The meme that English majors are down for the count is a self-defeating stereotype. Most people are aware of it, which means that the few people that still pursue it are doing so for some reason relating to a quirk of that type. As an English graduate, English is basically just a watered down version of a philosophy program, exemplified by their GRE scores which are similar to philosophy in terms of verbal and analytical writing ability.
Our math is worse, but averaged out, English majors have similar scores to engineering majors. As with most things, intelligence is important and will allow them to punch above their stereotyped income. Like with most majors, it's just signaling their inherent traits.
As an aside, my math is better than most of my English peers, and I took calculus in college and got like a 26 on the math ACT. Amongst other English majors, that puts me in the 99th percentile of math ability. It’s true though that your typical STEM grad clears us in mathematical ability. Fortunately for the workplace, verbal ability goes a long way.
>the net costs of not buying a car are generally negative on average.
Citation needed. I would say simply moving close to your job so you can walk or bike to work is the easiest ways to enjoy financial abundance and get rich on the savings. Even if the rents are more expensive close to your job, the savings from not owning a car (or even owning a car and just reducing operating costs by driving less!) will easily cover the difference. A long car commute has to be among the most common ways Americans shoot themselves in the foot, financially speaking.
"If these numbers sound ridiculous, it’s because they are. It is ridiculous to commute by car to work if you realize how expensive it is to drive, and if you value your time at anything close to what you get paid. I did these calculations long before getting my first job, and because of them I have never been willing to live anywhere that required me to drive myself to work. It’s just too expensive, and there is always another option when choosing a job and a house if you make it a priority."
I have a PhD and an extremely negative opinion of academia. Granted, most conservatives don't have PhDs. But most people in general don't have PhDs, so I'm not sure how useful of an observation that is.
Most college degrees are useless, in the sense that you use like 1% of what you learned there in whatever job you go on to have after college. The degrees are not useless in the sense that having them in your resume helps you get that job which then turns out to have zero overlap what so ever with the things you learned in college. The reason this happens is simply that a college degree is our signaling mechanism for being somewhat reliable and intelligent. It seems to me that this is an extremely inefficient mechanism, that it is only becoming more and more inefficient over time, and that as a result it will be less relevant in the future (and that will be A Good Thing, Actually).
Here's a fact I just looked up: DESPITE being 7% of students, STEM majors receive 20-50% of funding. We could adjust those numbers by cutting the non-STEM population in half, but you could argue, why not eliminate non-STEM entirely?
Let's dispense with the term college and use the term "moralistic philosophizing." I've published articles where I suggest we should spend more money on education to boost the Democratic vote share. If college makes people liberal, then liberals should maximize college funding. But in this article, I cast some skepticism on the idea that college itself is turning people into liberals. Rather, it is possible that 18 year old liberals are going to college because they desire to socially conform to high-status behaviors.
Let's say my previous articles had an incorrect presumption, and college doesn't even make people more liberal. (It's really a question of degree: of course college makes some people more liberal, but is it more effective, bang-for-buck, than YIMBY housing projects to increase urbanization? Is it more effective than high-skilled immigration?)
If this were true, should Democrats support college education as an electoral strategy? Or is the entire thing a waste (relatively speaking) when compared with YIMBYism or immigration?
I would argue that having an intuition of "moralistic philosophizing" creates a "shining city on a hill" which makes teenagers into liberals. They fantasize about going to Harvard (Hogwarts), and Harvard is liberal, so they become liberal. Dumping billions of dollars into schools and making them liberal is essentially a propaganda effort. The college experience itself doesn't make people liberal, but the aspiration or dream of going to college is sweetened by the funding.
It's like when the Catholic Church invests a lot of money into priests, teaching them Latin and giving them cool vestments. This gives the priest high status, and makes the parishioners look up to the priests.
In this sense, college is a status machine designed to create teenage liberals by erecting an idol for them to worship. An 18 year old liberal should feel like he or she has won the lottery when they get a Harvard acceptance letter.
If we defund college, human beings need an alternative institution to idolize as a source of status. Traditionally, that was the church. I doubt that if we defunded colleges that churches would "fill the vacuum." I'm not sure if anything would -- we might just fall apart as a society.
My contention is that since the dawn of civilization, metrogenesis was always predicated on institutional worship. Priests collected a 10% tithe and used that money to erect art, idols, statues, temples; design fancy costumes; and spend time practicing rituals and ceremonial spells and sacred languages. This is how you start a civilization: a class of wordcells starts impressing everyone else with threats of heaven and promises of hell (the ultimate cancelation).
