If you’re short of time, and know about the past—which as of last week is now historical—failures of higher education, skip When It Was It Bad and jump right to Make It Sting.
When It Was Bad
A clue, not the first, but a dandy one, was when textbooks became hideous brute deadweights, with colorfully idiotic pictures and margins the size of Lithuanian sheep pastures, reissued biannually as “new” editions, with the full compliance of professors who produce (don’t say write) them.
A second clue, not that different, really, was when colleges started offering communications and similarly useless “degrees”. Learning, and paying to learn how to produce superior propaganda should not be the purpose of “higher” education.
Colleges were by that point already unsalvageable, but few could see this.
Many now can. Because many had the advantage of a plethora of fresh evidence, most conspicuously in the form of hard DIE mania and quotas, even when these are forced to go under new names. Canada is allowed to openly ban white men. That and college is already over half women, the majority in many fields, and so-to-be majorities even in science. Men have had enough mandatory formal scolding by “educators” by the time they’re eighteen, and they increasingly will not want to voluntarily pay for more. Let alone learn about “getting along”: in science, anyway, this is deadly poison.
The kids that make it to American campuses cannot read. Or won’t read. A long-time professor at Columbia says “students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.” One student told him she was never required to read a book before getting to college. Not even one.
Hardly any of the kids who are at college belong there. They could have, and should have, learned what they needed to know to get on in life before college. But high school, and middle school, have also been dumbed down. This is all accurately predicted by the theory of averages, as I written many times (blog/Substack). The greater the proportion of kids going to school, the dumber school becomes, until, when all go, education hits bottom. Equality is the Great Leveler.
If you’re still in the unconvinced camp, let me remind you of this cri de coeur from David Butterfield, ex of the University of Cambridge. He resigned after two decades professoring there, because why? Because, for one, disability exceptions. Including—and I ask you to believe this, even though you won’t—learning disability exceptions. This is like insisting short professional basketball players be awarded +20 bonus points at the start of every game. One report says 90% now whine about “mental health.”
The largest and final clue was college administration “degrees.” Yes, really: these exist. It is Experts, or managers, in the Expertocracy training themselves in managerialism, so that they can, with the greatest efficiency, subsume colleges into the managerial bureaucratic beast. It is the one “degree” with the greatest successes.
Butterfield writes of this, though he is far from the first and not alone, about how professors, grateful at first to be relieved of the burdens of paperwork, surrendered more and more of their authority until they became mere “employees”, working at the whim of Experts. Some “prestige” colleges now have as many, or more, administrators as professors. Read that twice.
Which leads to headlines like this: “UConn looking to address low enrollment for 70 majors“. Experts are considering closing down programs that aren’t adding to the bottom line. Like math, physics, art, music, linguistics, almost all languages, and, yes, philosophy. Shall I remind us what “PhD” stands for? No. Why bother.
Make It Sting
We have a choice. Let the flesh rot off the carcasses of the old system, and build anew. Or try to repair what stands. Quoting Mystery Grove: “As one Russian official said of attempts by the Czar to modernize Imperial Russia shortly before the Revolution: ‘The most dangerous thing you can do to a bad system is try to reform it.'”
Porque no los dos?
We now have a chance to hose off the smelly slimy woke mess that coats and gooks the halls of academe. If this fails, then we will be comforted that we are also building our own. Here’s how to reform.
Woke effeminate sclerotic decaying money-eating shiny-new-already-dissolving-buildings universities now have power and authority. Both can be taken and given to others.
The power can be taken away by, for one, taxing endowments. Now I know nothing of the legal bits of this, but it has been promised by the incoming regime, and even if they can’t get away with taxes like this, the fear of the Lord that it might should be instilled in university administrators.
What can be done is to defund any university which is any way woke. Have any DIE, in any department or level, by name or euphemism or even smell, and no federal funds. No student loan guarantees. Choke off the money, and change comes. Another threat is that those involved in Official Mis- and Disinformation efforts cause their schools to lose funding.
