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Something that David Graeber said that opened my eyes. Until the 1970s or so, Universities were actually a guild for academics geared towards the production of

Something that David Graeber said that opened my eyes. Until the 1970s or so, Universities were actually a guild for academics geared towards the production of knowledge. They had self rules, titles, apprenticeship systems, and to some degree the backing and protection of the state. Plus like a true medieval guild, they were run by the masters of the guild itself. Sure, they did not call themselves guilds, but in form and function they behaved like one. The reason why this arrangement was allowed to stay from ancient days is that the universities performed a useful function for local and federal governments, unlike craft guilds. Governments need a lot of trained clerks, always have. Universities however only need professors to replace the dying batch, as the production of knowledge really wasn't tied to markets or social whims per-se. So a large part of the educated students were turned towards government jobs, a useful arrangement for both parties. This setup appears to have broken down pretty recently, although exactly why is left as an exercise for the reader.

guachesuedehack 8y ago
What would be your theory ?
- village-idiot 8y ago
  Hah, I thought it would be funny to add that "left as an exercise to the reader" bit, a habit from my Math days. Two things. First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. The result is that in the 1920s a Philosophy grad would be extremely useful to a county government because of their general liberal arts education, nowadays a high school diploma does the trick. Doubly so now that everyone can use a computer to some degree or another. Without the critical function of providing clerks, Universities have lost a large amount of their value proposition to the government. Second, since the 1970s both political parties have shifted away from the government as all of us striving together, to a necessary evil at best. The right has been extremely effective at villifying government action and government spending in particular. With that context in mind, it is not surprising that the right would aim to not only cut government spending on higher education (something that their religious wing also likes) to save on the tax money, but also to "starve the beast" in general. Also, the 1970s were kinda crazy, and academia came out of that looking kinda extreme.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    >> First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. Which probably explains why most public services are FUBAR and stuffed full of incompetent idiots.
  - repolfx 8y ago
    Your last and second-to-last paragraphs aren't entirely congruous are they? Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along. But then you say that the same era was kinda crazy and academics in particular (absolutely not a bastion of the right) came out looking extreme. I'm not sure where you're based in the world, but that description seems accurate for the UK, perhaps the USA but my knowledge of 1970s era America is not so hot. Rather than "the right" winning some sort of struggle, perhaps the population came to be suspicious of government naturally as a result of observing the craziness of those times. After all it would be strange if times could be crazy and government employees (as all academics are) could look kinda extreme, and that not affect people's views on a large scale.
    - village-idiot 8y ago
      I should’ve specified, I live in America. I also did not live to see the 1970s in person, so my final paragraph should be taken with more salt than the preceding ones. > Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along. To be fair, “the right” is a fairly large section of the population. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that in general Americans are much more skeptical of the utility of government than they were 50 years ago. I think your last paragraph is plausible, but it’s not my favored explanation. For me, I think the decline in public opinion towards government programs started with racial integration. Around that time a surprisingly large chunk of white people appear to have willingly degraded their public institutions to avoid having to share with black people, sometimes going as far as literally filling recently integrated pools with concrete rather than share. You also see private Christian schools pop up with the explicit goal of being segregated. Fun fact, organized evangelical involvement in right wing politics began with segregation. It’s only after the association with segregation became toxic did they pivot to abortion and homosexuality as their bête noire. They’ve tried their best to downplay this though, because it’s kind of an ugly truth. Within this framework, the anti-government anti-public institution movement got rolling in the 1960s, and started to get a large political head by the 1970s and 1980s. The political turmoil within that period on the left in universities was a response and symptom of that anti-government swing, not a cause of it. It is for certain possible that certain antics by academia during that time period came across as unpalatable to moderates, undermining their position. I just don’t think it was the cause.
tracker1 8y ago
"... to replace the dying batch, ..." I would speculate that longer lifespans may well have a lot to do with at least some of the shifts.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > "... to replace the dying batch, ..." > I would speculate that longer lifespans may well have a lot to do with at least some of the shifts. Longer lifespan only indirectly implies higher retirement age.
repolfx 8y ago
