Academia lies and lies and spends and spends

When I was a volunteer IT department for an AIDS care non-profit corporation (heavily Democratic, as you may imagine), I was often told that pharmaceutical companies were free-riding on all that magical medical research done by those wonderful universities.

Meanwhile, the great Dr Jerry Pournelle tells us:

Of course as soon as the Master Plan was adopted and funded, the California State Colleges began a political campaign to be turned into universities, with salaries comparable to the Universities, and graduate schools with research, and publish or perish, and all the rest of it; and instead of being teaching institutions they would become second rate copies of the Universities, with a faculty neglecting teaching in order to gather prestige in research and publication, or, perhaps, at least to look as if they were. In any event the California State Colleges became California State Universities, their commitment to actual undergraduate education was tempered to make room for the graduate schools, budgets were higher, costs were higher, and tuition, which had been designed to be very low, began to climb.

And guess what else was a Democratic lie?!?

During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.

Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated.

Turn anything Socialist, and you turn it into ice cream soup, because the animating intelligence behind the original thing is gone. Care for the poor, love of science or literature… the Soul of Man withers and dies under Socialism.