Last week, the Wall Street Journal ran an article by Prof. Peter Berkowitz on the global -arming scandal in which he argued that it was predictable, given the incentives in academia.

Today’s paper includes this letter from a writer in California who obviously “gets” higher ed:

Prof. Berkowitz gives several insights into the peer review process guarding the scientific validity of academic research. Institutions of higher learning are administered by disinterested and disengaged managers who defer to full-time tenured faculty the functions of hiring, teaching and research. The faculty is primarily interested in specialized research and furthering their own careers and status. They are often so narcissistic that the search for truth and its exposition is displaced by their own sociopolitical agendas and indoctrination. The prime transaction involved in teaching evaluation is accomplished by popularity assessments where instructor favor is curried with “correct” answers and exchanged for generous student grades. Students are interested in units and GPAs and gravitate toward entertaining, easily assimilated courses rather than those with substantive standards and academic rigor. Professors are agreeable to inclusion of tangential material that has weak links to the core subject matter, but which meets the joint interests of the faculty members and their sycophantic students. This subculture does not produce competent, objective research in the classic tradition of the scientific method.
Fred Thompson Walnut Creek, Calif.