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Notes -
There's two answers to this question.
@The_Nybbler gave one, network effects and prestige make the "Harvard product" non-fungible.
The other is that to make a superior product; that is, a university that produces higher quality education than Harvard does today, is essentially illegal.
You'll recognize here the classic structure of oligopolies: make the brand not the product a requirement of policy, and add requirements to production that can't be easily scaled to prevent the entry of competitors. This is usually constructed in terms of "safety" but any excuse is valid so long as you can make sure that becoming a competitor is more expensive than buying you outright.
Social media has this problem too, and here maybe we can find a pattern for how institutional capture could work. Universities are vulnerable because their funding is sourced from the government and government backed loans. Rather than try to redirect the funds to new institutions, you could just turn the spigot off to collapse their value and buy the brand cheap in an austerity drive that allows you to fire 80% of the staff, in particular the political activists.
Short term I agree, it won’t work, but keep in mind that ATM, Theres a monopoly on university level job training. The old university system was all there was, and so they never faced much competition for post graduation job placement. If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates. Depending on the school and major the new academy doesn’t need to be that good to outpace the current university system. Most people coming out of the university today are probably less educated than high school graduates of the 1960s. They are not well-read, they don’t understand the scientific method (unless they happen to graduate in STEM) and don’t know how to do serious academic research or write logically coherent papers. Heck, even the professors seem to be less able to do serious academic work.
Does anyone actually want to hire a humanities degree holder? I can’t imagine anyone looking at the current crop and wanting them in any part of the business. They’ve mostly majored in being liberal, campus protesting, and becoming a litigation nightmare. If there were alternatives, they’d be completely unemployable simply because even minimal job-related competence (doing dispassionate research, doing the work assigned, staying on topic, and knowing better than to be a walking, talking bag of grievances all of which are based on something the company could be sued for) those people would be snapped up. Why hire a blue hair when Hillsdale grads can do better work and act like professional workers?
Therein lies the problem. Universities are not about education, they are about selection. Until you can reliably demonstrate you are getting better admittees than Stanford, Stanford will be better than you. And no one will agree to go to your school instead of Stanford until you show you can place them...
So the burn it down plan is the only plan that has a chance of working. Once people are dubious about going to the current universities because they cant take out loans to go there and no one else can either, so why bother? Then something else can spring up.
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Can you elaborate? I see the structural analogy, but how is it implemented in this case?
It's mostly down to CRA related Calvinball.
If you try and start your own university with, say, rigorously merit based admissions and no grievance studies departments, you'll instantly become a mostly east-asian lawsuit magnet.
Now, the way that the CRA is written, by the letter of the law you'd actually be more compliant than Harvard, but what matters isn't what the law says, it's what judges believe it says and how many lawsuits your organization can defend itself against until it shuts down.
In more operational terms, for your degrees to be worth anything you need accreditation, and accreditation bodies are controlled by your enemies. Granted, the Trump administration understands this which is why Trump signed April's EO that directs Secretary of Education Linda MacMahon to frustrate any accreditor that requires DEI initiatives and the like.
This is why I add "essentially", as usual in such cases, the hurdles aren't technically impossible to meet, just practically impossible.
Don't places like BYU and Liberty university kind of disprove this? I actually don't think this would be a failure mode. I think the right wing vs neutral would be a bigger problem. Anyway BYU is accredited reasonably well regarded and kicks out students for drinking, premarital sex and homosexuality I doubt a Motte approved right wing university would be more conservative then that.
I think the point is that if your institution is over a century old, like BYU, (cue Fiddler: "Tradition!") you can get away with a lot more than if you're starting something today. Liberty seems to do okay, but Bob Jones University has gotten a lot of litigation for its beliefs (which I personally don't subscribe to, not defending it here).
The problem is that you can't start century-old institutions overnight. Maybe the second-best time is now, but that's not a huge solace. I guess "find a vestigial existing one and wear it as a skin suit" could be done --- haven't there been a number of liberal arts colleges going up for auction in the last decade?
Didn't they both get into fundamentally the same trouble over bans on interracial dating? I thought the difference was that Bob Jones fought all the way to the Supreme Court but Liberty folded.
Liberty had racial restrictions? Are you perhaps confusing them for one of the small and actually-fundamentalist Christian colleges out there?
Googling "Liberty University interracial dating" finds multiple articles saying that it was banned in the 1980's, although only one is from a Wikipedia-reliable source (WaPo) with the rest being blogs and suchlike (including the official blog of Oral Roberts university bragging about how they were less racist than other Christian universities). There is also an article looking back on the interracial dating controversy on the Liberty University alumni magazine, which isn't clear if it was officially discouraged or formally banned. Google AI thinks there was never an actual formal ban.
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Thé motte wants a different kind of conservatism than BYU has.
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What the hell is ”CRA”? Googling mostly turned up Cyber Resiliency Act and something from Canada.
Civil Rights Act.
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