Purge administrators. Pick a level—say, 10%—and announce that if any college or university has that many or more administrators than professors, no federal funding. We must no longer feed the managerial beast. After a few years, or months, to boot the waste, then lower the level to 5%. Deans do not count as professors. Watch the cheating of renaming administrators as professors. Any ex-administrator can never count as a professor.
The other avenue is to encourage all kids who should not be going into college to do something else. Having the unable on campus burdens everyone unnecessarily. The same thing happened with primary education, because teachers are forced to aim at the lowest level. Which makes education hell for the able. It limits the best, and does very little, to nothing, for the unable.
It is the weakest and least able, or now the unable, who fill the useless and ridiculous majors. There is no reason we as a people should be funding communications “degrees”, or any grievance “studies” “degrees” and similar other fluff or radioactive nonsense. Colleges can be free to have as many of these programs as they like, but they should not be allowed to spend any of our money on them. We fund only the best.
Research funding. Cut most of it off. Much of it is there only because professors must publish or perish. This creates the raging tsunami of worthless and harmful “research”, in all fields, not only science. Absolutely zero funding for things like “women in physics” or “super duper pedagogy”.
The assumption that universities are the best and most efficient places to learn new things must be challenged. It isn’t true, at least not now. If we as a society deem scientific discovery important, there are other avenues, especially private ventures.
There is more, but you have the idea. Money is the obvious, and necessary, line of attack. Make it sting.
Who Says So
Lack of (genuine) teachers are not a problem. If you want to learn, say, electronics, go to any of a dozens of sites. I myself teach probability. It’s one thing to convince a car rental company not to require a “degree” for entry-level clerks, as some do. But it seems difficult, if not impossible, to convince medical and legal licensing boards not to require some kind of certification. It’s the Accreditation Gate that must be solved.
Because DIE is official government policy, in form of civil “rights”, many look to the certification of the college “degree” as evidence of some level of worthiness, because companies become skittish of checking worthiness themselves. Yet this would be so even if we did not insist on DIEing. Not every firm or person can take the time to check the competence of every person. The problem was thus never certification per se. The problem is the parchment in palms has been of inconsistent or of little or no value.
Now you can take my probability class, and I can (and will) write a letter giving my impression of your assimilation of the material. This can be shown to anybody, but the value of that letter depends on myself having any prestige. I have none, since I have been cast into the outer darkness for refusing to DIE. You only have the benefit of me being right, and my enemies (who boast of their wee Ps) being wrong.
Yet you might get away getting somebody to accept a letter for one item, like probability, but you likely won’t in general, or for all things. There’d be too many letters from too many teachers, over-burdening those who need to check credentials.
Which means we need to own the Accreditation Gate. Closing that Gate allowed Canada to crush a Christian law school. No accreditation, no certification, no certification, no entering the bar. We do the same thing right back at them.
Earlier, I suggested a group of Our Men join and provide the service of accreditation. We’d serve as the accreditation boards do now, though not formally as an “our thing”, because once such an entity becomes formal, the DIE screws are applied.
We now have the opportunity to create something formal, with all the perquisites that implies. Call it, say, the Reality Accreditation Board. Only sane and Reality-based subjects are covered. Again, no grievance, no fluff, no DIE, no “jobs for girls”. Leave the nonsense to others.
Make it rigorous and make it vigorous. Make it so that if a person has only a credential from some lesser entity, a hiring manager considering it says, “Well, this is okay, but would it pass the standards of the RAB?”
We do the RAD, even if we lose the other battles, and even if the RAD has to be an unofficial “our thing”.
Subscribe or donate to support this site and its wholly independent host using credit card click here. Or use the paid subscription at Substack. Cash App: \$WilliamMBriggs. For Zelle, use my email: matt@wmbriggs.com, and please include yours so I know who to thank.
