7 ms·

The Slow Death of the University

213 points by mgunes 11y ago

contingencies 11y ago
Descriptions of certain ancient centers of learning (I am thinking of Nalanda[1]) seem to convey an atmosphere of open-to-all-and-sundry and free sharing of knowledge, ideas and interpretation amongst the entire community. We can at least look for that online. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda
- reallyRaoul 11y ago
  finland.
Shyis 11y ago
This is only mildly related to the article, but does anyone else have difficulty imagining what others' jobs are? For example, I'm just young enough to remember a time when I thought a programmer was someone who hid in a closet to slam at a keyboard for nine hours a day, but that notion was only corrected by entering the workforce. What about my other misconceptions? There's no way to learn about all of them firsthand. I figure plumbers just travel between job sites to hit pipes for nine hours a day, managers just scream into phones and reply to emails for nine hours a day, and literary theorists ... sit ... in their offices ... for nine hours ... That's the problem; I'm not possessed of a sufficiently creative (or informed) mind to fill in the blanks here. Dangerously, due to that programming knowledge, I also have the incorrect notion that everyone else could be replaced by either a handful of code and some lightly trained workers, or wholesale by mechanization. Clearly this isn't the case (or the market is doing a very poor job of finding exploitable niches), so what gives? What do people _do_? Because I'm at a loss and need to educate myself.
- DanAndersen 11y ago
  I understand your thinking here. Maybe we need something like Dirty Jobs but for non-dirty jobs too.
  - nostrademons 11y ago
    My last startup did something like that - we interviewed close to a hundred people to figure out what they really did in their jobs. It was targeted towards undergrads, as a form of career guidance, but it turns out to be very hard to get people to pay attention to career guidance that doesn't directly lead to getting a job. We also tried refocusing toward older young professionals (late-20s), but that had the same problem: it's much easier to sell a service that's task-focused than one that's discovery-focused. My sense is that there's probably not a viable business there but it may make an interesting hobby blog-series, if you can get people to participate.
- benten10 11y ago
  ...but... that's what literary theorists literally do, isn't it? Read books and articles and write about them, and attend meetings. Having spent a reasonably long time in the University system (as a student, mind), I have a general idea of what everyone does and why. On the other hand, I really don't understand what a lot people in the tech industry do. I have a friend who works for some kind of 'data analysis' company. He makes $80K a year, and he tells me on a bad day he has to do 2 hours of 'real' work: the rest of the time is spent on reddit or taking classes. It's gotten so bad (or good) for him that he is taking 3 evening classes in the University he graduated from while working full-time. He says he spends most of his worktime doing assignments and readings anyway, so he's more prepared for classes than he was ever in college. I understand why a game company might need 50+ developers working on the same game. I understand why Google might need all those engineers. I really don't understand what 50+ 'data engineer's at what is essentially an SEO company with 100+ employees do... Like you say, I am really confused : is the market REALLY that bad at finding exploitable niches? And then there's another friend of mine, who says the most difficult part of his Google engineering job by far was getting it. Go figure!
  - alexashka 11y ago
    They do exactly what you think they do - they help CRUD - create, read, update and delete information. Combined with engineering, there's some very interesting ways to do all those things. For example statistics on such a big scale were very hard until the internet became so widespread. The folks who brag and tell you they make great money and don't do shit all - it's just ego tripping. Really, I've seen it a thousand times - somebody of moderate intelligence and no desire or ability to do anything creative or interesting, will sweat his/her way through university and then gloat over what an awesome position in company X he/she now has. Really, it can be frustrating if you are in financial difficulty but rest assured, those who do the real work and are savvy enough to not get taken advantage of, will come out on top. The fella bragging about not doing much is going to continue not doing much and best case scenario - he/she cruises through life with a nice salary, having done the bare minimum. Meh.
  - bjwbell 11y ago
    Any large corporation is filled with busy work (~80%), which you can get out of. It's up to the employee to find their way to that 20% that's real work. If wanted it's definitely possible to find that 20% and be /truly/ worked to the max. But it doesn't just happen.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  Lawyers are probably a big one. Most people think they spend all day in the courtroom, but many lawyers never set foot in a courtroom. Instead, their days are spent meeting with clients and preparing documents: their job is to translate the plain-English requirements of what the clients want to agree upon into legalese that has specific meaning in court.
  - eternauta3k 11y ago
    So law is in a way programming?
    - hkmurakami 11y ago
      That's one reason why the tax code is a perfect domain for computer assistance (read: Intuit).
    - AngrySkillzz 11y ago
      It's writing (legal) code that you can run on judges.
      - russellallen 11y ago
        Lol. For most lawyers out drafting contracts, we're still in the days of mainframes. We write code by hand which will probably never be run on a real judge, but we hope we haven't made any bugs.
        Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        The fun part is that there is a positive correlation between having bugs and having your code run on a judge.
      - arethuza 11y ago
        Except that very little of the code (e.g. contracts) that get written ever run and the people who debug the code (litigators) aren't the same people who wrote it in the first place. Also the people who wanted the code written in the first place have never actually read it are convinced it says something different to what it actually does say.... It would be an interesting project to create an artificial court/judge into which you feed a contract and an argument and get a response out.
- aklemm 11y ago
  "Working" by Studs Terkel comes to mind. http://www.amazon.com/Working-People-Talk-About-What/dp/1565843428 http://www.amazon.com/Working-People-Talk-About-What/dp/1565... So many people have this question early in their careers, it really seems like something is wrong. Perhaps we need a serious/mandatory/formal job-shadowing program for teens and college students.
  - Shyis 11y ago
    I'll give it a look. Thanks!
  - therealdrag0 11y ago
    That looks perfect. I wish there was an audio version.
    - aristus 11y ago
      Studs was a radio interviewer. The book is taken from thousands of hours of material. https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/938 https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/938
  - dxbydt 11y ago
    This is a stunning book. 15 years ago, when I first came to this country from India, a classmate gave me a copy of this book. I guess he wanted me to understand America or Americans or whatever. It definitely affected me at some deep level. I still have my copy, and I read it everytime something upsets me about my job & I get those "maybe I should just switch to something else..." feeling. Its not "by Study Terkel" because he didn't really write this book....I mean, its his book, but he basically ran into all these chaps, and let them do all the talking. And they talk and talk and talk. He prompts them from time to time, but mostly, its a book by these people. And their stories and lives are super compelling. I often used to wonder why people do dead-end jobs like parking cars in a building, or store clerk etc. Here, those people tell you why. There is this hooker who tells you how she got into the business, how she turns tricks, dealing with cops, offering freebies to pimps,the whole thing is simultaneously amazing and sordid and just puts everything into perspective. It taught me that America is a hard country. Its not some first world paradise. America is like, seriously fucked up. I mean, all these people, they were here long before I got here, and they have friends & families & homes & connections, and yet their lives are so hard and messed up and its not all whining & complaining, but I did get the impression things are very hard out here for the blue collar guy. Ofcourse had Turkel gone to Sand Hill road & bumped into a hundred VCs, that would be a very different book. It a definite must-read, especially if you are an immigrant.
