The Slow Death of the University

&quot;It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny.&quot;<p>Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of &quot;free speech areas&quot; and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. When people are talking about &quot;safe areas&quot; to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead. Political parties have more diversity of allowed thought. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of &quot;agree with me&quot; or be condemned.<p>If you didn&#x27;t forge your ideas in the fire of criticism at university, then you were cheated by others or yourself. The best teachers will make you argue both &#x2F; multiple sides of a scenario and be offended that you parroted their opinion back to them. The worst teachers only see one valid way to think and are doing &quot;missionary work&quot; instead of teaching.<p>It is often depressing to read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thefire.org" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.thefire.org</a>

This is only mildly related to the article, but does anyone else have difficulty imagining what others&#x27; jobs are? For example, I&#x27;m just young enough to remember a time when I thought a programmer was someone who hid in a closet to slam at a keyboard for nine hours a day, but that notion was only corrected by entering the workforce. What about my other misconceptions? There&#x27;s no way to learn about all of them firsthand. I figure plumbers just travel between job sites to hit pipes for nine hours a day, managers just scream into phones and reply to emails for nine hours a day, and literary theorists ... sit ... in their offices ... for nine hours ...<p>That&#x27;s the problem; I&#x27;m not possessed of a sufficiently creative (or informed) mind to fill in the blanks here. Dangerously, due to that programming knowledge, I also have the incorrect notion that everyone else could be replaced by either a handful of code and some lightly trained workers, or wholesale by mechanization. Clearly this isn&#x27;t the case (or the market is doing a very poor job of finding exploitable niches), so what gives? What do people _do_? Because I&#x27;m at a loss and need to educate myself.

What&#x27;s it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking?<p>Anyway, the author is part of the problem. Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time. Until the professors themselves stop thinking this way, no government will prioritize them.<p>(And no, I don&#x27;t agree that humanities are useless. They have a huge potential. But for them to be of any use, professors will need to seek those applications, and study them. Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.)

I wonder if this death of criticism is misty eyed nastolgia for a future that either never, or rarely existed.<p>Let&#x27;s not forget that our so-called great universities:<p>- For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities.<p>- Were the providence of only the technocratic elite.<p>- Did very little research before the 20th century.<p>And now that the costs escalate out of control, is it any wonder that they have to go more commercial?<p>Some back of the envelope math: If every student takes 10 classes a year (5 per semester) and every professor teaches 5 classes per year to 20 students each, and gets paid 100K all-in, then the per-student faculty labor cost is 100K<i>10&#x2F;(20</i>5) = 10K per year. That&#x27;s not too bad for critical learning. Expand the classes to 40 and you can cut the cost in half, or give the faculty a big raise.

It&#x27;s a big, complex problem.<p>There is of course the change over the last few decades by which universities have become a third stage of standard education rather than a voluntary pursuit of possibly esoteric learning. This has been brought about by a number of factors, but has (I think) led to more education, which is a good thing. Of course, to offset the cost of 4 years of school and 4 &quot;lost&quot; years of productivity, students want degrees that will improve their odds of getting a job. That pretty much explains the shift towards professional training.<p>Bringing the universities to everyone also means broadening the offerings — originally when it was only the erudition-inclined or well-to-do, a university could get away with having a great deal of humanities and other fields that do not generate grants or jobs. It was learning for learning&#x27;s sake, which few could afford.<p>I do think we&#x27;re approaching an inflection point in the future at which some major universities will fight back against this trend. But because this will be expensive to them and their students, I don&#x27;t think it will happen soon. We need a time of extraordinary prosperity in which money can be lavished on social services and education, and that&#x27;s not today or the next ten years.<p>It&#x27;s sad, but I&#x27;m hoping it&#x27;s a transitional phase, not a final one.

&gt; It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, and there are those who claim that today, when that figure has risen to around 50 percent, such liberality of spirit is no longer affordable. Yet Germany, to name only one example, provides free education to its sizable student population.<p>... Yes, they have, and from what I&#x27;ve heard it consists substantially of very large seminar classes and an expectation of self-directed, self-motivated study from its students: hardly the paradigm the author has been mourning where faculty might expect that<p>&gt; the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas.<p>(Also available in Germany, just to note: immigration opportunities for international students, a premise the UK (and the US) have been shying away from.)

