9 ms·

The Misuses of the University

163 points by ubasu 7mo ago

PaulHoule 7mo ago
I miss the Newseum, not least because it had this exhibit: https://www.motorious.com/articles/highlights/don-bolles-car-controversy/ https://www.motorious.com/articles/highlights/don-bolles-car...
- xhkkffbf 7mo ago
  I liked the Newseum too, if only for the daily newspaper front pages available out front each day. Those were amazing. But it had the same problem. They spent a fortune on the physical plant and never had the foot traffic to justify it.
  - mandevil 7mo ago
    As someone who volunteered in a museum right near the Newseum, their biggest problem was the competition. The Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art being some of the best museums in the world, right across the street, with much better stuff and totally free was always going to be hard to compete with. The only private museum that has managed to survive is the International Spy Museum, which went all in on fun and interactives, and much less on education, and has a lot less prestigious footprint.
- RGamma 7mo ago
  Journalists were asking for the bombed car of journalist Jon Bolles to be removed? Murdered while he was defending the public interest against the mafia? Standards seem to be falling everywhere...
jaco6 7mo ago
[dead]
zer00eyz 7mo ago
> With its 29 cantilevered roof planes and its clerestory glazed windows, it will quickly become the highlight of campus tours. Prospective students will look on with envy. Maybe it will attract more applicants. I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top. Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.
- wrqvrwvq 7mo ago
  Modern uni has a strong cruise-ship aesthetic.
  - sevensor 7mo ago
    I live in a college town. There are now commercial bar crawl operators. They make the T shirt, develop an itinerary, coordinate with the bars. It’s a weirdly infantilized form of debauchery. Can’t frat boys be trusted to make bad decisions on the spur of the moment any more?
- busyant 7mo ago
  my youngest son visited a handful of "fancy" schools near the end of highschool and he thought the whole process was nuts. he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."
- parpfish 7mo ago
  one conspiracy theory i have been stewing on for years is that the luxuriousness of modern colleges was an intentional move to neuter the political power of the youth following the student unrest of the 60s and 70s. somebody made a conscious decision to turn college into a little utopian island divorced from reality to quell protests. students get their own on-campus entertainment venues, sports teams, luxurious dorms and dining halls, rec centers and gyms, on-campus health services. for some students this is designed to keep them content and docile, but for others its designed to let them learn about the injustices of the world while being quarantined away from it so they cant affect change. and the most insidious part of it is that they're the ones paying for it (with interest!). by the time they are kicked out of this little cocoon, they're saddled with enough debt that they have no choice but to grind away at a job they hate for a few decades
awakeasleep 7mo ago
If you’ve ever read science fiction about life in the ruins of an advanced culture, but you were irritated with how it skimmed over what the process of the fall was like— well, we sure have a wealth of those details now.
- Insanity 7mo ago
  'advanced culture' is in the eye of the beholder. At the time, Rome was an advanced culture and we have a bunch of details of their fall. Not to take away from your point - I agree and the current fall makes it more tangible.
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    The fall of Rome also took centuries, historians can't even agree on exactly when it began.
    - Insanity 7mo ago
      True for the empire, not true for the republic (which still took decades but not centuries)
      - RGamma 7mo ago
        When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
        PaulHoule 7mo ago
        1970 or so. There is this version of it https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.
        linkregister 7mo ago
paulorlando 7mo ago
"Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. The new fixed costs cannibalize existing funding streams, increasing pressure to grow revenue."
- vlz 7mo ago
  'He remembers the quip from a former dean: “The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.”'
  - PaulHoule 7mo ago
    I was working in digital libraries circa 2005 and we had that bubble pop when people understood the business model was "get a $100,000 grant and spend $20,000 a year maintaining the product in perpetuity." I tried to convince management that if these were part of a system designed for maintenance in mind we could get that $20,000 to $500-$2000 a year, but it seemed the institutional response to this situation was "let go of the most productive people and keep the least."
    - gsf_emergency_6 7mo ago
      [dead]
rd 7mo ago
I recently graduated (class of '25), and the thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university. There's a great student op-ed about _a_ proposed solution (firing the deans): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-bureaucratic-bloat-harvard/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...
