Outside the Walls of the Crumbling Tower
The academy is unfit for purpose, and we have everything we need to replace it.
Life comes at you fast.
I don’t normally return to the same subject immediately after writing about it, but.
Harvard just keeps racking up Ls.
No, not that.
I mean, that’s pretty embarrassing. But it’s not what we’re here to talk about.
Just a few days ago I hit the publish button on my final piece of 2023, an overview of the craptacular year that the legacy academy enjoyed, using the comic spectacle of Harvard’s diversity hire president as the personified embodiment of the crumbling ivory tower. Near the beginning I wrote:
Once the story [about her history of shameless plagiarism] was out, the Internet resounded with calls for Claudine the Fake and Gay to resign. Being possessed of the full measure of integrity characterizing the contemporary academic class, which is to say having none whatsoever, she naturally dug in her heels and refused outright.
The essay was published Friday night, after which I headed down to the local watering hole to reward my liver for a day’s work well done. The long weekend followed, during which nothing much of importance happened – who has the energy to make headlines on New Year’s Eve? I for one was too busy rewarding my liver for a year’s work well done.
No sooner does the second day of the New Year come, then Claudine Gay makes a fool of me.
MFW:
Perhaps, after all, she does possess some small shred of the capacity to feel shame.
Lol.
Yeah I couldn’t write that with a straight face.
It’s not like she’s doing the honourable thing: renouncing academia, donating her estate to a fund for the education of inner city orphans, and secluding herself in a nunnery, ideally after taking a vow of eternal silence. She’s stepping down from the presidency of Harvard, yes. But she will continue to draw the $900,000 a year salary she earned as the president, which to be fair is not far off what most Harvard professors make, in exchange for which incredible annual deposit of lucre she will do original and impactful research uh teach okay probably not that either, well I guess ... wear ugly glasses and be a black woman, I suppose.
Hat-tip to
for supplying that meme on Deimos. Now go subscribe to her Substack.But tell me more about white privilege.
She certainly didn’t step down because of her scruples. It’s far more likely that the pressure finally rose to the level that she had no choice but to step down. Fake and Gay herself alludes to this in her resignation letter, in which she blames the torrent of racist abuse she received following the plagiarism revelations.
Almost as soon as the resignation letter hit the Internet, the celebratory parade was inevitably interrupted by the wignat joojoo train. Forcing Fake and Gay’s resignation was not, you see, a win for the forces of the true, the beautiful, and the good. There is no egg on the woke face. It was just another example of The Tribe punishing an impudent minion who forgot herself, crossed a line that was not to be crossed, and was shown the door. The plagiarism was merely wheeled out as an excuse. She will be replaced with someone more reliable, probably one of the Chosen1, who will continue to implement Marxcissist DIElectics, except competently. As obvious proof of the veracity of this supposition, here’s the Jewish billionaire Bill Ackman explaining at some length (see also) that Claudine’s resignation is not good enough; that the Jewish board member Penny Pritzker, Gay’s biggest backer, must also resign, along with the rest of the board; and that specifically because the anti-white racism at its core is a moral abomination, the entire edifice of Demoralization, Infiltration, and Expropriation that pushed Gay to the surface like an anal polyp must be burned to the ground, the soil on which it grew sprinkled with uranium salts, the devil worshippers who cultivated it scattered like ashes in a frozen wind, their men thrown headless and castrated2 into shallow pits filled with burning lime, their women and children taken away in zipties to Chinese Bitcoin mines where their neural tissue will be reprocessed for use in bioelectronic GPUs, and the anathema of Amalek pronounced upon their descendants even unto the seventh generation.
Ahem.
Sorry, I, uh, got a little carried away there.
Ackman doesn’t go quite that far, but a Martian warlord can dream. In any case, you get the idea. He wants the entire DIE infrastructure shut down, something he has absolutely no need to push for if the only goal was to slap down an uppity house negro.
Anyhow, those insisting that this is all nothing but Typical Tribal Trickery largely seem to miss the point. The goal here is not to fix Harvard by installing a good president. Harvard will not get a good president, and Harvard cannot be fixed. The goal was to make the academy look like a coven of blundering scoundrels, and boy was that achieved. Academics closed ranks around Gay, went way out on a limb for her, and then that limb fell off. The entire world saw them openly defending academic perfidy at the highest levels in the name of Dishonesty, Imbecility, and Exclusion. The prestige of the academy took a massive hit. Regardless of what terminally online Fuentards think really happened, the general perception is that the independent media pushed a story, the establishment tried to pretend it didn’t matter, and then ... the establishment blinked. They look foolish, but much more importantly, they look weak.
