Frederick M. Hess and Brendan Bell write,
What is needed. . .is a place where serious scholars can have the space to pursue questions and subjects that don’t fit the progressive orthodoxy at today’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning. We need an incubator where promising young intellectuals could pursue their research without being forced to conform to the prevailing ideology, and where they can find the scaffolding — employment, funding, networks, and publication outlets — to enable them to achieve independent viability. What is needed is an ivory tower of our own.
Their goal is to set up a secular institution to compete with the Progressive religious seminaries. They put together a business plan for a new elite university that would host roughly 5000 undergraduates and 1500 graduate students. Their calculations suggest that such an enterprise would run at an operating loss of $50 million per year and also require $1.5 billion in initial capital to acquire land and build facilities.
Recently, I read Building the Intentional University, a book about the Minerva University, edited by founders Stephen M. Kosslyn and Ben Nelson. Their goal is not to ape existing universities but to redesign undergraduate education from scratch to make it more effective and less costly. I find this a more interesting project, although I am have some qualms about their approach.
In my opinion, if you are motivated to learn about something, you can find online resources that will be at least as good as what college students get, and perhaps better. I say that the future belongs to auto-didacts. Moreover, as William Gibson is reported to have put it, the future is here–it’s just not evenly distributed.
Seemingly related, from Scott Beauchamp,
perhaps the most subversive act is to learn without the authoritarian “assistance” of the typical modern university
Good luck to them 🙂
I think a question to ask is “how did existing elite universities end up like this?” To be followed by “and how do we prevent it at this new university?” You could even ask a more general question “what large institutions haven’t been taken over by progressive religion?”. It seems that religious organizations, for profit companies, nor a host of others big and small have been able to resist.
A different strategy is: How can we offer practical education and accreditation services to society without tying them to these elite institutions of politics and culture shaping that the National Affairs article envies? Ideally, the former charges market price and operate without traditional government, and the latter depends on the support of donors or some other non-government source.
The Prussian education system of Nietzsche’s time had decayed from a bold institutional experiment which invigorated German culture into a sort of administrative cargo cult where scholars and students merely went through the motions.
The more things change, huh?
cite?
It’s at the link above with Scott Beauchamp’s name in it.
Thanks.
Man this sounds like an awful idea for a university and not go to.
In reality, I believe 80 – 90% of university students are learning a skills (and achieving sheepskin effect) to get a decent job in the United States. At the heart of what students need to learn is basic communicating, oral & written, computer, math and business skills for a decent job. And most of don’t care much about ideology and universities should angle more to careers and jobs.
The biggest problem with Bryan Caplan endless complaints of modern society using education as a signal are:
1) All societies have had ways young people send signals to achieve adulthood. They are good at hunting, joined the military for 2 – 4 years or got married were all past signals.
2) Employers are labor demand and they have great influence over the market. If they want different signals they can use them.
As has been said countless times before, an employer who uses a signal that has a “disparate impact” has bought a lottery ticket for major litigation and maybe social attack. Using ed credentials as a signal is pretty safe–even though it has a tremendous disparate impact.
Bryan Caplan doesn’t think ed credentials are a useless signal. In fact, he thinks they are a pretty accurate signal of “intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity.” What they are not a useful signal of is academic knowledge and skills. But since most jobs don’t require much in the way of academic knowledge and skills, that doesn’t really diminish their usefulness to potential employers and partners.
What bothers Bryan is the cost and the pretense.
And let us not diminish conscientiousness and conformity. In the modern world, economic rents make up the profits in our leading industries. At best these rents are proprietary knowledge you don’t want leaking out, at worst they are scandals you want as few people talking about as possible. What kind of employees do you want guarding your economic rents? Not the ones that ask problematic questions or act out on their own.
Don’t companies want to hire “intelligence, conscientiousness, and conformity?” TBH these are very important attributes of your workers.
1) Most companies are not like professional sports team in which you are limited by the number of very productive players. Sure you can argue 80% of company productivity comes from 20% of workers but it takes the bottom 80% to cooperating with the top 20% of workers.
2) Many companies have to have a good set of workers with different skills, experience and abilities.
3) Most companies define their goals for a specific year and expect employees to focus on those goals.
Unfortunately, I don’t think very many people are self-directed and motivated enough to learn by themselves (e.g., with online resources). Sad to say, I think I’m probably one of them, though with the structure of schools I did quite well…
Doing anything requires motivation. This isn’t unfortunate; it’s basic psychology. People only eat food because their brain motivates them to do so. People only learn because of some motivation to learn: maybe they have some career goal, or personal goal, or they are conforming to peer pressure, or expectations from society or their parents. If you stripped away every motivation to learn a subject, then by definition, no human would ever do so.
