I completely understand what Dr. Loury is concerned about, however, what is an effective way to push back against the far-left ideology and takeover of the universities and the spread of this ideology to the public education system, publishing and even science journals. How do you bring that back closer to center? If the likes of Rufo and Ackman did not "attack" Harvard, would Harvard have even given any thought at all to reviewing its policies and administration?
The crown jewels have dulled a lot more than you seem to realize. No, the barbarians should not be allowed to dictate to the universities and chop them up. But what he hell have they been doing to prevent this from happening? Not much. You are rarer than you think. I would not pay for any child of mine to attend 99% of American or British universities at this point. Too much indoctrination. Too dangerous for anyone who has a non far left opinion. No more freedom of speech or expression. No freedom to pursue truth, which is the purpose of academe. Instead people are taught to regurgitate ideology. It's happened too many times to trust it anymore. Should universities be left to either figure themselves out or go the way of the dodo without interference from the government? Of course. But they've been rotting from within for 50 years, which has accelerated every decade. None of this is surprising.
The barbarians have already taken over the universities - it's just that they aren't whom Prof. Loury assumes. And now Western civilization has arrived at the gates to reclaim them.
How about after you read your first book without pictures - I believe they're called "chapter books" - we can circle back and have a nice discussion about "intellekshuals" and other fancy words you saw somewhere ....
You speak as though there is only one problem with universities, and this is it. Until acceptance to higher education, and graduation and honors come purely through merit, then universities can and must be under fire.
For one to say "I didn't agree with this, and many like me exist" is well and good, but where's the proof? Where were the tenured professors who stood up for the values of free speech and non conformity. The professors who said "This is not right and I condemn it?" There are countless students whose academic careers were destroyed because they stood up and were torn down, where were you then? Who will hold the decision makers accountable for the inability of college students to be different, in whatever way they desire to be different?
Until you, and those like you, can and will confidently make a stand for anyone who dares to speak against orthodoxy, who strains against 'prevailing wisdom,' there can be no other recourse than to tear the house down to remove the rot. As long as the smug superciliousness of university graduates continues, as long as humility ceases to be, then these institutions must necessarily face harsh criticism.
Until and unless there is genuine change, a return to classical education values, rather than the perceived money printing colleges have become, there should be no conversation about preservation of these institutions. What would we preserve, and why? A talented, driven individual with access to the internet could teach themselves nearly everything a college could teach them, largely for free, and until 'higher' education understands that the world is shifting, it should be scrutinized.
So if none inside the gates are willing to publicly, loudly, proclaim that they see the problems, they don't condone the actions, and call for change, then the people hiding inside their palisades of superiority deserve the barbarians laying siege to their strongholds.
Let's go with your argument, tear down the system...and then what? This argument has been spoken by my colleagues on both extremes of the Isle and when I ask this question they have no plan. The Internet is not an educator and full of bias. Algorithms control what you search and the information you receive. AI is clouding our ability to critically think and social media has executed the public Commons. It is not the replacement for education.
All this to say that it's much easier to destroy than it is to build and it's time for us to get our heads out of the sand and get creative about addressing the monsters we've created.
OK, that's a good question. In my opinion, all credentials should be accredited. So as a thought experiment, what if you could get certifications for anything? All you have to do it take a certification exam and you are awarded the cert. No education required, only competency. Certifications are put together by experts, and proctored by neutral parties, where any variance from pure neutrality is heavily punished.
Want to be a finance person? This finance director position requires Finance Certs I, II, and III, and Economics I, and etc etc. This incentivizes true knowledge, rather than algorithms and disinfo (and also, algorithms don't control everything, you can educate yourself as high as you want in math and physics, for example, nearly for free).
The current system rewards conformity, by its very nature. The university model worked for so long because it was centralized knowledge that could be learned all at once, rather than travelling to apprentice to Descartes, then travelling to Russia, blah blah. It worked until the internet came about, but here's the kicker: THE INTERNET IS THE EXACT SAME THING. A repository of all human knowledge and experience. No longer do you have to pay $200k to go to Cambridge for 4-6 years, you can, quite literally, get the same knowledge at a fraction of the cost. You can form an ad hoc study group with 2 Japanese people, a Hungarian, and Skyler from Minnesota.
With all that power, just sitting there, tell me what the justification is for higher ed to continue as it always has? Tradition for tradition's sake is just another word for stagnation. Like it or not, e-learning and collaboration is the future.
Finally, if you can't differentiate between knowledge and AI slop, that's a you problem, dawg. These are all challenges we'll have to face eventually as AI gets more and more powerful, and refusing to face them now because it makes people stupid is just making it our children's problem.
Tear down or renovate the institutions, bring education to modernity and beyond, and find ways to mitigate the potential harm of AI and the very clear harm of social media.
Thank you for your response, these are the types of brainstorming and idea generating discourses that are needed.
