04-04-2008, 10:06 AM
ham Wrote:False Advertising?
Fraudulent degrees?
Are you reading John Bear's biography, perchance?
When you have an industry ruled by an entrenched cartel, which regulates the entry of competition into the field and evaluates the alleged quality of that competition, this is the result you get.
In the 1950's Toyota manufactured cars that, by US standards of the time, were small, unreliable, underpowered, ugly and difficult to maintain or repair due to lack of parts and trained mechanics. If the auto companies then had a cadre of shills and wannabes like the higher education cartel has today, Toyota would have been banned from the country.
"OMG, what if one of those small, unreliable cars were to break down on the freeway??? Somebody could get killed!!!! The Russians could sabotage US commerce by jamming up all the roads with broken down Jap cars!!!!! Congress ought to pass a law to protect us all...."
Thankfully the likes of Bear and Gollum were not around back then, or we wouldn't be able to enjoy the world standard of quality automobiles that Toyota produces today.
Likewise, when any of a number of "non-traditional" programs started, were they much different than SRU? Weren't people saying the exact same things about Nova a few decades ago? (And still are, in some places.)
They were saying the same things about CCU in Congress only weeks before it was accredited.? In its early days CCU was a "pay and play" operation little if any different than SRU, as Bear himself has described it in his books.
CCU existed and thrived under the lax California laws of the day. SRU found a venue with similarly lax laws and, at least initially, thrived as well.
Whether SRU would have turned the corner and become a full-fledged member of the cartel we never will know. But given that money seems to be the foremost criteria for cartel admission, it seems that it would have been just a matter of time before Dixie accumulated a sufficient war chest to pay the toll.