Well, Starbucks is more prestigious than McDonalds...A well known bar near the University of Chicago which I frequented in the old days had the diploma for one of the bartenders posted on the wall behind the bar.....Masters in Philosophy from that same U of C....
A side-effect of this mess is the slow-roll apocalypse in academic publications and the sciences. The replication crisis has shown that around 50% of the hard-science publications, and over 90% of the soft-science publications cannot be replicated. This means that rate of scientific-development is collapsing outside of NDA-filled corporate institutions. The corporate managers are the ones who have gained power over future development... and the people creating that development are more likely to be DEI hires.
We're going to see a world where "the science" is as reliable as any other form of mysticism. Some times it'll work, but the guy who could explain why it works is employed as a part-time uber driver. That guy is a political dissident while the professor is a member of the commissariat.
> We're going to see a world where "the science" is as reliable as any other form of mysticism.
I believe we've been in that world for quite a while now. It's certainly the case in computer science and IT, which is replete with cargo cults and strange performative rituals. And a vast laity who anticipate all sorts of magical impossibilities from the priesthood, from immortality to omniscience to obedient robowaifus, in exchange for their unwavering faith.
I'm increasingly convinced that there is some fundamental aspect of human psychology from which these desires and expectations emerge. A sort of template that gets imprinted on whatever the fashionable/dominant belief system is at the time.
You can take the human out of "unscientific mystical superstitions", but you can't take the mysticism out of the human. We have a natural conviction that there must be some method of overcoming our most basic fears and limitations, some loophole or cheat code in the universe.
If the proper rituals are performed, whether it involves specially prepared herbs or specially prepared slivers of silicon, we can defeat our innate ignorance and mortality. Any belief system that denies that this is possible is doomed to fail, or at least mutate into a version of itself that guarantees the thing it once denied. Thus science became The Science.
Many of those things - radical life extension, gyndroid concubots, etc - are probably possible, and a great deal more besides. Desirable is often another story.
But achieving them, that's the real trick. It takes enormous discipline, intellectual creativity sustained in a single direction by many people over a long time, with bullshit ruthlessly weeded out at every step. Very few people are really capable of this, and that fraction is much smaller than the fraction of those who want to prestige and pay that comes from participation in such projects, meaning that participation must also be ruthlessly policed.
Since we no longer regulate participation properly, the rest of the process breaks down, and technical progress gets mired in a swamp of incompetence and corruption.
I seriously doubt any of it is possible, personally. Like, if you compared repairing an aging living cell to repairing a jet engine, in operation, in flight, you'd fall short by orders of magnitude of complexity. Now do that for billions of them, and don't make any mistakes. If the mechanism for doing so was possible, nature probably already would have figured it out.
The answer is always, "oh but we'll use nanobots / genetically engineered viruses / etc." which are all science fantasy too. Just magic with a sci fi veneer.
Might we see marginal improvements? Sure. We might do better than pharmaceutically zombifing dead people - better than empty bodies chasing the lifespan high score chart - by learning more about how to keep the brain as well as the body relatively functional for a few extra decades. I could believe that, although real results are still lacking in spite of decades of sensational claims by life extension researchers. But effective immortality I sincerely doubt.
As for robowaifus, I mean, if all you're looking for is a silicon doll hooked up to a chatbot, sure, whatever. You might even get it to climb the opposite slope of the uncanny valley to the point where most people don't find it revolting from a distance. But Moore's Law is dead and I think there are better uses of computing resources than datacenters dedicated to physically manifested pornography, such that economics will probably put them out of reach of your average socially awkward young man.
The thing about all of this is: we *already have* the capability to do much, much more interesting things. The inner planets are within reach of our technology, if not within reach of our will and mettle. The asteroid belt and its nearly endless material resources too, if the economics work out (I am skeptical but not cynical in regard to this). We're sitting around waiting for fusion, which may never happen, but we haven't even built out our *fission* capacity which is a proven technology.
And we could certainly live much better, happier, fuller lives right now instead of delaying maturity in hopes of living to see the fully automated luxury communism utopia pitched by tech-mystics.
We don't need to wait on pseudoscience-magic to be much more impressive than we presently are. We just need to be willing to be brave, embrace extreme danger, and look to the future, building cathedrals for our great-grandchildren instead of opium dens for our permanently infantilized.
I live in Chicago. I have had numerous people in the recent past inform me that "women graduate from college more than men, which proves women are smarter".
I have gently informed these people that "women graduate from college more than men which proves college is dumb".
Believe it or not my thought has not been well received. BTW neither of those sentiments is NECESSARILY true.
It doesn't mean they're dumb, although they tend to be. Just that they have a much higher tolerance for tedium … and that men are running away from a space that is now coded as feminine.
This is very common in bureaucracies. They will willfully ignore the elephants in the room everyone is thinking about but are too scared to mention in favor of "doing something" that has nothing to do with the core problem.
It's the mindset of corporations that give free pizza on Fridays after employees leave in droves due to lack of pay.
We have now a woman as the head of department. She thinks a department of 98% of working men care about toilet sanity, free coffee or the fruit box. We want to work, we need tools and a decent salary keeping up at least with inflation. Once per year they even send the diversity department to us which is a bloody laugh. Nobody gives a rat's ass about these things.
They don’t, but its a lot harder to have a modern attrition war (which Ukraine is showing to be the new model) if the vast majority of your citizens are against it. Due to technological advancements and the rapid decline of the GAE military, air superiority is no longer a guarantee (thus leading to attrition war). This breaks the NATO war model, thus wars become much, much more costly and thus harder to justify.
You can’t have forever war if its too expensive in men and material. Thus forever war is itself attrited to dust.
The CIA may continue to cause mischief, but the GAE won’t be able to put “boots on the ground” anymore, at least for a generation as far as I can tell.
I won’t miss the imperial faggot army, at all. If the rest of the world wants to fight, sure I don’t give a shit if a bunch of people kill each other for shit that doesn’t affect me and I don’t care about. The empire is currently collapsing and any resulting wars (god forbid) are going to be civil. Now I hope these wars are mere palace coups and don’t violently and messily spill into the streets…. But regardless, I think your deluded if you are expecting more of the same as if the last 25 years never happened.
Lunched yesterday with a Belgian academic just back from a swing through China. Says the Chinese are ready to clean out their (99% Western educated) academics who advocate this kind of nonsense and to re-found tertiary education on more traditional cultural values (like cutthroat competition). Friends from the Russian academy say it never really got started there.
Will believe it when I see it. They also claimed a few years ago they were going to stamp out the problem of doctors publishing fake research in order to get promoted - a policy the PRC created for itself by tying promotions to publishing. They made a lot of noise and set up some bureaucracies but there seems to have been no improvement.
The Chinese are infamous for churning out low quality, incorrect, and often fraudulent research on an assembly line. Their purpoted dominance in publications and patents must be interpreted in this light.