I tend to be a pessimist, critical scholar who challenges the "all or nothing" dichotomies inherent in most of our social interactions. I am an educator who, like you, believes that there are longstanding issues within our educational institutions. While I agree that everyone should have access to education, I disagree with the notion of all credentials being accredited. In our current economic structure, this model would lead to greater issues. You just pay for the certificate and gain status. It's the same issues we are currently facing. In fact, many industries are already going down this road and using software engineers to create these programs.
The internet is not the exact same thing as a college or university. It's not even the same thing as a library. It's leading to greater conformity. The repository is limited by the companies that create the programs and the software engineers that designed the algorithms. I have education in learning sciences and people are essential in learning. Machines do not teach us character traits like humility, compassion, critical thinking, and respect. Machines can't teach us how to repair relationships or our communities. This is not to say that colleges or university classrooms do this either, but to your point, those spaces are intended to provide opportunities for those exchanges of ideas and working through differences of perspective. I agree that continuing down the current path for traditions sake is not going to help us as a society. However, E-learning and is not the answer, it's the disease.
You're also right that it is my problem if I can't differentiate between AI and knowledge. What's funny is most people can't, and by the time people figure out, if at all, how much of the information we are fed is dictated by AI, it will already be too late.
My spouse is a systems engineer, and I receive an new lesson everyday about AI and it's worse than what most people realize. You can't find a search engine that isn't already controlled by AI. All that e-learning that seems revolutionary, would only produce garbage because companies are not using content experts to create the models, they are using engineers who have no expertise, but instead feed their models whatever garbage they see fit. And you know what they say, garbage in garbage out.
Look at any field within higher education and their job postings. They're not hiring content experts; they are hiring software engineers. I'm not refusing to face the issues. I said what I said because I'm facing it every day and ringing the alarm. Companies are attempting to sell us on AI being the revolution that will allow everyone access to education. Look closer at their work and you'll find that their models are hallucinating, cost more than they're worth, create more errors with each new model (because they are built from the garbage of the internet), and pushing out the creatives, innovators, and experts that we need (going back to the original article). Based on your posts, I imagine that we share quite a few beliefs and concerns. Let’s hope more folks are engaging in discourse about pathways towards addressing the multiple issues at hand.
Those are well reasoned counter arguments. I agree that it isn't an instant fix, but the way I envision it, certs would HAVE to be created by experts. True experts, not data weenies. And it would be a proper test of ability, not just knowledge. Like an Excel III cert would involve the creation of a large, varied spreadsheet tied to outside data sources with macros and etc etc, right? Proctored, on-site. I imagine a company (in an ideal situation, which I know isn't the case) using these as incentives, for true merit based advancement.
I understand it isn't feasible with the way things work and the way society is structured, but I use it as a counter example of why universities are slowly becoming historic, rather than needed.
To speak to the root of the problem is impossible, because the actual issues of higher education, whether that be college, PhD, or even advanced trades, all stem from people and our interactions. But I think if we could shake things up enough to force universities to face irrelevance or change for the better, it's worth a shot.
As for AI, it absolutely saddens me the number of things that I see daily on X or TikTok that are artificial and yet have so many people simply believing what they see with no critical thought behind it. Deep fakes are very shortly going to be a major problem for anyone in the public eye, and we as modern humans are just not equipped to spot the fake, as it were. I don't have a solution for that, I don't believe anyone does, and I certainly don't believe anyone who SAYS they do, but it's a deep, sort of existential fear of mine that anything and everything we see online and use to shape our views could be artificial. The Truman show meets 1984 in the worst way.
If it were possible to engage with many people in this manner, we'd all be better off and maybe advancing as we should be. So thanks for not being a knob about it.
UATX is a fine example of what comes next. Hope the majority of universities get the memo, because they won’t survive the coming apocalypse unless they do. Between the backlash and the demographic death spiral, many won’t.
US Congress should define "non-partisan" viewpoint diversity as at least 30% Republicans & 30% Democrats, up to 40% moderates/independents/ radicals. (Registered as of 2024)
Then start removing tax exemption govt benefits from colleges without enough, in practice, Republicans.
Without govt cash, most colleges will go thru radical changes, in addition to hugely looking for more Republicans to hire as professors & trustees & administrators.
That's assuming that political identity is fixed and monolithic. Not sure how one would measure viewpoint diversity in a dossier. In fact it may be very similar to the diversity statements that were recently created, the ones that have given rise to current critique on both sides of the ideological spectrum.
"...it’s worth pointing out that I was against shouting down Ray Kelly when he came here to speak at Brown. I don’t think federal judges should be prevented from speaking at Stanford Law School because they’re conservatives. But there were not enough faculty like me to prevent these outrages."
