13 ms·

How bad have universities got?

• was_a_dev 5y ago
  This feel ungenuine to use statistics about US universities and then extrapolate across the West. With maybe the exception of Australia, the US is clearly "ahead" on this crisis in higher education. Here in the UK, there has been some issues, but still enough open discussion to prevent the open door to begin closing.
  • Proven 5y ago
• weavejester 5y ago
  No mention of the paradox of tolerance, I see, either in the article or the study it cites.
  • yucky 5y ago
    I always find it funny how the far left and far right both cite Poppers Paradox as if it supports their view. Paradoxical indeed.
    • weavejester 5y ago
      It's not paradoxical if one side is wrong. It's also something you'd expect to see brought up in a discussion on intolerance of conservatism in academia, if only to try to refute it.
      • yucky 5y ago
        >It's not paradoxical if one side is wrong. Both sides would agree with that.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• spudwaffle 5y ago
  > gender differences I’m only denying the identity of their colleagues, why do the liberal professors hate me? This is cancel culture!
  • tacitusarc 5y ago
    Reasonable people can see there’s at least a discussion to be has. Simply mocking those who disagree does nothing for the credibility of your viewpoint.
  • nso95 5y ago
    Strawman
  • mdp2021 5y ago
    The complete quotation must be: > Nearly a quarter of American social science and humanities academics support dismissing colleagues who have unorthodox views in areas such as immigration or gender differences The poster's comment has large gaps in matching the quotation. Edit: actually the poster's comment literally seems to support «dismissing colleagues» out of «hat[red]» (on obscure basis, but at this point, giving "hatred" a weight, it is already irrelevant).
• jtwebman 5y ago
  Is this a factor though that conservative views have started to lean more towards conspiracy theories and religion vs fact and science? I would also say debate never really changes anyone's minds. People tend to believe things with emotions and believe irrational things even when showing overwhelming evidence. This happens on both sides of politics or anything.
• uejfiweun 5y ago
  I recently graduated from a top 20 school and in my experience it was not the professors you had to worry about, as this article suggests. Instead it was the other students, especially on social media, that were the most dangerous. I witnessed people losing internships and jobs after posting very IMO non-offensive statements, such as saying illegal immigration is bad and capitalism is good. It taught me a valuable lesson - when it comes to highly emotional and politically charged people, simply agree with whatever they are saying, then get the hell away.
  • 300bps 5y ago
    simply agree with whatever they are saying, then get the hell away One of the characteristics of facism according to Wikipedia is “forcible suppression of opposition” which is ironic because facism is typically considered a far-right ideology.
    • dymk 5y ago
      Modern day progressive ideology has for a while now been distanced from classical liberal ideology in a few key ways. Especially when it comes towards discussing ideas that don't always agree with the ideology.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    • teucris 5y ago
      There’s a ton of daylight between being oppressed and deciding not to engage in an argument. If you are not engaging out of a fear of large-scale repercussions, then it starts to smell like oppression. Not to say this isn’t bad, but it’s important to make sure to take context into account.
  • drunkpotato 5y ago
    This surprises me. I've never heard of anyone losing an internship or co-op position for such a reason. I can't think of it happening anywhere I've worked. As both of us have anecdotes however, perhaps some data on this could be enlightening.
• drunkpotato 5y ago
  A decently nuanced take. We don't want universities to be an echo chamber, however, neither do I want it to be a place where we pretend that "both sides" are equally valid. Rather, a spirit of inquiry should be welcome, and congealing around a left-authoritarianism is not healthy either.
  • gitfan86 5y ago
    It doesn't matter what "we want". What matters is what the customer wants. The people paying 50k/year have decided that they want to go to schools where right wing views are not tolerated.
    • mdp2021 5y ago
      In that case we need proper labelling of entities releasing certificates, so that those who want to develop knowledge and critical thinking go in the right place, opposed to those entities in which the opposite - "doctrine" - is imparted. Edit: > what the customer wants On that basis, one does not see how the entity can ever emit a valid title.
