4 ms·

Your posted suggestion, of defining the best outcomes as immediate job success, would solidify a market practice of lowering fences between town and gown (viabl

Your posted suggestion, of defining the best outcomes as immediate job success, would solidify a market practice of lowering fences between town and gown (viable during only the past 3 or 4 generations) as the only viable way forward for educational bodies that intend to survive. Because I agree with your general statement that market situations lose relevance once legislated, I think the principle more naturally extends to mean: It is better to consider how to keep universities, whether research institutes or liberal arts universities, as a distinctive part of "the whole spectrum of techniques by which one generation transmits its insights and abilities to the next," Prof. Edsger Dijkstra's words. Not enshrine a set of commercial principles by which every piece of a spectrum must play. Immediate job success is a fickle master; it would be a shame to LinkedInify any society. In 1996, Dijkstra said, [0] > The University with its intellectual life on campus is undoubtedly a creation of the restless mind, but it is more than its creation: it is also its refuge. The University is unique in that on campus, being brilliant is socially acceptable. Furthermore the fabric of the academic world is so sturdy that it can absorb the most revolutionary ideas. > But it is not only a refuge for the restless minds, it is also a reservation for them. It does not only protect the restless minds, it also protects the rest of the world, where they would create havoc if they were let loose. To put in another way, the fence around campus is essential because it separates two worlds that otherwise would harm each other. The fence ensures that we have relatively little direct influence on the world "out there", but we would be foolish to complain, for our freedom to be as radical as we like is based on the fact that, for at least the first 25 years, industry and the world-at-large ignore our work anyhow. Currently, there seems to be a world-wide tendency to try to lower the fence; the effort strikes me as ill-directed. He had also been writing similar things in 1986 [1] and 1994 [2]. [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/dijkstra.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~vl/notes/dijkstra.html [1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD988.htm https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD09xx/EWD988... [2] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD1175.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/EWD117...

devwastaken 2y ago
No one can live in a capital market without capital. Education has always been about capital markets - uneducated people are highly limited in their use. There has never been a school that was built for "free", it's always come from capital one way or another. It used to be primarily private capital, people who believed in it's purpose. Outside of the top 1% Now nothing is built without students and taxes footing the bill. If it cannot survive on its own merits then its existence is an abuse to the people it claims to support. Turn it into something else and let real solutions arise naturally.
- SgtBastard 2y ago
  > uneducated people are highly limited in their use. >taxes footing the bill. It sounds like it is surviving only its own merits, merely shifted in time. (Admittedly, from the perspective of an Australian whose strongest institutions are all public and the private universities are a bit of a joke)
- advael 2y ago
  No it hasn't? That's some insane revisionist history, and this is what I blame Reagan for. The attitude that universities and even education broadly primarily or solely exist for producing vocational training The original and, to this day, primary unique purpose universities serve is facilitating research. Capitalists try to claim credit for all the progress in science and innovation that's happened since the industrial revolution, but the institutions that evolved into what we now consider academia predate it significantly, and it's important to note that they were not always viewed even by their benefactors as having immediate value in a direct economic sense. Most of their educational capability is a side effect of developing competency in training new researchers. People who fell off this track still often got a quality education and became better-rounded, and also people who could get to a university tended to be high-status, so for a while it was a decent-fidelity signal for the competence-status mix that hiring decisionmakers cared about. Trying to get everyone in on this not only devalued that signal, but has caused a lot of this institutional rot. I think we agree on the end of that story but not the beginning of it Vocational training and especially apprenticeship should be encouraged and enabled more, and shoehorning universities into this role was misguided from the start
  - devwastaken 2y ago
    ideas of how it should be and the actual circumstances today are completely different. That ideal is abusive because it is not reflected in reality, taking advantage of young naive adults.
- tsimionescu 2y ago
  What are you on about, mate? Universities significantly predate even the concept of capital. Not universities as a concept, but specific universities that you can go to today - notably Oxford and Cambridge, but many others in Europe. And their purpose has almost always been scholarship, not employment. Most modern universities stem from institutions meant to find better ways to understand God's work, and perhaps to better worship it. The Catholic Church was the primary "investor" for a long stretch of time, at a time when it was a more powerful "state" than almost any other in Europe.

devwastaken 2y ago

No one can live in a capital market without capital. Education has always been about capital markets - uneducated people are highly limited in their use. There has never been a school that was built for "free", it's always come from capital one way or another. It used to be primarily private capital, people who believed in it's purpose. Outside of the top 1% Now nothing is built without students and taxes footing the bill. If it cannot survive on its own merits then its existence is an abuse to the people it claims to support. Turn it into something else and let real solutions arise naturally.

SgtBastard 2y ago
> uneducated people are highly limited in their use. >taxes footing the bill. It sounds like it is surviving only its own merits, merely shifted in time. (Admittedly, from the perspective of an Australian whose strongest institutions are all public and the private universities are a bit of a joke)
advael 2y ago
No it hasn't? That's some insane revisionist history, and this is what I blame Reagan for. The attitude that universities and even education broadly primarily or solely exist for producing vocational training The original and, to this day, primary unique purpose universities serve is facilitating research. Capitalists try to claim credit for all the progress in science and innovation that's happened since the industrial revolution, but the institutions that evolved into what we now consider academia predate it significantly, and it's important to note that they were not always viewed even by their benefactors as having immediate value in a direct economic sense. Most of their educational capability is a side effect of developing competency in training new researchers. People who fell off this track still often got a quality education and became better-rounded, and also people who could get to a university tended to be high-status, so for a while it was a decent-fidelity signal for the competence-status mix that hiring decisionmakers cared about. Trying to get everyone in on this not only devalued that signal, but has caused a lot of this institutional rot. I think we agree on the end of that story but not the beginning of it Vocational training and especially apprenticeship should be encouraged and enabled more, and shoehorning universities into this role was misguided from the start
- devwastaken 2y ago
  ideas of how it should be and the actual circumstances today are completely different. That ideal is abusive because it is not reflected in reality, taking advantage of young naive adults.
tsimionescu 2y ago
What are you on about, mate? Universities significantly predate even the concept of capital. Not universities as a concept, but specific universities that you can go to today - notably Oxford and Cambridge, but many others in Europe. And their purpose has almost always been scholarship, not employment. Most modern universities stem from institutions meant to find better ways to understand God's work, and perhaps to better worship it. The Catholic Church was the primary "investor" for a long stretch of time, at a time when it was a more powerful "state" than almost any other in Europe.