fixing education and research

because we're not going to have better or smarter guys next time

“obviously, this issue is hideously complex and basically unfixable.”

this is a common mantra. it’s also totally wrong. this issue is incredibly simple and easily fixable. we just need to courage and fortitude to rip off the band aid and let the chips fall where they may.

key salient:

education and research in america constitute a gordian knot situation and such situations need lateral thinking to resolve. they cannot be fixed within the construct that made the mess. a new frame is required.

example:

link

for decades the marxist/aggrievement-cultists, funded by an endless firehose of federal money and the massive DEI and partisan pressure, have utterly dominated universities.

protected and enabled by this backstop they have created schools and departments that are irredeemably rancid and will perceive anything even close to handed as "far right extremism." they rage and war at anyhting not “just like them” and “university as struggle session cauldron” where the rights of a tiny group of unhinged and unselfgoverning “protest majors” funded by outside agencies are given not only precedence but pride of place over the kids that just wanted to learn engineering has increasingly become the rule rather than the exception and even now such schools fight back to keep “boys who tuck” on the girl’s sports teams.

just what sort of “education” is this intended to impart and why?

it’s obvious that this is not an acceptable outcome and that the federal government has come to dominate universities by the simple expedient of “having gotten them hooked on federal cash.” this is the business model of a pimp and the educational system will turn whatever tricks it’s told to keep the funding flowing.

it’s basically impossible to compete unsubsidized with those getting massive subsidy, so everyone has to play.

and once the needle of cashflow goes in, it never comes out and if education must become indoctrination to keep it going who cares about debasing a few ideas like free speech, free thought, or critical thinking.

it’s easy to stir up emotions and opposition to this and say “yay! out team our values!” but trump is neither wise nor moral to get this granular and to tie behavior to money. it’s exactly wrong. he's validating the process of breakage/ideological domination through patronage and the idea of political interference in universities as the purview of the executive.

“Federal officials told the university it must immediately place its Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Department under “academic receivership for a minimum of five years.”

that's not a solution, it's a setup for problems.

such policy only cements the game of "who dominates university ideology" which is just plain stupid and will inevitably bite us in the backside later when some new faction takes the white house and uses it to impose their preferred ideology upon schools.

every election will be a choice about "what universities can/must teach." that's an absurdity and coyote’s law obviously pertains here.

this is why you cannot fix the problem using the old frame. “how shall the government manage the schools?” is a loser as a question. once you ask it that way, there is no good answer, just an endless wrangle of partisans trying to be the “better and smarter guys this time.”

it’s a practice with a 0.000 lifetime batting average.

fortunately, it’s also one we don’t need.

the only real solution here is simple:

stop government funding of universities.

all of it.

no more grants for research, no more student loans and student loan accreditation boards, no more free cash and tax free hedge fund status.

it has all become the problem. the money is the problem and it creates a guild system. to be eligible for your students to get federal loans, you need to be accredited. to be accredited takes the permission of the existing schools, the ones who keep hiking tuition at 3 times the speed of sound. every single facet of this is broken by federal money and federal limitation.

title IX, DEI, ESG, censorship, competition, ideology, all of it. none of this is organic. it’s all artifacts of federal meddling.

so let’s just stop.

no interference and no support.

schools, go find your way as private actors like everyone else.

provide a product that people will pay for and compete on value on a fair playing field.

the fact is that the whole idea of the school and the university needs to change to reflect the modern reality. most of what they teach is useless and most of those they teach it to are ill served by having learned it. most of how they teach it is antiquated and ridiculous. the university as we know it was created to address a scarcity of knowledge, to collect rare tomes and writings in one place where the students might access them and to allow collaboration between leading lights and their proteges to break new paths and find new things.

none of this is hard anymore. none of it is rare. the idea of “needing to build a university around a library of jealously guarded manuscripts” has become a nonsense. this is the internet age. the idea of needing geography to collaborate is still slightly plausible, but FAR less so that it was. you can learn more arguing economics on twitter for a year than in most faculty lounges.

the cost to provide an education has been dropping like a stone while the price to get one is up 4X from when i was in school. the gato alma mater is now $68k a year, more once you cover ancillaries.

the only other cost keeping pace with this mad dash is hospitals, the other place the federales dominate and subsidize everything and constrain supply and competition.

telling, that…

time for a market solution.

we could easily make college good, fast, and cheap by setting it free. make it compete and strive and we’ll get good product. allow oligopoly and subsidy and interference and we won’t.

of necessity, this involves a period of “letting the current system fall on it’s fat face” and that carries some disruption, but are we really expected to cry for the 2000 diversity deans that need to find new careers. perhaps they can “learn to code.”

this lesson is general.

it goes for all the government money. it holds for elementary schools and high schools and every kind of research grant.

it’s the same problem manifest everywhere and the beneficiaries of the status quo are experts at taking and abusing “hostage puppies” but this does not mean they have any sort of real point or moral high ground. mostly, it shows the opposite.

consider perpetual font of bad covid takes dr angela as she claims that removing federal funding will “eliminate a generation of scientists.”

this could not be more wrong.

getting government funding out of science is not an attack on science, it is a liberation of it.

this is exactly what ike warned us about in his farewell address:

that a small unaccountable group in government would come to dominate the funding of scientific research and thereby impose its own doctrines and dogma upon the pursuit of "the scientific method" rendering it instead "the science™" a pay for play monopoly captured by federal interests who ask what your conclusions will be and check them for ideological purity before they agree to fund the work.

sound science is not produced in such ways.

propaganda is.

sound education is not produced in such ways.

bismarkian ideology factories are.

it generates misincentives, has no mechanism to allocate between choices based on their utility, and it squanders funds to provide bad product while crowding out the good.

sorry, i wish that there were some happy fluffy bunny compromise here, but the whole of this edifice is capture and corruption and as soon as you allow the state funding of any science or education, however compelling the hostage puppy can be made to look, you wind up back here again in the cesspool of pipers for hire cosplaying as scientists or educators in order to earn their supper through slavish service to a hijacked agenda while riding roughshod over all else.

all that’s left to argue about is “who shall do the hijacking?” and that’s a question to which there can be no good answer.

the only solution is not to allow it to be asked.

getting leviathan out of science will not "eliminate a generation of scientists," it will finally enable us to produce one worthy of the name.

removing its scaly snout from education will allow schools to once more become places of learning and value instead of extended struggle session themed daycare.

there is no middle way.

federal funding is a hyper-addictive toxin with no safe dosage. it crowds out all else and leaves only the poisonous fruit of the statist tree behind.

and it’s time we stopped falling for it.