• krastanov 5y ago
  This writeup has a pretty weird style of citations. Five of the first six links are actually the same PDF. Feels a bit misleading, when you are trying to establish something as a measured fact with statistical significance.
  • ContrarianBrit 5y ago
    It was a very big study with lots of interesting data! But I agree, I should have provided a wider range of citations. This report only covers the UK, but is also good: https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8614/Academic-Freedom-in-the-UK-Legal-and-Normative-Protection-in-a-Comparative-Context-Report-for-UCU-Terence-Karran-and-Lucy-Mallinson-May-17/pdf/ucu_academicfreedomstudy_report_may17.pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8614/Academic-Freedom-in-the-UK...
  • blacksqr 5y ago
    Not only that, but the sixth link is to a substack post which links to the very same paper to support its claims. The linked paper gathered opinions from American academics via an email survey where the respondents self-selected and the response rate was 2-4%. So the results seem about as statistically useful as a Twitter poll.
  • TaylorPhebillo 5y ago
    Agreed- I was really interested in the facts cited at the start, less so in the citation-less analysis later. So I looked into the report cited many, many times- it's from the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology. Looking into them, influence watch says "The organization primarily reports on bias against conservatives. CSPI provides research grants of $2,000-$15,000 to applicants to study incidents or trends of bias against conservatives." https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/center-for-study-of-partisanship-and-ideology-cspi/ https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/center-for-study-o... On a side note, I'd really prefer not stating something as fact, then linking only to a 200 page report without any hints about where to actually find the info. Edit: I'm not thrilled with the linked report in general, but: The author says > Nearly a quarter of American social science and humanities academics support dismissing colleagues who have unorthodox views in areas such as immigration or gender differences. From page 24 of the report, I see where the author finds this information, but it's worth noting the support for dismissing academics comes almost entirely from the topic "women and minorities lower organizational performance"- more conventionally conservative topics don't seem to have anything like a similar rate. I can't find anything obviously like the 4 out of 5 PhD students discriminating against right wing scholars.
• cowpig 5y ago
  > Education predicts liberal attitudes on issues such as immigration, Brexit and the death penalty, those with less education tending to adopt conservative positions. There is a crucial implication for universities. Because universities provide education, they gather individuals who tend to have liberal views. Exceptions always exist, yet the education-liberalism nexus implies that liberalism will predominate; most academics have higher degrees and students work towards degrees. Isn't this reasoning circular? It seems the author is taking a correlation ("liberal attitudes" and "higher education"), and then claiming that because the correlation exists, there is a causal connection that will perpetuate the correlation? But the cause is just glossed over, an implicit step in the circular thought process? Assuming for a second that compressing political ideas down to a single "liberal vs conservative" axis is useful (I think it is actively harmful), my first question here is: why are "liberal attitudes" correlated with education?' edit: there is a single, but shallow and unsatisfying point about the "educated class" tending to come from "creative fields" that are somehow better-suited to "liberal attitudes", I guess, but that's not really doing it for me
  • slibhb 5y ago
    > my first question here is: why are "liberal attitudes" correlated with education? Here's one perspective on that: https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-intellectuals-oppose-capitalism https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-in...
    • cowpig 5y ago
      Is this related to the author, or just something you personally think is interesting/worth reading?
      • ContrarianBrit 5y ago
        This is a good summary of this debate: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03054985.2016.1151408?casa_token=PfbtLR-BFiIAAAAA%3AnMuHgA3iw5JwUUN8PnRd7vFBmeQEOSDPXSPTKJ7Z8bwJXqKtO6B4CgEs9_gkCQPuk7itW2bO6yBw8w https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03054985.2016.1...