- neutronicus 7mo ago
  That's a common sentiment among non-Hopkins Baltimoreans. It's a small city, so a lot of people have experiences with real estate held by Hopkins.
- DesaiAshu 7mo ago
  Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club) It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very heavy paycuts to remain in academia, but the result of that finger pointing is devaluing education The right approach - in my eyes - is to share the land Harvard, Stanford, et. al. sit on with 10x the number of students. This simultaneously increases efficiency of the entire P&L while providing a higher quality of education to everyone As we've seen with the UC system (and the excellence of IITs + Chinese research universities), high density education can be synonymous with top tier research outcomes - Ivory Towers are not needed
  - impendia 7mo ago
    I got curious, and looked up the Harvard Polo Club. Apparently it naturally faded away as polo declined in popularity, but then was revived in 2006. I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off. But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?
delichon 7mo ago
> He remembers when that building came up, back in 2001, replacing a grove of elm, beech, and oak trees on campus. The old arts center hadn’t been cheap: $17 million was real money at the turn of the millennium. They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. There are many "temporary" Quonset huts around here twice that age. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.
- bpt3 7mo ago
  As the article states, the funds came from an external donor. It's not how I would choose to use $250M+ of my money, but it appears to have nothing at all to do with federal funding (nor would it even if the building was financed by the school, but especially not in this case).
  - momoschili 7mo ago
    The federal funds pay for it through the indirect costs funding its maintenance most likely... I suspect that represents a significant portion of the total cost of the building.
    - bpt3 7mo ago
      Universities are only allowed to include indirect expenses that are related to the research in question, not all expenses incurred by the university (such as a student center, dorm, stadium, etc.).
      - momoschili 7mo ago
        Well many buildings that are donated have research conducted within them. Not always a lot, but a large building is going to have plenty of uses. Eg stadiums often have medical research that is being conducted within them.
        7mo ago
noelwelsh 7mo ago
When I was at university, my institution was investing $millions in building various new building. A grumbled to my supervisor, who explained to me that this was important to attracting new students. It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.
- Tangurena2 7mo ago
  I blame the "contest" started by the magazine US News and World Report, which started their college rating. This led to university execs aiming to raise their rating at the expense of education. Higher rankings meant higher bonuses for top employees - especially the president of the university. This race for ratings is why the cost of a university education has skyrocketed far faster than inflation.
  - Loughla 7mo ago
    I am not aware of any college that uses reports like US News and World Report rankings in the compensation packages of their executives. I agree with your main point, but see a different cause, though. The problem is that parents and students use these reports as a bellwether for identifying prospective schools. Campus visits (short visits) where you see what the campus looks like, but don't actually learn what its about is the second problem. There is too much PR and not enough focus on substance in higher education, just like there is in many, many, many areas of life in the United States today.
  - ThinkingGuy 7mo ago
    The podcast "Revisionist History" by Malcom Gladwell did a great episode on the US News and World Report college ranking list, and the (often perverse) incentives it's created. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-the-rankings https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-...
- neilv 7mo ago
  I liked MIT's "building 20" cluster of wooden shacks, which were featured prominently in the east side of campus. It was said that, when an experiment needed more space, people would casually punch a hole in a wall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20 Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center
1024core 7mo ago
I misread the title as "The Missuses of the University" and thought this might be the next iteration on the "Real Housewives" franchise: "Real Housewives of the University". Sorry, didn't mean to distract from the serious topic at hand.
- amarant 7mo ago
  Glad I'm not the only one on here who is apparently illiterate: I did the exact same misread!
markus_zhang 7mo ago
It is just part of the establishment. When the establishment withered it withered with it. It’s just a symptom of a larger, deeper problem.
- mandevil 7mo ago
  Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland lines are the perfect metaphor for what has happened to American society. From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else. And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.
