I doubt that many people follow fine-art auctions, but major sales frequently are reported in the mainstream press. For instance, a Rembrandt painting sold for a record $33.2 million. The Massacre of the Innocents by Peter Paul Rubens sold for $77 million. Anthony van Dyck's last self portrait sold for $13.5 million. Even one of Adolph Hitler's water colors sold recently for $13,500. Needless to say, none of this money went to the artists or their progenies or even to supporting fledgling artists. So I ask, are the people who pay these enormous prices for the works of long dead artists really art lovers? Do they buy art because they truly love it or because they want to boast, "Look what I have!"

There was a time when wealth supported artists. That practice died out sometime after the sixteenth century. What goes on today borders on the absurd.

Although I use Dallas, TX as an example, what is going on in Dallas is going on in many other places. Fine-arts performance groups everywhere are living on the edge of disappearance.

Dallas is in the process of completing a $392 million addition to its Arts District by adding "world class" theater, opera, and ballet venues. The Arts District is comprised of 13 facilities including

1. the AT&T Performing Arts Center
2. the Annette Strauss Artist Square
3. the Dee and Charles Wyly Theatre
4. the Margot and Bill Winspear Opera House
5. the The Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art
6. the Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center and
7. the Nasher Sculpture Center

Each of these, obviously, is named after some benefactor, and the facilities are magnificent. But the Dallas Morning News reports that

"Those who attended last Friday's opening-night performance of The Nutcracker at the Winspear Opera House could not help but notice that the music was canned, not live."

"By the end of the five year agreement the base musician pay will be $743 less than it is today."

"To reduce expenses in the 2008-2009 Season, contracts for Texas Ballet Theater dancers were cut from 38 to 35 weeks."

So there it is again, magnificent venues named after their benefactors while the artists themselves are neglected. This is not love of art for art's sake; it's merely benefactor aggrandizement. It's look what I can afford to build or buy. Not a single one of the benefactors listed has ever engaged in artistic creation or supported an artist.

But Dallas' goal was never to promote the arts. The goal has always been to "legitimize Dallas' claim as a city of the arts, revive its slumbering downtown, and create a grand civic place where everyone would feel welcome even without a ticket." But except for occasional special events, the goal is a fantasy. One fundraiser, Deedie Rose , has said, "When we built the art museum, the supporters were mostly visual arts people. With the Meyerson, it was mostly symphony people. This time we had million-dollar donations from people who had never been big arts supporters [emphasis mine] but who believed that the project was important for the city." The entire project is nothing but fluff to promote business.

But can it work in Texas or anywhere else? Texas in particular and the United States in general are not cultured places. Pop music and football are their major attractions. Will true art lovers flock to these performances? How far can a true lover of ballet be expected to go to watch a performance danced to recorded music? Will first class musicians go to Dallas or anywhere else to perform for pay that's a pittance? Will mediocre performances attract patrons just because they are performed in astounding buildings? I don't know, but I'm dubious.

Art for the sake of business is a long way from being art for art's sake. The people who attend these performances will not care the least about who the benefactors were even if their names are emblazoned on the buildings or leave remembering them. They will remember the performances, good or bad, not the architectural glitz. Architecture is only one part of the task, and it is the easiest part to build, just as buying the paintings of old masters is easier than painting them.

The notion that there is political lopsidedness in academia tilted to the left is an old canard propagated by anti-intellectual ideologists who do not now and never had a taste for truth. And now, Patricia Cohen of the New York Times has written a piece titled, Professor Is a Label That Leans to the Left, about a study done by two sociologists, Neil Gross and Ethan Fosse, that is full of abject nonsense and comments from proponents of the right wing.

She writes this, either quoting or paraphrasing these sociologists: "Conjure up the classic image of a humanities or social sciences professor, the fields where the imbalance is greatest: tweed jacket, pipe, nerdy, longwinded, secular — and liberal. Even though that may be an outdated stereotype, it influences younger people’s ideas about what they want to be when they grow up." How? Most students enter college without ever having seen any college professor. Never having seen a college professor, how could this "classic image" have influenced them?

