Quotulatiousness

February 21, 2024

“College attendance is our society’s only meaningful initiation ritual, and it thus assumes an existential importance that renders it near-impossible to replace until an alternative is found”

Filed under: Education, Health, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Johann Kurtz believes the modern university’s survival despite its increasingly irrational and counterproductive actions can be explained as the last modern example of an initiation ritual:

Harvard University Memorial Church.
Photo by Crimson400 via Wikimedia Commons.

Our understanding of the college system is incomplete. Until we correct this, we won’t be able to fix or replace the system.

First, consider a paradox: college attendance remains near all-time highs [Link], yet the majority of Americans no longer believe it is worth the cost [Link].

The college system seems irrationally resistant to declining value. We must therefore ask: is there an important non-rational reason for college attendance which we have failed to acknowledge?

I believe the answer is “Yes”. College attendance is our society’s only meaningful initiation ritual, and it thus assumes an existential importance that renders it near-impossible to replace until an alternative is found.

Our culture is historically anomalous in lacking explicit initiation rituals.

Mircea Eliade, the great religious historian of the 20th-century, defined initiation rituals as “a body of rites and oral teachings whose purpose is to produce a decisive alteration in the religious and social status of the person to be initiated“.

    In philosophical terms, initiation is equivalent to a basic change in existential condition; the novice emerges from his ordeal endowed with a totally different being from that which he possessed before his initiation; he has become another.

    — Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation: The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth

In Europe, fully expressed initiation rituals were common until the end of the Middle Ages, and in the wider world, until the end of the First World War. Now, they only persist in the West in the sacramental practices of devout Christians (baptism, confirmation, and so forth).

Once, however, these practices were of tremendous importance to us, as Eliade makes clear:

    To gain the right to be admitted among adults, the adolescent has to pass through a series of initiatory ordeals: it is by virtue of these rites, and of the revelations that they entail, that he will be recognized as a responsible member of the society. Initiation introduces the candidate into the human community and into the world of spiritual and cultural values. He learns not only the behavior patterns, the techniques, and the institutions of adults but also the sacred myths and traditions of the tribe, the names of the gods and the history of their works …

In the absence of local community rituals, the universities are a natural site for their replacement. These have always been religious sites, although the nature and expression of this religion has transmuted over time.

H/T to Bruce Gudmundsson at Extra Muros for the link and his additional comments:

This hypothesis accords with the argument, made often in this blog, that education and schooling are two very different things. At the same time, it suggests that one of the definitive purposes of Extra Muros, the encouragement of young people to eschew the conventional college experience in favor of a combination of practical pursuits and systematic self-tuition, may be a fool’s errand. After all, if four (or five or six) years of drinking second-rate beer from red plastic cups does for the office-bound folk of North America what fear-filled rites of passage do for members of the bone-in-the-nose set, then I might well be sailing against the wind.

Upon second thought, I find hope in the possibility that the parasite (or, to be more precise, the cancer) promoted by d’Angelo, Kendi, and company will soon deal the coup de grâce to its mortally-wounded host.

The coming-of-age ordeals of warrior tribes demand that boys who would be men prove possession of such martial virtues as courage and self-command. The rites-of-passage of the modern middle classes, however, require that postulants demonstrate a mixture of conformity, conscientiousness, and, to a diminishing degree, intelligence. (Readers familiar with the oeuvre of economist Bryan Caplan will recognize the source of this troika. However, it is worth noting that, while Professor Caplan will occasionally tip his hat in the direction of the campus-based building of basic brain-power, he devotes far more attention to the collegiate cultivation of the two components of Sitzfleisch.)1

The cult of Marx, Mao, and Marcuse demands complete compliance, not only with its basic tenets, but also with any changes in the party line that, from time to time, may occur. (I am old enough to remember the days when campus commies of the caucasian persuasion could don dashikis without facing charges of “cultural appropriation”.) Thus, those who sit at the feet of the acolytes of critical theory learn an art of great value to people who wish to thrive in a large organization, that of discarding the old hat, and putting on the new one, at just the right time. (Think, if you will, of the mid-level employees of the McDonalds Corporation, who, over the course of the last four decades, were obliged to alter their opinion of the McRib sandwich more often than they changed the oil in their cars.)

    1. Bryan Caplan, The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), pages 9-21.

February 6, 2024

The Sky People hold very different beliefs to those untouchable Dirt People

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rob Henderson says that the gap is “Grand Canyon-sized” between ordinary Americans and the Ivy League grads who cluster at the top of every progressive organization:

55% of Ivy League graduates believe that the U.S. “provides too much individual freedom” compared with just 16% of ordinary U.S. voters.

Back in 2019, as I was developing what became the luxury beliefs framework, I read a recently issued chapter published by Cambridge University Press titled “Why Are Elites More Cosmopolitan than Masses?”

Authored by a team of social scientists, this 2019 paper reports stunning gaps in political views and outlooks between elites and ordinary people in various western countries.