The goal is not to get people to learn without the presence of any motivation or reason to do so. One goal is to enable more people to learn by making the normal requisite motivational factors accessible to them.
Social factors are huge for most people. It’s a lot easier to work if you’re studying the same things as other people; you can talk to them about it and gauge whether you’re on track. A little structure goes a long way.
My guess offhand is that most math and statistics classes I would not have learned on my own, nor computer classes, nor technical classes generally.
Motivation matters. For me the problem is having to do problem sets, turn in analysis, etc. Tyler Cowen discusses this in _Average is over_ though the details escape me. The college can be a bit like a church or prayer group–it can be where you meet other people with the same zeal. So he said.
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Youtube is in part a “game-changer” (I hate that word) because people use it to learn how to do “how-to” projects that previously they would need a friend to help with, or read a manual, or do things much more “sink-or-swim.”
Youtube and video is also a game-changer because there are a lot of people who won’t read except under duress or with strong incentives, but who find it less burdensome to watch a video. Thus the challenge is in part now on the quality of the videos.
In addition, having to write papers and take exams aids in the learning process. Learning online without papers and exams, simply based on “demand pull” from curious autodidacts, is not going to be effective for most people, I would guess.
This is one of the ways I’m different from most people, I guess. Most of the time, I would much rather read about something than watch it or listen to it.
Is there good research on this?
Most proficient readers can read probably three times faster than the typical person in a video talks. I’m like that. This is not to boast, some of the ability is God-given, along with the result of good education and endless reading. But what percentage of the public is this way? Is it 20%?
Steve Sailer has stated or implied that he is that way.
Greg Cochrane at West Hunter blog similarly, he made some crack about (to paraphrase) “if you don’t want to read this you can be like the kids these days, you can listen to a podcast and take twice as long to get half the information.”
Also, for me, just about any book is browsable in a way that a video or podcast is not. The smart guys I know from college tell me that they use podcasts for drive-time or dog-walking or tread milling workouts.
Somewhere…I read that even in Switzerland, which is a highly functional developed country (but with a low percentage of college graduates) someone had concluded that x% of workers would not read any instructions longer than a page. It was a big number–something like 30%.
In the field of industrial engineering and job training, quite a large percentage of people couldn’t read something longer than a page. Couldn’t or wouldn’t–anyone in management had to work with that estimate of reading ability / comfort with the printed word.
Personally, if at all possible I prefer to watch video at double speed with subtitles on and sound off. I wish more hardware would accommodate that preference. You’d think I’d miss things, but if I go back and watch at normal speed it turns out I got it the first time.
I know a blind guy (lost his sight from diabetes as an adult) who was a working journalist and a professor of communications. My sense is that he listens to everything sped up 3x (so it seems to me). He also does that for any text to voice utility.
Would be great. In the last two months, I’ve been re-iterating that not only is politics downstream from culture, but that the academy is a huge influencer of culture.
And it’s a “open secret” that Universities discriminate against pro-life Republicans. It’s well past time that Reps start taking away tax-exemptions from rich Harvard, Stanford, Yale, and other orgs that discriminate.
In practice.
Building up an alternative Conservative Ivory Tower could certainly work, but fairly close already is Hillsdale College. But I don’t think Peter Thiel nor the Koch Brothers have a Conservative University; perhaps the Waltons? or some other billionaires.
But most conservatives don’t want Con U – they want Normal U to be diverse, and hospitable to conservative professors and thinking.
I’d rather suggest the lawfare against U discrimination while pushing for on-line testing and credential gaining, without a specific U, but with various subject matter credentialing orgs. Including public records of dissertations and theses, so potential employers can see your work — plus with better anti-plagiarism checking.
AI Tutors are likely to be highly usable within the next 5 years, a focus on courses using AI Tutors and tests which are semi-public, would serve both the learning purposes as well as the signaling purposes.
This reminds me of slatestarcodex saying:
If you accept that as National Affairs says that universities are these “privileged place in the public square” for the elites to shape the culture and language and government policies of society, well that is outrageously political and it seems hopeless to ask them to be politically neutral.
In my view, this elite political culture shaping institution should not receive public support or status, it should be strictly privately funded. Educational and accreditation services should be unbundled from such institutions and be widely accessible to all with market pricing.
It’s true that high quality free resources already exist online. Online has already taken over for curious learners asking specific narrow questions. But alternatives to traditional schools lack accreditation mechanisms that peers, employers, and society uses to judge what you’ve learned and how well you learned it. Related to accreditation is motivation. Even auto didacts require motivation. If people are going to spend years working through challenging and frustrating educational materials, they need some kind of tangible measurable and believable progress towards their larger goals to motivate them.