  - Nicook 7mo ago
    The third worldization of the USA continues at pace. Expensive reasonable enclaves for the rich, nothing for the rest.
  - scuff3d 7mo ago
    The community college I went to was doing this same crap. I remember going to the opening of a new arts building that provided less usable space then the building it replaced, and sitting around with all the donors and school administration paying themselves on the back. Meanwhile they didn't have enough room for most of the departments, and the tutoring programs were getting slashed.
patcon 7mo ago
Beautiful essay. Such quiet scathing critique. Written from the POV of a history professor witness: > The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza. These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...
- kittikitti 7mo ago
  I also found that quote to be great. I'm starting to read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom so this is an apt comparison. Thanks.
djoldman 7mo ago
Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either. "Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related. I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.
- gowld 7mo ago
  R1 Research University. Teaching mostly by TA, not Faculty. Not a "college".
  - warkdarrior 7mo ago
    TAs soon to be replaced by AI.
  - moab 7mo ago
    Are you a professor at a R1 school? All the faculty I know at R1s (see CMU, MIT, etc) are doing quite a lot of teaching in addition to their research.
    - hibikir 7mo ago
      I think he is mostly explaining the experience of many a student, which finds themselves, especially in the first few years, with very large class sizes and minimal interactions with professors. It's not that the professors don't do any teaching, but that your first two years probably feel like a scam, especially if there are many general requirements not tied to your major.
- nephihaha 7mo ago
  Johns Hopkins gets a lot of money from vested interests to push whatever suits them.
  - cucumber3732842 7mo ago
WalterBright 7mo ago
Johns Hopkins has a business school, the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which was peculiarly not mentioned in the essay. You'd think their own business school would be capable of bringing fiscal sanity to the university?
- nyeah 7mo ago
  Business school professors are professors. They've never run any business. They can train MBA students to get hired and promoted. They can keep their own personal money in S&P500 index funds. That's about it. (EDIT: Even if a few B-school professors have real-world business management skills, why would the university listen to them? They're just employees, and they're not nearly expensive enough to be credible.)
  - WalterBright 7mo ago
    I'm reminded of "Back to School" where Rodney Dangerfield explained to the business professor how business really works.
  - georgeecollins 7mo ago
    This is so true! At best business school professors have a side hustle consulting. And you can read in many places about the perils and questionable efficacy of consultants. What they are-- first foremost-- is academics and fad surfers.
- bpt3 7mo ago
  What is the fiscal insanity of taking money from someone and spending it for your benefit (with some strings attached, which are usually minor)?
  - WalterBright 7mo ago
    The article explains it reasonably well.
    - 7mo ago
nephihaha 7mo ago
"Limp signs on the fencing announce the opening of the SNF Agora Institute, by which, he’s informed, the university is “building stronger global democracy." "In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..." Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas. What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?
ajkjk 7mo ago
This is all stuff I feel like I was basically aware of but when it's described together it's so... depressing. Ugh.
ohgeekz_com 7mo ago
[dead]
econ 7mo ago
A wise man once told me that a company or organization has enough professors or high level academics they must also run the show. They won't like it but they have to. You shouldn't have a layer above and pretend they know better. They will inflate the importance of stuff they can understand and ignore everything important.
alexpotato 7mo ago
A friend of mine was the head lab technician at a large prestigious research university. I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process. From talking to my friend, I realized: - most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job - they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible - the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding - the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.
yowayb 7mo ago
I cherish my UCSD education and (equally, if not more) all the socializing that came with it. The concept (and aims) of university faces the same headwinds of any business based on intellectual property in America: artificial moats of IP law. China's manufacturing success partially stems from the government's inability to enforce IP law. Thankfully, ideas want to be free, and LLMs give us the best-yet UI to information. To me, Hacker News is a university. It's a place where I come to learn (from thousands of "teachers") and these "teachers" are actually also students, learning as well.