Although she correctly points how this view has been manufactured and fostered by the American conservative movement, she fails to draw any conclusions from it. Conservatives, either religious or otherwise, are true believers. To them the truth is irrelevant, and if truth is irrelevant, the search for it and its acquisition is of no interest. When these people enter college, they do so to merely acquire techniques. Their questions are, how do I do that? and of what use is learning that? They rarely ask, is that the truth?

But what Ms Cohen and the conservatives who promote this canard fail to recognize it that the political orientations of most professors have no relevance to anything they do in the classroom. What difference would it make to students if a professor who teaches mathematics were a republican, a democrat, a socialist, a communist, or even an anarchist? What about professors of Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Astronomy, Foreign Languages, English Grammar, Geology, and most other subjects? Who cares what they believe?

To all professors—liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, communist, or anarchist—two plus two is four, H₂O is water, e equals mc², the planets revolve around the sun, and the sun is not the center of the universe.

Professors teach what is known in their own subject-matter fields. How would knowing what their voter registration cards say further the conservative-liberal debate? (I even doubt that anything that can truly be called a debate exists.) There are just a small number of academic departments where a professor's political beliefs might influence his teaching. Notice, I wrote "might." Most professors, at least the good ones, can easily present the best arguments used by both sides with equal vigor. They can also present the criticisms. For some unknown reason it is assumed by the right that a scholar's beliefs trump his knowledge. Is that because their beliefs trump their knowledge? True believers already know it all; they can't be taught. The university is not a place in which they are comfortable because questioning their beliefs generates distress and places their self-interests in jeopardy.

The Western World's ideal of education stems from Classical Greece where Plato started the first real university. His ideals were the search and dissemination of truth, goodness, and beauty. If you study Plato's Dialogues you will discover just how hard he was on people's beliefs. He used the character of Socrates to demolish them.

Those who believe that universities should include the teaching of beliefs and ideologies are advocating the conversion of the university into what is called, in the Middle East, a madrassa. Americans of late have been very hard on madrasses, complaining that they teach the ideology of Islamic jihad. Yes, they do. Which ideology of jihad does the American right want the American university to teach?

True believers never discover truth. It is only discovered by doubting what is commonly believed and trying to either verify or refute it. In that light, much ideology is not worth bothering about; no evidence can be offered for it one way or the other.

Some students enter college with open minds and a desire to know. Many don't; knowing does not interest them. And if anyone really wants to know how professors become leftish, read Bart D. Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, where Ehrman describes how he, a student with a fundamentalist Christian background, found the strengths of his fundamentalist beliefs weakening as he learned more and more about how the Bible came to be.

In my career as a professor, I was aware of only one professor who used his classroom as a platform for his personal political beliefs. Contrary to what Ms Cohen might assume, he was an arch conservative. The students who took his courses were well aware of what he was doing; they spoke about it all the time, just as Mankiw’s students of economics at Harvard have publicly described Mankiw’s course as massive conservative propaganda.

No professor at the university I taught at ever made an issue of this professor's propagandish teaching. They didn't have to; they all knew that the bright students in his classes recognized it for what it was and that the dull students didn't matter. They weren't going to learn much anyhow. And that may really be what distinguishes leftish professors from rightish ones. The leftish ones allow students to draw their own conclusions.

Anyone who leaves college with the same beliefs had when he/she entered has wasted his/her money and time. What the conservatives who have manufactured and propagated this leftish professor canard want to do is destroy the search for truth by falsely describing it as a political ideology. All they want to do is erase the distinction between knowledge and belief. They comprise, in fact, nothing but a modern day Papal Inquisition.

The only reason this canard keeps popping up is that journalism is a label that leans toward stupidity. It will go away when journalists quit reporting it.