I would be interested to hear a Christian plan to revive this process in the 21st century other than a purely negative "defund colleges, they are useless." Actually, moralistic philosophizing is not useless, it is the basis of civilization, and no society can be held together without it -- not even with sheer force or violence. Although societies with weak or underdeveloped moralistic philosophies tend to be more dysfunctional (I'm looking at you, Africa).
I don't see $100 billion as a lot of money to spend on moralistic philosophizing. Things can always be improved. If I was in charge, I would probably implement some kind of physical requirement for colleges, and create a tiered university system where colleges are assigned funding according to how strict their entry requirements are. I just don't think defunding is going to solve any problems.
I am doubtful that defunding colleges is going to give Christians the boost that you think it is. As in late Rome, when the Roman religion was becoming degraded, it was cults (including Christianity) which benefitted. I think the Trump cult (which we both oppose) is an example of how delegitimizing the mainstream doesn't lead to Christian revival, but the worship of strongmen with questionable morals.
>I doubt that if we defunded colleges that churches would "fill the vacuum." I'm not sure if anything would -- we might just fall apart as a society.<
We didn't "fall apart as a society" when people stopped going to church, so this doesn't seem very plausible.
If you want an institution dedicated to "moralistic philosophizing," then I mean yeah, traditional religions and churches are explicitly for that. That is clearly the societal niche that they evolved to fill. Universities may do some of it here and there but they're also being tasked to do like fifteen other things, all of which they do badly for the most part, "moralistic philosophizing" included.
Most people don't go to college in order to do "moralistic philosophizing," they go because they believe they need to in order to get a good job. If you could guarantee to someone their dream job with no need to go to college, I imagine large swathes of people would jump on that opportunity and skip higher education. Those who didn't take the deal may still have other motivations--for instance, the desire to sit around drinking and "partying" instead of working a 9 to 5. I'm not sure if I personally knew anyone who went to college so they could be part of the liberal intelligentsia, but I definitely knew plenty who went for that reason.
You seem to understand that we don't need every citizen to be a "moralistic philosopher," and that any real priestly caste is going to be relatively small compared to the general population. So if you wanted universities to primarily serve such a function, it would make far more sense to claw them back down to the smaller sizes that they were in the past, rather than endorsing the status quo where everyone and their mother is expected to attend.
>I am doubtful that defunding colleges is going to give Christians the boost that you think it is.<
I didn't say shrinking college would give Christians a boost, I said I have a very negative opinion of academia. I also have a very negative opinion of rectal cancer, and if you gave me a magic button that would eliminate it, I'd press the button. I wouldn't expect Christianity to get some sort of sudden revival from it, though. I'd just expect there to be less of a bad thing in the world.
Agreed. College is, for the most part, straightforwardly worthless from an educational standpoint. Although there are plenty of programs that do teach useful information. Just from eyeballing it, for every STEM graduate, there is about 1 graduate from a program of dubious educational value.
Elite overproduction is not produced by education. Education is used as a proxy for elite overproduction. Traditionally, elite overproduction resulted from the aristocracy (who enjoyed better nutrition and saw more of their children survive) outbreeding the peasantry, resulting in more aristocrats than suitable positions for them.
What happens if a noble has three sons? The oldest inherits the title and lands. One of the others might marry the daughter of a nobleman who has no sons. Other possibilities include a career in the church. In the linked paper below I argue that the explosion of monastery formation in the 12th century absorbed excess elites, delaying elite overproduction for a century. You could be a mercenary (see wiki link). Or you could get a government job if you trained for it (hence the rise in college attendance during times of elite overproduction).
How does elite overproduction get resolved? Traditionally, it was by getting rid of excess elites in one way or another. Elites killing themselves off in wars was popular choice (google Scourging of the North or Battle of Taunton). Wiping out a good chunk of elite wealth causing them to lose elite status also works such as Emancipation wiped out much of the wealth of elites in the American South, and the stock market crash and subsequent high levels of taxation resulted in the top 1% income share getting cut in half over subsequent decades. See third link for more on this.