In the introduction, they suggest that elite attitudes are expressions of cultural capital. That is, the large gap in views between elites and everyone results from elites drawing symbolic boundaries between themselves and the provincial masses.

Indeed, another report found that 65 percent of Americans believed that the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good. This view is held across the board — across age, gender, race, political party, and ideology.

The authors of the 2019 chapter write:

    Mastering intricacies of gender and race relations discourse and behavior has become a marker for belonging to the cosmopolitan class, in a similar way that tastes for classical music and art were markers of bourgeois culture in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Interestingly, the researchers find that social background and ideological affinities account for elite similarities more so than educational attainment. This might be one reason why, despite obtaining the same degrees from the same institutions as many elites, I still retain an outlook reflective of my provincial upbringing.

Following my experiences in the Los Angeles county foster system, my adoptive family and I settled in a dusty lower-class town in the northernmost region of California—a place just as provincial as any rundown neighborhood in flyover country—where I spent most of my youth.

The authors of the paper measured the opinions of elites (those holding the highest positions in each sector) across various fields including politics, finance, academia, and media, as well as the opinions of ordinary people.

Relative to the masses, elites are more likely to agree with statements such as “We should do everything possible to fight climate change, even if it slows economic growth.”

And elites are more in favor of allocating authority not to local or national governments, but to global organizational bodies (e.g., the U.N.).

The researchers also found that elites are significantly more pro-immigration, as measured by the extent to which they agreed with statements like “When jobs are scarce, employers should give priority to people of [this country.]”

I thought about those results for a long time. Especially as I came across another study indicating that educated people are more likely to express prejudice toward immigrants who are described as highly educated, relative to less educated, and are therefore seen as job competitors.

Among university students, attitudes toward immigrants were most negative when the immigrants had a university education, and most positive when the immigrants had little to no formal education. It’s nice for the educated class when immigrants provide cheap hired help and open interesting restaurants. They’re less excited when immigrants are competing with them for the same jobs. If thousands of people with bachelor’s and postgraduate degrees from, say, China and India, were unlawfully entering the U.S. each day, my guess is current elite attitudes around border security would be very different.

In a way, it’s rather reassuring that the Sky People are still demonstrably human, based on the change in opinions when it’s their ox being gored …

February 3, 2024

QotD: The Postmodernist’s Dilemma

Filed under: Education, Quotations, Science — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If Leftists could see the obvious consequences of their own positions, they wouldn’t be Leftists. We know this. But since it’s their world, and we have to live in it as best we can, it helps to go back and spell out those obvious consequences from time to time. The biggest, most obvious one of all is what I’m going to call The Great Contradiction. It’s the obvious next step from the Great Inversion: If “whatever is, is wrong”; then all authority, everywhere, is illegitimate — which includes the authority proclaiming The Great Inversion.

We could also call it “the PoMo’s Dilemma”, since this stuff originated in the ivory tower back in the Sixties, and finally broke containment in the late Seventies. Most intellectual fads quickly become caricatures of themselves, but in their haste to get to the next hot new thing the PoMos decided to cut to the chase. Postmodernism started as a self-parody. Put simply but not at all unfairly, PoMo is the assertion for a fact that there is no such thing as a fact. There is no Truth, just “truth”. No eternal verities, just perspective, just discourse; it’s all — say it with me now — “just a social construction”.

I suppose we must give the early PoMos credit for having — in a thoroughly Postmodern way – the courage of their convictions. When Alan Sokal invited the PoMos to try transgressing the Law of Gravity from his twenty-first floor apartment window, the goofs from Social Text published a “rebuttal” to Sokal, informing him, a working physicist, that they, the English Department, understood physics better than he did. He meant it as a joke, but he was really right all along about the so-called “law” of “gravity”.

That was 1996. At that point, any sane society would’ve had the editors of Social Text dragged out of the faculty lounge and shot in the middle of the quad, pour encourager les autres. But of course we chose not to. And why would we? Being close to three decades deep into the Great Inversion by then, we got much barmier stuff than anything Social Text published in freshman orientation. Stick it to The Man, we were told, and don’t trust anyone over thirty …

Severian, “Hoist on Their Own Petard”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-19.

January 30, 2024

The foul “nudgers” are at it again at Cambridge

Filed under: Britain, Education, Health, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Christopher Gage reports on a recent fun-reducing experiment by paid psychological meddlers at Cambridge University:

“Wineglass” by quinn.anya is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 .

Researchers found they could “nudge” people into drinking less wine when they denied the unsuspecting blighters a large 250ml measure.

Last summer, these wholly well-adjusted people convinced 21 Cambridgeshire pubs and restaurants to offer only small or medium glasses of wine. The result left the boffins breathless. But sadly, not in the medical sense of the word.

When denied a large, vivifying glass of wine, the subjects drank eight percent less than usual, and the pubs didn’t lose any money — smaller measures cost more. Puritans: two. Oenophiles: nil.