- mgunes 11y ago
  http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-do-people-do-all-day.html http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-do-people-do-...
- FeloniousHam 11y ago
  Slate's Working podcast (now with Adam Davidson): http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/working.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/working.html
- tehchromic 11y ago
  Maybe also a good question is "what should they do". A lot of jobs are rubbish. That opinion rubs people the wrong way for totally acceptable reasons, but only a hundred years ago, around 90% of people were farmers. Today it's 2%. I think it's fair to say that the cataclysmic effect that our human economy is having on the planet can not last in it's current configuration. Most people should be employed in building and maintaining the planetary biome... in other words, they should be: farmers, only a sort of high-tech, hi-fi, scientific mercenary warrior type of farmer. A plumber for example - the world will always need those - ought to be primarily concerned with diverting waste as a source feed for soil, in a clean and efficient way: a hero. But most jobs exist under a 100 year old paradigm which will change rather quickly. You might say they are "soon to be farmers" - that's the best case scenario. Other's would have us all be mercenaries and go out in a blaze of glory. Not me.
  - pharke 11y ago
    Reminds me of this talk https://youtu.be/21j_OCNLuYg https://youtu.be/21j_OCNLuYg and also happens to be my current mid-range goal. I've worked on a farm, gardened, and raised chickens growing up and I'm dead set on doing it again, the amount of work that goes into it vs. the amount of food and enjoyment that you get out of it makes it a no brainer if you can take the leap and buy a plot. Construction begins this summer and I couldn't be happier.
  - yetanotheracc 11y ago
    You are right. The world doesn't need engineers (we didn't run out of television sets). It needs farmers.
  - duckingtest 11y ago
    I think you're ignoring the possibility of technical progress. Who says we will even need food in 100 years? Eating dying plants and dead animal bodies is, on the whole, a very, very inefficient way of getting energy from the sun.
fennecfoxen 11y ago
> It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, and there are those who claim that today, when that figure has risen to around 50 percent, such liberality of spirit is no longer affordable. Yet Germany, to name only one example, provides free education to its sizable student population. ... Yes, they have, and from what I've heard it consists substantially of very large seminar classes and an expectation of self-directed, self-motivated study from its students: hardly the paradigm the author has been mourning where faculty might expect that > the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas. (Also available in Germany, just to note: immigration opportunities for international students, a premise the UK (and the US) have been shying away from.)
devindotcom 11y ago
It's a big, complex problem. There is of course the change over the last few decades by which universities have become a third stage of standard education rather than a voluntary pursuit of possibly esoteric learning. This has been brought about by a number of factors, but has (I think) led to more education, which is a good thing. Of course, to offset the cost of 4 years of school and 4 "lost" years of productivity, students want degrees that will improve their odds of getting a job. That pretty much explains the shift towards professional training. Bringing the universities to everyone also means broadening the offerings — originally when it was only the erudition-inclined or well-to-do, a university could get away with having a great deal of humanities and other fields that do not generate grants or jobs. It was learning for learning's sake, which few could afford. I do think we're approaching an inflection point in the future at which some major universities will fight back against this trend. But because this will be expensive to them and their students, I don't think it will happen soon. We need a time of extraordinary prosperity in which money can be lavished on social services and education, and that's not today or the next ten years. It's sad, but I'm hoping it's a transitional phase, not a final one.
- DanAndersen 11y ago
  There's something of a shift toward professional training, but there still seem to be a glut of students entering college without a clear idea of what they're getting out of it or what it will cost them. Pressured to attend by the social expectation that everyone should go to college, the now-foolish guidance many in my generation received of "do what you love," and the ready supply of student loans, students are still throwing themselves into the gaping maw of debt and degrees that are not useful to them in the workforce. (I am very lucky that, for me, "do what you love" ended up meaning the field of computer science). What we need is to break out of this idea that everyone must attend university "or else you'll be a garbageman" or whatever they were telling us in school growing up.
naringas 11y ago
Isn't this part of a larger, global trend of turning public institutions into private businesses? It happened to the American prision system, it's happening to healthcare, education, and higher education.
- zackmorris 11y ago
  Ya just replace private with hierarchical. I don't think many techies grew up dreaming of being cogs in an industrial machine but for whatever reason libertarianism/authoritarianism has taken a strong hold on many of their imaginations and we're seeing a lot of these controversies framed in ways that limit possibilities. College is wonderful. Everyone should get to go. Acceptance should be based on age or merit, be freely provided by government funding, and the alumni should remember how they got where they are and pay it forward. And to extend that, significantly more research needs to happen at universities so it’s not tainted by the profit motive. Also we should remember that the adage “those who can’t do, teach” gave us the gift of a system where a single person can change dozens or even hundreds of lives a year, and thousands over a lifetime. Frankly the older I get, the more these “lets all just forget the lessons of the past” arguments sound like a bunch of hooey. Yes there are compelling innovations all of the place that will let people learn at a vastly accelerated place outside of school. But public education was never just about learning. As much as I hated long periods of it, I can’t really imagine a democracy functioning in its absence. And fixing it would be rather straightforward, if we let teachers/professors have more of a say in it and got the blasted politicians and financiers out of it.
mathattack 11y ago
I wonder if this death of criticism is misty eyed nastolgia for a future that either never, or rarely existed. Let's not forget that our so-called great universities: - For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities. - Were the providence of only the technocratic elite. - Did very little research before the 20th century. And now that the costs escalate out of control, is it any wonder that they have to go more commercial? Some back of the envelope math: If every student takes 10 classes a year (5 per semester) and every professor teaches 5 classes per year to 20 students each, and gets paid 100K all-in, then the per-student faculty labor cost is 100K10/(205) = 10K per year. That's not too bad for critical learning. Expand the classes to 40 and you can cut the cost in half, or give the faculty a big raise.
- stephengillie 11y ago
  You're assuming that teaching ability scales without scaling the workforce. Having an instructor provide for more students means each student gets less instructor-time. More instructor-time increases the learning ability of most students. And so class size is an important metric. For most universities, their biggest product is their own marketing and promotional material. Now that they are corporatizing, they are painting hindsight with rose-colored glasses, as "Brave New 1984" as most corporations are wont to do.
  - JoeAltmaier 11y ago
    I'm thinking that 'instructor-time' is a myth. A class of 20, say 3 lectures of an hour a week - that's just 9 minutes per student if they spent ALL the time interacting. But they don't; more like a minute per student tops. No, instructor-time is moot. Maybe instructor training is important; maybe a quality syllabus helps; a good book is key. But the instructor/lecturer can lecture 10 or 100 equally well.
    - bachmeier 11y ago
