Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

Camille Paglia: The Modern Campus Cannot Comprehend Evil | TIME http://time.com/3444749/camille-paglia-the-modern-campus-cannot-comprehend-evil/

http://t.co/pTQV28O0q3THE BEST ANSWER YOU WILL FIND

While you will hear objections to this, they are the exception not the rule. All university departments hold biases and suppress competing ideas, and the careers of the members of the department depend upon upholding those biases, because of the incentives to publish, and the authoritarian hierarchy of the university. Universities remain vestiges of the church – which invented the university. And for good reason: grad students make cheap slave labor.

So, there is very little practical difference between the practice of ideology and the practice of academic research in this regard. In practice, ideas die with their originators and sponsors, not when they are successfully attacked. The incentive to over-invest in a paradigm to retain one’s position is too high. This is why students must choose departments based upon what the department members publish.

Sowell’s recommended “fix” is to financially and organizationally separate research departments (that do not serve the interests of students whatsoever) from teaching departments (whose only concern is the students) but the administration (serving neither the students or the researchers) is currently consuming all the vast investment americans are making in educations (that have questionable return, and in some cases negative return.) Realistically if undergrad students paid teaching professors, not researchers, for their education, and we regulated administration and capital acquisition to 20% of fees, education would be absurdly inexpensive, and students would leave with little debt. We could then ask grad students and phd students and the government to bear the costs of research, rather than the undergrads. And we would shrink the administration back to it’s necessary and sufficient size. (Financially, academia now has absorbed all the costs originally saved by eliminating the church. For all intents and purposes, we have merely replaced academia and church with academia. In fact, I am pretty confident that academia is far more expensive than the post-enlightenment church was in every form of capital consumption.)

But the university system is not designed for students and their careers, it is designed to provide economic rents to researchers and administrators, by selling faulty products to students, that in any other industry would be open to class action lawsuits for fraudulent representation, and possible only because of inflationary pressure on by the government, in the same way that the government created inflationary pressure on the housing industry leading to the 2008 crash.

See Sowell’s work and Caplan’s work. Caplan is always someone you must be skeptical of nearly everything he says, so his his empirical work is what you can appreciate, but you must ignore all his conclusions. (Sort of like reading Marx.)