> If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet.

I’m not sure what one would be hungry for that couldn’t be met in college. Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.

200 years ago I had to go to university because why? That's where the books and smart people were concentrated.

So I would pay a lot of money and physically relocate myself to access those books and people.

Now? I can study online, I can read, I can converse with super bright people of my chosing without the friction and limits of doing that in a college environment.

Learning in a structured environment provides access to the orthodox in the field of study. This can be very valuable to limit unnecessary exploration of blind avenues (there is of course such a thing as necessary exploration of blind avenues)

For those who progress through the academy, the risk is that they become narrow thinkers

For those without access to the structure, the risk is that they become cranks

These aren't absolutes, but they are observable trends

[Edit: are —> aren't]

I used to have a particularly brilliant (not sarcasm; he really was brilliant) colleague who “invented“ lots of things that had already been invented and would have saved a lot of time by just bouncing things off others who would say stuff like “oh, so it’s RPC” or “oh, so like a distributed queue” and stop him from reinventing the wheel.

Your colleague can dump their thoughts into such a system and quickly get back the shibboleths and the foundational papers. Now is the best time to be a self-taught genius.

University should not be separate from earlier forms of education, things that are university like should also filter back into to high school and middle school.

As a borderline-crank myself, I think we need more folks with crank tendencies and more folks with a solid scientific approach. We have the most minds right now, amazing capabilities but at the same time, a narrowing Chesterton's Window (I know, Overton Window, :)

We should push kids harder in the ways that matter and less in the ways that is too soon. Grinding arithmetic and non-contextualized history is a multilayered waste of time. I am very pro both of those subjects, just the way we teach them an the timing is way off.

The issue isn't some failure of education, but the fact that people are different and have different skill sets. And as education came to be expected to be something everybody goes through and in a roughly similar fashion, the inevitable decline to the lowest common denominator was inevitable.

[1] - https://bullittcountyhistory.org/bchistory/schoolexam1912.ht...

It's like basic math....

Did you continue to read it? Because it covers other topics. Without using the internet, can you name the eligibility requirements of the Gov. of Kentucky? How about five county officers and their principle duties?

I think your initial response belies a deeper problem we struggle with. Our attention span has shortened and social media has biased us towards more course interactions.

The useful skill is being able to find the information on the Internet if you want to run for governor of Kentucky. If you grow up in Kentucky learning it once in seventh grade is sufficient so you know it's a possibility, but will most likely never matter again after that class.

Without an understanding of math you can only cargo cult problems. You can get away with being lazy with computation with no real issur but only if you understand the underlying theory.

Not that it really proves anything in the larger scope they seemed to imply. At least, not anymore than losing on the old show “are you smarter than a fifth grader?”

Most people know that college education has become dramatically "simplified", but fewer seem aware that this is also true of nearly all of our education systems. And it's all for the same reason. When education was not required nor expected, what education that did exist was able to excel and push a group of people who genuinely wanted to learn in ways that are not really possible today, outside of things like elite preparatory academies.

And I think this lesson is extremely important when beginning to think about how education might be reformed. It's easy to say that secondary (or even primary) education should be more sophisticated, without considering the implications of that on the student body. You can't really have widespread exceptional education standards and the expectation that most people should be able to achieve those standards. This is why reforming education is a far bigger task than the current idea of 'throw more money at it' could ever solve.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

Grammar I could probably have done in eighth grade but I forget some of the terminology.

Areas like history, I'd know a fair bit (as an American) but there's a lot of historical essentially trivia that I wouldn't know though may have known at one time.

Some of the double letters and other things in the spelling I'd probably get wrong. That's what red squiggly underlines when typing are for.

You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently.

One of the diseases of current academia is use of an extremely stilted language, perhaps intended to paper over some logical cracks.

One word. Derrida.

ChatGPT and its successors may put a big dent in the pretentious blithering industry. It's now too easy to generate a pseudo-academic style. Large language models are really good at this, because they have so much obscure text upon which to draw.

Yet I loathe the words "synergy" and "optics". Gag me with a spoon.