Yesterday, December 21^st, ABC News ran a story about Diane Sawyer's interview of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. She, like most mainstream American journalists, has long given up on any attempt to report real news, and is on Forbes Celebrity 100 list which otherwise consists almost entirely of entertainers and athletes.

Sawyer, a talking rag doll stuffed with sawdust, asked the Iranian president ridiculous questions in what was obviously an attempt to make Mr. Ahmadinejad look bad in the eyes of her American viewers.

For instance, she asked him about "a newly revealed secret document that purportedly shows Iran has been trying to develop a crucial component of a nuclear bomb." He said it was fake; she asked if he had any proof; he asked if she had any proof that it was authentic. Standoff? Not really! Sawyer failed to acknowledge that the American government and others routinely produce supposedly secret documents that turn out to be fakes. Has she forgotten the fake document about George Bush's service in the National Guard that got Dan Rather fired? Has she forgotten the faked document that Colin Powell displayed at the Security Council that claimed Iraq was purchasing aluminum tubes from Nigeria needed for an atomic weapons program? If anyone needed to provide proof of the document's authenticity, Sawyer did.

Second, she asked Ahmadinejad if he would "assure the West that Iran would never weaponize its nuclear material and turn it into a bomb." Of course, he refused to answer this question. How could he have answered it? Ahmadinejad will not be Iran's president forever, and even if he has no intention of weaponizing its nuclear material, who knows what future presidents of Iran or any other country, for that matter, will do? Unless she is brainless, Sawyer knew the question could not be answered and asked it just for that reason. She knew that she and ABC news could emphasize Ahmadinejad's refusal to answer and make him look bad.

Third, she asked him whether Iranians were free to demonstrate and say whatever they wished. Ahmadinejad rejected the suggestion that Iran doesn't tolerate criticism or street protests, saying "In Iran we have got freedom, more than what there is in America" and that Iranians can demonstrate if they have valid permits. Didn't Sawyer realize that permits are required in America too? Or was she dissembling? When Sawyer asked about the deaths of demonstrators during the recent demonstrations about the election results, did she conveniently forget about the deaths of student demonstrators at Kent State?

Fourth, she asked him about releasing Shane Bauer, Josh Fattal and Sarah Shourd, three Americans who claim to have innocently wandered across the Iranian border. "Are you still going to do your best to set them free?" Sawyer asked. "Yes," Ahmadinejad curtly replied. "But I have got a question to you. How do you know they have accidentally crossed into Iran? How do you know they were looking for waterfalls and forests?" Sawyer asked if there was evidence that the trio were anything but adventurous tourists, Ahmadinejad asked, what proof do you have that they were? Another standoff? Not really! After all, Bauer is a freelance journalist, Shourd is a writer, and Fattal is an environmental worker. No one asks how these three became "friends." They hale from different parts of America—Minnesota, California, and Oregon. Were they tourists in search of a waterfall or a trio in search of a story? Ahmadinejad said let the courts decide. If you were in a foreign country in search of a waterfall, wouldn't you hire a guide?

Sawyer, along with most mainstream journalists, has long abandoned anything that can be described as journalistic integrity. Her interview was meant to be sensational. (Oh, how that describes the American press!) She is engaging in nothing more than National Enquirer journalism. And she is not the only ABC "journalist" doing it.

Remember Martin Bashir's (or is it Basher's?) piece on Michael Jackson before his trial on child molestation. A hatchet piece if there ever was one; yet Martin wept crocodile tears after Jackson's untimely death. And there's Charlie Gibson (Gypson?) who interviewed President Obama recently. When Gibson asked the President why he approved sending more troops to Afghanistan, he allowed the President to get away with merely answering, "because I believe it's the right thing to do." How informative was that? Would any president ever admit that he did something because he believed it was the WRONG thing to do? Why didn't Gibson ask the president why? Because he really didn't care; the interview was not meant to elicit any useful information. Gibson interviewed the President just to interview the President, merely to get another feather for his bonnet.

