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Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 21, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Two questions about American colleges:

  1. What are some societal roles universities are uniquely well-suited to fill but just… aren’t, for whatever reason? As someone in the arts, the committed development of new/avant-garde professional work comes to mind.

  2. Based on your moral values, where do you draw the line of how the various strata on a university campus (student, faculty, postgrad, admin, etc) can/should get romantically involved with each other? University dating policies have become vastly more restrictive/protective (based on your value system) in the last decade, especially those between the paying customers and the staff serving them. Is it simply a question of the power dynamic? Age of consent? Moral integrity?

Universities should be vastly reduced in size and should mainly consist of men. Any loan system should be abolished but the tuitions should be at a level regular middle class family can pay for their children, or, without family support, one should be able to afford with some part-time plus summer-full-time job. Bureaucracy for choosing research subjects and getting funding should almost entirely be abolished.

Until these things happen universities anywhere will simply be nothing more than rent seekers on a piece of paper that promises but rarely delivers upper-middle-class status, adult daycare, enforcers of bureaucratic power on the elite-minds, and speed bumps on actual science and technology development.

What's with the men-only part? I am sincerely asking for clarification because I am not sure of the rationale.

“Mainly consist” was the term I used. It’s a combination of a couple reasons:

  • Female heavy degrees are almost always fake subjects polluting scientific integrity and draining resources. I have witnessed many times in my university life that the worst and most pointless courses/degree specialisations in even the hardest science tracks were devised with the expectation to attract more females. Fields like sociology, psychology, art history etc speak for themselves. Closing down these faculties or only restricting them to rigorous academic work would immediately cut down female population in universities severely.
  • Keeping the intelligent female population of your nation in useless education until late 20s, wasting away the most fertile years of their life is just incredibly bad policy.
  • There are very few significant achievements in human history that doesn’t originate from a tight-knit group of competent men heavy on camaraderie and ambition. Adding females to the equation always erodes this spirit.
  • Endless education as a tool to escape “real life” is a problem afflicting both sexes but especially women fall very hard into this trap. Female brain is much more sensitive to approval from authority figures and the education system with its clear reward feedback loops seems to be almost addictive to a sort of high achieving woman.
  • Women typically makes a lot less use of their education even when they enroll in more sensible degrees. They are easily spooked by competitive environments, they are tricked by social validation that comes with many low value professions, and they take long maternity leaves and work part-time because they enjoy to be with their family more than at work.
  • Female style of office politics is absolutely poisonous to academia. When women takes over administrative positions at sufficient numbers, academic research just gives way to conformism and group-think.
  • The fact that almost every above-average women in the society spends their prime pair bonding years at university campuses, and afterwards develop a refusal to date anyone below their education status, makes university de-facto mandatory for any men with some ambition. There is no reason why someone needs to go through a 4-year degree to become a film director, computer programmer or sales manager. People historically didn’t go to uni for such jobs. But if you try this today you are very likely forfeiting your mate prospects. Even men who don’t want/need uni education to be very successful, have to enter a good one and drop out to gain enough social clout.

I can really just go on. All of these are obviously gross generalisations and often apply to many men in some degrees as well but in the end these effects add up in a big way.