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My close friend has a close friend who's a Lit prof who seems to teach more about Marxism than about Literature and from seeing her work the purpose of the modern professoriate seems to be:

First, to master an esoteric guild language that makes your prose unreadable and your thoughts inscrutable, which is meant entirely as a signal to other people in the guild that you have mastered their jargon, beliefs and etiquette, that you are an official guild member;

and then to use your position in this guild to pursue and express your political and moral goals, usually through bigotry archaeology, the denunciation of some writer, artist or school for its crimes of oppression, and the positing of utopian political standards that always end in a "heads I win, tails you lose" Kafka trap where the theorist professor stands at the apex of morality and all who came before her are smeared with guilt and shame.

It is definitely much more of a priesthood than a professoriate!

The one thing that's left out of all this are the students and their needs, the obligation to actually teach the subject at hand and maybe spark a flame of love or inspiration in young minds. But the students are really just props or audience members—the entire purpose of the modern professoriate are their career and social needs, everything else is either secondary or irrelevant.

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That’s right. And one of the main things nobody talks about but everyone should be talking about is the gross disservice this does to students. It’s additionally problematic because it’s ubiquitous. ALL of the universities are captured. The big loser: Students.

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Correct.

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the students( the willing 'subjects' ) brain fried to resent the very parents who were footing THE BILL for their education!!

Subliminal instruction taught me:

- Its my duty to find work first and maybe a male or female co- habitant

-the more I own and paid for my education the better the career to pay for the education...

-I would pay for my education for the REST OF MY LIFE

- Perfectly within financial ability to have a child out of wedlock because one didn't need a partner to procreate, and gov't sponsored day care is healthy

-God does not exist

-Medicine and Doctors are God

-Science is real

-Professors are in touch with the 'real' reality... a student must strive to understand ( their bull-_hit. )

Took to my mid 40's to unravel these few deceptions...

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When my l/O Psychology class and I conducted a survey about hostile environments and academic freedom, the powers that be (i.e., the dean and president), were so angry, they proclaimed the survey to be dangerous and forbid me from using it even during my dismissal hearing:

The Baffling 'Bull' Behind Title IX — Minding The Campus

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Funny, I knew an academic and the exact thing happed to him. He was furious. I heard that they eventually ground him down to nothing. He eventually quit.

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The trouble with quitting is that it makes suing more problematic. Having been dismissed for cause by Berea College through a process that was far less than i was due, and having two able lawyers take my case on a contingency basis federal, court fees have exceeded $65k and the process has taken over 7 years and is still undecided. However, recently, the 6th federal circuit partially reversed a district judge’s previous summary judgment in favor of the college.

Professor-v.-Professor Defamation Suit Can Go Forward, Based on Defendant's Statements to Students

In the Cancelling of the American Mind, Lukianoff & Schlott suggest that the 200 recent Woke-related dismissals reflect a rate about twice as high as the infamous McCarthy purge of “communists” in the 1950’s. Nick Wolfinger has collected a score of these narratives in an anthology to be published soon. My story will be among them.

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I quit high school in ninth grade. Years later I got my GED and went to UMB for two semesters. Both semesters I made the Dean's List. I'm a mid-weight but I learned how to take notes and study. I never missed a class. I studied my ass off. It was nothing but sacrifice and hard work. The only reason someone refuses to debate an issue is because they know they have no good argument.

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I'm wondering if The Problem comes from The Academy becoming Big Business?

BTW (as someone on The Right) Ideology, is also a problem. When (say) 90% of Professors hold the same basic world view...this is a problem.

"Midwits. This isn’t merely ignorance—it’s midwittery. Many academics are not particularly intelligent; they are, at best, middling intellects."

I'm thinking this has probably always been the case. The number of really smart brilliant has always been small. Also the idea that if someone knows a lot about one thing (Or Are Famous!), they Must know a lot about some other subject.

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This is what I came to say. They're not educational institutions at all anymore. Theyre businesses.

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Yup, they are businesses but I’d argue this is an issue but it’s not the primary problem.

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I agree. But the bloat, Its insane. There was once a time when you could work your way through college while paying rent, and have little to no debt at the end. Might take 6 or 8 years, but I know people who did it in the 90s.

How many people skip college because of the intolerance? The irony of preaching these thing while having such prejudices. The irony of being in a place that is supposed to question everything and seek truth. I liked it better when these people were heavy into religion.

We are not dealing well with secularism, technology, and the isolation that comes from those things.