During the past 5 years there were never enough faculty to do anything right or, rather, to resist the wrong. That's really the crux of the issue. There are many smart and educated people in academia, but apparently 95-98% of them are cowards. I can't recall a single instance in which the faculty banded together against profound political pressure (from students and administrators, mostly!) to defend norms or rules or meanings that they KNEW to be right and correct. Can you really say that your faculty control your institution? Or is it the ever-swelling cadre of administrators who pull the strings? There are now about 15x more in some places than there were 50 years ago (per student).
Universities WERE our crown jewels. They inherited a wonderful legacy, built by brave and original men. Now they're full of careerist cowards. I'm not sure if your funding should be restricted (although I suspect that even half of current levels, well used, should be more than enough to sustain real research and culture; your cherished institutions have been tremendously wasteful) but I'm sure that I feel nothing but contempt for your class. We gave you status, tenure, cushy sinecures, money, authority. All you had to do was attend to your conscience and work for the benefit of the public. You failed.
The very smart people at Harvard don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have promised to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
"What is clear now, however, is that the barbarians are at the gates, and the crown jewels of civilization are in their sights. “We’re gonna bring down Harvard, we’re gonna bring down Columbia, we’re gonna bring them to their knees, we’re gonna cut off their funding”—what kind of funding are they talking about? They’re not cutting off the Middle East Studies Department. They’re cutting off the School of Engineering, they’re cutting off the Physics Department, they’re cutting off the people who’re generating the big grant money from the federal government—the healthcare and sciences and so forth.
So, what’s the argument in favor of such cuts? “They’re woke.” "
So much to unpack here.
First of all, no one is cutting off engineering departments. What's in the wind is cutting way back on "indirect costs." Administrators are aghast at that because it means nothing able to run a cyclotron or other large, expensive apparatuses. I call bullshit on that. If 25 researchers each get huge indirect monies, each of which is sufficient to run said equipment, that leaves a huge surplus to fund such profit centers as a Middle East Studies department or a Feminist studies department or a DEI department. I jest about them being profit centers--they're money holes that wouldn't exist but for government largesse to people who do actual valuable work--like engineering and physical sciences departments. Cutting back on the indirect costs, as Mr. Loury, economist, surely knows, strangles those departments. If people want to learn about those topics, no one is stopping them from doing so. They can pay for them out of pocket.
Money, as Loury knows and pretends not to understand, is fungible--there's no magic mark on a dollar bill that states how that particular bill will be spent. To date, none has been called to account for "indirect" expenditures. It's always been pretty much a matter of honor system. When the IRS audits you, they ask what you have, what your expenses are, etc. and they compare those to your stated income. If you're living larger than your income suggests you can afford, they infer--usually correctly--that you're not telling them the whole truth.
And so it is with universities. The departments I mentioned above--and a lot more--are loss centers, not profit centers. And yet they proliferate. Whence the funding for them? Universities don't have printing presses that crank out money, so it has to come from somewhere. Donors? Certainly not enough deluded large donors to fund BS like the above. Endowments? Nobody touches the principal of endowments, so it would have to come from dividends. But even that doesn't tot up to enough to pay for everything that comes out of those dividends--like tuition forgiveness, social programs, hirings, etc. New flash: it comes from the "indirect costs" on grants to physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers.
Economists know this. It's common sense. Why Mr. Loury is pretending not to know is puzzling--unless he's being intentionally disingenuous. I don't want to believe that. Perhaps he just had a very bad day when he wrote this screed.
The rhetoric of “crown jewel” and “barbarians at the gate” may be more inflammatory than illuminating. There are many universities and a lot of faculty and students, which makes it difficult to make accurate generalizations. I’ve spent 50 years at various state universities as a student, researcher and faculty member. My experience is that most people spend most of their time teaching, learning and researching non-political subject matter such as nursing, microbiology, engineering, computer science, chemistry, medicine, business, finance, statistics, accountancy, etc. Destroying the universities would also damage all of this. Be careful what you wish for.
Kayla Bartsch, a conservative writer for National Review and recent graduate of Yale University, made a similar but more general point in a column in August 2024:
“National conservatives…seem more interested in demagoguery and authoritarianism than in the preservation of liberal education. The NatCons’ anti-university rhetoric has dovetailed with a fierce anti-intellectualism among the populist New Right…. the progressive takeover of the Ivy Leagues is a huge problem. Anti-intellectualism is not the way to fight it…. With regard to Yale, I could offer a litany of criticisms of administrative bloat, the political tilt of the faculty, and the values prevalent on campus — but this does not negate the fact that there are still excellent professors and bright minds on campus. Many leaders, including leaders on the right, emerged not that long ago from Ivy League universities.”