The usual suspects cooked up this obscene waste of time and money. Professor Dame Theresa Marteau, director of the behaviour and health research unit at Cambridge University, boasts lurid form in control freakery.

Her previous studies read like an almanac of neurotic impulses. The mad mullah dreams of shrinking plates and sinking sodas. This finger-wagger-in-chief obsesses with the vinous, porcine masses and what they may slip into their faces when she’s not looking. Marteau chillingly laments that large wine glasses “increase the pleasure of drinking wine”.

The fundamentally nosey swear these are the first murmurs of Utopia. Next, they’ll bend boozing regulations into a truncheon to batter the gastronomic swine over its head. They don’t stop. First, they shrink the large glass. Then, the medium glass affects as the large. What happens next? Take a wild guess.

This is not the work of some rogue Colonel Kurtz. One Daily Telegraph writer seized on the study. Employing the presumptuous “we” beloved of oppressive minds, they offered tips to help us drink less, assuming we drink large wines only because we are weak-willed effigies desperate for professional helpers to show us what’s best for us.

Advocates of “nudging” drive themselves senseless over this psychological thimblerig. The potential to correct “undesirable” behaviour proves too great to resist. They are a species of featherless biped with which I share nothing but the right to a trial before a jury of my peers.

As I write, I’ve just returned from a five-mile jaunt with 33 pounds strapped to my back. Loading a bag with weights burns double the calories. Therefore, whatever I do after that trek is my business alone. On my desk is a large glass of Portuguese red blend. Beside that soul-tingling measure sits a smouldering, hand-rolled, menthol-tipped cigarette.

Why strangers stake their mental well-being on what others put into their bodies, I will never know. Why they wish I’d sit here choking on sparkling water and its vegetable equivalent — celery — I’ve not the foggiest of insights. All I do know, friends, is that I am not the one in dire need of a few sessions with a psychoanalyst. My professional advice: Seven letters. Vulgar slang. A phrasal verb rhyming with “duck cough”.

York University’s CUPE local apparently cribs their homework from the Völkischer Beobachter

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Media, Middle East, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

York University’s contract and part-time instructors are represented by CUPE local 3903, who’ve distributed an eye-openingly anti-semitic document with the (implied) order to interrupt normal tutorials and replace the content with Palestinian propaganda:

Detail from an official “toolkit” distributed to York University contract and part-time faculty which claims that their employer is complicit in “genocide” by the mere tolerance of Jewish groups on campus.
Photo by A Toolkit on Teaching Palestine

A new toolkit circulated to York University teaching assistants instructs them to denounce Israel at every available opportunity, even when it has no apparent relevance to the subject being studied.

“Let us collectively divert this week’s tutorials to teaching on Palestinian liberation,” reads the 15-page document circulated by CUPE 3903, the union representing York’s contract and part-time faculty.

The document adds that tutorials should be diverted to condemnations of the “Zionist Israeli state” regardless of the course that the TA is supposed to be discussing.

“It is a medical issue. An arts issue. A feminist issue. A society issue. A political issue. A cultural issue. A geography issue. An engineering issue. An architecture issue,” it reads.

The document is filled with claims denouncing Israel as a genocidal “colonial project”. Canada is treated much the same, and is referred to alternately as the “Canadian settler state” or “Turtle Island”.

The mere presence of Jewish groups on campus is also referred to as evidence of York University’s “complicity” in genocide.

The document denounces the existence of sanctioned “Zionist cultural institutions”, making explicit reference to Hillel, the world’s go-to Jewish campus organization. York is also called an accessory to genocide because of its research links with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The pamphlet even provides a script for TAs to read as they inform students that the tutorial will be cancelled in favour of becoming a “teach-in … for liberation.”

“Today, I open up our classroom to bring our attention on Gaza, to speak up and stand in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement, and contribute in ending Canada’s and York’s complicity with genocide and the settler-colonial occupation of Palestinian land and life,” reads one introductory line.

January 28, 2024

Adolescence is “a profoundly unnatural life-stage”

Filed under: Business, Education, Europe, Health, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Sarah Hoyt on the plight of the younger Millennials and the Gen Z kids in our over-supervised safety-at-all-costs culture today:

Child labour laws did generally get younger children out of dangerous places like mines, mills, and factories. Modern child labour laws instead keep young adults from gaining work experience in many cases.
Photo of pre-teen children working in a mill in Macon, Georgia in 1909. Photo NCLC.01581, Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons.

Mostly, it gets attributed to “kids these days” but unless you have kids, these days, you don’t know how they are bound. And even if you do, you might not realize it, because all you see is the infantilization of a generation, and not that they, themselves, aren’t the ones doing the infantilizing, but all those “good rules” and regulations and laws are doing it.

