Fixing College: Hit Them In The Money, Replace Their Prestige

If you’re short of time, and know about the past—which as of last week is now historical—failures of higher education, skip When It Was It Bad and jump right to Make It Sting.

When It Was Bad

A clue, not the first, but a dandy one, was when textbooks became hideous brute deadweights, with colorfully idiotic pictures and margins the size of Lithuanian sheep pastures, reissued biannually as “new” editions, with the full compliance of professors who produce (don’t say write) them.

A second clue, not that different, really, was when colleges started offering communications and similarly useless “degrees”. Learning, and paying to learn how to produce superior propaganda should not be the purpose of “higher” education.

Colleges were by that point already unsalvageable, but few could see this.

Many now can. Because many had the advantage of a plethora of fresh evidence, most conspicuously in the form of hard DIE mania and quotas, even when these are forced to go under new names. Canada is allowed to openly ban white men. That and college is already over half women, the majority in many fields, and so-to-be majorities even in science. Men have had enough mandatory formal scolding by “educators” by the time they’re eighteen, and they increasingly will not want to voluntarily pay for more. Let alone learn about “getting along”: in science, anyway, this is deadly poison.

The kids that make it to American campuses cannot read. Or won’t read. A long-time professor at Columbia says “students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester.” One student told him she was never required to read a book before getting to college. Not even one.

Hardly any of the kids who are at college belong there. They could have, and should have, learned what they needed to know to get on in life before college. But high school, and middle school, have also been dumbed down. This is all accurately predicted by the theory of averages, as I written many times (blog/Substack). The greater the proportion of kids going to school, the dumber school becomes, until, when all go, education hits bottom. Equality is the Great Leveler.

If you’re still in the unconvinced camp, let me remind you of this cri de coeur from David Butterfield, ex of the University of Cambridge. He resigned after two decades professoring there, because why? Because, for one, disability exceptions. Including—and I ask you to believe this, even though you won’t—learning disability exceptions. This is like insisting short professional basketball players be awarded +20 bonus points at the start of every game. One report says 90% now whine about “mental health.”

The largest and final clue was college administration “degrees.” Yes, really: these exist. It is Experts, or managers, in the Expertocracy training themselves in managerialism, so that they can, with the greatest efficiency, subsume colleges into the managerial bureaucratic beast. It is the one “degree” with the greatest successes.

Butterfield writes of this, though he is far from the first and not alone, about how professors, grateful at first to be relieved of the burdens of paperwork, surrendered more and more of their authority until they became mere “employees”, working at the whim of Experts. Some “prestige” colleges now have as many, or more, administrators as professors. Read that twice.

Which leads to headlines like this: “UConn looking to address low enrollment for 70 majors“. Experts are considering closing down programs that aren’t adding to the bottom line. Like math, physics, art, music, linguistics, almost all languages, and, yes, philosophy. Shall I remind us what “PhD” stands for? No. Why bother.

Make It Sting

We have a choice. Let the flesh rot off the carcasses of the old system, and build anew. Or try to repair what stands. Quoting Mystery Grove: “As one Russian official said of attempts by the Czar to modernize Imperial Russia shortly before the Revolution: ‘The most dangerous thing you can do to a bad system is try to reform it.'”

Porque no los dos?

We now have a chance to hose off the smelly slimy woke mess that coats and gooks the halls of academe. If this fails, then we will be comforted that we are also building our own. Here’s how to reform.

Woke effeminate sclerotic decaying money-eating shiny-new-already-dissolving-buildings universities now have power and authority. Both can be taken and given to others.

The power can be taken away by, for one, taxing endowments. Now I know nothing of the legal bits of this, but it has been promised by the incoming regime, and even if they can’t get away with taxes like this, the fear of the Lord that it might should be instilled in university administrators.

What can be done is to defund any university which is any way woke. Have any DIE, in any department or level, by name or euphemism or even smell, and no federal funds. No student loan guarantees. Choke off the money, and change comes. Another threat is that those involved in Official Mis- and Disinformation efforts cause their schools to lose funding.

Purge administrators. Pick a level—say, 10%—and announce that if any college or university has that many or more administrators than professors, no federal funding. We must no longer feed the managerial beast. After a few years, or months, to boot the waste, then lower the level to 5%. Deans do not count as professors. Watch the cheating of renaming administrators as professors. Any ex-administrator can never count as a professor.

The other avenue is to encourage all kids who should not be going into college to do something else. Having the unable on campus burdens everyone unnecessarily. The same thing happened with primary education, because teachers are forced to aim at the lowest level. Which makes education hell for the able. It limits the best, and does very little, to nothing, for the unable.

It is the weakest and least able, or now the unable, who fill the useless and ridiculous majors. There is no reason we as a people should be funding communications “degrees”, or any grievance “studies” “degrees” and similar other fluff or radioactive nonsense. Colleges can be free to have as many of these programs as they like, but they should not be allowed to spend any of our money on them. We fund only the best.

Research funding. Cut most of it off. Much of it is there only because professors must publish or perish. This creates the raging tsunami of worthless and harmful “research”, in all fields, not only science. Absolutely zero funding for things like “women in physics” or “super duper pedagogy”.

The assumption that universities are the best and most efficient places to learn new things must be challenged. It isn’t true, at least not now. If we as a society deem scientific discovery important, there are other avenues, especially private ventures.

There is more, but you have the idea. Money is the obvious, and necessary, line of attack. Make it sting.

Who Says So

Lack of (genuine) teachers are not a problem. If you want to learn, say, electronics, go to any of a dozens of sites. I myself teach probability. It’s one thing to convince a car rental company not to require a “degree” for entry-level clerks, as some do. But it seems difficult, if not impossible, to convince medical and legal licensing boards not to require some kind of certification. It’s the Accreditation Gate that must be solved.

Because DIE is official government policy, in form of civil “rights”, many look to the certification of the college “degree” as evidence of some level of worthiness, because companies become skittish of checking worthiness themselves. Yet this would be so even if we did not insist on DIEing. Not every firm or person can take the time to check the competence of every person. The problem was thus never certification per se. The problem is the parchment in palms has been of inconsistent or of little or no value.

Now you can take my probability class, and I can (and will) write a letter giving my impression of your assimilation of the material. This can be shown to anybody, but the value of that letter depends on myself having any prestige. I have none, since I have been cast into the outer darkness for refusing to DIE. You only have the benefit of me being right, and my enemies (who boast of their wee Ps) being wrong.

Yet you might get away getting somebody to accept a letter for one item, like probability, but you likely won’t in general, or for all things. There’d be too many letters from too many teachers, over-burdening those who need to check credentials.

Which means we need to own the Accreditation Gate. Closing that Gate allowed Canada to crush a Christian law school. No accreditation, no certification, no certification, no entering the bar. We do the same thing right back at them.

Earlier, I suggested a group of Our Men join and provide the service of accreditation. We’d serve as the accreditation boards do now, though not formally as an “our thing”, because once such an entity becomes formal, the DIE screws are applied.

We now have the opportunity to create something formal, with all the perquisites that implies. Call it, say, the Reality Accreditation Board. Only sane and Reality-based subjects are covered. Again, no grievance, no fluff, no DIE, no “jobs for girls”. Leave the nonsense to others.

Make it rigorous and make it vigorous. Make it so that if a person has only a credential from some lesser entity, a hiring manager considering it says, “Well, this is okay, but would it pass the standards of the RAB?”

We do the RAD, even if we lose the other battles, and even if the RAD has to be an unofficial “our thing”.

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