I think the crux of the problem lies in the sheer number of students who attend college today; as the author points out:<p><pre><code> &quot;It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, ... [today] that figure has risen to around 50 percent...&quot; </code></pre> The reality is that teaching critical thinking doesn&#x27;t scale nicely, because it requires an intimate dialogue; the process of rigorously critiquing ideas is a two-way street. In today&#x27;s institutions, where professors lecture to classes of 200+ students, this simply isn&#x27;t possible.<p>In the article, the author claims universities have abandoned their roles as centres of critical thinking due to capitalistic forces. While I think this is true, I also believe that our collective attitude towards university shares the blame. Unfortunately, college is seen as the only legitimate path to success after high school.<p>If students had more opportunities to explore their interests, instead of being funnelled into university, perhaps universities could re-establish themselves as institutions where critical discussion takes place.

Descriptions of certain ancient centers of learning (I am thinking of Nalanda[1]) seem to convey an atmosphere of open-to-all-and-sundry and free sharing of knowledge, ideas and interpretation amongst the entire community. We can at least look for that online.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nalanda" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Nalanda</a>

Isn&#x27;t this part of a larger, global trend of turning public institutions into private businesses? It happened to the American prision system, it&#x27;s happening to healthcare, education, and higher education.

Those South Koreans were probably carrying brand new Samsung phones under their jacket. Just as potent as a pair of Kalashnikovs, which their Northern brethren prefer ;)<p>In certain parts of the English-speaking world, universities are not dying, they&#x27;re actually flourishing... but only because of a major influx of Chinese and Korean students willing to pay those exhorbitant out-of-state fees.<p>And since most of those valuable foreign customers want to study business, finance, medicine, law, and a handful of STEM fields, universities have no choice but to cater to their demands. Some programs in the West Coast are half Chinese by now. Those kids probably pay 80% of the gross fees, too. On the other hand, when I took English or philosophy, I was often the only Asian in the class.<p>But China is growing very fast (slower than before, but still fast), and Korea has all but done catching up with the rest of the developed world. Other countries might then supplant China as the largest supplier of international students, but they&#x27;ll grow up, too. Sooner or later, all the international students who are propping up American universities will decide that they&#x27;d much rather spend their dollars elsewhere. When that last bubble bursts, even STEM fields will not be immune from a massive shock, and heavily subsidized humanities departments will be in real trouble this time.

The author would have benefitted from a bit of historical knowledge of the university as an institution. The English were making the same sort of complaints about Scottish universities in the 18th Century, and it&#x27;s pretty clear from our perspective now where more of the insights emerged in that period.<p>While he may find it distasteful, the first university in Bologna appears to have formed around a core faculty who decided to start charging students for their lectures.

Somebody should offer a prize for the earliest citation of the expression &quot;critical studies&quot; as used here. It may not go back to Monty Python&#x27;s time, and certainly not Erasmus&#x27;s. (I imagine the award to be the right to look coolly at Terry Eagleton and say &quot;kill him&quot; in Korean, or the language of one&#x27;s choice.)<p>I think that the humanities gave away a good deal of their own prestige by chasing a false notion that they could and should become scientific. Northrop Frye, whom Eagleton mentions, had some big grand ideas about schematizing things, I recall.

The question is what&#x27;s causing this? Is it income disparity and a lack of wealth distribution, making our universities tailor more towards making money? Is it the information golden age that we&#x27;re in, making education more of a 4 year summer camp for people to have fun instead of learning? Is it leftism and our need for increasing political correctness and thus bureaucracy to enforce that? Is it a side effect of our new trend of sticking everyone into a skinner box?<p>I dunno.

