Megan McArdle discusses a tough problem. I don’t know what the solution is, but it seems to have happened since the sixties, so to figure out how to fix it, we need to examine what broke it.
11 thoughts on “Unbiasing Academia”
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Megan McArdle discusses a tough problem. I don’t know what the solution is, but it seems to have happened since the sixties, so to figure out how to fix it, we need to examine what broke it.
Comments are closed.
It’s a tough problem only if you assume the Marxist left has spent the last 3 decades acting in good faith, and subsequently we, the loyal non collectivist opposition should respond in kind.
I could be wrong, but I get the sense the problem started earlier than the sixties. The sixties is when the Marxists made their big push, but I think the system was vulnerable to a take-over before that. Sort of like how the Maginot Line was vulnerable to flanking for decades before Hitler exploited that vulnerability.
I’m guessing what “broke” the system were the massive post-WWII changes that began with the GI Bill.
Pre-WWII college was very much an elite instituion, and the purchasers of its services were wealthy, astute purchasers who were educated themselves (often with private tutors, or elite boarding schools based on the Eton model) and could tell the difference between a scholar and a “gender studies” huckster. But then the Billy-Bob’s of America (“First person in our family to go to college!”) started attending, and they attended for cheap or on Uncle Sam’s dime, and their parents didn’t know Shit from Sherlock. All they knew was that it was “College”, and they were so proud.
The massive built-out of new colleges and campuses to meet this new demand meant massive hiring, and uninformed purchasers meant that the deans could lower their standards in the hiring process. They didn’t need real scholars, just someone who could run a 101 survey course. But eventually these bad hires made tenure, and eventually made it to the hiring committee.
That’s my theory anyway.
I think some of the problem can be traced to the draft deferrals many people got by staying in college dueing the Vietnam era. They stayed in school, got a lot of degrees, and ended up being hired as faculty as colleges rapidly expanded during that timeframe.
Why fix it now? Let the bubble burst and fix the one-third or so of academia that survives.
Nothing surprising here. Fredrick Hayek covered this issue in his book, the “Road to Serfdom” Its basically self-interest.
Who do you think the experts will be that replace the market as a decision mechanism in a government controlled system? The experts at the “elite” universities. As he noted in his book he was basically acting irrationally since as a well known economist at a elite university he would be in a decision making position, and have much more power and prestige if socialism replaced the market based economics.
And no, it won’t disappear if funding for higher education disappears. Instead it will only concentrate higher education at the elite schools like Harvard, Yale, etc. that have such huge endowments they are immune to such winds of change and are the most socialist. Its the for-profit and regional schools where diversity has more of a chance of furnishing that will disappear.
I dunno, Brock. Students and professors were in the forefront of the October Revolution, and manned the barricades in Paris in 1848. It may just be the nature of the beast, you know? The university is our last remaining outright feudal institution, and socialism can easily be seen as feudalism in which the manor encompasses an entire nation-state. (Note the low social mobility — proles do not join the Inner Party after all — the emphasis on rights and obligations up and down and relative contempt for cash transactions between equals, the intense hostility to individual liberty and the merchant class, the ubiquity of moralizing dogma, the obsession with dividing the pie fairly versus any notion of growing the pie.)
“But then the Billy-Bob’s of America (“First person in our family to go to college!”) started attending, and they attended for cheap or on Uncle Sam’s dime, and their parents didn’t know Shit from Sherlock.”
Just because someone is born poor or in “Billy-Bob” America, it doesn’t mean they should not be allowed to attend college or that they are incapable of performing.
“Pre-WWII college was very much an elite instituion, and the purchasers of its services were wealthy, astute purchasers who were educated themselves (often with private tutors, or elite boarding schools based on the Eton model)”
There is not a gene that makes rich and socially well connected people smarter than the rest of humans.
There are too many examples of people who were born into abject poverty and went on to be titans of industry or make significant contributions to science for anyone to believe that college should only be available to the rich and well connected.
If that is not what you were getting at, then I’m sorry for the misinterpretation.
“Allowed to attend” is not the problem, rather the issue is who should pay for attendance. It’s a return on investment calculation. Markets are designed to do this. Governments not so much. We should return to the model where you pay for your kids and I pay for mine and I mean K-whatever. What we have now is overproduction due to subsidy by the government. Basic economics.
Markets also give us scholarships for talented people born into poorer families.
I don’t think the solution to oversupply is that only rich people should get to go to college. If there is an oversupply, then that means we have a jobs shortage and a better way might be to create more jobs.
If however, the problem is that college grads are lacking in certain skills, the problem doesn’t lie with how college is paid for or whether or not the Billy Bobs get into college. The problem is what is being taught and perhaps teacher’s expectations of students.
It has absolutely nothing to do with ‘only rich go to college.’ It has to do with a lack of checks and balances which leads to a tipping point in hiring.
The teacher temperament [ENFJ] likes things settled and organized. This is not the same as the scientist [INTJ] which puts truth above all else. The commandant [ENTJ] wants structure and control of other people.
Institutions would tend to get the type of people that like to control others. The idea of a free thinker would be like a terrorist to them.