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No, whatever is done about academia will cause lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research.
Given the rate at which things are going, it seems likely that whatever will be done about academia won't actually be done until 2040 at the earliest. The demand for medical and engineering research seems likely to be high enough such that, with the advent of AI and the self-discrediting of academia over the next 14 years, that lots of medical and engineering research will happen in non-academic institutions, allowing for collateral damage to be minimized as the research can still continue at those places. Having that research be done through proprietary or intellectual-property-protected means is probably the biggest downside.
There's something darkly funny about the prospect of the profit motive of the cynical businessman being far more valuable than the truth motive of a good-faith academic for producing actual knowledge or useful research.
Darkly funny? That is just obvious reality, and always has been.
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This is ultimately the lesson that needs to be properly taught as to why capitalism outperforms the alternatives. The profit motive, or greed if you prefer to phrase it in a negative way, is not in and of itself good for society, but it is reliable. Which is why it is a good platform to build upon, to align incentives with goals that are prosocial. Fear is the closest alternative, which is why regimes that reject capitalism will tend to reach for fear as their source of motivation for prosocial actions. It's not perfect though, and its inferior to greed; when abused the stick loses its sting. But "truth" is so far off that it's hilarious to think anyone serious would think it could do the job, especially when profit, power and influence are on the table for the taking if you were just bend your principles. And you won't even notice you are bending them, your brain will make it very easy to believe that "truth" aligned with whatever your employer wants to hear, whatever your political tribe wants to hear, whatever your peers want to hear.
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Scams like Theranos aside, you generally need something to sell to make a profit, and you need something that at least sort of kind of works to get people to actually buy it most of the time. Or as Ghostbusters put it:
"Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn't have to produce anything! You've never been out of college! You don't know what it's like out there! I've worked in the private sector. They expect results."
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Damn, what do you think might happen? Will quality of research get so bad that half of all studies won't replicate? Will doctors start pumping kids full of hormones, and chopping off body parts for no reason? Will AI engineers allocate significant resources to making it more stupid?
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It isn't my sense of things that academia contributes much to medical and engineering research. Maybe Johns Hopkins and MIT do, but not "academia". 99% of universities produce exactly nothing of any scientific, cultural or literary worth.
I don't know about medical, but for engineering, the competitiveness level for professorships is so high that there is quite a lot of talent distributed pretty widely. If one looks around for, I don't know, top quantum researchers, you might be surprised how widely you'll find them. There's still a lot of garbage being published, sure, but that's more a product of the incentive structure demanding more more more in terms of publications. Moreover, while academia hasn't been entirely immune to the general homogenization effects that happened to much of the rest of society, there are still somewhat distinctive flavors that can be seen. For example, (being a bit reductive here), one could say that there's something of a "Berkeley way" of approaching learning problems that is more distinctive on the west coast. Obviously, some of their successes filter over to other folks, but they have sort of a different mindset (purely technically speaking, not about their weird political bubble).
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Do you think such damage could plausibly be within three orders of magnitude of the damage the current system has recently produced?
If "lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research" is a problem worth considering, maybe it behooves the system to fix the problem in a more discerning and deft manner, rather than simply allowing it to fester to the point that outside intervention becomes inevitable? And if the system is constitutionally incapable of fixing the problem... what is there to do but simply accept the costs?
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Doubtful - things that provide real value will be continued elsewhere, in corporate R&D labs if needed. The real losers would be expensive but legitimate research with no practical application, like particle physics or astronomy.
What constitutes 'real value ' and 'legitimate' research to you in this statement? Presumably not poetry or history.
Real value in this context means that it produces return on investment in a straightforward way. Legitimate research reveals new facts about material reality.
This is straightforward but it also assumes that research that does not produce an immediate "return on investment" or immediately reveal "new facts about material reality" is illegitimate, and I would suggest that that is a fairly strong overstatement. Consider archeology, paleontology, linguistics, literature, history, even some types of math. Presumably you would not consign all these to the flames.
No I wouldn't, I was just saying they would be unlikely to survive as corporate R&D efforts.
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Poetry and history can certainly have real value and legitimate research. I am not confident that academia is outputting any appreciable quantity of real value and legitimate research on these subjects, relative to the value it consumes to "study" them. Then again, Poetry and History are not my direct area of expertise.