pu_pe 7mo ago
Title could be "The Museums of the University". This is not only a US phenomenon, some European universities are essentially becoming museums if you look at their budgets and administrative priorities.
throwway262515 7mo ago
"It is said that the King of Siam used to make a present of a white elephant to courtiers he wanted to ruin." [0] No King of Siam needed when the executives running the place competently wield their foot guns. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/white_elephant https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/white_elephant
lo_zamoyski 7mo ago
Fun read focused on the financial misallocations and warped sense of priority of the administration. The reason, of course, is that the university has lost its way, and if you want to know what their functional aim is, as chaotic as it may be, ask "who benefits?". Of course, the university lost its way quite some time ago. Indeed, education in general has. But if we focus on the university, the basic question we should be asking - one that should inform all of our decisions and actions - is "for the sake of what?". What is the university for? If you ask most people, perhaps especially since the War when university attendance exploded, the answer will likely be "to get a job". So, the university, it is supposed, is primarily an institution centered around career training and preparation. Indeed, if you grew up during the last half century, you might have grown accustomed to hearing a certain negative encouragement to attend university, namely, that if you wish to avoid working at McDonald's - which is taken to be the worst fate imaginable - then you must have a college degree. This was an unquestioned iron rule that insinuated a certain conception of the primary purpose of unviersity education. In communities dominated by blue collar workers, the university was sold as one's ticket out of the ostensibly dreary world of manual labor into the ranks of the white collar professional classes. (Gen Z begs to differ; interest in the so-called trades has increased by 1500%.) Now, assuming university education is job training, we might wish to ask whether they are effective at this task, especially given the astronomical costs of tuition to which students are yoked after graduation. Here, the answer is far from clear and one suspects negative for most graduates. Even so, the concept of university-as-job-training-center itself is a debasement of the original purpose of the university. The primary purpose was historically embodied by the liberal arts, which is to say, the free arts. These are opposed to the so-called servile arts. Guess into which "job training" fits best. The liberal arts as originally taught were not the liberal arts as we imagine them today. The foundation of what you might call undergraduate education was the trivium and the quadrivium. The first taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric in order to prepare students to be able to reason, evaluate arguments, and to make arguments themselves. It freed a person by developing basic intellectually competence. In the second, students were taught arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Despite what are for us today some strange names, these prepared the student for quantitative reasoning: quantity as such, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space-time. From there, students continued onward to study philosophy, medicine, theology, law, and so on. The purpose of these liberal arts was to produce a free man, free because he is enabled to pursue the truth. Even the so-called research university demotes the primary function of the university by making pedagogy a kind of afterthought or concession. Eduating students is secondary; the primary aim of faculty is research. Of course, people used to attend university at the age of 14, the age at which we typically enter secondary school, so the boundaries have shifted, but I would nonetheless argue that education - and especially the university - should return to its roots as an intellectual community of faculty and students oriented toward producing free human beings capable of seeking the truth. Research should take place in dedicated institutes. Students are a long way from research anyway, which in any case tends to be specialized. The trades should be taught in trade schools and institutions focused on producing competence in those areas. Institutional function should be clear so that an institution can acheive its end successfully instead of trying to be everything and nothing. Focused study of specialized academic fields should be postponed until postgraduate study.
EdwardDiego 7mo ago
> clerestory glazed windows I learned a new word today!
7402 7mo ago
US colleges received billions in gifts from non-democratic countries in 2025: Qatar $7.7 billion China $6.4 billion Saudi Arabia $4.7 billion These countries are not making donations to support democracy and freedom. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-billion-in-foreign-gifts https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b...
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163 points by ubasu 7mo ago

