The way forward is to abjure easy and satisfying libertarian reflexes like abolishing tenure or cutting funding to universities, grants and loan programmes...
I would love to be impressed - heartened - by this analysis and action plan. But it so hopelessly underestimated the scale of the task. Some reality here:
1) it's taken conservative politicians (and most thinkers) an extraordinary long time (50 years) to get the measure of the power of an (overwhelmingly leftist) academia to effectively emasculate our supposedly pluralist democracy. To finally wake up to it only when it is way too late. The leftist academia meanwhile has been churning out entire generations of ambitious young professionals, managers and administrators (let alone BBC-type arts and media leftist clones) sheep-dipped in its bogus 'social justice' vanities and delicious victimhood cults. What now do you hope to do about all these people? Somehow 're-educate' them. Of course not.
2) so any return to sanity in our culture will now take generations as well.
3) 'successes' (in the UK at least) are delusory. The UK has been in the vanguard of wokeness etc so much so that (unlike America) it barely has any conservative political constituency left now.
The only real (slim) hope is that the arts, humanities and social 'sciences' parts of our tertiary education institutions will self-destruct their useless narcissistic/virtue signalling selves. If anyone doubts the scale of the problem, read this: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Fantastic piece. I strongly believe that to reform universities we need to combine the best of new right, libertarian, and classical approaches to education. One thing I would like to see, in addition to what you discussed, is greater consideration of which degrees are worth funding at all, and for how many. Not simply as a matter of content, but as a matter of predation. Ryerson, where I attended, has an English BA that students graduate from with little practical skill - all they’re taught is how to analyze books, little in the way of editing, publishing, copywriting, etc. Most masters degrees are well known scams that disproportionately attract international students or those who don’t know what to do with their lives. I’m by no means opposed to people taking soft subjects but those who do should be getting a serious education, and whoever’s job it is to ensure that, maybe the accreditation agencies, has totally looked the other way.
Whether universities are the capstone in a progressive education or not, this doesn't consider why almost 40% of UK students need to attend full time tertiary education. Why only 30% will fully repay fees (covered by UK taxpayers) or why we need 250k activist-academics to be employed full time. Only 15% attended in the 1980s, 25% 1990s. Yes to higher ed for brightest. Yes to opinion diversity. No to degree factories and a backdoor immigration channel. Let's offer current fee rates for the best students and in vocational nationally important career paths. Let universities set their fees (without any state underpinning) for the rest. Let nature take its course and sub-standard universities adapt or perish.
Very disappointing, totally inadequate. More boomers with more boomer solutions, you do not reform a bureaucracy, you start from scratch. "I'm going to cut off the heads of the Hydra I want cut off", no sonny boy, you have to go for the heart. Besides in SSH methodology is shit, the whole set of fields need to be created from scratch with far higher standards, proper understanding of statistics i.e. 3 years of study min from the math department and those in the field need to have a lot more intellectual humility when it comes to what one can ever hope to show.
Mild cost cutting measures or mild reforms are a false dichotomy - there are other options. The devastation of the monasteries, for example. The universities are producing nothing of value, and are extracting a great deal of value from society. They have become millstones around our necks, generating mountains of tendentious nonsense. We could take a page from Henry VIII - abolish them, appropriate their endowments, and use the windfall to pay off the debts inflicted on their hapless graduates.
That may seem drastic. However. Another think tank or regulatory imposition isn't going to cut it. Neither is eliminating an administrative department here and there. California banned affirmative action years ago, yet the universities there imputedently continue to be among the most biased in the country. Neither professors nor admin care about the law. They do not care about debate. They do not even care about basic epistemic standards. The institutions are so thoroughly staffed by these enemies of civilization that there is no hope of reform.
Therefore fire them all, and trust that God will know his own. Burn the ivory towers to the ground, salt the earth on which the ashes stand, and use the plunder and whatever refugees are salvageable to start fresh.
What you call "left wing" is shorthand for "PMC" and universities are by definition the incubator of the professional managerial class and its values. In fact, for a talented kid not hailing from a PMC background, perhaps the main function of the university is as a place to learn those values.
Hence, any attempt to reform universities without changing economic and class relations is futile.
Excellent article! Although I do wish people would stop using words like "Right" and "Conservative" in the sense of "people who, deep down, want to protect my culture, my identity, and my way of life."
