In the face of the endless garbage being churned out in US higher education, and the plight of Jewish students, it is good to know that new structures are taking shape:
Most university departments, therefore, are now under the control of professors who are very unlikely to hire scholars interested in non-radical perspectives on their disciplines (let alone conservatives). The solution for donors, though, is not to withhold all donations but to use their money to create new colleges or units within universities that will hire professors without prejudice. Trustees and presidents have the authority to set up new centers or colleges within a university and to appoint academically qualified people who will not engage in discrimination. We have excellent examples of such centers and colleges: the James Madison Program at Princeton, the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida, and the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State.
This observation comes from John O. Mcginnis, the George C. Dix Professor in Constitutional Law at Northwestern University.
He concludes:
Universities today are at a crossroads. Externally, they are losing support among the public. Internally, they cannot perform their primary function of sifting and diffusing knowledge because of the intellectual orthodoxies that have seized control of administrations and inspired the faculty. The massacres in Israel and the response on our campuses might spark reform of these essential institutions, but only if they decisively break with the identity politics and bureaucracies that have led them to their present state.
In my view a broader and deeper problem is the sheer size and scale of higher education that is funded, in whole or in part, by the taxpayer. Yes, it is true that even private universities and colleges have been infected by some of these horrors, but no serious change in my view is likely until the state gets out of higher education.
In the US, we may have an existing mechanism with which to rein in (some) ultra-woke education.
Many of our largest universities (and even private schools) were established as land-grant universities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land-grant_university
Many of these schools are well outside of their establishing missions and ultra vires of their reasons for existing. There is legal reason to think that this is a viable avenue for addressing this woke capture.
From bobby’s quote:
I have nothing against a liberal arts curriculum as such.
The problem is that a liberal arts curriculum can easily be turned into totalitarian indoctrination.
“The solution for donors, though, is not to withhold all donations but to use their money to create new colleges or units within universities that will hire professors without prejudice. ”
Blah blah blah, we can reform. Bollocks. This is what a very large number of people tried to sell us with the EU. “We can’t reform it if we aren’t on the inside”. Bollocks.
The rot is complete and right to the top. If they were capable of change – or had any semblance of humanity – administrations would have started making that change at about 9am EST on 7th October. They haven’t so they’re not and they don’t.
Take your money and start completely afresh.
The best thing we could do right now in the US would be to put student loan debt back into play in the bankruptcy system. No more $300,000 debts for a women’s studies degree if the banks have to seriously consider repayment risk.
The idea that you should have to take out a loan in order to finance an education is in and of itself fundamentally insane. Especially in the US university system.
The costs are insane, mostly due to administrative overhead and lavish facilities. Most of the GI Bill generation lived in Quonset huts and attended classes in repurposed buildings of various vintages. Did they receive any less an education?
It’s the same across the entire American educational system. Look at what they have for facilities in most high schools, despite constant whinges about insufficient funding. And, the kids can’t read, let alone at grade level, when they graduate.
My grandmother taught in a one-room school, all eight grades from first to eighth. In the winter, if she and her older male students didn’t keep the pot-bellied stove filled with wood, they froze. All of her students somehow managed to leave her tutelage “reading at grade level”, oddly enough.
The idea that you have to have the money they spend these days to get an education is ludicrous. Tuition used to be a tiny fraction of what it cost to learn; the majority of your expenditures were on living expenses while you were a student. Today? Dear God, but I look the bills over and all I can say is that the system has lost its damn mind.
And, the irony? The ever-more expensive educations they’re offering up? The degrees they’re conferring? Many of them aren’t worth a damn at all. You look at the product of all that effort and money, and all you can do is nod your head along as the newly-graduated bright light tells you that grammar and spelling are imperialist constructs, and not to be bothered with…
If you think that last bit is hyperbole, it isn’t. Friend of mine got that from a job applicant that was asking why their resume hadn’t gone forward. Academia has gone nuts.
@bobby b
The best thing we could do right now in the US would be to put student loan debt back into play in the bankruptcy system. No more $300,000 debts for a women’s studies degree if the banks have to seriously consider repayment risk.
FWIW, Women’s Studies degrees are actually quite lucrative. You can get a job as a diversity officer and hassle real productive people, and get paid really well. But you are right. You can tell a lot about a country by which debts are immune from dissolving under bankruptcy.
I think an alternative would be for the University to fund the debt. For example, you get to go to college for free but in exchange you sign an agreement that 20% of your salary post graduation for the ten years following graduation, would be paid to the University. This seems to align the incentives correctly, and would surely weed out many of the useless courses. I believe Purdue University did experiment with this approach for a while.
The thing is that a liberal arts education is useful. I think everyone should receive some degree of liberal arts education in history, literature, language competency and so forth. The problem is that although it is useful, it is not $200,000 useful. Fundamentally the problem with a University education is that it is ridiculously expensive. Prices inflated by government grants, risk free loans, and, to quote Thomas Jefferson on a somewhat difference subject:
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
For what it is worth, we see the rise of technical and online colleges that are cheaper and in many respects better than the transitional universities. I have done work for a couple of them and they are completely different from traditional universities. They are focused on graduating students to get good well paying jobs, and just don’t have the time and resources for the usual nonsense. I see all those kids marching “from the river to the sea” — even though they know not which river or which sea — I wonder why they aren’t doing their homework.