exactly why is left as an exercise for the reader. Because for a long time politicians in all western countries have been pushing the idea that attending university shouldn't be a rare or elite thing, that instead nearly everyone should go to university and get a degree. Scaling up changes things fundamentally. Numbers of students graduating with degrees has been showing a clear exponential growth curve over the last 100 years, see page 14 here for the UK: http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04252/SN04252.pdf http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN042... The explosion in size and funding levels of the university system that accompanied this growth has radically changed society in many subtle ways I suspect we're still struggling to understand. Why did politicians do this? We must speculate. The explanations given at the time were somewhat dubious and tended to revolve around "the knowledge economy" (at least in the UK). Tony Blair was big into this around the turn of the millennium - the idea that the rise of China meant western countries couldn't compete anymore in traditional labour intensive industries and would have to move on to "knowledge work", which they then assumed meant needing a degree. Quite why China would be unable to educate its workforce to the same level, or why labour costs would not eventually rise in China to western levels, was left unexplored. I personally suspect there was another agenda at work. From the mid 1990s to early 2000s, the USA and Europe were dominated by left wing parties (arguably Europe still is). People who spend more time in the university system tend to get more socialist in general. The correlation between increasing student populations and increasing future left wing voters would be hard for any political strategist to ignore. That leaves the question of why university tends to make people more left wing. Leftist academics themselves tend to explain it as "smart people agree with left-wing policies" and leave it at that. But there are lots of smart people who don't, so that explanation seems lacking. However that's a topic for another time.
- tobylane 8y ago
  >the USA and Europe were dominated by left wing parties (arguably Europe still is). Not by European standards. France has a centrist leader. UK, Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain and others have right wing parties in power.
dredmorbius 8y ago
Kinda yes, kinda no. Education has been under constant evolution since its earlierst forms, though the change over the 20th century (in North America and Western Europe especially) has been profound, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. I'm going to wind back a bit further. With the founding of the first European universities (1088, University of Bologna), education focused on the seven liberal arts, with degrees generally in administration, law, medicine, and divinity. Early on there was a divide between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts -- what we'd now call "technology" or "engineering", as well as various applied fields -- also known as the vulgar arts. The term doesn't carry the full derogatory sense of today, though these were considered far less honorable and privileged than the liberal arts. Most practical arts were taught within guilds, not at universities. The liberal arts were divided amongst the trivium (from which: trivial): grammer, logic, and rhetoric, or roughly, input, processing, and output; and the quadrivium: maths, geometry, music, and astronomy, or numbers, numbers in space, numbers in time, and numbers in time and space. Roll forward to about 1800 and Alexander von Humboldt was reforming the German university system with changes that largely reflect the modern system. The field of "philosophy" had long since been divided into its "natural" and "moral" fields, those were now starting to break out into the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, etc.) and social sciences (over the course of the 19th century): sociology, political science, political economy, psychology, and anthropology. The modern sense of majors was established by the 1880s or so, though it expanded much since then. In the last decades of the 19th century, areas such as English and Literature started becoming formalised as scholarly research rather than technical practice. Technology was creating demands for specialised technical skills, while the university as a basis for cultural indoctrination was also recognised (John Stuart Mill writes on this at length, Jens Hanson has a good treatment of this). By 1900, the high school graduation rate in the United States was about 5%. It helped greatly to be white, male, and not working-class. The high-school curriculum itself was comparable to at least the first year or two of a liberal arts college, with math, Latin, Greek, philosophy, literature, and other coursework. The PhD attainment level today is over twice that of high-school graduates in 1900. Technical schools, of which M.I.T. was not the first but among the most significant, date to roughly 1860. Its course catalogue, to this day, is numbered in the order in which programmes were added to the curriculum, up through the first 12-15 entries, making for an interesting bit of anthropological evidence itself. By the 1920s, the term "publish or perish" was appearing in the context of academic publishing. World wars 1 & 2 both proved the significance of science and technology, and Vannevar Bush in particular pushed for a vast expansion of higher education and research following his war work, with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 spurred this on. The GI bill accelerated this, and initiatives such as the California Master Plan for Higher Education and others elsewhere (the UK has a similar programme) in the late 1950s and early 1960s lead to a tremendous expansion of universities, along with the Baby Boom and (in the US) draft deferments for the Vietnam War. College enrollments and degree awards boomed. Disciplines within the letters and sciences (modern-day liberal arts) developed increasing degrees of specialisation and in the eyes of many, were increasingly divorced from practical realities. Government funding drove much research, especially in engineering and the sciences, but also in nontechnical fields. The tide started to roll back in the 1970s with the oil shocks, economic malaise (far more severe in Britain than the US), and other factors, though tuition hikes were fairly modest until the late 1980s / early 1990s. Industry funding replaced some government monies. The glut of 1970s and later PhDs were hitting first slowed growth, then stasis, and finally decline in available academic positions. At the same time, advanced degrees in many areas proved of limited interest in themselves outside academia. TL;DR: there were significant changes through the 1970s and 1980s, but they are better seen as part of a very large arc of development of higher education.

