Florida State Professors Question Deal That Gives Donor a Role in Hiring Decisions

Been fighting with my reference manager. I’ve been using Scribe, which I love, but it has an error and the good folks over at GMU aren’t updating it anymore (which I understand, so no problem there). But since I’m in the hunt for a new program, I’m wondering if the Prohackers know of or have written a really good review of various citation managers. I’m keen on those geared towards historians, of course, but I’d love to hear the pros and cons from your side. As a p.s.: Before anyone suggests it, I really don’t find Zotero very useful. I’ll fall back on it if I have to but I’d really love to hear a good compare/contrast of some of the other options.

Hi, I want to use a macro for Microsoft Word that will search for and find every duplicated word in my document. I am hoping to use this as a proofreading tool and I was wondering if anyone in the Profhacker community has created such a code and would be willing to share it. I Googled this issue and didn’t find a solution. I’ve never written a macro and am a little intimidated by the thought of doing it. I am a humanities person ;)

You might find these posts useful: “How Do You Organize and Annotate PDFs? (Reader Response Roundup)” and “Using Mendeley for Research Management.”

Depending on what you mean by “duplicated word,” I’ve got a couple of suggestions: 1) If you mean mistakes like “she is is good,” you can have Word look for it as part of spell check. (I can’t find the option at the moment, but I believe it’s on by default if you enable “check spelling as you type.”) If one really wanted to do a macro for specifically and only this (I’ve never used Word macros), you could borrow the regular expressions used in command-line tool macros, like sed and grep (here’s a big resource for those: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/tutorials/au-writersworkbench/section3.html ).

2) If you mean over-used words, like wanting to search for how much you use “actually” or other funny hedge words and to identify words that are overused, you could try pasting in your text at wordle.net —that will generate a word cloud for your document (the “language” menu can turn on or off “common” words), and while it’s not a macro, it might help you identify words that are used frequently that you might not otherwise notice.

EDIT: If you mainly want to play with Word macros, note that you’ll need to use Visual Basic for Applications (“VBA”) to write this program in Word itself. Here’s an example of a VBA macro that determines word frequency (http://word.tips.net/T000879_Determining_Word_Frequency.html ). I personally prefer working on the command line; here’s the same program written as a shell script (http://books.google.com/books?id=jO-iKwPRX0QC&pg=PT124&lpg=PT124&dq=find+word+frequency+with+sed&source=bl&ots=xiVyw3cJvC&sig=eIuVMVjblJM5Qt0adcBlXSOXKR4&hl=en&ei=tsi6TbLdF8fk0QHYx-jbBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=9&ved=0CFwQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=find%20word%20frequency%20with%20sed&f=false ).

Thanks to George Williams and profwhodrives for the helpful advice. The links are great and a reminder to take the long view is much appreciated! Thanks!

[[Bruce Benson, chairman of FSU's economics department, said that
of his staff of 30, six, including himself, would fall into Koch's
free-market camp."The Kochs find, as I do, that a lot of regulation is actually
detrimental and they're convinced markets work relatively well when
left alone," he said.]]

Alan Greenspan himself has renounced this notion. Before Congress. Under oath.

This isn’t just a question of academic freedom. Benson and the Kochs are fighting a desperate rear-guard action against history and reality, and the only question left for them is how much innocent blood they’re willing to spill as they retreat, for their policies do, in fact, kill people. The Kochs are beyond the taxpayers’ reach, but Bruce Benson certainly is not, and if his answer to that question is anything other than “none,” he needs to be escorted quickly and firmly off my payroll.

Dear dean:

It was irresponsible to have *taken* the donation.

Seems to me the donor didn’t really “donate” the money as he retains control over its use. Any tax attorneys here who can explain if the donor and his foundation get to claim a deduction for tax purposes and if the University can count this as a charitable contribution instead of a work for hire contract??

As an economist, what I find concerning is not that the university and economics department sold their souls, but that they got such a low price for it. In many universities, $1.5 million wouldn’t even yield one faculty chair. At FSU, it seems to have bought multiple “positions.” Perhaps the university should have put the positions out for bid; perhaps George Soros could have bought some liberal economists (or at least forced Koch to pay more).

An observation: FSU’s university and academic administration are housed in buildings that are a part of the football stadium (actually built into it!). Stadiums are of course where donor/booster money rules the day. So is it any great surprise that the administration signed off on this deal?

Doesn’t this flagrantly violate IRS rules? How can Florida State get away with this? And how can the donor get away with this? Where is the IRS investigation in this?

As I note on my blog, collegefreedom.blogspot.com, the proper role for donors in the hiring process is absolutely none. And Florida State’s arrangement is a serious threat to both academic freedom and academic integrity.

Actually, this is not new. Decisions seemingly made by well placed college/university employees have always been for sale to the highest bidder. The only difference is that in the past, the practice was well disguised. Lower placed college/university personnel simply assumed that the employment decisions were made by their supervisors – but in reality they were not. The advantages of this new “open” approach is that internal staff and faculty now know where they need to go if they wish to influence an employment decision – and it is not up the customary organizational chart. It’s off campus to the individual who “bought” the right to make the appointment. Remember “all is fair in love and war”.

And that’s a state university funded by taxpayers?

We might as well give up on civil life and hand the key to the city to our oligarchy.

In the European Middle Ages, the peasants had to line up every year in front of their lord and present him with sizable “gifts”. This was in addition to turning over the major share of their crop and performing onerous chore duties (like building his castle and coming up with for the construction material themselves). What these oligarchs are doing is coming pretty close to racketeering, basically buying themselves relatively cheap propaganda. In comparison, how much does a series of ads on major network costs?