I realized about 10 years ago that my son’s generation was about 10 years behind where we were. In their mid twenties they were doing things we did in our teens. It was disconcerting. And even I had no idea why, other than too much regimentation in school, too much of a never end of button counting, and not enough room or freedom to think or be on their own.

Since then … I’ve seen more. And a lot of the reason they are younger than we were is that the entire world is geared not to let them grow up. I mean, let’s be glad that — unprepared or not — they’re legal adults at 18, or people would be denouncing them for walking alone down the street, without an “adult” at 25.

There’s also … adolescence is in some ways a profoundly unnatural life-stage, and more or less invented in the 20th century. In the past, sure, people were children, and people grew to be adults, but there wasn’t this protracted time period where they were adults in size and at least some ability, but weren’t allowed to be adults: they weren’t allowed to earn or spend, or make their own decisions, for years.

The earn or spend thing is important. Kids used to grow along with their tasks. Read Tudor or colonial memoirs, and you find four year olds looking after cows or horses, or learning Latin, or other unlikely things even for twelve year olds in our time.

Mom went to work at 10 and started getting a salary. It wasn’t much, and 90% of it went to her parents’ budget. But she was working, holding down a job, doing things that were maybe not at adult level, but could lead to it, eventually, if she applied herself. This was normal for her generation. In my own generation, amid the working class, most people went to work at 10. Heck, amid the middle class, most people went to work at 15 or so, after 9th grade. Were they more mature than the rest of us that went all the way to college?

I wouldn’t have thought that at the time, but yes, of course they were. Most of my elementary school classmates were married, with kids by the time my biggest worries were final exams. Of course, with my intellectual pride I looked down on them but now I understand they were managing a very difficult job, which at the time I could not have done.

I always feel stunned and shocked when someone says the kids should be “holding down two jobs like I was at 16” or “working to pay their way through college”. (That last is a giggle as it has two impossibilities. Finding a job that pays enough after college which has a lot of make-work expectations, and making a full-time middle-class salary, which is what college costs these days.) Two Jobs. At 16. The difficulties in giving work to 16 year olds, increasingly restriction of hours, etc. combined with chaotic scheduling in the only unskilled jobs remaining (mostly just retail) means that until recently none of them could find A job. Let alone two. And the recently was during Covid. I haven’t seen so many little 16 year olds cashiering, or serving at tables recently. And that’s because most people I’m seeing are around my age: I guess unemployment is biting hard.

But you know, all these strong rules against “child labor” mean that most kids hit 18 or, if they’re going to college, 22 or — more likely, as most degrees (remember make work?) are taking 6 or 7 years — 24, with absolutely no job experience. Which means their applications aren’t even looked at. Not seriously.

Honestly, almost every young person — particularly young men — I know who found a job, and is doing relatively well, did so through contacts. Through friends of friends. Through knowing someone.

This is a bad sign, because it’s how Portugal functions, and it is not in any way shape or form meritocracy, which in turn contributes to other things falling apart.

But more and more what I’m seeing is young people hitting their mid twenties lost, and doing this, and doing that, and trying this and trying that, and nothing ever gels. To make things worse, they don’t have the habits mom had by 10, because they haven’t been allowed to acquire them.

There was a similar generation — one, while here we’re well into two — in Portugal, where unemployment was so bad (the generation before mine) that most people weren’t “established” on a path till their mid thirties. I’d guess about half of them never got the knack of it: of the day to day of working, fulfilling the work duties, just … the unglamorous day to day that makes us adults.

QotD: Never depend on “surveys” for real-world issues

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There’s a reason “social science” is all horseshit, and that reason is: surveys. All of this stuff is based on surveys, and as it happens, I have quite a bit of experience of being on the receiving end of these. You see, back in grad school I was involved with a young lady in the Soash Department — I know, I know, but a man has certain needs, ya feel me? — and so I was always on call to take whatever goofy little tests they dreamed up, as a favor to her and her equally spastic hardcore Lefty friends. Anecdotes aren’t data, of course, but I’ve got a lot of anecdotes, and I can tell you — anecdotally — that there are two huge, self-reinforcing problems with these surveys: a) respondent pool, and b) design.

The respondent pool is, overwhelmingly, college kids taking them for class credit. Knowing what we know about Basic College Girls, who again are the majority of all college kids, is it any surprise that the results just happen to confirm the conclusions the slightly older, but no less Basic, Grad Student Girls were looking for? Throw in the design problem — questions about as subtle as “Do you think all races should be treated equally, or are you a monster?” — and you’ve got scientific proof that Liberals are good people and Conservatives suck.

Severian, “Is vs. Ought II: Moral Foundations Theory”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-20.

January 27, 2024

Modern academics “were perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains the behaviour of every other species on earth, with the exception of humans”

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the National Post, Gad Saad offers an action plan to bring our universities back to a slightly more reality-based view of the world and prevent further postmodernist deterioration:

University College, University of Toronto, 31 July, 2008.
Photo by “SurlyDuff” via Wikimedia Commons.

