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Bill Tozier links to and quotes the exact same things I would have, had I gotten here first. Instead I’ll simply suggest that you follow the links and read.
While most of the rant is foolish, I wholeheartedly agree with the section Bill quoted. There’s just one problem: what about science? You can’t really do science without the labs, and while many of the labs are as tedious and boring as being asked to explain Twain’s fourth paragraph, some are great. Upper level physics labs are as good an introduction to working in a “real” lab as you can expect (though real labs usually have slightly less broken equipment), and I don’t think I’d call someone a chemist unless they’ve been put through the misery of hundreds of titrations and columns. And without universities, where are you going to get this kind of instruction? So, I don’t think we need to get rid of universities, but I’m all for an overhaul of “the system”.
Biocurious is written by Andre Brown and Philip Johnson, since 2005. Content of the weblog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