Great piece. I agree with you completely, although I'm slightly more optimistic toward the possibility of a successful purge.
One slight quibble: regarding Cambridge discriminating against native British in admission, it'd be better to compare the racial composition of Cambridge undergrad admits with the composition of their age cohort rather than with the 85% overall British white percentage. That said, British 18-24 year olds are still 76% white (source linked at end), and them being 61% of Cambridge admits is still substantial underrepresentation (and thus your point is unchanged).
Heh. I was homeschooled until age 10 back when it was still a little weird (late 80s-early 90s) but the notion of using a relevant comparison group is undoubtedly something I picked up from Sowell when I was binging his work in my 20s.
I must confess to as a youth I dreamt of scholarhood, I lived and breathed to be a scholar; to become either the next Jung or to become the next W.L. Warren except I was gonna study myths and legends (like the Bros Grimm did) and the history of Japan and France. I had big dreams.
Enter my first days in university when I had to run from one end of the college to the next, 'no problem I said, I'll just change schools' I said the following year, and did and.... did the exact same thing again. What I found was that the English department was intellect free save for maybe one professor. He was the only male prof in the department and utterly brilliant, I loved studying under him. History department had one prof who couldn't be bothered to teach and instead played youtube videos all class long, while the rest of the department was brilliant. Trouble is that some of the fellow students were brilliant, but my fellow Metis students (all female) wanted to just slam on 'white men' (whatever the hell that is I think they meant anglo-saxons or francs), and bitch- I mean present research papers about 'Native genocide' at the hands of the whites via famine and genocide, so that their research included natural disasters and plagues being blamed on the Spanish & French.
I spent 8 years therein Academia (I helped as a research-student, an unusual position) before I lost it, and had to quit. I've been in and out of janitorial and teaching the past few years, and honestly I don't much miss university. While I loved the history department, I don't miss how weak they were to the one woke prof, or how toxic the English department was, or having to suck up for grades.
My whole point is that while I dreamt of also being a Tolkien, who would teach history and myths, and write my own I've since given up on such pursuits in a uni setting. I really do plan to go back to secure a French Bacc & Maitrise from Lavale but that would be only to secure further qualifications for better pay down the road in Asia and to add to my repertoire for my stories.
Though the temptation to cut my losses is always there and I'll never recommend my kids to enter academia save if its Japan which seems like the only place with still prestigious universities. Great essay John as always.
It isn't possible to do great things in university anymore, in general. Certainly not on the level of a Tolkien, though too be fair he was always an anomaly. But a Tolkien would never be tolerated, now.
Agreed, it’s why I had to quit, I only think about going back for French grammaire to improve mine and tighten up skills I already have.
I despise what these scum have done to the academia I grew up loving and admiring so much. Though in my case I was always an odd kid from an odd family in the countryside, who were all heavy readers and passionate admirers of 19th century scholars of different topics.
Hope new institutions in French and English rise soon to let us true scholars have a chance to combat the nefaste influence of academics and administrative busy-bodies.
Yes, I am also wary of Pod People. But here it’s from what home schoolers call it when they form a group for field trips, social activities, and teaching subjects the adults know to all the kids in a pod.
What’s coming reaches far beyond academia. Your people, howsoever you define that, will need capable young leaders to push aside the Clown World dross and lead through The Long Emergency.
If you stop thinking of being Tolkien and start thinking of how to help with THAT problem, many possibilities and futures open up for you. Your family background suggests that you might be The Guy for this.
Will you take up the burden through dankness, though you do not know the way?
"... couldn't be bothered to teach and instead played youtube videos all class long..."
That right there would be a possible cause for termination here, no matter how woke or what race cards you try and play.
While Swedish academia on the whole is pretty far on the slippery slope, in no small part due to copying whatever whiffs over from America, it is nowhere as bad as you or John describes it, content-wise.
It's not uncommon in North America. I once covered a lecture for a not particularly bright female professor. She helpfully prepared slides for me. They were mostly YouTube videos. Looking out over the class, I could see they were all desperately bored.
“Is this usually what class is like?” I asked.
“Yes,” they replied. “She just shows movies.”
I stopped playing the movies, whipped through those slides that were actual slides, engaged the class in conversation, and let them go early.
Shameful. A video, on topic, with new information once in a while is not a problem.
As homework. With a writing-assignment of some kind.
As my tutor told me, repeatedly: "If what you're going to do in class can be done as assignments or homework, why bother having class?"
It was his way of making me understand what class is for: me lecturing on stuff we're going to go over in fine detail, debate, argue over and hash out where all that is part of "the learning process".
Problem with that is, you or I can determine whether or not a Youtube in a topic we are well-read in, is crap or not.
A student can't since they haven't the knowledge, so just as with literature the lecturer must pick for them, initially.
Just look at treadheads or rivetcounters going at each other, about "which tank won WW2" - without realising the entire question is ridiculous. The Top 10-whatever lists of tabloids and magazines now try to pass as knowledge. In Swedish, this is called "snuttifikation", has been since the 1970s. "Snutt-" means 'ditty' or 'very little out of a whole' or 'stump'. I guess you might say "Making molehills out of mountains" to get the same meaning.
Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply that watching movies is a replacement for an education. Ultimately there's no replacement for reading actual books, and lots of them, and then writing about those books to grapple with their subject matter. And of course the guidance of someone who knows what they're doing is invaluable.
But if that guide is just showing you movies, well...
This is how it is in elementary schools now as well. I substitute teach and the lesson plans are all Chromebooks and YouTube videos. Only once or twice have I been asked to teach. The kids are so behind, it's scary. 6th graders who can't write a 5 paragraph essay nor subtract fractions. I don't think the "smart" classroom is very smart.
Screens are being used to fry kids’ brains. They're atrophying from lack of use
Teach your own kids to read, make sure they read books, and make sure they learn to think, write, and do mathematics with their own brains, and they will have superpowers compared to their peers.
Ouais, but she was beloved by a lot of department heads and none of us students cared enough to report her, as her teaching style was boring and the videos were fun.
Though in hindsight it was pretty awful and she probably should have been fired. She was also the most pro-postmodernist in the History department and preferred the company of the English one. The other history profs were all cool.
Postmodernism being turned into an ideology or ontological position, instead of remaining a method is indeed a great evil, and as an ideology it can't but help always leading to the well-known pointless puerile misconception of nihilism we see run rampant all over the Western world.
Modern universities are depressing to be in, I’ve already told you the tale of how miserable I felt being forced to endure pointless lectures in feminism and “why spreading the HIV virus shouldn’t be criminalized” when I was in LAW SCHOOL, one of the best in my country to allegedly…but it’s not just that it’s not just the artificial plastic factory feel that most universities have to them, it’s not the sterile censored environment, or the terminally stupid people that make the majority of teachers and professors, it’s not the pointless ideological bullshit and protests that don’t matter: I’ve seen people protesting the war between Russia and Ukraine in university grounds, I live in BRAZIL and most people protesting couldn’t point to Ukraine in a map, I know because I checked!
