On 22 Jul 2012 20:43:20 GMT, Han wrote:

" wrote in
:

On 22 Jul 2012 10:59:20 GMT, Han wrote:


snip back to what you're responding to...

I don't know how to solve that. Obviously I
would not want to get blamed for somone's inabaility to get financing
because he is from a ghetto background with no track record ...

Why? Minorities are incapable of working their way up? ...or you
just don't want the *blame*?

Wow, you did get my drift! liberal, but fiscally responsible. And art
for the sake of art is just fine, whether or not dead or almost dead
languages are involved.

Art for art's sake is fine in the open market but with tax dollars, not so
much. Where you choose to spend your money is your decision. What art you
choose, likewise.

As far as students studying dead languages, or dead art, I have no problem as
long as they're paying the tab. When they borrow $100K on their fantasy and
then expect me to bail them out, I certainly do have a problem.

Universities aren't trade schools.

They aren't supposed to be infinite money sinks, either. Like everything
else, they have to provide greater benefit to society than their cost.

I retired in
large part because of the ridiculous bloated bureaucracy that required me
to spend almost all my time with requirements, certifications and
nonsense reports, rather than the research I was being paid to do.

That's what professors are paid to do, today. It really hasn't changed in (at
least) fifty years, except in magnitude.

But
doing away with those things needs to mean that people who commit fraud
get really serious punishment, rather than just being banned for 5 years
of receiving federal funds.

We're on the same page, here! Those from E. Anglia should be banished from
all science.

Indeed I don't want to be blamed for denying minorities their rights.

But you don't have a problem with actually denying them their rights?

How to exactly balance the individual's right to help out of a previously
disadvantaged situation and the right of society for productively using
their resources, is difficult grin.

Easy. Give them help into the water and then make them swim on their own. The
problem with affirmative action is that it hurts both those who can't make it
and the ones who can, as well as those who get displaced (by those who can't).
It's a lose-lose-lose situation.