Universities Are Not on the Level | Hacker News Reader

Universities Are Not on the Level

joshbarro.com

69 pointsctoth56 comments

Not to say anything nice about the ideological sh*t-show of modern academia...but an article sub-titled "Academics should think more about what their industry has done to lose the trust of Americans" might want to mention the decades of far-faster-than-inflation tuition increases, and destitution-level pay for most of the instructional staff, and ever-growing administrative bloat, and student-luxury-amenities arms race, and blind eyes turned to university-staff sexual predators, and ...

Lets not the semiprofessional sports teams that are allowed/encouraged to operate under their umbrella somehow. They never seem to funnel anything tangible BACK to the university but are always taking.

I just don't get how this has been allowed to flourish. Its not healthy for anyone and has nothing to do with the academic mission of a school.

I'm not a big fan of sports myself, but an argument that often gets used is that college teams (particularly when they do well) cause alumni to be more generous in giving to their schools. I don't think any school has really done the research to show that this is the case, though.

I'd love to see that broken down in a fair way. I've heard that a lot as well, but I've never seen any data.

It seems like the athletic programs at these schools directly impact a few hundred (ish) kids that are actually in the big sports, and otherwise exist as a machine that enriches the people running the athletic program.

> I don't get how this has been allowed to flourish

It has made Disney tremendous amounts of money. That's basically it.

> far-faster-than-inflation tuition increases

> destitution-level pay for most of the instructional staff

Faculty in the California State University system are planning to strike during the first week of the spring semester. Their goal: to get a 15% salary increase. Factoring in inflation and the increased cost of living near many campuses, it's not a hand up, or even treading water, it's sinking a little more slowly.

If they get what they want (and they should, compensation for non-administrators in the CSU is ridiculous), the money has to come from somewhere. It seems extremely unlikely that the CSU will be able to get the funding from the legislature in a year of budget deficits. Yes, they could (and should!) cut the number of administrators, but most actually serve useful functions, and the savings would not be that great. That leaves tuition increases. Maybe things would be different if the system were still funded by the state to the same degree they were decades ago, but those days are gone.

Indeed there are a lot of things that can help or harm confidence in an institution. I think this blog post is focusing on the socio-political aspect, rather than the economic and criminal aspects.

The socio-political hinterlands these bloggers inhabit is that of being unable to recognize the failures of modernism. It's an failure of their collective mind to continue to cling to a failed project - and fundamentally modernism's inherent self-contradiction: modernism's inability to modernize itself.

We ventured deep into what makes something true and down every epistemological corridor, we found a chasm that could only be crossed by assuming true to our ontological priors. And when we pointed that these assumptions landed us in different realities, the modernists, blind to their own actions, were cocky enough to tell us they never did such a thing.

I'm fed up with the lot. The entire weaselly bunch can get busy leaving.

If Gödel means I have to view shamanism and racism with equal esteem as empiricism and egalitarianism, I don't want to modernize past modernism.

I don't think humans, in our present form of bio-technological evolution, can afford to without everything becoming worse.

I’ve been listening to and reading Barro for years and I’m not sure this bloviation is realistic. Ultimately he’s whoever you decide he is. But it doesn’t match my understanding of his attitudes or interests.

This guy PSEs. I've worked in tertiary education policy for 20 years and this is about the best summary of structural issues possible to fit in a tweet-length post, well done.

PSEs?

All I can find is Porn Star Experience, which I'm guessing is what's intended, but doesn't strike me as the most natural usage of the term (which, admittedly, I've never used).

EDIT: Thanks for the downvotes...I still can't tell if this is correct or not. The reply that says "post secondary educations" doesn't make sense to me because it this appears to be used as a verb, and that doesn't scan for me.

HN can be frustrating, you'll get voted through the floor by the initial rush of dopamine addicts frustrated questions don't contain info.

Then, you'll be told you got voted through the floor because you complained you got voted through the floor.

Over the 14 years I've been here, I've gotten enough training data to A) wait it out and/or B) make an edit showing humor about it? "wow, -4 for an innocuous take you'd find at any coffee shop!?"

On the net, it doesn't matter much unless you're a new account, things always trend positive as long as you don't _always_ show up with takes explaining everyone is committing group think and you're the only one who gets it. (p.s. that's not even close to what you're doing here! just illustrating the only situation in which I think people get persistently negative votes)

EDIT: Lol

They just "verbed a noun", I believe.