I'm a liberal who thinks the progressive (identitarian) left is partly to blame for SOME of the discrediting of universities; however, I don't get grouping the forgiveness of certain student loans in with the left's sometimes sins. The argument against the practice too often came down to people who either came from such corners as the moneyed, the elderly who graduated from college when it was more or less affordable, and people who went into trades and saw no need to help pay for the college educations of other people when THEY hadn't gone to college -- never mind, that these indebted college grads were often the very people who campaigned the most energetically for unions and higher wages (including minimum wage). Even more importantly, we live in a country in which, in part, colleges became odiously expensive due to policies made by politicians. I was in college and remember the shock of seeing my Pell grants mostly cancelled as my "financial aid" was shifted to student loans, largely based to Reagan, I believe. Much of the student loan debt that is out there, in other words, is so massive as the result of distinct (political) differences between our country and most of our peer countries. Student loan forgiveness, to some degree, acknowledged that.
Our supposed peer nations vastly underspend on their own defense, secure in the knowledge that the U.S. nuclear shield will protect them, vastly underinvest in new drugs, secure in the knowledge that they can force U S. companies to sell to them at cost, and then grotesquely underwrite the credentialing of the ruling class offspring. Biden's student loan forgiveness was one of the largest wealth transfers from the working class to the ruling class in history.
They also have higher taxes on the rich, so maybe, just maybe that accounts for some of the difference. I don’t know what the figures are now, but at one point, many years ago, we represented 2% of the world’s population, and yet we consumed 26% of the world’s consumable resources every year. Try to imagine that our outsized defense spending made some of this disproportionate consumption possible. Can you make that hugely difficult connection? I’m guessing not. The world was built around us, and yet people like you find it impossible to connect that fact with our vast wealth. How very curious.
lol - virtue-signaling and condescension make for a poor argument. (And you probably wouldn't acutally like comparing CVs with me, to be honest - but perhaps I'm wrong and you actually are just as accomplished as you are arrogant.) "People like me," as you put it (and I don't actually know any people who would claim that lowly mantle), do also recognize that via the incredibly regressive VAT tax the working poor and middle classes are far more highly taxed than are the rich in most of the EU. And given the overwhelming advantages that the wealthy possess in terms of primary schools, tutoring, etc., that "free education" many EU nations offer their young disproportionately benefits the ruling class.
A suggestion for reforming universities in the right way can be derived from Prof. Loury's statement "we must not allow ourselves to be talked into forgetting that our universities and the experts that they house are devoted to conserving, curating, transmitting, and augmenting the traditions of philosophical inquiry, literary and artistic expression, and scientific discovery that make up our civilization." This contains a pretty good definition of what an academic is, in terms of what an academic does. Anyone who is devoted to doing the things listed (conserving, curating, etc.) is an academic and therefore should stay. But anyone who isn't devoted to doing these things, but is solely focused on critique, 'disruption' (which, remember, was praised by the Foucault-inspired far-leftists until the likes of Trump and Rufo started doing it too), and activism, is not an academic and should go.
The caveat is that critique of a tradition can sometimes count as augmenting that tradition, and so has a place. How to distinguish between this academically legitimate kind of critique and unacademic disruption? Often times, one does know the difference when one sees it. Is the critique grounded in and in continuity with the tradition it's changing? Is it 'constructive criticism' (i.e., is it oppositional or augmentative in spirit)? Or does it rest on presuppositions that are outside of that tradition, and does it only presume to make 'gotcha' points and 'problematize' instead of also offering some kind of viable alternative to what it's critiquing?
When did it start? At least around Roe v Wade in 1972, when the US Democrats started excluding pro-life intellectuals from the public square, and from being hired by Harvard or Brown.
It is illegal for a tax exempt "non-partisan" org to discriminate against hiring Republicans -- yet the number of registered Republican professors at Brown is certainly countable. And small. Of the nearly 1000 professors & TAs, it would not be surprising if less than 1% (10) are Reps.
In Congress, it's more than 50%. Registered Republican, not (self-identified) conservatives. Those conservatives not willing to accept the "stigma" of being a Rep might be moderates, or merely smart enough to be somewhat cowardly. Being honest about being a Republican will only happen when the stigma is revoked. By quotas or some other radical process. (The Anatomy of Racial Inequality is a fine book, with a fine description of stigma).
All non-partisan orgs with fewer than 30% Reps & 30% Dems should lose tax exemptions. Professors, Trustees, Admin workers.
The ideal of Free Speech & peaceful, respectful disagreement with somebody else's ideas is indeed a Crown Jewel. But colleges without Republicans are charging for diamonds but delivering Fool's Gold.
But isn't it true that government grants are not for the most part funding "Queer intimacies of mating triggerfish" type studies? So that's why Trump is going after hard science research, it's the only fungible target. You can agree or oppose but there is a logic behind ending these grants as a way to force change
I completely understand what Dr. Loury is concerned about, however, what is an effective way to push back against the far-left ideology and takeover of the universities and the spread of this ideology to the public education system, publishing and even science journals. How do you bring that back closer to center? If the likes of Rufo and Ackman did not "attack" Harvard, would Harvard have even given any thought at all to reviewing its policies and administration?