      > But the instructor/lecturer can lecture 10 or 100 equally well. Depends on the class. I once had a colleague say that he'd teach the intro class to 5000 students in the basketball arena. For that class, at that university, it would probably work. I'm teaching a senior-level econometrics class to 10 students right now. Everyone has a laptop in front of them, typing into RStudio throughout the class. I help students when they can't get things to run properly. We have plenty of other interaction. They each do unique homework sets and their own project. There's no way that class would work with 100 students, or for that matter, more than 15 students.
deleted 11y ago
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pXMzR2A 11y ago
Good article by Eagleton but I do wonder very much if it would have made headlines on HN if the title was "the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique" and the HN readers knew of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton#Literary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton#Literary_Theory
- emodendroket 11y ago
  Well the point seems to be that the university is becoming something quite unlikely it has traditionally been conceived.
marcosdumay 11y ago
What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking? Anyway, the author is part of the problem. Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time. Until the professors themselves stop thinking this way, no government will prioritize them. (And no, I don't agree that humanities are useless. They have a huge potential. But for them to be of any use, professors will need to seek those applications, and study them. Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.)
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  They certainly aren't the only ones capable of critical thinking, but they are supposedly the ones who received a 4-year education in critical thinking, while other people were spending time learning about physics or what have you.
  - Retric 11y ago
    Yet, they largely have a reputation as incapable of critical thought. When an archeology professor is talking about critical thought they mean an argument capable of convincing people. Technical people may view this as sloppy thinking as a transistor does not care what you think, but it’s a very valuable skill. It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated. PS: With this mindset listening to a news broadcast can become almost painful as you see layers of deception. Study a little marketing and suddenly a lot of 'toys' seem more like 'junk'.
    - clusterfoo 11y ago
      > It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated. In my experience (having started uni in the humanities), this way of thinking (which is how most people think) actually makes you more susceptible to manipulation, not less, because you're basically trained to think that a convincing argument and a valid argument are the same thing. Which really is how most people perceive reality: from political debates to the workplace, most people remember how well you "handled yourself" in a disagreement, how charismatic, how well you "stood your ground", etc. Not how sound your logic was. And this is how most of the world operates. Programmers spend all of our day pointing out flaws in each others' work, we simply do not allow each other to be wrong and correct each other at every turn... this takes time to get used to when you're starting out (or come from a non-tech background), and would drive most people crazy and bruise their fragile egos (If this behavior has ever accidentally bled into your non-tech social life, you know this does drive most people crazy). But we do it because the damn thing has to work at the end of the day. "Cargo cult programmers" are given a bad name, where in other professions you can make a career off of hopping onto the cargo cult of the day and parroting (or being) a charismatic talking head. It's a "Sell me this pen" world, vs "Take this pen apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and build me a better pen". It's not that there's no value in the humanities, but without technical training we end up with... well... the world as it is. There's a reason the tech community has been at the forefront of innovation for the past century, moving at light-speed while the rest of the "warm and fuzzy" world (from educational, to medicinal, to political institutions) is trying to catch up, like they're all still in the friggen 19th century communicating via carrier pigeons. And I don't mean only technical innovation: the tech community has been at the forefront of social innovation as well. Ideas like open data, open source, horizontal institutions, fast iteration and experimentation at the institutional level... nobody else does it. All other professions have their little cliques formed, where god forbid anyone question the Big Talking Head at the top or try to shake up things too much, or share too much information with anyone outside the in-group.
riemannzeta 11y ago
The author would have benefitted from a bit of historical knowledge of the university as an institution. The English were making the same sort of complaints about Scottish universities in the 18th Century, and it's pretty clear from our perspective now where more of the insights emerged in that period. While he may find it distasteful, the first university in Bologna appears to have formed around a core faculty who decided to start charging students for their lectures.
nickysielicki 11y ago
The question is what's causing this? Is it income disparity and a lack of wealth distribution, making our universities tailor more towards making money? Is it the information golden age that we're in, making education more of a 4 year summer camp for people to have fun instead of learning? Is it leftism and our need for increasing political correctness and thus bureaucracy to enforce that? Is it a side effect of our new trend of sticking everyone into a skinner box? I dunno.
cafard 11y ago
Somebody should offer a prize for the earliest citation of the expression "critical studies" as used here. It may not go back to Monty Python's time, and certainly not Erasmus's. (I imagine the award to be the right to look coolly at Terry Eagleton and say "kill him" in Korean, or the language of one's choice.) I think that the humanities gave away a good deal of their own prestige by chasing a false notion that they could and should become scientific. Northrop Frye, whom Eagleton mentions, had some big grand ideas about schematizing things, I recall.
alexashka 11y ago
What... is this guy talking about? "the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique." What? What the hell is humane critique? "Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism." Wow... You know what allows you to reflect? Having enough time while being an active part of society. Time to reflect, being active to have proper perspective. If all you're doing is reading books and talking, all you can reflect on is books and hearsay, combined with some intuition. The last thing an English major can do is reflect on anything that requires understanding mathematics or statistics or... you know, the stuff that people who do science have to know? Just because you read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, doesn't mean you can critique anything that actually matters, that people who haven't read Dostoevsky can't... There's scientific knowledge, and then there's entertainment such as fiction and television shows etc. Guess which category this guy belongs to? The all-over-the-place sloppy writing this guy produces is telling. I guess when you're surrounded by a bunch of folks who don't create anything but words, you start thinking you know a thing or two beyond entertaining people with words.
princetontiger 11y ago
The university is not dead. People who are going to inferior schools want to make this logic a fact.
- aswanson 11y ago
  Your second sentence ironically defies logic.
protomyth 11y ago
"It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny." Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. When people are talking about "safe areas" to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead. Political parties have more diversity of allowed thought. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned. If you didn't forge your ideas in the fire of criticism at university, then you were cheated by others or yourself. The best teachers will make you argue both / multiple sides of a scenario and be offended that you parroted their opinion back to them. The worst teachers only see one valid way to think and are doing "missionary work" instead of teaching. It is often depressing to read https://www.thefire.org https://www.thefire.org
- blhack 11y ago
  Here is an excellent speech on this by one of the best people to speak on this topic (Steven Pinker): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcdFI6Sda0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcdFI6Sda0k FIRE is an EXCELLENT group.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- wozniacki 11y ago
  Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned. It is a mistake to assume that this is a localized phenomenon limited to the United States. Lately - and as somewhat of a testament to how disturbingly uniform and inauthentic, millenial culture has become everywhere - the same kind of intolerance for discordant views can be seen on campuses from Canada to the UK. I'll leave you with an excellent write up on the topic of this brand of groupthink and shutting down opposing views, on campuses, by Brendan O'Neill in The Spectator : Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up. [1] [1] Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-so-last-century-todays-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-s...
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pacaro 11y ago
Reading this reminds me of "A Very Peculiar Practice"[1][2] which foreshadowed this by nearly 20 years [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Peculiar_Practice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Peculiar_Practice [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&list=PLJ4mcFE1FY8dGdRX6DyCFcTHF3wSHPb3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&list=PLJ4mcFE1FY...
ffn 11y ago
This was easily one of the wittiest and funniest articles I've ever read from a British author... But why shouldn't vampires be more lauded than Victorians? Why should Jane Austen, with her painfully circumlocutions, be more academically welcome than that woman (forget her name) who wrote 50 shades of gay? In many ways, old "classical" works are telling the exact same stories as modern "trash novel" works, except the modern "trash novel" works are doing it in such a way that is clear, simple, relevant (to today's audience), and thus free of misunderstandings. From them, through clever literally mental contortions, one can still elucidate all the themes, lessons, and humanities like you could from confounding classics - just less obfuscated like "there is no place like home" instead of "lost is my homecoming", "...and then they had sex and fell in love..." instead of "... I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this...", etc. And who says the arts are dying? The arts are vibrant and alive in today's web-comics, video games, movies, and tv-shows. The medium has changed from a completely closed system of ink and paint to a modular, copyable, and distributable one of .mdl files, computer images, and carrier streams. It's just intentionally confusing junk like cubism, poorly drawn junk like medieval art, and inhumane junk like pyramid building that's gone away. The pressure to have to constantly monetize, I'll admit, is painful... but that primarily hurts the large institutions who have bottom lines that must be covered. And in my opinion as a flexible small business kind of guy, that's a good thing. Large institutions were necessary for centuries for individual survival at the cost of individual self-actualization, but in today's flexible scale era, it's entirely possible to just be good at something and survive without having to give up your soul to a large corporation. In that case, going small, lean, and individual is the way of the bright future.
- chippy 11y ago
  In asking the question of why modern things such as "things that are currently fashionable to today's 20 year old's" are less worthy for study than traditional subjects, these phrases were given: >free of misunderstandings >less obfuscated >clever literally mental contortions >intentionally confusing I imagine you would be seeking to understand the difference, and seeking to understand why some things that may appear obfuscated and confusing to a modern person are thought of by many to be better. I hope I can help the understanding via this comment. Pretty much all poetry for example is full of misunderstandings, obfuscated, with clever literally devices and it is intentionally so. Consider poetry then! Think about why many people value poetry over a clear concise newspaper article. Why do humans like art, why do people like these confusing things? Do they actually enjoy the confusion, or is it something else that they enjoy? Your example is Jane Austin vs 50 shades of grey. Perhaps other comparisons would help. How about Dan Brown vs Shakespeare? How about Beethoven vs Bananarama? How about Turner vs Bob Ross? Do these comparisons help in understanding what defines a quality piece of work? Do you think that a university that for two years examines Dan Brown in it's literature department will continue doing so when Dan Brown no longer becomes popular and Game of Thrones becomes popular? What does that say about the educational and artistic value of an author when they are forgotten a few years later? Should the subjects of universities be decided by the consumers, the young students? Or should they be decided by the academic establishment? What difference would that make to education, to critical thinking? This is some of what the article was about.
coliveira 11y ago
Universities have been "dying" for hundreds of years. Please call me when they stop existing! Whenever there is a new technology (printing press, cinema, TV, computers, internet) there will be someone saying that universities are old-fashioned and useless. Of course, this never happens, because there is always a need for institutions of knowledge, in one way or another. For example, people buying into the internet-crazy think that everything can be replaced by the Internet. Media companies (music, cinema, book publishing) were supposed to be dead at least a decade ago. It turns out that in reality they are bigger than before. What people forget is that the Internet doesn't create things by itself. Good movies will continue to be produced by specialized companies, good books will continue to be published by specialized publishers, and so on. Only the technology changes, but human needs continue the same. Similarly, universities will be just fine in a century or more. They will adapt to the new technologies and continue to produce knowledge as they have done before.
kijin 11y ago
Those South Koreans were probably carrying brand new Samsung phones under their jacket. Just as potent as a pair of Kalashnikovs, which their Northern brethren prefer ;) In certain parts of the English-speaking world, universities are not dying, they're actually flourishing... but only because of a major influx of Chinese and Korean students willing to pay those exhorbitant out-of-state fees. And since most of those valuable foreign customers want to study business, finance, medicine, law, and a handful of STEM fields, universities have no choice but to cater to their demands. Some programs in the West Coast are half Chinese by now. Those kids probably pay 80% of the gross fees, too. On the other hand, when I took English or philosophy, I was often the only Asian in the class. But China is growing very fast (slower than before, but still fast), and Korea has all but done catching up with the rest of the developed world. Other countries might then supplant China as the largest supplier of international students, but they'll grow up, too. Sooner or later, all the international students who are propping up American universities will decide that they'd much rather spend their dollars elsewhere. When that last bubble bursts, even STEM fields will not be immune from a massive shock, and heavily subsidized humanities departments will be in real trouble this time.
jqm 11y ago
Some people think debt or decadence will be the end of the West. I personally believe it will be bureaucracy.
- djulius 11y ago
  Couldn't agree more. For universities, it is the dictature of the accountants. Every penny spent must be checked by an almost infinite hierarchy of accountants/manager who have no experience of the core tasks of a university (teaching/research). More precisely, I don't know if the hierarchy is finite or not, or if there is a termination problem in the process. Sometimes penny checking finishes, sometimes not.
hanief 11y ago
It reminded me of a quote from Hemingway's book, The Sun Also Rises: - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. - “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
nbourbaki 11y ago
I think the crux of the problem lies in the sheer number of students who attend college today; as the author points out: "It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, ... [today] that figure has risen to around 50 percent..." The reality is that teaching critical thinking doesn't scale nicely, because it requires an intimate dialogue; the process of rigorously critiquing ideas is a two-way street. In today's institutions, where professors lecture to classes of 200+ students, this simply isn't possible. In the article, the author claims universities have abandoned their roles as centres of critical thinking due to capitalistic forces. While I think this is true, I also believe that our collective attitude towards university shares the blame. Unfortunately, college is seen as the only legitimate path to success after high school. If students had more opportunities to explore their interests, instead of being funnelled into university, perhaps universities could re-establish themselves as institutions where critical discussion takes place.