A lot of courses, most obviously math courses, are 100% standardized textbook content. The lecture format, where a professor does a live chalkboard/whiteboard presentation of the textbook content isn’t necessary. Yet, the people who’ve mastered large quantities of that material, almost always learned in a traditional school setting. The rare auto didacts that mastered academic materials without a traditional school of course had some unique drive and personality but also had some unique life circumstance that provided the necessary motivational factors.
The National Affairs article is not talking about high education in the sense of individual learning and skill growth, but as this “privileged place in the public square” that shapes public discourse and develops policy agendas on policy and culture.
Ideally, the learning and skill building functions of higher ed should be non-political, accessible to everyone, and be more cost efficient. The second function of higher ed, this overtly political culture and policy shaping shaping organization of the elite, which Kling labels “Progressive religious seminaries”, those should follow the classic “separation of church and state” or “separation of school and state” and should not receive public support and financing, nor should it receive a “privileged place in the public square”. It should have to compete for status and authority and funding like anything else without any explicit institutional privilege.
People arent doing this? Liberty University, Ave Maria, that one funded by the Amway ppl, etc.
“…you can find online resources that will be at least as good as what college students get, and perhaps better. ”
You can also binge learn when your interest is high instead of on some arbitrary schedule set by the live performer and stage availability. Not to mention, the convenience of obtaining a variety of views/explanations so that the student can weigh and consider the differences. The second factor of studying.
American universities would benefit from a return to the Scottish University tradition that emphasized teaching first rather than an annoyance suffered for the privileges enjoyed by the faculty whose advancement depends not on teaching but research. There is no relationship beyond the causal that a talented research can be an effective teacher, especially of student new to the subject. Just, as we are seeing today, there is no relationship between being a literary theorist, poet or even published writer, and being able to teach composition as a vocational skill.
It should be noted it was the Scottish university tradition that brought forth the Scottish Enlightenment which is responsible for most of the modern world, economic, technological and political.
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“The medieval university differed in many respects with our idea of a modern university. It was primarily a guild of teachers and scholars, formed for common protection and mutual aid. It was a republic of letters, whose members were exempt from all services private and public, all personal taxes and contributions, and from all civil procedure in courts of law. The teaching function was secondary, and often entirely overlooked. The Scottish university from the beginning, however, emphasized the teaching function, and created an atmosphere academic rather than civil or political. ”
http://www.archive.org/stream/scribnersmagazin29newy#page/742/mode/1up
‘Scottish university’ John Grier Hibben, Scribner’s magazine, 1901
This is amazingly funny.
Let’s do a mental experiment. Image that Random University has two professors in the political science department registered as Republican party members.
Professor Jones is trapped, intellectually, in pre-Revolutionary War era political thought. He’s fascinated by Thomas Hobbes and James Locke and now obscure French physiocrats. He thinks they were deep thinkers whose ideas deserve serious consideration today, he thinks they influenced the American founding fathers. He thinks it quite important to realize that ideas can move from one society to another, from one historical era to another, and he’s forever trying to persuade his students on this point.
Professor Smith is 20 years younger, 20 pounds lighter, and prefers 20th century rock to 18th century opera. He’s modern. He teaches political science as sociology rather than history. He’s a bit … selective. He talks to his classes about the expansion of welfare and social security as a topic of interest, with a class or two about civil rights in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Womens suffrage is NOT a topic. Gay and Lesbian issues is not a topic. How people vote is decided by economic self-interest and educational levels and racial identity — gender is not a factor, ideology doesn’t matter, and there is no such thing as idealism. He doesn’t take many questions from black students, and he slaps many of them down — “I see you haven’t done the reading. Were the words too hard?” He talks a bit about society’s “inevitable class divisions” caused by IQ and other “genetic differences”. He is NOT going to waste class time celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King, no matter what other professors are doing, and there is certainly no point discussing the man’s fantastical political ideas.
You get the idea, I trust. And let’s suppose that for some reason Random University gets in the news and the revolting students are complaining about the professors they don’t like. Who’ll it be — Professor Jones, hobnobbing with Hobbes? or Professor Smith, being realistic about genetics and MLK?
As Hess and Bell see things, it’s poor unloved old-fashioned Professor Jones that needs a refuge, a university where it’s “safe” to openly declare his interests, and talk plainly to his students, and write papers about his unfashionable ideas, which can finally be published in a journal worthy of collection in a university library.