Yeah, I guessed that. But which noun? Can someone unpack what the comment means if the abbreviation is for post graduate education?

It's a combination of the "this guy fucks" meme and a verbed noun, so it's like saying "this guy Facebooks".

That having been said, I also didn't know what PSE was, and I don't think you should be downvoted.

Post-secondary educations.

I came here to post this. This far more than out of touch politics or corruption is the fundamental problem.

When NFTs take advantage of young gullible people to sell them certificates at a ridiculous markup, we properly call that a scam.

When universities let students go into massive debt for degrees that do not boost earning power, that’s fine.

What’s even more criminal is that tenure track positions remain scarce and academics in general remains underfunded in spite of insane tuition inflation. Where is that money going? Loads of administrators and salary increases for the higher ups of course. Administration overhead is just ludicrous. It’s a jobs program for older people funded by making the young go into debt.

Goofy politics is a minor issue next to this.

How would you feel about separating out post-grad and undergrad into their own separate universities?

It would be much more effective to separate out testing & certification, from education & training. It's a conflict of interest, and it allows universities to lose focus from just making sure their students learn the required material.

There is no way that addresses even one of the issues. You should dig a little deeper.

But where will we get our adjuncts and people to do our dry cleaning?

Agreed. For "non-profits" institutions, I certainly see college administration and trustee boards getting paid astronomical amounts for otherwise dubious work and expertise while students and academics suffer.

The thing that I found most insulting was when university faculty and staff would complain about entitled students. My reply was always," if your tuition for 1 year costs as much as a fully optioned luxury vehicle, I expect certain things to be present."

And I can at least sell the automobile at a later date. Can't do that with my toilet paper of a degree.

I wholeheartidly believe in some form of student loan forgiveness but it needs to be at the expense of higher education who created this crisis.

The solution is simple: 1. Cap student visas 2. End government backed student loans. Or at least restrict them to STEM only. 3. Tax university endowment income as a percent to pay down outstanding student loan debts when tuition is over an arbitrary amount.

Universities want to peddle socialism then it's time they pay their fair share.

> I’m not under the impression that the replication crisis in the social sciences looms as large for others as it does for me

Not just social sciences. I decided to get out of biology when I helped an adjacent lab with some machine learning, discovered that the entire effect they were looking at was due to the old gotcha about groups of correlated files getting split across the train/test barrier, gently communicated the bad news to the person who had asked for my help... and a year or so later saw the uncorrected result on the front page of Nature.

Brutal competition against brilliant peers for shit pay is one thing, but this? This was a step too far. I couldn't compete with this. I hit the eject button and didn't look back.

Ouch. Out of curiosity could you link to the Nature article in question?

I feel like this article almost makes some good points, but instead of completing any good points, it just keeps jumping to other unrelated points.

This gives the distinct impression that it's not trying to identify any single problem, but to stoke a vague sense of bitterness at academia.

Like there is a replication crisis in academia. That's a scientific problem that requires a scientific or engineering solution (perhaps requiring independent labs with 0 affiliation to execute experiments on your behalf and interpret data on your behalf).

There was also some college president who lacked integrity and was fired, yay.

The article fails to show what the common thread is in cause and solution between these two issues (and if there's no connection, then it shouldn't bring them up one after the other).

If I go a step further, this might even be interpreted as a bad-faith attempt to comingle completely non-political problems with academia (replication crisis, cost increases, a dishonest college president) with politics.

IMO the connection was that universities are hesitant to pursue claims of replication problems, plagiarism, etc. when the accused academic is from a preferred groups, or has preferred ideologies. This is why the cries of academic freedom and freedom of speech (made by the presidents in front of congress) rang hollow — it was obvious that if the free speech was made by other people, and targeted different groups, it would not have been countenanced.

> IMO the connection was that universities are hesitant to pursue claims of replication problems, plagiarism, etc. when the accused academic is from a preferred groups, or has preferred ideologies.

But if it wants to make that point it should start by stating the point outright and then follow-on with some sort of supporting arguments.

The post brings up Dan Ariely's work that doesn't replicate. So far as I know there's no allegation that this was political -- just plain old self-interest.

The only thing it presents is an allegation about some history paper around metallurgy. Which just seems like a bitter association rather than an attempt at evidencing the claim that the majority of academic replication failure is political.