213 points by mgunes 11y ago

Descriptions of certain ancient centers of learning (I am thinking of Nalanda[1]) seem to convey an atmosphere of open-to-all-and-sundry and free sharing of knowledge, ideas and interpretation amongst the entire community. We can at least look for that online. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda

reallyRaoul 11y ago
finland.

Shyis 11y ago

This is only mildly related to the article, but does anyone else have difficulty imagining what others' jobs are? For example, I'm just young enough to remember a time when I thought a programmer was someone who hid in a closet to slam at a keyboard for nine hours a day, but that notion was only corrected by entering the workforce. What about my other misconceptions? There's no way to learn about all of them firsthand. I figure plumbers just travel between job sites to hit pipes for nine hours a day, managers just scream into phones and reply to emails for nine hours a day, and literary theorists ... sit ... in their offices ... for nine hours ... That's the problem; I'm not possessed of a sufficiently creative (or informed) mind to fill in the blanks here. Dangerously, due to that programming knowledge, I also have the incorrect notion that everyone else could be replaced by either a handful of code and some lightly trained workers, or wholesale by mechanization. Clearly this isn't the case (or the market is doing a very poor job of finding exploitable niches), so what gives? What do people _do_? Because I'm at a loss and need to educate myself.

DanAndersen 11y ago
I understand your thinking here. Maybe we need something like Dirty Jobs but for non-dirty jobs too.
- nostrademons 11y ago
  My last startup did something like that - we interviewed close to a hundred people to figure out what they really did in their jobs. It was targeted towards undergrads, as a form of career guidance, but it turns out to be very hard to get people to pay attention to career guidance that doesn't directly lead to getting a job. We also tried refocusing toward older young professionals (late-20s), but that had the same problem: it's much easier to sell a service that's task-focused than one that's discovery-focused. My sense is that there's probably not a viable business there but it may make an interesting hobby blog-series, if you can get people to participate.
benten10 11y ago
...but... that's what literary theorists literally do, isn't it? Read books and articles and write about them, and attend meetings. Having spent a reasonably long time in the University system (as a student, mind), I have a general idea of what everyone does and why. On the other hand, I really don't understand what a lot people in the tech industry do. I have a friend who works for some kind of 'data analysis' company. He makes $80K a year, and he tells me on a bad day he has to do 2 hours of 'real' work: the rest of the time is spent on reddit or taking classes. It's gotten so bad (or good) for him that he is taking 3 evening classes in the University he graduated from while working full-time. He says he spends most of his worktime doing assignments and readings anyway, so he's more prepared for classes than he was ever in college. I understand why a game company might need 50+ developers working on the same game. I understand why Google might need all those engineers. I really don't understand what 50+ 'data engineer's at what is essentially an SEO company with 100+ employees do... Like you say, I am really confused : is the market REALLY that bad at finding exploitable niches? And then there's another friend of mine, who says the most difficult part of his Google engineering job by far was getting it. Go figure!
- alexashka 11y ago
  They do exactly what you think they do - they help CRUD - create, read, update and delete information. Combined with engineering, there's some very interesting ways to do all those things. For example statistics on such a big scale were very hard until the internet became so widespread. The folks who brag and tell you they make great money and don't do shit all - it's just ego tripping. Really, I've seen it a thousand times - somebody of moderate intelligence and no desire or ability to do anything creative or interesting, will sweat his/her way through university and then gloat over what an awesome position in company X he/she now has. Really, it can be frustrating if you are in financial difficulty but rest assured, those who do the real work and are savvy enough to not get taken advantage of, will come out on top. The fella bragging about not doing much is going to continue not doing much and best case scenario - he/she cruises through life with a nice salary, having done the bare minimum. Meh.
- bjwbell 11y ago
  Any large corporation is filled with busy work (~80%), which you can get out of. It's up to the employee to find their way to that 20% that's real work. If wanted it's definitely possible to find that 20% and be /truly/ worked to the max. But it doesn't just happen.
nostrademons 11y ago
Lawyers are probably a big one. Most people think they spend all day in the courtroom, but many lawyers never set foot in a courtroom. Instead, their days are spent meeting with clients and preparing documents: their job is to translate the plain-English requirements of what the clients want to agree upon into legalese that has specific meaning in court.
- eternauta3k 11y ago
  So law is in a way programming?
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    That's one reason why the tax code is a perfect domain for computer assistance (read: Intuit).
  - AngrySkillzz 11y ago
    It's writing (legal) code that you can run on judges.
    - russellallen 11y ago
      Lol. For most lawyers out drafting contracts, we're still in the days of mainframes. We write code by hand which will probably never be run on a real judge, but we hope we haven't made any bugs.
      - Lawtonfogle 11y ago
        The fun part is that there is a positive correlation between having bugs and having your code run on a judge.
    - arethuza 11y ago
      Except that very little of the code (e.g. contracts) that get written ever run and the people who debug the code (litigators) aren't the same people who wrote it in the first place. Also the people who wanted the code written in the first place have never actually read it are convinced it says something different to what it actually does say.... It would be an interesting project to create an artificial court/judge into which you feed a contract and an argument and get a response out.
aklemm 11y ago
"Working" by Studs Terkel comes to mind. http://www.amazon.com/Working-People-Talk-About-What/dp/1565843428 http://www.amazon.com/Working-People-Talk-About-What/dp/1565... So many people have this question early in their careers, it really seems like something is wrong. Perhaps we need a serious/mandatory/formal job-shadowing program for teens and college students.
- Shyis 11y ago
  I'll give it a look. Thanks!
- therealdrag0 11y ago
  That looks perfect. I wish there was an audio version.
  - aristus 11y ago
    Studs was a radio interviewer. The book is taken from thousands of hours of material. https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/938 https://www.popuparchive.com/collections/938
- dxbydt 11y ago
  This is a stunning book. 15 years ago, when I first came to this country from India, a classmate gave me a copy of this book. I guess he wanted me to understand America or Americans or whatever. It definitely affected me at some deep level. I still have my copy, and I read it everytime something upsets me about my job & I get those "maybe I should just switch to something else..." feeling. Its not "by Study Terkel" because he didn't really write this book....I mean, its his book, but he basically ran into all these chaps, and let them do all the talking. And they talk and talk and talk. He prompts them from time to time, but mostly, its a book by these people. And their stories and lives are super compelling. I often used to wonder why people do dead-end jobs like parking cars in a building, or store clerk etc. Here, those people tell you why. There is this hooker who tells you how she got into the business, how she turns tricks, dealing with cops, offering freebies to pimps,the whole thing is simultaneously amazing and sordid and just puts everything into perspective. It taught me that America is a hard country. Its not some first world paradise. America is like, seriously fucked up. I mean, all these people, they were here long before I got here, and they have friends & families & homes & connections, and yet their lives are so hard and messed up and its not all whining & complaining, but I did get the impression things are very hard out here for the blue collar guy. Ofcourse had Turkel gone to Sand Hill road & bumped into a hundred VCs, that would be a very different book. It a definite must-read, especially if you are an immigrant.
mgunes 11y ago
http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-do-people-do-all-day.html http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/2011/03/what-do-people-do-...
FeloniousHam 11y ago
Slate's Working podcast (now with Adam Davidson): http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/working.html http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/working.html
tehchromic 11y ago
Maybe also a good question is "what should they do". A lot of jobs are rubbish. That opinion rubs people the wrong way for totally acceptable reasons, but only a hundred years ago, around 90% of people were farmers. Today it's 2%. I think it's fair to say that the cataclysmic effect that our human economy is having on the planet can not last in it's current configuration. Most people should be employed in building and maintaining the planetary biome... in other words, they should be: farmers, only a sort of high-tech, hi-fi, scientific mercenary warrior type of farmer. A plumber for example - the world will always need those - ought to be primarily concerned with diverting waste as a source feed for soil, in a clean and efficient way: a hero. But most jobs exist under a 100 year old paradigm which will change rather quickly. You might say they are "soon to be farmers" - that's the best case scenario. Other's would have us all be mercenaries and go out in a blaze of glory. Not me.
- pharke 11y ago
  Reminds me of this talk https://youtu.be/21j_OCNLuYg https://youtu.be/21j_OCNLuYg and also happens to be my current mid-range goal. I've worked on a farm, gardened, and raised chickens growing up and I'm dead set on doing it again, the amount of work that goes into it vs. the amount of food and enjoyment that you get out of it makes it a no brainer if you can take the leap and buy a plot. Construction begins this summer and I couldn't be happier.
- yetanotheracc 11y ago
  You are right. The world doesn't need engineers (we didn't run out of television sets). It needs farmers.
- duckingtest 11y ago
  I think you're ignoring the possibility of technical progress. Who says we will even need food in 100 years? Eating dying plants and dead animal bodies is, on the whole, a very, very inefficient way of getting energy from the sun.