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They are among the rare few businesses who have received permission from the state to conspire together to set prices for their services.

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Also: Anyone exceptionally intelligent is going to make a ton more money in a private enterprise versus academia. Im sure that there are a few very bright people who do it because they genuinely want to further collective knowledge. But then they get trapped in a culture of bullshit.

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Or they don’t go into academia in the first place precisely because it’s ideologically skewed.

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Exactly. Various factors beyond my control kept me out of university, but Im thankful.

I wonder how many kids are skipping Uni because of all this nonsense? Not to mention the debt.

Something I read recently: For the first time in history, the average IQ of people graduating with bachelors degrees today is exactly the same as the general population.

It seems to me that we are moving away from these old, slow moving institutions. The internet is democratizing everything. How many different tech certifications are available online for a fraction of the price? Just get some of those, and demonstrate your skills to the right people.

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My plumber is retiring at age 60 as a near millionaire. He earned it...crawling under houses to fix sewer leaks, repair pipes, replace or unstop drains and toilets etc. He was good and reliable. Never went to college, of course. Taught by his dad and smart enough to learn more. Except for the STEM disciplines, if you work hard, you can do well without a college degree.

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I grew up in a very poor rural area. Last time I looked, the average household income was about 35K per year.

However, I have known at least 2 farmers who wear the same overalls, and drive the same old truck everyday, but died with 7 figures in the bank. And thats in addition to the value of the actual farm, home, equipment, and livestock. They never spent money on anything they didnt need.

AI is not going to take away skilled trades jobs any time soon. And with a little bit of business knowledge, you can make a great living working for yourself as a carpenter, plumber, machinist, etc. If youre good at managing people, the sky's the limit.

I don't believe that the fact that men are attending college less is a bad thing. There are many other avenues, if youre motivated. We can learn anything online for free, or close to it. The most successful entrepreneurs of our time went to school long enough to make the right connections, and dropped out. But many people need that well worn path toward a career.

All a degree says is that you're willing to play the established game.

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Which is why I went into high school teaching despite lower pay. I saw a dramatic shift to ideology and midwittery in Australian universities after fee paying/business model and "semesterisation" took place in the 90s. Obscure non-credit seminars became credit semester units became majors and degrees within a few years. Any staff diverging from the line keep their thoughts to themselves for fear of having hours reduced or contracts not renewed.

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I have worked in two universities in NZ in non academic roles. The money and resources that are poured into student success is mind blowing. They are pandering to students who can hardly structure a sentence let alone follow instructions. It’s become a middle class stomping ground for students who have no idea what they are doing the bank of mum and dad propping up their children all the way. Now the students that are enrolled in professional programmes are a different beast, they work, they have to, in order to go through. However universities are now money making machines, they were once the elite institutions where the brightest would succeed now, they have been dumbed down with students on scholarships that can barely write, and the some of the academics have never worked in the real world and have become institutionalised they hold the power.

My daughter has just finished at university and her degree, well whilst she loved her study programme, it will be difficult to gain employment in NZ she will have to go overseas to gain employment. Too many degrees are being approved with very little input from the industry to ensure that there is an employment pathway at graduation.

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Also from NZ with a daughter who recently finished a 3 year 2x STEM degree. She's now in UK and says the tech job market is lousy there. One of our other kids moved to Oz (after covid) for his 1st professional job and says the (tech) job market there is "easy" (having already switched jobs for a promotion).

I agree with you about the grade inflation that has occurred in Uni over the past 30 years. Our daughter suspects it has probably been worse in the UK. She tells us almost all grads she has met finish 3 year degrees with 2:1 or 1st honours and reckons she gets screened out of a lot of applications because she didn't do honours. Also most of her 'successful' applications have been followed by pretty simple on-line aptitude tests before an online interview with a recruiter.

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For Some its not about money. The Best are curious.

An astrophysicist's live reaction to the first JWST science images

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZeEhUCAeac

Jul 12, 2022 UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

Today I was at the National Astronomy Meeting with 500 of my fellow astrophysicists and we were all excited to see the first science images from the James Webb Space Telescope. I recorded my live reaction for you, and theirs! I'll have a more in depth look at each of the images for you in Thursday's video.

They're like 6 year olds on Christmas morning!

BTW Great Channel to Subscribe to!

(it doesn't hurt that she's Easy On The Eye!)