This year, I am celebrating my 30th year as a professor. During those three decades, I have witnessed the proliferation of several parasitic ideas that are fully decoupled from reality, common sense, reason, logic and science, which led to my 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. As George Orwell famously noted, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them”. Each of these ideas were spawned on university campuses, originally in the humanities and the social sciences, but as I predicted long ago, they have infiltrated the natural sciences, and now can be found in all areas of our culture.

These destructive ideas include, but are not limited to, postmodernism (there are no objective truths, which is a fundamental attack on the epistemology of science); cultural relativism (who are we to judge the cultural mores of another society, such as performing female genital mutilation on little girls?); the rejection of meritocracy in favour of identity politics (diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) as the basis for admitting, hiring and promoting individuals); and victimhood as the means by which one adjudicates between competing ideas (I am a greater victim therefore my truth is veridical).

I was first exposed to this pervasive academic lunacy via my scientific work at the intersection of evolutionary psychology and consumer behaviour. Central to this endeavour is the fact that the human mind has evolved via the dual processes of natural and sexual selection. Nothing could be clearer, and yet I was astonished early in my career to witness the extraordinary resistance that I faced from my colleagues, many of whom were perfectly happy to accept that evolution explains the behaviour of every other species on earth, with the exception of humans.

Apparently, human beings transcend their biological imperatives, as they are strictly cultural beings. This biophobia (fear of using biology to explain human phenomena) is the means by which transgender activists can argue with a straight face that “men too can menstruate and bear children”. Biology is apparently the means by which the patriarchy implements its nefarious misogyny, making us all “wrongly” believe that men can on average lift heavier weights and run faster than women, notwithstanding a litany of evolutionary-based anatomical, physiological, hormonal and morphological sex differences.

According to radical feminists, these differences are largely due to social construction. Hence, a man who stands 6-4 and weighs 285 pounds can wake up one day and declare himself to be a transgender woman. Anyone who disagrees with this notion is clearly a transphobe.

January 25, 2024

QotD: How Meritocracy morphed into “Meritocracy”

Filed under: Books, Economics, Education, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The current meritocratic system began as an effort to open up a hereditary WASP elite to outsiders — and for a while, as immigrants, minorities, and women earned their way into America’s legacy campuses, writes Markovits, it looked like it was working more or less as intended. In the last few decades, however, the system has morphed into a do-or-die tournament for the prize of an Ivy League degree and a bonus-rich job at a swanky address. Instead of being democracies of talent, Harvard and Yale and their elite cronies are now quasi-exclusive clubs for the children of wealth. Money gives rich parents the means to groom their kids for these clubs as early as infancy with classes, books, and trips to museums meant to enhance kids’ development. They move to wealthy neighborhoods, where schools offer a vast array of (ahem) “enrichment” activities, including test prep and college-essay tutoring. Alternatively, they put their kids through 12 years of $40,000-a-year-plus private schools, whose administrators just happen to be chummy with Princeton admission officers.

Their efforts pay off for their progeny, but in the harsh competition that is the contemporary economy, they leave everyone else in the dust. Nourished in the hothouse of elite homes and communities, rich children have pulled away from their middle-class counterparts when it comes to academic performance, outscoring them on the SAT by twice as much as middle-class kids outscore poor students. The most elite colleges enroll more students from households in the top 1 percent than from the entire bottom half of the income scale. Those students are first in the pipeline to elite jobs. Top banks go only to the Ivy League, MIT, and Stanford for their recruiting. Top Five law schools are the training grounds for partners at the poshest firms. Meantime, middle-class kids are not only a rare sight on elite campuses; they’re also far less likely to get any college degree. Poor kids do worse still.

The result, says Markovits, is precisely the sort of dynastic elite that the putatively unbiased SAT was supposed to put out of business. To the dismay of his critics on the left, Markovits is not entirely unsympathetic to the winners of the tournament. The rich used to be indolent, he reminds us. The whole point of wealth was to be freed from toil, while peasants sweated in fields and manor kitchens to serve their betters and eke out a living for their undernourished families. These days, by contrast, the rich work 16-hour days and weekends under immense competitive pressure to close the deal, make partner, and take a conference call with Japanese businessmen. “No prior elite has ever been as capable or as industrious as the meritocratic elite that such training produces. None comes close,” Markovits asserts. Yes, a few actresses and real estate barons try to bribe and cheat their children into the palaces of learning, but most Ivy Leaguers have used their privileged upbringing to make their way into these bastions according to the rules of achievement. Given the expensive grooming required to make it to the top campuses, he implies, a squeaky-clean meritocracy would still favor the rich.

Kay S. Hymowitz, “Meritocrats versus Meritocracy”, City Journal, 2019-10-11.

January 5, 2024

The value of college degrees

Filed under: Economics, Education, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 04:00

Ted Gioia isn’t a college dropout, but he’s seen enough to realize that given how his career has gone, he might well have saved himself a lot of time and money by not going to university in the first place:

I spent almost a decade and huge sums of money — much of it borrowed in the form of student loans — to earn multiple degrees from elite institutions.

