"It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny."
Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. When people are talking about "safe areas" to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead. Political parties have more diversity of allowed thought. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned.
If you didn't forge your ideas in the fire of criticism at university, then you were cheated by others or yourself. The best teachers will make you argue both / multiple sides of a scenario and be offended that you parroted their opinion back to them. The worst teachers only see one valid way to think and are doing "missionary work" instead of teaching.
Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least
in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not
letting people speak who a group disagrees with.
STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities
has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned.
It is a mistake to assume that this is a localized phenomenon limited to the United States. Lately - and as somewhat of a testament to how disturbingly uniform and inauthentic, millenial culture has become everywhere - the same kind of intolerance for
discordant views can be seen on campuses from Canada to the UK.
I'll leave you with an excellent write up on the topic of this brand of groupthink and shutting down opposing views, on campuses, by Brendan O'Neill in The Spectator :
Have you met the Stepford students? They’re everywhere.
On campuses across the land. Sitting stony-eyed in lecture
halls or surreptitiously policing beer-fuelled banter in
the uni bar. They look like students, dress like students,
smell like students. But their student brains have been
replaced by brains bereft of critical faculties and
programmed to conform. To the untrained eye, they seem
like your average book-devouring, ideas-discussing,
H&M-adorned youth, but anyone who’s spent more than five
minutes in their company will know that these students are
far more interested in shutting debate down than opening
it up. [1]
[1] Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’
> When people are talking about "safe areas" to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead.
I understand what you're getting at, but some people really do have PTSD, and some speeches really do contain things like graphic recountings of abuse. Should those people just not attend university? (I'm actually undecided.)
This is only mildly related to the article, but does anyone else have difficulty imagining what others' jobs are? For example, I'm just young enough to remember a time when I thought a programmer was someone who hid in a closet to slam at a keyboard for nine hours a day, but that notion was only corrected by entering the workforce. What about my other misconceptions? There's no way to learn about all of them firsthand. I figure plumbers just travel between job sites to hit pipes for nine hours a day, managers just scream into phones and reply to emails for nine hours a day, and literary theorists ... sit ... in their offices ... for nine hours ...
That's the problem; I'm not possessed of a sufficiently creative (or informed) mind to fill in the blanks here. Dangerously, due to that programming knowledge, I also have the incorrect notion that everyone else could be replaced by either a handful of code and some lightly trained workers, or wholesale by mechanization. Clearly this isn't the case (or the market is doing a very poor job of finding exploitable niches), so what gives? What do people _do_? Because I'm at a loss and need to educate myself.
So many people have this question early in their careers, it really seems like something is wrong. Perhaps we need a serious/mandatory/formal job-shadowing program for teens and college students.
...but... that's what literary theorists literally do, isn't it? Read books and articles and write about them, and attend meetings. Having spent a reasonably long time in the University system (as a student, mind), I have a general idea of what everyone does and why.
On the other hand, I really don't understand what a lot people in the tech industry do. I have a friend who works for some kind of 'data analysis' company. He makes $80K a year, and he tells me on a bad day he has to do 2 hours of 'real' work: the rest of the time is spent on reddit or taking classes. It's gotten so bad (or good) for him that he is taking 3 evening classes in the University he graduated from while working full-time. He says he spends most of his worktime doing assignments and readings anyway, so he's more prepared for classes than he was ever in college.
I understand why a game company might need 50+ developers working on the same game. I understand why Google might need all those engineers. I really don't understand what 50+ 'data engineer's at what is essentially an SEO company with 100+ employees do... Like you say, I am really confused : is the market REALLY that bad at finding exploitable niches?
And then there's another friend of mine, who says the most difficult part of his Google engineering job by far was getting it. Go figure!
Maybe also a good question is "what should they do". A lot of jobs are rubbish. That opinion rubs people the wrong way for totally acceptable reasons, but only a hundred years ago, around 90% of people were farmers. Today it's 2%. I think it's fair to say that the cataclysmic effect that our human economy is having on the planet can not last in it's current configuration. Most people should be employed in building and maintaining the planetary biome... in other words, they should be: farmers, only a sort of high-tech, hi-fi, scientific mercenary warrior type of farmer. A plumber for example - the world will always need those - ought to be primarily concerned with diverting waste as a source feed for soil, in a clean and efficient way: a hero. But most jobs exist under a 100 year old paradigm which will change rather quickly. You might say they are "soon to be farmers" - that's the best case scenario. Other's would have us all be mercenaries and go out in a blaze of glory. Not me.
Lawyers are probably a big one. Most people think they spend all day in the courtroom, but many lawyers never set foot in a courtroom. Instead, their days are spent meeting with clients and preparing documents: their job is to translate the plain-English requirements of what the clients want to agree upon into legalese that has specific meaning in court.
