I'm optimistic on this renaissance you speak of. Scholarly alternatives will arise, or universities will be hollowed out and open to be reclaimed, but, either way, the intelligent, the curious, the creative, and most importantly, the ambitious, will find a way to congregate again. They usually always have, in some shape or form. For the time being though, I feel as if not having the opportunities a good university system can provide is a great loss for younger generation. If there's anything positive to say about my own lackluster time in college, it was that if I miss anything, it was the ambition, and being in an environment of ambitious people (to say nothing of the often stunning architecture and well-kept grounds on many campuses). I know it was most likely because I kept good company of like-minded individuals, but I remember going to bars, pubs, coffee shops, and just shooting the shit on people's balcony or apartments, talking about what we wanted to do in life, how we were going to do it, and solving the world's problems. Everyone had a big dream they were pursuing. You asked anyone where they saw themselves in ten years, and they'd have a lofty answer and a plan to get there. It made it easy to keep your own ambitions high, being around driven people.
Conversely, nothing feels more stagnating and depressing as working in an office environment and asking that same question to people and getting the answer, "Uh... I'll be here, I hope." Truly creative individuals suffer without a place to congregate and rub elbows, I think, and poisoning the well of universities, where so many of them would begin and launch their ambitions, has most likely robbed this country of millions of great minds, lofty dreams, and good people that could have changed this country for the better, given the right opportunity, who now toil at thankless office jobs or admirably do their best to keep a small business afloat in stormy economic waters. That sense of community that college offers is just one of the many things this country is missing in most places, and one of the most gaping vacancies in so many people's lives. I've long suspected one of the reasons so many people remember college so fondly (and get depressed when they leave) is because it's the one time in the average American's life they: A) live in a generally walkable community B) are exposed to a healthy selection of social contacts, potential friends and romantic partners and C) are allowed to pursue their own interests and passions. Obviously this isn't the case for every college or student, but you get the general gist of it. I believe in Joseph Campbell's "Hero of a Thousand Faces", he makes the argument that going off to university is a form of modern coming-of-age ritual in the West, where boys make the transition to manhood. The fact we're losing this, if we haven't already lost it... is it any real wonder why young adults seem like overgrown children? Especially as college holds their hands and treats them like kindergartners shepherded by an overbearing schoolmarm?
About a decade ago I read an article about how the rate of professors in Universities increased over ten years by 50%, but the rate of increase for admin was 287%. Most of those professors of course were low paid adjunct. That was of course before the acceleration of this DIE madness, so we can imagine what the increase of Admin has been since. That required a 15-20% increase in tuition every year for two decades, so at this point you practically have to be dumb to go to college.
I've been telling young people for years, learn a trade. You'll have a family, house, two cars and a boat by the time those lonely fools after college get halfway through paying their debt.
I think that “confidence” in college is a proxy for confidence in our managerial elite. After all, colleges legitimize their rule the way the Church legitimized medieval kings. This is why I think the drop in support among Democrats is especially significant. For a long time, they thought that AA and DIE would only harm working class badwhite strivers, while their own spawn would be insulated through their ability to navigate the system. Now they are discovering that, without red state freshmen to attack, the diversity is turning on them, and the shrinking pool of jobs has made them targets.
Normally I find blue-on-blue catastrophes hilarious, but it genuinely saddens me that something I grew up revering as one of those working class strivers is so devastated. But I can’t help but feel that colleges are a kind of synecdoche for the GAE, and if we are fortunate, they will share the same fate. America will lose its monopoly on policing the world and become a real country again, disencumbered of its parasitic globalist class, and colleges will lose their monopoly on credentialing elites and selling entry tickets to the middle class, returning to what they once were, places of intellectual and spiritual vitality. God willing I’ll see both in my lifetime.
The rot goes back to when the universities started taking too much grant money, and then demanded that all teachers be doctors.
Some fields don't advance all that much. Doctors -- those who advance the field -- should be rare. Mere mastery in a field such as rhetoric should be sufficient for teaching rhetoric.
For a difficult field such as physics, either the masters programs should be made longer or we should have something in between a Masters Degree and a Doctorate -- an AbD, for example.
This excessive emphasis on "extending the field" created a Cult of Novelty that goes WAY back. This is how splats of paint became Fine Art, and annoying noises became Modern Classical Music 80+ years ago.
