I'd say, with a few exceptions (including the fact that you could carve out a few classes on each toxic campus), we no longer really have universities. We have criminally expensive daycare centers for the weirdos, the ignorant, and the mental defectives. That's the faculty and staff. I'll allow others to talk about the students.
I always push back a bit on this line. I know where it comes from, and a thousand examples can be offered to justify it, but for my part I’ve spent a lot of time in college and I’ve never failed to find great teachers and solid programs for which I was deeply grateful. I studied Hebrew Bible under one of the leading scholars in the country and got a firsthand experience, through direct interaction, in his theories and methods. I took Attic Greek 101 from one of the main authorities in Greek comedy and 102 from the (at he time) editor of the leading archeological Journal in America. As @Stone Age Herbalist pointed out today in his latest essay, there are a lot of great things happening in universities despite all the genuinely bad stuff. There’s a revival coming; it won’t look exactly like what came before, but I have no doubt it will be better than what we have now.
I always found good teachers, too. But although I am out of the uni world now, I have friends and family that are still in it. Nothing they've told me makes me think there is hope for turning this around. A close relative who is a dean of a sane department in a "christian" uni has reinforced how poor the quality of thinking is, how *very* bad the decision making on who to hire and why, and how very little students are getting for their massive investment. We sent one son to what we thought was a top quality christian college only to find out that they were just as demented there as everywhere else (with the exception of a few great teachers that he loved). I think people are better off educating themselves and taking the odd class here and there online. There are many fine adjuncts but the quality of the tenured faculty is not good in too many cases. It's the old thing about how A players always want to hire A players. But B players always want to hire C players.
It seems so odd, to blame *schools* for the lack of reading.
When I was in school, I read 3, maybe 4 whole books, as assignments. That's it. And yet. I read hundreds of books. Trashy SF and fantasy, mystery novels, true-life adventure stories, books on archaeology and horticulture, drawing and how-to books, encyclopedias of insects, plants, and birds, the entire Bible (because I was bored in Spanish class), Norman Cohn's *The Pursuit of the Millenium* (fascinating!), Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls (on which I wrote a paper, for 10th grade social studies, because why not?)... if the schools had never assigned me a single book, nobody could have *prevented* me reading them.
There are many more plausible things to blame for the decline in reading. Schools ain't it.
I blame the cost of bookshelves and the relentless electronic conquest of boredom.
I grew up in a house crammed to the rafters with books, and no TV. But now that I have a family of my own, I find shelf space the primary limiting factor. Five bookcases in our living room alone, and still we cannot approach my parents' levels of book-hoarding, and barely manage to keep our children supplied with reading material. We supplement with e-readers, but it's not the same.
"... electronic conquest of boredom" is the critical factor. Plus we are over stimulated at work by starting at blue screens all day, it induces an agitation that makes me quite restless. Reading after a long day at the keyboard can be a challenge.
Absolutely I have. There are many I have missed out on due to long hours and grind that I subject myself too. So I know that those habits from the grind have conditioned me away from cracking open the book and reading in a quiet room. I confess I fight an addition of the stimulation of background noise and “information” and the rush of dopamine from discovery of new information. The blue screen hours don’t help me in that respect.
The “Open Exam” was already invented hundreds of years ago in China and is required to enter civil service. That’s why they have smart leaders and we have dumb ones.
Me too. When I read about what University and Academia are supposed to be, in the likes of Josef Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture and Michael Oakeshott's "The Voice of Liberal Learning". It makes me nostalgic for a University that I never really got to experience. Don't get me wrong, I had a great college experience, all things considered. I added philosophy as a major in addition to computer science. Computer Science I studied purely for its utility, but philosophy I studied for the sake of learning and the love of knowledge itself. I just fell in love with the liberal arts. I feel like few people understand the actual idea of a university. Those on the left who want to use it to advance ideology, and those on the right who want to just be a way to level up and make more money.
When I dropped out of law school it wasn’t because I was a bad student or my grades were bad, it was because of the sheer disappointment and disgust I felt in the college environment, I vividly remember the moment I decided to drop out, the teacher of “history of law and power structures” asked the class to read just 4 books of the “Politica” by Aristotle, I had read that book before and anyone who has knows it’s a relatively short book…so I asked the professor in private why didn’t he asked the class to read the entire thing, it could even be read in one sitting or at most within a week, and he had given us 2 months to read only 4 short books of the work…he answered me with “if I tell the class to read the entire book no one will read it”, I remember thinking “so what? This is a university not a fucking social club just fail them in the subject” but I did not voice my opinion, that was the moment I asked myself what was I doing waking up at 4 am to be on time for college so I could spend my entire morning sitting still in a classroom that more resembled a high school than my idea of how academia was supposed to be like…I dropped out about a week after that.