Good article by Eagleton but I do wonder very much if it would have made headlines on HN if the title was &quot;the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique&quot; and the HN readers knew of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Terry_Eagleton#Literary_Theory" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Terry_Eagleton#Literary_Theory</a>

This was easily one of the wittiest and funniest articles I&#x27;ve ever read from a British author...<p>But why shouldn&#x27;t vampires be more lauded than Victorians? Why should Jane Austen, with her painfully circumlocutions, be more academically welcome than that woman (forget her name) who wrote 50 shades of gay? In many ways, old &quot;classical&quot; works are telling the exact same stories as modern &quot;trash novel&quot; works, except the modern &quot;trash novel&quot; works are doing it in such a way that is clear, simple, relevant (to today&#x27;s audience), and thus free of misunderstandings. From them, through clever literally mental contortions, one can still elucidate all the themes, lessons, and humanities like you could from confounding classics - just less obfuscated like &quot;there is no place like home&quot; instead of &quot;lost is my homecoming&quot;, &quot;...and then they had sex and fell in love...&quot; instead of &quot;... I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this...&quot;, etc.<p>And who says the arts are dying? The arts are vibrant and alive in today&#x27;s web-comics, video games, movies, and tv-shows. The medium has changed from a completely closed system of ink and paint to a modular, copyable, and distributable one of .mdl files, computer images, and carrier streams. It&#x27;s just intentionally confusing junk like cubism, poorly drawn junk like medieval art, and inhumane junk like pyramid building that&#x27;s gone away.<p>The pressure to have to constantly monetize, I&#x27;ll admit, is painful... but that primarily hurts the large institutions who have bottom lines that must be covered. And in my opinion as a flexible small business kind of guy, that&#x27;s a good thing. Large institutions were necessary for centuries for individual survival at the cost of individual self-actualization, but in today&#x27;s flexible scale era, it&#x27;s entirely possible to just be good at something and survive without having to give up your soul to a large corporation. In that case, going small, lean, and individual is the way of the bright future.

Some people think debt or decadence will be the end of the West. I personally believe it will be bureaucracy.

Reading this reminds me of &quot;A Very Peculiar Practice&quot;[1][2] which foreshadowed this by nearly 20 years<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Very_Peculiar_Practice" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;A_Very_Peculiar_Practice</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&amp;list=PLJ4mcFE1FY8dGdRX6DyCFcTHF3wSHPb3s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&amp;list=PLJ4mcFE1FY...</a>

It reminded me of a quote from Hemingway&#x27;s book, <i>The Sun Also Rises</i>:<p>- “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.<p>- “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

The university is not dead. People who are going to inferior schools want to make this logic a fact.

Universities have been &quot;dying&quot; for hundreds of years. Please call me when they stop existing! Whenever there is a new technology (printing press, cinema, TV, computers, internet) there will be someone saying that universities are old-fashioned and useless. Of course, this never happens, because there is always a need for institutions of knowledge, in one way or another.<p>For example, people buying into the internet-crazy think that everything can be replaced by the Internet. Media companies (music, cinema, book publishing) were supposed to be dead at least a decade ago. It turns out that in reality they are bigger than before. What people forget is that the Internet doesn&#x27;t create things by itself. Good movies will continue to be produced by specialized companies, good books will continue to be published by specialized publishers, and so on. Only the technology changes, but human needs continue the same.<p>Similarly, universities will be just fine in a century or more. They will adapt to the new technologies and continue to produce knowledge as they have done before.

What... is this guy talking about?<p>&quot;the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique.&quot;<p>What? What the hell is humane critique?<p>&quot;Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism.&quot;<p>Wow... You know what allows you to reflect? Having enough time while being an active part of society. Time to reflect, being active to have proper perspective. If all you&#x27;re doing is reading books and talking, all you can reflect on is books and hearsay, combined with some intuition.<p>The last thing an English major can do is reflect on anything that requires understanding mathematics or statistics or... you know, the stuff that people who do science have to know?<p>Just because you read Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, doesn&#x27;t mean you can critique anything that actually matters, that people who haven&#x27;t read Dostoevsky can&#x27;t...<p>There&#x27;s scientific knowledge, and then there&#x27;s entertainment such as fiction and television shows etc. Guess which category this guy belongs to?<p>The all-over-the-place sloppy writing this guy produces is telling. I guess when you&#x27;re surrounded by a bunch of folks who don&#x27;t create anything but words, you start thinking you know a thing or two beyond entertaining people with words.