guachesuedehack 8y ago

What would be your theory ?

village-idiot 8y ago
Hah, I thought it would be funny to add that "left as an exercise to the reader" bit, a habit from my Math days. Two things. First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. The result is that in the 1920s a Philosophy grad would be extremely useful to a county government because of their general liberal arts education, nowadays a high school diploma does the trick. Doubly so now that everyone can use a computer to some degree or another. Without the critical function of providing clerks, Universities have lost a large amount of their value proposition to the government. Second, since the 1970s both political parties have shifted away from the government as all of us striving together, to a necessary evil at best. The right has been extremely effective at villifying government action and government spending in particular. With that context in mind, it is not surprising that the right would aim to not only cut government spending on higher education (something that their religious wing also likes) to save on the tax money, but also to "starve the beast" in general. Also, the 1970s were kinda crazy, and academia came out of that looking kinda extreme.
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  >> First, reading, writing, and arithmetic are no longer college level skills. That combined with computers means that the bar for government clerical work is much, much lower. Which probably explains why most public services are FUBAR and stuffed full of incompetent idiots.
- repolfx 8y ago
  Your last and second-to-last paragraphs aren't entirely congruous are they? Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along. But then you say that the same era was kinda crazy and academics in particular (absolutely not a bastion of the right) came out looking extreme. I'm not sure where you're based in the world, but that description seems accurate for the UK, perhaps the USA but my knowledge of 1970s era America is not so hot. Rather than "the right" winning some sort of struggle, perhaps the population came to be suspicious of government naturally as a result of observing the craziness of those times. After all it would be strange if times could be crazy and government employees (as all academics are) could look kinda extreme, and that not affect people's views on a large scale.
  - village-idiot 8y ago
    I should’ve specified, I live in America. I also did not live to see the 1970s in person, so my final paragraph should be taken with more salt than the preceding ones. > Firstly you argue that "the right" is responsible for villifying government action, i.e. the population at large were basically static in their views until "the right" came along. To be fair, “the right” is a fairly large section of the population. I don’t think it’s unfair to say that in general Americans are much more skeptical of the utility of government than they were 50 years ago. I think your last paragraph is plausible, but it’s not my favored explanation. For me, I think the decline in public opinion towards government programs started with racial integration. Around that time a surprisingly large chunk of white people appear to have willingly degraded their public institutions to avoid having to share with black people, sometimes going as far as literally filling recently integrated pools with concrete rather than share. You also see private Christian schools pop up with the explicit goal of being segregated. Fun fact, organized evangelical involvement in right wing politics began with segregation. It’s only after the association with segregation became toxic did they pivot to abortion and homosexuality as their bête noire. They’ve tried their best to downplay this though, because it’s kind of an ugly truth. Within this framework, the anti-government anti-public institution movement got rolling in the 1960s, and started to get a large political head by the 1970s and 1980s. The political turmoil within that period on the left in universities was a response and symptom of that anti-government swing, not a cause of it. It is for certain possible that certain antics by academia during that time period came across as unpalatable to moderates, undermining their position. I just don’t think it was the cause.

tracker1 8y ago

"... to replace the dying batch, ..." I would speculate that longer lifespans may well have a lot to do with at least some of the shifts.

wolfgke 8y ago
> "... to replace the dying batch, ..." > I would speculate that longer lifespans may well have a lot to do with at least some of the shifts. Longer lifespan only indirectly implies higher retirement age.

repolfx 8y ago

exactly why is left as an exercise for the reader. Because for a long time politicians in all western countries have been pushing the idea that attending university shouldn't be a rare or elite thing, that instead nearly everyone should go to university and get a degree. Scaling up changes things fundamentally. Numbers of students graduating with degrees has been showing a clear exponential growth curve over the last 100 years, see page 14 here for the UK: http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN04252/SN04252.pdf http://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/SN042... The explosion in size and funding levels of the university system that accompanied this growth has radically changed society in many subtle ways I suspect we're still struggling to understand. Why did politicians do this? We must speculate. The explanations given at the time were somewhat dubious and tended to revolve around "the knowledge economy" (at least in the UK). Tony Blair was big into this around the turn of the millennium - the idea that the rise of China meant western countries couldn't compete anymore in traditional labour intensive industries and would have to move on to "knowledge work", which they then assumed meant needing a degree. Quite why China would be unable to educate its workforce to the same level, or why labour costs would not eventually rise in China to western levels, was left unexplored. I personally suspect there was another agenda at work. From the mid 1990s to early 2000s, the USA and Europe were dominated by left wing parties (arguably Europe still is). People who spend more time in the university system tend to get more socialist in general. The correlation between increasing student populations and increasing future left wing voters would be hard for any political strategist to ignore. That leaves the question of why university tends to make people more left wing. Leftist academics themselves tend to explain it as "smart people agree with left-wing policies" and leave it at that. But there are lots of smart people who don't, so that explanation seems lacking. However that's a topic for another time.

