“… the universities are a rich prize, which is a dangerous thing to be when you are simultaneously obsolete, unsympathetic to the people, and hostile to the king.”
A thought-provoking parallel, between the downfall of the medieval monastic establishments and the possible coming collapse of the university system – here, at Postcards from Barsoom.
I’ve been calling for a Dissolution of the Universities on blog comment threads for perhaps twenty years or more.
It’s all a great shame: I went to a fine university and had a wonderful time, intellectually and socially.
Your author, though, doesn’t simply recommend a Dissolution – he says it’s inevitable and explains why.
Let me add one anecdote. Years ago I was an admissions interviewer for a Cambridge college. On the whole my fellow interviewer and I agreed on our assessments of each candidate – with one exception. I thought a particular lad should be admitted, my colleague thought not. I quizzed him. We’d learnt that the lad came from a household that took The Daily Telegraph. My colleague didn’t want the scion of such a right-wing family in the college.
How had we learnt about the Telegraph? I’d asked the lad how he came to know so much science that was not part of his school syllabus. He said it was because the Telegraph had a particularly good science correspondent. What a marvellous reason to reject a candidate, eh?
Good lord, Dearie – what a horrible reason for rejecting an otherwise good candidate. Yes, that is why the current uni system is doomed. There’s more good to be gotten out of being an autodidact, and I wonder if this is what will happen, as the author predicts. Learning because you’re fascinated by the subject and want to learn more about it, rather than jumping through the academic hoops by rote, in pursuit of an expensive but ultimately useless piece of paper.
For myself and my generation of Chinese-Americans, it was assumed that after high school instead of going into the family restaurant business [mind you, being a Chinese restaurant line cook on school breaks was an excellent way to pay for college], that we would each go to college and become some sort of professional. And so it happened.
My children all went to college, but with the exception of one daughter who was in a specialized field that required a 5 year double degree program; none of the rest finished the 4 year degree. Not that they were failures. They all ended up as business owners and specialists in remunerative technical fields.
My grandchildren are just starting K-12. I have great doubts that if there are colleges left by then [and to be honest we are at risk that there may not be a country left by then] that they will be students. I just will help them on whatever way they choose that is available to them. They are all smart [all learning to read before K-12] and will cope with whatever society we have then.
Subotai Bahadur
George Marsden’s “The Soul of the American University, From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief” provides an excellent scholarly view of the historical development of present reality. Broader and more detailed than Bill Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” (and, I suggest, more grounded and therefor far more accurate), it dissects and displays what develops during a culture’s rejecting God. Attempts to understand what one currently sees will find Marsden an excellent source.
It’s a pretty good analogy. In fairness, it should be noted that the monasteries did things other than copying and praying…land reclamation, for example (or maybe it should be land clamation) and the development of some early industrial processes. In his book on the history of the waterwheel, Stronger Than a Hundred Men, Terry Reynolds credits the monasteries with much of the early development of waterpower and its applications.
Indeed, some have argued that the seizure of the monasteries significantly delayed England’s industrial revolution.
Recruiting for certain attributes in a candidate is not problematic, per se.
Recruiting for the wrong attributes definitely is problematic.
Consider why universities were established in the first place.
That universities in the most part have more than lost their way; they actively pursue that wayward path lead by a deficient pseudo intellectualism.
The body is infected. You don’t destroy the body, you eradicate the infection.
@David Foster:
A good case has been made that the first true capitalist businesses were mediaeval French monasteries. Some specialized in livestock breeding, some in vineyards, some in copying books and documents. They were all chartered by the Church in such a way that you could sign business contracts with the monastery itself: abbots might come and go, but the business carried on and could be trusted to live up to its promises. A bit later, secular rulers copied this procedure and began granting charters to trade guilds, towns, schools, and large enterprises of various sorts. One of the companies now running water works in France, I believe, is directly descended from a company that received a royal charter to build a dam and mills on the Loire in the 14th century.
The monasteries were far from obsolete in Henry VIII’s England. But they were hugely unpopular, as usually happens with highly successful groups of people who keep themselves apart from the general population. At other times the targets were Hanseatic merchants, Jesuits, or Jews. It’s a standing temptation to kings to enrich themselves by robbing their richest and least loved subjects.
Jacques deMolay has entered the chat.
Years ago I read something about “higher education” that stuck with me.
That the value isn’t so much what field you study but that you had the discipline for four years to see it through with work.
