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Charles J. Sykes

Profscam Audio Cassette – Audiobook

by Charles J. Sykes (Author)

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Journalist Sykes examines the academic culture of the American professoriate and finds it distinctly lacking in redeeming traits. 6 cassettes.

Language

English
Publisher

Blackstone Pub
Dimensions

9.61 x 6.75 x 1.28 inches
ISBN-10

0786102276
ISBN-13

978-0786102273
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Language ‏ : ‎ English
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0786102276
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0786102273
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 13.6 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 9.61 x 6.75 x 1.28 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #10,203,057 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #75,791 in Instruction Methods
- #77,272 in Higher & Continuing Education
- #1,075,335 in Politics & Social Sciences (Books)

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4.5 13 ratings

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Charles J. Sykes

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Charles J. Sykes, is the author of eight previous books including "A Nation of Victims," "Dumbing Down Our Kids," "Profscam," "The Hollow Men," "The End of Privacy," "50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School, "A Nation of Moochers," and "Fail U."

Charlie identifies as a conservative, but in "How the Right Lost Its Mind," he presents an impassioned, regretful and deeply thoughtful account of how the American conservative movement came to lose its values. How did a movement that was defined by its belief in limited government, individual liberty, free markets, traditional values and civility find itself embracing bigotry, political intransigence, demagoguery and outright falsehood? This book looks hard at the Trump era to ask: How did the American conservative movement lose so many traditional values?

Until he stepped down in December 2016 after 23 years, Sykes was one of Wisconsin's top-rated and most influential conservative talk show hosts. He is now an NBC/MSNBC contributor and a contributing editor for The Weekly Standard, where he also hosts the magazine’s daily podcast. In 2017, he was co-host of the national public radio show, "Indivisible," which originated from WNYC. Sykes has written extensively for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Politico, New York Review of Books, Newsweek, Time.com, and other national publications. He has appeared on Meet the Press, the Today Show, ABC's This Week, Real Time with Bill Maher, as well as on PBS, CNN, Fox News, the BBC, and NPR.

Sykes is a member of the Knight Commission on Trust, Media, and Democracy and sits on the Advisory Committee for the Democracy Fund.

He lives in Mequon, Wisconsin with his wife and three dogs. He has three children and two grandchildren and spends way too much time on Twitter.

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William G.

Amusing, thought-provoking rant about problems in higher education.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 12, 2018

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Charles Sykes is a conservative radio host and commentator much seen these days on MSNBC. This early book by him is a fun read: an amusing rant, not always fair, against certain abuses he sees in (especially) public higher education. Thought-provoking even when you disagree.

2 people found this helpful

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Ronnie Gonzalez

A MUST to Read

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 17, 2013

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This should be MANDATORY reading for ALL families and pre-college students who have been brainwashed into thinking that college is any kind of haven of maturity and intellectualism. College is a snake-pit of pettiness and shallowness, light years beyond anything students and family ever complained about, in public school

5 people found this helpful

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Richard Francke

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 4, 2014

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A clear view of academic mediocrity.

4 people found this helpful

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Nemo

ANOTHER CAVEAT ABOUT THE CORRUPT IVORY TOWER

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 27, 2015

As a work of journalese, the ProfScam book has those characteristic virtues and limitations. What I wish Sykes would've treated at some length is a particularly shameful way that universities exploit grad students in their social sciences departments. My personal experience comes from having gone through the grad program at Syracuse University where I earned a Ph.D. in Political Science. In the years that I spent there, taking courses and serving as a Teaching Assistant, none of the profs ever told me a crucial fact relevant to my goal of becoming a professor myself. (Nor did any of my fellow grad students there tell me they'd been told, either.) It has to do with universities performing a double role both as producers and also as consumers of aspiring professors.
A grad studies program welcomes grad students for a number of reasons. Obviously, they provide warm brains for the profs to teach advanced courses in their favorite specialties (thus helping the profs enjoy themselves and pull down a paycheck). Grad students also can serve as TAs, relieving profs of some of their teaching load dealing with undergrads (often in very large classes). Many of the grad students develop a great liking for their field of study, and want to turn around and teach about it to other students after being certified as Ph.D.s. But their ability to do so depends on the "effective market demand" in the academic job market. Will there be enough available positions for them to get the jobs they're aspiring to and been trained for?
It's a relationship between supply and demand, of course. But a student's decision about whether to embark on, and continue in, such a program of study would be heavily influenced by that crucial piece of information: What is the ratio between the number of qualified applicants to the number of available positions in the field concerned? In other words, what are your chances? And the incumbent profs have a pretty good idea what this is. Not just from the number of applicants to open positions in one's own department, but also from discussions and gossip with colleagues in other schools.
The trouble is, they don't readily share this insider fact with students in a realistic sense, limiting themselves to vague expressions like--the market is kind of "tight," or whatever word (not number) they use. But it makes a lot of difference to a student whether his/her odds are one in 10 or one in 300. If the students were to know the actual odds were closer to the latter, they might well decide not to let themselves be shepherded through the programs to end up with the degree but unable to have a decent chance to work the job.
And the professorial lack of candor and deception don't end there. Over the years, I sent out hundreds of applications for a "regular" (full-time tenure track) job. I figured my excellent grades and superb dissertation would get me hired. But the rejection letters coming back wouldn't say why I wasn't. Except an occasional one (maybe one in thirty or so) which said its department had to pick from X number of applications. After a while, I computed what that X number average was. In my case it came out to be somewhere between 275 and 300.
Now, this means that all the other university and college departments were de facto accomplices in covering up information about what was the relationship between supply and demand. When you think about it, if each rejection letter contained this information, the applicant would fairly quickly realize the reality of the job market. I would certainly have quit wasting my time and money mailing out application materials a lot sooner than I finally did. As it was, I kept trying without success for about five years before I said the hell with the sleazy corruptions and deceptions of academia. Eventually, I just went to a three-month (but expensive) vocational training program to become certified for a somewhat dangerous blue-collar job where I made $23/hour. There was a minimum educational requirement to get into that program. It was a GED.