When readers of this piece watch any mainstream news broadcast, they should ask themselves what of significance they learned that they didn't know beforehand. Much more often than not they will answer, "Nothing"! And if anyone asks why the popularity of the American mainstream press is dropping, that answer should answer the question.

One caveat: don't assume that this piece means that I approve of Mr. Ahmadinejad or Iran's political system. What is disapprove of is dishonest journalism.

Caveat emptor, a pig in a poke, and let the cat out of the bag! Most people are familiar with at least two of these. When dealing with the software industry, all three must be remembered.

Sellers have never had sterling reputations for honesty. lf they had, the three expressions cited above would never have attained a place in common usage. Putting a cat in a bag and selling it as a pig gave rise to the latter two expressions. The smart buyer, the buyer who took the caveat to heart, opened the bag before putting down his money and let the cat out.

Software manufacturers have foisted the impression on the public that software is intellectual property, but there are so many differences between the paradigms of intellectual property and software that only the naive could ever take such claims seriously. 

The paradigms for intellectual property are the non-fiction book, the novel, poetry, musical composition, dramatic scripts, sculpture, paintings, in short, fine art. And these range from the absolutely unique item, like a great painting, that only one person can own to multiple itemed works, like books, that many people can own copies of.

Software is certainly not at all like the former. Is it like the latter? First of all, a book has an author or authors, a musical composition a composer, a painting a painter. These are the people who collect the royalties. Who authors software? Do they get the royalties? Ah, don't they wish it were so.

Secondly, books, except textbooks, musical compositions, paintings, etc., don't come out in versions. Tolstoy didn't make a career out of writing War and Peace over and over again, improving a bit here and a bit there, even though I suspect he would have said that it could have been improved upon had he been asked. Michelangelo didn't sculpt scores of versions of David and sell them as upgrades.

Thirdly, when I buy a copy of a book, etc., it is mine, not the author's or the publisher's. I can do what I want with it. I can sell it, rent it, lend it, rewrite it, even destroy it. The manufacturers of software want to prohibit all of this. They even claim to retain ownership and sell only the right to use. But even this claim is specious.

If I rent something to someone, I rent it for a specific period of time. When that time period is over, I want it back. When you go to Blockbuster and rent a CD, you don't get it indefinitely. Blockbuster wants it back. But Microsoft doesn't want old versions of Windows back, it doesn't even want new versions of Windows back, so one can ask what kind of ownership do software manufacturers claim to retain? If I sell something, I have no further claim on it. It I discard something, I have no further claim on it. To retain a claim, I have to want it back, otherwise, I have sold it, discarded it, or given it away. So although software manufacturers claim to retain ownership, it is ownership of nothing.

Finally, software is written with the help of software. An awful lot of it is canned. There are miles of similar code in programs that perform similar functions. Not so in novels, musical compositions, and other fine art. So if software is intellectual property, it is a strange kind of intellectual and a strange kind of property.

In reality, software is a product made by employees in a factory. The software engineer, programmer, coder is no different than the welder or the lathe operator. Each has learned a specific skill. None is involved in an intellectual enterprise, and that is the chief reason software is often so bad. There are no bugs in true intellectual property, it has no security gaps. Authors, painters, composers, sculptors, poets do not include statements absolving themselves from damages as all software producers do.

Then there are the claims of all the money being lost. Perhaps! But not as obvious as many seem to think. There is an assumption behind this claim that is patently false. The assumption is that everyone who pirates software would have bought it if he couldn't have gotten it otherwise. But that's not even remotely true. 

Distinctions need to be made between those who pirate software in order to sell it and those who pirate it for their own use. Few would disagree that the former are engaged in an improper activity. The same can't be said of the latter, however. People who pirate software for their own uses do it for many reasons. One prevalent reason is putting software you have legitimately purchased on more than one computer in your own home. If I have a desktop and a laptop, why should I have to buy two copies of a program? If I have two CD players, I don't have to buy two copies of a CD. I don't have to buy a separate copy of a book for each member of my family who wants to read it. Why should this be wrong for software but right for CDs and books? The immorality or criminality here eludes me. Are software manufacturers more entitled to protection than authors or artists? Why?