What if there were a DE institution, say Universidad de Cristero, in which you'd be paid to teach highly motivated Christians of all ages around the world?
One day perhaps the money will drain out of academia and the only people who stay in it will be the ones that really want to be there Can't happen soon enough in my opinion.
Well done. JFK suffered from severe back pain from an injury he received during his service, but that makes his commitment to the physical fitness promoted in the video all the more remarkable.
My dad earned his PhD in history from North Western, left to go into real estate and development, so I grew up working on his construction crews and in the family business. I barely got a BA in German and Philosophy, got lucky and went into software development. My path is so different than Dad's, which makes it a challenge sometimes advising my 20 yr old son.
One of the sad things that has happened is we have discouraged so much experimentation and learning by trial by error in favor of recommendations and studies. As I call it, one way up the mountain approach. In my career, I was always at a disadvantage because I didn't have the same background as many I was competing with in my field, but that only forced me to experiment, read and research on my own. My poor wife will testify the years I spent always spending time on weekends, vacations etc trying to improve my skill. But I became really good at acquiring a productive grasp on new software languages, styles of programming an combinations of technology. I had to in a sense, in order to prove family wrong that I went into the wrong field.
In that respect, should my son say "Screw it, dad, I'm just going to work at X" I can't say that I would be worried for him. We homeschooled him until 9th grade, he went to private school, had 4 years of Latin, and the kid loves to work and is good at communication and sales. If some of the same professors and rigorous coursework were available like the challenges that I frankly turned way from at the uni in the 80s, I'd be upset and tell him to take better advantage that I did. Today I don't think I have a grasp on what college is going to offer other than a pure technical study.
Not sure I'm making sense, but your article trigger these thoughts so I'd thought I'd share. We clearly need to retool many of our institutions, they are not serving us.
John Carter does not look to revive the university, it seems. Nor do I. Didn't you muse on alternative educational frameworks a little more than a year ago?
Why not something like the Ancient (and Constantinopolitan) model of teacher as self-employed?
There's a lot of interesting points here, but was there ever a golden age when universities existed to educate the best and brightest, regardless of whatever social factors were valued in that day? Hardy was making this lament in Jude the Obscure. Even when they were all male, the most prestigious universities mostly existed to build social capital among young men from wealthy and influential families. Now sex and race (the right ones, of course) are alternative forms of influence, so we see universities selecting for that. It's not surprising that universities now won't seek out the kinds of smart anons who don't have or want any influence within the system - they never have.
There’s never been an age where the ideal of the university has ever wholly instantiated. Everyone in every period had something to complain about. But that gives me hope, because if it never was all that it could be, it’s also never failed despite its flaws.
I think there's still a lot that's good. I loved my time as a student - there were so many fascinating lectures, concerts, and art exhibits and each one felt like a window into a whole world that you could spend your life exploring. I've found it so crushing to be on the other side and realize what the university wants me to be now is a project manager/therapist/bureaucrat.
The last bastion of the life of the mind in Academia is the driven students pursuing independent studies.
Independent/directed studies have a much heavier reading load and it's basically impossible to hide having not read. Only the driven students do them, and the connections from working with professors is how you get places. The good-old-boy system and letters of recommendation and the grace of God are the only things keeping a few lights on in Academia.
The Oxford model is 1 on 1 tutorials with professors. 12 to 18 person seminars can still work. Beyond that, there are folks who don't belong and they've got folks who do to hide behind.
My alma mater, as of next year, will not allow any course to run with an enrolment smaller than 30. It's not hard to predict what that will mean for the Faculty of Arts. The end is nigh. The thing is, it doesn't even upset me anymore. I'm at the point where I think it would be kinder to cancel the arts programs immediately rather than let them desperately flail and thrash for several years.
I'd say, with a few exceptions (including the fact that you could carve out a few classes on each toxic campus), we no longer really have universities. We have criminally expensive daycare centers for the weirdos, the ignorant, and the mental defectives. That's the faculty and staff. I'll allow others to talk about the students.
