Welcome to Bizarro Amerika!

Wait—Liberty University gets half a billion dollars a year in federal aid? And they have almost 50,000 students? I feel a great disturbance in the Force, as if thousands of minds suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.

I looked a little further and discovered, though, that Liberty is actually a mid-sized private college with an on-campus enrollment of about 12,000 — they're sucking in all that money because they're deeply involved in that lucrative on-line 'education' game, where they shuffle students through a series of web pages and declare them S-M-R-T, smart. I was made suspicious when I looked at their list of faculty in chemistry and biology and was surprised to see that their total number of chemistry/biology faculty is 21, while my university has a total combined chemistry and biology faculty of 15…for a student body of fewer than 2,000. If we just go by the service provided, I think that means the University of Minnesota Morris should be getting $357 million every year from the government, and we could give every student free tuition, raise faculty salaries to a competitive level, and hire a couple more faculty in each discipline to ease the strain we're going through right now (we're short-staffed, and it hurts). And then, with the money left over, we could build a water park and a light-rail connection to Minneapolis and get everyone an ice cream cake on their birthday! Yay!

Bonus: with all that money, you'd also get a physics and a geology department that doesn't teach that the earth was formed in six days 6,000 years ago, and a biology department that actually teaches biology instead of abracadabra-magic-man-in-the-sky-done-it.

Since we're paying so much money for it, can we rename Liberty University? I'd like to call it Leech University. At least they wouldn't have to change the monogrammed towels.

By PZ Myers | Sourced from Pharyngula
Posted at April 5, 2011, 11:10 am