I think these tech and online colleges have a good chance of taking over and predominating in the America that is coming — after America and the west collapse into a pile of rubble, something will have to grow out of what is left. I doubt Harvard will be first on anybody’s list.
See also:
“Galloping Credentialism”, whereby the the educational standards / grades / qualifications for ANY occupation are constantly being ratcheted upwards, despite the tasks not actually requiring it.Add to this the grinding denigration of skills actually involving manual labour and getting metaphorical or actual dirt under the fingernails.
But, closely associated with this is the eye-watering “dumbing-down and de-literating” of most of the life and general knowledge; The “Eloi” manufacturing their “Morlocks”.
I lost it from the first line.
“Most university departments, therefore, are now under the control of professors who are very unlikely to hire scholars interested in non-radical perspectives on their disciplines (let alone conservatives)”
The thing is it isn’t radical anymore if it’s the mainstream.
Quoting Fraser and Mr Jefferson:
“He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
Just from curiosity, has anyone any idea of how many the swarms amounted to?
I’m guessing about a dozen.
The decline of American education goes back a very long way. At the child level one could say that it was poisoned from the start as Horace Mann, the “father of Public Education” in the 1850s, was a firm believer in the benevolent power of government and that was what his schools taught – but he would have been horrified, utterly horrified, at modern American schools where “Progressives” do not even want (yes – do not want) children to read books that are pro private property and hostile to Big Government – if the teachers even teach more than basic reading or more than basic mathematics to much of the population. Yes – much of the population, especially of the racial groups the left pretends to care about, can not read or understand mathematics beyond a basic level. The children can understand basic slogans “More Dollars for …..!, but many of the products of these schools are not able to read a complex argument, and they have no real grasp of mathematics either – so they believe that government spending has been “cut” when it has been increased, and they believe in “white privilege” and “the gender pay gap” and anything else they are told to believe in, as they have not got the mental tools (understanding language and understanding mathematics) to check it.
The leaders of the left know what they say is a collection of lies (they are “cognitively high functioning” as a certain British academic would say – who leaves out that they are also sickeningly evil) – but the average leftist voter, nodding at the television screen, does not have the information to check any of the claims made – and does not have the skills to get that information, the education system works hard to PREVENT them having them having the skills to get or critically assess information.
As for the people who go to “good schools” and “good universities”, and not just in the United States – just about everywhere. They are indeed taught how to read and how to do mathematics, but they are also saturated with propaganda, agitation propaganda (“agitprop”) designed to totally twist and distort their minds – to make them fanatical Collectivists – it does NOT always work, but it does often work, or at least partly part. And the idea that students soon forget the conditioning (the brain washing – indoctrination) when they leave university – is sadly wrong.
Again the decline of the universities is a long story – the Collectivists, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Ely and so on, were gaining influence, and trying to eliminate pro liberty academics, from the late 19th century.
But it is very recently indeed that expressing conservative opinions was, de facto, outlawed in American universities – perhaps as recently as 2009 when the Obama regime started pushing the Herbert Marcuse doctrine that expressing conservative opinions “harmed” students of “disadvantaged and marginalised groups” and was, therefore, “Hate Speech”.
“But surely this applies to Jewish students?” – of course NOT, as “exploiters and oppressors” Jews, supposedly, deserve to be attacked – “racism” (and so on) can only be by the rich against the poor – as poverty must be the result of “exploitation and oppression” by rich people, “racism” is about “power structures”, so (for example) a group of Muslim Africans who attack a French village shouting that they are there to “kill white people” can NOT, by definition, be “racist”. Even the French police denies the attack was “racist” as they have been taught the Marxist definition of “racism” – just as the British (and other) police have.
By the way, Herbert Marcuse, and many others of the Frankfurt School of Marxism, were from Jewish families, they created the doctrines that are now being used against Jews.
One of the sick ironies of history.
@rhoda klapp
I’m guessing about a dozen.
I don’t know about colleges, but I do know a bit about schools. When my kids first started school in the mid 2000s, the school had 85% of their staff as teaching faculty. Now, in that same school, less than 50% of their staff are teaching faculty. I doubt Universities are much different.
These things all feed off each other. For example, colleges have huge departments dedicated to helping kids with loans and grants and so forth, and large numbers of people managing these things for the University. Back in the day when someone could pay for college by working a summer job and maybe a part time shift at Mickey D’s, with Mom and Dad kicking in a few thousand, then all of that was unnecessary. Like I say, I have done some work for some small colleges and even them — the number of staff dedicated to Pell Grants, and VA grants, and reporting back to the government agencies about how effective these grants are, is just mind blowing.
British universities are also in terrible trouble.
I used to say that the University of Buckingham was the only pro liberty university here.
But then I found out that Mark Seddon had been appointed to head a program on the United Nations and international relations at Buckingham.