I always push back a bit on this line. I know where it comes from, and a thousand examples can be offered to justify it, but for my part I’ve spent a lot of time in college and I’ve never failed to find great teachers and solid programs for which I was deeply grateful. I studied Hebrew Bible under one of the leading scholars in the country and got a firsthand experience, through direct interaction, in his theories and methods. I took Attic Greek 101 from one of the main authorities in Greek comedy and 102 from the (at he time) editor of the leading archeological Journal in America. As @Stone Age Herbalist pointed out today in his latest essay, there are a lot of great things happening in universities despite all the genuinely bad stuff. There’s a revival coming; it won’t look exactly like what came before, but I have no doubt it will be better than what we have now.
https://www.stoneageherbalist.com/p/a-mesolithic-slave-executed-in-neolithic
I always found good teachers, too. But although I am out of the uni world now, I have friends and family that are still in it. Nothing they've told me makes me think there is hope for turning this around. A close relative who is a dean of a sane department in a "christian" uni has reinforced how poor the quality of thinking is, how *very* bad the decision making on who to hire and why, and how very little students are getting for their massive investment. We sent one son to what we thought was a top quality christian college only to find out that they were just as demented there as everywhere else (with the exception of a few great teachers that he loved). I think people are better off educating themselves and taking the odd class here and there online. There are many fine adjuncts but the quality of the tenured faculty is not good in too many cases. It's the old thing about how A players always want to hire A players. But B players always want to hire C players.
I know I sound black-pilled but I'd just like to say that nothing would please me more than being wrong. And in the end, I know that God is sovereign.
It seems so odd, to blame *schools* for the lack of reading.
When I was in school, I read 3, maybe 4 whole books, as assignments. That's it. And yet. I read hundreds of books. Trashy SF and fantasy, mystery novels, true-life adventure stories, books on archaeology and horticulture, drawing and how-to books, encyclopedias of insects, plants, and birds, the entire Bible (because I was bored in Spanish class), Norman Cohn's *The Pursuit of the Millenium* (fascinating!), Forty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls (on which I wrote a paper, for 10th grade social studies, because why not?)... if the schools had never assigned me a single book, nobody could have *prevented* me reading them.
There are many more plausible things to blame for the decline in reading. Schools ain't it.
I blame the cost of bookshelves and the relentless electronic conquest of boredom.
I grew up in a house crammed to the rafters with books, and no TV. But now that I have a family of my own, I find shelf space the primary limiting factor. Five bookcases in our living room alone, and still we cannot approach my parents' levels of book-hoarding, and barely manage to keep our children supplied with reading material. We supplement with e-readers, but it's not the same.
"... electronic conquest of boredom" is the critical factor. Plus we are over stimulated at work by starting at blue screens all day, it induces an agitation that makes me quite restless. Reading after a long day at the keyboard can be a challenge.
But have you tried purchasing a quality bookcase lately?
IOW I have given up the Kindle, need the pages of a book to break that spell.
Absolutely I have. There are many I have missed out on due to long hours and grind that I subject myself too. So I know that those habits from the grind have conditioned me away from cracking open the book and reading in a quiet room. I confess I fight an addition of the stimulation of background noise and “information” and the rush of dopamine from discovery of new information. The blue screen hours don’t help me in that respect.
You can get literally hundreds of books at library sales for a hundred or so dollars.
It is electronics and the dearth of book culture outside of just collecting them like Booktok.
The “Open Exam” was already invented hundreds of years ago in China and is required to enter civil service. That’s why they have smart leaders and we have dumb ones.
True
The finest essay you ever wrote. Hands down.
The ending was beautiful, and I sincerely hope you become a Substack bestseller.
My other hope is I get there, but not sure how long that'll take or even how to do so. But either way, might have to keep grinding away.
Godspeed hope you graduate to that great achievement soon.
Thank you very much.
Non thank you, this is the sort of essay I’d love to print and keep with me for the rest of my days, and to re-read when sad or doubting.
I don’t know, it made me re-think things and consider my priorities and very self. So it was somewhat life-changing, so thank you for that Celaeno.
"I love universities. I love the idea of them. "
Me too. When I read about what University and Academia are supposed to be, in the likes of Josef Pieper's Leisure: The Basis of Culture and Michael Oakeshott's "The Voice of Liberal Learning". It makes me nostalgic for a University that I never really got to experience. Don't get me wrong, I had a great college experience, all things considered. I added philosophy as a major in addition to computer science. Computer Science I studied purely for its utility, but philosophy I studied for the sake of learning and the love of knowledge itself. I just fell in love with the liberal arts. I feel like few people understand the actual idea of a university. Those on the left who want to use it to advance ideology, and those on the right who want to just be a way to level up and make more money.
The Knuth, the whole Knuth, and nothing but the Knuth. so help me E.F. Codd.
Fantastic essay. Gorilla's on pcp there's a image to ponder
That made me think of the lyric from The Day I Tried to Live from Sound Garden:
The day I tried to live
I stole a thousand beggars change
And gave it to the rich
Inspiring. We can salvage this corrupted culture. Be the change where you are.