The crown jewels have dulled a lot more than you seem to realize. No, the barbarians should not be allowed to dictate to the universities and chop them up. But what he hell have they been doing to prevent this from happening? Not much. You are rarer than you think. I would not pay for any child of mine to attend 99% of American or British universities at this point. Too much indoctrination. Too dangerous for anyone who has a non far left opinion. No more freedom of speech or expression. No freedom to pursue truth, which is the purpose of academe. Instead people are taught to regurgitate ideology. It's happened too many times to trust it anymore. Should universities be left to either figure themselves out or go the way of the dodo without interference from the government? Of course. But they've been rotting from within for 50 years, which has accelerated every decade. None of this is surprising.
The barbarians have already taken over the universities - it's just that they aren't whom Prof. Loury assumes. And now Western civilization has arrived at the gates to reclaim them.
The problem is the right wing has no intellectuals to replace them lol
No reason to introduce intellectuals to our campuses now - we've done just fine without the last 50 years ...
Fun to say but utterly stupid and without merit. Hope you had a good time tho!
How about after you read your first book without pictures - I believe they're called "chapter books" - we can circle back and have a nice discussion about "intellekshuals" and other fancy words you saw somewhere ....
I have read more than you.
Tax dollar shouldn't go to indoctrination centres. No threat to democracy detected.
The barbarians are funding these universities and attacking Jewish students.
Had the barbarians attacked black students the response would be far different.
Let’s not pretend this is free speech. The keffiyah is little more than a klan hood.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
You speak as though there is only one problem with universities, and this is it. Until acceptance to higher education, and graduation and honors come purely through merit, then universities can and must be under fire.
For one to say "I didn't agree with this, and many like me exist" is well and good, but where's the proof? Where were the tenured professors who stood up for the values of free speech and non conformity. The professors who said "This is not right and I condemn it?" There are countless students whose academic careers were destroyed because they stood up and were torn down, where were you then? Who will hold the decision makers accountable for the inability of college students to be different, in whatever way they desire to be different?
Until you, and those like you, can and will confidently make a stand for anyone who dares to speak against orthodoxy, who strains against 'prevailing wisdom,' there can be no other recourse than to tear the house down to remove the rot. As long as the smug superciliousness of university graduates continues, as long as humility ceases to be, then these institutions must necessarily face harsh criticism.
Until and unless there is genuine change, a return to classical education values, rather than the perceived money printing colleges have become, there should be no conversation about preservation of these institutions. What would we preserve, and why? A talented, driven individual with access to the internet could teach themselves nearly everything a college could teach them, largely for free, and until 'higher' education understands that the world is shifting, it should be scrutinized.
So if none inside the gates are willing to publicly, loudly, proclaim that they see the problems, they don't condone the actions, and call for change, then the people hiding inside their palisades of superiority deserve the barbarians laying siege to their strongholds.
Let's go with your argument, tear down the system...and then what? This argument has been spoken by my colleagues on both extremes of the Isle and when I ask this question they have no plan. The Internet is not an educator and full of bias. Algorithms control what you search and the information you receive. AI is clouding our ability to critically think and social media has executed the public Commons. It is not the replacement for education.
All this to say that it's much easier to destroy than it is to build and it's time for us to get our heads out of the sand and get creative about addressing the monsters we've created.
OK, that's a good question. In my opinion, all credentials should be accredited. So as a thought experiment, what if you could get certifications for anything? All you have to do it take a certification exam and you are awarded the cert. No education required, only competency. Certifications are put together by experts, and proctored by neutral parties, where any variance from pure neutrality is heavily punished.
Want to be a finance person? This finance director position requires Finance Certs I, II, and III, and Economics I, and etc etc. This incentivizes true knowledge, rather than algorithms and disinfo (and also, algorithms don't control everything, you can educate yourself as high as you want in math and physics, for example, nearly for free).
The current system rewards conformity, by its very nature. The university model worked for so long because it was centralized knowledge that could be learned all at once, rather than travelling to apprentice to Descartes, then travelling to Russia, blah blah. It worked until the internet came about, but here's the kicker: THE INTERNET IS THE EXACT SAME THING. A repository of all human knowledge and experience. No longer do you have to pay $200k to go to Cambridge for 4-6 years, you can, quite literally, get the same knowledge at a fraction of the cost. You can form an ad hoc study group with 2 Japanese people, a Hungarian, and Skyler from Minnesota.
With all that power, just sitting there, tell me what the justification is for higher ed to continue as it always has? Tradition for tradition's sake is just another word for stagnation. Like it or not, e-learning and collaboration is the future.
Finally, if you can't differentiate between knowledge and AI slop, that's a you problem, dawg. These are all challenges we'll have to face eventually as AI gets more and more powerful, and refusing to face them now because it makes people stupid is just making it our children's problem.
Tear down or renovate the institutions, bring education to modernity and beyond, and find ways to mitigate the potential harm of AI and the very clear harm of social media.