Most Conservative politicians don't have a political philosophy. They do whatever their donors want. Right now, those donors want to drive economic growth by increasing population growth through mass immigration -- even if that means lower GDP per capita, housing shortages, and lower wages for most working people. Actually, the last two are a feature and not a bug.
Yes, some Conservative politicians have a political philosophy. It's a kind of libertarian globalism in which people are interchangeable units of production and consumption in a global marketplace. Things like "culture," "identity," and "way of life" have no meaning for them. Those entities don't exist in their model of reality.
You can try telling Conservative politicians that wealth is most efficiently created in high-trust cultures and that such cultures are a minority on this planet. If we destroy those cultures, we will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. We will all be poorer.
You can try telling them that. At best, they will respond with a blank stare. At worst, the name-calling will begin.
All that being said, there is room for optimism. I would simply say that political lobbying should not be confined to "Conservatives." It should be aimed at everyone, including people who self-identify as "woke" and who, initially, may seem hostile. Woke ideology is a lake a thousand miles wide and two inches deep. It is sustained largely by group conformity and ... by corporate donations.
The way forward is to abjure easy and satisfying conservative reflexes that involve tinkering with the current system. Instead, we should completely remove government involvement from university education. https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-augean-stables-of-academe
I like points 1 and 2, with the exception that I'd keep full academic freedom protections for department heads and have "obligatory institutional neutrality" start only at the dean / vice dean level and above.
Points 3 and 4 seem to me disastrous. Hiring people on the basis of "I promise I am a conservative" is as objectionable as hiring them on the basis of "I promise fealty to EDI". Ditto regarding building centres within universities that have politically-based carve outs from the rules that should apply to everyone ("over there you devote yourself to truth, over here we devote ourselves to Hayek").
They are also rules that build losing into your strategy ("of course we'll always be on the back foot, so we need special protections"). I mean isn't that the, um, soft bigotry of, er, low expectations?
If you want the university back you have to build a plan for really getting it back, not a plan that is like "the university, now with safe spaces for conservatives too"
I would love to be impressed - heartened - by this analysis and action plan. But it so hopelessly underestimated the scale of the task. Some reality here:
1) it's taken conservative politicians (and most thinkers) an extraordinary long time (50 years) to get the measure of the power of an (overwhelmingly leftist) academia to effectively emasculate our supposedly pluralist democracy. To finally wake up to it only when it is way too late. The leftist academia meanwhile has been churning out entire generations of ambitious young professionals, managers and administrators (let alone BBC-type arts and media leftist clones) sheep-dipped in its bogus 'social justice' vanities and delicious victimhood cults. What now do you hope to do about all these people? Somehow 're-educate' them. Of course not.
2) so any return to sanity in our culture will now take generations as well.
3) 'successes' (in the UK at least) are delusory. The UK has been in the vanguard of wokeness etc so much so that (unlike America) it barely has any conservative political constituency left now.
The only real (slim) hope is that the arts, humanities and social 'sciences' parts of our tertiary education institutions will self-destruct their useless narcissistic/virtue signalling selves. If anyone doubts the scale of the problem, read this: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind
Fantastic piece. I strongly believe that to reform universities we need to combine the best of new right, libertarian, and classical approaches to education. One thing I would like to see, in addition to what you discussed, is greater consideration of which degrees are worth funding at all, and for how many. Not simply as a matter of content, but as a matter of predation. Ryerson, where I attended, has an English BA that students graduate from with little practical skill - all they’re taught is how to analyze books, little in the way of editing, publishing, copywriting, etc. Most masters degrees are well known scams that disproportionately attract international students or those who don’t know what to do with their lives. I’m by no means opposed to people taking soft subjects but those who do should be getting a serious education, and whoever’s job it is to ensure that, maybe the accreditation agencies, has totally looked the other way.
Whether universities are the capstone in a progressive education or not, this doesn't consider why almost 40% of UK students need to attend full time tertiary education. Why only 30% will fully repay fees (covered by UK taxpayers) or why we need 250k activist-academics to be employed full time. Only 15% attended in the 1980s, 25% 1990s. Yes to higher ed for brightest. Yes to opinion diversity. No to degree factories and a backdoor immigration channel. Let's offer current fee rates for the best students and in vocational nationally important career paths. Let universities set their fees (without any state underpinning) for the rest. Let nature take its course and sub-standard universities adapt or perish.