But you know, there are about 7.3 billion other people who think that the students are probably going to complain about Professor Smith. He’s modern, he’s hip, he’s up to date, and he’s a racist, they’re going to say. Also, he’s probably a sexual chauvinist. He’s probably homophobic, and they want the university to get rid of him, even if he does have tenure.
I’d bet money on it. Because, oddly enough, after watching ten years or so of these “Liberal Students Hate Conservative Scholars” stories which pop up at almost weekly intervals, there are never reports about liberal American university students objecting to the intellectual interests of conservative professors. Instead, there are reports about students complaining about the behavior of conservative professors, about the attitudes displayed by conservative professors, about the chilling lack of empathy in some conservative professors.
You see why this is funny now. Hess and Bell see all these students objecting to Professor Smith. In response, they loudly proclaim they want to make being a conservative professor “safe”. They’re going to get some funds from conservatives and start a new “elite” university for people like Professor Jones.
But Professor Jones is happy where he is, and the students are okay with him. It’s Professor Smith who will move off into the Hess-Bell university, and the odds are very high that he’ll annoy his students there just as he did at Random University, for very much the same reason. This is going to be a huge surprise to Dr’s Bell and Hess.
This quote from Slate Star Codex seems appropriate: “The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.”
I’m not sure Professor Smith would teach that gender, ideology, or idealism don’t matter. Unless he’s really bad at statistics and history. Similarly, it seems to me that you can find a lot of work by a Steve Sailer on LGBT stuff.
Imagine for a moment Steve Sailer or Charles Murray being a professor. I’m not sure they would run the class in the way professor Smith does, but its not clear to me that would help them in any way.
What exactly do we mean by empathy here? I don’t see any empathy being displayed by the left. Steve Sailer always used to say that the passions are inflamed by a simple debate. “Whose to blame for black dysfunction?”
Left: Whites are to blame. Therefore whites are evil and it’s OK to hate whites. Not much empathy there. This inevitably leads to ever greater and ever more invasive attempts to locate the racism at the heart of the white soul that is holding blacks back.
Mainstream conservative: Blacks are to blame. It’s the rap music you see. Not much empathy there. Doomed to fail.
Sailer Explanation: Nobody to blame. Unfortunate fact of life. No hatred there.
You could say that the Sailer explanation is “less hopeful” about ending black dysfunction, but what exactly do you want from these people? Charles Murray talks in empathetic tones about the common dignity of man and everyone finding a place of human dignity for themselves that utilize what talents they do have. The Bell Curve is in part a tome asking us not to just turn people at the bottom of all races into over controlled wards of the state. That empathy doesn’t help him.
And what should we think of MLK? When he died his approval rating in the North and South was low. He had moved on from Civil Rights to things like School Busing and Socialism. These things were not popular and when implemented we’re huge failures. His assignation made him into a martyr before he could ruin his reputation.
Do you have any empathy for a white person when his neighborhood “goes black”. When the crime skyrockets, the schools become places you wouldn’t send you kid, and your house that you poured you life savings into declines in value by half or more. This happened across the country in every city over the last few decades. Where is your empathy for these people? What, you have none. Only hatred. Only blaming them for problems black people have that are beyond their control.
This isn’t about empathy or the way these people behave or their attitude (hint: with dignity and integrity). It’s about the fact that if what they are saying is true all sorts of gravy trains aren’t justifiable anymore. All sorts of worldviews have to change. And, yes, you even have to have some empathy for those deplorables that are worried about their kid getting beat up at school.
That’s nice — you got an excuse to say something here. May I suggest that in the future if you wish to comment on what I’ve posted, you’ll draw more favorable attention if you actually read the post and respond to the points it raises.
Equilibria are hard to disrupt.
Bryan Caplan makes the case that the extant model of higher ed in the USA is an equilibrium reinforced by massive subsidies and by a catch-22 of conformity. Employers want applicants to signal smarts, conscientiousness, and conformity. A college degree signals that the individual probably has all of these traits. Then the employee learns a trade (human capital) on the job, partly because she is smart and conscientious — and partly because she intuits and does what’s expected. A maverick autodidact flouts the conformity signal necessary to get the job in the first place.
I would add two other factors that reinforce the equilibrium:
1) Assortative mating by educational attainment. A selective, residential college provides economies of scope in job-market signaling and peer mating.
2) Bundling consumption and investment. Although Bryan Caplan argues that college isn’t a consumption good because most students find academics boring and because many students suffer failure, he tends to overlook the genius of bundling. Students enjoy campus amenities and revelry (i.e., consumption of the non-academic components of college), and a furlough from chores, all bundled with, and justified by, investment in a credential for the job market.
Economies of scope and the ambiguity of the consumption-investment bundle reinforce the college equilibrium, at least at selective residential colleges.