Of course if cheating is that rampant then even that went out the window
I don’t believe “artificial intelligence” is a panacea
I have a good friend whose professional life was an argument against higher education
He began getting into the IT field back before the micro computer took off. He learned to program all on his own
I joke with him saying he could’ve been another Steve Wozniak and that he tried to convince Xerox, who made big printers in addition to copier, to use that micro processor for a small computer
And they were not interested
Wozniak of course tried to convince Hewlett-Packard to do the same and they were not interested either
And he had something interesting to say about artificial intelligence
But the point he made was this:
Say you were in the automotive engineering field and you want to design a far more efficient car
You tell your computer that you want it to deliver fuel more efficiently
So it comes up with the best carburetor design that’s ever been seen not knowing anything about electronic fuel injection
All artificial intelligence can work with is what is already in its database – not some jump into the unknown
A higher education is supposed to make one think “outside the box” but so many of them are simply indoctrination centers now
I will have to say that the value of a higher degree is becoming less than less
By the way my friend I would consider it in the top 5% of programmers writing everything from system software to applications
All self taught.
I was a little dismayed to learn that my alma mater, the university of Virginia, had diluted its honor code
When I was there 50 years ago if you were caught cheating – even passing a bad check – it was automatic expulsion.
It actually kept me out of jail with a Virginia state trooper.
I was given the choice by a local magistrate for speeding by paying a $300 fine or going to jail. I had of course not that money in my pocket but a checkbook and I convinced them that all they had to do was inform my school that the check was bad and I would be kicked out.
That tipped the balance
I too sense that they change is coming with these universities but I don’t know what’s going to replace it.
Or supplement them.
I think the rot started when so many decided that western history wasn’t anything worth studying and that all cultures were equal
Interesting post by Barsoom.
The key to the modern university system is the “credential”, whether on an informal or formal basis. That having that college degree is the automatic ticket to a better life
That’s not the same is a quality education. The belief in that tailsmanic power by the general population has devolved to the point where it’s more important that your K-12 educational experience gets you into the right school than anything you might learn along the way. That gap between learning and education has created an uneasy equilibrium that may (or may not) cause the system of higher education to racially collapse.
There has been recognition for decades about the shaky ground higher ed has been on for decades. The past few years have been unmitigated disaster, and Barsoom does an excellent job documenting them, because it has forced them out in the public eye for everyone to see. Besides the radicalism and fraud in higher ed, even worse the student debt crisis has shown that rather being a Golden Ticket a degree has become a debt trap.
Higher ed sells entry into the class system, not higher learning
The question is what happens next.
Having lived through the imminent collapse of the higher ed system for the past 30 years I am, to put it politely agnostic whether it will finally happen. People who sell me that story start to sound like the green-haired lefty who tells me Communism can work because, despite the historical evidence, true Communism hasn’t been tried yet.
In other words, I’ll say the same thing to people who pitch me ideas for businesses or social movements or just plain old predictions about the future. Tell me why this will succeed now as opposed to before, what were the past analytical or operational experiences and what have you learned from them.
Sorry I’m a bit cynical. I hear a lot of stories, many very good and sincere ones, but simply from a epistemological point of view they often don’t (and really can’t) align perfectly with reality.
Few observations. The experience of K-12 education and choice shows that if you want to replace something that there has to be a replacement. Belief in the value of higher ed might be getting shaky but until there is clear alternative path you’re not going to get a preference cascade. The other thing to get change, is to shut off the money supply is to get the feds out of the student loan business. The government shouldn’t be involved in loaning money to people for useless degrees. That will shake things up in a hurry.
If we have reached the tipping point I see at least three things happening
1) The collapse of the mid-tier (and indeed many top tier) private colleges. Their business model is completely unsound and they don’t have a large or wealthy enough donor base to juice it.
2) Public support for higher ed will be transformed from government-provided student loans to a publicly-managed higher education systems. That’s what we would call a state or “public university system” where there will be a much higher degree of accountability for type of results achieved. Note by “publicly-managed” I just don’t mean a four-year college experience but also 2-year and trade school.
3) The private higher ed system will not just undergo a shakeout but many of the survivors (much fewer now) such as the very top tier will assume exclusively the credentialing system that was previously offered off by higher ed as a whole. Harvard, Yale, some of the other Ivies, and other place like Northwestern will exist because they offer entry into the elite. Others will survive as mere finishing schools, but the Faber Colleges will disappear,
Universities started as explicitly ecclesiastic institutions and remained so in the case of Oxbridge well into the 20th century. Limiting both students and faculty to professing members of the Church of England and a curriculum geared toward preparing clergy. The mundane such as science had to be shoehorned into the curriculum under the rubric of “Natural Philosophy”.