One thing that most people outside of academics do not know is that for most research grants, anywhere from 60-100% of the total for the “research” (read salaries, supplies, and doing the actual studies) is given to the administration so it almost doubles the cost of the research from the get go. When I started, there were about 3 VPs and the place ran efficiently, now there are well over 100 VPs. It is insane!
How about putting all 18 year Olds through 2 years of compulsory national service. After all, most kids are just killing time in college anyway.
That service could be in a military branch, but that would not be mandatory. The participants would only be required to do something in the national interest, something tangible! (Maybe infrastructure maintenance).
This would also include classes to bring everyone up to a minimum level of literacy and civics.
After those 2 years, whether or not they go on, to “higher” education, they’d be better people for the experience.
Our university is discussing the possibility of restructuring the mathematics program. The supposed reason is “lack of financial viability.” We are understandably confused because if you look at the amount of tuition money being paid by students taking courses taught by mathematics instructors, it is well in excess of the total expenses of the whole department (including salaries, health benefits, equipment costs, internal research grants, etc.)
The problem is a new administrator. She created a computer program to track finances. She admits that the mathematics program pulls in more tuition money than its expenses. But she says that if you consider only the students in our majors, we are losing money. We ask how, especially since most the majority of classes that they are taking are required for programs that are not in danger of being shut down (and thus would be offered even if we ditched our math degrees; i.e. if the programs were cut we’d have the exact same expenses but lower tuition income.) She says that we need to look at the simple computer data, which she stresses is the output of a program but definitely not a model! Can she explain where the money is being lost? I.e. what expense is exceeding the income? No, it’s too complicated, only by looking at the computer program can you see how things are calculated.
Of course you can’t just access the computer program. You have to go to a one hour training session before you are granted access. These are run by support staff. And it turns out that at the end of the training session you aren’t granted full access to the program, you only get the final conclusions which have already been stated. In order to get permission to make your own data plots you have to go to a supplementary training program (taught by more support staff). But even after that you still cannot see how any of the data is calculated, you only get the output.
Thus a new administrator was hired to make fallacious conclusions about the budget, and to prop up her position she gets a support staff to run training sessions that waste the time of the faculty who are actually making the university money. It’s pretty obvious who should be the first one fired if we want to save money, but of course this new administrator is safe from such discussions (despite her position not even existing two years ago.)
Join? RAB? Who’s in the group so far? I mean, it’s a great idea, but shouldn’t we focus on slaying the beast first? Imagine this: Trump actually follows through on his promise to dismantle the Department of Education. Suddenly, the massive pipeline of federal dollars is gone—poof! A bizzilion dollars no longer available for cash cow students to borrow and colleges to feast on.
Can you hear the outcry? Pell Grants, SEOG, Work Study, Perkins Loans, Direct Student Loans, Family Education Loans, TRIO programs—all wiped out in one fell swoop. Just in 2021 alone, these programs funneled over $60 billion into our universities. That’s a tidal wave of funding that’s kept tuition high and students deep in debt. Without it the entire higher education system could face a reckoning. HAHAHA. Love it.
What then? Would we finally see colleges reining in their bloated costs, or would it just leave millions of students without a way to pay? Either way it’s going to be catastrophic. The parasite tenured weasels cannot continue on.
One of the most problematic aspects of this change is how to really evaluate people. Universities as they stand do not know how to. H-indices do not serve the purpose. Universities are guilds, there they evaluate on the spot, day in, day out. Not if you publish a sexy paper in a high impact factor journal. Peter Higgs published very few papers, Legget started teaching after only have had published a one-page summary of his thesis. Experimental work? Well, remember Nik Tesla? What became of him? The financiers pulled the plug. No-one is a genius until one is. By the way, let’s end this obsession with ‘genius’, ok? Where has that taken us? Another Dante? Another Giotto? Another Machault?
From my experience, watering down in mathematics has been occurring since I began teaching nearly three decades ago. This trend is unrelated to promoting equality. However. it is important to note that the top 5% remains just as strong, if not stronger, than the top 5% of previous generations.
