Question was inspired by this essay: https://whitehotharlots.substack.com/p/the-crisis-of-higher-education-is
I think we should start co-opting their points. Academia is broken! Let’s fix it!
I’ve seen a lot of stuff on the left about the election that’s largely positive. Let’s keep that
This is spot on. I left academia at the end of 2023 and glad I got out when I did. Things are not getting any better it seems. In CA, our “public” universities are totally beholden to capital interests and will do nothing that improves quality of education, quality of lives for their workers, instead spending time “fighting antisemitisim”.
It is pretty depressing, because this vital institution is just rotten to the core and needs to be completely rebuilt I fear
Anyone who thinks that US universities are hotbeds of communism has never set foot in an econ department (or poli-sci).
Doesn’t help when liberals constantly resort to backing up their arguments with a single academic paper that they do not have the credentials to interpret. Just go look on r/science on stormfront.
Academic papers are not holy divinations of God’s will representing a steadfast unequivocal truth. They are written in the context of their particular economic and social system that incontrovertibly influences their hypotheses, methods, samples, findings, interpretations, etc. I have read papers that twist themselves in knots to provide milquetoast answers that avoid reckoning with capitalism and poverty, especially in healthcare and public health. However, they go along the rails of liberal ideology so they are not sufficiently questioned.
I think even Marxists and other leftists could benefit from improved scientific literacy in that way. We could be much better equipped to talk about and fight against how the system reproduces and enforces itself through academia.
I recently encountered a report that made the claim that AI generated text is actually far more CO2 efficient than an American writing the same text.
Which ignored the training of the model, the fact that far more text is generated than a person would ever write in their lifetime, that the quality of the text is useless spam, that a persons CO2 footprint doesn’t exist for the sole purpose of, and doesn’t entirely encompass them doing their job (ya know, people want to live a fucking life outside of writing) and so on and so forth.
The only kind of intent I can see behind such a claim is to make the argument that we should replace all writers with AI. And even then you wouldn’t get rid of the person’s CO2 footprint, so the next step after that would be to kill the person too.
Here it is: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-54271-x
Techbros were pointing to this like it’s the word of god.
“Trust the science”
The Science:
im not from the us but where i study and work its increasingly obvious that there has been a deliberate plan to rob these places from any of the revolutionary or emancipatory potential they once had. at some point the capitalists realized that when you put a whole bunch of young kids together and let them learn and live their lives with relative freedom from the economic realities, they’ll just always turn communist, so they had to put an end to that.
its such a shitshow with endless budget cuts, no money for infrastructure or teaching at all, no money for research so all research has to be funded through corporate grants (meaning the staff that has the best connections to those companies rise to the top, no matter the quality of the actual research), students live in terrible and way too expensive housing, the university itself is such an unwelcoming and uncomfortable place that you’d never want to spend any time there, the food is expensive and bad, everything that is not teaching gets outsourced, etc. etc.
if that wasn’t enough, it is clear to all the students that none of the stuff they learn will ever be relevant to what they actually end up doing, which is either boring ass bullshit office jobs or marketing, with basically nothing inbetween and that the value of a liberal arts education (or any education under capitalism for that matter) doesn’t actually amount to anything (as is clearly evident from the world around us). like the idea that educating people in all sorts of things would lead to better outcomes when these people take positions of power is nice, but it is clear that under capitalism that is just simply not true.
Criticizing the concept of academia is a right-wing position.
Criticizing the industrial nature of it and the absurd tutition prices for universities is a left-wing position.
I have a friend who used to be a family court lawyer and started teaching law at a nearby university. She said it really broke her brain to go into an environment where the stakes were, “if you don’t stay late tonight, you may be seen as lazy in the long run which could hurt your chances of tenure,” when the stakes before were, “if this paperwork isn’t filed by 3, this kid may end up back with their abusive parent”.
And also the university continuously misgendered her for no fucking reason on a bunch of her official school accounts.
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america doesn’t have universities anymore, just hedge funds with lecture halls attached
Or sports enterprises with a side hustle in education
This is truer than a lot of people realize I think
wonder if it would be possible to organize some kind of community made socialist colleges
hexbear.college anyone? i have a little experience contributing to openedx, but if people have other preferences (or want a homegrown thing i’m down). I’m not that good a dev/ops but I’ve done a bunch of self hosting projects that have been stable other than my lack of budget to keep them up at times.
I’ve been going through the shit, but I still want to contribute to the hexatlas project I saw on here a while back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_School_of_Social_Science
The Jefferson School of Social Science was an adult education institution of the Communist Party USA located in New York City. The so-called “Jeff School” was launched in 1944 as a successor to the party’s New York Workers School, albeit skewed more towards community outreach and education rather than the training of party functionaries and activists, as had been the primary mission of its predecessor. Peaking in size in 1947 and 1948 with an attendance of about 5,000, the Jefferson School was embroiled in controversy during the McCarthy period including a 1954 legal battle with the Subversive Activities Control Board over the school’s refusal to register as a so-called “Communist-controlled organization.”
I wish universities in north America even had one single bed of socialism/communism considering it’s nothing but “fuck yeah capitalism” or “capitalism has issues but muh communism is worse” in almost all faculties in the case of the university I attended.
Make school free, fire all board members, nationalize all schools
I feel like the rise of AI is going to rapidly exacerbate any and all existing issues with education on all levels tbh
Arguably it already is
Universities have developed a lot of the same issues as businesses: managerial bloat, the MBA-ification of measuring progress and outcomes, and erosion of job security, work-life balance, and sense of advancement among the people doing the actual work.
I don’t pretend to know the intricacies of higher education in the states, but getting capitalist money out of things like science journals would be hugely beneficially everywhere.