There is nothing subtle about the leftism of Mark Seddon – he is the ex editor of the socialist “Tribune” publication, and worked for various socialists (open socialists) at the accursed United Nations.
Anyone who has come upon his rantings (on Twitter, now X, and elsewhere) knows he is a fanatical Anti-Semite. Sorry “Anti Israeli” – and if anyone thinks there is a real difference, I have a nice bridge to sell you.
So this means there are no pro liberty universities in the United Kingdom – none.
How did this happen at Buckingham, a university that was created in 1976 to fight totalitarians like Mark Seddon.
How did it happen? How?
“But Paul we must be tolerant of statists – we must give them positions at our universities, business enterprises, and other bodies”.
Such an attitude is suicidal – and it always was. Let someone like Richard Ely into a university and he will work to exclude all non statists, and he will seek to fail undermine pro liberty students – via the setting and marking of examinations.
As for giving a post to someone like Mark Seddon – the stupidity (the suicidal stupidity) of letting such a being into an organisation, should be obvious.
But then the British reacted to the treachery of the socialist (self confessed socialist) MI6 agent Mr Philby (senior), by appointing his son (commonly known as “Kim”) to a senior position in M16.
No prizes for guessing what socialist “Kim” Philby proceeded to do.
People act on their beliefs – if you appoint people with evil beliefs, they will behave in evil ways.
Forget their “nice manners”, and their “good families” – what matters is what a person believes, what their beliefs are.
If someone is a socialist (“liberal” in the bizarre misuse of language in the United States) it is logical to assume that they will act in such a way that furthers the socialist cause – i.e. promotes robbery and tyranny.
There is nothing astonishing in this – what is astonishing is that other people are shocked when the supporters of robbery and tyranny act in such a way as to promote the cause of robbery and tyranny.
For example, you get to go to college for free but in exchange you sign an agreement that 20% of your salary post graduation for the ten years following graduation, would be paid to the University. This seems to align the incentives correctly…
So the Intersectional Poetry major pays 20% of a barista paycheck, whilst the lawyers and STEM types pay *lots* more. I’m not sure this is an improvement, unless it causes universities to limit ‘studies’ degrees.
@sonny wayz
So the Intersectional Poetry major pays 20% of a barista paycheck, whilst the lawyers and STEM types pay *lots* more. I’m not sure this is an improvement, unless it causes universities to limit ‘studies’ degrees.
Right but that is the point. The University has to recover the cost of educating them in all that intersectional poetry, which costs in the same ballpark as educating them how to write computer programs or design bridges. So 20% of the Computer programmer over ten years is $500k, and 20% of the poetry person is $50k. So the university is much less likely to offer courses or places on courses to the poetry person. Their outcomes are aligned with educating the students in such a way that the graduate will get a great, well paying job.
If this were the case, imagine Universities begging people — paying people — to come to school and get post graduate degrees in Artificial Intelligence — an amazingly lucrative field. 20% for ten years could be in the millions.
BTW, one other aspect of this that is scary, and you decide if it is a feature or a bug), it is pretty common for women within ten years of graduation to take a lot of time off for childcare. So that would impact the fees recovered by the university. How would they respond to that? How should they respond to that?
And FWIW, intersectional poetry degree graduates go into the whole DEI racket, which is extremely lucrative. So there is that too….
In the US, government involvement in “higher education” dates all the way back to the “Federal Period” (1789-1820). There were some private colleges (Harvard, Yale, William and Mary, etc), but they taught classics, divinity, and law. The Founders decided that the new nation needed men with training in the sciences and in civil engineering, to (literally) build the nation.
So they established the US Military Academy at West Point, not just to train officers for the Army, but provide the needed technical experts. Besides West Point, there were several state military academies: VMI, Norwich, Citadel, and others. VMI and Norwich still commission officers directly into the Army (not through ROTC).
Many former Army officers became important figures in the railroad industry.
There are also additional US service academies for the Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard.
And in 1862, they finished the job and established the whole system of Land-Grant Universities throughout the country, funded by the sale of fed land, and chartered specifically to foster tech, science, and all the other useful and needed skills and professions on which a country could be built.
Most of the large US schools started this way, and the target of “the teaching of practical agriculture, science, military science, and engineering” still exists in their charters. (Honored now mostly in the breach.)
@bobbyb it is worth reiterating your point that these colleges were founded by the sale of resources that the Federal government actually owned. Rather than today, what they would be is borrow the money and make your great grandchildren pay it.
Given that the United States is far and away the world’s poorest country (when you subtract assets from debt — the US national debt is bigger than the next five or six biggest debts put together) it seems to me that that is something we need to do today too — sell off the trillions of dollars in assets owned by the federal government to try to get the exploding debt under control. Of course they won’t. And it is probably too late to fix it that way. But it is nice to know that the government used to actually pay for things rather than just making money out of thin air.
It is strange to think of the US as the poorest country in the world. We march on as if everything was hunky dory, ignoring the 33 trillion dollar sword of Damocles ready to eviscerate our national self delusion.