So what was it that really pushed Gay over the edge?
Consider the timeline:
Dec 5th: Claudine Gay is hauled in front of Congress to explain her tolerance of campus anti-semitism, and succeeds only in further infuriating the Jewish community.
Result: Claudine Gay does not resign.
Dec 10th:
Rufo and reveal that Claudine is not only Gay, but also Fake, having plagiarized her doctoral dissertation, several of her small handful of papers, and even at one point, amazingly, bafflingly, the acknowledgements.Result: Claudine Gay does not resign.
Dec 11th to Dec 28th: deeper investigation reveals further evidence of even more extensive plagiarism.
Result: Claudine Gay does not resign.
Dec 29th: some shithead anon on Substack makes fun of her affirmative-action haircut and ill-fitting powersuit.
Dec 30th to Jan 1st: long weekend, nothing happens.
Jan 2nd: Claudine Gay ragequits.
Now, I can’t prove that one you glorious bastards forwarded her my low-brow invective, and I don’t know for sure that upon reading it she locked herself in her office to spend the New Year with a bottle of scotch and a head full of dark thoughts. But the timing does make one wonder.
I kid, I kid. Rufo and Brunet very obviously deserve all the credit for this.
With, it must be acknowledged, a lot of help from influential Jewish billionaires.
As for me, I am a mere jester, laughing from the sidelines.
I doubt Fake and Gay even knows I called her Fake and Gay. But it would be funny if she did.
As something of an epilogue, Brunet did some digging on Fake and Gay’s thesis adviser Gary King who, it turns out, is equally fictitious:
The tl;dr is that this tenured giant of the social sciences has erected his entire career upon the shaky edifice of ideas that he either stole outright or pulled out of his butt. Everything he has published, in other words, is either de facto plagiarism (albeit conducted with somewhat more skill than that demonstrated by Gay), or fraudulent flim-flam. Gay is truly the rancid fruit of a poison tree, and in keeping with that metaphor she fell very close to it indeed: King, too, is a professor at Harvard.
As I keep saying: the rot is too deep. It is not a matter of a few bad apples; the entire bunch has been spoiled.
The academic community is taking it all about as well as you’d expect:
The funniest reaction so far is from the Associated Press, who have identified plagiarism as the newest right-wing weapon against academia:
Smelling blood in the water, Rufo is in full agreement with the AP (but not, ironically, the community note) for all the wrong reasons, and is happy to throw money at anyone who wants to start looking at the publications of other academics:
Over the past month, many suggested that part of the motivation for the professoriate’s spirited defense of Gay’s right not to perform the emotional labour of citation was their anxiety over the skeletons they all know full well are hiding in their own closets. Plagiarism-checking software didn’t really exist until a couple of decades ago, and so far as I’ve seen it hasn’t been systematically applied anywhere outside of the occasional undergraduate course. By unspoken gentlepronoun’s agreement, our eminent learned societies have quietly avoided subjecting their work to such scrutiny.
That raises the fascinating question of just how much plagiarism there really is. The guilty man fleeth. The ladyboy doth protest too much.
We already know all about the Replication Crisis, with something like half of the scientific literature failing this basic test of scientific validity.
To this we might also add the Falsifiability Blight. A great deal of contemporary scholarship – the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmological model, with its invisible forces, unidentifiable constituents, and myriad of adjustable knobs; the endlessly versatile effects of anthropogenic carbon dioxide, which whether warming or cooling the climate is always doing so catastrophically; the spooky witchcraft of implicit bias, stereotype threat, and structural racism – is founded on theories (or “Critical” “Theory”) that cannot, by their very nature, be falsified. Sublimely unconcerned by this, the adherents of these unkillable paradigms shamble through the hallways and lecture theatres like an army of the undead, consuming the brains of the living and leaving a barren wasteland of lifeless ideas in their wake.