Public institutions seem so much more vulnerable than private ones. So here’s my sci fi fictional interpretation: “you take our gifts with their string attached or we sic the legislature we paid for on your institution….”

…and I can’t understand why it’s allowed to do so?

The same thing is happening at the Univ of AZ . See
http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/freedom-from-regulation/Content?oid=2744162
Visit the Freedom Center’s website for more info on what they are up to. Some interesting reading there.

“The Kochs are beyond the taxpayers’ reach, but Bruce Benson certainly is not, and if his answer to that question is anything other than “none,” he needs to be escorted quickly and firmly off my payroll.”

So, in other words, YOU want to interfere with academic freedom.  I’m sorry but academic freedom exists for libertarians and other minimal statists every bit as much as for the communists and socialists who infect so much of academia.

Indeed, LEFT-WING Communist policies have killed far more people than any Libertarian policies ever have or (I strongly suspect) ever will.  In fact, the death toll under Communism is measurable and has resulted in the deaths of over 100,000,000 souls.

To wit:

Stalin’s policies in the Communist USSR: 60 million people dead (Source: Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago)

“The Great Leap Forward” in Communist China: 40 million people dead (Source: Kurt Glaser and Stephan Possony, Victims of Politics (1979))

North Korea’s Communist Policies: 2 million (Source: Courtois, Stephane, Le Livre Noir du Communism)

Pol Pot’s Communist Policies: 1.67 million (Source: “The Cambodian Genocide”, Century of Genocide: Eyewitness Accounts and Critical Views, Samuel Totten, editor, 1997).  This represents over 20% of the ENTIRE population of the country!

Vietnam’s Communist Policies (all by execution): 65,000 (Source: Jacqueline Desbarats and Karl Jackson (“Vietnam 1975-1982: The Cruel Peace”, in The Washington Quarterly, Fall 1985)

This does not count the numerous deaths in the rest of Eastern Europe under the Iron Curtain or in Cuba, which would only add to the total.

Under free market enterprise, it is absolutely true that everyone gets unequal slices of the cake (and they should since people should receive not according to their need but rather according to their contribution to the overall production!) but everyone who works does get a slice (a policy that is given its endorsement in the Bible in 2 Thessalonians 3:10 — “those who do not work shall not eat”).  See also the children’s fable, “The Little Red Hen”.

Under Communism, no one eats because no one is willing to work (since it is “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need”) so there is no pie to share.

In summary, consign communism to the dustbin of history where it belongs and celebrate the achievement of free enterprise which ALONE has been able to raise the multitudes out of the persistent poverty that existed from the dawn of human civilization until roughly the beginning of the 19th century (yes, it is true — the average person in Europe in 1800 lived NO BETTER than the average person in Ancient Rome, while the average person today lives FAR BETTER than the wealthy did 100 years ago).

“Libertarianism as advocated by Rand, Greenspan, the Kochs et al. has been disproved as any sort of rational system for explaining how the world works, let alone a structure for maximizing the common good.”

1) Rand is not a libertarian. She hated libertarians. 2) Greenspan is not a libertarian. A libertarian would not run the Fed. 3) The Kochs are libertarians.

2) I didn’t know that Libertarianism was ever conceived of as being a “rational system for explaining how the world works” or ”a structure for maximizing the common good.” It is a philosophy focusing on maximizing personal freedom with the sole limitation that one should not harm others and it has never been implemented in even the smallest sense (unlike Communism).  

3) Libertarianism is not a justification for greed. You are confusing libertarianism with Wall Street’s Gordon Gecko.

As for the claim that there have been anyone killed by libertarian policies, you had put forward the claim without evidence. I therefore basically ignored it (if you go back and read my post, I NEVER suggested that libertarian policies did not kill; only that leftist policies kill far more).  Since the blogs on the Chronicle are dominated by leftists, I naturally assumed that you were one, so I apologize for that mistaken assumption and that was the reason for the natural counterpoint (since so many leftists deny that their policies kill people).

Now back to your claim.  The Tony Haywards and Don Blankenships of the world were not enabled by libertarian policies since libertarians have been unable to create ANY national or state policies given that they have never controlled any organization above a town council (and even that might be suspect).  So I would have to say that if you blame libertarian policies, you haven’t proven that even a single person has ever been killed by them.

That is not to say that if a libertarian government WERE elected that their policies would not kill.  Indeed, it would be foolish to say that they would not.  Just as it is equally foolish to argue that any particular government policy does not, in fact, kill people because (and here is the dirty little secret) they ALL DO.

When we take money via taxation from the people, it denies them the ability to spend on themselves that same money.  When that happens, at least some of those people decide to try to save money by undertaking foolish things (like skipping their medicine).  As a result they die.  Thus the policy of taxation kills people.  It doesn’t matter what it is spent on.

Now if we don’t tax people, some other people will use that extra money to do foolish things (like buy cocaine).  As a result they die.  Thus the policy of not taxing people kills people.  It just is a different group of people.

Other libertarian policies that will kill will be abolishment of seatbelt laws, deregulating cocaine, etc. However, most of the people these policies will kill will have died of their own stupid decisions. We should not protect people from themselves and if we let people make stupid decisions, maybe they won’t reproduce and contaminate the gene pool (that’s a joke folks — but see the Darwin Awards, since they actually make that claim).

So either your statement is a non sequitur because libertarian policies do not exist or it is a blanket indictment against all policies, in which case it is meaningless.  In any case, your argument for terminating Dr. Benson’s professorial appointment remains an assault on academic freedom.

@sselisker- Thank you for your response. Wordle.net sounds like what I need! Thanks again.