The primary function of universities should be to curate and pass on accumulated (old) knowledge to the next generation. Research should be a sideline. Good professors should be granted the PRIVILEGE to have spare time to do research. They should be paid to do teaching -- save for those who write readable books or get patents for doing lucrative research.
Witty, informative, amusing. What more can one ask in an essay?
The only substantive debate on universities is whether they get massively purged or do we go for full Dissolution of the Monasteries? Think of all the assets that would be freed up.
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 14, 2023Liked by John Carter
Higher education is largely a time sink for a population whose reproductive health is being mismanaged. Delayed maturation and the postponement of family formation and fertility are integral features of the regime's social engineering. Steering young women into college plays a large rile in this. A sane society would allow women to get pregnant n their 20s, raise their kids, and return to education when the kids are old enough. Life expectancies today make this a viable approach, but it is not even being considered. The regime, industry and the Netflix/social media ideological complex prefers the present approach.
Dumbing down higher education is also inevitable if you seek to constantly expand participation rates and if you need to conceal the hollowing out of education at the primary and secondary levels.
My very first aspiration/ambition in life was to become a scholar and enter the Ivory Tower. I can (personally) say: Western Academia is dead. Students do not merely "stay away in droves", but some (like myself and others) outright move to alternate structures for procuring knowledge.
It may sound like a novelty for some: but heading off to University is not the end all or be all for Seeking Knowledge. Prior to the establishment of said institution in the Mediaeval world; young men went to teachers, scholars, etc *in person* and studied at their feet, one-on-one.
The Islamic world has kept this tradition alive and well for over a Millenia. And I can happily say that I can count myself as a Beginning "student of knowledge" in that sphere. Academia's death need not be the "end" that many young scholars and would-be scholars think it is.
It can be a golden opportunity to finally take one's learning more seriously + actively.
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 14, 2023Liked by John Carter
You know how I feel about DIE, John. So the sooner it happens to these indoctrination centers, the better. I remember the nascent version of woke communism from when I went to college, it wasn't anything like what it has evolved into back then, it was still being developed, still quietly growing like a cancerous tumor.
Only later did it come roaring out of the universities to take over western countries. Now we can see it in all its perversion and depravity, and see the despair it creates in populations that must endure it.
How many managers do you need, when much of the manufacturing is shipped overseas?
How much has education simply become a holding pond for youth? While indebting them for life. "You will own nothing and be happy." Or get cancelled.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of personal experience with any form of schooling, having avoided it with a passion, but the broader social and cultural issues are where the real sources of the problems in education go and where they will be solved.
For instance, in armies the people running things are called generals, while specialist is about one rank above private. Yet in our society, the kids who would be natural generalists would be the ones most interested and curious about everything, because they will be the ones to understand how all the parts fit together. Yet in our sick, sick culture, they are diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated until their minds fit back in the box.
Society run by and for the specialists is a Tower of Babel. One that is spiraling down the big rabbit hole to boot.
Do you think that will be solved by skewing college admissions back toward those more marginally proficient in checking the boxes? As a grumpy old white guy, I will be the first to admit we have made delusional thinking into an art form. These diversity hires are just trying to catch up.
Jul 14, 2023·edited Jul 15, 2023Liked by John Carter
I'm going to college for engineering and I pray to the stars above that I'm not stuck with a bunch of woke mongrels. While I love the humanities, it hurts my soul even more knowing that STEM has gone woke (*cough* Nature, Scientific American, and Science Magazine *cough*). I don't even know how it makes sense for STEM to be woke...there's always been people of color, women, disabled people, etc. in the field. But, then again, I guess that just shows how ignorant to history these "academics" and administrators are.
And then there's the chart of the kids that identify with the Skittles Mafia...I usually spend my daily Ten Minutes Hate on these losers. Mainly because they're a bunch of straight women who want to be "quirky" "minorities" and so choose--or worse, create--some pastel flag (usually "queer") with a strange, technically-should-be-grammatically-correct-but-also-is-just-ridiculous-and-demeaning name, whose atrocious color combos are enough to make an artist gag (I have on several occasions). These people are also the reason why gender and personality have been confused with one another, but that's a rant for another day.
On a better note, that David statue is awesome and these sculptures are now my new obsession.
I still remember my 1st semester Organic Chemistry Professor (name redacted, he is still alive)saying “Its a shame I shall have to flunk so many of you. “ as he handed out the final exam. The class that started over flowing a 350 seat auditorium was down to 60 by spring. The good old days!