And I think you are far behind the times - I'm not sure many people study Derrida these days.

What have you read recently?

"Embrace the Suck", by Gleeson. (Yet another Navy SEAL memoir. This author seems to enjoy the suffering a bit too much. Other SEAL memoirs describe the same training, but not with such enthusiasm for the pain.)

Gleeson seems to be into the suffering for its own sake.

I don't think that jargon is created to confuse or obfuscate, most likely the opposite. My favorite example is in sailing. Every functional part of a sailboat has a name, because precise communication between crew can be critical and saying "pull the rope, no the other one, no the other other one" doesn't help. But telling a non sailer to tighten a jib sheet seems unnecessarily persnickety.

Not to me. I enjoy learning things like that.

I enjoyed watching the "Power" TV series not just for the plot, but for the colorful street jargon. For example: "I'll dime you" means I'll call you on the phone.

What have you read recently from academia?

> You aren't in the academia, are you? Because you explain things in simple terms, yet very efficiently.

Sometimes things aren't simple.

That's a trope of critics, but not what happens. Have you studied in college? They (almost always) cover a very wide range - much wider than you will discover on your own - and the focus is to teach you to think critically and be able to examine them yourself. They are not there to teach you information, or that is secondary (at least in social sciences and humanities).

Also, you omit other enormous benefits, including personal tutorial - including guidance, feedback, etc. - from leading experts and PhD students, not to mention a room full of peers studying the same things.

I did not exclude other benefits of a university education in my statement, I simply highlighted one of the things that sets it apart from learning in isolation.

How wide a range of subjects one might discover on ones own is arguably broader (although of course not precluded by an academic education either)

I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too.

There are many other factors at play, and where and how you are educated is only one of them.

The original claim was about concepts beyond an orthodoxy, but whether concepts or subjects, it's very unlikely you will discover on your own more than a university full of domain experts who spend lifetimes discovering and studying these things. It's not remotely plausible.

> I am largely self taught in CS (my degree was in another subject), but that had not prevented me from having multiple patents and having published academically too.

Good for you. It doesn't mean you wouldn't have been better off learning CS from experts - especially with all your talent - nor is it a representative sample of education. Most people who don't go to college have no hope of matching its benefits on their own.

Also, your field of study was CS. I don't know about orthodoxy taught in CS, but again, in humanities and social sciences, what's taught is how to develop your own thinking. For example, parroting this orthodoxy (and rhetoric) of the anti-intellectual reactionaries is not a sign of well-developed critical thinking.

College isn't only learning from experts though.

Instruction from experts is a good thing, and that part of college is therefore a good thing. But there are many aspects of college that is directly or indirectly not exactly the same thing as sitting there in front of an instructor.

Things such as paying tuition, socializing, walking around campus, getting classes on being more woke. These aspects add and detract from the central idea of college, which is instruction by experts.

Therefore students have to weigh the total experience and see if it is worth it. The article is saying many of them reckon it is not worth it anymore.

The idea that they represent a single orthodox is a little flawed.

To generalize even further, perhaps to the point of uselessness, is to find balance between tradition and your own spirit–patiently learning how things are, while always critically considering how they could be different.

As long as you maintain perspective like this, and you’re aware of the biases and pitfalls of the avenue you’re pursuing, you can do great in either, or why not spend time in several?

This is true, but in practice few people do it. Most people will not have much time left for study alongside a job. And without the "friction"/motivation college brings, most people will not learn anywhere near as much.

Genuine question: how do you get those people to talk to you? (I am assuming you are not famous or wealthy enough to pay them to talk to you; I am neither.)

Intellectuals in general have espoused a lot of inhuman political ideologies.

I don't see education as the solution to despotism. That requires a fair mind and rationality — neither of which has roots in book learning.

I don't necessarily see communism working over a long period even at that scale though. I think attrition would be too high. The chance of some whacko gaining too much power would be too high. Moral would degrade over time when people were able to compare their own situation with that of their neighbours under other systems.

