WITH MEDIA BIAS, SEMINARS HAVE DIED | 2010-08-19
The point of a real seminar is that the participants correct you. So BUGS includes many things I only know part way or may be mistaken about. I went back to polisci grad school for a semester in 1994, I did well enough, but it was mainly to check out some of the more blatant assertions I make about the Professor-Priesthood.
One thing I discovered was that I had been right when I said that real seminars had died out, but that they had become even deader since I was in school decades before.
As in grammar school, you are assigned a "paper" of so many WORDS. Even an undergrad in the 1960s the idea of telling an UNDERGRADUATE how many WORDS should be in his work would be laughed at as childish.
You did that for assigned writing in Junior High.
In the sixties a professor would routinely present a proposal for an article he was going to submit to his seminar and often also to an advanced regular class. I assume that if you are a doctorate just beginning a concept for a journal article, you would want to submit it at its early stages to a group of engineers in grad school to check it for possible fundamental problems.
Nothing of the kind would even be contemplated in the so-called seminars I went to. They were like freshman high school English, where students would be in a lecture course, but would pick stories in the Reader's Digest to report on.
You had to get the length of the report right and the teacher knew the article.
This was a unique experience, so I am reporting my basic findings to you. In real academia, i.e., the sciences, an article presents the results of a particular piece of research and other professors repeat the same experiment.
The more radical your conclusions the more likely later repeats will contradict it. But also the more radical your results the more likely they are to go into the media.
When the KGB files were opened up right after the fall of the USSR some professors took a quick look at them and said that Alger Hiss was not mentioned in them as a spy. Our local liberal newspaper had Hiss's picture on the front page and blared this "news."
The KGB files are larger than the Library of Congress. Some other readers found Alger Hiss and practically everybody else who was subjected to "McCarthyism" was, in fact, a KGB agent with thousands of pages detailing his activities.
The State Newspaper never mentioned any of that.
This is not an isolated event. Putting a story on the front page is a big decision. If you ask "Why is this information produced?" the answer is simply that it is a big story that, so far as the people who depend on the newspaper for their information, proves what the paper has been saying all along.
Any objections will be buried in the letters to the editors section, assumed to be coming from a biased source, or not at all.
We all know that is how the world works, but no one THINKS about it when it comes to things like the death of Seminars.
Even in the 1960s a professor was subject to some real losses if his article was silly or wrong. So he checked it out with his seminars. Today, if you are on the right side, if you are completely wrong all you have is another published article for your resume.
This is all between you and the editor. No one has ever suffered from being totally discredited by Jensen or other heretics.