What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking?
Anyway, the author is part of the problem. Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time. Until the professors themselves stop thinking this way, no government will prioritize them.
(And no, I don't agree that humanities are useless. They have a huge potential. But for them to be of any use, professors will need to seek those applications, and study them. Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.)
At the risk of being overly confrontational, the things that make humanities people believe that they are capable of critical thinking (in contrast to STEM types) are comments like yours.
> Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time
Where in the article does the author state or imply this? The section beginning "When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier..." is obviously written to be tongue-in-cheek.
A close reading (humanities skill!) of this article might highlight the following passage as the central thesis:
Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.
> Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.
Again, where in the article does the author suggest this course of action? If anything, he seems to be suggesting the opposite, that the humanities should be returned to their traditional place in the public square, questioning and criticizing the prevailing ideologies of the day:
It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny. What if the value of the humanities lies not in the way they conform to such dominant notions, but in the fact that they don't?
"...What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking?..."
The same thing that is with everyone else. If you look around our societies today it seems almost a matter of course that the first argument deployed in any debate is a dismissal of the opposing view holder's ability to think critically. Not to put too fine a point on it... but you can see that argument employed a lot here on HN. It's not really a matter of STEM people being dismissive of others' critical thinking skills - or even Humanities people being dismissive of others' critical thinking skills - as much as it is a matter of ALL people being dismissive of others.
It's, kind of, the nature of discourse in our society these days.
> What's it with humanities people that make them believe that only them, of all people, are able to do critical thinking?
I suspect it might be ego, after a fashion. Having observed that those educated in other fields have more marketable skills, a need to claim one's own education has produced a uniquely valuable skill arises.
They certainly aren't the only ones capable of critical thinking, but they are supposedly the ones who received a 4-year education in critical thinking, while other people were spending time learning about physics or what have you.
I agree that humanities are not worthless, but I think I (and the author) would probably agree on what that utility is: the university is where people think delicate thoughts, and essentially lead the rest of us in how we think about a person, an era, a trend, a concept. The humanities are all about perception, and there is infinite newness to be gleaned from looking at every part of history, which is only very partially (in both senses) recorded. The humanities are, collectively, our imperfect attempt to define a consensus of what happened, what it meant, and why a new perspective might be important (or at least interesting) to modern people. (And since humanities people are happy to trigger off of other humanities people, we wouldn't even need any new events, history, or art to keep the machine going; it would just endlessly rehash it's own interpretations endlessly.)
I wonder if this death of criticism is misty eyed nastolgia for a future that either never, or rarely existed.
Let's not forget that our so-called great universities:
- For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities.
- Were the providence of only the technocratic elite.
- Did very little research before the 20th century.
And now that the costs escalate out of control, is it any wonder that they have to go more commercial?
Some back of the envelope math: If every student takes 10 classes a year (5 per semester) and every professor teaches 5 classes per year to 20 students each, and gets paid 100K all-in, then the per-student faculty labor cost is 100K10/(205) = 10K per year. That's not too bad for critical learning. Expand the classes to 40 and you can cut the cost in half, or give the faculty a big raise.
I wonder if this death of criticism is misty eyed nastolgia for a future that either never, or rarely existed.
Not entirely. Take a look at Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (http://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-lo...). Universities grew enormously from 1945 – 1975. During that time, too, a disproportionately large number of students majored in English in particular, as well as other humanities disciplines. During that 30-year period, universities expanded and especially grad programs expanded—by 900%.
Most of those grad programs are still pumping out PhDs, even though the market for PhDs is weak. ABDs are a huge economic win for universities. So we have a situation in which supply has far outpaced demand for decades.
You're assuming that teaching ability scales without scaling the workforce. Having an instructor provide for more students means each student gets less instructor-time. More instructor-time increases the learning ability of most students. And so class size is an important metric.
For most universities, their biggest product is their own marketing and promotional material. Now that they are corporatizing, they are painting hindsight with rose-colored glasses, as "Brave New 1984" as most corporations are wont to do.
Indeed, as the author lamented about how much the deck is stacked against the humanities, I found myself wondering: are there actually fewer students today studying the humanities than at some point in the past?
Is the number of people with degrees in medieval literature actually decreasing, or just not increasing as much as the number of engineers?
Seems more likely that there are just a lot more students who can attend university now, and the sustainable way for this to happen is for most of them to be encouraged to go into particularly employable fields. This would fit with the observation that there's currently a huge oversupply of humanities Ph.D.'s with no academic positions waiting for them.
Flaws (lack of inclusiveness) don't mean it was no good. Unless you believe exclusiveness was core to the value proposition of a University, we can strive to make it inclusive without destroying the positive aspects.
We can still be nostalgic for the loss of things that weren't yet perfect.