Honestly, I think we'd be better off making room for small communes and giving them legal protections similar to corporations. Establish some decent laws that allow people to organize and live that way for as long as they want to but also ensure that such systems aren't abused and are held to account when they do wrong. There's a time and place for them in many people's lives but it isn't something we should try to impose on a broad, unwilling populace.

Note that Deng changed PRC from personalist dictatorship to an autocracy that had much more decentralization. He wanted one party rule but not all power in the hands of one person. His liberalization of the Chinese economy lifted millions out of poverty. China ignored Western economist advice and did much better than former Soviet republics as a result.

The mass killings and terror stopped with Deng. They are back with Xi who has re-established a personalist dictatorship. Instead of a blanket knee-jerk reaction to the word “communism” one should analyze each situation on its merits. There is nuance at play. Tito was no Stalin, for instance.

The majority of our history classes also frequently got bogged down before we could get to the civil rights movement and really have to go into the dirty little details of what the post-Civil-War US looked like.

Are you in college?

> can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for

Wow. That's pretty wild! Can you back that up somehow? On the Internet, extreme statements somehow have more credibility. In college, more extreme statements require more extreme support for them.

> Analyzing cultures for weakness? Doesn’t sound like a particularly meaningful or commonly needed study.

What is more important than looking at ourselves in the mirror, and learning everything we can from others? It's not like we are doing so well right now.

It's not an extreme statement, just a brief description of well-known events.

There goal was to build a self-sustaining agrarian society and everyone who even looked like an intellectual, had a university education, had glasses, or some other trappings of Western life was eliminated or sent to concentration camps where they mostly died.

Why? Because the didn't fit the mold of "suffering farmers oppressed under capitalism & imperialism, waiting to be rescued."

Please, this is widely documented and trying to suggest otherwise seems quite disingenuous.

> I agree with you that inconvenient truths now get muzzled because they don’t fit an acceptable meta-narrative. This is very problematic for society and when taken to the maximum, can lead to thinks like Cambodia’s attempt at restarting society by killing all those who didn’t fit the model they were looking for.

And then you took issue with the description of the Cambodian genocide. Despite the fact that he was agreeing with you. Now you start a whole new argument. I'm not even sure what are you trying to argue about.

I agree.

I had my best critical thinking class in community college. If I was innately smart, I probably would not have needed it as badly, but that one class gave me a lot of foundation and some credence to 'education' being useful. In other words, I am not smart, but I am educated. Overall, I think society benefits from that.

But that was 2 year community college after which I transferred ( and later got an MBA ).

At least personally, it's concerning to find out how many people think they are thinking critically all the time, but are not able to think critically about the definition of critical thinking.

It seems to me that there are several common ways people define the term:

1. To mean any innate interest or drive whatsoever for knowledge in any topic that is remotely academic or related to something academic. Typically in the context of something free-form and not guided by an instructor.

2. To mean the ability to re-evaluate beliefs shaped by the knowledge you have previously absorbed. This is the most common definition but also the most problematic since it rarely involves questioning your beliefs about critical thinking itself in the future. In essence you are replacing one source of truth with another source of truth making claims based on authority. This often leads to the typical "I learned about critical thinking, now I will reject anything my parents say as false and things my school says as true". I don't believe that is what is meant by this definition, but it is unfortunately very common for people to leave their "critical thinking class" with that kind of takeaway. They also might leave their critical thinking class with the tendency to come up with meta questions and meta narratives and then put them on the internet a bit like what I'm doing. I hate that as well since it's incredibly annoying.

3. To mean the ability to come up with solutions to a novel problem; to synthesize information from a variety of sources and come to a conclusion substantially different from each source individually.

In other words, neither of three options listed.

I suppose that is why I'm confused when the term is used, since I don't think I would use the term critical thinking for avoiding logical fallacies. A better term might be "not wrong thinking". Of course this also should take into account that some things we call logical fallacies probably shouldn't be considered logical fallacies at all, like "slippery slope" arguments and so forth, which are considered to be a fallacy since there is no mathematical implication, despite the obviously correct nature of many slippery slope arguments.

