Who's qualified to have an opinion?

I just saw a poll which asked people whether the federal government is spending too much, not enough, or about the right amount, on health care for the uninsured. Now I wonder how many of those polled could tell within, let's say, 25%, how much money the government IS spending on that? And if you you don't know how much is being spent now, then how can you possibly think you're qualified to tell whether it's too much, too little, or about right?

This comes to mind because I recently had the "privilege" of sitting in on a Faculty Senate meeting as a proxy senator. One of the issues that came up was a motion proposed that recommended that any "available" money be used to hire more online education support staff.

Leaving aside the observation that the motion was utterly meaningless because the word "available" is meaningless (how much money will we ever have that isn't "needed" for anything else?), this was one in an endless series of instances in which people are confidently expressing opinions on subjects on which they have no qualifications to hold an opinion.

How many of these distinguished senators can convincingly argue that more support for online education is a more pressing need than additional parking at the Charleston Campus? Or running an additional section of some course that scores of students need for their degrees but are unable to enroll in because every section is full? Or adding another person to the Institutional Research operation, which tells us what we're doing successfully and what we're doing unsuccessfully, and which I understand has only 1.5 people assigned to it right now?

How many of those distinguished senators could even come close to making a list of all the items that the school needs money for, and how many of them are in any position to know which items are most seriously underfunded or overfunded? How many of them know what the net financial effects of different forms of spending are - i.e., which expenses pay for themselves or partially pay for themselves through increased revenue of some kind?

Not only are almost all the people who proposed and supported this measure completely ignorant of all those questions, but they are openly contemptuous of the idea that they SHOULD know any of those things. AND THESE PEOPLE ARE EDUCATORS!!! Their job is supposedly to increase knowledge on the part of their students - and yet they are dismissive of the idea that they themselves should possess any relevant knowledge before they express an opinion.

This is the modern view of how to address issues. The important thing is to take a stand - to make a statement - and only a curmudgeonly killjoy would ever suggest that you ought to know what you're talking about first. If you've "taken a stand," then you can feel good about yourself - and that's what really counts.

One of the most important characteristics of an intelligent person is that he or she knows what he is qualified for and what he's not qualified for. He knows the limits of his own abilities and his own knowledge. If you don't know what those limits are, then you're stupid - I don't care how many degrees you have.

Most people in my (mathematics) department would probably identify me as the most opinionated - or at least ONE of the most opinionated - members of the department. But I bet that hardly anyone has noticed that I probably abstain from voting on more issues in our department meetings than any other person - because I don't think I have enough information to cast a confident vote, or because I think the issue requires more thought than I have had time to devote to it. And when a committee has labored for months on a recommendation of some kind, I am among the least likely people in the department to disagree with their advice, unless it's clear to me that their basic assumptions or priorities differed strongly from mine. I am astounded at the presumptuousness of those who think about an issue for all of three minutes after seeing it listed on an agenda, and immediately fancy that they've reached better conclusions than people who have been working on the question for an entire semester.

The vote cast by the Faculty Senate a couple of weeks ago isn't going to do any real harm, primarily because it isn't going to have any effect anyway. But it still annoys me on two counts: First because so many members of the senate walked out of the meeting with a smug certainty that they made an informed judgment on a topic of which they are in fact abysmally ignorant, and secondly because some day one of these "I voted for this because it made me feel good" motions actually WILL have an impact - and it won't be a positive one.

Never in my life

I am 62 years old. So I have seen the TV news business ever since there was a TV news business. I remember watching John Cameron Swayze with my father, for cryin' out loud, when the nightly news broadcast was only 15 minutes long and was sponsored by Camel cigarettes! And I'm a news junkie – so I've been as close an observer of the TV news as anyone I can name.

In all that time, NEVER has the "news" business degraded, debased, and discredited itself as it has over the last week and a half, culminating in today's revolting orgy of celebrity-worship over the death of Michael Jackson.

Even as a celebrity, Michael Jackson was not in the same class as (for example) Elvis Presley or Frank Sinatra. Both of them changed the course of popular music and maintained their popularity, influence, and musical significance for FAR longer than Michael Jackson ever dreamed of doing. (In fact, Michael Jackson's fame is due almost as much to the fact that he was a probable pedophile as it is to his music.) But ten days after the deaths of Elvis Presley and Frank Sinatra, no one was pretending that they were still the biggest news stories of their day.

The newspeople can defend themselves that they were only giving the people what they wanted, but that won't wash. First of all, the news media clearly fanned the flames of the idiotic hero-worship that erupted when Jackson died. Secondly, TV news is not show business. TV reporters refer to themselves as journalists. That means they have a professional responsibility to make decisions as to what is worth spending three or four hours of news broadcast time on. In this case, they shamelessly abandoned that responsibility.

What has happened since the days when news was news? The irresponsibility of the news media has contributed to a culture in which people actually take a fool like Sarah Palin - a woman who wouldn't even make the list of top fifty-thousand most qualified Americans - seriously as a presidential contender, for heaven's sake – all because she's a celebrity! Millions upon millions of people have grown up without a shred of ability to distinguish serious issues from trivia. Thus, millions of those sawdust-brained fools were glued to their TV sets today, actually thinking they were witnessing something that mattered!

And don't think this kind of empty-headed inability to make judgements about what's important is just an indication of the emptiness of American culture. In Britain, a few years back, the BBC held a poll to determine who were the 100 greatest Britons of all time – mind you, that includes Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, John Maynard Keynes, Elizabeth I, St. Thomas More, Francis Drake, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Queen Victoria, Admiral Nelson, Francis Bacon, John Locke, ... and there in THIRD PLACE was a little blonde twit who died tragically without a single noteworthy accomplishment to her name – Princess Diana.

You tell me, over and over and over again: You don't believe we're on the Eve of Destruction.