Others often pirate software just to look at it or try it out, something that often results in future sales. The manufacturers of software don't factor these future sales into their loss calculations though, do they? Why not? And what's wrong with trying something out before you buy it? Don't you test drive a car before putting down the cash? Except for those small developers who offer minor programs on the internet, do you know of any way to try out software without purchasing it?

People often pirate software which they really have no intention of using to any degree. Such pirating does not result in any loss of sales, so why should the manufacturers of software care about it? Such pirating is no different than borrowing a CD or a book, and it is perfectly acceptable and legal to do that. So why not software?

So how does software piracy affect the economy and the technology industry as a whole? Damned if I know. It is not obvious to me that the Chinese would be buying Windows from Microsoft if it weren't available from the sources they now get it from. I don't know how many Chinese could afford it at Microsoft's price. Would it mean more jobs for Americans? I have no reason to believe it. We have all heard about off-shored outsourcing and visas for foreign workers. And how does it affect the development of software? Would there be more of it if the rewards were greater? God knows, we're inundated with it now. No developer seems to be terribly discouraged by the piracy that's been going on, and the manufacturers themselves are constantly engaged in attempts to comer a market and drive competition out. Does that encourage developers?

Software is a pig in a poke. It never works as promised, often requires more resources than claimed, and is sold under garage sale conditions with a disclaimer absolving the manufacturer of responsibility for any and everything. And these are the people crying crocodile tears about piracy! One can even suspect that software companies deliberately market defective software so they can later market "upgrades." What do they say about thieves? It takes one to know one!

Didn't Microsoft literally steal DOS? Oh sure, the guys who developed it were dumb enough to sell it cheap and didn't deserve what they didn't get. But shouldn't anyone dumb enough to put his stake in an industry whose products are easily copied and stolen be prepared to bear the consequences? Capitalism is an economic system that involves risk. A person investing in this system must evaluate the risks associated with the enterprise. And don't tell me Bill Gates and others didn't know the risks.

So what's the upshot? The manufacturers claim that they're losing money. Maybe, maybe not. They knew what they were getting into. No one twisted their arms, and they're all using tools developed by someone else. They didn't invent the computer or devise the programming languages, and if they can use other people's ideas for their own profit, why shouldn't others use their ideas for profit? Remember, a penny saved is a penny earned. Ideas, after all, have no owners. Manufacturers lie about their software, why shouldn't they lie about the effects of piracy? 

Would you be so willing to sop up the tears of the seller whose customer let the cat out of the bag that was supposed to contain a pig? Or would you laugh at his embarrassment and say he got what he deserved? 

When Calvin Coolidge said "The business of America is business," he and very few if any others knew just how deep this sentiment would sink into the American consciousness. Now it seems apparent that the way business thinks has muscled every other kind of thought process out of the American mind. The unfortunate result is that if no business solution exists to an American ailment, it festers into an incurable American disease.

Two kinds of thinking dominate the business mind. One comes from the paradigm of manufacturing; the other from the paradigm of marketing. Both have been used as the basis of education bashing.

If looked at in terms of the manufacturing paradigm, education is likened to the assembly of parts into a product. And the paradigm decrees that if the worker assembles the parts correctly, a good product is produced. If the product produced turns out not to be good, the conclusion drawn is that the worker did not assemble the parts correctly.

The paradigm, of course, is very problematical. It overlooks questions of design and materials among other things. Nevertheless, the paradigm is pervasive. And it is the foundation of some education bashing.

The educated student is likened to a product, subject matter is likened to its parts, and the teacher is likened to the worker. When the student turns out to be uneducated, the conclusion is that the fault lies with either the subject matter or the teacher. So we are subjected to interminable curriculum debates, reform, and teacher bashing.

