Gibberish Works! - Seems like higher education has always struggled with defining HIGHER EDUCATION. Tradition is a powerful foe. Once locked in to an idea, many things will masquerade as an expression of it. I was reading of 120 published academic papers that were found to be nothing but gibberish and had to be withdrawn. They are computer generated nonsense; really! SCIgen is a piece of software created by folks at MIT “to prove that conferences would accept meaningless papers . . . and to maximize amusement.” The software randomly combines strings of words which produce false science papers. Here are some of the titles, “Application and Research of Smalltalk Harnessing Based on Game-Theoretic Symmetries,” “Am Evaluation of E-Business with Fin,” and my favorite, “Simulating Flip-Flop Gates Using Peer-to-Peer Methodologies.” Cyril Labbe of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France specializes in tracking down these fakes and even experiments by putting forth his own. He’s found 30 published fake papers, “Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, based in New York.” He himself created an imaginary author, Ike Antkare, and put forth more more than a hundred fake papers. He then added them to the Google Scholar database and made Ike “the world’s 21st most highly cited scientist.” There is an ideology that drives all of this. GET PUBLISHED OR PERISHED is the faculty pressure. Get a name; or at least publish a paper that no one can understand. You might then at least be held to be brilliant since you can’t be understood. Bible Colleges can be no different. Jesus warned of a life that was hypocrisy; i.e. all was done “to be seen by others,” (Mt 6:1, 5, 16, 23:5-7). This is the temptation: PRIDE. It is the “We must be looked at as important,” test. Who wants to be a Great-Unimportant-Nobody! But this was the way with Jesus. “Be the servant of all” if you want to be great. “The last shall be first,” is not the path most of us are interested in. “Take the lower seats,” Jesus said. I spent some time looking online at several sites that list Churches looking for Pastors. What interested me was what they were looking for. Applicant qualifications included: have a least a Master’s degree. must be published. must run all ministries of the Church. must have been divorced! I was amazed that a Church said they had so many divorced couples that they wanted a Pastor who had been divorced so that he could understand them. I never would have believed that I might be disqualified from a ministry position because I haven’t divorced my wife! speak several languages. I believe that those who would not qualify would include Jesus, the Apostles, the Prophets, Luther, Calvin, etc. I did read one listing that was for a little Church in a little town that simply wanted to grow in following Jesus, and was indifferent to growing in numbers. If I had been looking for a Pastorate I would have looked there first. At CIB we try to impress on students and staff that it is not greatness that we are seeking; it is Christ! What matters is faithfulness and nothing more. God told Jeremiah to tell Baruch, “Are you seeking great things for yourself? Seek them not!” He was Jeremiah’s scribe or personal secretary. He believed that these credentials would exalt him. “Knock it off!” God says.
Posted on: Mon, 01 Sep 2014 15:30:05 +0000
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