The free market has produced growth without relying on a consensus of core moral beliefs.Any person who wants to fund a racist smell research or purchase a loan to do it themselves should be free to do so. Tax payers who haven't consented to that are correct to be irrtated with these issues,much like they would be in any secular society where the government is funding churchies.The problem with 'elite overprudiction' is not the OVERPRODUCTION part, but the ELITE one. Academia is becoming less elitist and perfectionist,our elites have lower iqs and conscientiousness that previous generations. Academia is gynocratic,and pushes egalitarian norms. No child left behind produces the tall-poppy syndrome. The few men and old women left with more socially conservative attitudes to teaching(eg whiplash movie)are less inclined to demand excellence and are afraid to make their peers feel uncomfortable. Noone bothered with underwater baskets at The Manhattan Project,noone does so in the IDF or in Musk's companies. White-knighting and simping for women while colleges devolve to day-care centers is not have positive results
This is an over-simplified analysis that leaves out major parts of the right wing argument.
One of the top reasons so many on the right would happily defund all universities tomorrow is the prevalence of fraud. This comes up in nearly every discussion about the problem. You obliquely gesture in this direction in the final paragraphs, but only in the context of students cheating. Everyone agrees that this is bad, and that academia won't lift a finger to fix it. Only the right are brave and smart enough to take the logical next steps:
1. the reason they won't fix it is because the academics are all cheating too.
2. a system that claims to be about truth and learning but is full of cheaters is a bad system that encourages/rewards bad behavior, and should be abolished for that reason alone regardless of any other arguments.
3. a big part of the "liberalness" of universities is possible only due to this cheating. That is, left wing beliefs are wrong, and the reason they're so prevalent on campus is because there are no intellectual standards that force academia to adopt correct ideas.
Forcing citizens to fund institutions that are full of cheaters who spread incorrect ideas is clearly bad, and thus, defunding is the only moral position. STEM or not STEM or basket weaving or English or whatever just doesn't matter at all, in this context.
I generally agree with the thrust of this piece - that a) the plebs need moral stricture and guidance, b) religion is no longer cutting it, and academia seems to be doing a surprisingly good job of stepping up to replace it, and c) this is not a good reason to destroy academia. I mostly get off the bus there, though.
The really big reason is that the moral stricture and guidance coming from academia is low-quality. It’s based on important base values like respecting the inherent dignity and worth of each human, but has managed to contort itself into a remarkably destructive and dragging force. There are many philosophies that could come out of academia that I think could provide a religion-replacement, and wokism is not nearly the worst, but it is worse than what it’s replacing and is worse than what ‘academia as moral core’ could be (much as not all religions are created equal). Hopefully this is merely the proto-Judaism of the next phase of religion and not what mainline academic moral core will be in future years. I’d be fairly happy with your piece if you’d endorsed this point.
As additional minor quibbles, I don’t think there is a need for a similar amount of economic value to be put towards moral core as in the Middle Ages. The miracles of modern connectivity and (to a lesser degree) literacy mean that we don’t need a priest for every hamlet. I could see a world where it made sense to have a moral core liaison in medium-to-large companies or something, but DEI officers don’t seem to have done hugely well at that job even when it was wokism’s most scalable idea for how to use its middling members.
‘Elite overproduction’ seems to be more like a finishing school, but one where at the end of the pipeline the gender imbalance leaves too many women without eligible suitors. In that sense, I’m perfectly fine with it expanding - I think the amount of both overall and especially unskilled labor necessary for an increasing quality of life is decreasing rapidly, and I think the world is better with educated nonproductive people than uneducated nonproductive people.
I think the problem of a proliferation of conflicting moralities in modern society is inevitable. The Reformation, for instance, followed on the heels of the printing press - a tool which vastly improved the dissemination of ideas. This eventually led to the tolerance of the enlightenment, where different branches of Christianity were permitted to coexist since there was no longer any way of reliably policing the spread of information.
This gets even more complex in the social media age. Now the spread of ideas is even more out of control! And there's no way to easily contain it or direct it towards some singular vision of morality. Ultimately we are going to have to live with conflicting morals in some way or another.
(1) Conservatives might want to defund the universities not to stop the so-called woke mind virus (which is a fun story) but just to hit back at their opponents. Like, professors are woke? Defund and thus raise the cost for wokeness. Also, take away the money and somewhat decrease their status. Harvard will remain Harvard but plenty of less selective schools will seem a lot shittier.