Great write up Mr. Carter. You still haven't reached the crux of it yet though, none of this ends until the dollar loses reserve currency status. That is the pillar that holds up all the others you dislike. It took me from 2008 until 2018 to realize that. Kids not going to school because of cost and a degree not gaining you the income to service or discharge that debt? Uncle Joe (or any statist) at this point will bail em out. He isn't bailing out the students, because those job prospects will continue to shrink year by year anyways, he's bailing out the schools. Just like the banks, ask someone why it was wrong to bail out the banks but right to bail out their school debt and watch the smoke come out of their ears.
I got a glimpse of how STEM is getting railroaded in academia last week. I went through a chemistry graduate program a few years ago and the wokeness was still not very prevalent there but...
I took a new job as a gen science and physics teacher for the IB program. IB is cozy with the WEF, and the leader of the workshop I had to take for it prominently wore the circle rainbow pin representing the UN goals for enslavement... I mean "sustainable development".
In the new physics curriculum, there is now an entire module regarding "the greenhouse effect", and it is a requirement to talk about human impact. Ok, but in breakout groups with other teachers, I learned there was also some kind of climate agenda also built into the chemistry and bio subjects. It's beaten into these kid's heads.
Also, they are required to do a study concerning a "global issue". What does that mean? Well, if you're doing your report in STEM, you better be talking about climate change. Nearly every example topic this drone gave was about climatology itself, how solar panels work, or some other kind of environmental activism bullshit. Oh yeah, I think vaccinations and health were given as well.
So, I've decided that when I start I will do what they have been doing: planting seeds of subversion. You bet your bottom dollar I will be talking about the reproducibility crisis, the limitations of consensus, on the influence of money and ideology on results, etc
My 11-year-old reads at 14th-grade level, according to her most recent standardized test (legal requirement for homeschoolers). This means her comprehension is equal to that of the average college sophomore. At first I was delighted. Then I realized this actually means the average college sophomore can only read as well as a bright 11-year-old.
I'm optimistic on this renaissance you speak of. Scholarly alternatives will arise, or universities will be hollowed out and open to be reclaimed, but, either way, the intelligent, the curious, the creative, and most importantly, the ambitious, will find a way to congregate again. They usually always have, in some shape or form. For the time being though, I feel as if not having the opportunities a good university system can provide is a great loss for younger generation. If there's anything positive to say about my own lackluster time in college, it was that if I miss anything, it was the ambition, and being in an environment of ambitious people (to say nothing of the often stunning architecture and well-kept grounds on many campuses). I know it was most likely because I kept good company of like-minded individuals, but I remember going to bars, pubs, coffee shops, and just shooting the shit on people's balcony or apartments, talking about what we wanted to do in life, how we were going to do it, and solving the world's problems. Everyone had a big dream they were pursuing. You asked anyone where they saw themselves in ten years, and they'd have a lofty answer and a plan to get there. It made it easy to keep your own ambitions high, being around driven people.
Conversely, nothing feels more stagnating and depressing as working in an office environment and asking that same question to people and getting the answer, "Uh... I'll be here, I hope." Truly creative individuals suffer without a place to congregate and rub elbows, I think, and poisoning the well of universities, where so many of them would begin and launch their ambitions, has most likely robbed this country of millions of great minds, lofty dreams, and good people that could have changed this country for the better, given the right opportunity, who now toil at thankless office jobs or admirably do their best to keep a small business afloat in stormy economic waters. That sense of community that college offers is just one of the many things this country is missing in most places, and one of the most gaping vacancies in so many people's lives. I've long suspected one of the reasons so many people remember college so fondly (and get depressed when they leave) is because it's the one time in the average American's life they: A) live in a generally walkable community B) are exposed to a healthy selection of social contacts, potential friends and romantic partners and C) are allowed to pursue their own interests and passions. Obviously this isn't the case for every college or student, but you get the general gist of it. I believe in Joseph Campbell's "Hero of a Thousand Faces", he makes the argument that going off to university is a form of modern coming-of-age ritual in the West, where boys make the transition to manhood. The fact we're losing this, if we haven't already lost it... is it any real wonder why young adults seem like overgrown children? Especially as college holds their hands and treats them like kindergartners shepherded by an overbearing schoolmarm?