Thank you for your response, these are the types of brainstorming and idea generating discourses that are needed.
I tend to be a pessimist, critical scholar who challenges the "all or nothing" dichotomies inherent in most of our social interactions. I am an educator who, like you, believes that there are longstanding issues within our educational institutions. While I agree that everyone should have access to education, I disagree with the notion of all credentials being accredited. In our current economic structure, this model would lead to greater issues. You just pay for the certificate and gain status. It's the same issues we are currently facing. In fact, many industries are already going down this road and using software engineers to create these programs.
The internet is not the exact same thing as a college or university. It's not even the same thing as a library. It's leading to greater conformity. The repository is limited by the companies that create the programs and the software engineers that designed the algorithms. I have education in learning sciences and people are essential in learning. Machines do not teach us character traits like humility, compassion, critical thinking, and respect. Machines can't teach us how to repair relationships or our communities. This is not to say that colleges or university classrooms do this either, but to your point, those spaces are intended to provide opportunities for those exchanges of ideas and working through differences of perspective. I agree that continuing down the current path for traditions sake is not going to help us as a society. However, E-learning and is not the answer, it's the disease.
You're also right that it is my problem if I can't differentiate between AI and knowledge. What's funny is most people can't, and by the time people figure out, if at all, how much of the information we are fed is dictated by AI, it will already be too late.
My spouse is a systems engineer, and I receive an new lesson everyday about AI and it's worse than what most people realize. You can't find a search engine that isn't already controlled by AI. All that e-learning that seems revolutionary, would only produce garbage because companies are not using content experts to create the models, they are using engineers who have no expertise, but instead feed their models whatever garbage they see fit. And you know what they say, garbage in garbage out.
Look at any field within higher education and their job postings. They're not hiring content experts; they are hiring software engineers. I'm not refusing to face the issues. I said what I said because I'm facing it every day and ringing the alarm. Companies are attempting to sell us on AI being the revolution that will allow everyone access to education. Look closer at their work and you'll find that their models are hallucinating, cost more than they're worth, create more errors with each new model (because they are built from the garbage of the internet), and pushing out the creatives, innovators, and experts that we need (going back to the original article). Based on your posts, I imagine that we share quite a few beliefs and concerns. Let’s hope more folks are engaging in discourse about pathways towards addressing the multiple issues at hand.
Those are well reasoned counter arguments. I agree that it isn't an instant fix, but the way I envision it, certs would HAVE to be created by experts. True experts, not data weenies. And it would be a proper test of ability, not just knowledge. Like an Excel III cert would involve the creation of a large, varied spreadsheet tied to outside data sources with macros and etc etc, right? Proctored, on-site. I imagine a company (in an ideal situation, which I know isn't the case) using these as incentives, for true merit based advancement.
I understand it isn't feasible with the way things work and the way society is structured, but I use it as a counter example of why universities are slowly becoming historic, rather than needed.
To speak to the root of the problem is impossible, because the actual issues of higher education, whether that be college, PhD, or even advanced trades, all stem from people and our interactions. But I think if we could shake things up enough to force universities to face irrelevance or change for the better, it's worth a shot.
As for AI, it absolutely saddens me the number of things that I see daily on X or TikTok that are artificial and yet have so many people simply believing what they see with no critical thought behind it. Deep fakes are very shortly going to be a major problem for anyone in the public eye, and we as modern humans are just not equipped to spot the fake, as it were. I don't have a solution for that, I don't believe anyone does, and I certainly don't believe anyone who SAYS they do, but it's a deep, sort of existential fear of mine that anything and everything we see online and use to shape our views could be artificial. The Truman show meets 1984 in the worst way.
If it were possible to engage with many people in this manner, we'd all be better off and maybe advancing as we should be. So thanks for not being a knob about it.
Don't forget Idiocracy and the Matrix!
UATX is a fine example of what comes next. Hope the majority of universities get the memo, because they won’t survive the coming apocalypse unless they do. Between the backlash and the demographic death spiral, many won’t.
US Congress should define "non-partisan" viewpoint diversity as at least 30% Republicans & 30% Democrats, up to 40% moderates/independents/ radicals. (Registered as of 2024)
Then start removing tax exemption govt benefits from colleges without enough, in practice, Republicans.
Without govt cash, most colleges will go thru radical changes, in addition to hugely looking for more Republicans to hire as professors & trustees & administrators.
That's assuming that political identity is fixed and monolithic. Not sure how one would measure viewpoint diversity in a dossier. In fact it may be very similar to the diversity statements that were recently created, the ones that have given rise to current critique on both sides of the ideological spectrum.
"...it’s worth pointing out that I was against shouting down Ray Kelly when he came here to speak at Brown. I don’t think federal judges should be prevented from speaking at Stanford Law School because they’re conservatives. But there were not enough faculty like me to prevent these outrages."
