Roger Scruton has called for dumping universities as they currently exist. Scrap them altogether, he says. At least dynamite the state-sponsored ones (in England).
Most universities are state-sponsored, though. At least they are in the USA. Even institutions which have billion-plus dollar endowments rake it enormous wads of cash in the form of research “grants” and “overhead.” And student loans, which are all now government-backed.
Our government can’t close Harvard down, at least because Harvard is a part of government, a breeding ground for future bureaucrats and apparatchiks. Think of like the State Department farm team. But we could, if we had a mind, cut off the money spigot.
Which won’t happen. Instead, we ought to try and starve them of students, as we’ll see.
Scruton said “we have completely lost control” and we ought to “get rid of universities altogether.”
Again, not going to happen. There is no way the powerful are going to willingly surrender their control and authority. Bust as elite universities and governments are in essence one, there isn’t a chance in Hades for government-university to loosen its grip.
There are only two choices: cut off the supply of propaganda fodder, i.e. students, or start our own rival institutions that are in no way dependent on governments (as they are now constituted). This includes, unfortunately, disallowing government-backed student-loans. For he who gives the money dictates the terms.
To cut off the students we have go after parents, the kids themselves, and woke corporations.
The corporate world uses “degrees” as proxies for minimal competence and teachability. They can’t use formal tests for this, because these tests will inevitably be discovered to be “racist”, “sexist”, whatever. Corporations could just drop the “degree” requirement for entry-level positions, but then they have to justify not hiring the vast mass of indigenous populants applying for jobs.
Sounds like an impossible situation, but I don’t buy it. Having an applicant sit in a chair for half hour and respond to hard questions would provide just as much information as a piece of paper stating the applicant had a “Communications degree” from a university.
The real problem is convincing woke corporations to change their practices, so that they abandon “degree” requirements. Since the tail wags the dog in those places, i.e. HR dictates policy, we have to go after HR.
That meas unwaking the woke. If you can solve that problem, you can solve our culture’s main problem. Which doesn’t seem likely.
Next step is to target parents and kids. Convince them that “degrees” are too damned expensive, that becoming a slave to a woke corporation with tens of thousands in student-loan debt in tow is not a worthy goal. There are better ways to live. Forbes doesn’t think so. They say “Taking out loans gives students a reality check.” So does dropping a bar of soap in a prison shower.
Be a carpenter, or mechanic, or plumber, electrician, specialty farmer, anything which frees you as best as possible from the working for the woke corporate oligarch-controlled machine. Marry early, have a family, stay close to home, go to Church, and live modestly.
That strikes me as not only more feasible, but all evidence is that it works in practice.
Still, for a few, and only for a few, we will need a mechanism for advanced education. To do this, we need our own institutions, of some form. We have talked of this many times.
Others see the need, too. Scruton saw it, and when he said it many agreed. Now City Journal sees it, too.
Anyone interested in the subject knows that American colleges and universities increasingly prefer promoting leftist social change to seeking objective truth in their research and teaching. Professors, students, outside speakers, and any others with opinions that contradict a consensus that moves ever-leftward are ostracized for their supposed racism, sexism, heteronormativity, binarism (believing that people are either male or female), ableism (regarding disabled people as disabled), species- ism (valuing people more than animals), and other prejudices thought so noxious that many students, professors, and administrators refuse them even a hearing. Rigor and objectivity in teaching and research have steadily given way to indoctrination.
What we all know.
Now this fellow says a new, Reality-based private university “could largely pay for itself,” which I’m not buying (get it?). It is sure to lose money; or rather, to cost lots. Especially if it’s built, as he imagines, in a “newly planned university town”. Dude.
That writer also forgets about accreditation, which is how the education syndicate squeezes out competition. For instance, remember that Canadian Christian law school that refused to bow down to sodomy? They lost their accreditation. Students can still go there, but Canada requires accreditation to become a lawyer. So it’s either bend over and say “Yes please may I have another” or go out of business.
Which is why we have to completely new (old) ways of passing Reality and Truth on. Like these. But if you have others, let’s hear them.
What’s that about research?
The London School of Economics asks its faculty members whether there are any right-wing sociologists.
Their initial reactions tells you everything you need to know. https://t.co/uHVVyW0Qbv
— Amir Sariaslan (@AmirSariaslan) June 16, 2019
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I’ve examined a lot of papers coming out of university research. Others have too. In many areas of research university claims fail to replicate well over 80% of the time.
I’m suspicious of some messaging for a reason.
A lot of Forbes, etc. has gone full blown into “go into blue collar work!”, never mind it’s also the most threatened by immigration, and it’s advice targeted to conservatives. “That’s right, make sure you never enter an influential career field, go into work that has a fighting chance of wrecking your body into chronic pain (the Sacklers have got you covered!), and I’m sure you’ll be able to compete with a steady stream of illegals who will work for money under the table!”
New universities? You’ve got that right, they’ll conquer them like they conquered the old ones.
Aggressive evangelism is the only real answer I see. It’s the one thing that influences everything else because it’s the important thing. Trying to argue people into standing up to Leviathan just isn’t going to work
In such a short piece it is easy to overlook the fact that major corporations enjoy just a cozy relationship with the government as do universities. There is no incentive for corporations to change their hiring practices as they are both partners and benefactors of the status quo. What needs to be “changed” to lead us to sanity goes far deeper than the education system.
Rather than expending effort on, as you rightly note, an unsuccessful attempt to shut these places down, I prefer the attitude expressed in the Bible in passages such as Matthew 10:14, Mark 6:11, and Luke 9:5.
There was one such university just outside Dallas. Took no fed gov money. It’s gone.
Don’t really know the solution (maybe where there is no solution, there is no problem). Tech seems to be one area that may change the game. Who cares if you have a degree from Harvard in wymyns studies if you can code, or better yet, build useful gadgets. Heck, you don’t even need to be able to make them from scratch, just assemble them from off the shelf parts. Functionality is no respecter of persons.
The purpose of modern universities is passage from childhood to adulthood. They are for social-cultural transformation, not technical learning per se. The degrees are pieces of paper with little significance.
It is easy today to transmit technical information via the Internet. That’s how most college classes function now. Students in lecture halls listening to professors propound is old school (literally).
The New U format, whatever it might be, must provide the social/cultural function — lots of budding young adults in face-to-face contact building adult relationships. Figure out how to do that, at a reasonable cost, and then you will have something.
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Patrick Henry College, Purcellville, VA. Completely independent.
What we need to do is create our own accrediting organization. Nothing prevents this – it’s what the older colleges did.
“Since the tail wags the dog in those places, i.e. HR dictates policy, we have to go after HR.” With shotguns and flamethrowers. Come to think on it, that would fix many of the problems at our current universities.
What McChuck said. We need a revolution in faux-education.