Victor Davis Hanson also spoke about another subject dear to my heart. The failure of academia and the fact that we should stop pouring money down the rathole that is public education. Especially the university system that has become a cesspool.
Hanson speaks about it as follows:
College.
"The university will either change soon or simply implode; its present course is unsustainable and rests on the premise that schizophrenic deans and presidents can still manage to write and say things to student cry bullies that they hope their donors and alumni never read or hear.
Colleges overcharge insolvent students through tuition increases far beyond the annual rate of inflation—the Ponzi scheme predicated on guaranteed federal loans that cannot be repaid by poorly educated graduates and drop-outs, many with little skills or demonstrable education. Obama has already promised relief to the disabled student debtor: expect that more amnesties will follow, probably predicated on the basis of race, class, and gender. In the meantime, the number of disabled indebted students will mysteriously soar.
In response, the university freely imposes speech codes, allows racial segregation, and winks at censorship of texts. It has suspended due process in cases of allegations of sexual assault, and allows 1930s-like violence (reminiscent of the Brownshirts) to disrupt public lectures and assemblies—if the agendas of the protestors profess social awareness. Only the hard sciences and professional schools in engineering, mathematics, and medicine have for the moment partially escaped the ruin.
Online colleges are far cheaper and more concerned with offering skill sets for cash. Their spread has so far been checked by the lack of general education enrichment, by the mythical college experience of physically living in or walking about a beautiful campus, and by the lack of prestige accorded a for-profit, online diploma. But if the traditional American college has largely given up on liberal education (due to its deductive and politicized mandatory –studies courses), if being on a campus can equate to an unpleasant ordeal of thought policing and mob rule, and if a diploma from a major university does not suggest that one knows anything about history, literature, science, or basic facts concerning our civilization, why would the university need to continue? Cui bono?
It runs now partly on past momentum, and partly because taxpayers and alumni donors still subsidize it. If a majority were to feel that their money only empowers fascism among faculty and administration, and if they were to conclude that students are not sympathetic in their indebtedness, but rather increasingly arrogant and ignorant in their passive aggressions, then they might well simply pull the plug on what is becoming their Frankenstein monster."
Well put. Online degrees will replace the bogus university experience and many hack professors will lose their rice bowl. It couldn't happen to a bigger bunch of scumbags.
11 comments:
Tell you something else that is already happening.
Certifications are replacing degrees in a lot of STEM fields.
A BS in Computer Sci will be nice, but anything much beyond that will come from people like Cisco, RedHat, Citrix, or even (gag) Microshaft.
So is VDH a #nevertrumper? I seem to recall some disparaging remarks early on.
I can't recall any of the PJMedia crowd who goes against the orthodoxy.
The closest are Insta (although he's been backsliding the last few times I've gone there) and Roger Simon.
Milton Friedman spoke of four ways to spend money. Spend your money on yourself, spend your money on others, spend other people's money on yourself, and spend other people's money on other people. The last is the most reckless spending of the four. The example he gave was public education. Spot on.
I've become more smarterer after college than through college. And now I'm intolerably smart. However, I must hasten, college really did teach me to read simply by demanding it. I learned information really does want to be free. People really do want to talk about what they know. It's not so much bragging but people really do like to spill it all out. Not saying people don't hoard proprietary knowledge. Intellectual property whatever.
Whatever you want to know is available for free. I bet. Almost.
Contrarily, Wolfgang Puck was showing us the world of his mum and how she's a brilliant natural cook. Puck goes, "C'mon, Mum, tell us what you put in there." She can't because it's a deeply held secret, her secret world will collapse, her top secret must not get out, she must be the only woman around that knows how to do this, on a show about cooking instruction *click* Bitch, you're wrecking my theory about people sharing wisdom and being talkative abut the things that they know.
She's a knowledge hoarder. Personality flaw. The second rung down is a knowledge seller. Some kind of shortcoming that disallows anything else. The natural state is a knowledge sharer.
I can then open YouTube and have fifteen videos of women showing what Puck's mum did, compare recipes of online and decide for myself which way to go, maybe even what that top secret thing is.
Chinese were like this. They would not reveal the top secret ingredient that makes their noodles so elastic that from one wad they stretch and double, and double, and double to hundreds rather quickly and impressively. Noodle maker after noodle maker would not tell the white guy their secret until finally some friendly young guy did. Baking soda. Chinese noodle stretchers are knowledge hoarders. YouTube, knowledge sharers.
For example I have learned so many words in different languages on my own through the internet it's incredible. Many more than I did in or for or through college. And that's just words. There's so many of them you can't even use them.
Except to unravel a gnarly crossword corner effortlessly one lonely time among thousands of those things.
I ask it everything. My microwave of 10 years shuts off at 5 minutes. Finally I asked the internet wtf? Other people are having the same problem. And now I have a plan of attack. ding ding ding I can actually take it apart. It could be something so stupid as the fan blade falling off. A problem with that model. Is that muy ridiculoso or what? 10 years!
I could end up reading and writing as a proper Egyptologist without even actually wanting that and not trying because all that automatically comes with what I am after. A masters degree-worthy education in Egyptology is the tin-cups on strings attached to the things that I'm after. If I were interested in certification, boink, I could do it easily as taking those CLEP exams during college. Come to think of it, that might be fun. All because of the internet.
My signs have doubled at least. Tripled. I know more signs than my deaf friends do. I know all the online dictionaries. See new ones in videos all the time. Study them in different languages. No brag, just fact, I got three signs for the word "rapture" where English has one word. Because of Blondies' song. And the internet. And that's just one example of hundreds if not thousands.
Speaking of gnarly corners, this morning I came across "very cold" : _ _ L _ _ and I filled in GELID without pausing to think. Thank you internet.
Today the internet lady said, "The ophthalmologist asked me if I know what cataracts are and I answered that's where the northern Nile get very ripply. He responded with a grimace. By the way, I know why they called cataracts. Do you?"
That's a pretty good joke, don't you think?
She's asking us all and I'm thinking sure, because waterfalls make clear water appear clouded and the ancients considered clouded water pouring over the eyes. But other people will answer her so I can just watch. Thank you internet.
I'm kind of waiting for someone to point out the cataracts are at the southern Nile but so far nobody has.
Vic has done a lot more than I will ever do, but I disagree with his tone many times.
"by the mythical college experience of physically living in or walking about a beautiful campus,"
In fact, networking is one of the biggest advantages of 4 year Universities/colleges. This is why a two year degree at a community college and then transferring to a four year has drawbacks compared to attending the same school 4 years.
Of course, because of the voracious greed of anyone near a college campus save the students when entering but almost never upon leaving so indebted as indoctrinated, 4 years easily turns into 5 or 6, yet the point stands that the first two are important because of potential dorm experiences that are not mythic.
In fact, using the term mythic here reveals a salesman's approach to observation.
Universities are going to ride the train of catering to out-of-state tuitions and government backed student loans from now until the apocalypse. Universities are now colluding with each other to basically shut out in-state students in favor of out-of-state students by taking more of them than not, so that the other in-state students go out of state because they can't get into the in-state university of their choice.
Guildofcannonballs said...
biggest advantages of 4 year Universities/colleges
I think the idea of going to university for 4 years is a lie now. Due to class impaction, that is being stretched out to 5, 6, or more years. And that's for a bachelors. Graduate, PhD, to Post-Doc is an ungodly amount of time. What kind of masochist wants to be in the collegiate system for that long. Oh wait, leftists. NVM.
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