But I don’t have a degree in music — the field that became my vocation. And I never took a single course or lesson in jazz (my specialty) during my entire life.

I wasn’t a dropout, not even close. But it’s sobering to consider my life in retrospect, and see how much it relied on what I taught myself outside of the classroom. So I now have a very different view of college than I did back when I was a student.

My more mature view is as follows:

(1) A college degree is more about signaling your worth than about learning.
This is hardly a brilliant insight — many are now saying this. But when you’ve lived it yourself, it changes your perspective on everything.

[…]

(2) College provides inspiring role models — but they also exist in other settings.
I was blessed with a small number of teachers and mentors who taught me by example — and most of this happened at high school and college. There is no substitute for seeing greatness in the flesh at close hand.

But this can happen outside of college — my wife, for example, had those experiences working as a dancer and choreographer in New York. She learned more from her mentor Erick Hawkins than from any college professor.

[…]

(3) Dropping out is a real option with genuine upside, but it’s not for everybody.
Let me put it as simply as possible: Many successes are dropouts, but few dropouts are successes.

I would advise against abandoning your education for simple reasons of avoidance — because classes are a hassle, tests are a bummer, etc. But if you have a genuine vision of your life and the skills to achieve it, college is purely optional. And perhaps even hazardous.

(4) As the college experience becomes more expensive and close-minded, the appeal of alternatives increases exponentially.
At what price does college become a bad deal? I don’t have an answer to that, but we must be close to a tipping point.

If I tried to replicate my formal education today, it would cost ten times as much. I would have student loans as large as the national debt of a mid-sized country. That’s just ridiculous.

But this kind of irrational endpoint results when a bloated bureaucracy increases tuition at more than the inflation rate every year — and continues doing so for a half century. The people running our major universities think they can get away with this because customers want impressive diplomas, and can be squeezed to an infinite degree.

But infinity doesn’t actually exist in human affairs. And unsustainable trends eventually prove just that, namely that they are unsustainable.

(5) The smartest people will increasingly bypass the system.
I can’t emphasize this enough. My advice to young people today is very different from what I would have said just 5 years ago.

I now tell them to find ways to work outside of bureaucratic legacy institutions.

[…]

(6) Dropouts really do change society.
As someone who invested so much time and money in big-ticket credentials, that’s painful to admit. But I’ve seen too much to ignore the facts. I now grasp that people who are genuine visionaries know at an early stage that they can teach themselves, think for themselves, and manage themselves. Those are more valuable skills than any degree.

So maybe I didn’t drop out like my friend’s buddy at Harvard, back in the mid-1970s. But I wouldn’t laugh at the idea nowadays, the way I did back then. And if I had everything to do over again, I might drop out myself.

Qatar’s Aggies

Filed under: Education, Middle East, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Free Press, Eli Lake discusses the deal between Texas A&M and the Qatari government that gives the Qatar Foundation — run by the Qatari royal family — full ownership of any intellectual property developed at the Qatari campus of the university:

Texas A&M’s Nuclear Engineering and Science Center in College Station, Texas.
Photo via Texas A&M

What does Qatar get for its investment in U.S. universities? The answer may surprise you. In addition to the prestige and the influence of affiliating one’s national philanthropy with elite schools, Qatar is also accumulating the kind of technical research that was once the prize of American universities.

Consider Texas A&M University, one of the best places in the country to study nuclear engineering. Last month, The Free Press obtained exclusive access to a copy of the latest contract between Texas A&M and the Qatar Foundation that shows all of the intellectual property developed at the university’s campus in Doha belongs to the Qatar Foundation, a national philanthropy owned by the country’s royal family.

“The Qatar Foundation shall own the entire right, title, and interest in all Technology and Intellectual Property developed at (Texas A&M University Qatar) or under the auspices of its Research Program, other than those developed by non-TAMUQ employees and without financial support from the Qatar Foundation or any of its affiliates,” says the contract, dated May 25, 2021.

This kind of arrangement is common for large research universities in America. But TAMUQ is not your ordinary university. It is entirely funded by the Qatar Foundation. Kelly Brown, a spokeswoman for Texas A&M, told me that Qatar “pays for all faculty and staff salaries” as well as the physical campus, labs and equipment, housing, transportation, and travel allowances for professors.

It’s no small matter. The intellectual property generated by Texas A&M University in Qatar, or TAMUQ, includes highly sensitive research in a variety of fields ranging from computer science to bioengineering. Last year, TAMUQ inked an agreement to develop projects with a subsidiary of Barzan Holdings, Qatar’s largest arms manufacturer.

Andre Conradie, the CEO of the joint venture between Barzan and Germany’s Rheinmetall, said at the time, “This partnership will encourage the development of technological and operational capabilities to enhance military protection.”

