Posted on 03/29/2025 5:10:50 AM PDT by Rummyfan
I’m Gen X. I was pretty young when I earned my PhD, so I’ve been a professor for a long time—over 30 years. If you’re not in academia, or it’s been awhile since you were in college, you might not know this: the students are not what they used to be. The problem with even talking about this topic at all is the knee-jerk response of, “yeah, just another old man complaining about the kids today, the same way everyone has since Gilgamesh. Shake your fist at the clouds, dude.”1 So yes, I’m ready to hear that. Go right ahead. Because people need to know.
First, some context. I teach at a regional public university in the US. Our students are average on just about any dimension you care to name—aspirations, intellect, socio-economic status, physical fitness. They wear hoodies and yoga pants and like Buffalo wings. They listen to Zach Bryan and Taylor Swift. That’s in no way a put-down: I firmly believe that the average citizen deserves a shot at a good education and even more importantly a shot at a good life. All I mean is that our students are representative; they’re neither the bottom of the academic barrel nor the cream off the top.
As with every college we get a range of students, and our best philosophy majors have gone on to earn PhDs or go to law school. We’re also an NCAA Division 2 school and I watched one of our graduates become an All-Pro lineman for the Saints. These are exceptions, and what I say here does not apply to every single student. But what I’m about to describe are the average students at Average State U.
(Excerpt) Read more at hilariusbookbinder.substack.com ...
Thanks for posting. Went to the look and the whole article was worthwhile reading.
I’ve seen a few YouTube videos where they go around to “elite” universities and ask simple questions like, “How much is 3x3x3?” or “How many states are there?” or “What is the largest state?” or “Name a state that starts with the letter ‘K’”. They don’t know.
Overspecialization and the abandonment of the canon are not the whole story, but their impact can hardly be overstated. The point of distributional requirements across various disciplines as part of the undergraduate program is not to produce well rounded graduates who can hold their own mingling with people of other backgrounds in social settings; this is nice enough in its place, but it’s not the purpose.
The fundamental purpose is that the various disciplines are intended to cross check each other. Stovepiping and echo chambers are a major hazard. If the lunatics who have taken over the psychology department at Indoctrination University come up with a crazy new theory, take it over to the history, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, economics, business or myriad other departments and see whether it has been tried. How did it work out in practice? Even within the realm of psychology, take it off campus and consult with the clinical psychologists who are trying to help patients/clients with serious life issues. Talk to the police, social workers and elementary and secondary teachers who are trying to deal with the carnage in families and on the streets. What works in the real world? What actually improves lives? Does the theory survive a basic reality check?
The distributional requirements were traditionally supposed to serve this function. This applied as well to literature, poetry and drama; does a work of fiction ring true, is it rooted in a coherent reality, or is it merely fantasy wish fulfillment? The woke disease started with excessive stovepiping, as lunatics gained their footholds, carved off their domains as isolated fields (often masked with arcane technical language intended to make it impenetrable to non-believers and prevent cross examination), and achieved critical mass. They then began to move aggressively on traditional academic fields that were still committed to the canon and attempting to maintain standards.
The scandal of modern academia is that so much of the legacy academic establishment has capitulated to the disease vectors. Why? Ultimately, I think, it’s because the whole woke crusade is ultimately a smokescreen for a political movement focused entirely on seizing power. Many of the people involved in this know perfectly well that they are lying, and they don’t care. The bigger the lie, the easier it is to identify, isolate and ultimately expel dissenters. The last generation has been the era of the great leftist purge of the universities. There are a few holdouts here and there, but the LeftWorld academic commissars are busy converting the universities from institutions committed to seeking the truth into political screens for controlling access to elite professional paths and governing positions.
For too long, people in the sciences stood aside, thinking the carnage could be limited to the humanities and social sciences. In STEM fields, they smugly assumed, sooner or later you have to be able to do the math. But now the race police have taken over the HR function, and they want to control faculty hiring and promotion and grad student admission to selective programs. The frauds and liars crack the whip. Truth tellers speak in whispers until they quit in disgust or get purged as standards decline and core fields are corrupted.
At best, we will end up with highly trained technologists who will reliably follow orders. But who is giving the orders? Should they be followed? Why, and on what grounds can one refuse?