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Bradley P. Hayton

Competing Interests in Higher Ed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 4, 2012

The state of American education is appalling, but it isn't the administration to blame. It is the profs. And Sykes minces no words. Here is a mere sample of his indictment: "No understanding of the academic disease is possible without an understanding of the Academic Man, this strange mutation of 20th-century academia who has the pretensions of an ecclesiastic, the artfulness of a witch doctor, and the soul of a bureaucrat. His greatest triumph has been the creation of an academic culture that is one of society's most outrageous and elaborate frauds. It is replete with the pieties, arcane rituals, rites of passage, and dogmas of a secular faith. . . . Ultimately, the academic culture represents a sort of modern-day alchemy in which mumbo-jumbo is transformed into gold, or, in this case, into research grants, consulting contracts, sabbaticals, and inflated salaries" (pp. 4-5). And this is only a sample of his bill of indictment!

The book is full of lingo, rhetoric, and name-calling. But through all the words, which actually make an otherwise dull subject electric, his contentions hit the mark bulls-eye. The faculty has the power to determine the product, the terms upon which it will be offered, and the customers who will be served. Profs are hyper-specialists, instead of offering students a general education. They are institutionally rewarded for more research grants and publications, and punished for good teaching and time spent interacting with students. In the past twenty years, profs have had decreased teaching loads while huge increases in salaries. Academic democratization has lowered standards while inflating grades. Academic thought police have promoted prof freedoms while imprisoning students in by-gone ideologies. Rather than broadening minds, the academic culture has ended up ratifying and strengthening our culture's most basic features. The rich humanities have been replaced by the sterile statistics of the social sciences.

Sykes blames the profs, but it's the culture of academia that is often the problem. Profs are forced to publish or perish, and they have to specialize in minute details to get published. And outstanding teaching is simply on the backburner of most of the major university's job descriptions. In order to survive in academia, they have to play the game of academia. Grade inflation occurs because so many low grades merely get student complaints to adminstrators who pressure grades upward. Student evaluations forced by accreditation agencies force profs to entertain students rather than educate them.

6 people found this helpful

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William

Not Every Professor Is A Bad Person, But The Bad Ones Could Do A Lot Of Damage.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 7, 2013

Not every professor is a bad person. There are some professors that are very fine people and very fine teachers contributing a lot of usefuless. However, if one encounters a bad professor, this book accurately describes some of them. Just as in a lot of other other occupations, there are some good people and some bad people. As the book accurately states, some professors at some universities have abandoned their teaching responsibilities and have assigned the teaching to teaching assistants. Some of the bad professors are very cold and arrogant. The author is correct in stating that lot of the so-called research in some universities is largely worthless and is solely used for career advancement. Of course, there are some people without college degrees that are more intelligent than some people who have degrees. There are some very fine self-taught people with little or no formal education. The book says that some of what is taught in the universites looks like it was designed by a game show host. There are legitimate criticisms against the tenure system in this book. This book has many valid points and is worth reading.

One person found this helpful

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Stephen Elliott

Prescient writing from a very careful and engaging writer on the future if universities and the purpose of education.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 9, 2017

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A prescient piece of writing by Charles Sykes. Almost 30 years later the university has become a glorified marketing agency which values research (no matter how irrelevant) over teaching. Mr Sykes even gave warning of the rise of global league tables using inappropriate metrics to promote the university at the expense of integrity. I recommend this book to anyone considering the cost or value of a university degree today

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Profscam Audio Cassette – Audiobook

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