Our academic freedom endangered
Like political campaign financing, academia has been hijacked by big moneyed interests.
To give the devil his due, it’s said that the American educational system is designed to provide industry with a work force that has been dumbed down in order to do so. Students are given the victors version of history, they way they want it known, or at least in K-12. At the collegiate level, they are turned into indentured servants with the noose of student debt, wrapped tightly around their necks.
For example, how many of you knew that American military forces fought in Russia, along with French, British, Italian and Japanese at the end of World War I in order to help the British prevent the Bolsheviks from taking power? It was an abysmal failure, the Detroit Army National Guard officers made certain their superiors knew it and if their family and friends hadn’t protested so strongly, the Guard units would have been left in northern Russia for another six months.
There is a high probability that if I hadn’t taken what was then called Soviet Geography, I wouldn’t have learned it either, but all Russians are aware of it.
Thanks to major corporate funding, what used to be known as academic freedom is not only threatened, it is rapidly becoming endangered, as if one espouses a practice the corporations do not want taught, the academic institution will in many cases side with their corporate benefactor. Big money doesn’t just talk, it screams too loudly.
Dave Kisor
Pahoa
Forget emotion when discussing TMT
Two more letters ran in the paper on June 11 trying to blow more smoke regarding the validity of allowing the Thirty Meter Telescope to be built. Once again their reasons are emotional not practical.
Our mountain is the perfect place for this project, the builders went through the necessary process and have done their best to assure protection of the “sacred” mountain. Likely, the Hawaiian ancestors who these protesters are so concerned with are rolling over in their respective resting spots wondering what all the fuss is about.
As a side point, in all my years on this island, I have never heard a single tourist look up at Mauna Kea and say “Oh, look at those ugly observatories.”
The lame excuses for not continuing with the TMT are really getting old.
Frank Dickinson
Kailua-Kona
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