The word critical implies some sort of criticism, I'm not sure if identifying a logical fallacy is really what we typically mean by criticism. At the end of the day I guess the word itself isn't important.

Seems to me like it's a self-defeating argument. If they were really teaching critical thinking as a skill, degree holders would immediately start arguing with them about this vague and poorly thought out claim, but in practice people just nod along.

Common sense is something you can only learn through personal struggle. But if you already have some common sense, going to university and learning about the 15 or so different subtopics of your field is enriching, imo.

There was probably a technical definition of the "critical" at one point, but now basically something like the above is meant by "critical thinking". I don't have a problem with it.

"At the beginning of 2002, the courses were as following: during the first week, an introduction to intelligence topics included the history, mission and values of the CIA, as well as a unit on the history of intelligence an literature taught by the Center for The Study of Intelligence’s (CSI’s). Next, during the following five weeks, analysts are introduced to a variety of skills including analytic thinking, writing and self-editing, briefing, data analysis techniques and teamwork exercises, these representing the basic skills for a CIA analyst. After these five weeks in the classroom, the students go on a four-week interim assignment meant to help them understand how the DI relates to other CIA components, making them better understand their future role. Then, they return to the classroom for another four weeks of training in more advanced topics: writing and editing longer papers and topical modules addressing issues like denial, deceptions, indicators and warnings. These special kinds of analysis require advanced and sophisticated tradecraft skills. Afterwards, they go away again, for a second four-week interim assignment and when they return, after another four weeks in the classroom (when they deal with even more advanced topics), a task force exercise awaits them: a two days terrorist crisis simulation outside the classroom. This is an opportunity to show what they’ve learned and to see how they react in a situation that they might come across in real life."

That's a real "critical thinking" course. What they're trying to do is teach people how to extracts facts from contradictory, incomplete, and deliberately false information.

Some of the concepts are generally useful. Here's an overview of the subject, from the U.S. Army.[2] "The critical thinking material has been used with permission from The Foundation for Critical Thinking, www.criticalthinking.org, The Thinker’s Guide to Analytic Thinking, 2012 and The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking: Concepts and Tools, 2009, by Dr. Linda Elder and Dr. Richard Paul." See especially section 2-13, "AVOIDING ANALYTICAL PITFALLS".

[1] https://www.performancemagazine.org/how-the-cia-analysts-are...

[2] https://info.publicintelligence.net/USArmy-IntelAnalysis.pdf

For instance (and this wasn't an example from the course - that would be brutal to read the whole thing over a semester - I can barely remember the works we discussed directly) - Edward Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. He has a discussion around Christianity and the Catholic Church being one of the reason's for Rome's fall. It's interesting to place this idea in the context of HIS time - he was writing during the late 18th century and we see his contemporary modes of thoughts in events like the French Revolution, when there was a deliberate effort to remove the Catholic Church's power. The contemporary thought and his arguments mirrored each other. It was as much studying the work in its historical context as studying what the work was saying. This is what I think of when I think of critically thinking - considering all the layers of both the argument and why it's being made.

These are probably details around your point 2 in that they are meta questions, and while annoying, are vital to engage with a historical text outside of anything but as a collection of facts and an entertaining narrative.

Do more in college. Write a rock opera, spend a week curled up in the union learning about black holes, be good enough to tutor.

Don't just graduate with nothing but a taste for bad jazz and cheap beer.

(Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. Not sure how internationally read it is, but a worthwhile classic. British degrees are classified from firsts to thirds (via upper and lower second class honours) - but the story is (initially) set at Oxford, which at the time awarded fourths.)

Free link to the book here:

https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/waughe-bridesheadrevisited1945/w...

I was ready to withdraw and reconsider engineering as a major.

Later still they posted the cut offs. 40 was the cutoff for an A. Avg was 36 and the cutoff for a B. My 48 was the 4th highest score.

I would have preferred the British system

Here in the US we have a saying of " C equals Degree", so kinda the exact opposite of the UK saying. Strange!

"C's get degrees": The bare minimum to get the credential is the optimal use of resources.

