Tldr; Universities used to be structured like cities, or be an extension of a city. Cities are so far essentially immortal. In keeping with modern doctrine, universities have been transformed into commercial corporations. We know that as a form, corporations have a limited lifespan. The average lifespan of a company in the s&p 500 has decreased over the last century from 67 years to around 15.

If you turn a university into a corporation, you limit its lifespan and should expect it to die after a few decades. The evidence is clear.

I haven't found any articles that try to sift the data based on this, so it's possible that it isn't a significant factor.

It might be interesting to compare this recent period of consolidation with the turn of the century when Pres. Theodore Roosevelt became known as a "trust-buster".

As a researcher in a STEM field (at US university) for only ~7 years I have often posited that many of the ideas which appeal to administrators result in a degraded academic experience for students. In turn, this can negatively impact research efforts.

I understand that this must be more frustrating to those in the humanities, as funding is more abundant in STEM, but my guess is that these same trends are harming the quality of research in all fields.

Just wondering if you can give some examples. I work at a Liberal Arts University.

Universities were once respected as the bastions keeping humanity's precious knowledge. There is no reason for that anymore, we need more online and freely accessible courses, data corpuses, libraries, and education material, funded by national governments. Education should be a fundamental human right, and it is not up to some startup or non-profit to fix that.

And also, that playing the "Whose field is more important" game is a losing one for all involved.

We were discussing the criticisms of late about STEM schools don't teach you critical thinking and Liberal Arts does. From our limited and admittedly biased standpoint is that there is an arrogance about how good liberals arts is relative to STEM that is unwarranted. Her experience is that she was not encouraged to think but to parrot back the biased opinions of her faculty. Failure to conform your thinking to their ideas was met with public criticism in the classroom and a lower grade.

That having been said, most people in the broader economy still need to fill roles with practical value as opposed to e.g. working at a think-tank. The critical skills the author describes are nonetheless important, and one of the terrifying things about this whole education business is that large parts of the middle and upper classes lack this, in spite of said higher education. But I digress.

The point is that we have more people going to university. So you put that together with the needs of the students and of course there will be an overall de-emphasis on ivory-tower activities. But I wonder if the total amount of such activities hasn't changed much, with regards to the size of the country or economy.

That said, we still need a place for those sorts of things to happen. And it does feel like it's been pushed off into "grad school," whereas undergrad has become a career mill much like how high school has become a college mill.

What I'll give the author credit for is the value of the mill. He's right that there isn't that critical thinking, and isn't that what we needed to begin with in the creative economy? And I do remember what that was like in school, and even today. People like the idea of creativity and critical thinking until you make them do it.

If the first point wasn't true and the second point was, the world would be much better, since everyone who wanted to go to university could do so and everyone who didn't wouldn't be forced to.

I stopped reading after that.

This rant is like anything else that could be posted to Crooked Timber. "Oh no! Humanities professors have to work like anyone else, with measurable results. The university is dying!"

I do respect the humanities, but there's only so much you can do with them. Whereas the knowledge, technology, wealth, and all-around good stuff gained from electrical engineering, astrophysics, materials science, etc. is as limitless as the universe.

What a fatuous statement. One could just as well say the humanities are as limitless as human thought and experience.

The sanitation movement that did so much for ending suffering caused by disease was as much a product of the humanities as it was science, and this is from an epidemiologist.

It is a fashion amongst many humanities people in the western world to criticize the western systems and to please their ideological masters and glean any benefits out of it. Do we see any humanities criticizing the communism and Marxism based on the flaws in these corrupt ideologies? No. We see them criticizing only the western system. I am not to say that western market based capitalist system is a panacia but it orders of magnitude better than the communism and Marxism based hell.

Because lord knows scientists have never worked with horrific regimes, right?

"Do we see any humanities criticizing the communism and Marxism based on the flaws in these corrupt ideologies?"

Umm...I see these all the time. Indeed, my first encounter with both Marx and the flaws of that system were from the humanities.

- "How the 'Dictatorship of the Proletariate' was ever supposed to just naturally fade away was left undiscussed, and clearly never occurred."