I miss the Newseum, not least because it had this exhibit: https://www.motorious.com/articles/highlights/don-bolles-car-controversy/ https://www.motorious.com/articles/highlights/don-bolles-car...

xhkkffbf 7mo ago
I liked the Newseum too, if only for the daily newspaper front pages available out front each day. Those were amazing. But it had the same problem. They spent a fortune on the physical plant and never had the foot traffic to justify it.
- mandevil 7mo ago
  As someone who volunteered in a museum right near the Newseum, their biggest problem was the competition. The Smithsonian and the National Gallery of Art being some of the best museums in the world, right across the street, with much better stuff and totally free was always going to be hard to compete with. The only private museum that has managed to survive is the International Spy Museum, which went all in on fun and interactives, and much less on education, and has a lot less prestigious footprint.
RGamma 7mo ago
Journalists were asking for the bombed car of journalist Jon Bolles to be removed? Murdered while he was defending the public interest against the mafia? Standards seem to be falling everywhere...

jaco6 7mo ago

[dead]

zer00eyz 7mo ago

> With its 29 cantilevered roof planes and its clerestory glazed windows, it will quickly become the highlight of campus tours. Prospective students will look on with envy. Maybe it will attract more applicants. I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top. Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.

wrqvrwvq 7mo ago
Modern uni has a strong cruise-ship aesthetic.
- sevensor 7mo ago
  I live in a college town. There are now commercial bar crawl operators. They make the T shirt, develop an itinerary, coordinate with the bars. It’s a weirdly infantilized form of debauchery. Can’t frat boys be trusted to make bad decisions on the spur of the moment any more?
busyant 7mo ago
my youngest son visited a handful of "fancy" schools near the end of highschool and he thought the whole process was nuts. he said something like "seems like we're all expected to make a decision based on how nice the weather was when we visited and the architecture... and I don't care about either one."
parpfish 7mo ago
one conspiracy theory i have been stewing on for years is that the luxuriousness of modern colleges was an intentional move to neuter the political power of the youth following the student unrest of the 60s and 70s. somebody made a conscious decision to turn college into a little utopian island divorced from reality to quell protests. students get their own on-campus entertainment venues, sports teams, luxurious dorms and dining halls, rec centers and gyms, on-campus health services. for some students this is designed to keep them content and docile, but for others its designed to let them learn about the injustices of the world while being quarantined away from it so they cant affect change. and the most insidious part of it is that they're the ones paying for it (with interest!). by the time they are kicked out of this little cocoon, they're saddled with enough debt that they have no choice but to grind away at a job they hate for a few decades

awakeasleep 7mo ago

If you’ve ever read science fiction about life in the ruins of an advanced culture, but you were irritated with how it skimmed over what the process of the fall was like— well, we sure have a wealth of those details now.

Insanity 7mo ago
'advanced culture' is in the eye of the beholder. At the time, Rome was an advanced culture and we have a bunch of details of their fall. Not to take away from your point - I agree and the current fall makes it more tangible.
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  The fall of Rome also took centuries, historians can't even agree on exactly when it began.
  - Insanity 7mo ago
    True for the empire, not true for the republic (which still took decades but not centuries)
    - RGamma 7mo ago
      When would you date the beginning of the current fall though? Late 20th/early 21st century? When would you end date it without longer hindsight? (honest question)
      - PaulHoule 7mo ago
        1970 or so. There is this version of it https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ Certainly the fall of the Breton Woods monetary system was part of it.
        linkregister 7mo ago

paulorlando 7mo ago

"Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. The new fixed costs cannibalize existing funding streams, increasing pressure to grow revenue."

vlz 7mo ago
'He remembers the quip from a former dean: “The endowment is the gift that keeps on taking.”'
- PaulHoule 7mo ago
  I was working in digital libraries circa 2005 and we had that bubble pop when people understood the business model was "get a $100,000 grant and spend $20,000 a year maintaining the product in perpetuity." I tried to convince management that if these were part of a system designed for maintenance in mind we could get that $20,000 to $500-$2000 a year, but it seemed the institutional response to this situation was "let go of the most productive people and keep the least."
  - gsf_emergency_6 7mo ago
    [dead]

rd 7mo ago

I recently graduated (class of '25), and the thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university. There's a great student op-ed about _a_ proposed solution (firing the deans): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-bureaucratic-bloat-harvard/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...

neutronicus 7mo ago
That's a common sentiment among non-Hopkins Baltimoreans. It's a small city, so a lot of people have experiences with real estate held by Hopkins.
DesaiAshu 7mo ago
Having personally run a college P&L, this dodges the bigger sunk costs of higher education: 1. Old and expensive to maintain land 2. High cost of living for all staff (weighted heaviest towards faculty) 3. Ancillaries that are revenue negative, _very_ expensive, and inconsequential to the purpose of the education (eg. the lacrosse team and the Polo Club) It's nice to point fingers at the people who are taking very heavy paycuts to remain in academia, but the result of that finger pointing is devaluing education The right approach - in my eyes - is to share the land Harvard, Stanford, et. al. sit on with 10x the number of students. This simultaneously increases efficiency of the entire P&L while providing a higher quality of education to everyone As we've seen with the UC system (and the excellence of IITs + Chinese research universities), high density education can be synonymous with top tier research outcomes - Ivory Towers are not needed
- impendia 7mo ago
  I got curious, and looked up the Harvard Polo Club. Apparently it naturally faded away as polo declined in popularity, but then was revived in 2006. I understand that, if you have a current and active polo club running, then you either have to keep it going or run the risk of pissing people off. But, if I can ask you to speculate, why might Harvard have revived its club in 2006?