fennecfoxen 11y ago

> It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, and there are those who claim that today, when that figure has risen to around 50 percent, such liberality of spirit is no longer affordable. Yet Germany, to name only one example, provides free education to its sizable student population. ... Yes, they have, and from what I've heard it consists substantially of very large seminar classes and an expectation of self-directed, self-motivated study from its students: hardly the paradigm the author has been mourning where faculty might expect that > the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas. (Also available in Germany, just to note: immigration opportunities for international students, a premise the UK (and the US) have been shying away from.)

devindotcom 11y ago

It's a big, complex problem. There is of course the change over the last few decades by which universities have become a third stage of standard education rather than a voluntary pursuit of possibly esoteric learning. This has been brought about by a number of factors, but has (I think) led to more education, which is a good thing. Of course, to offset the cost of 4 years of school and 4 "lost" years of productivity, students want degrees that will improve their odds of getting a job. That pretty much explains the shift towards professional training. Bringing the universities to everyone also means broadening the offerings — originally when it was only the erudition-inclined or well-to-do, a university could get away with having a great deal of humanities and other fields that do not generate grants or jobs. It was learning for learning's sake, which few could afford. I do think we're approaching an inflection point in the future at which some major universities will fight back against this trend. But because this will be expensive to them and their students, I don't think it will happen soon. We need a time of extraordinary prosperity in which money can be lavished on social services and education, and that's not today or the next ten years. It's sad, but I'm hoping it's a transitional phase, not a final one.

DanAndersen 11y ago
There's something of a shift toward professional training, but there still seem to be a glut of students entering college without a clear idea of what they're getting out of it or what it will cost them. Pressured to attend by the social expectation that everyone should go to college, the now-foolish guidance many in my generation received of "do what you love," and the ready supply of student loans, students are still throwing themselves into the gaping maw of debt and degrees that are not useful to them in the workforce. (I am very lucky that, for me, "do what you love" ended up meaning the field of computer science). What we need is to break out of this idea that everyone must attend university "or else you'll be a garbageman" or whatever they were telling us in school growing up.

naringas 11y ago

Isn't this part of a larger, global trend of turning public institutions into private businesses? It happened to the American prision system, it's happening to healthcare, education, and higher education.

zackmorris 11y ago
Ya just replace private with hierarchical. I don't think many techies grew up dreaming of being cogs in an industrial machine but for whatever reason libertarianism/authoritarianism has taken a strong hold on many of their imaginations and we're seeing a lot of these controversies framed in ways that limit possibilities. College is wonderful. Everyone should get to go. Acceptance should be based on age or merit, be freely provided by government funding, and the alumni should remember how they got where they are and pay it forward. And to extend that, significantly more research needs to happen at universities so it’s not tainted by the profit motive. Also we should remember that the adage “those who can’t do, teach” gave us the gift of a system where a single person can change dozens or even hundreds of lives a year, and thousands over a lifetime. Frankly the older I get, the more these “lets all just forget the lessons of the past” arguments sound like a bunch of hooey. Yes there are compelling innovations all of the place that will let people learn at a vastly accelerated place outside of school. But public education was never just about learning. As much as I hated long periods of it, I can’t really imagine a democracy functioning in its absence. And fixing it would be rather straightforward, if we let teachers/professors have more of a say in it and got the blasted politicians and financiers out of it.

mathattack 11y ago

I wonder if this death of criticism is misty eyed nastolgia for a future that either never, or rarely existed. Let's not forget that our so-called great universities: - For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities. - Were the providence of only the technocratic elite. - Did very little research before the 20th century. And now that the costs escalate out of control, is it any wonder that they have to go more commercial? Some back of the envelope math: If every student takes 10 classes a year (5 per semester) and every professor teaches 5 classes per year to 20 students each, and gets paid 100K all-in, then the per-student faculty labor cost is 100K10/(205) = 10K per year. That's not too bad for critical learning. Expand the classes to 40 and you can cut the cost in half, or give the faculty a big raise.

stephengillie 11y ago
You're assuming that teaching ability scales without scaling the workforce. Having an instructor provide for more students means each student gets less instructor-time. More instructor-time increases the learning ability of most students. And so class size is an important metric. For most universities, their biggest product is their own marketing and promotional material. Now that they are corporatizing, they are painting hindsight with rose-colored glasses, as "Brave New 1984" as most corporations are wont to do.
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago
  I'm thinking that 'instructor-time' is a myth. A class of 20, say 3 lectures of an hour a week - that's just 9 minutes per student if they spent ALL the time interacting. But they don't; more like a minute per student tops. No, instructor-time is moot. Maybe instructor training is important; maybe a quality syllabus helps; a good book is key. But the instructor/lecturer can lecture 10 or 100 equally well.
  - bachmeier 11y ago
    > But the instructor/lecturer can lecture 10 or 100 equally well. Depends on the class. I once had a colleague say that he'd teach the intro class to 5000 students in the basketball arena. For that class, at that university, it would probably work. I'm teaching a senior-level econometrics class to 10 students right now. Everyone has a laptop in front of them, typing into RStudio throughout the class. I help students when they can't get things to run properly. We have plenty of other interaction. They each do unique homework sets and their own project. There's no way that class would work with 100 students, or for that matter, more than 15 students.

