Where is the University Going?

Presented by the University of Austin
Amna Khalid, Carleton College
Nadine Strossen, New York Law School
Jacob Howland, University of Austin
Cary Nelson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Stanley Fish, New College
Moderated by: Michael Regnier, Heterodox Academy

[@a.t.stowell1709]

Extensive, root canal-level reform is needed. Some universities need to be "taken out behind the barn" because they are too far gone. 1. The value of "expertise" should come with an asterisk. In the sciences this is perhaps well understood, but there can be no such application to methodologically suspect areas like gender studies. 2. Educator advocacy organizations are hardly self-reflective. The "outing" of incompetent administrators in the last few years should be give one pause. Instead, most of these organizations engaged in gaslighting and shooting the messenger. 3. Education is now fully a business, with CEOs and customers. Failure to see this demonstrates blindness or willful ignorance. 4. The modern degree is merely a credential - a passport to the modern economy. Students are interested in education more generally. 5. Willfully ignoring the problem of rampant cheating and grade inflation is also part of the problem.

[@GoodLifeMedicine]

Professors are driven by money, power, and prestige, even in the limited amounts available to them. Every member of the faculty might be represented by a point on a 3D graph according to the level of each of these drivers he currently enjoys, and by another point representing what he most wishes for. Such profiling which mixes the objective and subjective, would be a good starting point for rooting out the motivations on the part of the faculty that result in politicized departments on the one hand, and the cynical, passive acceptance on the other. Interdepartmental groups need to form to explore these motivations with the goal to root out the malignancy and re-shape communities of basic inquiry.

[@alchemist6098]

There is an old saying: He who pays the piper calls the tune. As long as universities take huge funds from the taxpayer as state institutions do they should expect external control.

[@edtomlinson1833]

There is also a tone of condescension here, as if those who do not attend college are not prepared to be good citizens. Further, when a "regular" person hears some of these "experts" say things that are widely known to be false, it really harms the credibility of higher ed institutions. And we know that insiders who publicly oppose some of the false claims made by their peers risk losing their jobs. So again, how is it that legislation to reign in these excesses is an unreasonable threat?

[@RobertWGreaves]

I am glad I retired when I did. College is not about education, it is not even about preparing people to work. I taught Sound Engineering for 15 years. Half the students admitted to the program will never have a future in sound engineering. And this is why most college graduates in Sound Engineering across America are doing something else within 2 years.

[@musiqtee]

I agree, but from other reasons. In my 40 years as a sound engineer, I’ve had eight trainees. Six kept on. Creative work is vocational in nature, but in today’s view it’s a “career” - Efficiency and work. Paid labor to climb the ladder towards ownership of some kind, the naturalized dream of making money doing less work… Eyeing what’s happening to “content production”, this has become my view after listening to how our young imagine their future now - or struggle to. Doesn’t mean I’m “right”, but work-life balance is changing rapidly.

[@edwoodsr]

Google's AI overview: According to a 2024 meta-analysis of studies conducted between 1939 and 2022, the average IQ of undergraduate college students in 2022 was 102, which is slightly higher than the general population average of 100. This is a 17-point decline from 1939, when the average IQ was around 119. The researchers attribute this decline to the increased accessibility of higher education over the past 80 years. One change this suggests is that the traditional mission of the university be revised accordingly (or, perhaps acknowledged).

[@user-fw2dd2cy3c]

Stanley Fish sometimes manages to say true things, but often not. And: he helped destroy the humanities by postmodernizing the Duke English department in the late '80s.

[@prof.jezebel]

An interesting discussion. I am shocked that the corporatization of the university was not addressed more. If students are customers and we have to "keep the numbers up," please donors, and be "accountable" for the employability of graduates, does this not fundamentally compromise academic freedom, and undermine the projects of seeking truth, producing democratic citizens with critical thinking skills, and advancing human knowledge?

[@economicsandguitarsandsome1722]

Good panel, good talk. Thanks!

[@edtomlinson1833]

I see no evidence here for the claim that legislation (from the right) is the biggest threat to academic freedom. There are already laws that prevent harassment based on protected characteristics, and these are widely understood to be reasonable restrictions on such freedom. Legislation I have seen simply clarifies that this same approach applies in higher ed. What valid educational purpose does it serve to harass some students based on this supposed "oppressor-victim" paradigm? How are restrictions on the use of such a paradigm the most important threat? This was never explained, and the claim seems like wild exaggeration.

[@advocate1563]

Beyond reform in the uk. But then the geopolitical and.economic is starting to take over fhe philosophical ones. Fees too high - home students moving to apprenticesjips. Chinese students in STEM challenging for security reasons. We've now moved on to "plunder" India for those profitable students, but we've got tye genai effext. This last 2 years attendance on campus collapsing. Bluntly the model is changing and fast. It's more about taking market share than growing the pie. I see a revolution in higher education inthe near future.

[@user-jy8bt9uz7f]

Yes yes yes educate professionals and dont bleat about truth or your great moral purpose

[@gregorschoner9682]

Quite disappointing. Most participants here stay very much at the surface. They do not reflect critically about their own activist days in the post 68 period. Did they know what they were doing then? Was it unquestionably good for society that ideologically influenced and uninformed youths stopped US engagement against the totalitarian regime of North Vietnam? Did they ever go back to examine the politics of North Vietnam? Didn’t their generation create the ethics of academic activism that now blows in their face? Aren’t political attacks on the University a natural consequence of decades of mono-culture, activism, and partisanship? It is so obvious that even in this select forum, everyone is speaking to each other from a shared basis of political positions, comfortably on the liberal side. These people are not at all used to talking to people who have other opinions or values, a different reading of history (perhaps one exception on the panel). Without radically questioning that and the past 40 plus years of getting to that place, their institutions have no chance of revival.

[@user-jy8bt9uz7f]

Unified political conformity creates the Trumpian backlash

[@user-jy8bt9uz7f]

Yes you all deserve Trump