delichon 7mo ago

> He remembers when that building came up, back in 2001, replacing a grove of elm, beech, and oak trees on campus. The old arts center hadn’t been cheap: $17 million was real money at the turn of the millennium. They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. There are many "temporary" Quonset huts around here twice that age. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.

bpt3 7mo ago
As the article states, the funds came from an external donor. It's not how I would choose to use $250M+ of my money, but it appears to have nothing at all to do with federal funding (nor would it even if the building was financed by the school, but especially not in this case).
- momoschili 7mo ago
  The federal funds pay for it through the indirect costs funding its maintenance most likely... I suspect that represents a significant portion of the total cost of the building.
  - bpt3 7mo ago
    Universities are only allowed to include indirect expenses that are related to the research in question, not all expenses incurred by the university (such as a student center, dorm, stadium, etc.).
    - momoschili 7mo ago
      Well many buildings that are donated have research conducted within them. Not always a lot, but a large building is going to have plenty of uses. Eg stadiums often have medical research that is being conducted within them.
      - 7mo ago

noelwelsh 7mo ago

When I was at university, my institution was investing $millions in building various new building. A grumbled to my supervisor, who explained to me that this was important to attracting new students. It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.

Tangurena2 7mo ago
I blame the "contest" started by the magazine US News and World Report, which started their college rating. This led to university execs aiming to raise their rating at the expense of education. Higher rankings meant higher bonuses for top employees - especially the president of the university. This race for ratings is why the cost of a university education has skyrocketed far faster than inflation.
- Loughla 7mo ago
  I am not aware of any college that uses reports like US News and World Report rankings in the compensation packages of their executives. I agree with your main point, but see a different cause, though. The problem is that parents and students use these reports as a bellwether for identifying prospective schools. Campus visits (short visits) where you see what the campus looks like, but don't actually learn what its about is the second problem. There is too much PR and not enough focus on substance in higher education, just like there is in many, many, many areas of life in the United States today.
- ThinkingGuy 7mo ago
  The podcast "Revisionist History" by Malcom Gladwell did a great episode on the US News and World Report college ranking list, and the (often perverse) incentives it's created. https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-the-rankings https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/lord-of-...
neilv 7mo ago
I liked MIT's "building 20" cluster of wooden shacks, which were featured prominently in the east side of campus. It was said that, when an experiment needed more space, people would casually punch a hole in a wall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Building_20 Building 20 was razed to build the Gehry-designed, donor-named Stata Center (incorporating a donor-named Gates "tower"). Breaking with MIT tradition of calling buildings by number, IME most people call it by donor name. (Gehry's reflective surfaces could blind biologists in building 68 across the courtyard, at least before the donor-named Koch building was installed nearby.) Stata has its merits, but I think grad students who punched a hole in the wall would be in trouble. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stata_Center

1024core 7mo ago

I misread the title as "The Missuses of the University" and thought this might be the next iteration on the "Real Housewives" franchise: "Real Housewives of the University". Sorry, didn't mean to distract from the serious topic at hand.

amarant 7mo ago
Glad I'm not the only one on here who is apparently illiterate: I did the exact same misread!

markus_zhang 7mo ago

It is just part of the establishment. When the establishment withered it withered with it. It’s just a symptom of a larger, deeper problem.

