Even sheep can help you defeat a monster...

Mary's latest blog is about the neutralization of thought in higher education.

http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2010/04/why-good-practice-can-ruin-good-practice.html

I made the following comment:

Julian wrote: "When people like you meekly go along with such nonsense, it makes everyone's life harder because "they" continue to impose their petty rules and regulations. For goodness sake, get some backbone and stand up to them."
When you sign off your soul to Mephistopheles, he wins. He's got the enforcers on his side. He puts the food on your table. Nothing 'meek' about this - Faust wasn't meek. He just signed the wrong contract. And back in the 50s and 60s university life (in Britain) had academic freedom, tenure, optimism and excitement. Helen of Troy with a brain (girls - find your own equivalent :-)
Standing up to the Man requires more than spine. It's not an individual thing - unless you're feeling suicidal. It requires organization, hatred of the system, and a clear enough view of a good alternative.
Academics aren't exactly god's gift to the future of humanity, but we need 'em, and at the moment they're being ground into dust and irradiated. In 2000 years they'll be like the bags of shit in Pompeii - only toxic. Their freedom is our freedom. We grow a spine - they grow a spine.
Simple, but not easy...

Brian O wrote: "Perhaps a little deadwood is fine if it lets the rest of us do more work and less documentation of work."
This might sound like a defence of incompetence, time-serving and place-hunting, and we can all give examples - I'll just name Robbo the Fish and G O as my favourites.
When I was a "radical conservative" god help us all I used to think so too. I soon realized that what the British had ever done for us was starvation, slavery, pillage, rape and murder, however, and this put things in a different light. Efficiency and "total quality assurance" in an unjust and anarchistic society where everyone is at war with everyone else is not just a delusion but a ticket to the abbatoir. I give you the efficiency of the extermination camps. Or the pernickity mean-spirited egalitarianism of the social insurance system.
Every flame of freedom is a beacon of hope. The heroic autodidacts of 1850 to 1950 were following these beacons. Some of us Faustian idiots of the 50s and 60s were doing it too, in much better conditions.
Dead wood is better than wood that is cold, black, wet and slimy.

In a just and decent society where work and creativity are rewarded and where everyone has security of income, food and shelter, and culture, it will be possible to promote on merit (in the widest sense) alone, and to pursue efficiency without destroying people. Till then, resist, keep your head down, and drive that hypocritical beam in the eye of the oppressor into his brain.

Use your wits and even a flock of sheep will help you defeat a brutal one-eyed monster.