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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.
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.
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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