During the past 5 years there were never enough faculty to do anything right or, rather, to resist the wrong. That's really the crux of the issue. There are many smart and educated people in academia, but apparently 95-98% of them are cowards. I can't recall a single instance in which the faculty banded together against profound political pressure (from students and administrators, mostly!) to defend norms or rules or meanings that they KNEW to be right and correct. Can you really say that your faculty control your institution? Or is it the ever-swelling cadre of administrators who pull the strings? There are now about 15x more in some places than there were 50 years ago (per student).
Universities WERE our crown jewels. They inherited a wonderful legacy, built by brave and original men. Now they're full of careerist cowards. I'm not sure if your funding should be restricted (although I suspect that even half of current levels, well used, should be more than enough to sustain real research and culture; your cherished institutions have been tremendously wasteful) but I'm sure that I feel nothing but contempt for your class. We gave you status, tenure, cushy sinecures, money, authority. All you had to do was attend to your conscience and work for the benefit of the public. You failed.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/project-2026
The very smart people at Harvard don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have promised to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
"What is clear now, however, is that the barbarians are at the gates, and the crown jewels of civilization are in their sights. “We’re gonna bring down Harvard, we’re gonna bring down Columbia, we’re gonna bring them to their knees, we’re gonna cut off their funding”—what kind of funding are they talking about? They’re not cutting off the Middle East Studies Department. They’re cutting off the School of Engineering, they’re cutting off the Physics Department, they’re cutting off the people who’re generating the big grant money from the federal government—the healthcare and sciences and so forth.
So, what’s the argument in favor of such cuts? “They’re woke.” "
So much to unpack here.
First of all, no one is cutting off engineering departments. What's in the wind is cutting way back on "indirect costs." Administrators are aghast at that because it means nothing able to run a cyclotron or other large, expensive apparatuses. I call bullshit on that. If 25 researchers each get huge indirect monies, each of which is sufficient to run said equipment, that leaves a huge surplus to fund such profit centers as a Middle East Studies department or a Feminist studies department or a DEI department. I jest about them being profit centers--they're money holes that wouldn't exist but for government largesse to people who do actual valuable work--like engineering and physical sciences departments. Cutting back on the indirect costs, as Mr. Loury, economist, surely knows, strangles those departments. If people want to learn about those topics, no one is stopping them from doing so. They can pay for them out of pocket.
Money, as Loury knows and pretends not to understand, is fungible--there's no magic mark on a dollar bill that states how that particular bill will be spent. To date, none has been called to account for "indirect" expenditures. It's always been pretty much a matter of honor system. When the IRS audits you, they ask what you have, what your expenses are, etc. and they compare those to your stated income. If you're living larger than your income suggests you can afford, they infer--usually correctly--that you're not telling them the whole truth.
And so it is with universities. The departments I mentioned above--and a lot more--are loss centers, not profit centers. And yet they proliferate. Whence the funding for them? Universities don't have printing presses that crank out money, so it has to come from somewhere. Donors? Certainly not enough deluded large donors to fund BS like the above. Endowments? Nobody touches the principal of endowments, so it would have to come from dividends. But even that doesn't tot up to enough to pay for everything that comes out of those dividends--like tuition forgiveness, social programs, hirings, etc. New flash: it comes from the "indirect costs" on grants to physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers.
Economists know this. It's common sense. Why Mr. Loury is pretending not to know is puzzling--unless he's being intentionally disingenuous. I don't want to believe that. Perhaps he just had a very bad day when he wrote this screed.
"Deposing Claudine Gay with a tweet."
That facile remark is beneath you Glenn. Much of the rest of this is also overrought and poorly reasoned. I say that as a very big fan of your work.
The rhetoric of “crown jewel” and “barbarians at the gate” may be more inflammatory than illuminating. There are many universities and a lot of faculty and students, which makes it difficult to make accurate generalizations. I’ve spent 50 years at various state universities as a student, researcher and faculty member. My experience is that most people spend most of their time teaching, learning and researching non-political subject matter such as nursing, microbiology, engineering, computer science, chemistry, medicine, business, finance, statistics, accountancy, etc. Destroying the universities would also damage all of this. Be careful what you wish for.