Let's also not forget that what was so amazing about post-war education is that it went exactly opposite to the points you stated: it became subsidised, democratized, inclusive to lower socioeconomic classes in general and to minorities and women, and started to do more genuine research.
There's little misty-eyed nostalgia for 18th century universities, there is for the 1970s.
The issue for me isn't that 10k tuition fees is so bad (once you add non-teaching staff, or teaching-supporting staff, rent for facilities, administration, equipment, licensing access to libraries etc it'll be at least 15k). It's the fact that studying is supposed to be a full-time occupation. We don't ask of 12 year olds to work a 40 hour week, but we do of 20 year olds despite the fact they have as many classes but a higher study load outside of class.
Now if we consider that studying ought to be a full-time occupation, there's obviously an opportunity cost to studying or lack thereof. It's not just having to pay 15k per year for tuition, it's also forgoing the opportunity to work a job and make money to pay every expense a non-studying adult human normally needs to pay, rent, food, insurance etc. Another $15k per year is on the low-end.
So you end up with 30k over 4 years, at an average of 5% interest rates you easily graduate with 150k debt.
This is unworkable. So we require of students to work extra jobs next to their studies, knowing juggling a 70h work week for years on end while still living under crappy circumstances negatively affects studies, health etc. We require students to choose jobs that are most financially rewarding (knowing all too well that pursuing remuneration over everything else leads not to happiness, and that at the higher end the correlation between salary and benefit to society is weak). We see students accessing higher education with funds from family, something reserved for the (upper) middle class, and even for these kids it's very normal to have to not view studying as a full-time occupation despite being enrolled in a full-time program, and even so average debt in many countries sits around 30-50k.
Meanwhile, a country like Germany is offering free tuition, without having invented a magic money machine.
Yes, the message is a bit ironic, coming from a country promulgating persistent class hierarchy. Just keep giving us a cut of an endowment and 16th century trust, and let the peasants get back to tilling the fields.
The "commoners" of today want to learn engineering and practical things so they can improve their standard of living, which is unfortunate for the overall percentage of educators in social sciences.
There is of course the change over the last few decades by which universities have become a third stage of standard education rather than a voluntary pursuit of possibly esoteric learning. This has been brought about by a number of factors, but has (I think) led to more education, which is a good thing. Of course, to offset the cost of 4 years of school and 4 "lost" years of productivity, students want degrees that will improve their odds of getting a job. That pretty much explains the shift towards professional training.
Bringing the universities to everyone also means broadening the offerings — originally when it was only the erudition-inclined or well-to-do, a university could get away with having a great deal of humanities and other fields that do not generate grants or jobs. It was learning for learning's sake, which few could afford.
I do think we're approaching an inflection point in the future at which some major universities will fight back against this trend. But because this will be expensive to them and their students, I don't think it will happen soon. We need a time of extraordinary prosperity in which money can be lavished on social services and education, and that's not today or the next ten years.
It's sad, but I'm hoping it's a transitional phase, not a final one.
There's something of a shift toward professional training, but there still seem to be a glut of students entering college without a clear idea of what they're getting out of it or what it will cost them. Pressured to attend by the social expectation that everyone should go to college, the now-foolish guidance many in my generation received of "do what you love," and the ready supply of student loans, students are still throwing themselves into the gaping maw of debt and degrees that are not useful to them in the workforce. (I am very lucky that, for me, "do what you love" ended up meaning the field of computer science).
What we need is to break out of this idea that everyone must attend university "or else you'll be a garbageman" or whatever they were telling us in school growing up.
> It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, and there are those who claim that today, when that figure has risen to around 50 percent, such liberality of spirit is no longer affordable. Yet Germany, to name only one example, provides free education to its sizable student population.
... Yes, they have, and from what I've heard it consists substantially of very large seminar classes and an expectation of self-directed, self-motivated study from its students: hardly the paradigm the author has been mourning where faculty might expect that
> the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas.
(Also available in Germany, just to note: immigration opportunities for international students, a premise the UK (and the US) have been shying away from.)
I think the crux of the problem lies in the sheer number of students who attend college today; as the author points out:
"It is true that only about 5 percent of the British population attended university in my own student days, ... [today] that figure has risen to around 50 percent..."
The reality is that teaching critical thinking doesn't scale nicely, because it requires an intimate dialogue; the process of rigorously critiquing ideas is a two-way street. In today's institutions, where professors lecture to classes of
200+ students, this simply isn't possible.
In the article, the author claims universities have abandoned their roles as centres of critical thinking due to capitalistic forces. While I think this is true, I also believe that our collective attitude towards university shares the blame. Unfortunately, college is seen as the only legitimate path to success after high school.
If students had more opportunities to explore their interests, instead of being funnelled into university, perhaps universities could re-establish themselves as institutions where critical discussion takes place.
