Kathleen deLaski on skills employers desire; Maya Sulkin on Alpha school; Brent McCord on the new class divide; Steve Stewart-Williams on left-wing dominance
In my 1990s college experience, the self-described Marxist professors were the worst of the worst. Like little peacocks strutting to and fro in the auditorium spreading the gospel of Marx and Engels while completely ignoring the syllabus or divergent points of view. What a disservice to humanity. As a subtle middle finger, I sent them all bereavement cards upon the passing of Pol Pot in 1998.
Apologies, I’m going to give in to the urge to kick around the idea of “brokenist” a bit in the context of higher education. Assuming that the meaning of “broken” that we are working with is “damaged, no longer able to work” makes the further assumption that higher education was intended at one time to be involved in some kind of “work,” that is “activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something,” not merely the conduit for wealth transfer that it exists as today. The wealth transfer is direct to the sellers as in government subsidies and tuition payment, but also indirectly, in that it produces higher salaries for workers in the segments of the labor market that face less competition due to removal of the 4 million potential workers and their placement in higher education positions. This produces inflation in wage rates as well as as in the rest of the economy because the higher education consumption drives up prices. It is perhaps an open question whether the alleged college education wage premium is more of a function of anything substantive imparted through education, mere credentialing as a barrier to workforce entry, or whether keeping higher education employees out of the productive labor force allows actual workers to command higher salaries.
But at any rate, the typical “work” that colleges and universities were once considered to be engaged in included:
(1) career training
(2) development of a morally worthy polity
(3) research, and
(4) transmission of knowledge and culture.
Obviously higher education does nothing beneficial towards the accomplishment of these today.
But that is all neither here nor there. The bottom line is that higher education is inferior in every respect to the countless better options available today to accomplish the listed ends.
But perhaps, if we get historical and look to how the earliest institutions of higher education worked in practice, we might envision a future in which they have real work to perform. And that work historically was in service to religious and political institutions.
Like agriculture, higher education developed independently at multiple locations over the centuries. Although systems of higher education developed in Babylon and Egypt, the decentralized example of ancient Israel and Jordan is of interest due to the rise of education there as a civilizational preservative.
In the Americas, the first, and longest still operating university is the National University of San Marcos ( https://grokipedia.com/page/National_University_of_San_Marcos ) established on May 12, 1551, by royal decree of Charles V to to train clergy and officials for conquered territories.
It is said to have been modeled on the University of Salamanca. (https://grokipedia.com/page/University_of_Salamanca ) chartered in 1218 by King Alfonso IX of León which still survives today although, like so many universities, it is being strangled in bureaucracy. Per Grokipedia, “Pope Martin V in 1422 standardized examinations, degree requirements, and governance, emphasizing scholastic methods rooted in Aristotelian logic and Thomistic theology while prohibiting unauthorized private teaching.” So these universities worked both to sustain political and religious orders as well.
In North America, Harvard is of course the earliest college, established in 1636, by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “Originally chartered to educate ministers for the Puritan colony, with its 1650 charter emphasizing the advancement of learning and perpetuation of truth among English and Indian youth.” ( https://grokipedia.com/page/Harvard_College ). Harvard’s Puritan origins suggest, that although structurally modeled in the English tradition, it is perhaps best considered as a descendant of John Calvin’s Academy founded in Geneva in 1559. (https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/celebrating-calvin ). Calvin apparently modeled this academy after the Strasbourg Gymnasium, a dynamic classical Christian school established in 1537 by Johnn Sturm. (https://grokipedia.com/page/University_of_Strasbourg ). Early Harvard is said to have embraced a “strict interpretation of Calvinism, mirroring the educational models of Reformed churches in Europe such as Geneva and Leiden.” (historicrewind.com/harvards-founding-americas-first-college-in-1636/ )
Thus, one might predict that that those universities that are able to find a way to produce achievements in promoting the health of a religious tradition or in improving the competitive survival of a system of government are likely to be those who “work” and develop an institutional existence while those that continue to flounder in modern nonsense are those that will remain pointless.