The more I reread this the more half-baked and rambly it seems.

Except that's transparently not true outside of the imagination of culture warriors.

Nice assertion — is there any evidence behind it?

For instance, MIT recently had a bunch of hate speech (against LGBTQ people) posted around campus. In response, MIT... defended the actions and encouraged students to post their own countermessages rather than take down the hateful posters: https://orgchart.mit.edu/letters/recent-postering

If anything, MIT has been more forceful in setting limits on pro-Palestinian demonstrations than on anti-LGBTQ speech.

Haha what? this is the best example you can find? Those "anti LGBTQ" flyers were satirical attacks _from the left_ on the recently adopted MIT free speech policy.

You are arguing dishonestly.

First of all, the posters were not obviously satirical (as evidenced by the letter I linked). The intent of the posters only matters if you think MIT left the posters up because they had a leftward intent but a rightward message. But MIT made their decision before knowing the identity or politics behind the posters. This isn't the only example, but it is one that straightforwardly shows that MIT is consistent with regards to its free speech policies.

You accuse me of arguing dishonestly. Instead, why don't you present your evidence that MIT has acted against its policy in an official capacity?

None of the incentives line up in a remotely rational way in academia. It's a large-scale boondoggle.

Gullible young adults take on tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of non-dischargeable loans, ostensibly in pursuit of either knowledge or certification. Most achieve neither, leaving severely indebted with (maybe) a few solid drinking buddies.

The liberal arts professors, themselves the small subset who did pursue knowledge but have now discovered the market for esoterica is vanishingly small, attempt to eke out a living by doubling down on their wasted time. They produce documents only a tiny minority of their peers (or the next round of dupes/students) will ever read, desperately hoping thereby to secure one of a tiny number of available tenured positions, succeeding in the equivalent of a Ponzi scheme measured in hours, not dollars.

Professors in science or technology fields, having failed to find another model to subsidize basic research, endure the tedium of teaching hungover classes of mediocre minds, genuinely convinced that a breakthrough discovery might be just over the horizon, finally legitimizing their single-minded focus over decades.

Both sets of professors prop up the "peer-reviewed journal" scam, which has somehow convinced people that such publications indicate intellectual or academic merit, despite failing every reliability test anyone has attempted.

And then, for good measure, there are also...administrators and athletic teams, for some reason. I can't even figure out what the incentive is for administrators, nor can I understand why a university athletic system makes more financial sense than a minor league system, except maybe as a publicity stunt for the whole apparatus?

In the end, I can't actually think of anyone in the system who does seem to be getting what they want from the arrangement.

Let it crumble.

While I do agree with a lot of this, it strikes me that what may be occurring is simply shoddy academic work. But since the context in which it is happening is one of claimed progressiveness we get an existential and philosophical takedown that implies there’s a deeply rotten core at the center of the university system.

I don’t know whether or not scholarship quality is in decline or not, but a “culture war” happening doesn’t on its own make things like the replication crisis better or worse. These issues have been on-going for a lot longer than any western public figure has been forced to feign concern about colonialism.

> simply shoddy academic work. But since the context in which it is happening is one of claimed progressiveness we get an existential and philosophical takedown that implies there’s a deeply rotten core at the center of the university system.

There is a difference between "shoddy academic work" and the university defending that using 1984 type phrases like "duplicate work" and threatening journalists who reported the plagiarism.

https://nypost.com/2023/12/24/news/harvard-slammed-for-threa...

Perhaps my explanation wasn’t the best but academic organizations have been wielding and abusing the law to shield themselves from criticism and consequence for forever. And the same goes for the private sector when it gets brought to task by academics.

Spoilers; it’s always the one with the most capital that wins.

> what may be occurring is simply shoddy academic work

An easy way to determine this would be to look at previous, e.g. Harvard presidents, and evaluate whether their work was equally shoddy or of scant quantity.

The fundamental flaw in this article is that it assumes that everyone suddenly dislikes higher education due to the same reason, or at least non mutually-exclusive reasons. I think it's likely that people on the political right dislike it for being too "left", and people on the political left dislike it for not being "left" enough. It's also hard to tell how many people dislike higher education for some other reason, such as the author's reason (plagiarism and fake data scandals).

the "assum[ption] that everyone suddenly dislikes higher education due to the same reason" is not a premise of this article. It has a thesis--that people with a range of political beliefs distrust academia more than they have in the past because academia has become more dishonest--and then gives a bunch of examples of the dishonesty. Surely it goes without saying that people may have other reasons to distrust academia! Maybe you distrust academia now because you were promised a lavish sinecure in exchange for how diverse you will look on a glossy brochure but you lost it because racists found duplicative language in your otherwise stellar academic work.

