Yes, goals have changed, but I maintain that the goal of the higher education system has never been to create well-rounded people. In the early days, it was about training academics. Even today, many faculty and administrators at universities will claim that this is the goal of a university education. As I noted above, the university curriculum is still structured around the 400+ year old ideal of scholarship. In large part, students are required to take classes outside of their majors because that is the way it has always been done and because this system has produced pretty good results for a fairly long time.

Moreover, if you want to argue that there has been some period in time that people went to universities in order to become well-rounded people, I would invite you to describe that period. My understanding of the history of such institutions is that they emphasized training academics until the mid-20th century. In the post-War period during the coldest parts of the Cold War, a great deal of funding was put towards training engineers and physicists to design weapons and such, and as time passed people in industry began to realize that trained academics made pretty good employees, which is how we get to the modern idea that higher education should be a kind of vocational training. Do you dispute this history, or do you feel that I am missing something? When was the goal of higher education ever to produce well-rounded people?

Not 400 years ago when the modern university system got started.

The point was to create academics, not well-rounded people. The fact that being well-rounded leads to success in academia is a pleasant side-effect.

Indeed. I just didn't want to go too far off-topic on that particular hobby horse of mine.

Kun is responding fairly explicitly to Sarah Mei's post Programming Is Not Math, as evidenced by the link in the third paragraph of his post, as well as the copious quotes that he reproduces and replies to. Having also taken the time to read Mei's post, it would appear that (a) Kun is not misrepresenting her point of view, and (b) she is sincere in her opinion. So yes, I would say that Kun has evidence that at least one person is seriously making the point that he is refuting.

Which is almost exactly the point that the author of the linked article makes:

It isn't even about creating well-rounded people, and never really was---the point of a college education was to become an academic. You went to college because your end-goal was research. Of course, at that point in history the alternative was likely monastic life because your older brother was going to get the farm... That being said, it wasn't really until the middle of the 20th century that college was seen as a way of advancing a career outside of academia. Whether or not you believe that the role of universities *should* be vocational training, the curriculum and organization of institutions of higher education---particularly research universities---is still geared toward that Enlightenment ideal of academia.

The notion of a closely held corporation is well defined. Under this decision, Walmart could be considered a closely held corporation. According to (the oh so reliable) Wikipedia, the Waltons currently own more than 50% of Walmart.

How narrow is the ruling, really? SCOTUS declared that any closely held business has the right to refuse to pay for insurance that covers contraception if the owners have a religious objection. This may account for about half of private sector employment in the US [citation; there is a linked pdf from the Stern School in the third paragraph]. My Google-fu is not terribly good, and I am having trouble pinning down exactly what proportion of the total America workforce this represents---recent employment reports from BLS seem to indicate something on the order of 70% of the workforce is in the private sector. Assuming that this number is correct, something like 35% of the workforce is employed by closely held businesses. So while the jurisprudence may appear narrow, the effect is potentially quite large.

I think that we substantially agree. There are people that live in the city and need to get around within the city and there are people commute in. If one is going to completely eliminate downtown parking, then public transit needs to be good enough to provide for the people that live downtown. Personally, I would love it if transit were that good---I hate driving, especially in any traffic. However, I think that it is unrealistic to expect that public transit will ever be that good in all but a very few American cities (at least, not any time soon). In the meantime, if public transit is good enough to keep the tourists and commuters from gobbling up too much parking downtown, the problem is ameliorated to some degree.

In any event, thank you for the clarification and the lack of snark. It is unusual to meet rational people on the internet, and I apologize for whatever snark I may have snuck into my previous post.

What does any of that have to do with what I posted? You stated that the public transit system must be good enough to completely eliminate the need for downtown residents to own a car. My counter is that downtown residents are not the biggest problem, but that tourists and commuters are. Public transportation does not need to be good enough to completely replace the cars of downtown residents (which seems to be your claim, unless I am badly misunderstanding the comment to which I originally replied), but rather it needs to be good enough to encourage non-residents to park away from the core and hop onto a bus or train for the last couple of miles.

Most of the people parking in downtown SF do not live in downtown SF. The transit system does not need to be good enough to allow people to not own a car, it simply needs to be good enough to encourage people to use it instead of driving into the city. Personally, I think that public transit in SF is pretty close to this goal (though maybe not entirely there fore the daily commuter)---when my wife and I visit the Bay, we generally park at one of the BART stations in Berkerly or Oakland (where parking is available and not too expensive), then take the train into the city. From there, SF is mostly walkable or busable.

Including at least half of the sophomore level wannabe CS majors that show up in my calculus classes...

Just to ensure that we are on the same page (since the term "adjunct" means slightly different things in different places): adjuncts are contract workers who are generally paid by the credit hour to teach. They are not researchers, they don't have committee assignments, and they are not on the tenure track. They tend to have very little involvement in the day-to-day running of the department. The fact that adjunct faculty contribute very little to a department is why so many tenured faculty would rather hire professors onto the tenure track.

It varies a lot from field to field. In my field (mathematics), authors generally seem to be listed in alphabetical order. Anecdotally, I have been lead to understand that in anthropology and sociology, authors are generally listed in order of seniority; and that in neurology the first author is assumed to be the head of the primary lab at University A, the second author the graduate student running that lab, the last author is the head of the secondary lab at University B, and the second to last author is the grad student running the secondary lab.