Musk on Universities

McGill Campus

Elon Musk has recently spoken against the model of the university. He himself holds two bachelor’s degrees, but he points out the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Larry Ellison are all dropouts.

Universities, Musk says, are geared to the average brain. Ever since the postwar years, it has been the stated ideal that everyone ought to have the opportunity to attend university. Governments promoted this idea: they were afraid of an unemployment crisis with all the soldiers returning from the war, and civil unrest as a result; for this had happened in the years after the First World War. So they passed the GI Bill—university for the masses. And the cachet of the college man was pushed relentlessly by popular culture through the 1950s.

This meant that ordinary folks without a great passion for scholarship started attending universities.

The universities could not fail more than a limited percentage of students. After all, they had paid their tuition. If most of your students fail, you go out of business. So the schools had to adjust the curriculum and the standards so that the average intellect could get through, without too much effort.

Among other things, this created teenagers starting in the 1950s. That is, a distinct culture of young people alienated from the mainstream culture. This was an inevitable result of holding them back from joining the adult world, starting a family, and assuming social responsibilities. They were all dressed up, with nowhere to go. By contrast, George Washington had a profession and was earning his living as a surveyor at age 16.

For the most intelligent, high school would already have been mind-numbingly boring: forced to do time-consuming yet meaningless dog work all day instead of reading great novels, designing software, or building a business. Now university had gone the same way, was just a continuation of high school, and they were kept in that same intellectual straightjacket for an additional four years or more.

Now that everyone was going to college, entry requirements for almost any job went up. After all, every job wanted to look like a “profession,” and therefore command higher wages.  Now you needed a four-year degree, with all the time and money that cost, to get a job as, say, a newspaper reporter or a graphic designer. Or two degrees to be a public school teacher or librarian.

This drove the very intelligent out of fields that might in the past have been their escape hatch. As a result of that, the objective quality of journalism, graphic design, teaching, and librarianship, went down.

Meantime, university tuition fees have been going up at exponential rates, especially in the US, as they spend more money on administration and less on teaching. This looks suicidal, as if they know in their hearts they are doomed, and want to soak up as much cash as they can before the gravy train ends.

The Internet and now AI should happily lance that bubble. As a practical matter, nobody needs to go to university anymore. All the information you need is on your smartphone, available when you need it. Were it not for international students, the North American colleges would already be dead. They remain relevant as a cultural experience for Asian students; now more or less a branch of the tourism industry.

I for one deeply mourn the passing of Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, McGill, Queen’s, Yonsei, the Sorbonne, and the like. They were once places of dreams—of my own dreams. But that dream really died a long time ago.

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Why We Shouldn't Defund the CBC

The CBC and APTN have been revealed to be trying to entrap and embarrass conservative voices for a supposed parody show. What alarms me is not the blatant partisanship in a public broadcaster so much as the revealed systematic attempt to destroy Canada. The program sought to discredit Sir John A. Macdonald, our founder. It falsely accused Canada of genocide. Perhaps worst of all, it mocked and derided the RCMP, a longstanding national symbol.

This shows actual hatred of Canada: it was hate speech targeting Canada and Canadians. Paid for by Canadian taxpayers without their consent. Nothing could be more precisely calculated to harm Canada and its foundational mission of “peace, order and good government” than to attack the RCMP. Nothing could be more calculated to make the life of the average Canadian less peaceful, less orderly, and less pleasant. Attack the founder? That is to attack his vision, his agenda, and that is Canada.

And falsely claiming a genocide against the indigenous people is fomenting extreme ethnic hatred and division, in a highly ethnically diverse nation.

It is not enough to defund the CBC. Given this malicious indoctrination for the last couple of generations, given a sparse, geographically dispersed population not naturally in close contact, given our rapidly increasing ethnic diversity and large number of unassimilated immigrants, we actually desperately need a national broadcaster: a national broadcaster that will foster and promote national identity and unity. Something the very reverse of the CBC.

How do we get there? 

Trump does seem to be turning the culture around in the USA. A lot has to do with sending a very clear message from the top. Fire those at the top, and most lower ranks will fall in line. They will go along to get along. Most likely, that is what they are doing now: it defies belief that the average CBC employee actually believes in and endorses the toxic narrative they are obliged to present. It is probably peer pressure below a certain level.

