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Comment by vampirechicken | Hacker News Reader

A marxist critique of community college.

Or someone speaking out of experience? I can testify[1] on the nefarious influence of MBA-like groupthink in academia: gigantic counterproductive bureaucratic overhead, obsession with pseudo-measurability of everything, from impact factors over “quality assessment” to “standardization” of examination and “competence matrices”. Top-down bogus coming from people who failed in the corporate world and met their Peter’s principle in the academia they never left.

[1] http://www.veto.be/jg39/veto3914/ku-leuven-voert-machtsgreep...

while your characterization rings true for academia, I hardly believe that those attributes are the provenance of MBAs. The irony is that we are in an age of scientism (as Feynman would say) and it's precisely the popularization of science itself that has led to 'pseudo-measurability' that you speak of. I remember chuckling that my humanities classes were grading essays via mathematical rubric at a time when the math classes (which were proof-based) would just mark errors and give an 'overall grade'. Maybe they were just CYA in case someone would claim unfairness - which would not be the fault of the Business school.... Rather the fault of the law school litigious mentality.

You probably hit the nail with the popularization of science as the culprit for our captains-of-society’s obsession with measurability. And even more so with the institutionalized greed of law school sycophants. I don’t know about the role of the business schools — maybe I’m to harsh for my colleagues. But I noted that at least at my alma mater and its acquisitioned satellite colleges, the managerial caste consists of civil engineers with an MBA, only, and it’s a recurring pattern.

The noble idea of a res publica litterarum, or a universitas scientiarum — it’s lost since the post-war baby boom.

on reflection, I don't think the problem is popularization, so much as "authoritization". For whatever reason we like to put authoritative power in numbers. Although I disagree with his overall thesis and politics, David Graeber, in "Debt: the first 5000 years" really does identify this psychological tendency. (I think the solution is to free people from those shackles instead of giving in to it and trying to craft a solution that avoids it)

The irony is that we are in an age of scientism (as Feynman would say) and it's precisely the popularization of science itself that has led to 'pseudo-measurability' that you speak of.

Metrics, metrics, metrics... even if your metrics mean nothing at all, they're still very convincing!

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