Encefalus

I found this report the other day on Eurekalert. The article reports:

"Rice University’s Connexions, one of the most-visited online sites for open-educational resources, today announced it is making a popular textbook available free this fall for one of the country’s most-attended transfer-level community college courses — elementary statistics. The book, "Collaborative Statistics," has been used for more than a decade in California community college courses accepted for transfer credit by one of the nation’s premier public university systems, the University of California. The online version of the book has already been chosen as the primary text for fall classes enrolling more than 700 students."

The book can be found here http://cnx.org/content/col10522

So, we can get a free book written especially not for mathematicians, but for the scientists of applied fields with no profound mathematical knowledge! I consider this to be a very important movement. As the rate of information exchange increases, we see an exploitation of knowledge instead of free distribution. The article also reports:

"More than 90,000 U.S. students take a statistics course at a community college each year and many pay $100 or more for a traditional statistics textbook. According to the nonprofit MakeTextbooksAffordable.org, the average U.S. college student spends about $900 per year on textbooks, and textbook prices are increasing faster than inflation."

This goes for your new textbook…

So, giving away for free a valuable resource like that can go a long way towards improving the financial state of many students.

So, you’ll ask me, what should this be? After all, money is the way everything works. But I ask you, is this right?

Let’s go back to the creation of the first universities. We find in wikipedia in the entry University

"The original Latin word "universitas", first used in time of renewed interest in Classical Greek and Roman tradition, tried to reflect this feature of the Academy of Plato (established 385 BC)."

The Academy of Plato reflected a lot about the higher ideals that the Athenian Democracy aspired to. This civilization held in high esteem wisdom and knowledge. The first universities were founded upon that tradition. But at what tradition are the modern universities founded upon? I’ll tell you: PROFIT!

We live in a capitalistic world. Everything in that system must relate in one or the other way with its core principles to survive. Of course there can be exceptions, but a worldwide system like the one that the universities constitute, could never be classified as an exception, since its sheer size would never be able to be, if the universities were not an important element of the modern economy.

This guy wouldn’t be very happy about this whole situation…

So, instead of seeing a propagation of knowledge what do we see? EXPLOITATION. Universities contribute to this system with the following ways

1)They tax their students large sums of money to register in the university

2)They are directly connected with corporations which use the research to drive forward the capitalistic vision of constant growth. These corporations can be the army, can be enterprises or it can really be anything. Sometimes, they can be whole other systems unto themselves like the mental healthcare system as I stated in my article Clinical Psychology SUCKS or The Psychological Paradigm in the 21st century

3)They don’t help their students with their textbooks, or anything for that matter, since they’ll sometimes force you to stay in their campus and pay for the rent.

So, a university student will pay large sums of money, with the hope that he will get a degree and become, too, a cog in the whole system that gave birth to his degree. Reading Freakonomics I learned to find common economic patterns in everything that can have them (like for example McDonalds and ghetto gangs). You know what this system reminds of? PIMPS!

Most people would have an image like that come to their mind when they think of a pimp

Link: www.youtube.com

However, I think of that

But the exploitation doesn’t stop there. Think something more important. As the knowledge increases in size, we need to have ways to search through all this. So, we will use academic search engines. Which need payment for their services. The most profound example is Science Direct which taxes each paper 30$. Of course, you can have free access if you are a university student, but why shouldn’t anyone else have free access (even if this somebody is a former student who obtained his degree). I’ll tell you why: because he is useless for this system, since he doesn’t give or make any more money.

If knowledge was the purpose of existence of universities, then anyone, and I really mean anyone, could and should have access to every scientific information ever produced.

Of course, someone will argue that this system couldn’t be any other way in the current economic system, and that it also benefits the economy and, so, it benefits society. But I ask you, can economic growth and the concentration of money bring welfare to the individual? Or maybe is it the case that certain individuals or entities make large profits out of this situation and others (like the average scientist) simply survive in the whole system, floating in the waters of the vast ocean of exploitation of knowledge?

Furthermore, one could argue that personal gain is the motivation upon which capitalism has been founded and without it, we would have no books (academic or otherwise). But again, we have to ask, what is best for society? The personal gain or the benefit of everyone? Couldn’t for example, the state pay a certain sum of money to create public search engines to give access to everyone, while paying the authors for their work? Or, if this would cost so much money, couldn’t at least create a search engine with a minimal fee in part of those who want to use it?

I am from Greece, and here universities, by constitutional law, are public and free. Anyone can attend a class, and anyone can enter the university, as long as he passes the exams. But, the times are a-changing and the government is trying again and again to slowly corrupt the current educational system, obeying to the Bologna Treaty which really is a treaty to make the universities to function like they do in the USA and in Great Britain. The greatest universities will be for the elite of the society, thus leading Europe into the dogma that the USA has abided by since its very roots.

Of course, we have some enlighted individuals who have contributed to the free knowledge movement. We have Wikipedia and we have Pubmed. But are these enough? Certainly not, even if they are movements in the right direction. However, some people have decided to do something more

The Pirate Bay has become some sort of a modern movement for the free distribution of knowledge. Of course, before that, we had simple piracy, we had other torrent trackers. Now we also have rapidshare, or Freenet. But, the Pirate Bay is the first tracker to come out and speak loudly about the right to free information.

I know that there are many people out there who will disagree with what I’m saying, but I believe that information is meant to be free. That’s the way society and individual can progress. When someone tries to take that or any other right away from you, you fight back. This is why universities don’t promote knowledge as much as they’d like to claim they do, but Pirate Bay does. Heck, even blogs like Encefalus fight for free knowledge! Through the expression of our opinions and the commentary on research that might not be available to non-academics, we distribute information to those who might want it or might need it.

While corporate and govermental interests fight the citizen, the latter will rise to claim what is rightfully his. To close this article I will post in the further reading section a few links to sites that promote free distribution of knowledge. I encourage you to post yours in the comments if you want.

Further Reading:

Connexions

The Pirate Bay

Mininova

Pubmed

Wikipedia

Shareminer

Passfans

TechYou

The Free Knowledge Institute

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 17th, 2008 at 4:47 pm and is filed under General, Philosophical, Socio-Political. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.