Descriptions of certain ancient centers of learning (I am thinking of Nalanda[1]) seem to convey an atmosphere of open-to-all-and-sundry and free sharing of knowledge, ideas and interpretation amongst the entire community. We can at least look for that online.
Isn't this part of a larger, global trend of turning public institutions into private businesses?
It happened to the American prision system, it's happening to healthcare, education, and higher education.
Ya just replace private with hierarchical. I don't think many techies grew up dreaming of being cogs in an industrial machine but for whatever reason libertarianism/authoritarianism has taken a strong hold on many of their imaginations and we're seeing a lot of these controversies framed in ways that limit possibilities.
College is wonderful. Everyone should get to go. Acceptance should be based on age or merit, be freely provided by government funding, and the alumni should remember how they got where they are and pay it forward. And to extend that, significantly more research needs to happen at universities so it’s not tainted by the profit motive. Also we should remember that the adage “those who can’t do, teach” gave us the gift of a system where a single person can change dozens or even hundreds of lives a year, and thousands over a lifetime.
Frankly the older I get, the more these “lets all just forget the lessons of the past” arguments sound like a bunch of hooey. Yes there are compelling innovations all of the place that will let people learn at a vastly accelerated place outside of school. But public education was never just about learning. As much as I hated long periods of it, I can’t really imagine a democracy functioning in its absence. And fixing it would be rather straightforward, if we let teachers/professors have more of a say in it and got the blasted politicians and financiers out of it.
Those South Koreans were probably carrying brand new Samsung phones under their jacket. Just as potent as a pair of Kalashnikovs, which their Northern brethren prefer ;)
In certain parts of the English-speaking world, universities are not dying, they're actually flourishing... but only because of a major influx of Chinese and Korean students willing to pay those exhorbitant out-of-state fees.
And since most of those valuable foreign customers want to study business, finance, medicine, law, and a handful of STEM fields, universities have no choice but to cater to their demands. Some programs in the West Coast are half Chinese by now. Those kids probably pay 80% of the gross fees, too. On the other hand, when I took English or philosophy, I was often the only Asian in the class.
But China is growing very fast (slower than before, but still fast), and Korea has all but done catching up with the rest of the developed world. Other countries might then supplant China as the largest supplier of international students, but they'll grow up, too. Sooner or later, all the international students who are propping up American universities will decide that they'd much rather spend their dollars elsewhere. When that last bubble bursts, even STEM fields will not be immune from a massive shock, and heavily subsidized humanities departments will be in real trouble this time.
The author would have benefitted from a bit of historical knowledge of the university as an institution. The English were making the same sort of complaints about Scottish universities in the 18th Century, and it's pretty clear from our perspective now where more of the insights emerged in that period.
While he may find it distasteful, the first university in Bologna appears to have formed around a core faculty who decided to start charging students for their lectures.
Somebody should offer a prize for the earliest citation of the expression "critical studies" as used here. It may not go back to Monty Python's time, and certainly not Erasmus's. (I imagine the award to be the right to look coolly at Terry Eagleton and say "kill him" in Korean, or the language of one's choice.)
I think that the humanities gave away a good deal of their own prestige by chasing a false notion that they could and should become scientific. Northrop Frye, whom Eagleton mentions, had some big grand ideas about schematizing things, I recall.
The question is what's causing this? Is it income disparity and a lack of wealth distribution, making our universities tailor more towards making money? Is it the information golden age that we're in, making education more of a 4 year summer camp for people to have fun instead of learning? Is it leftism and our need for increasing political correctness and thus bureaucracy to enforce that? Is it a side effect of our new trend of sticking everyone into a skinner box?
Good article by Eagleton but I do wonder very much if it would have made headlines on HN if the title was "the slow death of the university as a center of humane critique" and the HN readers knew of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Eagleton#Literary_Theory
This was easily one of the wittiest and funniest articles I've ever read from a British author...
But why shouldn't vampires be more lauded than Victorians? Why should Jane Austen, with her painfully circumlocutions, be more academically welcome than that woman (forget her name) who wrote 50 shades of gay? In many ways, old "classical" works are telling the exact same stories as modern "trash novel" works, except the modern "trash novel" works are doing it in such a way that is clear, simple, relevant (to today's audience), and thus free of misunderstandings. From them, through clever literally mental contortions, one can still elucidate all the themes, lessons, and humanities like you could from confounding classics - just less obfuscated like "there is no place like home" instead of "lost is my homecoming", "...and then they had sex and fell in love..." instead of "... I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this...", etc.
And who says the arts are dying? The arts are vibrant and alive in today's web-comics, video games, movies, and tv-shows. The medium has changed from a completely closed system of ink and paint to a modular, copyable, and distributable one of .mdl files, computer images, and carrier streams. It's just intentionally confusing junk like cubism, poorly drawn junk like medieval art, and inhumane junk like pyramid building that's gone away.