I am an artist. I am very interested in encouraging my kids and their numerous cousins and young people I encounter generally to pursue art as a skill and even potentially a career, because I find it very rewarding and think they might as well. I would never, ever encourage them to engage with the academic art world in any way, and will actively discourage them from "studying" art at conventional educational institutions, and certainly not to pay those institutions to teach them how to be an artist. My personal experience with those institutions was woeful, and I've seen no evidence since that my experience does not generalize.
I'll admit mild surprise at your very seemingly visceral hatred of academia (see "Nuke and pave.") This could be based on your own bitter experience, or on reading articles such as the one in the OP. I'm not sure. I personally doubt stats on how many academics are conservatives if we're relying on self-reports, for a variety of reasons. (I do not contest the assertion that at least in the US academia is largely ideologically captive to left-wing sensibilities--smugly so. This is one reason I doubt the self-reports. I don't think this is necessarily true worldwide.) I have to assume some hyperbole here, though I am aware that a lot of people who did not themselves attend university feel like we could just raze them all to the ground and so what. I have friends back home who I suspect think this. The law of unintended consequences seems to loom large in such a scenario.
See the expansion above.
...I think I should probably generate fewer open-ended grievance rants. I guess there's the question of my personal experience and interaction, and then there's the question of general observable data. Put another way, are they good at teaching, and are they good for society?
Personal experience is a big part of it: I've been taught, and I've observed those close to me being taught, and I've worked at low levels in the system helping teach, and I've taught on my own outside the system. I've worked as a professional artist for near two decades now and was a struggling artist trying to break in for a half-decade before that, and that whole time I've been trying to learn as much as possible. To reiterate the edit above, I would never suggest that anyone I care about pay money to a university to teach them to be an artist, any more than I would recommend that someone I care about join a multi-level marketing scheme or invest in NFTs. The mismatch between value burned to value received is just too wide, even without accounting for the ideological contamination. This is the part of academia I know the most about, and I think maximalist-negative assessments of this area are entirely warranted.
Second-hand experience is also a part of it: I have professional academics in my immediate family who I'm close to, who are wholly committed to the current system, from which I can gain insight into a contrary perspective. I know they are good people who have dedicated their lives to excellence in their profession, who care deeply about doing a good job, who believe deeply that they are fighting the good fight, who have likewise spent decades straining to learn and improve, to do a good job. The stories they tell me and the answers they give to the questions I ask about how that fight is going are not encouraging.
Observation is a very big part of it.
Student loan debt is somewhere around two trillion dollars, and student loan forgiveness is a live political issue. The strongest argument for the existing system, by a very wide margin, was that it generated prosperity by equipping its students for success in the modern economy. That justification is incompatible with the apparent necessity of writing off all the student loans we shoveled into the pockets of those institutions. We can observe that their costs have spiraled without apparent end. We can observe that their capacity to achieve the goals that justified those costs appear to be chronically declining. They are very bad and very arguably getting worse at the jobs we pay them to do. But on the other hand, they are fantastically good at generating vast pools of toxic ideology which they then pump directly into our society's memeplex, with disastrous consequences for everyone.
You mention history: the most significant output of historical academia in the last decade or so that I'm aware of is the 1619 project. I think this is a very bad output that has made the world a significantly worse place in ways that can be directly measured by counting specific dead humans. A runner-up would be the supposed child graves "discovered" in Kamloops. My assessment of other outputs from the field leads me to conclude that this is probably a reasonably representative example of what we should expect from the field, and indeed from most fields generally. It seems to me that a large portion of every dollar Academia receives is going to go to generating more of this, and things like this, and things even worse than this. There are a lot of other examples, spread very widely over academia as a whole. I never got around to writing a post about the academic lady, prestigiously positioned at a prestigious university in charge of a grant worth the better part of a million dollars, discussing in a publicly-posted interview how important it was to not report abuse of black children by their families to the authorities.
There's more. There's so, so much more.
Coming to this late, but like @George_E_Hale, I find your thesis both persuasive and not, because you accurately identify the rot in academia and yet cherrypicking the worst and most woke activists to represent every single person who goes into academia for the love of history, literature, or journalism is rather unfair.
I think the problems with academia are multifarious and go well beyond "leftist capture."
I'd distill them down to the following:
Academia used to be for the wealthy. You had to be rich to be able to go to college to study Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery, and expect to be make a living afterwards. There were only so many professorships available to teach more academically inclined scions of wealthy families. When that landscape changed (in the US, largely due to the GI Bill after WWII, but also due to the general liberalization and tearing down of class barriers that occurred after the war), the market didn't. Lots of people still thought studying Anglo-Saxon poetry or ancient Greek pottery sounded like fun; the number of professorships did not scale.