On top of the Replication Crisis and the Falsifiability Blight, perhaps we will find that one of the stories of 2024 will be the Great Plagiarism Predicament, in which forensic examination of the literature excreted by America’s scholars will reveal that they’ve all been ripping one another off shamelessly for decades. Anecdotally, I’ve heard from many that DIEvy professors are particularly egregious in this regard, regularly lifting ideas from the hoi poloi at lesser institutions and passing those insights off as their own. See: Gary King.
How much cultural capital will evaporate if it turns out that the professoriate holds itself to scholarly standards that would get undergraduates expelled, all the while trafficking in airy fabulism that is useless at best and toxic, dyscivilizational poison at worst? How embarrassing would it be if it turned out not only that most of what academics have been generating isn’t only made-up nonsense, but that they lack even the elementary originality to make up their own nonsense?
Could that be enough to finally drive a stake through the heart of the academy?
Well, no. It will not.
It was incredibly tempting to put a paywall at this point in the essay. It’s already longer than most articles on Substack. Besides which it’s a logical breakpoint, with a bit of a hook to grab the reader’s attention. What’s he going to say next? Will he explain how the DIEing universities can finally achieve their desire and DIE? Will he suggest an actual solution? SUBSCRIBE TO FIND OUT!
I mean, you know, I spent several hours on this. Writing it, curating the art, editing it, curating more art, rewriting it, editing the rewrites. It’s a whole process. A lot of work. So I don’t think anyone would blame me for paywalling some of it.
But I want people to actually read this, and paywalls kill reach.
Besides which, dear readers, I have faith in you. I know you’ll do the right thing.
So long as there’s no better alternative, it doesn’t actually matter how dire the situation has become. An awful something is better than nothing at all, to most people. At the end of the day, the problem with the universities is that they are not meeting, and indeed are actively undermining, the social functions that they serve: preserving the knowledge of the past, passing it on to the next generation, and pushing back the frontiers of human understanding. But without a superior alternative – and at this stage ‘superior’ really means ‘just barely at the edge of workable’ – the clanking old beater will continue puttering along down the highway.
The truth is, we have almost everything we need to build an agile, fluid, ersatz academy on the Internet. The tools necessary for autodidacts to learn everything they need to on their own, largely for free, have existed for years now. For most it’s second nature to watch a few YouTube videos when they want to learn how to do something, for example. Search engines and Large Language Models are capable of giving a quick rundown on whatever you need to know, and then going into as much additional depth and detail as you want. Sure, the LLMs might lie to you. But then so will the professors.
The key missing element is credentialization. There’s no robust, open system by means of which students can prove that they know the things that they know, meaning that employers are still reliant on the academic diploma monopoly, thereby forcing students to go deep into debt paying inflated tuition fees so that they can waste years taking a large number of mostly useless courses while subjecting their minds to indoctrination with brain-frying illogicalities and paramoralisms (or the jaw-clenching frustration that comes from successfully enduring and resisting it). All just to get a job. Usually a shit job at that.
An expanded system of fine-grained standardized testing, enabling students to learn in whatever manner suits them and have their knowledge and mastery evaluated according to a universal and objective standard, would kick the final leg of support out from under the universities.
So what about the academics themselves? The ones who aren’t complete wastes of rations, that is? How do they survive outside the academy?
Independent scholars are finding that they can often get by at least as comfortably as they did inside the ivory tower by building audiences on YouTube, Substack, Xitter, Patreon, Instagram, Twitch, Zoom, and so on. The subscription and neopatronage models, combined with access to a global audience, can generate a reasonable income. One doesn’t need an audience of millions; a few hundred enthusiastic supporters throwing ten dollars a month their way brings in about as much money as a postdoctoral stipend. There’s the added benefit that there’s no particular need to live in a high cost-of-living college town so you can occupy an office at an R1 university campus. Meanwhile, the earnings upside potential is huge.
That isn’t to say there aren’t challenges.
Building an audience takes time. Years, usually. On the other hand, so does scaling the slippery staircase spiralling up the central shaft of the ivory tower: the time between enrolling as an undergraduate and getting tenure is usually a couple of decades3, throughout the entirety of which an aspiring scholar is generally perched at the edge of poverty.
Audience capture is an obvious failure mode. Let yourself get too locked in to an audience that knows what it wants you to say and punishes you when go off script, and you can find yourself in a sticky nightmare in which you’re writing about things you don’t really care about anymore because the hive mind wants its dopamine in a familiar and digestible format. Then again, under the current academic regime, grant committee capture isn’t so much a failure mode as the mode in which the system has failed ... to say nothing about the elaborate speech codes fencing off vast tracts of reality behind priestly taboos from the realm of permissible discourse.
