The New University

 

Canada's most photographed building

Jordan Peterson, who should know, has joined a chorus saying that our current university system is unsalvageable, and needs replacing. This is true even purely on technological grounds.

Here is what we need:

First, no funding from any government for the social sciences. If fortune telling is illegal, the social sciences should also be illegal, for the same reason: fraud.

No legal recognition should be given, and no public money spent, for academic qualifications in education, journalism, or art. These degrees do harm and no good.

All universities must have a charter of first principles, and be required to adhere to them in all courses. Without such principles, the humanities, based on deductive reasoning, are impossible. This indeed used to be the case: St. Michael’s was Catholic, McMaster was Baptist, Queen’s was Presbyterian. These charters need not be religious; the US Declaration of Independence, for example, would work. These charters must vary to ensure diversity and justify the existence of different institutions. No two institutions with the same or very similar charter in the same state or province.

Professors cannot be selected by existing faculty, as now happens. Once the existing faculty is corrupted, this system cannot work. Instead, professors establish their credentials as was originally the case, by attracting students. They offer video lectures, and see how many students sign up.

Students must therefore be allowed their choice of professors and lecturers online, from anywhere in the world, given that they are approved as doctrinally sound by the given institution.

To prevent corruption, we need to separate the job of teaching from the job of evaluation. Marking can be done by AI, which can plausibly now create challenge tests by auditing the lectures and the course materials, together with the university’s charter. 

Sitting for an evaluation will have to be done in person at the institution—so that the students cannot, for their part, resort to AI. The institution can also offer “study pods” and tutors, including residence if desired, so that students studying the same field can discuss matters and socialize.

And it would all be much cheaper than what we are doing now. And it would be far easier to upgrade and learn throughout one’s career, necessary when technology is changing so fast.

Discrimination at University of Manitoba

Bastion of white privilege.

A recently dismissed sessional instructor at the University of Manitoba has written a piece in the campus graduate student magazine protesting the system of student evaluations that caused her not to be renewed, on the grounds that it is unfair to minority professors.

Her evidence is that studies show “minority faculty often receive significantly lower and more negative evaluations in comparison with their white counterparts.”

Given that no studies are clearly cited, we need not accept that claim. There is a reason why academic standards require clear references and footnotes. Lose that, and anyone can say anything. The word “often” renders it ambiguous in any case—it does not necessarily mean more often than “white” instructors.

But let us assume that is so. It does not demonstrate that said minorities are being discriminated against because of their ethnicity. It might equally demonstrate that the current regime of affirmative action in hiring and promoting is, predictably enough, producing an inferior product. Why would it not, when you hire not on the basis of merit, but of other irrelevant factor like genitalia or skin colour? Merit must suffer, and especially among those of the preferred skin colour. It will correspondingly rise in those groups discriminated against—here, the “whites.”

Odd, though, that this could be a consideration for someone named Sardana Nikolaeva. Isn’t that an Eastern European name? Yet she is implicitly claiming here to be non-white. If Eastern Europeans are not white, who is? Does the term mean anything? Is there really a general prejudice toward Eastern Europeans in Canada?

Indeed, it seems quite a stretch for her to claim she got her--by her own account--universally negative evaluation sheerly because of her supposed visible minority status. Especially since she demonstrates the truth of the complaints in this very essay. Among the intolerable student comments she quotes are, ”she had an agenda,” ”she made me feel ashamed that I was white,” “she hates Canada and our culture,” as if they could not possibly be true. But her next paragraph begins, “As any predominantly white neo-liberal educational institution, the University of Manitoba functions within the politics of ignorance.” Is she not saying that any “white” institution is ipso facto “ignorant”? Would that not include Canada?

The seminar she taught, she explains, “revolved around the topics of racism and discrimination, white privilege, problematic aspects of multiculturalism, and experiences of marginalized communities in Canada.” Doesn’t sound like she has any political agenda, there, does it?

You might also note that much of what she writes is rather difficult to make plain sense of. It is not just the illogical assumption that disparity of outcome must prove discrimination, or her arbitrary concept of “white.” It is sentences like this: “The biased attitudes expressed in student evaluations of minority faculty are particularly problematic as they contribute to already existing practices of discrimination, marginalization, and lack of support from peer faculty and administrators in predominantly white campuses.” That is unnecessarily obscure. Why not “Biased student evaluations add to existing discrimination from colleagues and administrators.” An inability to express thoughts clearly is the most basic sort of incompetence in an instructor.