(2) so true and underrated about biology being a low-income and oversubsidized (NIH) major. To get a job from it, students have to go to med school (expensive) or phd school (lol still poor). Also, consider the whole women in Stem thing. Biology is technically a science so “Stem”. But it’s vaguely “helping people” and is much less mathy than engineering or physics, so women love it. Put those aspects together and, when you push women into “stem” you wind up with a biologist glut, because they tend to ignore market signals or view them as morally illegitimate.
(3) I agree that elite overproduction is overdone. But it reminds me about some of the early Christian controversies, which seem pretty dubious and hyper technical in retrospect. Basically, they had too many people who could be bishops and not enough parishes. So the para-bishops split into teams to compete over offices and to kick opponents out of office, by latching onto and amplifying otherwise minor disputes with no practical significance aside from the factional conflict. These disputes eventually took on a life of their own, with Roman authorities (Constantine, Justinian) trying their best to pragmatically settle things. But things would not settle because of the underlying dynamics of too many candidates for ecclesiastical office. Upside? I think elite overproduction can be real in intra-sectarian conflicts, where everyone agrees on the important issues. In other words, for true elite overproduction and not just exclusion of capable people like in the ancien regime, tsarist Russia or white men under dei, what you see is that the substantive disputes become ever more arcane and incomprehensible to outsiders. Like you write, we don’t really have elite overproduction now. And we know this because we don’t have, say, woke factions splitting and trying to impeach each other from office over the good and true meaning of, say, “racism.”
I totally agree with the comparation with the church. I would go as far as to claim that most education beyond primary school serves more as a social ritual than anything else, with the priest-teacher imparting the holy knowledge of algebra to kids who neither care nor will remember it the month afterwards. And im not against it! All societies need rituals and this better than most. But Id like people to admit it, instead of repeating empty phrases like "Education is the most important investment a country can make" and so on and so on.
The meme that English majors are down for the count is a self-defeating stereotype. Most people are aware of it, which means that the few people that still pursue it are doing so for some reason relating to a quirk of that type. As an English graduate, English is basically just a watered down version of a philosophy program, exemplified by their GRE scores which are similar to philosophy in terms of verbal and analytical writing ability.
Our math is worse, but averaged out, English majors have similar scores to engineering majors. As with most things, intelligence is important and will allow them to punch above their stereotyped income. Like with most majors, it's just signaling their inherent traits.
As an aside, my math is better than most of my English peers, and I took calculus in college and got like a 26 on the math ACT. Amongst other English majors, that puts me in the 99th percentile of math ability. It’s true though that your typical STEM grad clears us in mathematical ability. Fortunately for the workplace, verbal ability goes a long way.
https://www.umsl.edu/~philo/files/pdfs/ETS%20LINK.pdf
Josh, your math scores are too high. You are hereby expelled from the Council of Wordcels. Hand over your thesaurus and go in peace.
based and math-pilled
>the net costs of not buying a car are generally negative on average.
Citation needed. I would say simply moving close to your job so you can walk or bike to work is the easiest ways to enjoy financial abundance and get rich on the savings. Even if the rents are more expensive close to your job, the savings from not owning a car (or even owning a car and just reducing operating costs by driving less!) will easily cover the difference. A long car commute has to be among the most common ways Americans shoot themselves in the foot, financially speaking.
These numbers may not be adjusted-for-inflation, but this old blog post has major life-changing implications for a lot of people: https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/
"If these numbers sound ridiculous, it’s because they are. It is ridiculous to commute by car to work if you realize how expensive it is to drive, and if you value your time at anything close to what you get paid. I did these calculations long before getting my first job, and because of them I have never been willing to live anywhere that required me to drive myself to work. It’s just too expensive, and there is always another option when choosing a job and a house if you make it a priority."
Damn I should be more careful with my metaphors!
I should have said "in rural America." I have traveled extensively and none of that would have been possible without a car, so I am biased.
What's an investment, besides college, that you think usually pays for itself?
I have a PhD and an extremely negative opinion of academia. Granted, most conservatives don't have PhDs. But most people in general don't have PhDs, so I'm not sure how useful of an observation that is.
Most college degrees are useless, in the sense that you use like 1% of what you learned there in whatever job you go on to have after college. The degrees are not useless in the sense that having them in your resume helps you get that job which then turns out to have zero overlap what so ever with the things you learned in college. The reason this happens is simply that a college degree is our signaling mechanism for being somewhat reliable and intelligent. It seems to me that this is an extremely inefficient mechanism, that it is only becoming more and more inefficient over time, and that as a result it will be less relevant in the future (and that will be A Good Thing, Actually).