I'm not convinced that comparison of two children with tablets is valid. I get bored just watching videos or TV, and I did to a lesser extent when I was a kid. We got an encyclopedia when I was 10 more or less, and I started reading with the first volume. Some of the topics I remember lead me to think I stopped just reading about halfway through A and began to treat it more like a web page, following references and learning to weed out fluff like the 7th Earl of Winchestershire.
I know enough other people like that to not believe most children would just vegetate watching cat videos. I believe most would eventually learn how to do things with the tablet, like learn on their own. A tutor of some sort would speed up the process.
I've written before of being kicked out of college because I was learning more on my own from the library and an antique computer than the classes, and stopped going to classes. Lecture halls for required subjects, whose students forget everything after the tests are over, are not superior to cat videos. At least the cat video watcher can find other uses for tablets without getting kicked out of college :-)
I like McCord's take on discriminating "good" or "bad" utilization of AI, even beyond the education arena. "Perhaps the test is whether the authority remains answerable. By answerable, I mean it can be questioned, corrected, outgrown, reinterpreted, or, at the limit, left."
In my 1990s college experience, the self-described Marxist professors were the worst of the worst. Like little peacocks strutting to and fro in the auditorium spreading the gospel of Marx and Engels while completely ignoring the syllabus or divergent points of view. What a disservice to humanity. As a subtle middle finger, I sent them all bereavement cards upon the passing of Pol Pot in 1998.
Apologies, I’m going to give in to the urge to kick around the idea of “brokenist” a bit in the context of higher education. Assuming that the meaning of “broken” that we are working with is “damaged, no longer able to work” makes the further assumption that higher education was intended at one time to be involved in some kind of “work,” that is “activity directed toward the production or accomplishment of something,” not merely the conduit for wealth transfer that it exists as today. The wealth transfer is direct to the sellers as in government subsidies and tuition payment, but also indirectly, in that it produces higher salaries for workers in the segments of the labor market that face less competition due to removal of the 4 million potential workers and their placement in higher education positions. This produces inflation in wage rates as well as as in the rest of the economy because the higher education consumption drives up prices. It is perhaps an open question whether the alleged college education wage premium is more of a function of anything substantive imparted through education, mere credentialing as a barrier to workforce entry, or whether keeping higher education employees out of the productive labor force allows actual workers to command higher salaries.
But at any rate, the typical “work” that colleges and universities were once considered to be engaged in included:
(1) career training
(2) development of a morally worthy polity
(3) research, and
(4) transmission of knowledge and culture.
Obviously higher education does nothing beneficial towards the accomplishment of these today.
Higher education is more of an obstacle to students seeking employment than a benefit (https://jamesgmartin.center/2016/06/should-employers-be-prohibited-from-asking-applicants-about-college-credentials/ ). Colleges are crapping out moral exemplars like these, sadly typical, graduates: https://nypost.com/2026/05/18/us-news/luigi-mangione-reporters-unapologetically-celebrate-ceos-assassination-fk-brian-thompson/ AI powered, NSF funded college researchers are so busy crapping out so many crappy papers that any hypothetical papers of value are lost in the deluge: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-research-papers-slop , https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/930522/ai-research-papers-s-problem, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-32445-3 . And there is no end in sight as long as NSF continues to throw around thousands of grants for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece for work that AIs can crap out in a half hour. And the subsidized patents generated discourage competitive market funded research. And if colleges and universities are preserving and transmitting anything of value rather than deconstructing and appropriating for political agendas, it would be nice to see once in a while.
But that is all neither here nor there. The bottom line is that higher education is inferior in every respect to the countless better options available today to accomplish the listed ends.
But perhaps, if we get historical and look to how the earliest institutions of higher education worked in practice, we might envision a future in which they have real work to perform. And that work historically was in service to religious and political institutions.