"You want either a first or a fourth. There is no value in anything between.": Either excel at school to maximize your achievement or don't worry about your grades and simply pursue whatever comes your way from the opportunity to be there to enrich your life.

In retrospect? Yeah, I probably should have taken a B and finished relevant things faster. I have almost zero use for my understanding of the mathematic accounting of the particle-in-a-box.

Of course in grad school a C is a failure, so the wiggle room is slightly less generous.

Back in my day it was “Ds get degrees”.

Yes, the standard for graduate admission around the world (and also other things, like undergraduate research awards in Canada) is upper second.

This is not true of other places which award Firsts.

I'm only kidding, but more seriously it's certainly not all equal, and few are really in a position to compare any two, nevermind several - it's a bit of a joke that we then make 'a 2:1 in an engineering or related subject' or 'at least 3.5 GPA' or whatever a requirement as though the institution and cohort doesn't make a difference at all.

If you look at the top 1/3 of Harvard students who deserve to be admitted on academic grounds, you end up with a much smaller pool than "top 1/3 of Harvard students".

Even if you were right, though, it’d be an odd take — even if 25% (or 50%!) of Harvard students were admitted noncompetitively, they would simply not be part of the top 5% of Harvard students? Like they’re not diluting the top 5%, they’re just not in it.

I stand by “top 5% of Harvard” is a higher bar than “top 1/3 of Oxford”. But I will grant you that these are all based on GPA anyway, a rather noisy measure of even academic ability, let alone anything else we might care about.

Universities in the UK treat a degree from the US with a 3.7 or 3.8 or higher GPA as equivalent to a first according to Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_undergraduate_degree_c...

Probably more are familiar with the British Granada Television adaptation, which was shown here on the Great Performances series on PBS. I don't know how well that conformed with the book.

'[Puts book down, objecting to Charles also occupying himself] I do think you might talk to me - I've had a very exhausting day. Entertain me. Take me out of myself.'

My father went to a small, rural school whose local police force generally took the approach that as long as it didn't hurt anyone "At worst, a night in jail and no record of the arrest." Even for what would be considered distribution of hard drugs now.

When I went to school, students got a slap on the wrist for burning a hole in their dorm floor with thermite.

10 years after I went to school, a student was charged with a terrorism offense for making a dry ice pressure bottle and tossing it out of their dorm window as a joke.

And as near as I can tell, it's gotten stricter since. See: bitching about Harvard's dismantling of independent fun.

"Make lots of mistakes" isn't feasible if it ends up on a permanent record.

Dumb example I’ll share for a laugh is when I went to university (graduated 2013) they would put you on the sex offender registry for peeing outside and even for going in the wrong gendered restroom. One time I got obliterated and desperately needed to puke. But I was in a dorm where every other floor had your gender’s bathroom. Given my luck I was on the wrong floor. So my choice was potentially end up a sex offender for puking in a girl’s restroom stall or puke in the stairwell thus stinking it up for weeks. Guess which choice fear motivated me to make. Sorry about the stairwell, guys.

I think this depends quite a bit on your socioeconomic class. Overall in the US, only about 1/3 finish a college degree

This thread was about "college" generically, not about MIT.

There has been a lot of progress in exposing students to broad and multifaceted view of human endeavours. Aboriginal cultures are portrayed in full and with their negative and positive aspects in courses about them. I literally had a course on pre-colonial American cultures... that included all aspects of culture.

What would be racist - is having presenting a very lopsided view on what happened before colonial era replaced those cultures in the "new world"

This is bullshit. The difference is that today, your own culture e.g. (non-native) American society till the modern day is considered fair game for analysis, whereas 20 years ago there was probably a fair bit of "they are savages to be studied, whereas we are civilized" complex going on.

Guess what, that tends to temper critical analysis of other cultures as well, and focuses on understanding without judgement. It is dishonest to cast this as "a priori admiration".

> The good news is that its much more accessible now days to learn how to think outside a college system. If that's what you are hungry for, college is perhaps even your least likely bet.

