lecture hall. I was an off-campus student so I did not know the other students in the class, about thirty five in all. I figured, they must have run out of small classrooms to put is in this large hall.

The day of the first examination, the hall was full. Packed. The test was pretty easy, though. The next class, we were back down to thirty five students. Strange…

I got an A in that class and forgot about it. But I met a graduate who attended the same school during the same years, and we had the same professor for that subject. He asked me, “Didn’t you have the crib notes?” I said, “What crib notes?”

Turns out the professor, an Assistant Department Head, gave all his tests in two year cycles, so everyone had the old tests and just copied the answers over. It was all open book, open notes, so that was easy to get away with.

Now what kind of PhD could ascend to the rank of Assistant Department Head in a huge university and not understand that kids are smart enough to use old tests? I cannot believe that this teacher was that stupid. No, he was a Paraducer!

I previously related how public school teachers have to deal with administrative Paraducers to get their jobs done. In higher education, the problem is ten times worse. Imagine a Paraducer with a PhD and an ego to match.

A good chunk of college professors are Producers, mind you, but the Paraducers are much worse at this level of ‘achievement.’ The job protection they afford themselves is near bulletproof. There are only the loosest standards of behavior and conduct. Morality is relative to the professor’s on ‘belief system.’ Truth is an outmoded bourgeois concept for rubes. And anyone seeking to change the system from without is ignored, from within is crushed. A true Paraducer class.