Here's a fact I just looked up: DESPITE being 7% of students, STEM majors receive 20-50% of funding. We could adjust those numbers by cutting the non-STEM population in half, but you could argue, why not eliminate non-STEM entirely?
Let's dispense with the term college and use the term "moralistic philosophizing." I've published articles where I suggest we should spend more money on education to boost the Democratic vote share. If college makes people liberal, then liberals should maximize college funding. But in this article, I cast some skepticism on the idea that college itself is turning people into liberals. Rather, it is possible that 18 year old liberals are going to college because they desire to socially conform to high-status behaviors.
Let's say my previous articles had an incorrect presumption, and college doesn't even make people more liberal. (It's really a question of degree: of course college makes some people more liberal, but is it more effective, bang-for-buck, than YIMBY housing projects to increase urbanization? Is it more effective than high-skilled immigration?)
If this were true, should Democrats support college education as an electoral strategy? Or is the entire thing a waste (relatively speaking) when compared with YIMBYism or immigration?
I would argue that having an intuition of "moralistic philosophizing" creates a "shining city on a hill" which makes teenagers into liberals. They fantasize about going to Harvard (Hogwarts), and Harvard is liberal, so they become liberal. Dumping billions of dollars into schools and making them liberal is essentially a propaganda effort. The college experience itself doesn't make people liberal, but the aspiration or dream of going to college is sweetened by the funding.
It's like when the Catholic Church invests a lot of money into priests, teaching them Latin and giving them cool vestments. This gives the priest high status, and makes the parishioners look up to the priests.
In this sense, college is a status machine designed to create teenage liberals by erecting an idol for them to worship. An 18 year old liberal should feel like he or she has won the lottery when they get a Harvard acceptance letter.
If we defund college, human beings need an alternative institution to idolize as a source of status. Traditionally, that was the church. I doubt that if we defunded colleges that churches would "fill the vacuum." I'm not sure if anything would -- we might just fall apart as a society.
My contention is that since the dawn of civilization, metrogenesis was always predicated on institutional worship. Priests collected a 10% tithe and used that money to erect art, idols, statues, temples; design fancy costumes; and spend time practicing rituals and ceremonial spells and sacred languages. This is how you start a civilization: a class of wordcells starts impressing everyone else with threats of heaven and promises of hell (the ultimate cancelation).
I would be interested to hear a Christian plan to revive this process in the 21st century other than a purely negative "defund colleges, they are useless." Actually, moralistic philosophizing is not useless, it is the basis of civilization, and no society can be held together without it -- not even with sheer force or violence. Although societies with weak or underdeveloped moralistic philosophies tend to be more dysfunctional (I'm looking at you, Africa).
I don't see $100 billion as a lot of money to spend on moralistic philosophizing. Things can always be improved. If I was in charge, I would probably implement some kind of physical requirement for colleges, and create a tiered university system where colleges are assigned funding according to how strict their entry requirements are. I just don't think defunding is going to solve any problems.
I am doubtful that defunding colleges is going to give Christians the boost that you think it is. As in late Rome, when the Roman religion was becoming degraded, it was cults (including Christianity) which benefitted. I think the Trump cult (which we both oppose) is an example of how delegitimizing the mainstream doesn't lead to Christian revival, but the worship of strongmen with questionable morals.
>I doubt that if we defunded colleges that churches would "fill the vacuum." I'm not sure if anything would -- we might just fall apart as a society.<
We didn't "fall apart as a society" when people stopped going to church, so this doesn't seem very plausible.
If you want an institution dedicated to "moralistic philosophizing," then I mean yeah, traditional religions and churches are explicitly for that. That is clearly the societal niche that they evolved to fill. Universities may do some of it here and there but they're also being tasked to do like fifteen other things, all of which they do badly for the most part, "moralistic philosophizing" included.
Most people don't go to college in order to do "moralistic philosophizing," they go because they believe they need to in order to get a good job. If you could guarantee to someone their dream job with no need to go to college, I imagine large swathes of people would jump on that opportunity and skip higher education. Those who didn't take the deal may still have other motivations--for instance, the desire to sit around drinking and "partying" instead of working a 9 to 5. I'm not sure if I personally knew anyone who went to college so they could be part of the liberal intelligentsia, but I definitely knew plenty who went for that reason.