mandevil 7mo ago
Not just that the establishment, but the entire educational complex, from the large research universities like JHU to the community colleges, were built around a 1950s-1970's American economy and the society that supported that. And now that that is gone, what happens to all of the universities? They've been just as corrupted and degraded as the rest of it. My wife and I were talking last night about how Disneyland lines are the perfect metaphor for what has happened to American society. From the 1950's to the 1990's there was basically no way to avoid standing in the lines, everyone was in it together and you just had to stand in the lines. Then in the 1990s they added FastPass and you could, if you were clever and planned a bit, skip some lines but you were still going to be standing in lines with everyone else, and they were free and reasonably fair process. Then in the 2010's they started to do book ahead FastPass and if you were staying in a hotel on site you could book all the good times for all the rides, to try and encourage hotel stays. And now with Lightning Lane's they are incentivized to make the line process so onerous to get you to fork over $25/person/ride to skip them. And that's where we are today: an enshitified product that is designed to give a good experience to the very wealthy, while making it worse for everyone else. And that's the same path we've gone in entertainment, in housing, in education, in healthcare, in so much of modern American society.
- Nicook 7mo ago
  The third worldization of the USA continues at pace. Expensive reasonable enclaves for the rich, nothing for the rest.
- scuff3d 7mo ago
  The community college I went to was doing this same crap. I remember going to the opening of a new arts building that provided less usable space then the building it replaced, and sitting around with all the donors and school administration paying themselves on the back. Meanwhile they didn't have enough room for most of the departments, and the tutoring programs were getting slashed.

patcon 7mo ago

Beautiful essay. Such quiet scathing critique. Written from the POV of a history professor witness: > The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza. These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...

kittikitti 7mo ago
I also found that quote to be great. I'm starting to read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom so this is an apt comparison. Thanks.

djoldman 7mo ago

Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either. "Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related. I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.

gowld 7mo ago
R1 Research University. Teaching mostly by TA, not Faculty. Not a "college".
- warkdarrior 7mo ago
  TAs soon to be replaced by AI.
- moab 7mo ago
  Are you a professor at a R1 school? All the faculty I know at R1s (see CMU, MIT, etc) are doing quite a lot of teaching in addition to their research.
  - hibikir 7mo ago
    I think he is mostly explaining the experience of many a student, which finds themselves, especially in the first few years, with very large class sizes and minimal interactions with professors. It's not that the professors don't do any teaching, but that your first two years probably feel like a scam, especially if there are many general requirements not tied to your major.
nephihaha 7mo ago
Johns Hopkins gets a lot of money from vested interests to push whatever suits them.
- cucumber3732842 7mo ago

WalterBright 7mo ago

Johns Hopkins has a business school, the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which was peculiarly not mentioned in the essay. You'd think their own business school would be capable of bringing fiscal sanity to the university?

nyeah 7mo ago
Business school professors are professors. They've never run any business. They can train MBA students to get hired and promoted. They can keep their own personal money in S&P500 index funds. That's about it. (EDIT: Even if a few B-school professors have real-world business management skills, why would the university listen to them? They're just employees, and they're not nearly expensive enough to be credible.)
- WalterBright 7mo ago
  I'm reminded of "Back to School" where Rodney Dangerfield explained to the business professor how business really works.
- georgeecollins 7mo ago
  This is so true! At best business school professors have a side hustle consulting. And you can read in many places about the perils and questionable efficacy of consultants. What they are-- first foremost-- is academics and fad surfers.
bpt3 7mo ago
What is the fiscal insanity of taking money from someone and spending it for your benefit (with some strings attached, which are usually minor)?
- WalterBright 7mo ago
  The article explains it reasonably well.
  - 7mo ago

nephihaha 7mo ago

"Limp signs on the fencing announce the opening of the SNF Agora Institute, by which, he’s informed, the university is “building stronger global democracy." "In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..." Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas. What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?

ajkjk 7mo ago

This is all stuff I feel like I was basically aware of but when it's described together it's so... depressing. Ugh.

ohgeekz_com 7mo ago

[dead]

econ 7mo ago

A wise man once told me that a company or organization has enough professors or high level academics they must also run the show. They won't like it but they have to. You shouldn't have a layer above and pretend they know better. They will inflate the importance of stuff they can understand and ignore everything important.

alexpotato 7mo ago

A friend of mine was the head lab technician at a large prestigious research university. I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process. From talking to my friend, I realized: - most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job - they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible - the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding - the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.