Very disappointing, totally inadequate. More boomers with more boomer solutions, you do not reform a bureaucracy, you start from scratch. "I'm going to cut off the heads of the Hydra I want cut off", no sonny boy, you have to go for the heart. Besides in SSH methodology is shit, the whole set of fields need to be created from scratch with far higher standards, proper understanding of statistics i.e. 3 years of study min from the math department and those in the field need to have a lot more intellectual humility when it comes to what one can ever hope to show.
The correct answer is defunding.
Mild cost cutting measures or mild reforms are a false dichotomy - there are other options. The devastation of the monasteries, for example. The universities are producing nothing of value, and are extracting a great deal of value from society. They have become millstones around our necks, generating mountains of tendentious nonsense. We could take a page from Henry VIII - abolish them, appropriate their endowments, and use the windfall to pay off the debts inflicted on their hapless graduates.
That may seem drastic. However. Another think tank or regulatory imposition isn't going to cut it. Neither is eliminating an administrative department here and there. California banned affirmative action years ago, yet the universities there imputedently continue to be among the most biased in the country. Neither professors nor admin care about the law. They do not care about debate. They do not even care about basic epistemic standards. The institutions are so thoroughly staffed by these enemies of civilization that there is no hope of reform.
Therefore fire them all, and trust that God will know his own. Burn the ivory towers to the ground, salt the earth on which the ashes stand, and use the plunder and whatever refugees are salvageable to start fresh.
We can encourage DEI debates.
What you call "left wing" is shorthand for "PMC" and universities are by definition the incubator of the professional managerial class and its values. In fact, for a talented kid not hailing from a PMC background, perhaps the main function of the university is as a place to learn those values.
Hence, any attempt to reform universities without changing economic and class relations is futile.
DEI requires young faculty to publicly assert their support of DEI., does it not? This trains young people to lie.
Excellent article! Although I do wish people would stop using words like "Right" and "Conservative" in the sense of "people who, deep down, want to protect my culture, my identity, and my way of life."
Most Conservative politicians don't have a political philosophy. They do whatever their donors want. Right now, those donors want to drive economic growth by increasing population growth through mass immigration -- even if that means lower GDP per capita, housing shortages, and lower wages for most working people. Actually, the last two are a feature and not a bug.
Yes, some Conservative politicians have a political philosophy. It's a kind of libertarian globalism in which people are interchangeable units of production and consumption in a global marketplace. Things like "culture," "identity," and "way of life" have no meaning for them. Those entities don't exist in their model of reality.
You can try telling Conservative politicians that wealth is most efficiently created in high-trust cultures and that such cultures are a minority on this planet. If we destroy those cultures, we will kill the goose that laid the golden egg. We will all be poorer.
You can try telling them that. At best, they will respond with a blank stare. At worst, the name-calling will begin.
All that being said, there is room for optimism. I would simply say that political lobbying should not be confined to "Conservatives." It should be aimed at everyone, including people who self-identify as "woke" and who, initially, may seem hostile. Woke ideology is a lake a thousand miles wide and two inches deep. It is sustained largely by group conformity and ... by corporate donations.
I urge the provost to require a debate like they did at MIT
The way forward is to abjure easy and satisfying conservative reflexes that involve tinkering with the current system. Instead, we should completely remove government involvement from university education. https://jclester.substack.com/p/the-augean-stables-of-academe
This article is full of begs-the-question. For example, "abolish DEI". Great. Now tell us how to do that.
I like points 1 and 2, with the exception that I'd keep full academic freedom protections for department heads and have "obligatory institutional neutrality" start only at the dean / vice dean level and above.
Points 3 and 4 seem to me disastrous. Hiring people on the basis of "I promise I am a conservative" is as objectionable as hiring them on the basis of "I promise fealty to EDI". Ditto regarding building centres within universities that have politically-based carve outs from the rules that should apply to everyone ("over there you devote yourself to truth, over here we devote ourselves to Hayek").
They are also rules that build losing into your strategy ("of course we'll always be on the back foot, so we need special protections"). I mean isn't that the, um, soft bigotry of, er, low expectations?
If you want the university back you have to build a plan for really getting it back, not a plan that is like "the university, now with safe spaces for conservatives too"