tobylane 8y ago
>the USA and Europe were dominated by left wing parties (arguably Europe still is). Not by European standards. France has a centrist leader. UK, Germany, Italy, Austria, Spain and others have right wing parties in power.

dredmorbius 8y ago

Kinda yes, kinda no. Education has been under constant evolution since its earlierst forms, though the change over the 20th century (in North America and Western Europe especially) has been profound, particularly in the first half of the 20th century. I'm going to wind back a bit further. With the founding of the first European universities (1088, University of Bologna), education focused on the seven liberal arts, with degrees generally in administration, law, medicine, and divinity. Early on there was a divide between the liberal arts and the mechanical arts -- what we'd now call "technology" or "engineering", as well as various applied fields -- also known as the vulgar arts. The term doesn't carry the full derogatory sense of today, though these were considered far less honorable and privileged than the liberal arts. Most practical arts were taught within guilds, not at universities. The liberal arts were divided amongst the trivium (from which: trivial): grammer, logic, and rhetoric, or roughly, input, processing, and output; and the quadrivium: maths, geometry, music, and astronomy, or numbers, numbers in space, numbers in time, and numbers in time and space. Roll forward to about 1800 and Alexander von Humboldt was reforming the German university system with changes that largely reflect the modern system. The field of "philosophy" had long since been divided into its "natural" and "moral" fields, those were now starting to break out into the physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, etc.) and social sciences (over the course of the 19th century): sociology, political science, political economy, psychology, and anthropology. The modern sense of majors was established by the 1880s or so, though it expanded much since then. In the last decades of the 19th century, areas such as English and Literature started becoming formalised as scholarly research rather than technical practice. Technology was creating demands for specialised technical skills, while the university as a basis for cultural indoctrination was also recognised (John Stuart Mill writes on this at length, Jens Hanson has a good treatment of this). By 1900, the high school graduation rate in the United States was about 5%. It helped greatly to be white, male, and not working-class. The high-school curriculum itself was comparable to at least the first year or two of a liberal arts college, with math, Latin, Greek, philosophy, literature, and other coursework. The PhD attainment level today is over twice that of high-school graduates in 1900. Technical schools, of which M.I.T. was not the first but among the most significant, date to roughly 1860. Its course catalogue, to this day, is numbered in the order in which programmes were added to the curriculum, up through the first 12-15 entries, making for an interesting bit of anthropological evidence itself. By the 1920s, the term "publish or perish" was appearing in the context of academic publishing. World wars 1 & 2 both proved the significance of science and technology, and Vannevar Bush in particular pushed for a vast expansion of higher education and research following his war work, with the launch of Sputnik in 1957 spurred this on. The GI bill accelerated this, and initiatives such as the California Master Plan for Higher Education and others elsewhere (the UK has a similar programme) in the late 1950s and early 1960s lead to a tremendous expansion of universities, along with the Baby Boom and (in the US) draft deferments for the Vietnam War. College enrollments and degree awards boomed. Disciplines within the letters and sciences (modern-day liberal arts) developed increasing degrees of specialisation and in the eyes of many, were increasingly divorced from practical realities. Government funding drove much research, especially in engineering and the sciences, but also in nontechnical fields. The tide started to roll back in the 1970s with the oil shocks, economic malaise (far more severe in Britain than the US), and other factors, though tuition hikes were fairly modest until the late 1980s / early 1990s. Industry funding replaced some government monies. The glut of 1970s and later PhDs were hitting first slowed growth, then stasis, and finally decline in available academic positions. At the same time, advanced degrees in many areas proved of limited interest in themselves outside academia. TL;DR: there were significant changes through the 1970s and 1980s, but they are better seen as part of a very large arc of development of higher education.