The unmet demand for a traditional humanities education in elite universities is increasingly being supplied by offshore institutions that set up shop near universities but are not officially part of them. Indeed, the last decade has seen an extraordinary blossoming of private humanities institutes that offer what progressive academe no longer offers: a space to escape the suffocating taboos of contemporary university life, a place to explore the deep questions of human existence and form friendships in the pursuit of meaningful lives and (dare one say it) truth.
I have spoken at a lunch at the Elm Institute, one of the places mentioned in the article.
Hankins advocates expanding these “offshore institutions” to assist graduate students. He worries that otherwise traditional knowledge and methods will be lost, as the older generation of scholars dies off and is replaced by ideologically-trained younger cohorts.
I am pessimistic that any solution can be found. I still think that economics is on what I call the Road to Sociology, in which race, gender, and inequality become the dominant issues, and they are approached from a left-wing perspective.
What about economics programs in other countries? I doubt that economists in say, Japan, give much of a care for the US, just to use one example. I would think that since economists are employed all over the world, and economics studied all over the world, there will remain programs throughout the world that focus on traditional topics. Though it would be weird if the study of economics becomes less ideological in a country like the PRC than in the US.
Even if that were true, products of the top programs abroad need to get published in English language journals run by American and European elites to get published. Regular courses won’t be debased, but their researchers will be corrupted. Even now, faculty who came from more traditional cultures like Russia find themselves having to go Woke in very left wing departments to stay part of the elite.
Do they have to do that to reach the elite of Russian universities or ? How about China? Saudi Arabia ?
When it comes to humanities, anything at a university is likely to cost far more than it is worth.
For those of us who are driven to learn for personal reasons other than the need for a credential, times couldn’t be better: we are awash in excellent free opportunities.
Most public libraries offer The Great Courses on CD. These have enriched countless hours in the car.
The Open Culture web site is an amazing resource. My favorite find there so far has been Catherine Brown’s Oxford lectures on DH Lawrence.
I’ve done maybe 15 to 20 Coursera courses that have been mixed but the US Poetry and the Australian Lit stand out in memory as particularly good experiences.
Marginal Revolution University was OK until they got too big for their britches. The early stuff is not too bad. I found Guinevere Bell’s Economic History of the Soviet Union particularly compelling.
The universities are lost. Nothing more than CCP affiliated kleptocracies forcing Diversity-Inclusion-Equity on a captive audience. Party membership required for high status employment.
We have a brief window of opportunity to appreciate some of the riches of the waning days of the open and free internet before Zuckerberg and the rest of the vile authoritarian reprobates purge it forever. At this point, it is time to think ahead and start building hidden libraries to store books against the not too far distant day when Biden storm troopers are kicking down our doors to confiscate and burn unauthorized copies of Homer and Shakespeare.
>—“…the not too far distant day when Biden storm troopers are kicking down our doors to confiscate and burn unauthorized copies of Homer and Shakespeare.”
At least there was a moment of sanity before things went sideways into deep paranoia there. The Great Courses are indeed a wonderful resource. Edgar is right about that. Even if you don’t get them from a library they are inexpensive to purchase.
Perhaps they should come with a warning though that almost all of them are by professors who teach at the very same “CCP affiliated kleptocracies” whose influence edgar thinks he is escaping via this route.
Yes, you are correct that the lectures are by college professors. But have you considered how much of the Great Courses inventory are by dead guys? Quite a few of their courses are more than a decade or more old now.
Ok then, some did die in the last decade.
But, in this scoring system, most still lose points from the suspect behavior of still being alive.
Harold Bloom and Jonathan Steinberg were the dead guys I had in mind, but check out the ages of their stable of professors: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Courses
Quite a high percentage of emerita. I fear the age of The Great Courses as we have known and loved them is fading into the sunset.
What do you mean when you say that MRU “got too big for their britches?” I know what the expression means, of course, but I don’t know why you’re applying it to MRU.
The production values have gotten very slick and I personally find the busy production work distracting. But then there is the bigger issue of so many episodes coming across as water carrying for their tech titan patrons.
Maybe I am more idiosyncratic than I know, but I can’t help but think that at least in my age group, most people prefer a straight video lecture like this: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/dh-lawrence-1-consciousness to Monty Python inspired studio engineering like this: https://mru.org/courses/everyday-economics/avengers-story-globalization
It’s “Guinevere Nell” btw, not Bell. But I appreciate the nod.
It can be tricky balancing education with factors such as profit, and government mandates or expectations (for grants) and ironically this can disrupt economics education.. Since I never earned from my course, perhaps it was spared from this concern ..
Thanks for comment here, Guinevere. I haven’t seen your MRU episode, now I plan to look. (depending on my time as a FIT owner overwhelmed with too many intellectual players making long but not-quite steelman arguments on so many interesting subjects.)
O’Sullivan’s law will hit economics, HARD.
“All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.”
It’s ongoing and won’t end until most of the field is purged of non-believers in the progressive religion/ideology/dogma.
Arnold is pessimistic that any solution can be found.
Well, first the problem has to be more honestly stated: for decades, colleges have discriminated against hiring Republicans. Stopping this discrimination is necessary, and possibly sufficient, to restore better college edu.
There’s a Disparate Impact solution – require educational tax-exempt organizations to hire pro-life and/or Republicans in numbers around 80% of their population.
Populist affirmative action for Reps hugely reduces this problem.
Not liking this Republican AA solution, which is certainly not perfect, doesn’t mean it won’t happen. What other possible solutions can be mentioned? If the anti-AA folk don’t have a probable solution to advocate for which solves the basic anti-Rep problem, the support for Rep AA will continue to increase.
This is similar to how any “unsolved” problem, as it gets bigger, generates support for big govt solutions that reduce the freedom of those who are causing the problem.