With many Americans being dissenters, Colonial institutions accommodated by either being explicitly sectarian or non-sectarian with Harvard on the sectarian side, just not Church of England. Aside from various fine points of Theology and doctrine, the curricula were indistinguishable and Humanities based. For most of the 19th century, engineers and other “mechanics” didn’t go to college, that was reserved for “gentlemen” or other pretenders to refinement.
That was then and this is now. The problem with nuking higher education is that we depend on very many practitioners of domains which are far too large to be condensed into some sort of examination. Engineering, medicine and law don’t work that way even though all require some sort of examination which is necessary but not sufficient to practice. The schools still manage to teach more in four to seven years than can be proven in a few hours of testing.
The New 95 Theses, from 1515 Fund. (The Fund invests in ‘nontraditional founders’, especially those without college degrees, and the name reflects the date when Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door)
]https://www.1517fund.com/post/the-new-95
“remained so in the case of Oxbridge well into the 20th century. Limiting both students and faculty to professing members of the Church of England”
Wrong by about a century.
That was a fascinating article. I especially liked the reference to Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, a book that has kept me coming back to it for 20 years. That book jumps past what we think might be coming into a future where the great change has happened and people have gotten used to nanotechnology, no more countries, people belonging to tribes, etc. I’ve read it five times, and I still don’t quite think I’ve “gotten” all of it yet.
I think the author is right. Academy has become the opposite of nimble. It seems unable to handle any criticism or attack with anything but panicked shrieking, just like the young people it depends on for its survival.
in Cuba in the late 40s, the university culture spawned gangsterism, in part because the current president Grau was an academic, and there was a laissez affaire culture because of student activisms in the 30, that had toppled the previous dictator, the Depression sparked Lefitist pretentions everywhere including the ill advised 1940 constitution, which was much like the Green New Deal, free education, free health care, free housing and other unicorns, were promises to enact this figment,this is where Fidel sprang from as well as one of his long time nemesis, Orlando Bosch, one represented the law school class, the other the medical school, this is a rough parallel to what happened in the 30s, with Hiss and Chambers, part of the same coin box, also James Burnham, and James
Eastman, the latter would migrate to National Review, where they were given a berth by Young Buckley, who had followed up his investigations into his alma mater, by working with Eudocio Ravines, a young Latin American defector from the leftist culture of Peru
a generation later would come the the SDS movement from the likes of Hayden and Ayers,
which would evolve into the Weather Underground in part nurtured by the likes of the Venceremos Brigade, who under KGB tutelage turned out Guerillas, in Camp Matanzas,
this where Companera Bass comes from
See also my Ricochet post Graduation, 2025:
https://ricochet.com/1826227/graduation-2025/
With regard to the self-taught IT Administrator: I have a minor in Computer Science, demoted from Major when I realized computer science isn’t “just” a branch of Mathematics. (I went on to get a PhD, despite deciding around the time I got my Masters that I didn’t want to be in Acadamia, because I love math so much!)
I have since pretended to be a Software Engineer — and I have become self-taught in many esoteric Computer Science topics, largely useless (due, in part, to network effects, although they are better than what we have now), but very fascinating. Things like Lisp, Object Capabilities, the Actor model for parallel programming, ternary logic, and so forth. A lot of this approaches pure math in a way that my minor didn’t.
I do not regret demoting Computer Science to a Minor — I have the impression that my college’s program was more “industrial” oriented rather than “science” oriented — and I have little confidence I would have learned these things in the classroom.
Perhaps I am misreading my program, but I know there’s a strong current in Computer Science (and in the sciences in general) that education has to be “practical”. I cannot help but observe, however, there’s a special need for the impractical, both because it’s what sparks joy (at least for me), and because the impractical sometimes becomes the practical. If an education system isn’t willing to give a taste of the impractical, then where else can a student find it?
(Well, for an autistic dopaminer like me, I was probably bound to find it on my own, regardless, and that has both helped me in my career, and hurt me — and perhaps the greatest pain comes from seeing something that would greatly simplify our lives, but we cannot use it, because no one else does!)
Alpheus…the software entrepreneur & VC Paul Graham (Y-Combinator) is a big Lisp fan, indeed, he wrote his original store-generator software (Viaweb) in it and remarked last year that:
“The best way to understand programming languages would probably be to learn both extremes: assembly and Lisp. The stuff in between is all compromises anyway.”
https://x.com/paulg/status/1787783820399304975