It was the sheer torture of it, the feeling of wasting one’s precious time in that pointless facade when one could be actually studying, I wished to take extra courses on Latin and Greek but they were almost non existent, don’t worry thought: African dance theory has plenty of classes.
I had no option but to drop out, I couldn’t endure the place.
Time can never be replaced. So much of our society is designed to steal it. This is the nature of managerialism - time parasites who feed by eating our time. Not only in universities.
This comment makes me think of a book I had my son read when I homeschooled him in 6th grade. Momo by Michael Ende. Also known as Momo and the Time Thieves. It is the nature of managerialism, been that way since the beginning.
Perhaps the best response to all of this is to just do as Atlas and shrug.
The silver lining is that the very administrative parasites that have been killing their Western host for generations are themselves products of these institutions. Thus, by dumbing down "educations" and "credentials" to the level of irrelevance means that going forward the administrative state and increasingly the elites whom they serve are becoming more and more incompetent and less capable of implementing their global governance schemes.
And that means the whole rotten edifice might just collapse under its own weight instead of us having to winkle them out with rifles, ropes, and lampposts. I forsee independent guilds within various disciplines making a comeback, with their own standards and requirements for certification of applicants. Especially if insurers wise up to the fact that credentials from existing DEI towers are worse than useless for determining competence or qualification.
I have no intelligent comment to write here, so I will just say thank you for bringing this to my awareness. I am deeply sad for this world in its current state. I keep looking for hope in the darkness. Sharing information and insight is one such ray of hope and shines light on the tides of horror that engulf us.
"…the quiet halls of academe have degenerated into feminized kindergartens in which the internal discourse oscillates between the equally distasteful extremes of stultifying dogmatic conformity and shrieking hysterical insanity, a sanitarium presided over by a caste of dead-eyed mismanagerial pod people for whom ‘knowledge production’ is just another blood sack to stick their feeding probosces into."
Is it even possible? Every university has gone the same way, which implies this path is inherent to the nature or structure of the institution.
After all, although Butterfield protests that in the past things were good, that's not been my experience. I attended a reasonably prestigious British university in 2004 and the course was crap, practically fraudulent. The professors were all cheating like crazy using the usual bag of tricks (e.g. allocating marks to group work where every group was given one high performer who then had to do the work for everyone). Look at the replication crisis in psychology and you find that some of the highest profile fraudulent studies date back to the 1960s. In the 1930s universities were all a hotbed of communist sympathizers to the extent that the US couldn't even find enough loyal academics to run their nuclear programme, which leaked like a sieve. And before that they were mostly theocratic convents for religious crazies.
There's probably no hope for creating good universities. The very concept of a university dooms it to a downward spiral of ever more extreme left wing ideologies. People should be trained by companies. If people want to study things companies don't fund like Sanskrit then they can do it in their own time, or do it the old fashioned way and find a rich patron.
And yet despite those historical shortcomings - which I think illustrate only that we've been here before - universities have produced some remarkable work.
The problem with a purely corporate approach is that it tends to be very profit centric, and fairly short term. Particularly these days, with a very few notable exceptions. You won't, for example, find research programs into Sanskrit in the private sector (or apparently at the universities, either).
I'm also not sure there's anything inherently left wing about universities. When they were seminaries, for example, they were very conservative. To a large degree the problem is precisely communist infiltration, which have pursued an active program of leftist subversion.
Conservatism isn't the opposite of leftism though. China in the 2010s is largely a story of communist conservatives re-asserting control over capitalist progressivists. Conservatism stands for nothing beyond preserving whatever the status quo is, which for hundreds of years was Christian theocracy. And Christianity bears strong resemblances to leftism, so I don't think it's really a different phase of their existence.
There is certainly plenty of long termist corporate research to look at in the current landscape. Obviously, very long term high risk research requires rich patrons, but there are plenty of those e.g. SpaceX's entire research programme and existence is nothing but long term risky research, Waymo is a 15+ year multi-billion-dollar-per-year research effort that quite likely will never turn a profit, LLMs were the result of a roughly decade long research effort across the entire tech industry, then you have CPU/GPU development, video encoding, telecoms .... all commercial and often done on long time horizons. The lab I work at is commercial and has funded one of its current lines of research (which is not profitable) for at least twenty years now!
The reason corporate research usually appears short term is not because academia is somehow more far sighted or altruistic. It's because taking research outputs and commercializing it acts as a critical form of reality check. You can't commercialize something based on false premises, it gets found out. If you don't do reality checks often enough then projects often spiral downwards into senility. The problems in academia are largely a result of never having any kind of forced encounter with reality and what we see across the board is fake research investigating nonsense theories, which they can avoid accountability for by claiming their programme is just very long term.
Screw that! We need to go back when companies filter candidates properly by tests! So your kid can learn at home a skill and excel without bullshit credentials costing half million dollars...
That is basically the plan at this point. Allow the enemy to rule over the ashes, build new power bases in the hinterlands, then occupy the old real estate when they inevitably collapse.
Cambridge has been here before. There was half a millennium or more in which it was a sleepy backwater, irrelevant to the flow of intellectual endeavour, because it was enmired in dogmatic scholasticism (which has more than a few points of similarity with the current ideology). It eventually recovered.
Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, though. Perhaps this time is terminal.
Indeed, and the reason Cambridge and Oxford got their acts together was that they were being outperformed by nimble young institutions that were attracting all the top intellectual talent.
Same thing will happen again, I'm sure, only this time at the level of the entire academic system, with the ersatz Invisible College of the internet attracting the most capable minds.
The numbers don't lie. They expose the rot at the core of western universities. Consider Cambridge's remuneration data for 2023 (link below):
In 2023, there were 701 Uni of Cambridge staff being paid more than £100k a year base salary.
An astonishing 525 of these were non-academic staff (up from 482 in 2022). Of these, 122 were paid over £150k, with 33 paid over £200k.
The Dean was on an eye watering £499,000.
By contrast, only 176 academics were paid over £100k and none were paid over £150k.
Those numbers tell the whole story. Cambridge may look like a university but in reality, it's not - it's a self serving bureaucracy that's become detached from the main mission of the University, and wide open to grifters.
This is happening all over the western world and it's a disaster. Simply put, elite western universities just aren't that good anymore. I agree that the problem is too endemic to fix - it's too late & we must ensure total collapse, before any restoration can take place.
Luckily, many nations outside the western sphere have kept a very firm focus on what a university is & what standards it must maintain - and they will become the new standard bearers of higher education.
Perhaps Mr Butterfield should make his way to China, Russia, India or any of the main BRICS states - all have absolutely superb universities that are firmly focussed on their core mission & that are churning out superior students to the west, 24/7.
I remember during the first Trump election talking with my AWFUL aunt about how university degrees weren’t worth the paper they were printed on and were just job licenses. Even the ivys, especially the ivys, and that they weren’t worth giving extra status anymore.