- "Marx's writing, while a well-reasoned critique of capitalism, failed to provide a workable alternate solution."

Both of these were from fairly leftist professors. One should note that, at this point, "Western Systems" are really all that's left, so yes, there's going to be more criticism of them. The Soviet Union collapsed. And China is now some sort of weird hybrid system - and if you're seriously going to argue that there's not academics in the humanities criticizing China, I really don't know what to say.

I believe someone from the humanities would have trouble with this statement. Of what use is all the techno gadgets if we lose what makes us human? I'm a techie, but I've also studied some humanities, and delve into some in my spare time, things like communication, psychology, arts these all make life a lot richer, even if they do have less flashing lights.

Humanities professors on the other hand have had it pretty easy, and that seems to be coming to an end, the same for universities in general. It's something I'm torn about, I always loved my time at university, but the reason I went there was for the knowledge, because that was where it was stored. Now universities are in many ways obsolete - all the knowledge is in the cloud. If you need to ask an expert then just ask online, so we still need experts, just the renumeration model is being disrupted - like everyone elses pretty well.

What we do need is critical thinking, and traditionally this was what was taught in an arts degree. In many ways the academics have done this to themselves, by dumbing down degrees and focusing more on 'business' outcomes they've eliminated what was the defining characteristic of a degree and it is now just a set of check boxes, which of course you don't need a uni for. I blame the MBA's - the cultureless hoards of middle management that suck the life out of everything that's not quantifiable and can be entered on a spread sheet.

People should grapple with these questions in a sustained, deliberate way, with reference to what's already been said and where arguments are evaluated critically by many eyes. That's what academia is for.

He engaging in philosohpy doesn't necessarily justifies the existence of humanties departments in universities. With spread of internet and MOOCs the first even departments that should cease to exist on state money are the humanities departments.

Humanities are the only departments that should exist on tax money.

It's not there is no value in opinions, there is, it's just that people have come to expect the rewards of knowledge for having opinions. And reality doesn't work that way.

And for anyone who actually cares about this point, there was a well known study of psychological experiment replicability I was alluding to which should be part of the assumed context for anyone discussing such topics. It is also painfully formalistic to attach qualifiers to every statement when that is not the cant of a forum like this. You should know this, but instead you're latching onto a lingusitic formalism as a defense of your point instead of arguing the point head-on.

Sorry humanities people. The science and technology people are way more useful than you and most of them are smarter than you too. There is no intellectual equivalency between the domains despite the perennial protestations of the humanities faculty.

If we lose this, then it will be a sad day imho.

Edit: PG even wrote a post on this http://paulgraham.com/disagree.html

Oh please. You were doing fine up to that point. There's always been a tension between theory and practice.

"What we do need is critical thinking, and traditionally this was what was taught in an arts degree. In many ways the academics have done this to themselves, by dumbing down degrees and focusing more on 'business' outcomes they've eliminated what was the defining characteristic of a degree and it is now just a set of check boxes, which of course you don't need a uni for."

What I took away was an assertion that degrees are now about checking off practical checkboxes and that this is the fault of MBAs.

My take is that there has always been a tradeoff between broader education and teaching critical thinking with learning specific skills.

Some thing's are easy to quantify and this is what the focus is on. How do you quantify something like critical thinking, what quantifiable value is there in a knowledge of history - how do these things help little Johnny get a job. Well they don't really. I think of the results of learning these things as emergent properties, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Wouldn't it be more interesting to have a population educated in the humanities? wouldn't a democratic society be better served by a population educated with at least a base in the humanities? A society of people that can make rational arguments and evaluate the political arguments of the day would be a lot different from the one we live in now.

These sort of arguments are for a qualitative change - and I don't see how you can quantify them in a spread sheet. The thinking that drives MBA’s currently drives education from what I can see - keep costs down, standard courses, pack as many into a class as you can, and so on.

Of course you need both science and liberal arts.

"Science without conscience is the soul's perdition."

and on the other hand

"I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do."