One must develop the writing and speaking skills to connect with an audience. But actually, more or less the same speaking skills are necessary to succeed as a lecturer. Furthermore, on the current academic path, one must develop the ability to connect with a grant committee, and whereas writing for a popular audience tends to make one a better, more engaging writer, writing for an anonymous panel of bureaucrats tends to render one’s prose as lifeless as a fossilized tree stump. This has the knock-on effect that academic prose has become so oppressively dull that academics rarely read papers outside their area of expertise. Interdisciplinary research would probably be much more frequent if the writing was clear and engaging; and if scholars mainly wrote for popular audiences, these being their main source of funding, their writing would have to be clear and engaging.
There’s the question of what kind of research can be supported by interested lay people. The answer to this is almost certainly that it will not be the same research as receives funding from national granting agencies. But that’s probably not a bad thing.
Distribution of funds by anonymous panels of expert peer reviewers recruited by impersonal bureaucracies introduces powerful biases into the directions of scientific research. Incremental, rather than disruptive, science is preferred: no one wants the gore of their favourite ox being used to augur the future of the field. At the same time granting agencies strongly prefer research proposals that can yield guaranteed results ... and if the results can be guessed ahead of time, it follows that the research probably isn’t particularly ground-breaking, and therefore not especially interesting. The natural consequence is that most researchers end up beavering away on increasingly granular minutiae, learning more and more about less and less until they know absolutely everything about nothing at all. Such work is of no interest to anyone outside of their own little circle, and often barely all that interesting to them. “What the heck is the point of this,” is a question that elicits deep spiritual torment for many academics. It’s very difficult to feel passionate about dedicating one’s life to studying the inner workings of the ozopores under the antecephalic apodous collum of an endangered millipede found only under a single large rock in the Guatemalan rain forest.
Uninspiring research of the sort that the modern academy excels in producing is an inevitable consequence of the bureaucratization of funding. The agencies don’t care about the contents of the research, and they don’t care if the public cares; the taxes are appropriated whether the public wills it or no. All the bureaucrats care about is the maximization of quantifiable metrics: so many papers published, so many citations obtained, and so on. It’s all Big Line Go Up so the soft-spoken squishes in the bureaucracy can tell their immediate superiors they’re doing their due public diligence. It doesn’t matter to them if the work is relevant, or interesting, or even correct. Thus the publish or perish ethos of the modern university, in which academics are incentivized to churn out mountains of unreplicable, unfalsifiable, and unreadable bland nonsense as fast as they can. The modern academic knowledge production system is the original Large Language Model.
Independent scholars surviving via the support of public audiences won’t be able to get away with pointless research and dull prose. It will have to be interesting enough to support, which means that it will have to be relevant. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone has to care about it. Again, audiences of millions aren’t required: enthusiastic patronage clubs of hundreds are probably enough. If, in the entire world, with a population of 8 billion people, after a few years of working on and writing about a certain subject, you can’t find a few hundred people to nerd out with you enough to throw a few dollars your way every month, well, maybe that line of research just isn’t worth pursuing. Except perhaps as a hobby ... and maybe a lot of science would be improved if it was deprofessionalized, and returned to its roots as a prestige hobby for the idle rich.
There are challenges to independent, online scholarship, yes. It’s a new model that’s barely begun to be explored. But the tools are all there, and there’s already a growing number of scholars who are finding that they can, in fact, succeed quite comfortably without being employed by a large institution. Not only that, but they have the freedom to research whatever they want, say whatever they want, and communicate it in whatever manner and style they want. In the years to come I expect the number of scholars working in this mode to grow. Right now it’s a trickle, composed mainly of the Defenestrated, Insulted, and Excluded. They’re understandably a bit shellshocked and bitter. Eventually, as it becomes clear that life is better outside the institutions, that trickle will become a flood.
What happens when researchers realize that being affiliated with institutions no longer carries quite the cachet it once did, but rather associates them in the popular imagination with mendacious buffoons, howling lunatics, and lying sociopaths, such that it makes their every utterance not more credible but less?