The pressure to have to constantly monetize, I'll admit, is painful... but that primarily hurts the large institutions who have bottom lines that must be covered. And in my opinion as a flexible small business kind of guy, that's a good thing. Large institutions were necessary for centuries for individual survival at the cost of individual self-actualization, but in today's flexible scale era, it's entirely possible to just be good at something and survive without having to give up your soul to a large corporation. In that case, going small, lean, and individual is the way of the bright future.
In asking the question of why modern things such as "things that are currently fashionable to today's 20 year old's" are less worthy for study than traditional subjects, these phrases were given:
>free of misunderstandings
>less obfuscated
>clever literally mental contortions
>intentionally confusing
I imagine you would be seeking to understand the difference, and seeking to understand why some things that may appear obfuscated and confusing to a modern person are thought of by many to be better. I hope I can help the understanding via this comment.
Pretty much all poetry for example is full of misunderstandings, obfuscated, with clever literally devices and it is intentionally so. Consider poetry then! Think about why many people value poetry over a clear concise newspaper article. Why do humans like art, why do people like these confusing things? Do they actually enjoy the confusion, or is it something else that they enjoy?
Your example is Jane Austin vs 50 shades of grey. Perhaps other comparisons would help. How about Dan Brown vs Shakespeare? How about Beethoven vs Bananarama? How about Turner vs Bob Ross? Do these comparisons help in understanding what defines a quality piece of work? Do you think that a university that for two years examines Dan Brown in it's literature department will continue doing so when Dan Brown no longer becomes popular and Game of Thrones becomes popular? What does that say about the educational and artistic value of an author when they are forgotten a few years later?
Should the subjects of universities be decided by the consumers, the young students? Or should they be decided by the academic establishment? What difference would that make to education, to critical thinking? This is some of what the article was about.
[+] [-] protomyth|11 years ago|reply
Then the battle is lost, because universities, at least in the USA, are the home of "free speech areas" and not letting people speak who a group disagrees with. When people are talking about "safe areas" to protect students from words spoken by a speaker, then criticism is dead. Political parties have more diversity of allowed thought. STEM is often criticized as unwelcoming, but humanities has become a place of "agree with me" or be condemned.
If you didn't forge your ideas in the fire of criticism at university, then you were cheated by others or yourself. The best teachers will make you argue both / multiple sides of a scenario and be offended that you parroted their opinion back to them. The worst teachers only see one valid way to think and are doing "missionary work" instead of teaching.
It is often depressing to read https://www.thefire.org
[+] [-] wozniacki|11 years ago|reply
I'll leave you with an excellent write up on the topic of this brand of groupthink and shutting down opposing views, on campuses, by Brendan O'Neill in The Spectator :
[1] Free speech is so last century. Today’s students want the ‘right to be comfortable’http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9376232/free-speech-is-s...
[+] [-] blhack|11 years ago|reply
FIRE is an EXCELLENT group.
[+] [-] derefr|11 years ago|reply
I understand what you're getting at, but some people really do have PTSD, and some speeches really do contain things like graphic recountings of abuse. Should those people just not attend university? (I'm actually undecided.)
[+] [-] xmjee|11 years ago|reply
http://sl4.org/crocker.html
If scientific facts (so-called "HateFacts", think Evolutionary Psychology) offend you, it's your problem really.
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Shyis|11 years ago|reply
That's the problem; I'm not possessed of a sufficiently creative (or informed) mind to fill in the blanks here. Dangerously, due to that programming knowledge, I also have the incorrect notion that everyone else could be replaced by either a handful of code and some lightly trained workers, or wholesale by mechanization. Clearly this isn't the case (or the market is doing a very poor job of finding exploitable niches), so what gives? What do people _do_? Because I'm at a loss and need to educate myself.
[+] [-] aklemm|11 years ago|reply
So many people have this question early in their careers, it really seems like something is wrong. Perhaps we need a serious/mandatory/formal job-shadowing program for teens and college students.
[+] [-] benten10|11 years ago|reply
On the other hand, I really don't understand what a lot people in the tech industry do. I have a friend who works for some kind of 'data analysis' company. He makes $80K a year, and he tells me on a bad day he has to do 2 hours of 'real' work: the rest of the time is spent on reddit or taking classes. It's gotten so bad (or good) for him that he is taking 3 evening classes in the University he graduated from while working full-time. He says he spends most of his worktime doing assignments and readings anyway, so he's more prepared for classes than he was ever in college.
I understand why a game company might need 50+ developers working on the same game. I understand why Google might need all those engineers. I really don't understand what 50+ 'data engineer's at what is essentially an SEO company with 100+ employees do... Like you say, I am really confused : is the market REALLY that bad at finding exploitable niches?
