[Buddha-l] Sabba Sutta

[Richard Hayes]

On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 12:58 -0800, Jayarava wrote:

> In case anyone is interested David Montalvo has written a lovely paper on Buddhist Empiricism.

Thanks for this reference. I have never seen this article (perhaps
because I have never read or even heard of the journal Asian
Philosophy), but I might be able to get it through interlibrary loan.

>  It's a well written and quite comprehensive article - exemplary in
> many ways. I do like to celebrate good academic writing as it is so
> rare! 

Yes, good academic is rare and is destined to become even more so. That
is because the idiots who determine academic salaries have no idea how
to decide who should be paid what amounts. (The right answer: every
professor should get exactly the same salary, and that salary should be
exactly the same as the salaries of all janitors, groundskeepers,
secretaries, clerks and parking lot attendants.) So the bean counters
have invented a charade of assessing the value of publications and
effectiveness at teaching. But no one has the slightest idea how to
assess the value of publications (and rightly so, since publications
have no intrinsic value at all and are worth something only to the
people who find some value in them for some reason) or the effectiveness
of a teacher. Consequently, professors get paid by the ham-fisted method
of counting publications. Whoever says the most wins the most dollars.
Now the average professors has about one good article in her, if she's
really really lucky. But anyone who stops after writing her one good
article, or who waits until she is smart enough to write a good article,
is sure to be fired, so professors just keep churning out crap and
publishing it everywhere they can. Groundskeepers and janitors tend not
to publish anything, so they get paid very little around a university.

Sorry to have to be so truthful so close to bedtime.

-- 
Still waiting to write my one good article, I remain
Yours truly,
Richard Hayes
Department of Philosophy
University of New Mexico