An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college, you can continue to study outside things while you are at college. The problem for most people seems to be that at a college, these ideas will be subjected to rigorous intellectual analysis, whereas on the Internet it's easier to hide in echo chambers where everyone agrees with you.

> I say this as a person with 3 degrees...colleges were more old school then than now.

I think this is little more than viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better off. I highly recommend against the Internet as a substitute for actual college education because it's not "old school" any more.

These was definitely no shortage of ability to analyze and criticize western civilization in a college 20 years ago.

// An unnecessary dichotomy. The Internet is not blocked at a college

You are replying to a comment about what is accessible. College goes not preclude internet. College however is an extremely large resource and time commitment. Therefore ability to learn outside of that is a great addition.

// Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better off.

Agreed. Hence the article we are all talking about - people wisely chosing to forego college as a default.

Not to mention that the whole 18th century is famous for its criticism of (that time's) western civilization...

I'm trying to engage reasonably by assuming some things here, specifically that the OP has peripheral knowledge of some courses (since they haven't actually attended college recently) and they are categorizing the relatively detached nature of those courses as "a priori admiration".

I guess I could also respond by simply asking for specific examples of "a priori admiration" that the OP has seen in college courses recently. I doubt I will get any, but am open to changing my mind if I do.

Your first post had none of the things you are talking about in your 2nd post... It simply said "that's bullshit" and suggested that what changed is the openness of western culture to criticism.

Your second post (one I am replying to) is more reasonable but if this is somehow what you originally meant that's not what came out..

I would probably say blunt, but I think you got the general tone correct.

> Your second post (one I am replying to) is more reasonable but if this is somehow what you originally meant that's not what came out..

Well, the original post had no proof and was making wild statements. It's fair game to meet it with a blunt assessment.

Do you spend time arguing with the wild-eyed guy on the street who is holding a sign that secret agencies are spying on you? Probably not. On the other hand, see that in a national paper with some references and statistics, and hey, you're actually sitting up and taking notice.

Your first comment was much more on the wild-eyed guy side of the scale, hence the (probably overly so, sorry!) blunt engagement.

Emotional temper tantrum - check.

Whataboutism referring to other cultures - check.

> Guess what, things change, and usually in a way that society is better

Unchecked assumption that “new” = “better” - check.

Definitely the product of modern academia lacking any critical thinking skills with a knee jerk reaction to any criticism.

"Eg I had a class that really critically analyzed native American cultures. Today the class would be considered racist, it would have to a priori be an admiration of those cultures, rather than a critical analysis."

...that makes rather extreme ad-hoc statements about modern academia without citing even a shred of their own or someone else's experience is chock-full of critical thinking skills and a great way to conduct debate?

Definitely the product of an education via Internet Corner Bubble Forum where you can randomly make up controversial statements that get upvoted by like-minded people and expect to not be called out on them.

Read the replies. There was a debate. You just weren’t a part of it because you just had a shit fit and didn’t contribute.

If we are going to be collegiate, let's critically examine our own posts. What is that based on? It doesn't match what I know.

> When Professor Stuart Reges challenged the University of Washington’s position on land acknowledgements, administrators punished him, undermining his academic freedom

But don't worry, you don't have to go so far as critically teaching about all the aspects of different cultures to risk being accused as a racist on college campuses. I also remember the racist rock from a couple years ago[1]:

> The University of Wisconsin removed a 42-ton boulder from its Madison campus Friday after complaints from students of color who called the rock a symbol of racism.

[0]: https://www.thefire.org/news/lawsuit-professor-sues-universi...

[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/09/us/chamberlin-rock-removed-un...

Given this background, I think it is a mark of academic freedom that literally all the university did was offer a separate course section for people who wanted it. I fail to see how he is being retaliated against in any way -- if the university is offering an alternative to his course for people who want to exercise their academic freedom, why is he against that?

Sounds like it should be useful to promote free thought -- you can either take the course where the whackjob professor argues against acknowledging Native American tribes in a computer science course, or you can take the course that, you know, focuses on computer science. And hey, maybe the whackjob professor is a good enough teacher that his content outweighs the land theory nonsense, and people actually take his course? I certainly know a lot of good professors I learned from at college were eccentric.

