Alex's Journal

In the month since the university has been out for the summer, I have to admit that I haven’t had much motivation to write any entries about history. I haven’t researched anything nor have I really read anything pertaining to history. I have finished a couple of Mark Twain books and a book with short vampire stories, but other than that, I haven’t really read anything. Which brings me to this entry’s topic.

I’ve given it a bit of thought about why exactly I study history. The answer is fairly straight-forward I think. I’ve always had a strong fasciation for the past and for some unexplainable reason, a particular interest in the 19th century. I remember when I was a young child at my grandparents’ house when my grandmother would show me old photos of her grandparents and great-grandparents. I always marveled that the people in the old sepia photographs who I was looking at lived in a completely different time and century when things were much simpler.

Even today I think that same drive is behind my fascination with history. I am obviously a modern student in a modern world, who has a fancy laptop, a couple of websites, a couple of blogs, a cell phone, a Facebook account, several gigabytes of music, etc, etc — all of the so-called modern necessities for people of my age; and yet, even I often feel overwhelmed and feel the need to just reject all of this technology and go back to a more basic life. Studying history gives me the ability to simply disappear into a simpler world in which these modern marvels do not exist and to try to experience what life would have been like before electricity or the advent of microchips.

It may seem strange for the son of a computer programmer who is only 21 years of age and who has grown up with computers all of his life to feel this way, but I often do. When doing research, I prefer to use books in the library and read articles in physical journals and take notes with a notebook and pen rather than finding resources online and taking notes digitally as so many of my peers do. I know it is not as efficient and if pressed for time, I will resort to that, but I feel that if you enjoy the research, why does it matter how long it takes?

When I was much younger, the computer was virtually my life. I’ve created programs on multiple platforms, I’ve experimented with different flavors of Unix and Linux and I’ve done websites since I was 11 and the web was hardly anything but a sparse collection of text. I am by no means computer-illiterate or technology-shy (to be perfectly modest…) as many people I know who prefer to do things the old fashioned way. For me, it is simply a choice.

That is why I study history. Not only do I find it absolutely fascinating from an academic approach, but it is a means of escape, I suppose, where a body can disappear to a time before Facebook and MySpace, a time when calling somebody meant visiting them in person, a time when riding shotgun implied carrying an actual shotgun and a time when things were simpler.

This is a duplicate post from my history blog, History Rhymes.

This is an article that shows the incredibly sad reality about grade inflation in American universities and its consequences. It is definitely worth a read.

Grade Inflation in American Universities

For one of my history classes this semester, I am going to be doing a semi-lengthy paper on Reinhard Gehlen. This class is a historical methods class, however the focus of the class is the history of espionage. I was assigned the topic of Reinhard Gehlen because I can read German primary sources without the need to translate.

Reinhard Gehlen in 1945

For those of you who have no idea who Reinhard Gehlen is, he was the a major-general in the German army during World War II. After the war, he was recruited along with several other high-ranking Nazi officials by the CIA to setup an spy ring directed against the Soviet Union. He is essentially considered the founder of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) which is more or less the German equivalent of the CIA.

For more information about him, click here.

Today I did a presentation in one of my classes about why over-funded athletics programs should be removed from universities or at the very least, significantly scaled down. They have simply gotten too carried away with their spending and are guzzling university funding at an enormous rate. It’s really sad in my opinion because they are detracting from the academics at universities. No wonder the American education system is pumping out so many stupid people.

In my presentation, I included a comic graph that really shows the skewed priorities that football coaches have when it comes to salaries. Some of the specific examples of coaches I listed were hired with contracts worth $6-$12 million which is absolutely outrageous. After all, the whole purpose of the university is educate and not to pay coaches absurd amounts of money.

One of my favorite quotes that I found is from an article I read in The New York Times Magazine online and goes as such:

Dollars are directed from general funds and wrestled from donors, and what does not go into cherry-wood lockers, plush carpets and million-dollar weight rooms ends up in the pockets of coaches, the most exalted of whom now make upward of $2 million a year.

It’s true too! Not only are coaches making insane amounts of money, but athletic departments are spending huge amounts of money on other projects, most of the pointless and stupid. An example of that would be the University of Michigan. They spent $18 million in upgrading their stadium. One of the “highlights” of the renovations were 10-foot high lyrics to their football team’s fight song. That’s an appalling waste of money! It could go to something like classroom renovation and modernization. That funding could be used to upgrade computers around the campus or add more computers or do a huge number of other things like research grants.

The scary part is that, for most universities, most of this funding comes from student tuition rather than the revenues generated by ticket sales or merchandise sales. Universities also use their football team as a reason to raise tuition if the football team performs well, which is really ridiculous when you consider that the football team’s performance has absolutely nothing to do with how well the university is ranked academically and has no effect on the kind of education most students will get. The only effect it has is negative — it diverts funding that could go for academic purposes.

Another great quote I found that I intend to leave off on, is one from James J. Duderstadt, former president of the University of Michigan. The quote comes from his book, Intercollegiate Athletics and the American University: A University President’s Perspective and goes as such:

The damage done to students participating in [sports] programs, not to mention the university itself, has become simply too great. It is time that we decoupled football and basketball from the world of big-time show business, and reconnected these programs, their coaches, and their student-athletes to the educational mission of the university….[otherwise] they are not worth continuing….it might be far better for our institutions, our students, and our nation if we were to phase them out in favor of flag football and intramural basketball. (214)

As a college student, it is not an uncommon thing for me to be assigned essays and papers. An research assignment given to me about two weeks ago had a strange requirement attached to it: we are not allowed to use Internet sources. When I asked the 80-something year old professor why we are not allowed to use Internet, he simply said that he doesn’t trust any of the online sources available out there.

This professor also has never used a computer to type anything (all of his syllabi, assignments, tests, etc are all typed on a typewriter) and never checks his e-mail.

That got me thinking. Is there such a thing as an Internet phobia? I did a quick search on Google for Internet phobia and quickly came up with several relevant links. It turns out that there is a minority amongst seniors that simply resisting new technology such as the Internet or even computers in general. According to a study done by the Kaiser Family Foundation, “Fewer than 31 percent of seniors older than 65 have ventured online, compared with more than two thirds of the younger baby boomers, 50 to 64. Of seniors older than 65 whose annual household income is less than $20,000 a year—a group that makes up the majority of the elderly on Medicare—an even slighter 15 percent have gone online.”

Source: Newsweek