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Since I began following you a few years ago, I became a debate junkie. If I had it to do over, I would have joined the Debate Team in high School. What makes me angry is that educators are trashing debates. Because they know they can't back up the claim. Also, it's a fuck you, this isn't open for debate sort of fascist thuggery called activism. I never completed the first semester of high school. An eighth-grade education. I got my GED. I went to UMB for only two semesters. This is what I learned. I might be a mid-weight, I learned how to study. I learned how to take notes. Not miss class. I was on the Dean's List for both semesters. It was nothing but SACRIFICE and HARD WORK.

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What a great comment. Thank you.

And if someone doesn’t want to debate, okay, then have a conversation. The refusal to engage is destroying us.

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It is destroying us but the refusal to engage is essential to the Woke holding onto and asserting power. As you’ve pointed out yourself, the Woke have created systems that require you to avoid questioning

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They are not really up to a polite debate because they don't have the facts behind their argument. They will, however, just resort to calling you names like Hitler, racist, fascist etc.

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Ideological based groupthink has certainly metastasized out of the Social Sciences and Humanities into any scientific domain you could nominate. For my profession of medicine it’s arrived as gender identity ideology, which, at last, is receiving some first tiny steps of challenge when we see that future vulnerable children might yet start to receive some protection though it is still proving to be a leviathan genie to put back in the bottle. There will be plenty of skin and hair yet to be flying to achieve it!

The longer such beasts have resisted challenge, the stronger they have become. Who knows what is driving the woke movement generally speaking? I think we can identify narcissistic compassion at the helm? Any other ideas? Anyone?

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Why not say the obvious DEI. We are not all equal. Darwin , survival of the fittest . DEI, survival of the dumbest guaranteed !

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DEI is *one* part of this, yes.

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On the publishing aspect of the question, another factor is the role of academic journal publishers themselves. I'm sure they didn't set out to promote fraud, or that they have any ideological skin in the game, but about 25 years ago a few well-financed publishers (most prominently Taylor & Francis and Elsevier) began hoovering up lots of smaller journals and publishers, imposing uniform working practices across them to drive up their profit margins in ways that led directly to a deterioration of quality in the end results. Copy-editing ceased to be about an intelligent engagement with the text (encompassing fact-checking and querying weak argumentation as well as the nuts and bolts of applying a house style on questions of spelling, capitalization, italicization etc) and instead became a limited and mechanical process whose hourly rate of pay was squeezed ever lower and lower. In 2007 T&F's copy-editing scale assumed a throughput of 3,000 words per hour -- already more like a proofreading speed and double what could be expected of anything that deserves to be called "editing" -- for the princely sum of £12 per hour. Fifteen years later, and not only had the actual £ per hour rate not changed (so no accounting for inflation), but to add insult to injury, they now assumed a throughput of 4,000 words per hour. Given that anyone knowledgeable and conscientious is actually working at about 1,500 words per hour, you would actually be making £4.50 per hour, well below minimum wage for even the most unskilled manual labour, let alone a job that, if done properly, requires skill, a tertiary education, tact, experience, and specialized knowledge in several areas.

The end-result has been a collapse in the quality of published articles because, quite apart from any failures of peer review, the production process now longer has the safety mechanisms to spot fraudulent or even simply ineptly written articles. Journal copy-editing is no longer done by subject specialists or even native speakers of the publication language. And all because publishing, which used to be considered a "gentlemanly" pursuit for those motivated by a love of the printed word, was taken over by large corporations so that decisions affecting the editorial quality of the end-result began to be taken by financial officers, driven to maximize shareholder value, who had no conception of the editorial processes their decisions were compromising.

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I have a doctorate in Literature and I live in Israel so obviously you’re about to HATE anything I write. I’m also retired but the “dumbing” down process began long ago. You belong to a deprived group so turn the other way on plagiarism! You come from a minority culture which has a different point of view so there is an element of correctness to your argument etc. etc. I never rose very high in the academic world and was fortunately able to teach Shakespeare and 19th century lit which while not free from “backward” thinking (in both senses) was not yet being used to promote and propagate propaganda. But not to worry ChatGPT is getting well educated.

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As a former academic, I agree. It is so sad what Western academia has become.

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I have a solution to this. Oddly, it’s quite similar to Trump’s.

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Defunding department of ed?

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That would have zero impact on fraud in academia.

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Just to clarify: it would be ugly to wholesale eliminate the department of education for a bunch of reasons, but it's pretty easy to see how people draw the conclusion that government tampering helped get it this way and theres no way forward without cutting it down to size both in its funding and credentialing power.