Of course I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about, the subtext being because I didn’t have a fancy ivy degree.
During my time in school, I treated the degrees as job licenses. As that was what I ultimately wanted out of it, a good paying “useless” job that wouldn’t take up all of my intellectual horsepower (so i could devote that to stuff like this). Many a professor got deeply uncomfortable with me over me bluntly treating the “college experience” as a mere formality and rubber stamp. Yet none of them could disagree.
Having the universities be job factories was frankly idiotic. Anyone with a brain could tell you this, yet people would rather outsource all the risk and expense of hiring qualified talent to the university system, and well, here we are now that all that credibility has been used up. Corporations may have to, *gasp* hire qualified people, somehow, who don’t have that slip of paper, or collapse. The legacy of the universities during my lifetime was to socialize the costs of acquiring talent, to the talent.
At the end of the day, what exactly is the point of the university? It doesn’t appear to have any productive use these days. Its not a place of excellence, and its no longer all that good at prescreening the population for corporations and the government to cherrypick. So it either starts doing one of these again, finds something new, or ceases to exist.
Professors generally hate it when you strip away their illusions, of the passionate life of the mind and pursuit of knowledge and such, to point out that they are simply there to provide a gauntlet for students to earn a piece of paper that will let them get a job, and that the majority of students know this and will therefore put no effort into the gauntlet than absolutely necessary.
Take a look at Griggs v Duke Power which was the disparate impact case. In response, employers outsourced their employment testing to higher education. Thanks, Warren Burger.
I think college education in general is in an economic bubble. The cost exceeds it's actual market value and there may be a correction coming with much downsizing. Regarding DEI, requiring that all first year freshmen pass calculus would possibly end it, but there would be too much money to lose for that to happen.
"Regarding DEI, requiring that all first year freshmen pass calculus would possibly end it,"
You seem to not want a traditional European university but a technical school. Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate racial and sexual quotas like Title IX?
Both. Eliminate anything with “studies” in the title. Intro calculus would not indicate a technical school, traditional education required a certain mathematical comprehension as otherwise critical thinking could not occur. And it’s training for the brain. The real idea is to filter out those incapable of logical thought who are infesting the DEI departments. News reporters often look foolish due to a lack of applying eighth grade arithmetic. Colleges once required two years of algebra for admission, which should imply the ability to learn some calculus. You could argue for a lower level, but computational thinking should be part of being college educated.
I disagree. Mathematical thinking cannot help students understand the overarching culture. Techies like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates drove the US and the West in general into the current mess.
Traditional education in the West was concerned with developing a well-rounded man. It most definitely did not focus on mathematics. Harvard was originally a divinity school. So were all the ancient European universities.
I could make a case that the scientist and Age of Reason morphed into the Age of Kneeling Nancy. The objectification of life turns humans into alienated random particles. The European mans' fascination with science and numbers has produced a Frankenstein monster. Lots of great gadgets that give an illusion of "progress" but ultimately make men spiritually/culturally weak or drives them insane.
Most of the scientists I’ve known are not at all that narrow. I do not know John Carter, but he is a scientist and seems to get it. I was not suggesting that all be educated as mathematicians, just that we go back to the days where it’s included in a well rounded education. The lack of it does indeed harm one’s cognitive abilities.
I don't know what you mean by narrow. My experience with technical people and those who identify as conservative is that they can have high IQs but are dumb as a fence post culturally.
It's why they have been losing for generations in my opinion. They are completely outclassed by more culturally unified although more crazy people who have intuitively exploited the weaknesses inherent in the scientific/mathematical Age of Reason. They are able to think and act in an instinctive way and the techie/conservative can not.
When I say, culture is what's left over after you forgot what you tried to learn, they haven't a clue what I'm talking about. LOL.
Are you implying that people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have been "losing for generations"? Holy crap, if that's what losing looks like, sign me up. These people sit at the absolute pinnacle of our society and culture. They not only increasingly create popular culture, but literally gatekeep distribution as well.
Entrance requirements for the humanities once included a high level of mathematical proficiency; similarly, for the sciences, historical, linguistic, and literary mastery was also required.
Dropping such requirements has led to a proliferation of overly specialized midwits.
There was an insurance executive, Charles Ives, who was able to compose some good music. However, I have known many people who had to make a living as lawyers, doctors or bureaucrats who after decades decided they wanted to paint again, some were even fine arts majors. By that time it was too late. Their brains developed grooves of a type that would not allow them to think in terms of metaphor, images and gestures.
Even doing commercial art changes the way your brain operates compared to making so called fine art.
I think they dropped the algebra requirement in the 60s. Also, the language requirement. For DEI. Before, you had to study a foreign language for two years, I believe in order to get a BA.
* get accepted to elite university
* declare that you're retarded and can't do the work
* graduate with honors
* seethe when nobody takes your credentials seriously
* accept job at starbucks
* spend your evenings on reddit saying "um akshully"
* wait patiently for CNN producer to reply to your email
It really do be like that.
I is a college graduate—aren’t I?
* clamor for student debt "relief"
Well, Starbucks is more prestigious than McDonalds...A well known bar near the University of Chicago which I frequented in the old days had the diploma for one of the bartenders posted on the wall behind the bar.....Masters in Philosophy from that same U of C....
A side-effect of this mess is the slow-roll apocalypse in academic publications and the sciences. The replication crisis has shown that around 50% of the hard-science publications, and over 90% of the soft-science publications cannot be replicated. This means that rate of scientific-development is collapsing outside of NDA-filled corporate institutions. The corporate managers are the ones who have gained power over future development... and the people creating that development are more likely to be DEI hires.
We're going to see a world where "the science" is as reliable as any other form of mysticism. Some times it'll work, but the guy who could explain why it works is employed as a part-time uber driver. That guy is a political dissident while the professor is a member of the commissariat.
> We're going to see a world where "the science" is as reliable as any other form of mysticism.
I believe we've been in that world for quite a while now. It's certainly the case in computer science and IT, which is replete with cargo cults and strange performative rituals. And a vast laity who anticipate all sorts of magical impossibilities from the priesthood, from immortality to omniscience to obedient robowaifus, in exchange for their unwavering faith.
I'm increasingly convinced that there is some fundamental aspect of human psychology from which these desires and expectations emerge. A sort of template that gets imprinted on whatever the fashionable/dominant belief system is at the time.
You can take the human out of "unscientific mystical superstitions", but you can't take the mysticism out of the human. We have a natural conviction that there must be some method of overcoming our most basic fears and limitations, some loophole or cheat code in the universe.
If the proper rituals are performed, whether it involves specially prepared herbs or specially prepared slivers of silicon, we can defeat our innate ignorance and mortality. Any belief system that denies that this is possible is doomed to fail, or at least mutate into a version of itself that guarantees the thing it once denied. Thus science became The Science.
Many of those things - radical life extension, gyndroid concubots, etc - are probably possible, and a great deal more besides. Desirable is often another story.
