Possible Education Changes at University of Wisconsin

Quoting from the article linked:

The plan to cut the liberal arts and humanities majors (see full list below) is in line with a failed attempt by Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2015 to secretly change the mission of the respected university system — known as the Wisconsin Idea and embedded in the state code — by removing words that commanded the university to “search for truth” and “improve the human condition” and replacing them with “meet the state’s workforce needs.”

The push away from liberal arts and toward workplace skills is championed by conservatives who see many four-year colleges and universities as politically correct institutions that graduate too many students without practical job skills — but with liberal political views.

Now *that* eventually reminded me of something I read a couple of years ago: The Nazis closed some of the Frankfurt University's departments in the 1930's because of "their inclination towards Marxism". I think Sociology was one of the departments closed.

I have two sisters. One has a History-of-Art degree and the other something along the lines of Sociology. One was in middle management until "downsized" a few months ago; the other one works in Education administration, interpreting whatever the political lords and masters come up with and making sure the schools in her area conform legally.
How much of the "Do you want fries with that?" is anecdotal evidence with very little basis in fact?

I work on IETF and IEEE 802 standards. All published in English. IEEE 'won' the battle against ITU in publishing in German and French back in the early '90s when republication of IEEE 802 documents as ITU docs was occurring and being held up for years with the French trying to invent french words for all the new technology.

We did learn with RFC 2410 a serious need to be careful in what we write in English so that 5 years later, non-native English speakers will implement the standard correctly (some Koreans took the American jokes seriously and tried to implement them resulting in non-interoperablity). These days in both areas we argue capitalization and placement of punctuation so that the meaning (and jokes in IETF land) is clear. We have painfully learned that language DOES matter.

Right now I am working on the charter for a proposed IETF workgroup that did not succeed in getting chartered last fall, as the main participants got lost in the language and the charter text just confused everyone. I am having to nail definitions to the wall so that no one can wiggle them around.

Perhaps it is my dyslexia and what I had to go through back in the '60s that have made me one of the 'go to guys' in clear, concise technical text. I also learned a lot from my old copy editor at Network Computing mag back in the '90s. She was one of those liberal arts English majors... She really understood getting content into a 500 word column budget. Taught me a lot about power words and implied meanings.

So don't kill one of the truly basic skill sets needed in a modern civilization. Language arts.