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Academia will not reform itself and will not stop trying to overthrow the government, constitution and society that produces and funds it. They will at some point be brought to heel, either by the government or the people. Some president sooner or later will realize all the money and land being sucked up by organizations of useless traitors and fake "scientists", and just take it. That is, if the people don't turn up with pitchforks first.
Whenever and however that happens, exactly nothing of value will be lost. Academia is underwater morally, politically and scientifically. It is fundamentally compromised and incapable of even describing the problem. The above report is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
No, whatever is done about academia will cause lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research.
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.
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.
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.
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