About a decade ago I read an article about how the rate of professors in Universities increased over ten years by 50%, but the rate of increase for admin was 287%. Most of those professors of course were low paid adjunct. That was of course before the acceleration of this DIE madness, so we can imagine what the increase of Admin has been since. That required a 15-20% increase in tuition every year for two decades, so at this point you practically have to be dumb to go to college.
I've been telling young people for years, learn a trade. You'll have a family, house, two cars and a boat by the time those lonely fools after college get halfway through paying their debt.
I think that “confidence” in college is a proxy for confidence in our managerial elite. After all, colleges legitimize their rule the way the Church legitimized medieval kings. This is why I think the drop in support among Democrats is especially significant. For a long time, they thought that AA and DIE would only harm working class badwhite strivers, while their own spawn would be insulated through their ability to navigate the system. Now they are discovering that, without red state freshmen to attack, the diversity is turning on them, and the shrinking pool of jobs has made them targets.
Normally I find blue-on-blue catastrophes hilarious, but it genuinely saddens me that something I grew up revering as one of those working class strivers is so devastated. But I can’t help but feel that colleges are a kind of synecdoche for the GAE, and if we are fortunate, they will share the same fate. America will lose its monopoly on policing the world and become a real country again, disencumbered of its parasitic globalist class, and colleges will lose their monopoly on credentialing elites and selling entry tickets to the middle class, returning to what they once were, places of intellectual and spiritual vitality. God willing I’ll see both in my lifetime.
Could it be that the credentialed class is starting to see the cracks in their own sick broken collectivist debt trap they created?
Group think almost never ends well, and its as futile as arguing with an idiot.
It always drags you down to the lowest level of human existence and beats you with experience.
The rot goes back even further.
The rot goes back to when the universities started taking too much grant money, and then demanded that all teachers be doctors.
Some fields don't advance all that much. Doctors -- those who advance the field -- should be rare. Mere mastery in a field such as rhetoric should be sufficient for teaching rhetoric.
For a difficult field such as physics, either the masters programs should be made longer or we should have something in between a Masters Degree and a Doctorate -- an AbD, for example.
This excessive emphasis on "extending the field" created a Cult of Novelty that goes WAY back. This is how splats of paint became Fine Art, and annoying noises became Modern Classical Music 80+ years ago.
The primary function of universities should be to curate and pass on accumulated (old) knowledge to the next generation. Research should be a sideline. Good professors should be granted the PRIVILEGE to have spare time to do research. They should be paid to do teaching -- save for those who write readable books or get patents for doing lucrative research.
Witty, informative, amusing. What more can one ask in an essay?
The only substantive debate on universities is whether they get massively purged or do we go for full Dissolution of the Monasteries? Think of all the assets that would be freed up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_monasteries
Higher education is largely a time sink for a population whose reproductive health is being mismanaged. Delayed maturation and the postponement of family formation and fertility are integral features of the regime's social engineering. Steering young women into college plays a large rile in this. A sane society would allow women to get pregnant n their 20s, raise their kids, and return to education when the kids are old enough. Life expectancies today make this a viable approach, but it is not even being considered. The regime, industry and the Netflix/social media ideological complex prefers the present approach.
Dumbing down higher education is also inevitable if you seek to constantly expand participation rates and if you need to conceal the hollowing out of education at the primary and secondary levels.
My very first aspiration/ambition in life was to become a scholar and enter the Ivory Tower. I can (personally) say: Western Academia is dead. Students do not merely "stay away in droves", but some (like myself and others) outright move to alternate structures for procuring knowledge.
It may sound like a novelty for some: but heading off to University is not the end all or be all for Seeking Knowledge. Prior to the establishment of said institution in the Mediaeval world; young men went to teachers, scholars, etc *in person* and studied at their feet, one-on-one.
The Islamic world has kept this tradition alive and well for over a Millenia. And I can happily say that I can count myself as a Beginning "student of knowledge" in that sphere. Academia's death need not be the "end" that many young scholars and would-be scholars think it is.
It can be a golden opportunity to finally take one's learning more seriously + actively.
You know how I feel about DIE, John. So the sooner it happens to these indoctrination centers, the better. I remember the nascent version of woke communism from when I went to college, it wasn't anything like what it has evolved into back then, it was still being developed, still quietly growing like a cancerous tumor.
Only later did it come roaring out of the universities to take over western countries. Now we can see it in all its perversion and depravity, and see the despair it creates in populations that must endure it.