As one of the country’s premier schools in nuclear engineering, Texas A&M has access to two nuclear reactors in Texas not affiliated with the U.S. government. In December, the National Nuclear Security Administration renewed a contract for the university, along with the University of California and Battelle Memorial Institute, to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which involves oversight of teams who design and maintain nuclear weapons for the U.S. government.

January 4, 2024

“Missing from Gay’s note was some important … context”

Filed under: Education, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Oliver Wiseman and Bari Weiss consider the resignation-under-pressure of Harvard President Claudine Gay:

Why did Claudine Gay step down yesterday as president of Harvard? In a letter announcing the bombshell decision, Gay wrote that it was in “the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.”

She also blamed racism: “It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” Gay wrote in her email Tuesday.

Missing from Gay’s note was some important … context.

In particular, there was no mention of the twin scandals that have plagued Gay and captured the attention of the country in recent weeks. The first: her handling of antisemitism and free expression on Harvard’s campus since October 7, including her appalling appearance before Congress in December.

The second: the ever-growing list of plagiarism allegations against Gay. On Monday night, the dogged journalists over at The Washington Free Beacon reported six more charges of plagiarism. That brought the number of allegations against Gay close to 50 and implicated half of her published works in the scandal. The next day, Gay was gone, making her the shortest-serving president in Harvard’s history: the Kevin McCarthy of higher ed.

Within minutes the crowing began. Major props went to Bill Ackman, the billionaire investor who has relentlessly criticized his alma mater since the attacks of October 7; to Chris Rufo, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow who was early on the story of plagiarism allegations against Gay; and to Free Beacon reporter Aaron Sibarium (more about him in a minute).

But does Gay’s resignation — and apparently she will remain on the faculty — actually change things?

Our sense — and recent events have only reinforced it — is that Claudine Gay is only the symptom of a deeper rot, both at Harvard and across higher education more generally.

One of the people who has been outspoken about that deeper crisis is Jeffrey Flier, who was the dean of Harvard Medical School from 2007 to 2016 and is a member of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a group founded by Harvard academics last year to fight the free speech crisis on their campus. (Harvard ranks dead last with a score of 0.00 in FIRE’s college free speech rankings.)

We spoke to Flier hours after Claudine Gay’s resignation. He said he sees the present crisis as a chance for the university to fix itself. “Her departure may have been necessary. But the university needs to do more than appoint a new president,” he explained.

“Before October 7, few people thought fixing problems at Harvard was a really urgent need. I am with a group that wanted real change, but relatively few people were listening. But now there is real opportunity for change,” explains Flier.

December 24, 2023

QotD: Dreaming of George Bailey’s world while living in Pottersville

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, Quotations, USA, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

George Bailey, the hero of It’s a Wonderful Life, missed the two events that made the ideal man of his time, place, and social class: going to college and serving (as an officer, of course) in the Second World War. Instead of doing those things, either of which would have sent him out into the world beyond the limits of Bedford Falls, he remained at home, taking care of his family, his business, and his community. In other words, the hero of America’s favorite exercise in Yuletide nostalgia epitomized a way of life that, in the season of the film’s cinematic debut (the summer of 1946), was already on its way to the dustbin of history.

This, the most enduring of the many works of Frank Capra, became the Atlantis myth of post-war America. That is, those who, over the course of the last half-century, saw It’s a Wonderful Life on television, knew well that the age of community and connection depicted on their screens had already passed into the realm of legend. Moreover, to add injury to insult, they also knew that, if they wished to enjoy the fruits of a middle-class existence, they would have to live in the manner of vagabonds.

In the movie, slum-lord Henry Potter tries, but fails, to turn the provincial paradise of Bedford Falls into a run-down haunt of spinsters, drunks, and floozies. In the real world, it was Franklin D. Roosevelt who put the kibosh on the original Main Street, USA. To be more precise, the principal achievements of America’s greatest tyrant, the Great Depression and the Second World War, undermined the financial, legal, and cultural foundations of the “wonderful life”. Thus, by the time this process had run its course, inflation had made a fool’s game of simple thrift, the replacement of law with regulation had hobbled private enterprise, and people who had left home for the sake of college, work, or military service found themselves lost in a sea of strangers.

In response to these changes, colleges and universities stepped up to the proverbial plate, happy to offer substitutes for the things that had been lost. They gave young people a chance to obtain certificates that would attest to both their suitability for service in the ranks of corporate minions and their social respectability. At the same time, these institutions gave older people a way to convert their value-losing cash into an asset that promised to pay dividends that would benefit their children (and, indeed, their grandchildren) for decades to come.

Thus arose the people I have come to call the MICE (Mobile, Individualistic, College Educated) people. Bereft of regional accents, productive property, and deep connections to friends and relations, they wandered the world, building networks, acquiring degrees, and padding resumés. However, after two generations of such peripatetic solipsism, the age of the MICE people is coming to an end.

