In the news

So, Andrew Wakefield falsified data. The whole vaccine-autism thing has stunk royally since the very beginning. Nobody could ever replicate his data. Good reason why. He made it up. He made it up, and did such a good job of it that people decided against vaccinating their kids, leading to Measles becoming endemic in the UK again, and the UK losing herd immunity against the disease.

Another interesting article this week comes from Stanley Fish at the New York Times. He cites the case of one Prof.Rancourt, a physicist at the U of Ottawa who is clearly loony. And then proceeds to use this as an example of the misuse of academic freedom by tenured faculty in North America.

I really, really dislike straw man arguments. Pick a certified nutjob who is disliked by faculty and students alike, and make an example out of him. And then say academic freedom is misused to a great degree by tenured professors. So, the question is, can you run a university like you run a business? If so, then I think if you make a 55 billion dollar loss for your university, you should be handed out several hundred billion more to save it. That seems to be the current policy anyway. And judging from the NIH funding crisis..that is not the case. It is only the corporate fatcats who get rescued for screwing up bigtime.