And then there's another friend of mine, who says the most difficult part of his Google engineering job by far was getting it. Go figure!
[+] [-] tehchromic|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DanAndersen|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FeloniousHam|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgunes|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcosdumay|11 years ago|reply
Anyway, the author is part of the problem. Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time. Until the professors themselves stop thinking this way, no government will prioritize them.
(And no, I don't agree that humanities are useless. They have a huge potential. But for them to be of any use, professors will need to seek those applications, and study them. Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.)
[+] [-] ForHackernews|11 years ago|reply
> Just at the beginning of the article he states that humanities are only good for rich students to pass their time
Where in the article does the author state or imply this? The section beginning "When I first came to Oxford 30 years earlier..." is obviously written to be tongue-in-cheek.
A close reading (humanities skill!) of this article might highlight the following passage as the central thesis:
Universities, which in Britain have an 800-year history, have traditionally been derided as ivory towers, and there was always some truth in the accusation. Yet the distance they established between themselves and society at large could prove enabling as well as disabling, allowing them to reflect on the values, goals, and interests of a social order too frenetically bound up in its own short-term practical pursuits to be capable of much self-criticism. Across the globe, that critical distance is now being diminished almost to nothing, as the institutions that produced Erasmus and John Milton, Einstein and Monty Python, capitulate to the hard-faced priorities of global capitalism.
> Locking themselves in a room, nostalgically talking with like-minded people without ever doing anything leads nowhere.
Again, where in the article does the author suggest this course of action? If anything, he seems to be suggesting the opposite, that the humanities should be returned to their traditional place in the public square, questioning and criticizing the prevailing ideologies of the day:
It would also seek to restore the honorable lineage of the university as one of the few arenas in modern society (another is the arts) in which prevailing ideologies can be submitted to some rigorous scrutiny. What if the value of the humanities lies not in the way they conform to such dominant notions, but in the fact that they don't?
[+] [-] bilbo0s|11 years ago|reply
The same thing that is with everyone else. If you look around our societies today it seems almost a matter of course that the first argument deployed in any debate is a dismissal of the opposing view holder's ability to think critically. Not to put too fine a point on it... but you can see that argument employed a lot here on HN. It's not really a matter of STEM people being dismissive of others' critical thinking skills - or even Humanities people being dismissive of others' critical thinking skills - as much as it is a matter of ALL people being dismissive of others.
It's, kind of, the nature of discourse in our society these days.
[+] [-] Kalium|11 years ago|reply
I suspect it might be ego, after a fashion. Having observed that those educated in other fields have more marketable skills, a need to claim one's own education has produced a uniquely valuable skill arises.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] javajosh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathattack|11 years ago|reply
Let's not forget that our so-called great universities:
- For a long time excluded women, Jews and many minorities.
- Were the providence of only the technocratic elite.
- Did very little research before the 20th century.
And now that the costs escalate out of control, is it any wonder that they have to go more commercial?
Some back of the envelope math: If every student takes 10 classes a year (5 per semester) and every professor teaches 5 classes per year to 20 students each, and gets paid 100K all-in, then the per-student faculty labor cost is 100K10/(205) = 10K per year. That's not too bad for critical learning. Expand the classes to 40 and you can cut the cost in half, or give the faculty a big raise.
[+] [-] jseliger|11 years ago|reply
Not entirely. Take a look at Louis Menand's The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (http://jakeseliger.com/2010/01/21/problems-in-the-academy-lo...). Universities grew enormously from 1945 – 1975. During that time, too, a disproportionately large number of students majored in English in particular, as well as other humanities disciplines. During that 30-year period, universities expanded and especially grad programs expanded—by 900%.
Most of those grad programs are still pumping out PhDs, even though the market for PhDs is weak. ABDs are a huge economic win for universities. So we have a situation in which supply has far outpaced demand for decades.
At the same time, I'd argue that there's a huge amount of bogosity in humanities departments, and that bogosity has mostly gone unaddressed (http://jakeseliger.com/2012/09/22/the-stupidity-of-what-im-d...).
[+] [-] stephengillie|11 years ago|reply
For most universities, their biggest product is their own marketing and promotional material. Now that they are corporatizing, they are painting hindsight with rose-colored glasses, as "Brave New 1984" as most corporations are wont to do.
[+] [-] rspeer|11 years ago|reply
Is the number of people with degrees in medieval literature actually decreasing, or just not increasing as much as the number of engineers?
Seems more likely that there are just a lot more students who can attend university now, and the sustainable way for this to happen is for most of them to be encouraged to go into particularly employable fields. This would fit with the observation that there's currently a huge oversupply of humanities Ph.D.'s with no academic positions waiting for them.