yowayb 7mo ago

I cherish my UCSD education and (equally, if not more) all the socializing that came with it. The concept (and aims) of university faces the same headwinds of any business based on intellectual property in America: artificial moats of IP law. China's manufacturing success partially stems from the government's inability to enforce IP law. Thankfully, ideas want to be free, and LLMs give us the best-yet UI to information. To me, Hacker News is a university. It's a place where I come to learn (from thousands of "teachers") and these "teachers" are actually also students, learning as well.

pu_pe 7mo ago

Title could be "The Museums of the University". This is not only a US phenomenon, some European universities are essentially becoming museums if you look at their budgets and administrative priorities.

throwway262515 7mo ago

"It is said that the King of Siam used to make a present of a white elephant to courtiers he wanted to ruin." [0] No King of Siam needed when the executives running the place competently wield their foot guns. [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/white_elephant https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/white_elephant

lo_zamoyski 7mo ago

Fun read focused on the financial misallocations and warped sense of priority of the administration. The reason, of course, is that the university has lost its way, and if you want to know what their functional aim is, as chaotic as it may be, ask "who benefits?". Of course, the university lost its way quite some time ago. Indeed, education in general has. But if we focus on the university, the basic question we should be asking - one that should inform all of our decisions and actions - is "for the sake of what?". What is the university for? If you ask most people, perhaps especially since the War when university attendance exploded, the answer will likely be "to get a job". So, the university, it is supposed, is primarily an institution centered around career training and preparation. Indeed, if you grew up during the last half century, you might have grown accustomed to hearing a certain negative encouragement to attend university, namely, that if you wish to avoid working at McDonald's - which is taken to be the worst fate imaginable - then you must have a college degree. This was an unquestioned iron rule that insinuated a certain conception of the primary purpose of unviersity education. In communities dominated by blue collar workers, the university was sold as one's ticket out of the ostensibly dreary world of manual labor into the ranks of the white collar professional classes. (Gen Z begs to differ; interest in the so-called trades has increased by 1500%.) Now, assuming university education is job training, we might wish to ask whether they are effective at this task, especially given the astronomical costs of tuition to which students are yoked after graduation. Here, the answer is far from clear and one suspects negative for most graduates. Even so, the concept of university-as-job-training-center itself is a debasement of the original purpose of the university. The primary purpose was historically embodied by the liberal arts, which is to say, the free arts. These are opposed to the so-called servile arts. Guess into which "job training" fits best. The liberal arts as originally taught were not the liberal arts as we imagine them today. The foundation of what you might call undergraduate education was the trivium and the quadrivium. The first taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric in order to prepare students to be able to reason, evaluate arguments, and to make arguments themselves. It freed a person by developing basic intellectually competence. In the second, students were taught arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Despite what are for us today some strange names, these prepared the student for quantitative reasoning: quantity as such, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space-time. From there, students continued onward to study philosophy, medicine, theology, law, and so on. The purpose of these liberal arts was to produce a free man, free because he is enabled to pursue the truth. Even the so-called research university demotes the primary function of the university by making pedagogy a kind of afterthought or concession. Eduating students is secondary; the primary aim of faculty is research. Of course, people used to attend university at the age of 14, the age at which we typically enter secondary school, so the boundaries have shifted, but I would nonetheless argue that education - and especially the university - should return to its roots as an intellectual community of faculty and students oriented toward producing free human beings capable of seeking the truth. Research should take place in dedicated institutes. Students are a long way from research anyway, which in any case tends to be specialized. The trades should be taught in trade schools and institutions focused on producing competence in those areas. Institutional function should be clear so that an institution can acheive its end successfully instead of trying to be everything and nothing. Focused study of specialized academic fields should be postponed until postgraduate study.

EdwardDiego 7mo ago

> clerestory glazed windows I learned a new word today!

7402 7mo ago

US colleges received billions in gifts from non-democratic countries in 2025: Qatar $7.7 billion China $6.4 billion Saudi Arabia $4.7 billion These countries are not making donations to support democracy and freedom. https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-billion-in-foreign-gifts https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b...

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