Here in Denmark we had a university like that a few decades ago. It briefly turned into a communist commune. However to continue to attract students they had to slowly moderate and open up. Today they are a normal university. A few of their ideas like group project oriented education was ahead of its time.

My takeaway so far, not yet having read the book, is that it's indirectly arguing that a new paradigm is needed.

Everybody has to raise funds, either by being long term valuable to investors or by being valuable now.

The fundamental issues in most of public unis (not the UK) is that you can afford to do non profitable endeavours (both on the research and in generating earning potential for the students) while being funded with my taxes.

Of course the incentives are not aligned and the system is doomed to failure.

I really can't wait for useful universities alternatives made by productive people (some of which are in academia, most of them are in the private sector) and not the old academia dinosaurs.

Which is exactly what is happening today in the entire world, and magnified hundredfold by the megaphone of social media. Due to the faults of the state in 2007, that once again applied its forceful hand on the delicate, chaotic balance of the market, we've seen an acceleration towards inequality and lowered standard of living, apart from the ultra-rich and mega-corporations that are able to benefit and gain from zero interest rates. And what do academics and laymen alike ask to get out of the tar pit? More state. More politics. A move towards left and right authoritarianism.

What caused the 2007 crisis and all other crises is not the market. The market is a convenient scapegoat upon which politicians, even the most neo-liberal ones, can place all the blame. The market is an autonomous process which is controlled and manipulated by the people in the palace with their laws to favour their lobbyist friends. You don't accumulate trillions of dollars without help from the people writing the laws.

These days it's almost become blasphemous and paints a target on your back to ask for actually free markets. These days everybody wants even more state, stuck in this media-powered Stockholm Syndrome for the political circus. Every election a new fever dream that the next party will solve all the ills in our world. Even young people are becoming politicised, participating and promoting the same old game for rich, old people.

We are further and further away from that Enlightened liberal dream, from the true separation of state and market.

It's an ideal which sort of works for commodities like potatoes, and only on the assumption that nobody manages to take over that market. That might have been the case earlier in history, but with industrialization scale confers a huge advantage. Which means the family farm can't possibly compete with a huge commercial farm, and will get gobbled up by it eventually.

"Paranoid references to ‘cultural Marxism’" ==> "since the 1980s will be aware that, under the influence of Gramsci and French ‘theory’, students are encouraged to view culture, texts and identities as politically constituted."

Left wing talking points have become a mask worn by mega-corporations, and it's all Johnny Redneck's fault.

I cannot wait for our Western Empire to fall.

Funny how both the far-right and far-left are hoping this will happen.

But it would clearly be better if we could solve our differences like "adults" :p

But instead of telling people what that future has to look like, we should maybe give them the tools to figure this out themselves.

Ideology is the opposite of that.

Best thing to do at a University is leave (except in very rare cases, like a small subset of professors)

The past forty years have seen universities in the English-speaking world undergo significant changes. One narrative suggests that this transformation was driven by the rise of the New Right in the 1980s, which aimed to introduce market competition and enterprise into the university sector. This led to the marketisation of research and increased competition between institutions. The use of university rankings and league tables further intensified competition and anxiety. The second narrative focuses on the politicisation of universities, particularly in terms of left-wing movements and activism. This politicisation has resulted in a divide between university graduates and non-graduates and has been exploited by conservative political parties to appeal to non-graduates. Both narratives have some truth to them, and universities have been overwhelmed by both economic and political influences. The marketisation agenda has merged with a political campaign against critical humanities, while the left's focus on scholarship and academic discourse has struggled to connect with the wider public. Wendy Brown's book "Nihilistic Times: Thinking with Max Weber" explores the concept of nihilism and its relationship to neoliberalism and politics. She suggests that a balanced approach is needed, with politicians focusing on politics and scholars focusing on scholarship. Universities should strive for independence from both politics and economics and rediscover their role in examining values and confronting the crises of the present. Academic freedom and responsibility are both important and must be defended.

IMO universities must have been pretty sick to begin with to capitulate so easily. The right-wing counter-narrative at least is internally consistent.

If you want to reconcile the two, the academics I know all suggest the wokest, youngest academics with the least regard for intellectual rigor usually allied with management. Like if you want to teach in the humanities, it's a big help to kick out all incumbents by saying that their courses are eurocentric etc. The more recent generations of academics have nothing to complain about re: universities because they were active agents in its demise.

Maybe not the way the article states.

Politics is involved in maintaining healthy markets in a variety of ways. Hands off mostly, but keeping market power from being too centralized, and making investments of national interest too large or too long term for smaller actors.

But the reverse, where markets run politics is a disaster. And promotes nihilism.

Also agree strong political viewpoints are out of place at the top administration level of educational institutions.

There must be some umbrella of relative neutrality protecting vigorous discourse within universities.

Universities in the UK are a mess, everything is rated on the salary within a couple of years of those leaving uni. But few people are asking if people are happy once they leave Uni, if they want to chase money, if the abundance of Uni places and associated debt make sense to everyone, and even whether society is better for so many people going to Uni. In the UK we've obliterated all vocational and manufacturing polytechnics, replacing them with STEM and business focused universities.

From my perspective, the pendulum has swung too far in this direction (towards everything being quantified with money and money and employment being the sole value of a uni and the courses it offers) and it needs to start swinging back the other direction.

A very simple phrase I recently heard and am paraphrasing: Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?

Most of STEM can be quantified, it's a lot harder to quantify the value of the Humanities and Social Sciences... maybe we should stop trying to make that the primary way to measure it.

Universities (in the UK at least) seem to be suffering from the metric becoming the measure.

People don’t want to chase money, they have to chase money. Rent is skyrocketing. Food prices are skyrocketing. Trust in society and its institutions is failing.

Money is the only escape catch from the Hobbesian state of nature we increasingly find ourselves in.

- 23 articles are about politics (76.67%)

- 7 articles are about technology/science (23.33%)

The majority (76.67%) of the articles submitted by johntfella are related to politics, while 23.33% of the articles focus on technology and science topics.

https://pastebin.com/xiVGK1mc

How is the weather in Eglin today ?

https://www.reddit.com/r/Blackout2015/comments/4ylml3/reddit...

"Short summary: Left wring professor blame everything on the political right. Even woke is a right wing thing. Everything was better before, even though no mentions of the reasons to the why the changes occurred. Something did not work properly before either."

Maybe, just maybe everything was better b4 because the left wing was not driven by a very vocal lunatic minority and the mainsteam just going along with the most utterly INSANE woke shit. Lots on the left are just cowards who are afraid to speak out of of fear of getting cancelled. Just MAYBE you should start associating what is called woke with an extreme left and not "the right" lol or "the left". MAYBE it was better back in the days because insane wokeness did not exist, the polarization was not this crazy and people were not driven more and more to the extremes by censorship and group think. Just maybe.

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