When I dropped out of law school it wasn’t because I was a bad student or my grades were bad, it was because of the sheer disappointment and disgust I felt in the college environment, I vividly remember the moment I decided to drop out, the teacher of “history of law and power structures” asked the class to read just 4 books of the “Politica” by Aristotle, I had read that book before and anyone who has knows it’s a relatively short book…so I asked the professor in private why didn’t he asked the class to read the entire thing, it could even be read in one sitting or at most within a week, and he had given us 2 months to read only 4 short books of the work…he answered me with “if I tell the class to read the entire book no one will read it”, I remember thinking “so what? This is a university not a fucking social club just fail them in the subject” but I did not voice my opinion, that was the moment I asked myself what was I doing waking up at 4 am to be on time for college so I could spend my entire morning sitting still in a classroom that more resembled a high school than my idea of how academia was supposed to be like…I dropped out about a week after that.
What if there were a DE institution, say Universidad de Cristero, in which you'd be paid to teach highly motivated Christians of all ages around the world?
I would be very interested.
One day perhaps the money will drain out of academia and the only people who stay in it will be the ones that really want to be there Can't happen soon enough in my opinion.
Well done. JFK suffered from severe back pain from an injury he received during his service, but that makes his commitment to the physical fitness promoted in the video all the more remarkable.
My dad earned his PhD in history from North Western, left to go into real estate and development, so I grew up working on his construction crews and in the family business. I barely got a BA in German and Philosophy, got lucky and went into software development. My path is so different than Dad's, which makes it a challenge sometimes advising my 20 yr old son.
One of the sad things that has happened is we have discouraged so much experimentation and learning by trial by error in favor of recommendations and studies. As I call it, one way up the mountain approach. In my career, I was always at a disadvantage because I didn't have the same background as many I was competing with in my field, but that only forced me to experiment, read and research on my own. My poor wife will testify the years I spent always spending time on weekends, vacations etc trying to improve my skill. But I became really good at acquiring a productive grasp on new software languages, styles of programming an combinations of technology. I had to in a sense, in order to prove family wrong that I went into the wrong field.
In that respect, should my son say "Screw it, dad, I'm just going to work at X" I can't say that I would be worried for him. We homeschooled him until 9th grade, he went to private school, had 4 years of Latin, and the kid loves to work and is good at communication and sales. If some of the same professors and rigorous coursework were available like the challenges that I frankly turned way from at the uni in the 80s, I'd be upset and tell him to take better advantage that I did. Today I don't think I have a grasp on what college is going to offer other than a pure technical study.
Not sure I'm making sense, but your article trigger these thoughts so I'd thought I'd share. We clearly need to retool many of our institutions, they are not serving us.
As long as you’ve inculcated a love of learning the problem, such as it is, will resolve itself.
By "X" I meant "Company XYZ". Most likely you understood that - Elawn has taken over letters of the alphabet :)
" We can work together to create new institutions for education and preservation of culture. We can build intentional communities around them . . . ."
Where do we sign up?
John Carter does not look to revive the university, it seems. Nor do I. Didn't you muse on alternative educational frameworks a little more than a year ago?
Why not something like the Ancient (and Constantinopolitan) model of teacher as self-employed?
There's a lot of interesting points here, but was there ever a golden age when universities existed to educate the best and brightest, regardless of whatever social factors were valued in that day? Hardy was making this lament in Jude the Obscure. Even when they were all male, the most prestigious universities mostly existed to build social capital among young men from wealthy and influential families. Now sex and race (the right ones, of course) are alternative forms of influence, so we see universities selecting for that. It's not surprising that universities now won't seek out the kinds of smart anons who don't have or want any influence within the system - they never have.
There’s never been an age where the ideal of the university has ever wholly instantiated. Everyone in every period had something to complain about. But that gives me hope, because if it never was all that it could be, it’s also never failed despite its flaws.
I think there's still a lot that's good. I loved my time as a student - there were so many fascinating lectures, concerts, and art exhibits and each one felt like a window into a whole world that you could spend your life exploring. I've found it so crushing to be on the other side and realize what the university wants me to be now is a project manager/therapist/bureaucrat.
The last bastion of the life of the mind in Academia is the driven students pursuing independent studies.
Independent/directed studies have a much heavier reading load and it's basically impossible to hide having not read. Only the driven students do them, and the connections from working with professors is how you get places. The good-old-boy system and letters of recommendation and the grace of God are the only things keeping a few lights on in Academia.
The Oxford model is 1 on 1 tutorials with professors. 12 to 18 person seminars can still work. Beyond that, there are folks who don't belong and they've got folks who do to hide behind.
My alma mater, as of next year, will not allow any course to run with an enrolment smaller than 30. It's not hard to predict what that will mean for the Faculty of Arts. The end is nigh. The thing is, it doesn't even upset me anymore. I'm at the point where I think it would be kinder to cancel the arts programs immediately rather than let them desperately flail and thrash for several years.
Provocative and entertaining to read as always.
Thank you very much.