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The author is clearly complaining from a conservative, free-market viewpoint, but it's difficult to overlook that the conservative, free-market ideology that tr
by lsy 4y ago
The author is clearly complaining from a conservative, free-market viewpoint, but it's difficult to overlook that the conservative, free-market ideology that triumphed in the Reagan-Thatcher era has been a major driver of the complaints voiced here. The late-sixties to early-nineties free-for-all at universities was partly due to an understanding of the university as a place for the betterment of the population in the form of a largely-subsidized public good. This also tied into concepts like tenure and academic freedom which insulated students and educators from the surrounding society, and allowed students to run organizations and modify or vandalize campus property without consequence, with the benefits and costs that entailed.
Today the university is largely re-imagined in the conservative mold. It is foremost an elite job-training site, and includes not only the cosmopolitan social training that companies demand of 21st-century knowledge workers, but free-market costs commensurate with the expected value of the degree in the vocational sphere. Administration has been handed over to a business class walled off from the educators, for fear of academics running the show, with predictable results of fiefdom-building. Tenured educators are disappearing and being replaced with the adjunct precariat, another conservative win. This all contributes to an atmosphere where the stakes of any action are very high for both students and university employees, and danger abounds, whether it be from lawsuits or from the possibility of being forced out of school and suffering lifelong consequences as a result. It's perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics, when one needs look no further than other bastions of the conservative mindset, like HOAs or corporate HR departments, to find organizations that would be similarly displeased with an ad-hoc island in a common-area water feature.
- golemiprague 4y ago[dead]
- rippercushions 4y agoThe article is blaming the school administration, a parasitic entity that's very different from the academics you're talking about. It's also clear that the increasingly bloated administration is horrendously inefficient from a free market POV, but what's happened here is not a free market, but regulatory capture: the administration makes the rules and spends the budget to benefit itself, squeezing out both teaching staff and students in the process.
- ss108 4y agoMy understanding of the other poster's comment was that the triumph of school administrators over tenured professors was for some time a conservative goal and ostensibly a conservative win--but it looks like it has backfired.
- rippercushions 4y agoUniversities like Stanford are notoriously liberal hotbeds, by what mechanism would conservatives even make that happen?
- giraffe_lady 4y agoThe hoover institution? The associations with the dept of defense? Liberal opinions may be commonly held there but the university itself isn't.
- catawbasam 4y agoHmm. Maybe google "Hoover Institution".
- rippercushions 4y agoI did: it's a notionally independent unit of Stanford that has an endowment of $0.7B, while Stanford as a whole has $37.8B. Can this tail really wag the entire dog?
- ss108 4y agoIDK, ask that poster, I'm just summarizing the comment.
- puffoflogic 4y agoThe neat thing about being leftist in the USA today is you can blame 100% of the problems caused by overregulation on "muh free market!", a mythical boogieman supposedly in control of the US economy but in reality essentially nonexistent.
- sonofhans 4y agoThis is a fantastic comment, and an incisive view of the problem. I don’t wish to sound to cynical, but in response to > It’s perplexing to see this laid at the feet of academics … I believe the answers are partly contained in your comment. For one, it’s in the professional interests of the administrative class to continue to demonize, marginalize, and disempower academics. For another, it’s in their political interests to continue pushing academic institutions towards job-training programs rather than expanding intellects.
- roenxi 4y ago> difficult to overlook that the conservative, free-market ideology that triumphed in the Reagan-Thatcher era The western conservative parties have disgraced themselves over the last 40 years with their failure to conserve successful free-market competition, no doubt. Looking at the US, and counting likely 2nd order effects, the majority of the economy is directed by government spending. ~40% directly, and probably double-digits indirectly as services to that 40%. Major fields like education, healthcare, energy, banking and housing are paralysed by regulation. The US still gets to claim relatively free market vs Europe or Asia, but the situation is so far gone it is debatable whether there are any genuinely free-market policies. A free market would not be paying for these administrators, for example. But all of that doesn't mean that the universities exist in the conservative image. The situation is the ugly compromise between a failed conservative movement to re-establish free markets and anti-market forces.
- Line5285 4y ago[flagged]
- walkhour 4y agoThe comment you replied to is gaslighting in its purest form. But the left likes you see itself fighting against a way more powerful enemy. The idea that universities are anything like conservatives would like them to be is like saying the antebellum South was a black's man dream.