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pXMzR2A 11y ago

Good article by Eagleton but I do wonder very much if it would have made headlines on HN if the title was "the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique" and the HN readers knew of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton#Literary_Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton#Literary_Theory

emodendroket 11y ago
Well the point seems to be that the university is becoming something quite unlikely it has traditionally been conceived.

marcosdumay 11y ago

What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking? Anyway, the author is part of the problem. Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time. Until the professors themselves stop thinking this way, no government will prioritize them. (And no, I don't agree that humanities are useless. They have a huge potential. But for them to be of any use, professors will need to seek those applications, and study them. Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.)

sliverstorm 11y ago
They certainly aren't the only ones capable of critical thinking, but they are supposedly the ones who received a 4-year education in critical thinking, while other people were spending time learning about physics or what have you.
- Retric 11y ago
  Yet, they largely have a reputation as incapable of critical thought. When an archeology professor is talking about critical thought they mean an argument capable of convincing people. Technical people may view this as sloppy thinking as a transistor does not care what you think, but it’s a very valuable skill. It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated. PS: With this mindset listening to a news broadcast can become almost painful as you see layers of deception. Study a little marketing and suddenly a lot of 'toys' seem more like 'junk'.
  - clusterfoo 11y ago
    > It's not just useful for convincing other, but also to notice when you’re being manipulated. In my experience (having started uni in the humanities), this way of thinking (which is how most people think) actually makes you more susceptible to manipulation, not less, because you're basically trained to think that a convincing argument and a valid argument are the same thing. Which really is how most people perceive reality: from political debates to the workplace, most people remember how well you "handled yourself" in a disagreement, how charismatic, how well you "stood your ground", etc. Not how sound your logic was. And this is how most of the world operates. Programmers spend all of our day pointing out flaws in each others' work, we simply do not allow each other to be wrong and correct each other at every turn... this takes time to get used to when you're starting out (or come from a non-tech background), and would drive most people crazy and bruise their fragile egos (If this behavior has ever accidentally bled into your non-tech social life, you know this does drive most people crazy). But we do it because the damn thing has to work at the end of the day. "Cargo cult programmers" are given a bad name, where in other professions you can make a career off of hopping onto the cargo cult of the day and parroting (or being) a charismatic talking head. It's a "Sell me this pen" world, vs "Take this pen apart, tell me everything that's wrong with it, and build me a better pen". It's not that there's no value in the humanities, but without technical training we end up with... well... the world as it is. There's a reason the tech community has been at the forefront of innovation for the past century, moving at light-speed while the rest of the "warm and fuzzy" world (from educational, to medicinal, to political institutions) is trying to catch up, like they're all still in the friggen 19th century communicating via carrier pigeons. And I don't mean only technical innovation: the tech community has been at the forefront of social innovation as well. Ideas like open data, open source, horizontal institutions, fast iteration and experimentation at the institutional level... nobody else does it. All other professions have their little cliques formed, where god forbid anyone question the Big Talking Head at the top or try to shake up things too much, or share too much information with anyone outside the in-group.

riemannzeta 11y ago

The author would have benefitted from a bit of historical knowledge of the university as an institution. The English were making the same sort of complaints about Scottish universities in the 18th Century, and it's pretty clear from our perspective now where more of the insights emerged in that period. While he may find it distasteful, the first university in Bologna appears to have formed around a core faculty who decided to start charging students for their lectures.

nickysielicki 11y ago

The question is what's causing this? Is it income disparity and a lack of wealth distribution, making our universities tailor more towards making money? Is it the information golden age that we're in, making education more of a 4 year summer camp for people to have fun instead of learning? Is it leftism and our need for increasing political correctness and thus bureaucracy to enforce that? Is it a side effect of our new trend of sticking everyone into a skinner box? I dunno.

cafard 11y ago

Somebody should offer a prize for the earliest citation of the expression "critical studies" as used here. It may not go back to Monty Python's time, and certainly not Erasmus's. (I imagine the award to be the right to look coolly at Terry Eagleton and say "kill him" in Korean, or the language of one's choice.) I think that the humanities gave away a good deal of their own prestige by chasing a false notion that they could and should become scientific. Northrop Frye, whom Eagleton mentions, had some big grand ideas about schematizing things, I recall.

alexashka 11y ago

What... is this guy talking about? "the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique." What? What the hell is humane critique? "Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism." Wow... You know what allows you to reflect? Having enough time while being an active part of society. Time to reflect, being active to have proper perspective. If all you're doing is reading books and talking, all you can reflect on is books and hearsay, combined with some intuition. The last thing an English major can do is reflect on anything that requires understanding mathematics or statistics or... you know, the stuff that people who do science have to know? Just because you read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, doesn't mean you can critique anything that actually matters, that people who haven't read Dostoevsky can't... There's scientific knowledge, and then there's entertainment such as fiction and television shows etc. Guess which category this guy belongs to? The all-over-the-place sloppy writing this guy produces is telling. I guess when you're surrounded by a bunch of folks who don't create anything but words, you start thinking you know a thing or two beyond entertaining people with words.

princetontiger 11y ago

The university is not dead. People who are going to inferior schools want to make this logic a fact.

aswanson 11y ago
Your second sentence ironically defies logic.

protomyth 11y ago

"It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny." Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. When people are talking about "safe areas" to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead. Political parties have more diversity of allowed thought. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned. If you didn't forge your ideas in the fire of criticism at university, then you were cheated by others or yourself. The best teachers will make you argue both / multiple sides of a scenario and be offended that you parroted their opinion back to them. The worst teachers only see one valid way to think and are doing "missionary work" instead of teaching. It is often depressing to read https://www.thefire.org https://www.thefire.org

blhack 11y ago
Here is an excellent speech on this by one of the best people to speak on this topic (Steven Pinker): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcdFI6Sda0k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcdFI6Sda0k FIRE is an EXCELLENT group.
deleted 11y ago
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wozniacki 11y ago
Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned. It is a mistake to assume that this is a localized phenomenon limited to the United States. Lately - and as somewhat of a testament to how disturbingly uniform and inauthentic, millenial culture has become everywhere - the same kind of intolerance for discordant views can be seen on campuses from Canada to the UK. I'll leave you with an excellent write up on the topic of this brand of groupthink and shutting down opposing views, on campuses, by Brendan O'Neill in The Spectator : Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere. On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students, smell like students. But their student brains have been replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing, H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five minutes in their company will know that these students are far more interested in shutting debate down than opening it up. [1] [1] Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-so-last-century-todays-students-want-the-right-to-be-comfortable/ http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-s...