Kayla Bartsch, a conservative writer for National Review and recent graduate of Yale University, made a similar but more general point in a column in August 2024:
“National conservatives…seem more interested in demagoguery and authoritarianism than in the preservation of liberal education. The NatCons’ anti-university rhetoric has dovetailed with a fierce anti-intellectualism among the populist New Right…. the progressive takeover of the Ivy Leagues is a huge problem. Anti-intellectualism is not the way to fight it…. With regard to Yale, I could offer a litany of criticisms of administrative bloat, the political tilt of the faculty, and the values prevalent on campus — but this does not negate the fact that there are still excellent professors and bright minds on campus. Many leaders, including leaders on the right, emerged not that long ago from Ivy League universities.”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2024/08/universities-are-not-the-enemy/
I'm a liberal who thinks the progressive (identitarian) left is partly to blame for SOME of the discrediting of universities; however, I don't get grouping the forgiveness of certain student loans in with the left's sometimes sins. The argument against the practice too often came down to people who either came from such corners as the moneyed, the elderly who graduated from college when it was more or less affordable, and people who went into trades and saw no need to help pay for the college educations of other people when THEY hadn't gone to college -- never mind, that these indebted college grads were often the very people who campaigned the most energetically for unions and higher wages (including minimum wage). Even more importantly, we live in a country in which, in part, colleges became odiously expensive due to policies made by politicians. I was in college and remember the shock of seeing my Pell grants mostly cancelled as my "financial aid" was shifted to student loans, largely based to Reagan, I believe. Much of the student loan debt that is out there, in other words, is so massive as the result of distinct (political) differences between our country and most of our peer countries. Student loan forgiveness, to some degree, acknowledged that.
Our supposed peer nations vastly underspend on their own defense, secure in the knowledge that the U.S. nuclear shield will protect them, vastly underinvest in new drugs, secure in the knowledge that they can force U S. companies to sell to them at cost, and then grotesquely underwrite the credentialing of the ruling class offspring. Biden's student loan forgiveness was one of the largest wealth transfers from the working class to the ruling class in history.
They also have higher taxes on the rich, so maybe, just maybe that accounts for some of the difference. I don’t know what the figures are now, but at one point, many years ago, we represented 2% of the world’s population, and yet we consumed 26% of the world’s consumable resources every year. Try to imagine that our outsized defense spending made some of this disproportionate consumption possible. Can you make that hugely difficult connection? I’m guessing not. The world was built around us, and yet people like you find it impossible to connect that fact with our vast wealth. How very curious.
lol - virtue-signaling and condescension make for a poor argument. (And you probably wouldn't acutally like comparing CVs with me, to be honest - but perhaps I'm wrong and you actually are just as accomplished as you are arrogant.) "People like me," as you put it (and I don't actually know any people who would claim that lowly mantle), do also recognize that via the incredibly regressive VAT tax the working poor and middle classes are far more highly taxed than are the rich in most of the EU. And given the overwhelming advantages that the wealthy possess in terms of primary schools, tutoring, etc., that "free education" many EU nations offer their young disproportionately benefits the ruling class.
A suggestion for reforming universities in the right way can be derived from Prof. Loury's statement "we must not allow ourselves to be talked into forgetting that our universities and the experts that they house are devoted to conserving, curating, transmitting, and augmenting the traditions of philosophical inquiry, literary and artistic expression, and scientific discovery that make up our civilization." This contains a pretty good definition of what an academic is, in terms of what an academic does. Anyone who is devoted to doing the things listed (conserving, curating, etc.) is an academic and therefore should stay. But anyone who isn't devoted to doing these things, but is solely focused on critique, 'disruption' (which, remember, was praised by the Foucault-inspired far-leftists until the likes of Trump and Rufo started doing it too), and activism, is not an academic and should go.
The caveat is that critique of a tradition can sometimes count as augmenting that tradition, and so has a place. How to distinguish between this academically legitimate kind of critique and unacademic disruption? Often times, one does know the difference when one sees it. Is the critique grounded in and in continuity with the tradition it's changing? Is it 'constructive criticism' (i.e., is it oppositional or augmentative in spirit)? Or does it rest on presuppositions that are outside of that tradition, and does it only presume to make 'gotcha' points and 'problematize' instead of also offering some kind of viable alternative to what it's critiquing?
When did it start? At least around Roe v Wade in 1972, when the US Democrats started excluding pro-life intellectuals from the public square, and from being hired by Harvard or Brown.
It is illegal for a tax exempt "non-partisan" org to discriminate against hiring Republicans -- yet the number of registered Republican professors at Brown is certainly countable. And small. Of the nearly 1000 professors & TAs, it would not be surprising if less than 1% (10) are Reps.
In Congress, it's more than 50%. Registered Republican, not (self-identified) conservatives. Those conservatives not willing to accept the "stigma" of being a Rep might be moderates, or merely smart enough to be somewhat cowardly. Being honest about being a Republican will only happen when the stigma is revoked. By quotas or some other radical process. (The Anatomy of Racial Inequality is a fine book, with a fine description of stigma).
All non-partisan orgs with fewer than 30% Reps & 30% Dems should lose tax exemptions. Professors, Trustees, Admin workers.
The ideal of Free Speech & peaceful, respectful disagreement with somebody else's ideas is indeed a Crown Jewel. But colleges without Republicans are charging for diamonds but delivering Fool's Gold.
But isn't it true that government grants are not for the most part funding "Queer intimacies of mating triggerfish" type studies? So that's why Trump is going after hard science research, it's the only fungible target. You can agree or oppose but there is a logic behind ending these grants as a way to force change