But achieving them, that's the real trick. It takes enormous discipline, intellectual creativity sustained in a single direction by many people over a long time, with bullshit ruthlessly weeded out at every step. Very few people are really capable of this, and that fraction is much smaller than the fraction of those who want to prestige and pay that comes from participation in such projects, meaning that participation must also be ruthlessly policed.
Since we no longer regulate participation properly, the rest of the process breaks down, and technical progress gets mired in a swamp of incompetence and corruption.
I seriously doubt any of it is possible, personally. Like, if you compared repairing an aging living cell to repairing a jet engine, in operation, in flight, you'd fall short by orders of magnitude of complexity. Now do that for billions of them, and don't make any mistakes. If the mechanism for doing so was possible, nature probably already would have figured it out.
The answer is always, "oh but we'll use nanobots / genetically engineered viruses / etc." which are all science fantasy too. Just magic with a sci fi veneer.
Might we see marginal improvements? Sure. We might do better than pharmaceutically zombifing dead people - better than empty bodies chasing the lifespan high score chart - by learning more about how to keep the brain as well as the body relatively functional for a few extra decades. I could believe that, although real results are still lacking in spite of decades of sensational claims by life extension researchers. But effective immortality I sincerely doubt.
As for robowaifus, I mean, if all you're looking for is a silicon doll hooked up to a chatbot, sure, whatever. You might even get it to climb the opposite slope of the uncanny valley to the point where most people don't find it revolting from a distance. But Moore's Law is dead and I think there are better uses of computing resources than datacenters dedicated to physically manifested pornography, such that economics will probably put them out of reach of your average socially awkward young man.
The thing about all of this is: we *already have* the capability to do much, much more interesting things. The inner planets are within reach of our technology, if not within reach of our will and mettle. The asteroid belt and its nearly endless material resources too, if the economics work out (I am skeptical but not cynical in regard to this). We're sitting around waiting for fusion, which may never happen, but we haven't even built out our *fission* capacity which is a proven technology.
And we could certainly live much better, happier, fuller lives right now instead of delaying maturity in hopes of living to see the fully automated luxury communism utopia pitched by tech-mystics.
We don't need to wait on pseudoscience-magic to be much more impressive than we presently are. We just need to be willing to be brave, embrace extreme danger, and look to the future, building cathedrals for our great-grandchildren instead of opium dens for our permanently infantilized.
I live in Chicago. I have had numerous people in the recent past inform me that "women graduate from college more than men, which proves women are smarter".
I have gently informed these people that "women graduate from college more than men which proves college is dumb".
Believe it or not my thought has not been well received. BTW neither of those sentiments is NECESSARILY true.
It doesn't mean they're dumb, although they tend to be. Just that they have a much higher tolerance for tedium … and that men are running away from a space that is now coded as feminine.
Yea, I know you know this but because college is dumb doesn’t mean women are dumb.
College? The whole education system is feminine now. That's why girls/women are more successful. Using your butt and memorising the dogma it is.
Don't you mean using your butt, actually?
Academic?
Well cheer up!
“Three years into a recruiting crisis, however, the Pentagon hasn’t specifically surveyed this core constituency to determine what’s going wrong.“ WSJ
The core constituency is Veterans, 80% of the military are family members. We have been telling the world this for 20 years.
The good news is the military won’t be coming to crush the people. The bad news is no military 🤣
Maybe the professoriate can lead their students to battle, instead of just inciting 💩 and hiding behind tenure.
This is very common in bureaucracies. They will willfully ignore the elephants in the room everyone is thinking about but are too scared to mention in favor of "doing something" that has nothing to do with the core problem.
It's the mindset of corporations that give free pizza on Fridays after employees leave in droves due to lack of pay.
Or the ever popular “employee of the month award”.
“Does this come with a raise?”
“Ha no it's just our way of appreciating yo- wait where are you going?”
The last guy is in the hospital for a bad ticker ❤️ now.
“He’s so generous with his time.”
Said the female employees 🤣
He just did their work for them.
Because they can’t.
Hey, maybe he’ll live.
We have now a woman as the head of department. She thinks a department of 98% of working men care about toilet sanity, free coffee or the fruit box. We want to work, we need tools and a decent salary keeping up at least with inflation. Once per year they even send the diversity department to us which is a bloody laugh. Nobody gives a rat's ass about these things.
Leading students in battle - 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
These Vampires can fight or be blood 🩸 and organ donors.
We get our own back one way or another.
Question: What do you call an academic outside of the ivory tower?
Answer: Unskilled labor.
I wouldn't paint them all with the same brush, but the majority of them fit the description.
No military means no forever wars. For the empire this is death, for me its hope.
Lol. That is hilarious.
Wars don’t require formal militaries.
…and you’ll miss them…
As for forever… ♾️ most of the world is at war forever. Aka endemic warfare.
It is true there’s going to be a pause, possibly quite long of expeditionary wars, which outside this hemisphere we should have never ventured.
They don’t, but its a lot harder to have a modern attrition war (which Ukraine is showing to be the new model) if the vast majority of your citizens are against it. Due to technological advancements and the rapid decline of the GAE military, air superiority is no longer a guarantee (thus leading to attrition war). This breaks the NATO war model, thus wars become much, much more costly and thus harder to justify.
You can’t have forever war if its too expensive in men and material. Thus forever war is itself attrited to dust.
The CIA may continue to cause mischief, but the GAE won’t be able to put “boots on the ground” anymore, at least for a generation as far as I can tell.
I won’t miss the imperial faggot army, at all. If the rest of the world wants to fight, sure I don’t give a shit if a bunch of people kill each other for shit that doesn’t affect me and I don’t care about. The empire is currently collapsing and any resulting wars (god forbid) are going to be civil. Now I hope these wars are mere palace coups and don’t violently and messily spill into the streets…. But regardless, I think your deluded if you are expecting more of the same as if the last 25 years never happened.
I certainly don’t expect 25 more years of the same, except it’s going to be the same- but located here not abroad.
You really will miss regular, disciplined armies.
I won’t.
As for the God Forbid’s…. As the Child Prophet of Beslan said;
“There is no God but Force.”
Amen 🙏
Lunched yesterday with a Belgian academic just back from a swing through China. Says the Chinese are ready to clean out their (99% Western educated) academics who advocate this kind of nonsense and to re-found tertiary education on more traditional cultural values (like cutthroat competition). Friends from the Russian academy say it never really got started there.
I guess we really are doomed, in that case.
I wish the Chinese the best of luck. Much easier to burn the infection out before it's taken hold.
Will believe it when I see it. They also claimed a few years ago they were going to stamp out the problem of doctors publishing fake research in order to get promoted - a policy the PRC created for itself by tying promotions to publishing. They made a lot of noise and set up some bureaucracies but there seems to have been no improvement.
The Chinese are infamous for churning out low quality, incorrect, and often fraudulent research on an assembly line. Their purpoted dominance in publications and patents must be interpreted in this light.