You seem to understand that we don't need every citizen to be a "moralistic philosopher," and that any real priestly caste is going to be relatively small compared to the general population. So if you wanted universities to primarily serve such a function, it would make far more sense to claw them back down to the smaller sizes that they were in the past, rather than endorsing the status quo where everyone and their mother is expected to attend.
>I am doubtful that defunding colleges is going to give Christians the boost that you think it is.<
I didn't say shrinking college would give Christians a boost, I said I have a very negative opinion of academia. I also have a very negative opinion of rectal cancer, and if you gave me a magic button that would eliminate it, I'd press the button. I wouldn't expect Christianity to get some sort of sudden revival from it, though. I'd just expect there to be less of a bad thing in the world.
Agreed. College is, for the most part, straightforwardly worthless from an educational standpoint. Although there are plenty of programs that do teach useful information. Just from eyeballing it, for every STEM graduate, there is about 1 graduate from a program of dubious educational value.
Elite overproduction is not produced by education. Education is used as a proxy for elite overproduction. Traditionally, elite overproduction resulted from the aristocracy (who enjoyed better nutrition and saw more of their children survive) outbreeding the peasantry, resulting in more aristocrats than suitable positions for them.
What happens if a noble has three sons? The oldest inherits the title and lands. One of the others might marry the daughter of a nobleman who has no sons. Other possibilities include a career in the church. In the linked paper below I argue that the explosion of monastery formation in the 12th century absorbed excess elites, delaying elite overproduction for a century. You could be a mercenary (see wiki link). Or you could get a government job if you trained for it (hence the rise in college attendance during times of elite overproduction).
How does elite overproduction get resolved? Traditionally, it was by getting rid of excess elites in one way or another. Elites killing themselves off in wars was popular choice (google Scourging of the North or Battle of Taunton). Wiping out a good chunk of elite wealth causing them to lose elite status also works such as Emancipation wiped out much of the wealth of elites in the American South, and the stock market crash and subsequent high levels of taxation resulted in the top 1% income share getting cut in half over subsequent decades. See third link for more on this.
https://escholarship.org/uc/item/230872k1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_company
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-current-crisis-era
The free market has produced growth without relying on a consensus of core moral beliefs.Any person who wants to fund a racist smell research or purchase a loan to do it themselves should be free to do so. Tax payers who haven't consented to that are correct to be irrtated with these issues,much like they would be in any secular society where the government is funding churchies.The problem with 'elite overprudiction' is not the OVERPRODUCTION part, but the ELITE one. Academia is becoming less elitist and perfectionist,our elites have lower iqs and conscientiousness that previous generations. Academia is gynocratic,and pushes egalitarian norms. No child left behind produces the tall-poppy syndrome. The few men and old women left with more socially conservative attitudes to teaching(eg whiplash movie)are less inclined to demand excellence and are afraid to make their peers feel uncomfortable. Noone bothered with underwater baskets at The Manhattan Project,noone does so in the IDF or in Musk's companies. White-knighting and simping for women while colleges devolve to day-care centers is not have positive results
This is a really weird, wandering article, full of assumptions.
what do you expect from an article defending liberal arts degrees? You expect some 12 point plan backed up by facts and evidence?
This is an over-simplified analysis that leaves out major parts of the right wing argument.
One of the top reasons so many on the right would happily defund all universities tomorrow is the prevalence of fraud. This comes up in nearly every discussion about the problem. You obliquely gesture in this direction in the final paragraphs, but only in the context of students cheating. Everyone agrees that this is bad, and that academia won't lift a finger to fix it. Only the right are brave and smart enough to take the logical next steps:
1. the reason they won't fix it is because the academics are all cheating too.
2. a system that claims to be about truth and learning but is full of cheaters is a bad system that encourages/rewards bad behavior, and should be abolished for that reason alone regardless of any other arguments.
3. a big part of the "liberalness" of universities is possible only due to this cheating. That is, left wing beliefs are wrong, and the reason they're so prevalent on campus is because there are no intellectual standards that force academia to adopt correct ideas.
Forcing citizens to fund institutions that are full of cheaters who spread incorrect ideas is clearly bad, and thus, defunding is the only moral position. STEM or not STEM or basket weaving or English or whatever just doesn't matter at all, in this context.
I generally agree with the thrust of this piece - that a) the plebs need moral stricture and guidance, b) religion is no longer cutting it, and academia seems to be doing a surprisingly good job of stepping up to replace it, and c) this is not a good reason to destroy academia. I mostly get off the bus there, though.
