Letters to the editor

[In response to the June 22 Beth Connors Manke article “On war criminials and resistance fighers.”]

I met an 80+ year old man in Colorado in the mid 70s that was a ranking officer in the SS. He was gotten out by the Catholic church’s ratlines.

I discovered a shrine to the grandfather of a group of Italians that lived in Pennsylvania in the late 1980s. I was looking for a bathroom and walked into a room with a uniform, a Hitler mural, and a picture of the grandfather in a SS uniform.

When I was in New Zealand, I met a Dutchman with a real loose story. He stayed in the same hostel as I, turned up on the same flight to Australia and we split the cost of an air-conditioned hotel room in Sydney. After over 15 hours of continual questioning he finally admitted that he had joined the SS and served as a concentration camp guard before Germany invaded Holland. He was still, after 40 years, wanted for war crimes in Holland and Poland.

Turn them in?

I witnessed three separate massacres of unarmed Vietnamese in my 11.5 months in the hell we created there. I never reported them to anyone. I never even went to the newspapers in New York City when I was stationed there afterward.

41 years later, I still feel worse than any of the war criminals that I met.

friendly, Smirking Chimp blog

The problem is as old as formal academic institutions. Is academia just a sugar mountain for spoiled rich kids to avoid facing the world? Often it is. The town and gown riots of medieval Cambridge come to mind. Do academics grossly overvalue themselves? Yes, mostly. Though this cannot be seen at the grad student level, inflation in academic costs and professors salaries has far outpaced the rest of the economy. Professors whine but they have not been subject to what the rest of us have for the last 30 years.

Part of the problem with academia is that so many have nothing of value to say. There is a lot of willful blindness in some fields. One professor of psychology and engineering(dual doctorate) would have his students take peer reviewed papers at random from psychology journals and critique them. Then he would wade in. Over 90 percent of any sample he had taken had serious enough experimental flaws to invalidate the studies, mostly assuming what they were trying to prove, but many other issues as well. This was after serious peer review. That leads me to question the value of the entire discipline.

Perhaps one answer is to not allow people to enter college till they have been living independently in the world for a few years. Another answer is to broaden focus. More hands on excercises, more arts, more humanities for technical fields, more mathematical and technical exposure for humanities. The engineering colleges were forced, by industry, in the 1980s to provide more rounded graduates. They did it by increasing credit hour requirements as well as adding writing and presentation requirements to existing classes. It created a very difficult curriculum which may be part of the reason it is getting harder to convince people of the value of the degree today. But few engineers today are illiterate in humanities or narrow focused nerds.

The opposite is not true of humanities majors, a majority of whom are scientifically, technically and often even mathematically virtually illiterate. That is without even considering things like whether they can fix a faucet, build a house or slaughter and dress a pig; things which most academics take for granted as beneath them yet they depend on every day.

Blood Red Sun, Smirking Chimp blog