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Comment by icambron | Hacker News Reader

The erosion of campus liberties at elite schools makes them worse places for everyone. And it's been happening at least since I went to school, from 2000-2004. It not only removes all the fun, it also infantilizes the students. College is where modern kids grow up, and growing up requires, for many of us, doing some unwise or at least unwise-looking things. The growth of the nanny-bureaucratic complex at these schools will make them dull, lifeless, and even more expensive, and then after college, people will finally start the growing up process at age 22. As that happens, they'll hire ever more administrators to try to fix it, with predictable results.

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>” then after college, people will finally start the growing up process at age 22.”

I used to think like this, but then I realize that a good portion of the students who are used to this kind of institutionalized infantilizing internalize that it is proper and necessary.

Then they go on to agitate for similar structures “in the real world”. Something to be especially mindful of is the fact that these students are going to “elite” schools and are therefore likely to end up in management or decision making positions.

Ah, so this is how we ended up with SBF and his “oopsie I made a fucky wucky” act.

He's almost 30 though.

Exactly, they’re saying that SBF and cadre expect to be treated as “kids” with the government/institutions playing nanny. It’s become their worldview coming from elite universities.

SBF?

SBF = Sam Bankman-Fried

aka. Sam Bank-Fraud

Thanks!

This isn't Seinfeld, and everything doesn't come back to Lloyd Braun.

> Something to be especially mindful of is the fact that these students are going to “elite” schools and are therefore likely to end up in management or decision making positions.

Well, they only do because people, probably including yourself recruit them preferentially. They don't magically end up in these positions.

Disagree? Make sure you exclude graduates from the top 20 universities in the US in your next recruiting event.

Why does everyone blame the administrators as if students play no part? Inclusion, diversity, and psychological safety are strong values with the current generation of college students (gen z) and are building upon ideas from previous generations (millennials).

The parents of millennials (boomers) have been lamenting their creation for years already.

America created and raised these children and now seems to have some remorse about it, and history continues to repeat itself.

Maybe the dominant culture is leaving some folks behind.

Leftist faculty educated students this way. America created these children, but leftist activists raised them, because parents were too busy working through their own self-fulfillment woes.

It's a cultural shift that seems crafted:

Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.

We have a whole generation of people who excuse bad behavior and failure with "I was having a hard time, I have to have my support peacock on the plane." None of these people heard "No" enough as a child.

There's value in teaching children to ignore name-calling. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me." This is what we used to teach. People can be mean, don't let it affect you. Show grit, find it in yourself to continue anyway, and you'll succeed.

Now? Achieve power by exploring your victim-hood and collapse in shaking outrage because someone disagreed with you.

We need to start fixing this, and clearing these piles of frivolous administrators from the staff at universities would be a great start.

Isn't that largely because the most marginalized groups started speaking up, and started being heard? Hasn't it progressed from there?

I think it's fair to say LGBTQ, women and brown folks are being hurt in tangible ways by dominant language (words can in fact hurt when they influence generations of behavior), and like most progress there seem to be some who are experiencing downsides now that things are changing.

Who decides who has sour grapes?

Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce with regressive policy?

Blaming the staff without examining the broader cultural shift seems as bad as an emotional support peacock.

    Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce
    with regressive policy?

Yes. American culture has always been a tug of war between puritanical norms and libertine norms, and we're seeing the latest mutation of the puritans taking over. It doesn't seem that way, because this iteration of the puritans have co-opted the language of the libertines, but if these university administrators were transported back in time, they'd be enforcing Prohibition laws with equal zeal. Transported further back in time, they'd be organizing the expulsion of Catholics, Quakers and other "heretical" religious sects. There is, and always has been, a large segment of America which looks at the average frat kegger the same way that a Taliban mullah looks at a collection of unveiled women. They hate fun, and, given a chance, they will do their utmost to banish it. And if fun can't be banished, it will be regulated into submission.

Of course, they don't do this for themselves. No, of course not. They do it to improve the moral worth of the people. Their zealotry is driven by the purest of intentions.

    Who decides who has sour grapes?

The ones who have placed themselves in a position to define which grapes are or are not sour: the aforementioned bureaucrats.

"Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C. S. Lewis

This reminds me of an old saying:

"The beatings will continue until morale improves."

> ...we're seeing the latest mutation of the puritans taking over. It doesn't seem that way, because this iteration of the puritans have co-opted the language of the libertines, but if these university administrators were transported back in time, they'd be enforcing Prohibition laws with equal zeal. Transported further back in time, they'd be organizing the expulsion of Catholics, Quakers and other "heretical" religious sects...

This rings true to me, and I find it very insightful. Thank you for writing it.

I enjoyed reading this. It brings a nice perspective on the issue which is hardly talked about.

The staff is using "inclusiveness" as the political cudgel it was intended to be. The people exercising power are doing so on behalf of the so-called marginalized with no evidence that the measures they're taking are beneficial in any way.

Words cannot harm you. Actions harm. Please stop perpetuating that nonsense.

Name-calling or epithet-hurling has not hurt anyone in a tangible way (tangible means "touchable" something physical). Bias, and discrimination based on bias or prejudice does cause economic and sometimes physical harm. It is proper behavior we need to teach, not hypersensitivity to phrasing.

This is it. Dangerous allyship... but I still think you aren't giving words and behaviors they lead to enough credit - the odds of the participants of this thread being in a marginalized group (myself included) are low, no language and set of behaviors systemically oppresses us.

I worry we throw the marginalized baby out with the bath water in discussions like this.

I agree with you that words do have power and meaning, but disagree with the current zeitgeist approach of censorship.

It causes far more harm on average than any minimal help it does in some cases. There’s substantial active harm in the amount of gaslighting and ill conceived redefinition of words going on. It’s exactly the sort of whitewashing of thought that’d lead to the world found in The Giver.