What happens when they realize that they no longer really need those large academic institutions? That the entire infrastructure of peer-reviewed journals, grant committees, lecture theatres, and administrative bloat has become surplus to requirements?
What happens when students realize that they can learn quite effectively, arguably more effectively, and inarguably much more economically, by leveraging the Internet to teach themselves whatever they want, as fast as they want, and connect as necessary with tutors and mentors drawn from that growing pool of independent scholars?
What happens when someone finally builds that open source system of standardized testing that enables students to sort themselves by subject-matter mastery on an objective scale that employers can rely on with far greater assurance than the slapdash, inconsistent, watered-down, and deeply compromised system of diplomas?
First this happens.
Then this happens.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
Oh and Happy New Year, everyone.
I think this one is gonna be great.
What did the parrot speak about?
You should subscribe to his Substack Jungle Bunker Telemetric Funk btw, in which SAM presents the case for Faustian Space Vitalism.
You should also
this on your social media platform of choice. Although what with all the throttling of off-platform links that’s happening these days, I’m not sure how effective that really is. But still, it’s appreciated. If you’re on Xitter, here’s a link to my own xeet which you can repost.
And if you really enjoyed this, you should
so you don’t miss whatever I write about next. I’ve got several essays in the hopper, covering a pretty ridiculous array of subject matter. If you’re new to Postcards From Barsoom, I’ve collected some of my favourite essays here, so you can get an idea of what I like to write about. Honestly I really wanted to take
’s advice and write about big-picture, actually interesting things like, say, UFOs, space colonization, or network states.
But once again the social media news cycle pulled me back into the mud.
A huge thank you to all of my supporters. It’s because of you that everyone else can read Postcards From Barsoom for free. You are Space Atlas, holding up the Martian globe. I love you all.
As always, in between writing on Substack you can find me on Xitter @martianwyrdlord, and I’m also pretty active at Telegrams From Barsoom.
The interim president, it is true, is Jewish, and reportedly very enthusiastic about DIEing. It remains to be seen who the next actual president will be. I’m hoping for Michelle Obama, because Harvard needs a black woman president, but what is a woman, really? Although I must admit that
. Briggs makes a solid case:
In those rare cases in which they haven’t already affirmed their genders themselves.
Bachelor’s degree, 4 years; Master’s and Ph.D., 6 years; postdoctoral research, variable, but optimistically 4 years, and easily a decade; junior professor, an additional 4 years.
Awesome victory lap!
I think the case is already closed on online vs. traditional book learning. The volume of high quality, well curated resources available online dwarfs what even the best university libraries and lecture halls can provide.
Credentialing is a solvable problem. The software/IT world had to figure this out on its own because the universities were too slow to adapt, and high quality certifications are worth more than a degree in most technical fields (such that universities often focus on teaching to the certs and offer them in addition to or in lieu of internal exams).
Research and practical learning is where I see the biggest deficit. University and corporate labs provide access to tools and materials that independent learners simply cannot reproduce in a garage, no matter how big their patreon accounts are. Imagine trying to acquire your own human cadaver or test monkeys for your self-guided medical studies. And though I've seen a few people with their own electron microscopes and other high end lab equipment I don't think garage labs are going to be competitive or affordable any time soon. So the question is how to solve this problem? Hacker/makerspaces may be the right model in some cases.
Ackman's gambit is almost certainly part of a wider, more ambitious, initiative. Higher education is a vast industrial sector in its own right and the US government is heavily involved in financing it. Overt direction/regulation risks phenomenal pushback, covert direction/regulation by way of selectively targeting key institutions for a scandal enables the key players in the Deep State and key industry stakeholders to make progress.
Ackman is a hedge fund owner. Those guys are plugged in to serious power networks. He would not make a public move as controversial as this without backing from within the oligarchy and the Deep State. He would be well aware of the implications of DEI for both finance and industry. The great DEI experiment of South Africa (Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment) was vigorously supported by the US and has crippled South Africa. The more prudent elements of the US leadership class can see where such things are heading and are proactively preparing to curtail DEI in key areas.
The underlying motivation for the scandal would be to prepare the sector for future change. The re-industrialisation of North America requires a serious technical and research skills-base. If I am right we will see some positive developments in key institutions like the National Science Foundation, NASA or DARPA. Change is certainly easier now that the public is aware of the size and gravity of the problem.