Young men of parts, who realize that college has nothing to do with either liberal learning or vocational training, are simultaneously taking up skilled trades and stocking their MP3 players with learned podcasts. At the same time, young women of quality are beginning to think that the traditional troika of Kirche, Küche, und Kinder offers better odds of deep satisfaction than life as a hormone-hobbled, Starbucks swilling, girl boss.

So, if you know young people like the ones I’ve just described, do posterity a favor, and put them in contact with each other. After all, they deserve a life as wonderful as that of George and Mary Bailey.

Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson, “College, Class, and Christmas”, Extra Muros, 2023-08-06.

December 13, 2023

“Harvard stands firmly behind President Claudine Gay”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Law, Middle East, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray discusses the sure-to-be-continued saga of a plagiarist — who’s also a full-time water-carrier for terrorism — who happens (for the moment) to head HAMAS University Harvard University:

Harvard stands firmly behind President Claudine Gay, a remarkably undistinguished scholar and academic leader who has been lavishly overpraised and promoted beyond her ability for three decades. They do this, they have just explained, because Harvard is deeply committed to a culture of academic freedom, open discourse, and cultural pluralism:

    In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay. At Harvard, we champion open discourse and academic freedom, and we are united in our strong belief that calls for violence against our students and disruptions of the classroom experience will not be tolerated. Harvard’s mission is advancing knowledge, research, and discovery that will help address deep societal issues and promote constructive discourse, and we are confident that President Gay will lead Harvard forward toward accomplishing this vital work.

And so here’s the tweet — I insist on still calling them tweets — in which Harvard announces that it has posted its public letter on its insistent promotion of open and constructive discourse:

We stand for open discourse! (Replies are closed.)

Coprophagiacs eat so much shit that it stops being shit, and just becomes the thing they eat. Every word of a statement from the enormously high-status trustees of an enormously high-status institution is just ludicrous. They self-refute, casually, without noticing.

Every day now, I think about a term that lawyers use: a colorable argument. If you have a colorable argument, you can file your lawsuit without being instantly thrown out of the courtroom. You may not have the winning argument, and you may not even have a really good argument, yet, but you have enough of an argument that you can start. Then, through the discovery process and with some luck and hard work, maybe you can build the actual winning argument. But for now, you have some not-totally-implausible factish claims, and you can more or less connect it all to a law of some kind, and you can walk into the courtroom without the judge bursting into laughter. You have a colorable argument; you have the bare minimum.

Look how much of the culture is made up of people who don’t have a colorable argument. Look how much total nonsense streams by.

Now, about those plagiarism allegations against the president of what is alleged to be one of the nation’s most prestigious universities:

    With regard to President Gay’s academic writings, the University became aware in late October of allegations regarding three articles. At President Gay’s request, the Fellows promptly initiated an independent review by distinguished political scientists and conducted a review of her published work. On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation. While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.

She did absolutely nothing wrong, and that’s why she’s requesting corrections on 18% of her exceptionally thin scholarly record. No big deal, she’s just correcting “citations and quotation marks that were omitted”. Who omitted them? That’s the wrong question, see, because what happened is just that they “were omitted”. The quotation marks didn’t insert themselves. I demand that the quotation marks be denied tenure for wandering away from the page!

December 12, 2023

La trahison des intellectuels modernes

Filed under: Education, France, Germany, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Niall Ferguson explains why the situation in Europe in the late 1920s persuaded Julien Benda to publish the famous La trahison des clercs … and how similar the situation in western academia is to a century ago:

In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs — “The Treason of the Intellectuals” — which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism. By that point, although Benito Mussolini had been in power in Italy for five years, Adolf Hitler was still six years away from power in Germany and 13 years away from victory over France. But already Benda could see the pernicious role that many European academics were playing in politics.

Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds”. And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence — with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.

A century later, American academia has gone in the opposite political direction — leftward instead of rightward — but has ended up in much the same place. The question is whether we — unlike the Germans — can do something about it.

For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marveled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicization of American universities by an illiberal coalition of “woke” progressives, adherents of “critical race theory”, and apologists for Islamist extremism.

Throughout that period, friends assured me that I was exaggerating. Who could possibly object to more diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus? In any case, weren’t American universities always left-leaning? Were my concerns perhaps just another sign that I was the kind of conservative who had no real future in the academy?

Such arguments fell apart after October 7, as the response of “radical” students and professors to the Hamas atrocities against Israel revealed the realities of contemporary campus life. That hostility to Israeli policy in Gaza regularly slides into antisemitism is now impossible to deny.

I cannot stop thinking of the son of a Jewish friend of mine, who is a graduate student at one of the Ivy League colleges. Just this week, he went to the desk assigned to him to find, carefully placed under his computer keyboard, a note with the words “ZIONIST KIKE!!!” in red and green letters.

Just as disturbing as such incidents — and there are too many to recount — has been the dismally confused responses of university leaders.

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