I seriously doubt that the students at Ralston College in Savannah, GA, where Butterfield currently works, are superior to those at Cambridge. However, he is probably better paid now. I wouldn’t recommend students majoring in Butterfield’s field of study unless they can afford to do so as a hobby.
Hear! Hear! Briggs!
Let us begin by awarding ourselved medals for a job well done. The greater the screeching for us having done so, the more deserving we are of the recognition!
The major roadblock in the US is discrimination lawsuits at the hiring / employer level. B.A.’s are largely used as a “get out of discrimination lawsuit free” card. If and when employers are allowed to provide objective and secure (fraud/cheating free) tests that focus purely on mastery and competence of given skills, plus interviews to ensure the right personal skills, then the need for the current model of higher education disappears. If the social and inter-personal skills are there (and for some jobs they won’t matter), then employers will focus on WHETHER a person has the set of X, Y, Z skills, and not on HOW or WHERE the person got such skills.
The main obstacles to that approach currently are mainly cultural and legal: Cultural, in that most parents and students just want to walk the well-trodden path, and in that most corporate HR departments are beholden to and are enforcing the old paradigm. Legal, in that pure skills-based testing is still subject to attack by anti-discrimination lawsuits in a way that hiring based on undergraduate credentials is not.
This is what you’re looking for:
https://permies.com/wiki/160690/physical-copy-SKIP-book
These crunchy permaculture guys out in the woods figured it out. Many farmers are too old to farm. Many young people want to farm but can’t afford land. Solution: SKills to Inherit Property. A self-guided course where you get proven subject matter experts to sign off on your ability. Does the landowner want to make sure you have what it takes to fell damaged trees on the property? Go volunteer with someone managing a timber stand until he’s ready to sign off that you know enough of the basics. He has a business and a phone number: the landowner can call him up and make sure you pass muster.
The university was a means of bringing multiple subject experts together in one location to mitigate the cost of traveling from tutor to tutor. That’s irrelevant today: we have video phones and the internet. Many students already go to college online. The next step is to decentralize the teaching pool. You can learn chemistry online from someone in Michigan while apprenticing at a machine shop in NC. All you need is some central database to keep track of who has signed off that you learned the appropriate tasks. That’s easy with the Internet.
(This is basically the Boy Scout merit badge system on a larger scale. The Boy Scouts could have helped, but they decided it was more important to be gay.)
The situation Rudolf Harrier describes is disappointing. But, unfortunately, there is currently an effort to destroy mathematics, though so far it hasn’t been going on all that long. It will be justified in terms of pragmatism, but it won’t actually be practical. It ultimately comes from a philosophy. The philosophy is that we don’t need to understand thing because everything is solved. Just throw computers at it. And at a deeper level, it’s the idea that human labor has no value in itself. It only has value if it benefits us personally or if it has high status, i.e., what other people say about it, not what it actually is.
That’s the latent philosophy behind mangerialism. In Ancient Greece, philosophy was the queen of the sciences, in the Middle Ages it was theology, back in the 1800’s Gauss said it was mathematics, and in the 20th century it was theoretical physics. But now, managerialism is the queen of the sciences. Because human labor is trivial, no thinking or understanding is needed, all we need is to follow a set of pre-designed instructions. And so the manager, the one who decides those pre-designed instructions is the truly important person.
And the thing is, it’s not just leftists who believe in this ideology. Many non-leftists also think that human labor is trivial; you can see it in how they talk. The fact that good work is meaningful is just a quirk of psychology. And anyway, we’re heading towards a techno-utopia where robots do all our work and a man can become a woman if he wants to. Of course, that day will never come, but it’s not going to stop people from destroying good things to get there. After all, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs, as the saying goes.
People have to stop deluding themselves with this inhuman ideology and preposterous fantasies about the future and just stop supporting bad things.