If looked at in terms of the marketing paradigm, education is likened to selling. The idea is that if teachers packaged the material in attractive ways, the student would buy it.

This paradigm too is problematical. It overlooks the fact that just because a product is bought has no bearing on whether the buyer uses it at all or to its best advantage. Nevertheless the paradigm persists, and when it turns out that the student is unable to use the product or use it well, the conclusion drawn is that the way the product is packaged must be faulty, and since the teacher is the packager, the ultimate responsibility for the failure is, yes, the teacher’s! So we debate teaching methods and tools. We hear things like, "Make learning fun," "Turn the classroom into a game room," "What we need is more toys in classrooms," the toy of fashion being the computer. And we bash the teacher again for not being an entertainer, forgetting that if teachers were entertainers, they wouldn't be in classrooms.

But education fits neither of these paradigms. The educated student is not a product assembled by teachers, and learning is not a game. Furthermore, both of these scenarios overlook things that should be blatantly obvious.

The first of these is that educated people have existed in all the eras of recorded history. People acquired educations long before the school and the classroom were invented, people acquired educations long before anyone even thought of things called teaching methods, so the methods, the schools, and the classrooms cannot be sufficient conditions for the education of students.

The second should be even more obvious. Almost every teacher teaches a group of students called a class simultaneously. Every student in the class is exposed to the same material presented in the same way. Some of these students learn a lot, most learn some, and some only a little. How can this be if the teacher and the material are at fault?

During my many years as a university professor, friends often asked for the names of good colleges to send their children to. My answer always baffled them. Although there are various way of "rating" colleges—the number of professors with terminal degrees, the number who publish, the number of Nobel Prize recipients, the size of libraries, etc.—I know of none that measures the amount of learning acquired by graduating students. So I used to say "If your child is a good student, he or she can get a good education at any accredited college, and if your child is not a good student, he or she will not get a good education at any college."

The point is that, and it should be obvious, education has very little to do with the teacher or the teaching and almost everything to do with the student. Yes, of course, an exceptional teacher can produce exceptional results in some students. And yes, facilities, books, and equipment do have some bearing. But neither of these affect all students. Even exceptional teachers find it necessary to fail some students, and everyone who attends schools that have the best facilities and equipment doesn't graduate either.

So the real question ought to be how do we rear good students? The other questions are really irrelevant, for no matter how they are answered, unless we can find the answer to the first question, the result will be the same, the debate will go on, and teachers and teaching will continue to be bashed.

The ultimate truth is that a social institution can be no better than the society that supports it, and unfortunately American society is not and has never been intellectual. Intellect and scholarship have never been esteemed. Too many parents don't or can't read. Too many homes lack educational resources. Books, magazines, and journals, especially good ones, are lacking in too many homes. Television is pervasive and from the point of view of intellect, is almost universally bad. It deserves its nickname, "boobtube." Intellect and scholarship are not the "business of business" and therefore not the "business of America." And I might add neither is education.

What do children see when they notice what American society does esteem? Entertainment, sports, and marketing. Therein lies the fame, the honor, and the rewards of being an American.

So what do our children want to be? Actors, rock stars, football players, salespeople, and in some cases, simple criminals, and none of these requires great intellect or a broad education.

Until this cultural attachment changes, America will have a problem with its educational system. So unless you're more optimistic than I, the teachers of America should acclimate themselves to teacher bashing just as they have acclimated themselves to low pay and low esteem, for good students cannot be reared en masse in a culture with these ideals.

What makes comparisons of the American educational system to the educational systems of other countries so insidious is that this aspect of a supporting culture is always overlooked. Students in those countries learn more than American students merely because those cultures rear better students, not because of better teaching, better teaching methods, or better equipment. And as long as we continue to believe that teachers and teaching are to blame, our students will not only learn less, but as time goes on, learn less and less.