Great piece. I agree with you completely, although I'm slightly more optimistic toward the possibility of a successful purge.
One slight quibble: regarding Cambridge discriminating against native British in admission, it'd be better to compare the racial composition of Cambridge undergrad admits with the composition of their age cohort rather than with the 85% overall British white percentage. That said, British 18-24 year olds are still 76% white (source linked at end), and them being 61% of Cambridge admits is still substantial underrepresentation (and thus your point is unchanged).
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/uk-population-by-ethnicity/demographics/age-groups/latest/
That's an important qualification, actually. Should have checked that!
Also, white working class kids in Britain are among the lowest- if not the lowest-performing group. One would not expect them to enter Cambridge.
If you don't think so, you probably have not met many working class whites in the UK.
you obviously were educated under the older school system
Heh. I was homeschooled until age 10 back when it was still a little weird (late 80s-early 90s) but the notion of using a relevant comparison group is undoubtedly something I picked up from Sowell when I was binging his work in my 20s.
Love Sowell. Strange how you don't hear much from the mainstream about such a brilliant African American.
I must confess to as a youth I dreamt of scholarhood, I lived and breathed to be a scholar; to become either the next Jung or to become the next W.L. Warren except I was gonna study myths and legends (like the Bros Grimm did) and the history of Japan and France. I had big dreams.
Enter my first days in university when I had to run from one end of the college to the next, 'no problem I said, I'll just change schools' I said the following year, and did and.... did the exact same thing again. What I found was that the English department was intellect free save for maybe one professor. He was the only male prof in the department and utterly brilliant, I loved studying under him. History department had one prof who couldn't be bothered to teach and instead played youtube videos all class long, while the rest of the department was brilliant. Trouble is that some of the fellow students were brilliant, but my fellow Metis students (all female) wanted to just slam on 'white men' (whatever the hell that is I think they meant anglo-saxons or francs), and bitch- I mean present research papers about 'Native genocide' at the hands of the whites via famine and genocide, so that their research included natural disasters and plagues being blamed on the Spanish & French.
I spent 8 years therein Academia (I helped as a research-student, an unusual position) before I lost it, and had to quit. I've been in and out of janitorial and teaching the past few years, and honestly I don't much miss university. While I loved the history department, I don't miss how weak they were to the one woke prof, or how toxic the English department was, or having to suck up for grades.
My whole point is that while I dreamt of also being a Tolkien, who would teach history and myths, and write my own I've since given up on such pursuits in a uni setting. I really do plan to go back to secure a French Bacc & Maitrise from Lavale but that would be only to secure further qualifications for better pay down the road in Asia and to add to my repertoire for my stories.
Though the temptation to cut my losses is always there and I'll never recommend my kids to enter academia save if its Japan which seems like the only place with still prestigious universities. Great essay John as always.
It isn't possible to do great things in university anymore, in general. Certainly not on the level of a Tolkien, though too be fair he was always an anomaly. But a Tolkien would never be tolerated, now.
Agreed, it’s why I had to quit, I only think about going back for French grammaire to improve mine and tighten up skills I already have.
I despise what these scum have done to the academia I grew up loving and admiring so much. Though in my case I was always an odd kid from an odd family in the countryside, who were all heavy readers and passionate admirers of 19th century scholars of different topics.
Hope new institutions in French and English rise soon to let us true scholars have a chance to combat the nefaste influence of academics and administrative busy-bodies.
You could create some sort of hybrid learning pod. The institution you want has to start somewhere.
Pods scare me, and the notion of them scare me. Haha, I dunno maybe there’s something there.
Yes, I am also wary of Pod People. But here it’s from what home schoolers call it when they form a group for field trips, social activities, and teaching subjects the adults know to all the kids in a pod.
Ohhhh I misunderstood, okay that actually sounds really cool. I’m gonna have to note that one down.
What’s coming reaches far beyond academia. Your people, howsoever you define that, will need capable young leaders to push aside the Clown World dross and lead through The Long Emergency.
If you stop thinking of being Tolkien and start thinking of how to help with THAT problem, many possibilities and futures open up for you. Your family background suggests that you might be The Guy for this.
Will you take up the burden through dankness, though you do not know the way?
"... couldn't be bothered to teach and instead played youtube videos all class long..."
That right there would be a possible cause for termination here, no matter how woke or what race cards you try and play.
While Swedish academia on the whole is pretty far on the slippery slope, in no small part due to copying whatever whiffs over from America, it is nowhere as bad as you or John describes it, content-wise.
It's not uncommon in North America. I once covered a lecture for a not particularly bright female professor. She helpfully prepared slides for me. They were mostly YouTube videos. Looking out over the class, I could see they were all desperately bored.
“Is this usually what class is like?” I asked.
“Yes,” they replied. “She just shows movies.”
I stopped playing the movies, whipped through those slides that were actual slides, engaged the class in conversation, and let them go early.
For fuck’s sake.
Shameful. A video, on topic, with new information once in a while is not a problem.
As homework. With a writing-assignment of some kind.
As my tutor told me, repeatedly: "If what you're going to do in class can be done as assignments or homework, why bother having class?"
It was his way of making me understand what class is for: me lecturing on stuff we're going to go over in fine detail, debate, argue over and hash out where all that is part of "the learning process".
Indeed. If you can learn it from YouTube, why do you need the lecturer?
Problem with that is, you or I can determine whether or not a Youtube in a topic we are well-read in, is crap or not.
A student can't since they haven't the knowledge, so just as with literature the lecturer must pick for them, initially.
Just look at treadheads or rivetcounters going at each other, about "which tank won WW2" - without realising the entire question is ridiculous. The Top 10-whatever lists of tabloids and magazines now try to pass as knowledge. In Swedish, this is called "snuttifikation", has been since the 1970s. "Snutt-" means 'ditty' or 'very little out of a whole' or 'stump'. I guess you might say "Making molehills out of mountains" to get the same meaning.
Oh, I certainly didn't mean to imply that watching movies is a replacement for an education. Ultimately there's no replacement for reading actual books, and lots of them, and then writing about those books to grapple with their subject matter. And of course the guidance of someone who knows what they're doing is invaluable.
But if that guide is just showing you movies, well...
A lot of very lazy "educators" out there...
This is how it is in elementary schools now as well. I substitute teach and the lesson plans are all Chromebooks and YouTube videos. Only once or twice have I been asked to teach. The kids are so behind, it's scary. 6th graders who can't write a 5 paragraph essay nor subtract fractions. I don't think the "smart" classroom is very smart.
Screens are being used to fry kids’ brains. They're atrophying from lack of use
Teach your own kids to read, make sure they read books, and make sure they learn to think, write, and do mathematics with their own brains, and they will have superpowers compared to their peers.
Ouais, but she was beloved by a lot of department heads and none of us students cared enough to report her, as her teaching style was boring and the videos were fun.