This is getting too long, so I’ll jump to the origins. There is a lot of truth to the formulation that what we know as western civilization was born when Rome met Jerusalem. The early church fathers may have started as a Jewish sect — viewed as heretical by orthodox Jews — that was founded on the idea of a Creator God who designed the world for a purpose. The world is ordered because it is planned. The early Christians undertook to spread the gospel to all nations, and they encountered a dominant Greco-Roman culture in which Plato was ascendant (though not unchallenged). The dominant pagan philosophical structure was Platonic, and Plato taught the unity of the good. Hmmm ... a coherent, lawful universe that is the work of a Creator God meets the unity of the good as the dominant philosophical position. The connection is not hard to make. Rome met Jerusalem ... and it is worth remembering that the orthodox pagans stood just as resolutely as did the early church against the encroaching eastern mystery religions and gnostic cults. That is now the great point of attack by the woke, subjectivity-worshipping cults, which are in open rebellion against the reality principle and the commitment to reason.
The universities cannot remain committed to the truth unless they are willing to submit to open public debate, tolerance of dissent, the status of logic over feelings, a willingness to admit error. Universities that won’t do that deserve to die. But we will have to replace them with something better than ChatGPT to do our thinking for us.
I went to college with a vague intention of studying history, but this was a long time ago. I knew I had gone to a completely ordinary public high school, that I was woefully ignorant of the canon, and that even in history, which was one of the subjects in which I had begun to develop serious geek level knowledge, I really only had a thumbnail grasp of things. I was attracted to an introductory course in political philosophy. I was intimidated at the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, et. all down through the moderns, but I thought maybe I should check them out.
The professor walked in the first day, went to the board, and wrote down a question: “Why should I obey the law?” He turned to the class and said that if we thought that was an artsy, fartsy question of no interest to a sophisticated modern person, this probably wasn’t the class for us and we should head over to drop and add. But I stuck around, and we were immediately into Plato’s Apology and the discussion goes on from there. The overarching Greek philosophical question is how to lead a good life, which requires defining the good; what leads to human flourishing, and what price should we be willing to pay? The answers are not in engineering textbooks. It’s good if buildings and bridges don’t collapse and if the tech guys can make pixels move faster, but that’s not what we live and die for.
Boomers were nothing like this massive college enrollment.
College enrollment in the United States from 1965 to 2022
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183995/us-college-enrollment-and-projections-in-public-and-private-institutions/
He’s partially right. But the fact that colleges force all students into taking crap courses that have nothing or little associated with the degree they want also leads to this attitude in the students. Colleges are absolutely scamming students with crap that doesn’t matter or help them in their chosen field many times.
From 8th grade and up we should be doing apprenticeships in whatever field a child is interested in. Society would be much better off.
Before I retired we were putting several universities on our DO NOT HIRE list each year.
Why hire engineers that can not do ANY math, let alone write a readable memo or report. I had to fire several EACH YEAR that would not stop using shortcuts and slang when writing reports to our federal sponsors.
Would you say the young are less curious than in the past, that knowledge for the sake of knowledge is not part of their seeking, that the mind is less important to them?
Twitter wasn't a money-losing social media platform; it was a three-letter agency tool to monitor and influence globalist policy. Elon Musk fired people who were never working for Twitter from the beginning but were instead working for the machine.
https://nypost.com/2022/12/22/facebook-twitter-stocked-with-ex-fbi-cia-officials/
They not only didn't learn about adulthood from their single moms and teachers, they were taught wrong. All their mental efforts were directed at making them consumers and tax slaves.
They now have the burden of unlearning what they were taught in order to learn what they need.
Toddlers are cute and endearing in small amounts but you do not want one working for you.
They just might find out that we're being manipulated by others who don't want those philosophical questions even asked lest it wake up the masses.
Sounds like my college roommate and his girlfriend. She’d come over to visit and they’d sit on the couch texting each other. I even told them I’d go out to get something to eat so they could have some private time. As far as I know, they spent most of their time doing that whether anyone else was in the apartment or not.
Yes to all three of your questions in #68.
There’s a lot there. 😉
It comes from a story about conditioned stimulus and how my professir taught it.
Skinner lost me at the Skinner box, and numerous other WTF ideas.
I’ll type it out when I get off mobile.
Overall as a classically educated scientist i came to doubt psychology deserved the -ology at the emd.
You post proves the point. Competition for the schools was higher in the past. Enrollment is not the issue. It’s how many are competing for how many seats. Seats were increased in response to the demand which no longer exists.
This is solely and exclusively the fault of leadership in the institutions.
Students are income. Therefore they cannot be failures.
The idea of academic standards is abhorrent to them because it works against their principal goal...income.
“I think a lot of us are giving up on talking to them about anything deep.”
Why waste the air?
Why don’t you post some data showing that over the same period?
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