A new low for science and higher education ?

It was already troubling enough when the decline of intellectual standards came to be captured in the now-famous phrase: “My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” It was troubling enough to watch a U.S. university ask its professors to volunteer in dining halls while simultaneously paying $95 million to hire a football coach. And now, the future of higher education in the United States appears to include teaching positions with no salary at all.https://www.science.org/content/article/university-teaching-job-without-salary-no-thanks

The implications are hard to ignore. At a time when we seem to be moving even further away from the world envisioned by Ulrich Betz—who asked the important question, “Why should a superstar scientist be celebrated less than a superstar football player?”—one might reasonably ask whether young people are being encouraged to pursue careers in science, scholarship, or simply football coaching instead.

Declaration of competing interests – As i wrote several years ago I have never been particularly fond of competitive sports.

PS – Back in 2017 Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack published an interesting paper examining how different countries perform with respect to economic and altruistic research motivations. Yet perhaps a third category should have been included: stupidity-driven research motivations—to better understand which societies are genuinely concerned about whether their populations may be becoming more superficial, less intellectually curious, and increasingly indifferent to knowledge.This is a worrying pandemic-like problem that interestingly does not seem to occur in a certain European country that has “no private schools or private educational institutions, meaning all educational services are publicly funded and free of charge, including universities”