How many managers do you need, when much of the manufacturing is shipped overseas?
How much has education simply become a holding pond for youth? While indebting them for life. "You will own nothing and be happy." Or get cancelled.
I have to say, I don't have a lot of personal experience with any form of schooling, having avoided it with a passion, but the broader social and cultural issues are where the real sources of the problems in education go and where they will be solved.
For instance, in armies the people running things are called generals, while specialist is about one rank above private. Yet in our society, the kids who would be natural generalists would be the ones most interested and curious about everything, because they will be the ones to understand how all the parts fit together. Yet in our sick, sick culture, they are diagnosed as attention deficient and medicated until their minds fit back in the box.
Society run by and for the specialists is a Tower of Babel. One that is spiraling down the big rabbit hole to boot.
Do you think that will be solved by skewing college admissions back toward those more marginally proficient in checking the boxes? As a grumpy old white guy, I will be the first to admit we have made delusional thinking into an art form. These diversity hires are just trying to catch up.
To paraphrase, it's patches all the way down.
I'm going to college for engineering and I pray to the stars above that I'm not stuck with a bunch of woke mongrels. While I love the humanities, it hurts my soul even more knowing that STEM has gone woke (*cough* Nature, Scientific American, and Science Magazine *cough*). I don't even know how it makes sense for STEM to be woke...there's always been people of color, women, disabled people, etc. in the field. But, then again, I guess that just shows how ignorant to history these "academics" and administrators are.
And then there's the chart of the kids that identify with the Skittles Mafia...I usually spend my daily Ten Minutes Hate on these losers. Mainly because they're a bunch of straight women who want to be "quirky" "minorities" and so choose--or worse, create--some pastel flag (usually "queer") with a strange, technically-should-be-grammatically-correct-but-also-is-just-ridiculous-and-demeaning name, whose atrocious color combos are enough to make an artist gag (I have on several occasions). These people are also the reason why gender and personality have been confused with one another, but that's a rant for another day.
On a better note, that David statue is awesome and these sculptures are now my new obsession.
Excellent!
I still remember my 1st semester Organic Chemistry Professor (name redacted, he is still alive)saying “Its a shame I shall have to flunk so many of you. “ as he handed out the final exam. The class that started over flowing a 350 seat auditorium was down to 60 by spring. The good old days!
Great write up Mr. Carter. You still haven't reached the crux of it yet though, none of this ends until the dollar loses reserve currency status. That is the pillar that holds up all the others you dislike. It took me from 2008 until 2018 to realize that. Kids not going to school because of cost and a degree not gaining you the income to service or discharge that debt? Uncle Joe (or any statist) at this point will bail em out. He isn't bailing out the students, because those job prospects will continue to shrink year by year anyways, he's bailing out the schools. Just like the banks, ask someone why it was wrong to bail out the banks but right to bail out their school debt and watch the smoke come out of their ears.
EXCELLENT piece, bro!
I got a glimpse of how STEM is getting railroaded in academia last week. I went through a chemistry graduate program a few years ago and the wokeness was still not very prevalent there but...
I took a new job as a gen science and physics teacher for the IB program. IB is cozy with the WEF, and the leader of the workshop I had to take for it prominently wore the circle rainbow pin representing the UN goals for enslavement... I mean "sustainable development".
In the new physics curriculum, there is now an entire module regarding "the greenhouse effect", and it is a requirement to talk about human impact. Ok, but in breakout groups with other teachers, I learned there was also some kind of climate agenda also built into the chemistry and bio subjects. It's beaten into these kid's heads.
Also, they are required to do a study concerning a "global issue". What does that mean? Well, if you're doing your report in STEM, you better be talking about climate change. Nearly every example topic this drone gave was about climatology itself, how solar panels work, or some other kind of environmental activism bullshit. Oh yeah, I think vaccinations and health were given as well.
So, I've decided that when I start I will do what they have been doing: planting seeds of subversion. You bet your bottom dollar I will be talking about the reproducibility crisis, the limitations of consensus, on the influence of money and ideology on results, etc
My 11-year-old reads at 14th-grade level, according to her most recent standardized test (legal requirement for homeschoolers). This means her comprehension is equal to that of the average college sophomore. At first I was delighted. Then I realized this actually means the average college sophomore can only read as well as a bright 11-year-old.