But for a while, academia could still coast, because the very fact of being accepted into university and graduating was a sign of intelligence and industriousness. In high school, I was still being told by school guidance counselors that "Lots of companies will hire you just for having a college degree; they assume you can learn." This was already becoming no longer true. I don't know if school guidance counselors still say this, but if they are, they're lying.
The reason for that is, well, a college degree was seen as the ticket to a good job. Therefore everyone should get a college degree. Therefore denying anyone the opportunity to earn a college degree was unfair. Therefore college should be accessible to everyone. I don't think we need to go over the many, many observable negative consequences of this. It's well-trod ground that touches almost every aspect of the culture war.
So, here we are. College degrees are largely seen as worthless (or a minimum barrier to entry), the government has shoveled money into ensuring everyone can go to college, and universities have eagerly sucked up all that money in the form of ever-inflating prices. And we have all kinds of bombs ready to go off.
The solutions are both simple and obvious, and completely infeasible. Do I agree with you that academia should be "razed to the ground"? Well, I think we should still make space in the world for a few scholars of Anglo-Saxon poetry and ancient Greek pottery. But maybe not so much space.
As a side note, I liked to draw as a kid (had dreams of becoming a comic book artist) but put down the pencils for decades (I went to college for "a good job.") Revisiting some of my old drawings, I realized I was both better and worse than I remembered. And recently got an urge to actually Learn Art.
I've watched a lot of YouTube videos from professional artists who largely agree with you that art school is pretty worthless. Art instruction, among other things, is more accessible than ever before. Free YouTube tutorials are abundant, but there are also online ateliers and coaches who are vastly cheaper than art school. Much like my language studies, I have found more benefit from online tutors and a bit of discipline in my free time than I ever got out of college classes.
The mechanical process explains why college degrees are increasingly common and the floor has crawled up; it doesn't explain why these groups take thousands of dollars a credit-hour and can't teach, and that's the part that's really damning. Yes, presumably some level of penetration of degrees means you'd be trying to teach people to learn who are constitutionally incapable of it, and there's some degree of capability or intelligence required to achieve harder capabilities, no small amount of which I recognize I don't have and may never have.
But then we get english majors that can't write a clear paragraph to save their lives, electronics engineers who've never touched a standalone transistor, so on. The old joke was that modern colleges were training people to become underwater basket weavers, but in the modern day, it's not clear they could do that. These aren't 140 IQ problems.
Nor does it explain the collapse for academics. These are supposed to be the people who care, and have focused, and been selected from the just-doing-it people.
I'm trying to write up the PubPeer equivalent of that big screed I had about the ballistics gel study a couple days ago, avoiding the political side of things, and focusing on just the typos and measurement results and non-reproducable output values and disclosure failures and clearly incorrect models, and it's longer than the culture war screed here! I keep finding new problems just trying to write the old ones in full detail. A good many are independent of the actual political disagreement, and a couple even undermine the political goal (if only by accident). And there's supposedly six adults working hard on this paper over a period of five years!
They made the decision that no one was going to look at their analysis with a skeptical eye. Tbf, that was a reasonable decision. But that says quite a lot about their entire ecosystem.
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George asked about history and poetry specifically; poetry is more or less equivalent to art and similar critiques apply before even approaching the political and social questions, but History has a credible claim to being a serious discipline in our present context.
I do not think I am cherry-picking. My claim: the most significant output of historical academia in the last decade or so that I'm aware of is the 1619 project, and the runner-up would be the Kamloops mass graves controversy. I don't think it's unreasonable to describe both of these as serious sociopolitical events that had notable direct impacts on our society, and that both emerged from and depended on History Academia to do what they did, and that both are understood both within and without the Academy to be Capital-H History.
The claim here is not that the 1619 Project is typical of the average consequence of academic historians; I would guess that average academic historians have little to no perceptible impact on society at all. The claim is that if you ask what Society receives of consequence from its lavish funding of History departments society-wide, these are two of the most significant results. If you disagree, what significant results do you see emerging from History Academia with greater positive impact?
It really is quite remarkable the extent that this is true. 2000-2016 was a true golden age, and seeing the proliferation of skill, knowledge and training was something that filled me with a profound sense of optimism at the time. Even know, in the shadow of AI, it's still not completely extinguished.
The argument I make to the academics in my life is that I love teaching. Education is a profoundly important part of human existence! From the moment we're born, we're learning every day, and the sharing and cultivation of knowledge and wisdom and skill is among the most valuable activities humans can engage in! The reason I'm so opposed to the current system is precisely because that system is doing such a fantastically bad job!!!
