As we know, college people are all Leftists, and if Leftists were capable of seeing the skull-fuckingly obvious consequences of their actions, they wouldn’t be Leftists. But I think it’s actually more basic than that. The answer, I submit, involves the Dunbar Number [link], which I’m using as a stand-in for the network of personal relationships that defines any bureaucracy.
Leave your logical brain aside for a second — I’ll pause, to let you pound as many shots as necessary — and think like a chick. Declining enrollment numbers are just a line on a graph. Indeed, the students themselves are mostly an abstraction — professors hate teaching and avoid it whenever possible, which, thanks to grad students, research sabbaticals, and the like, is fairly often. But that radical-even-by-academic-standards lesbian? She’s right there. All the time.
If you’ve never been inside the ivory gulag, it’s hard to convey just how tiny and all-encompassing that world is, but I’ll try. Imagine you’re just out of school and living with two roomies (for the one or two young folks who might still remain among the readership: It was once considered a good thing to move away from home, so much so that even if they had the opportunity to live in Mom’s basement after graduation — even if it would make great financial sense to do so — young folks would endure quite a bit of deprivation in order to make their own way in the world. This often necessitated living in crappy apartments in a dodgy part of town with one or more roommates, for several years). Your roomies do what young guys do — sometimes their girlfriends move in; sometimes they move out; sometimes their friends crash on the couch — but here’s the kicker: Everyone involved does the same job at the same company, such that you’re effectively always at work. Anything you do at “home” gets brought into the office, because everyone you live with — and everyone you could potentially ever live with — is there.
Imagine living life like that. That’s the ivory tower.
Severian, “The Dunbar Problem”, Founding Questions, 2021-10-06.
March 22, 2025
QotD: The Dunbar Number in the ivory tower
Filed under: Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: DunbarNumber, Severian, University — Nicholas @ 01:00
No Comments »
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