• pron 5y ago
  I don't understand how one can provide "damning statistics" for a trend based on a single sample. It is more likely that universities are less discriminatory today that fifty years ago, or ever. There were quotas on Jews at US universities as recently as 1960 and blacks were segregated until 1965, not to mention the centuries that women were banned outright. I think that only someone who knows absolutely nothing about the history of universities can think we're on some downward trend in academic discrimination. "The idea that most objects of inquiry exist independently of the social world," is not, as the article states, "a central Enlightenment value," and it was the knowledge about racism acquired through research that uncovered the fact that many "technical" subjects have always been politicised, rather than "the emergence of Black Lives Matter" that politicised them. We've become more aware of the biases that have long existed among us. The discovery of those biases did no more create them than the discovery of microorganisms created the need for hygiene. In both cases, though, the discovery has certainly made some people uncomfortable.
• kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  Was there a special on broad brushes at the hardware store? The author must be buying them in bulk.
• kwertyoowiyop 5y ago
  But seriously can we please keep political crap like this off HN?
  • mdp2021 5y ago
    I am afraid education (with the social currents impacting intellectual space) is a matter of intellectual value.
• devwastaken 5y ago
  Universities in modern day are used by staff and admins as a free tax payer funded paycheck. I would know. While the students are hammered with having to make money to afford to live there, papers, trivia tests, and subjects completely irrelevant to their field, causing them to not learn what they need in their field of study. We are pushing out students with little to no real world experience and very little ability to critically think or find answers on their own. Mostly because we give them no time to and instead make them write about what Plato did, or how we can create more gender neutral environments. There is no accountability. A university can offer a degree and teach nothing. They don't have to prove their graduates go anywhere, and often lie with statistics like "90% of our students get a job in their field". Meaning maybe a desk clerk. As for discrimination of opinion, its more akin to the spanish inquisition. Take for example these mask mandate rules. Students have to wear a mask, all the time, except not outside, or off campus, or when partying in housing. But the University police will threaten students if they are by themselves not wearing a mask. Everyone is vaccinated. It's all heavily politically motivated. They don't want their democrat institution to look bad. These factual points have been brought up plenty of times and the school admins know they don't have to listen to anybody. They're getting paid, if the school goes belly up because of the lack of students ( 1 million fewer students overall this year), they know they can just leave to destroy another institution. It's really bad, people don't realize just how bad COVID rules destroyed some of these uni's, how quickly they had to build new systems for "online learning" just to stay afloat. All because they can't manage costs and play politics. That all comes back down on the students.
  • einpoklum 5y ago
    > Universities in modern day are used by staff and admins as a free tax payer funded paycheck. No. University staff - academic and administrative - work for their paycheck. I would assume most of them work hard, although my evidence is local/anecdotal. > While the students are hammered with having to make money to afford to live there This is not a problem in every country, but yes, I agree that university education should be gratis. > We are pushing out students with little to no real world experience To the extent that the university is not the real-world - this is a tautology. > very little ability to critically think or find answers on their own.... we give them no time to and instead make them write about what Plato did, or how we can create more gender neutral environments. This is an over-generalization. Perhaps this happens in your department, in your university, in your country - and perhaps some others; I doubt this is true in the majority of cases. Although I'll grant you that institutions properly fostering critical thought is somewhat of a rarity. > There is no accountability. A university can offer a degree and teach nothing In many/most countries this is false: There are periodic appraisals of various academic tracks by other universities, the state, relevant industries etc (details vary by country). > people don't realize just how bad COVID rules destroyed some of these uni's This may be true, but I'm not in academia these days so I wouldn't know.
• Faelian2 5y ago
  Jordan Peterson has some interesting critics of universities on YouTube.
  • mdp2021 5y ago
    Could you please indicate the selected best ones?
• einpoklum 5y ago
  > Education predicts liberal attitudes on issues such as ... Brexit ... those with less education tending to adopt conservative positions How is brexit a "conservative" vs "liberal" issue? It's not even a conservative-vs-labor-party issue, with the vote splitting the supporters of those parties as well.
• footlose_3815 5y ago
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