[+] [-] sliverstorm|11 years ago|reply
We can still be nostalgic for the loss of things that weren't yet perfect.
[+] [-] IkmoIkmo|11 years ago|reply
There's little misty-eyed nostalgia for 18th century universities, there is for the 1970s.
The issue for me isn't that 10k tuition fees is so bad (once you add non-teaching staff, or teaching-supporting staff, rent for facilities, administration, equipment, licensing access to libraries etc it'll be at least 15k). It's the fact that studying is supposed to be a full-time occupation. We don't ask of 12 year olds to work a 40 hour week, but we do of 20 year olds despite the fact they have as many classes but a higher study load outside of class.
Now if we consider that studying ought to be a full-time occupation, there's obviously an opportunity cost to studying or lack thereof. It's not just having to pay 15k per year for tuition, it's also forgoing the opportunity to work a job and make money to pay every expense a non-studying adult human normally needs to pay, rent, food, insurance etc. Another $15k per year is on the low-end.
So you end up with 30k over 4 years, at an average of 5% interest rates you easily graduate with 150k debt.
This is unworkable. So we require of students to work extra jobs next to their studies, knowing juggling a 70h work week for years on end while still living under crappy circumstances negatively affects studies, health etc. We require students to choose jobs that are most financially rewarding (knowing all too well that pursuing remuneration over everything else leads not to happiness, and that at the higher end the correlation between salary and benefit to society is weak). We see students accessing higher education with funds from family, something reserved for the (upper) middle class, and even for these kids it's very normal to have to not view studying as a full-time occupation despite being enrolled in a full-time program, and even so average debt in many countries sits around 30-50k.
Meanwhile, a country like Germany is offering free tuition, without having invented a magic money machine.
[+] [-] jtzhou|11 years ago|reply
The "commoners" of today want to learn engineering and practical things so they can improve their standard of living, which is unfortunate for the overall percentage of educators in social sciences.
[+] [-] bobcostas55|11 years ago|reply
And now, instead, they exclude Asians. Progress!
[+] [-] vinchuco|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devindotcom|11 years ago|reply
There is of course the change over the last few decades by which universities have become a third stage of standard education rather than a voluntary pursuit of possibly esoteric learning. This has been brought about by a number of factors, but has (I think) led to more education, which is a good thing. Of course, to offset the cost of 4 years of school and 4 "lost" years of productivity, students want degrees that will improve their odds of getting a job. That pretty much explains the shift towards professional training.
Bringing the universities to everyone also means broadening the offerings — originally when it was only the erudition-inclined or well-to-do, a university could get away with having a great deal of humanities and other fields that do not generate grants or jobs. It was learning for learning's sake, which few could afford.
I do think we're approaching an inflection point in the future at which some major universities will fight back against this trend. But because this will be expensive to them and their students, I don't think it will happen soon. We need a time of extraordinary prosperity in which money can be lavished on social services and education, and that's not today or the next ten years.
It's sad, but I'm hoping it's a transitional phase, not a final one.
[+] [-] DanAndersen|11 years ago|reply
What we need is to break out of this idea that everyone must attend university "or else you'll be a garbageman" or whatever they were telling us in school growing up.
[+] [-] fennecfoxen|11 years ago|reply
... Yes, they have, and from what I've heard it consists substantially of very large seminar classes and an expectation of self-directed, self-motivated study from its students: hardly the paradigm the author has been mourning where faculty might expect that
> the undergraduate would simply drop round to their rooms when the spirit moved him for a glass of sherry and a civilized chat about Jane Austen or the function of the pancreas.
(Also available in Germany, just to note: immigration opportunities for international students, a premise the UK (and the US) have been shying away from.)
[+] [-] nbourbaki|11 years ago|reply
In the article, the author claims universities have abandoned their roles as centres of critical thinking due to capitalistic forces. While I think this is true, I also believe that our collective attitude towards university shares the blame. Unfortunately, college is seen as the only legitimate path to success after high school.
If students had more opportunities to explore their interests, instead of being funnelled into university, perhaps universities could re-establish themselves as institutions where critical discussion takes place.
[+] [-] contingencies|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda
[+] [-] naringas|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zackmorris|11 years ago|reply
College is wonderful. Everyone should get to go. Acceptance should be based on age or merit, be freely provided by government funding, and the alumni should remember how they got where they are and pay it forward. And to extend that, significantly more research needs to happen at universities so it’s not tainted by the profit motive. Also we should remember that the adage “those who can’t do, teach” gave us the gift of a system where a single person can change dozens or even hundreds of lives a year, and thousands over a lifetime.
