…is the natural product of our educational system.
Fortunately, as noted there, the pandemic has done much to pop that bubble, and make people rethink the whole thing. To the degree that government funding is involved, we need to start funding students, not systems.
[Update a while later]
Woke colleges are an assembly line for conformity.
“And the people in the houses
All went to the university,
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same…”
The current line of Universities were started in 1088 A.D., at the University of Bologna.
Their purpose was to turn out people suitably educated to replace the numerous clerics, loyal to the Pope, who were running as much as half of the government of the German Holy Roman Empire. This worked, and other rulers imitated this University. This began to allow governments to ignore the Papacy’s increasingly used tactic, of excommunicating rulers that disagreed with them, on a wide range of topics. By 1500 A.D. these “clerks” had replaced enough people who were loyal first to the Pope, with people loyal first to the local ruler. It is no oddity that “The Reformation” began to be supported by local rulers about this time, bringing in State Churches under State funding and control.
Universities have *always* been about the power of the State. The employer of the largest number of their graduates, which is what sets the demand for their services, is the State, whether at Federal, State, or Local levels. It is *no* surprise that such institutions gave birth to ideological experiments in the last 150 years that increase the percentage of the resources of society controlled by the State, or that they do so in direct opposition to the most *competent* published definition of the industrial revolution:
“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
Instead, academics began, no later than 1920, moving toward the Engels definition of the industrial revolution, talking about distractions like steam engines, railroads, and mass production lines, whose productivity under government direction does not come close to that of market allocation of resources. They do this, IMHO, because it is the best way to guarantee their continual bloat, until no one can get a job without a University degree, the State won’t hire someone who is not certified by the Universities, and the State is the only employer.
Woke colleges are an assembly line for conformity.
Wokedness has nothing to do with it. This has *always* been true. I remember the running (half)joke when I was in school back during the time of the “ancien regime” when the war in Vietnam was still relevant, when my university was referred to as the “diploma factory”.
Seen online last weekend, “The closing of universities this fall is more likely to reduce the spread of communism than it is to stop the spread of COVID.”
Communism has a much higher mortality rate than Covid.