> throw out the marginalized baby

I think that’s just an updated version of the “white mans burden” — the white man has a burden to take care of the poor colored people.

The real way to change such things is over time by hard work and engagement. Dismantling actually oppressive systems in financial systems and laws. Giving opportunities not outcomes. Reducing things like inflation which disproportionately affects poorer people. And a hundred other things, all of which were working over the last decades with improvements in almost every metric for marginalized groups. Still lots of real work left.

I agree with this sentiment a lot. Many people could benefit from understanding that a whole world of hard facts exists outside of their feelings.

There also appears to be a whole world of alternative facts.

>> Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.

This is it. This sentence is 100% correct.

The problem is not valuing inclusion, diversity and psychological safety. Those are just the excuses used by bureaucrats to justify removing autonomy. You can promote those values without requiring people to preregister attendees for every party.

>> the parents of millennials (boomers)

OI. The parents of the millenials are the X-gens mate.

Sometimes known as the lost generation, or latch-key-kids etc.

The boomers are _our_ parents! And don't you forget it.

Now, get off my lawn :)

I am an old millennial (39), both of my parents are square in the middle of boomer, and had me when they were 23 (they are in their early 60s now, so born at the tail end of the boomers). Still, it's not like they had me at 35, they were 23 and still entirely skipped gen X. They'd could have been born even earlier and had me later in life without much risk.

I get where you're coming from but I think maybe relax a bit there...

> OI. The parents of the millennials are the X-gens mate.

Usually, yes, but not always! I'm 29 (born in 1993), which I think is pretty clearly in the range of millennial (definitions vary, and I've seen cutoffs anywhere between 1994 and 1997, but I don't think anyone would put me in Gen Z by any reasonable stretch of the imagination). My parents were born in late 1958 and early 1959, which is probably not within the most common definition of boomer, but I've met other people my age with parents born a few years before mine. I don't think anyone would consider someone born in, say, 1955, to be Gen X, and having a kid at 39 in 1994 would have been somewhat unusual but not really that crazy (especially if the other parent happened to be a few years younger).

If that still doesn't convince you, I don't think I have anything else I could say, but maybe reading this comic might provide a compelling argument: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOdaSW2XUAE1Pxm?format=png&name=...

no, the millenials are a very large group because their parents were an even larger group, the boomers.

I've also noticed that a lot of the elite and ivy league schools have started pulling themselves from the US News and World Reports ranking system. Which is a great ploy to keep the mystique of these schools alive while they lose most of the educational advantages that they had over other schools.

> while they lose most of the educational advantages that they had over other schools.

The dirty secret is that they haven't really had those supposed educational advantages for a long time, if ever.

I attended undergrad at a large university that was (and still is) around the 75-100 range in US News rankings. I then attended graduate school at a top-10 US News school. My expectation coming in was that compared to my peers in undergrad, the undergrad students I was teaching as grad student would on average be smarter and work harder, and would have better resources available to them. All three were false. They were on average more ambitious and more demanding (in terms of e.g. asking for points back on assignments), but not smarter.

There are very real advantages to attending an elite school, but they are primarily social rather than educational. Having letters of recommendation from top scholars helps you get into grad school. Making friends with other people attending an elite school can provide all sorts of opportunities down the road. Just having the name on your resume will open doors for you. The undergrad education itself, though, probably isn't better.

almost all the undergrad students at elite schools are elite students. That is not at all true of second tier schools. That doesn't mean you can't find and establish a cohort with great students at a lower tier school, and the professors at lower tier schools are often excellent, but it's simply not true that you can move down the bell curve of board scores and not notice; though a friend of mine was fond of saying, "you need to live in a tall building to be able to see everybody else who lives in a tall building."

Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields? Does that mean that no player who didn't make it as a pro wasn't close, or that every pro player works out? No, but within the stochastic variance, sure.

> almost all the undergrad students at elite schools are elite students.

Based on my own experience at an elite school (as a graduate student, teaching undergrads), this is definitely false.

> Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields?

Because athletic performance can be objectively and reasonably easily measured along many (not all) dimensions. Intellectual performance is (1) much harder to measure objectively and (2) much less socially acceptable to use such measurements. Good grades can indicate high intellectual performance, or they can indicate grade inflation. A high SAT score can indicate high intellectual ability, or it can indicate that your parents paid $4000 for SAT prep courses and 1-on-1 tutoring. Basing college acceptance on a battery of psychological tests might be somewhat better than current methods at selecting elite students, but (1) those tests would immediately become the subjects of a new test-prep industry and (2) it's not socially acceptable to do that.

At one point there was a huge filtering effect on who got into the best schools, if you start with and concentrate top performers you get good results no matter what; and can set a faster pace in addition. The proportion of legacy and diversity students (combined with the national push for a reduced emphasis on objective testing) completely eroded this.

Not only are the students of less quality, the pace has to match the bottom, so they don't fail out all the special entries.

This has been my observation as well. When I meet a boomer that went to an elite school I often find them impressive. Anyone that is a millennial that went to an elite school, rarely is more impressive than the folks I’ve met from second tier schools. For Gen-Z it’s a mixed bag.

All those schools have going for them these days is a reputation that’s no longer deserved, social connections, wealth and a sense of entitlement that scores them freebies from time to time.

And then these elites will graduate and run the country’s major unelected institutions, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, consulting firms, expert agencies, non-government organizations, charitable foundations, think tanks, etc.

I went to a school with lots of parties, and I don't believe the presence of parties causes students mature to any extent. Most students acted like kids and were unaware of responsibility until after graduation regardless.

My gut feeling is being responsible for your own well being (rent, food, job) is important for contextualizing other aspects of your life, like studying vs play.

Do people really need college to grow up?

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