Frankly the older I get, the more these “lets all just forget the lessons of the past” arguments sound like a bunch of hooey. Yes there are compelling innovations all of the place that will let people learn at a vastly accelerated place outside of school. But public education was never just about learning. As much as I hated long periods of it, I can’t really imagine a democracy functioning in its absence. And fixing it would be rather straightforward, if we let teachers/professors have more of a say in it and got the blasted politicians and financiers out of it.
[+] [-] kijin|11 years ago|reply
In certain parts of the English-speaking world, universities are not dying, they're actually flourishing... but only because of a major influx of Chinese and Korean students willing to pay those exhorbitant out-of-state fees.
And since most of those valuable foreign customers want to study business, finance, medicine, law, and a handful of STEM fields, universities have no choice but to cater to their demands. Some programs in the West Coast are half Chinese by now. Those kids probably pay 80% of the gross fees, too. On the other hand, when I took English or philosophy, I was often the only Asian in the class.
But China is growing very fast (slower than before, but still fast), and Korea has all but done catching up with the rest of the developed world. Other countries might then supplant China as the largest supplier of international students, but they'll grow up, too. Sooner or later, all the international students who are propping up American universities will decide that they'd much rather spend their dollars elsewhere. When that last bubble bursts, even STEM fields will not be immune from a massive shock, and heavily subsidized humanities departments will be in real trouble this time.
[+] [-] riemannzeta|11 years ago|reply
While he may find it distasteful, the first university in Bologna appears to have formed around a core faculty who decided to start charging students for their lectures.
[+] [-] cafard|11 years ago|reply
I think that the humanities gave away a good deal of their own prestige by chasing a false notion that they could and should become scientific. Northrop Frye, whom Eagleton mentions, had some big grand ideas about schematizing things, I recall.
[+] [-] nickysielicki|11 years ago|reply
I dunno.
[+] [-] pXMzR2A|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emodendroket|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ffn|11 years ago|reply
But why shouldn't vampires be more lauded than Victorians? Why should Jane Austen, with her painfully circumlocutions, be more academically welcome than that woman (forget her name) who wrote 50 shades of gay? In many ways, old "classical" works are telling the exact same stories as modern "trash novel" works, except the modern "trash novel" works are doing it in such a way that is clear, simple, relevant (to today's audience), and thus free of misunderstandings. From them, through clever literally mental contortions, one can still elucidate all the themes, lessons, and humanities like you could from confounding classics - just less obfuscated like "there is no place like home" instead of "lost is my homecoming", "...and then they had sex and fell in love..." instead of "... I profane with my unworthiest hand this holy shrine, the gentle fine is this...", etc.
And who says the arts are dying? The arts are vibrant and alive in today's web-comics, video games, movies, and tv-shows. The medium has changed from a completely closed system of ink and paint to a modular, copyable, and distributable one of .mdl files, computer images, and carrier streams. It's just intentionally confusing junk like cubism, poorly drawn junk like medieval art, and inhumane junk like pyramid building that's gone away.
The pressure to have to constantly monetize, I'll admit, is painful... but that primarily hurts the large institutions who have bottom lines that must be covered. And in my opinion as a flexible small business kind of guy, that's a good thing. Large institutions were necessary for centuries for individual survival at the cost of individual self-actualization, but in today's flexible scale era, it's entirely possible to just be good at something and survive without having to give up your soul to a large corporation. In that case, going small, lean, and individual is the way of the bright future.
[+] [-] chippy|11 years ago|reply
>free of misunderstandings
>less obfuscated
>clever literally mental contortions
>intentionally confusing
I imagine you would be seeking to understand the difference, and seeking to understand why some things that may appear obfuscated and confusing to a modern person are thought of by many to be better. I hope I can help the understanding via this comment.
Pretty much all poetry for example is full of misunderstandings, obfuscated, with clever literally devices and it is intentionally so. Consider poetry then! Think about why many people value poetry over a clear concise newspaper article. Why do humans like art, why do people like these confusing things? Do they actually enjoy the confusion, or is it something else that they enjoy?
Your example is Jane Austin vs 50 shades of grey. Perhaps other comparisons would help. How about Dan Brown vs Shakespeare? How about Beethoven vs Bananarama? How about Turner vs Bob Ross? Do these comparisons help in understanding what defines a quality piece of work? Do you think that a university that for two years examines Dan Brown in it's literature department will continue doing so when Dan Brown no longer becomes popular and Game of Thrones becomes popular? What does that say about the educational and artistic value of an author when they are forgotten a few years later?
Should the subjects of universities be decided by the consumers, the young students? Or should they be decided by the academic establishment? What difference would that make to education, to critical thinking? This is some of what the article was about.
[+] [-] jqm|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pacaro|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Very_Peculiar_Practice
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9St60ZzwGgc&list=PLJ4mcFE1FY...
[+] [-] hanief|11 years ago|reply
- “How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
- “Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
[+] [-] creativestar|11 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
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