A new cabinet, a clear direction, and a few dramatic first moves should set the tone. Some things can be done almost at once, as Trump did in the US, to clearly send a message:

1. Order of Canada for Don Cherry.

2. Order of Canada for Ezra Levant.

3. Order of Canada for Chris Barber and Tamara Lich. 

4. Put these four on a board to oversee and vet content at the CBC.

5. Open a public inquiry into Chinese interference in Canadian elections, with full transparency and broad powers.

6. Pass a blanket “notwithstanding clause” applying to all future and previous federal legislation, to signal objection to judicial overreach—as Quebec did in 1982.

7. Place a moratorium on all immigration beyond net zero for the foreseeable future, to allow time for new arrivals to assimilate into Canadian culture.

8. Amend the Emergencies Act to insert penalties for any government that employs it illegitimately. 

9. Rescind approval for the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.

10. Repeal all “hate laws.” Reassert the Canadian right to freedom of expression, as in the US.

11. Declare DEI discrimination in hiring illegal, as it indeed is constitutionally.

12. End all government funding to special interest and political action groups.

That should help correct the course.

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Why Isn't Canada in Revolt?

RB Bennett

Someone asks recently online why, in the face of populist electoral rebellions in the US under Trump, in the UK under Farage and now Lowe, in Italy under Meloni, in the Netherlands under Wilders, in Germany, in France, in Scandinavia, Canada seems quiescent and content with the woke status quo.

I suspect this is mostly accidental. In 2021, Canada was leading the developed world in protest with the Freedom Convoy. The brutal and illegal crushing of that protest did much to cow opposition since; but that must mean it is simmering under the surface. Two years ago, it looked as though the Conservatives under Pierre Poilievre were about to sweep into power, humiliating the woke Liberals. Poilievre had impressive rhetorical skills, like Farage or Trump, and talked a relatively hard line. It looked as though Canada was, in Canadian fashion, going to manage a relatively orderly transition to the populist right.

But then the Liberals benefitted from being able to run against the USA and Trump instead of Poilievre—forcing the electorate to rally round the flag. Carney looked like an apolitical technocrat who might be able to manage the crisis. And the Liberal government perhaps benefitted even more from the collapse of the NDP, the party theoretically to their left. A double stroke of luck for them, unlikely to be repeated. And this made the election actually in large part a rejection of the left. It is just that the electorate blamed the NDP, and saw Carney as something new.

In the prior two elections, under Justin Trudeau, 2019 and 2021, the Conservatives actually outpolled the Liberals; the appearance of support for wokeness was an anomaly of the Canadian electoral map.

Now there is a push in Alberta for separation—that is hardly quiescence.

It is true, and disturbing, that current federal polling shows the Liberals well ahead of the Conservatives. I can only account for this as a continuation of the “rally around the flag” impulse in continuing crisis. But unless the Liberals can come through soon with some solid solutions, that support is likely to evaporate. Just as it has evaporated for Keir Starmer in the UK after a landslide election win; just as it evaporated for Boris Johnson and the Tories before him. And just as it evaporated for RB Bennet after he won the 1930 election in the first throes of the Great Depression. Elected as a steady business mind to deal with the crisis, and failing to make a dent, he was crushed in 1935. And has been blamed for the suffering ever since.

I expect Carney to ultimately be such a figure. The bad news is, we in Canada are likely to go through some suffering first. Possibly Canada’s impoverishment, possibly its collap

How to Fix Democracy

The franchise is too broad.

Someone once said that democracy works only so long as people don’t realize they can just vote themselves money.

And that, sadly, seems to be where we are headed.

There is a simple solution, and it is what our ancestors did: nobody paid by government gets to vote. This would include people on welfare, pensioners, the disabled, students on government scholarships. It seems a small sacrifice in exchange for a living, and would prevent this conflict of interest. 

And it would include civil servants, public school teachers, the police, the military. Employees should not vote on their own employment terms or rate of pay—otherwise, we have a ruling class.

In the same vein, corporations or individuals receiving government subsidies or government contracts should be prohibited from making any political donations for a set term—say ten years.

If this rule were imposed, it would probably cause the Liberal and New Democratic parties to collapse; the Democrats to collapse in the US. 

Which seems to me to show they are corrupt.