I admit the second one is far-fetched and weird; but almost entirely removed from academia. Sounds to me like a bunch of administrators making work to justify their own inflated salaries.

----------------------------------------

[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/education/why-dont...

* The Fire appears to be an advocacy organization for one side o that debate, not a credible source of news.

* What is wrong with removing the rock? What do you know about it? I read a couple articles, including the CNN article, and nobody seems to dispute its racist symbolism. The campus administration supported its removal and the students who raised the issue. What do you know better? And who was censored or otherwise harmed by its removal?

As is common IME for these sorts of claims, smoke machines but rarely a fire.

It's amazing that now we're getting hit from both directions in this regard. The left would like minorities treated with kid gloves, and now the right wants to muzzle schools that would say anything critical of white people or positive about minorities.

I don't know how we got to this place, but damn, it sucks. The 90s seem so quaint by comparison. I'm already looking back and thinking that 80s/90s were a really special era. After a bunch of crazy shit, and before the next wave. Not perfect, there were some incidents, but it just pales in comparison to what happens every year now.

By the end of the 80s, the canon wars had been fought and lost, so any topic was fair game for study. In loco parentis had been gone for a while. Ethnic boundaries were all but gone, and class boundaries were disappearing as well as more people went to college.

By the time the 90s rolled around university life seemed to be the free-wheeling intellectual pursuit with a healthy dose of libertinism that I considered the college experience. I grew up in that era, so maybe I am just a product of it. But there seems to be something pure in that model of university life.

In later years after the 90s, taboo subjects became more common, in loco parentis returned under the guise of limiting legal liability, tuition costs made class differences more stark, and most sadly of all I think we've lost a bit of the universality of the human experience thing, and focus too much on identity and how that divides people.

I suspect that is the driver behind a lot of the points you make - it isn't possible for universities to maintain a little culture of intellectual curiosity off on the side when double-digit percentages of the population are moving through them.

Contention creates a magnet for nonelastic investment in things monetary as well as social will. A surveillance economony that creates opportunity like today's commercialized internet would have been a wet dream for Sylvester McMonkey McBean.

And denying the primacy of objective truth (as best we know it, subject to intellectual inquiry and criticism) over subjective experience.

Did you mean "political cudgel"?

I agree people in power always have a collection of "facts" they pull out to "prove" things. Public arbiters of conversation (op-ed columnists, bloggers, etc.) ought to call those into question as a matter of routine.

We're in the midst of epistemological de/re-territorialization between objective and subjective and frankly, when I hear or read people frame their opinions as fact/truth/reality/nature/science I instantly shutoff and encourage others to do the same. Specifically, I'm an anti-reificationist and if I catch a wiff of people reifying their symbolic universe, they instantly lose my respect.

I found it! We are both absolutely rigid when it comes to reificationism. We happened to move to different sides of the political spectrum is all. It’s fascinating to me. I was a normal person not knowing politics 1.5 years ago. I got radicalized mostly in 2022 to the left.

Thanks for teaching me that word and amazingly I not only whole heartedly agree with everything you’re saying. I’m interested in your insights. Sorry if I behaved rudely to you in other comments. Im autistic and I forget to be an empathic person sometimes.

This lie that you are telling to justify banning transgender people is going to get the love of my life killed, if you're not careful.

I repudiate the narrative that supporting diversity of gender expression is sexualizing children, and will do everything I can to see you and your people lose in the court and at the ballot box.

Do you think there is absolutely no "tribalism" right now, in the public debate?

I don’t think this really true. It’s the sort of thing you’ll read on Reddit comment threads and breathless NPR article titles but when you actually dig into the story it ends up being a boring story about, sticking to facts and not some alt-history histrionics.

It is amazing how many people here are accepting with and agreeing with this statement with no citations at all.

No links to syllabuses of syncophant-led culturally-censored classes.

No links to anything about old courses getting cancelled or changed.

Just a "everybody knows" claim that is either believed or not depending on previous biases.