Again, I'm caught here between trying to avoid the appearance of a Gish Gallop firehose on one hand, and providing evidence for inflammatory claims on the other. I know an English Academic who teaches honors English classes. They routinely have students in the Honors English class who don't know how a paragraph works. This is in an extremely expensive private university! That student is actively, objectively being exploited by the university! No one cares!!!
...But ranting aside, congrats on getting into art! I've been on a learning kick off and on for the last two years or so, and heavily on for the last six months. Feels good, man! What're you aiming for at the moment? Got any pieces you can show?
Nothing worth showing yet. Right now I am going through some actual Fundamentals courses, learning all the things I never learned properly the first time around, like value studies, one, two and three point perspective, contours and negative spaces, sight sizing, etc.
I am way too old to pursue my dream of being a comic book artist, but I'd just like to be able to illustrate my own stories.
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I'd argue that you are cherrypicking here (perhaps unintentionally) to make your point. The 1619 project as I understand it was largely driven by media, not historians, in particular Nikole Hannah-Jones (a journalist). Now did it make a splash and influence the public sphere? Sure, but as NYT propaganda. I don't doubt some hacks took it into their history classes to further an agenda, but that's a corruption/subversion of actual historical academia. That's putting an agenda in a class, "People's History" style, not critical thinking. Or so I would argue. Even Beaulieu (an anthropologist) had her ground-penetrating radar comments taken by the media and misrepresented into the blowup about Kamloops. This reminds me of the Ebonics controversy of the 90s--linguists simply pointed out that AAEV/BEV had a noticeable grammar and set of consistent internal rules, that it was not a completely lawless, wild and woolly way of massacring standard English. This was contorted by media outlets into the notion that "linguists say we should teach Black English in schools." My point is that your issues (at least the ones you're listing) seem to be with the larger media contortions than academics.
I am not, again, suggesting that academia as we now know it is unbiased. I am suggesting the Nuke and Pave was way too strong, at least to my own sensibilities.
It is true that the project was initiated by journalists and the media apparatus, rather than by historians directly. It's worth mentioning in passing that Journalism is also an academic field, and one that Hannah-Jones is reasonably likely to be inducted into in the future, given the evident status resulting from her project.
Here is the 1619 project's bibliography. Pretty clearly, Jones drew heavily from "legitimate" academic and pseudo-academic sources (Kendi, Coates and similar, people it's not a good idea for an academic to disagree with) from a variety of fields, including history, in the production of her project. I am confident she was assisted in her project by many professional academics, including professional historians. She presented her project as history, and she was able to do so because actual historians provided her legitimized raw material and legitimized her output in turn.
Within the field of history specifically, people spoke out. James H Sweet, President of the American Historical Association, penned an article titled Is History History?. An answer to the title's question might be inferred by the abject apology that now precedes the article, in which he defends precisely zero of his previous points.
At least five other prominent historians were willing to speak out against it under their actual names, with the result that general descriptions note that it's controversial due to disputed accuracy of some elements of its narrative, making it indistinguishable from every other historical account ever written. In no way does this extremely limited pushback from within the discipline appear to have counteracted the 1619 project's effect on broader culture. The author has attacked those objecting to her project's lies as motivated by racism, and claimed that objectivity in History is impossible in any case and so her story is as good as any. Historians as a academic class appear to be smiling and nodding, or, at most, argue that this is a valuable contribution to the national conversation and the real problem is pushback from legislators.
Her project appears to have been accepted as history by large portions (supermajorities?) of the broader Academy itself, together with most of the rest of the knowledge-production apparatus outside academia proper, and through these channels has also been accepted by large portions of the public. It was subsequently converted into educational materials specifically for teaching history at all levels of education from grade school to University, and for this purpose was in fact adopted as formal curricula many teachers across many schools, and has doubtless heavily influenced the curricula and teaching of many, many more. It continues, to this day, to be generally considered a valid resource for teaching history, even at the university level.
...Given the above, how is the 1619 product not an output of History as an academic discipline, by which that discipline should be judged?
More generally, what is the purpose of History as a formal, credentialed, taxpayer-funded, status-laden academic discipline and sociocultural organ, in your view? What is the point of it, why is it valuable? There are always going to be autists digging for information about the past, synthesizing it down into coherence, and then encapsulating it for transmission in a narrative. I'm one of them, in my own modest way. Why is it necessary that this system in particular continue on?