Just as a data point that ultimately reinforces your main point, one of the reasons I am disillusioned with the higher education corporate complex is that as someone on the political left, I dislike it for being too left.

It's not the what, it's the why. (Though as a result, a lot of the what is bullshit these days too.)

I think the heart of the issue that explains why both the left and right are souring on academia is because academia is a gateway to power and prestige and people now mostly seem to go in not for seeking truth but for seeking power and status. People are publishing things that help them acquire more status, not seeking the truth. I would apply this analysis to what Claudine Gay wrote about in her research and how it bore out tenure and a Harvard presidency for her.

I went to college a couple years before this guy, and I studied economics. In the years following graduation, I remember lamenting that my college didn't have any behavioral economics courses (which are very similar to applied psychology that the author discusses). But then when the replication crisis kicked in, and the behavioral econ/applied psych field got whacked pretty hard, I realized it was a blessing not a curse that I missed out on it!

Besides the main content, there's also an image caption that describes what "AI Safety" looks like in practice:

> Dall-E 3 image generation for “academics undergoing a restorative justice process in which they atone for their plagiarism and redress the wrongs they committed against others.” Dall-E rejected the prompt “academics plagiarizing each other” on the grounds that “creating an image of academics plagiarizing each other would be inappropriate and unethical, as it promotes a negative and harmful activity.” It also rejected the prompt “academics being justly punished for plagiarism” because “I can't create an image that depicts punishment or negative consequences for individuals, even in the context of addressing unethical behavior.” It rejected a third prompt, “academics receiving a stern talking to for their plagiarism,” because this prompt “still centers around a negative and potentially harmful scenario.”

This was my favorite part of the article. I felt like it reflected its social underpinnings well.

It’s interesting to me that these criticisms come mostly from the right when they’re essentially the result of a corporate attitude towards universities, where rather than being so heavily subsidized that they are essentially free for the populace, and sheltered from popular opinion, universities are constantly competing for student attention, investment resources, prestige, and cooperation from industry. As a result the complained-about behaviors are essentially things we see in competitive industry — insincere lip service to diversity as advertisement, cutthroat behavior and outright cheating to attain status, self-congratulation for unremarkable or fake accomplishments, fiefdom-building, and general focus on profits above any semblance of a mission. But an effort to restore an academic environment would probably be rejected as leaving academics unaccountable to the market as they instruct the next generation.

I distrust assigning "right" and "left" before other evidence is presented.

I understand your point, but Josh Barro's actually pretty liberal. He's not right-wing at all. So in the context of this article, maybe there's a different framing.

Slightly OT: I see this post is now flagged, but I don't see how to 'vouch' it. I used to see the 'vouch' link. Did it go away, and now the flagging is removed only if it gets enough upvotes, gets mod approval, etc.? Or did I specifically lose 'vouch' privileges?

No, I don't think you've lost your vouching privileges. The post is just in a special state that shows [flagged] without being [dead]. There's no 'vouch' link because it's still visible to everyone. It happens occasionally. I think it might be when Dan has reviewed a flagged post and given it "protection" of some sort from being killed by future flagging but not removed the position drop penalty. I'm not sure, though. Maybe write him to ask and report back?

Oh, perhaps ‘vouch’ is only for dead posts, not ones that are merely flagged?

Yes, the option to 'vouch' is only available for posts that are actually dead. The question would be what circumstances lead to a post showing that it is [flagged] but not being [dead].

Counterpoint: while universities have tons of issues, they were and are doing relatively fine except in the minds of those moved by “anti-elite” politico-conspirational rhetoric.

counter-counter point : UC Berkeley has embarrassed itself on the national stage by attacking and shouting down speakers; within certain sub-groups at UC Berkeley there is definitely racism and ideology being passed around, but with "anti" attached to the front. There is no single answer, but few are completely innocent here IMHO.

usually for a response to be considered a counterpoint it has to be more than simple ad-hominem

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