Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Handle's avatar

I think the point about movies cuts the other way. It's hard to socialize and signal and make maneuvers in the various social games absent shared experiences and exposures. If there are few competing alternatives and lots of people are watching the same thing, it provides "cultural currency" something to talk about and reference that one can rely on to be generally accepted as conversational tender and which need not touch on anything ideological or political. Indeed people often see the injection of those things into the subject as obnoxious and inappropriate. Sports is a good example.

The problem is when you lose movies or sports or whatever you don't necessarily lose everything and it causes a desperate crowding in and obsession with those few areas that people in our social scene so still share and experience together, which for elites is now often exposure to viral political news on legacy and social media.

So, in this sense, fragmentation in everything else causes consolidation along ideological lines.

Expand full comment
Doctor Hammer's avatar

I don't think there is as much tension between the Null Hypothesis and the observation that universities have gone down hill as you might think. There is a difference between how you teach and what you teach, and another between those and how you measure or assess that teaching. Even holding how university professors and lecturers teach constant, if they shift from teaching good things to bad things you are going to get a slide downhill. A well taught course on how to throw a tantrum to get management on your side and receive special privileges will always be worse for the student than a well taught course on basket weaving.

When it comes to assessing whether we are holding how classes are taught constant, well, I have only been involved in assessment in one university, but it was a joke. They wanted "artifacts" of learning, essentially assignments retained, but had no interest in testing students later to see if they were learning what they were supposed to, and little interest in what they were supposed to be learning.

So yea, throw in "colleges are accepting students whose only benefit will be the credential, and passing them through via inflation so the college can collect the tuition as long as possible" and you have a recipe for the same teaching producing much worse results overall.

Expand full comment
7 more comments...

No posts