Like agriculture, higher education developed independently at multiple locations over the centuries. Although systems of higher education developed in Babylon and Egypt, the decentralized example of ancient Israel and Jordan is of interest due to the rise of education there as a civilizational preservative.
https://grokipedia.com/page/Beth_midrash and https://grokipedia.com/page/History_of_education_in_ancient_Israel_and_Judah . From my readings generally, I get the impression that Ezra’s innovations produced a model of education delivery that was able to survive despite the countless tragedies endured by the Jews over the centuries, but I don’t have a good source with which to attribute such a view.
Similarly in India, Nalanda University, the first residential university, was established by the emperor Gupta. https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20230222-nalanda-the-university-that-changed-the-world and https://grokipedia.com/page/Nalanda_University After its destruction by Muslim invaders, it appears to have served as a model for later great Buddhist universities, including Odantapuri (https://grokipedia.com/page/Odantapuri ) and Vikramashila University (https://grokipedia.com/page/Vikramashila ) until they too were destroyed by the Muslims.
In the Americas, the first, and longest still operating university is the National University of San Marcos ( https://grokipedia.com/page/National_University_of_San_Marcos ) established on May 12, 1551, by royal decree of Charles V to to train clergy and officials for conquered territories.
It is said to have been modeled on the University of Salamanca. (https://grokipedia.com/page/University_of_Salamanca ) chartered in 1218 by King Alfonso IX of León which still survives today although, like so many universities, it is being strangled in bureaucracy. Per Grokipedia, “Pope Martin V in 1422 standardized examinations, degree requirements, and governance, emphasizing scholastic methods rooted in Aristotelian logic and Thomistic theology while prohibiting unauthorized private teaching.” So these universities worked both to sustain political and religious orders as well.
In North America, Harvard is of course the earliest college, established in 1636, by the Great and General Court of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “Originally chartered to educate ministers for the Puritan colony, with its 1650 charter emphasizing the advancement of learning and perpetuation of truth among English and Indian youth.” ( https://grokipedia.com/page/Harvard_College ). Harvard’s Puritan origins suggest, that although structurally modeled in the English tradition, it is perhaps best considered as a descendant of John Calvin’s Academy founded in Geneva in 1559. (https://www.modernreformation.org/resources/articles/celebrating-calvin ). Calvin apparently modeled this academy after the Strasbourg Gymnasium, a dynamic classical Christian school established in 1537 by Johnn Sturm. (https://grokipedia.com/page/University_of_Strasbourg ). Early Harvard is said to have embraced a “strict interpretation of Calvinism, mirroring the educational models of Reformed churches in Europe such as Geneva and Leiden.” (historicrewind.com/harvards-founding-americas-first-college-in-1636/ )
Thus, one might predict that that those universities that are able to find a way to produce achievements in promoting the health of a religious tradition or in improving the competitive survival of a system of government are likely to be those who “work” and develop an institutional existence while those that continue to flounder in modern nonsense are those that will remain pointless.
I'm not convinced that comparison of two children with tablets is valid. I get bored just watching videos or TV, and I did to a lesser extent when I was a kid. We got an encyclopedia when I was 10 more or less, and I started reading with the first volume. Some of the topics I remember lead me to think I stopped just reading about halfway through A and began to treat it more like a web page, following references and learning to weed out fluff like the 7th Earl of Winchestershire.
I know enough other people like that to not believe most children would just vegetate watching cat videos. I believe most would eventually learn how to do things with the tablet, like learn on their own. A tutor of some sort would speed up the process.
I've written before of being kicked out of college because I was learning more on my own from the library and an antique computer than the classes, and stopped going to classes. Lecture halls for required subjects, whose students forget everything after the tests are over, are not superior to cat videos. At least the cat video watcher can find other uses for tablets without getting kicked out of college :-)
I like McCord's take on discriminating "good" or "bad" utilization of AI, even beyond the education arena. "Perhaps the test is whether the authority remains answerable. By answerable, I mean it can be questioned, corrected, outgrown, reinterpreted, or, at the limit, left."