It’s a disaster. It’s hard to say which is worse, though: higher ed, or K-12 public schools.
7 thoughts on “Higher Ed After Six Decades”
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It’s a disaster. It’s hard to say which is worse, though: higher ed, or K-12 public schools.
Comments are closed.
It goes deeper than Professor Vedder states. As he said, he loves the University. The problem is that the University does not love us! Us being the Republic of the United States of America.
The University, as a social institution, is inimical to the concept of limited government. The University in the last 60 years has simply returned to its roots. The Universitat De Bologna was founded by the Holy Roman Emperor to solve a worsening political problem for the HRE of Germany. That was excommunication of Rulers by the Pope, in which case the half or more of their government’s clerks who were clerics, loyal to the Church and its Pope, would not even talk to the Ruler they had worked for.
Over the next 6 centuries, after 1088A.D., the State, as a social institution, was vastly strengthened by Universities training literate clerks, functioning reliably for the Rulers, to the extent that the State’s major social rival, the Church, was reduced to a purely spiritual role. The percentage of government clerks coming from the Church was drastically reduced, and was negligible by 1700A.D.
In this situation, even Universities supposedly independent of the State for funding, were truly few. The State was their largest and exemplary donor. Also, they found themselves with the State, at one level or another, as the largest market for their graduates, without which their own purpose withered.
US Universities seemed somewhat insulated from this by simple distance, until after waves of reaction against the continuing industrial revolution began to appear. 75 years later, by 1920, groups inside the university culture began to justify assaulting the market freedoms that made the industrial revolution work:
“When a society moves from allocating resources by custom and tradition (moderns read here, by politics) to allocating resources by markets, they may be said to have undergone an industrial revolution” Arnold Toynbee-1884
It was the movement of resource allocation, from politics of rulers, to market allocation, that made Universities friendly to boosting their single largest market, government. Without resources under political control, there are no resources for government clerks to keep track of, and without that, no need for government clerks, and without those clerks, a *very* large portion of their graduates could not get jobs, and would not come to University, either as students, nor donors.
From that point, Universities started finding more and more reasons to teach that one “cause” or another was vital to society, that “just happened” to require government clerks. The rest is basically details that justify the need for government clerks. By now, Administrators control Universities, not Faculty, and increasingly control content of courses.
Not only was the very definition of the industrial revolution massaged into something more friendly to government expansion, but now I am told that economic historians are being encouraged to regard the industrial revolution as a fantasy that justified those never-to-be-sufficiently-hated “capitalists”.
The vast differences in productivity, between pre-industrial and industrial society might well be given up, to justify political allocation of resources, through university-trained clerks. We are reminded how great those differences are when we look at the difference in costs between the politically allocated SLS launcher, and the market allocated Starship system. That difference is between $2.5 Billion per launch, and $2 Million per launch, with a payload differential between 70 tons and as much as 150 tons. That is a difference in productivity of over 2,600/1.
If we allow the University to continue to control the transfer of knowledge from one generation to the next, that difference is what we are giving up for all of society’s activities, not just spaceflight!
“From that point, Universities started finding more and more reasons to teach that one “cause” or another was vital to society, that “just happened” to require government clerks. The rest is basically details that justify the need for government clerks.”
This illustrates the expansion of DIE majors quite well.
Thank goodness we had a government clerk handy to oversee our funding of bat coronavirus research at a Chinese laboratory.
Ultimately, the failure of K-12 education s more important than the failure of college education. You can’t build a strong building on a shoddy foundation.
This is a really mixed bag. Even though our education system is heavily dominated by the Democrats at the federal level, there appears to be serious school by school or district by district differences, much as there always have been but with the added element of differences in Marxist indoctrination and adoption of Progressive Marxist pedagogy.
Some schools, even those that lean heavily into Progressive Marxism, still turn out students who are more or less educated. That is bad enough but the most damage comes from districts that are Progressive Marxist to the point of not measuring learning or who view learning as white supremacy. Someone mal-educated has a greater chance of changing as they get older than those who were never taught anything and who had to meet no expectations other than party expectations.
Would giving teachers more power have prevented this situation or get us out of it? I don’t think so but an administration that outnumbers teachers and/or students isn’t healthy either regardless of ideologies.
It is kind of moot anyway since the crazy teachers are on the same side as the respectable administrators. The teachers likely support giving administrators more power since they are all working for the same cause and the situation would be true in reverse.
If I might be the contrarian here just a bit. This entire Socialist/Marxist edifice only provides the infrastructure for the youth trying to be indoctrinated within such a system to rebel against it. Much like the counter-culture revolution of the 60s rebelled against the post WWII institutionalized military-industrial complex that linked higher education to the Pentagon through research grants this top-down socialism in our educational institution will eventually find their students rebelling against an institution that only promotes a worse society and standard of living not only for themselves but their children as well. We’ll see it a declining standard of living where the world turns elsewhere for cutting edge innovations and new ideas. I have hope that the populace may one day turn from the hierarchical University to the non-Universal trade school that exists to supply knowledgeable workers in a demand economy. Our kids deserve the opportunity to earn a living not a subsistence payment.
Tom Billings I think your analysis of the University system is spot on.