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What are you smoking? Any org, with this quantity of money shoveled in, gets corrupt. Ditto with the education expertise cluster, connected with teacher credentialing, which is net total a staggeringly powerful force in the deformation of every aspect of the higher ed space.

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The DOE largely focuses on K-12.

Public universities are funded by state governments.

Abolishing the federal DOE would have very little impact on universities.

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I think the people who make this argument strongly want to destroy the title ix infrastructure, the student debt infrastructure, and the indirect control of the purse strings on things like National Endowments which afaik go only to individuals and institutions compliant with Department of Ed. Afaik the argument is that doing these would wholly reshape student tuition moneys and hiring/promotion practices. Sure, direct federal moneys make up a minority of funds across universities, but department of ed policy shapes the student body, hiring, and research itineraries through directly and indirectly attaching prerequisites to sources of cash, and afaik that includes indirect sources of money like subsidized or indebted tuition moneys and funds from taxpayers distributed through other agencies.

I personally get apoplectic about state-level credentialing, but that's another story.

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Sounds like a good Substack article!

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I saw this first-hand at a Canadian college in the late 60's. The college was new and it recruited a lot of professors, many of whom were Marxists. These professors established themselves in the political science, sociology, and athropology departments. They also hired their Marxist graduate students who served as tutors. In a very short time, these departments served as Marxist bulwarks, and their students as a substantial band of trouble-makers who kept the campus in turmoil for several years.

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Yup. That’s how it works: Academics hire people who believe as they do.

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The good news is that, after several years of turmoil and distruption, the college was able to get rid of the radical professors by not renewing their contracts. (Since the college was new, the profs didn't have tenure yet.) This resulted in a huge and final outburst from the radicals but, after that, things got calm again. But of course the graduate students (and others) came back in time to recolonize the campus.

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Because standards only matter if you actually hold yourself to them.

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True. So what’s the point of plagiarism rules if you don’t fire plagiarists? There is no point to them. Consequently, trust in institutions is undermined.

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Well I don’t think you should get rid of plagiarism rules simply because they aren’t enforced. To quote a favourite quote of mine:

“If you want people to respect the big rules, you have to be willing to enforce the small ones.”

By the logic of not having plagiarism rules if you don’t enforce them, the fact that people commit murder means that we should abolish all laws against murder.

You have to enforce them and passing more laws doesn’t solve the problem. As I’ve said in other situations, you can pass the “lobbying is illegal act” all you want but if the people they apply to don’t follow them, it doesn’t matter how many times you pass a law against lobbying, or plagiarism, or murder.

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What happens if/when you don't believe in Truth? That there is such a thing as Truth? Standards Go Away.

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I think it’s possible to believe that truth is much more complicated than it appears without necessarily giving up on standards. Legal disputes are a classic case of how the truth can be complicated.

But you can still hold up legal standards for finding out what the truth actually is. Or at least getting as close to the truth as possible.

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"I think it’s possible to believe that truth is much more complicated than it appears without necessarily giving up on standards"

Very True. As A Christian I Do Have Standards (that 10 Commandments thing :-)), But As a History Nut I also know Things are also Very Complicated.

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For sure, just because you fall short of the standards doesn’t mean you don’t believe in them.

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Higher Education Leaders Finally Start To Realize Their Entire Industry Is Worthless

An article in higher education’s flagship magazine is more evidence that academia is starting to recognize it needs to change.

Walker Larson

December 31, 2024

https://thefederalist.com/2024/12/31/higher-education-leaders-finally-start-to-realize-their-entire-industry-is-worthless/

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One word: Grants. Research is paid by competitive grants, and you have to satisfy the tastes of the granting agency to get money. Results are less important than ideology.

In industry, research is aimed at achieving a real solution to a real problem, so the taste and politics of the payer don't matter as much. In some countries academic research is funded annually, not competitively by project, which also leads to less bias and favoritism.

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Just discovered your Substack wow you’ve described the problem and reasons so clearly. Now how to we salvage the true academy from these pretenders?

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I’m a veteran professor…and I’ve had it. I have no more filter. I do my best to recognize the motivated students and warn them about all the bullshittery. I show them how to recognize it and I encourage - encourage! - them to resent it. There are still some of us willing to teach hard subjects in blunt and challenging ways and I still gain a lot of satisfaction in helping motivated students navigate their way to a rigorous and honest curriculum. It’s still possible, but I don’t know for how much longer.

Thanks, Peter.

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