Though in hindsight it was pretty awful and she probably should have been fired. She was also the most pro-postmodernist in the History department and preferred the company of the English one. The other history profs were all cool.
Postmodernism being turned into an ideology or ontological position, instead of remaining a method is indeed a great evil, and as an ideology it can't but help always leading to the well-known pointless puerile misconception of nihilism we see run rampant all over the Western world.
Agreed
Modern universities are depressing to be in, I’ve already told you the tale of how miserable I felt being forced to endure pointless lectures in feminism and “why spreading the HIV virus shouldn’t be criminalized” when I was in LAW SCHOOL, one of the best in my country to allegedly…but it’s not just that it’s not just the artificial plastic factory feel that most universities have to them, it’s not the sterile censored environment, or the terminally stupid people that make the majority of teachers and professors, it’s not the pointless ideological bullshit and protests that don’t matter: I’ve seen people protesting the war between Russia and Ukraine in university grounds, I live in BRAZIL and most people protesting couldn’t point to Ukraine in a map, I know because I checked!
It was the sheer torture of it, the feeling of wasting one’s precious time in that pointless facade when one could be actually studying, I wished to take extra courses on Latin and Greek but they were almost non existent, don’t worry thought: African dance theory has plenty of classes.
I had no option but to drop out, I couldn’t endure the place.
Time can never be replaced. So much of our society is designed to steal it. This is the nature of managerialism - time parasites who feed by eating our time. Not only in universities.
Life is too short.
This comment makes me think of a book I had my son read when I homeschooled him in 6th grade. Momo by Michael Ende. Also known as Momo and the Time Thieves. It is the nature of managerialism, been that way since the beginning.
Perhaps the best response to all of this is to just do as Atlas and shrug.
The silver lining is that the very administrative parasites that have been killing their Western host for generations are themselves products of these institutions. Thus, by dumbing down "educations" and "credentials" to the level of irrelevance means that going forward the administrative state and increasingly the elites whom they serve are becoming more and more incompetent and less capable of implementing their global governance schemes.
And that means the whole rotten edifice might just collapse under its own weight instead of us having to winkle them out with rifles, ropes, and lampposts. I forsee independent guilds within various disciplines making a comeback, with their own standards and requirements for certification of applicants. Especially if insurers wise up to the fact that credentials from existing DEI towers are worse than useless for determining competence or qualification.
It also chews away at the regime's legitimacy, as this is based on their credentials.
I have no intelligent comment to write here, so I will just say thank you for bringing this to my awareness. I am deeply sad for this world in its current state. I keep looking for hope in the darkness. Sharing information and insight is one such ray of hope and shines light on the tides of horror that engulf us.
"…the quiet halls of academe have degenerated into feminized kindergartens in which the internal discourse oscillates between the equally distasteful extremes of stultifying dogmatic conformity and shrieking hysterical insanity, a sanitarium presided over by a caste of dead-eyed mismanagerial pod people for whom ‘knowledge production’ is just another blood sack to stick their feeding probosces into."
Maybe someone will start some brand new institutions of higher learning with real standards. Paging Elon!
Is it even possible? Every university has gone the same way, which implies this path is inherent to the nature or structure of the institution.
After all, although Butterfield protests that in the past things were good, that's not been my experience. I attended a reasonably prestigious British university in 2004 and the course was crap, practically fraudulent. The professors were all cheating like crazy using the usual bag of tricks (e.g. allocating marks to group work where every group was given one high performer who then had to do the work for everyone). Look at the replication crisis in psychology and you find that some of the highest profile fraudulent studies date back to the 1960s. In the 1930s universities were all a hotbed of communist sympathizers to the extent that the US couldn't even find enough loyal academics to run their nuclear programme, which leaked like a sieve. And before that they were mostly theocratic convents for religious crazies.
There's probably no hope for creating good universities. The very concept of a university dooms it to a downward spiral of ever more extreme left wing ideologies. People should be trained by companies. If people want to study things companies don't fund like Sanskrit then they can do it in their own time, or do it the old fashioned way and find a rich patron.
And yet despite those historical shortcomings - which I think illustrate only that we've been here before - universities have produced some remarkable work.
The problem with a purely corporate approach is that it tends to be very profit centric, and fairly short term. Particularly these days, with a very few notable exceptions. You won't, for example, find research programs into Sanskrit in the private sector (or apparently at the universities, either).
I'm also not sure there's anything inherently left wing about universities. When they were seminaries, for example, they were very conservative. To a large degree the problem is precisely communist infiltration, which have pursued an active program of leftist subversion.
Conservatism isn't the opposite of leftism though. China in the 2010s is largely a story of communist conservatives re-asserting control over capitalist progressivists. Conservatism stands for nothing beyond preserving whatever the status quo is, which for hundreds of years was Christian theocracy. And Christianity bears strong resemblances to leftism, so I don't think it's really a different phase of their existence.
There is certainly plenty of long termist corporate research to look at in the current landscape. Obviously, very long term high risk research requires rich patrons, but there are plenty of those e.g. SpaceX's entire research programme and existence is nothing but long term risky research, Waymo is a 15+ year multi-billion-dollar-per-year research effort that quite likely will never turn a profit, LLMs were the result of a roughly decade long research effort across the entire tech industry, then you have CPU/GPU development, video encoding, telecoms .... all commercial and often done on long time horizons. The lab I work at is commercial and has funded one of its current lines of research (which is not profitable) for at least twenty years now!
The reason corporate research usually appears short term is not because academia is somehow more far sighted or altruistic. It's because taking research outputs and commercializing it acts as a critical form of reality check. You can't commercialize something based on false premises, it gets found out. If you don't do reality checks often enough then projects often spiral downwards into senility. The problems in academia are largely a result of never having any kind of forced encounter with reality and what we see across the board is fake research investigating nonsense theories, which they can avoid accountability for by claiming their programme is just very long term.
Screw that! We need to go back when companies filter candidates properly by tests! So your kid can learn at home a skill and excel without bullshit credentials costing half million dollars...
Someone beat him to it.
You say they’re not accredited? I say that’s a good thing.
Either a student wants to learn—or not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin
https://www.uaustin.org/our-principles
She's black? 1/38th Cherokee too, right?
Something that popped up into my head when I skimmed this (will re-read, always do):
"Rhodesia"
Withdraw support and let it collapse, then conquer and rebuild while purging all remnants of the old regime.
Or:
Move and build new beyond the reach of the klägg.
That is basically the plan at this point. Allow the enemy to rule over the ashes, build new power bases in the hinterlands, then occupy the old real estate when they inevitably collapse.
Cambridge has been here before. There was half a millennium or more in which it was a sleepy backwater, irrelevant to the flow of intellectual endeavour, because it was enmired in dogmatic scholasticism (which has more than a few points of similarity with the current ideology). It eventually recovered.
Past performance is no guarantee of future returns, though. Perhaps this time is terminal.
