A new low for science and higher education ?

It was bad enough that the status quo came to be epitomized in the enlightening sentence “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. It was already bad enough that we had to see a US university asking its professors to volunteer for dining halls a the same time it paid $95 million to hire a football coach. And now the future of higher education in US seems to be teaching jobs without any salary whatsoever https://www.science.org/content/article/university-teaching-job-without-salary-no-thanks

Considering that we are increasingly moving away from a future where Ulrich Betz’s important question would be a normal one “Why should a superstar scientist be celebrated less than a superstar football player?” then should young people all choose to pursue a career in football coaching?

Declaration of competing interests – As i wrote several years ago I´m not very fond of competitive sports.

PS – Back in 2017 Richard Klavans and Kevin W. Boyack authored an interesting paper about how different countries perform in what concerns economic and altruistic research motivations. Still, they should had include a third and important category, stupidity research motivations, in order to try to find out which countries are most concerned that their own population may be getting more stupid and more superficial. 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”