creativestar 11y ago

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pacaro 11y ago

Reading this reminds me of "A Very Peculiar Practice"[1][2] which foreshadowed this by nearly 20 years [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Peculiar_Practice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Peculiar_Practice [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&list=PLJ4mcFE1FY8dGdRX6DyCFcTHF3wSHPb3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&list=PLJ4mcFE1FY...

ffn 11y ago

This was easily one of the wittiest and funniest articles I've ever read from a British author... But why shouldn't vampires be more lauded than Victorians? Why should Jane Austen, with her painfully circumlocutions, be more academically welcome than that woman (forget her name) who wrote 50 shades of gay? In many ways, old "classical" works are telling the exact same stories as modern "trash novel" works, except the modern "trash novel" works are doing it in such a way that is clear, simple, relevant (to today's audience), and thus free of misunderstandings. From them, through clever literally mental contortions, one can still elucidate all the themes, lessons, and humanities like you could from confounding classics - just less obfuscated like "there is no place like home" instead of "lost is my homecoming", "...and then they had sex and fell in love..." instead of "... I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this...", etc. And who says the arts are dying? The arts are vibrant and alive in today's web-comics, video games, movies, and tv-shows. The medium has changed from a completely closed system of ink and paint to a modular, copyable, and distributable one of .mdl files, computer images, and carrier streams. It's just intentionally confusing junk like cubism, poorly drawn junk like medieval art, and inhumane junk like pyramid building that's gone away. The pressure to have to constantly monetize, I'll admit, is painful... but that primarily hurts the large institutions who have bottom lines that must be covered. And in my opinion as a flexible small business kind of guy, that's a good thing. Large institutions were necessary for centuries for individual survival at the cost of individual self-actualization, but in today's flexible scale era, it's entirely possible to just be good at something and survive without having to give up your soul to a large corporation. In that case, going small, lean, and individual is the way of the bright future.

chippy 11y ago
In asking the question of why modern things such as "things that are currently fashionable to today's 20 year old's" are less worthy for study than traditional subjects, these phrases were given: >free of misunderstandings >less obfuscated >clever literally mental contortions >intentionally confusing I imagine you would be seeking to understand the difference, and seeking to understand why some things that may appear obfuscated and confusing to a modern person are thought of by many to be better. I hope I can help the understanding via this comment. Pretty much all poetry for example is full of misunderstandings, obfuscated, with clever literally devices and it is intentionally so. Consider poetry then! Think about why many people value poetry over a clear concise newspaper article. Why do humans like art, why do people like these confusing things? Do they actually enjoy the confusion, or is it something else that they enjoy? Your example is Jane Austin vs 50 shades of grey. Perhaps other comparisons would help. How about Dan Brown vs Shakespeare? How about Beethoven vs Bananarama? How about Turner vs Bob Ross? Do these comparisons help in understanding what defines a quality piece of work? Do you think that a university that for two years examines Dan Brown in it's literature department will continue doing so when Dan Brown no longer becomes popular and Game of Thrones becomes popular? What does that say about the educational and artistic value of an author when they are forgotten a few years later? Should the subjects of universities be decided by the consumers, the young students? Or should they be decided by the academic establishment? What difference would that make to education, to critical thinking? This is some of what the article was about.

coliveira 11y ago

Universities have been "dying" for hundreds of years. Please call me when they stop existing! Whenever there is a new technology (printing press, cinema, TV, computers, internet) there will be someone saying that universities are old-fashioned and useless. Of course, this never happens, because there is always a need for institutions of knowledge, in one way or another. For example, people buying into the internet-crazy think that everything can be replaced by the Internet. Media companies (music, cinema, book publishing) were supposed to be dead at least a decade ago. It turns out that in reality they are bigger than before. What people forget is that the Internet doesn't create things by itself. Good movies will continue to be produced by specialized companies, good books will continue to be published by specialized publishers, and so on. Only the technology changes, but human needs continue the same. Similarly, universities will be just fine in a century or more. They will adapt to the new technologies and continue to produce knowledge as they have done before.

kijin 11y ago

Those South Koreans were probably carrying brand new Samsung phones under their jacket. Just as potent as a pair of Kalashnikovs, which their Northern brethren prefer ;) In certain parts of the English-speaking world, universities are not dying, they're actually flourishing... but only because of a major influx of Chinese and Korean students willing to pay those exhorbitant out-of-state fees. And since most of those valuable foreign customers want to study business, finance, medicine, law, and a handful of STEM fields, universities have no choice but to cater to their demands. Some programs in the West Coast are half Chinese by now. Those kids probably pay 80% of the gross fees, too. On the other hand, when I took English or philosophy, I was often the only Asian in the class. But China is growing very fast (slower than before, but still fast), and Korea has all but done catching up with the rest of the developed world. Other countries might then supplant China as the largest supplier of international students, but they'll grow up, too. Sooner or later, all the international students who are propping up American universities will decide that they'd much rather spend their dollars elsewhere. When that last bubble bursts, even STEM fields will not be immune from a massive shock, and heavily subsidized humanities departments will be in real trouble this time.

jqm 11y ago

Some people think debt or decadence will be the end of the West. I personally believe it will be bureaucracy.

djulius 11y ago
Couldn't agree more. For universities, it is the dictature of the accountants. Every penny spent must be checked by an almost infinite hierarchy of accountants/manager who have no experience of the core tasks of a university (teaching/research). More precisely, I don't know if the hierarchy is finite or not, or if there is a termination problem in the process. Sometimes penny checking finishes, sometimes not.

hanief 11y ago

It reminded me of a quote from Hemingway's book, The Sun Also Rises: - “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked. - “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

nbourbaki 11y ago

I think the crux of the problem lies in the sheer number of students who attend college today; as the author points out: "It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, ... [today] that figure has risen to around 50 percent..." The reality is that teaching critical thinking doesn't scale nicely, because it requires an intimate dialogue; the process of rigorously critiquing ideas is a two-way street. In today's institutions, where professors lecture to classes of 200+ students, this simply isn't possible. In the article, the author claims universities have abandoned their roles as centres of critical thinking due to capitalistic forces. While I think this is true, I also believe that our collective attitude towards university shares the blame. Unfortunately, college is seen as the only legitimate path to success after high school. If students had more opportunities to explore their interests, instead of being funnelled into university, perhaps universities could re-establish themselves as institutions where critical discussion takes place.