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To: valueminded who wrote (45165)	1/25/2006 11:39:22 AM
From: Tommaso	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116555

Well, for my part, I should not have sniped at you like that. I am speaking, however, from fifty years of experience within six colleges and universities at several different levels and in several regions of the country, plus, of course, the fact that all my brothers and sisters are also within various university systems as well as a great many friends. I could easily give examples of humanities professors who hardly do any teaching at all and who are paid six-figure annual salaries (Stanley Fish, for example) and underpaid mathematicians and physicists who are devoted and overworked (and who certainly could leave at any time and double their salaries). Also, wherever promotion and tenure depend (as they increasingly do) on student evaluations, you will find "wonderful teachers" who give many A's and leave students with a warm fuzzy feeling. There are many good things and many bad things about higher education in the United States. There certainly are many instances of internal academic politics. The reliance on publication as a criterion may be flawed, but it at least tends to show, when applied correctly, that the person knows something about something, even if it promotes the publication of a great deal of useless and pretentious garbage. To me, a remarkable feature of U. S. higher education is the difficulty in making meaningful generalizations about it. But one wonderful thing about it--which is true of the United States as a whole--is the abundance of opportunity to start over or start anew. You do not get pigeon-holed early in life, as often happens in other countries.