Indeed, and the reason Cambridge and Oxford got their acts together was that they were being outperformed by nimble young institutions that were attracting all the top intellectual talent.
Same thing will happen again, I'm sure, only this time at the level of the entire academic system, with the ersatz Invisible College of the internet attracting the most capable minds.
Fantastic piece.
The numbers don't lie. They expose the rot at the core of western universities. Consider Cambridge's remuneration data for 2023 (link below):
In 2023, there were 701 Uni of Cambridge staff being paid more than £100k a year base salary.
An astonishing 525 of these were non-academic staff (up from 482 in 2022). Of these, 122 were paid over £150k, with 33 paid over £200k.
The Dean was on an eye watering £499,000.
By contrast, only 176 academics were paid over £100k and none were paid over £150k.
Those numbers tell the whole story. Cambridge may look like a university but in reality, it's not - it's a self serving bureaucracy that's become detached from the main mission of the University, and wide open to grifters.
This is happening all over the western world and it's a disaster. Simply put, elite western universities just aren't that good anymore. I agree that the problem is too endemic to fix - it's too late & we must ensure total collapse, before any restoration can take place.
Luckily, many nations outside the western sphere have kept a very firm focus on what a university is & what standards it must maintain - and they will become the new standard bearers of higher education.
Perhaps Mr Butterfield should make his way to China, Russia, India or any of the main BRICS states - all have absolutely superb universities that are firmly focussed on their core mission & that are churning out superior students to the west, 24/7.
https://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/reporter/2023-24/weekly/6731/section4.shtml
It seems he's already found a position with Jordan Peterson … I don't see that project working.
Budget at every Western university is broadly similar. Admin feasting on the fat of the land.
Though it's also true everywhere in our society. Too many managers, getting paid too much, to do fuck all but get in the way.
I remember during the first Trump election talking with my AWFUL aunt about how university degrees weren’t worth the paper they were printed on and were just job licenses. Even the ivys, especially the ivys, and that they weren’t worth giving extra status anymore.
Of course I obviously didn’t know what I was talking about, the subtext being because I didn’t have a fancy ivy degree.
During my time in school, I treated the degrees as job licenses. As that was what I ultimately wanted out of it, a good paying “useless” job that wouldn’t take up all of my intellectual horsepower (so i could devote that to stuff like this). Many a professor got deeply uncomfortable with me over me bluntly treating the “college experience” as a mere formality and rubber stamp. Yet none of them could disagree.
Having the universities be job factories was frankly idiotic. Anyone with a brain could tell you this, yet people would rather outsource all the risk and expense of hiring qualified talent to the university system, and well, here we are now that all that credibility has been used up. Corporations may have to, *gasp* hire qualified people, somehow, who don’t have that slip of paper, or collapse. The legacy of the universities during my lifetime was to socialize the costs of acquiring talent, to the talent.
At the end of the day, what exactly is the point of the university? It doesn’t appear to have any productive use these days. Its not a place of excellence, and its no longer all that good at prescreening the population for corporations and the government to cherrypick. So it either starts doing one of these again, finds something new, or ceases to exist.
Bang on.
Professors generally hate it when you strip away their illusions, of the passionate life of the mind and pursuit of knowledge and such, to point out that they are simply there to provide a gauntlet for students to earn a piece of paper that will let them get a job, and that the majority of students know this and will therefore put no effort into the gauntlet than absolutely necessary.
Take a look at Griggs v Duke Power which was the disparate impact case. In response, employers outsourced their employment testing to higher education. Thanks, Warren Burger.
Bingo.
I think college education in general is in an economic bubble. The cost exceeds it's actual market value and there may be a correction coming with much downsizing. Regarding DEI, requiring that all first year freshmen pass calculus would possibly end it, but there would be too much money to lose for that to happen.
And that's why it won't happen. Too many oxen getting gored.
So instead the entire herd will die.
"Regarding DEI, requiring that all first year freshmen pass calculus would possibly end it,"
You seem to not want a traditional European university but a technical school. Wouldn't it make more sense to eliminate racial and sexual quotas like Title IX?
Both. Eliminate anything with “studies” in the title. Intro calculus would not indicate a technical school, traditional education required a certain mathematical comprehension as otherwise critical thinking could not occur. And it’s training for the brain. The real idea is to filter out those incapable of logical thought who are infesting the DEI departments. News reporters often look foolish due to a lack of applying eighth grade arithmetic. Colleges once required two years of algebra for admission, which should imply the ability to learn some calculus. You could argue for a lower level, but computational thinking should be part of being college educated.
I disagree. Mathematical thinking cannot help students understand the overarching culture. Techies like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates drove the US and the West in general into the current mess.
Traditional education in the West was concerned with developing a well-rounded man. It most definitely did not focus on mathematics. Harvard was originally a divinity school. So were all the ancient European universities.
I could make a case that the scientist and Age of Reason morphed into the Age of Kneeling Nancy. The objectification of life turns humans into alienated random particles. The European mans' fascination with science and numbers has produced a Frankenstein monster. Lots of great gadgets that give an illusion of "progress" but ultimately make men spiritually/culturally weak or drives them insane.
Most of the scientists I’ve known are not at all that narrow. I do not know John Carter, but he is a scientist and seems to get it. I was not suggesting that all be educated as mathematicians, just that we go back to the days where it’s included in a well rounded education. The lack of it does indeed harm one’s cognitive abilities.
Most of the academics I've known - scientists included - are indeed pretty narrow in their interests, of very limited curiosity about the world.
There are of course many exceptions to this.
I don't know what you mean by narrow. My experience with technical people and those who identify as conservative is that they can have high IQs but are dumb as a fence post culturally.
It's why they have been losing for generations in my opinion. They are completely outclassed by more culturally unified although more crazy people who have intuitively exploited the weaknesses inherent in the scientific/mathematical Age of Reason. They are able to think and act in an instinctive way and the techie/conservative can not.
When I say, culture is what's left over after you forgot what you tried to learn, they haven't a clue what I'm talking about. LOL.
Are you implying that people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have been "losing for generations"? Holy crap, if that's what losing looks like, sign me up. These people sit at the absolute pinnacle of our society and culture. They not only increasingly create popular culture, but literally gatekeep distribution as well.
Entrance requirements for the humanities once included a high level of mathematical proficiency; similarly, for the sciences, historical, linguistic, and literary mastery was also required.
Dropping such requirements has led to a proliferation of overly specialized midwits.
There was an insurance executive, Charles Ives, who was able to compose some good music. However, I have known many people who had to make a living as lawyers, doctors or bureaucrats who after decades decided they wanted to paint again, some were even fine arts majors. By that time it was too late. Their brains developed grooves of a type that would not allow them to think in terms of metaphor, images and gestures.
Even doing commercial art changes the way your brain operates compared to making so called fine art.
I think they dropped the algebra requirement in the 60s. Also, the language requirement. For DEI. Before, you had to study a foreign language for two years, I believe in order to get a BA.