The really big reason is that the moral stricture and guidance coming from academia is low-quality. It’s based on important base values like respecting the inherent dignity and worth of each human, but has managed to contort itself into a remarkably destructive and dragging force. There are many philosophies that could come out of academia that I think could provide a religion-replacement, and wokism is not nearly the worst, but it is worse than what it’s replacing and is worse than what ‘academia as moral core’ could be (much as not all religions are created equal). Hopefully this is merely the proto-Judaism of the next phase of religion and not what mainline academic moral core will be in future years. I’d be fairly happy with your piece if you’d endorsed this point.
As additional minor quibbles, I don’t think there is a need for a similar amount of economic value to be put towards moral core as in the Middle Ages. The miracles of modern connectivity and (to a lesser degree) literacy mean that we don’t need a priest for every hamlet. I could see a world where it made sense to have a moral core liaison in medium-to-large companies or something, but DEI officers don’t seem to have done hugely well at that job even when it was wokism’s most scalable idea for how to use its middling members.
‘Elite overproduction’ seems to be more like a finishing school, but one where at the end of the pipeline the gender imbalance leaves too many women without eligible suitors. In that sense, I’m perfectly fine with it expanding - I think the amount of both overall and especially unskilled labor necessary for an increasing quality of life is decreasing rapidly, and I think the world is better with educated nonproductive people than uneducated nonproductive people.
I think the problem of a proliferation of conflicting moralities in modern society is inevitable. The Reformation, for instance, followed on the heels of the printing press - a tool which vastly improved the dissemination of ideas. This eventually led to the tolerance of the enlightenment, where different branches of Christianity were permitted to coexist since there was no longer any way of reliably policing the spread of information.
This gets even more complex in the social media age. Now the spread of ideas is even more out of control! And there's no way to easily contain it or direct it towards some singular vision of morality. Ultimately we are going to have to live with conflicting morals in some way or another.
(1) Conservatives might want to defund the universities not to stop the so-called woke mind virus (which is a fun story) but just to hit back at their opponents. Like, professors are woke? Defund and thus raise the cost for wokeness. Also, take away the money and somewhat decrease their status. Harvard will remain Harvard but plenty of less selective schools will seem a lot shittier.
(2) so true and underrated about biology being a low-income and oversubsidized (NIH) major. To get a job from it, students have to go to med school (expensive) or phd school (lol still poor). Also, consider the whole women in Stem thing. Biology is technically a science so “Stem”. But it’s vaguely “helping people” and is much less mathy than engineering or physics, so women love it. Put those aspects together and, when you push women into “stem” you wind up with a biologist glut, because they tend to ignore market signals or view them as morally illegitimate.
(3) I agree that elite overproduction is overdone. But it reminds me about some of the early Christian controversies, which seem pretty dubious and hyper technical in retrospect. Basically, they had too many people who could be bishops and not enough parishes. So the para-bishops split into teams to compete over offices and to kick opponents out of office, by latching onto and amplifying otherwise minor disputes with no practical significance aside from the factional conflict. These disputes eventually took on a life of their own, with Roman authorities (Constantine, Justinian) trying their best to pragmatically settle things. But things would not settle because of the underlying dynamics of too many candidates for ecclesiastical office. Upside? I think elite overproduction can be real in intra-sectarian conflicts, where everyone agrees on the important issues. In other words, for true elite overproduction and not just exclusion of capable people like in the ancien regime, tsarist Russia or white men under dei, what you see is that the substantive disputes become ever more arcane and incomprehensible to outsiders. Like you write, we don’t really have elite overproduction now. And we know this because we don’t have, say, woke factions splitting and trying to impeach each other from office over the good and true meaning of, say, “racism.”
I totally agree with the comparation with the church. I would go as far as to claim that most education beyond primary school serves more as a social ritual than anything else, with the priest-teacher imparting the holy knowledge of algebra to kids who neither care nor will remember it the month afterwards. And im not against it! All societies need rituals and this better than most. But Id like people to admit it, instead of repeating empty phrases like "Education is the most important investment a country can make" and so on and so on.
Please share source on discriminatory pressure
Excellent point. What is needed is alternatives to the current academic system, not its destruction. Here are some thoughts on the issue:
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/for-a-future-worth-living-in
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/invisible-academies
https://swiftenterprises.substack.com/p/great-american-libraries