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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

> regular events on the currently hot social justice topics.

This is a cheap shot and totally inaccurate. Do you really think UK universities are closing their maths departments so that they can spend more on the humanities?

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No, but this is the kind of stuff that can keep students busy and not asking whether they get their money's worth. A very efficient distraction.

Students wanting to get their money’s worth is exactly the root cause of this. Trust me, British Universities are bending over backwards to give students what they want. If you’ve been anywhere near a British University you’d know how ridiculous it is to suggest that the staff are somehow secretly organizing BLM protests (??) as part of a plan to stop students noticing how much money they’re spending (??)

The universities should cut their losses then, and tell students to go somewhere else. Part of the issue is placating every whim of students, focusing on the fluff and not on the teaching.

I fully agree. It turns out that there are long-term costs to giving 18 year olds everything they think that they want for your short-term financial gain.

I noticed the general bending over backwards and I think the various political activities are a part of that. But you do not have to secretly organize X to benefit from it. You can just let the river flow and float on it. It is safe, non-controversial and does not require much effort.

Universities have been centers of protest for a long time, and extracurricular stuff has always been a major component of what attracts students. I don’t really see much connection between this and the closing of the maths department at the University of Leicester. Students these days are very career focused, and research is funded based on “impact”. These are the driving forces. The image of the student who cares more about radical politics than learning anything or finding a job is from the 1960s, not the 2020s.

I’ve been in plenty of meetings where we tried to make students happier, and I can assure you that it’s all by boring means such as inflating grades and reducing workloads (and indeed by more worthy and less cynical means from time to time). Politics on campus gets a lot of press coverage, but it’s a marginal issue in terms of student satisfaction.

Having studied both in Prague and the UK I can attest that British students are getting their money's worth of leisure and luxury. An interesting side effect is that the same facilities enjoyed by the largely native undergraduate students attract foreign nationals who made up 54% of the postgraduate and 49% of the doctoral student population in 2018/2019, and on whom Britain depends for staying competitive in this local optimum of an education system.

https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...

If maths departments have trouble retaining students then yes, absolutely.

You really think the money saved is going to the humanities? Could you provide one example of this actually happening?

Some people will only be happy when anything resembling a left-wing point of view is removed from education and the media.

Some of the "ism" culture war teaching in academia is indeed trite and silly.

But it's far less silly than Fox News and the entire right-wing media machinery - which most recently somehow managed to persuade tens of millions of Americans that a valid election was stolen, that Covid is a hoax, and attacking your own political representatives is a valid expression of democracy.

Honestly, compared to that having to pay attention to pronouns or learn something about black history is a complete non-issue.

That reminds me of my favorite saying: "-isms make schisms"

I heard it from a Rastafarian in a documentary and I have cherished it ever since.

Not sure how things are in the UK, but in the US, this is pretty much spot on. You'll see all sorts of curriculum pop up from grade school through universities to "teach" the SJW topic du jour. If Europe hasn't gone in this direction, well, that's probably why Europeans are so much better educated than Americans.

It's gone so far that the SF school board is more worried about names of their schools named after American greats than they are re-opening schools (which have been closed in California since March).

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/san-francisco-mayor-london...

Isn’t this just a generic rant about so-called SJWs etc. etc.? I can assure you that US universities aren’t defunding or closing their math departments in order to add more humanities courses about hot social issues. You may not like what some professors choose to teach, but a quick glance at the numbers will show you that, if anything, everyone else is being sacrificed on the altar of STEM, not vice versa.

Your second paragraph is about schools, not universities, and I can’t see how it’s at all relevant to this discussion.

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