My understanding once was that Historians generated a consensus understanding of the world we live in and how that world came to be, while simultaneously keeping that consensus as honest as possible by puncturing its self-delusions. I am quite convinced that the current system is incapable of performing such a function, as I believe examples like the 1619 project demonstrate.
Another argument might be that the system generates significant amounts of true knowledge, and that even if that true knowledge is shouted down and buried in the present, it is still possible to dig it up later and use it for the betterment of all. Unfortunately, it seems to me that the harm the system enables in the present and has enabled in the observable past, significantly outweighs any plausible potential benefit in the future. True knowledge can and will be generated outside the present system, and the scale of the harms appear to me to demand immediate redress.
Or perhaps the present system is about the process, not the observed ends. The important thing is to generate and maintain this lively, interesting, collegial intellectual ferment, where smart people get together and bounce zany ideas off each other, and we fund this in the hope that they'll hit on some bizarre, out-of-the-box idea that's super useful, something we'd never find by looking for it in a rational, systematic, spreadsheets-and-time-cards approach. And if this is the argument... You concede bias, but I do not think the term "bias" adequately encapsulates the scope of the problem.
And so on, and on. It is routine for Academics of all disciplines to call for ideological purging of people like me from the academy. It is routine for academics to express support for discrimination and exclusion of people like me from the academy, whether in polls or in their own public advocacy. I do not believe it is possible for my views or my values to receive a fair hearing in any part of the existing academic system. I do not believe it is practical for members of my tribe to attempt to join that system in hopes of reforming it from within. I do not believe that the system can be meaningfully reformed in any eventuality; Academics, collectively, have built the environment they wish to have and fully intend to maintain it, at any cost, while burning vast resources and generating considerable harms. The solution is not to ask them kindly to please not, nor to generate ineffectual mandates in the face of limitless resistance and bottomless malicious compliance.
The job we gave Academia was one of great import. They willingly accepted a sacred duty, and in my view they have willingly betrayed that duty about as thoroughly as it could possibly be betrayed. One of the patterns I've noticed in Moderate thinking is the ability to recognize that if bad choices are made, negative consequences are likely to result, but then when the bad choice is in fact made, to argue that the negative consequences they themselves predicted should nonetheless be restrained. My unwillingness to engage in such behavior is, I think, one of the things that marks me as an extremist. There have been no shortage of warnings to the Academy that if they continued to convert their system into a partisan war-engine for their tribe, the system itself would be in peril. They continued. I think it is time to actualize the peril. If you disagree, I'd be particularly interested in whether you disagree over where to draw the line beyond which the system must be dismantled, or if you disagree that there is such a line at all.
Your diagnosis is compelling. I think my concern is more with your prescription. I think reform is not impossible, for history or any number of disciplines. "Dismantling the system," as you put it, would have downstream consequences, and I suppose my concern is that these would mostly be negative. One of the usual complaints about youth (and Americans in general) is a lack of awareness of history--the country's, the world's. Would you agree with that criticism? If so would you suggest self-study is the way to rectify it, and not a better education system?
I do see great value in history as a discipline -- and reading widely and even widely different perspectives I think is part of that, and I'd suggest the role of a professor is to provide exposure to this. Banging one partisan drum is no better than banging another.
Your comment deserves a longer response but I've kept this dormant for a day and am currently on a train.
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Having taken a lot of art classes at lower level institutions, then are generally quite good!
They are not intellectual pursuits, not academia, and that is related to why they are good. Some that especially stood out include a wood fire ceramic program, which works with the forestry program to turn diseased trees and bricks into lovely pottery, printmaking programs, with metal plates, acid dyes, and generally nice and interesting old fashioned printing processes, and an art in the dark Northern Renaissance art history course. They're about the same level of rigor as things like biology for nursing, about median for the not very rigorous institutions they belong to. They also cost less than taking a community art course, something like $100 - $1,000 per semester, depending on the specific institution.
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In the UK it's exactly the same. I'm pretty sure I was one of exactly two conservatives in my cohort, and the other one 'came out' as Christian to me after four years of working with him every day. And that was in STEM.
I was thinking outside an Anglo or European context actually. I'm not surprised about the UK.
Ah, there I'm less sure. We had a lot of European academics and they were pretty much all left-wing or communist. Outside the Anglo countries and Europe I'm less sure, but does it matter? There's not many good universities left except the Asian ones and potentially the Indian Institute of Technology.
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