Anyone who has been reading the news for the past twenty or thirty years, too, must be surprised by the claim made here that college campuses generally are hotbeds of anti-minority and anti-female sentiment. The reverse is the obvious case.

It is simply so that, in a democracy, it is improbable if not impossible to see the government intervene to protect any genuinely oppressed minority from general discrimination. If there really is general discrimination, such measures could not pass the bar of majority approval, pretty much by definition.

It follows that any intervention by the state or by state institutions like public universities in favour of one group over another will always be a case of increasing an advantage already bestowed upon that group by common prejudice.

Black like me...

We can therefore expect student evaluations, in fact, to already be biased in favour of, not against, “visible minority” instructors. But this is not enough. Advantaged groups always expect more advantage. The truly oppressed learn through experience that they must remain silent.

But this, in the end, does not logically apply to an instructor with an Eastern European name. Here, the demand for special rights for preferred minorities is clearly only a cover, an alibi, for discarding the idea of student evaluation of professors in general. The peons of the unwashed majority must be understood to be prejudiced and incompetent, and kept in their place.

Yet the very idea that the customer should have no say in his own interest would be deeply shocking any other context than education. Why should we not choose our own professors, just as we choose our own doctors, lawyers, repairmen, or legislators? Even if the student did not have that natural and inalienable human right, isn’t he, as a purely practical matter, in a better position than anyone else to evaluate the quality of instruction?

In the end, the essay demonstrates the frightening totalitarian tendencies of the modern academy.

Dead Poets' Society

Students at Yale have just presented a petition complaining that too many of the poets in the English literature curriculum are dead white males. Students at Seattle University have just succeeded in forcing the Dean of Western Civ to go on administrative leave, on the grounds that Western Civ involves too much Western Civ.

I almost want to agree with them. I sometimes think of myself as the original protestor at how culturally narrow the traditional humanities curriculum is—I was arguing this way back in the early Seventies. That's why I ended up, having started as an English major, majoring in Comparative Religion. Comparative Religion was the only strategy allowing me to study perhaps ninety percent of the best thoughts of mankind. Anywhere else, you were effectively limited to post-Renaissance Europe. A rather tiny corner of the world.

I believe we are failing to educate ourselves, or our future generations, if the typical humanities curriculum does not include full majors, let alone courses, in the Chinese classics, the Vedas, and the Talmud. In any one of them, there is a hell of a lot more worth knowing, studying, and thinking about, there than in any given subject in the social sciences. Plus, of course, the valuable intellectual exercise of trying t ocome to terms with a foreign culture. Why, other than laziness or chauvinism, this obsession with only the Greeks?

But still I cannot agree with these present protests. They are moving in exactly the opposite direction. Instead of adding the study of other cultures, they are actually subtacting the study of any cultures at all.

Witness what has come to be called “culture studies.” They include no study whatever of the named culture. Instead, they deal only with modern politics. It is as if there was no China until Westerners appeared at the ports, no India before Clive, no Arabia before T.E. Lawrence.

So why does that appeal to “minority” students? I guess it's because it's an easy degree. It limits everything effectively to the twentieth century and its views; it limits everything to familiar issues. It limits things by and large to things they might well already know. The more so since they can then generally hand in essays based only on their personal experience as a “minority.” No thinking, no reading involved. And they cannot be challenged—everyone is the final authority on their own life.

And easy for the profs—they don't have to learn anything either. They just have to be.

Yet it is a special kind of madness to complain that English literature should cut out all the dead white males. That's like demanding that English studies drop the English.

In one of the bitter ironies of nature, the English turn out to be white of skin. And the major you sign up for is, after all, English, not Hindi or Swahili. English has become an international language over the past hundred years or so, and you begin to see contributions from folks of other ethnic backgrounds. But if you are going to study English literature, inevitably, something like ninety-nine percent of available authors will be white.

Insist on something like the demographics of the American present, and you are going to force-feed random junk, if anything. But then, what the protestors really want is that the course be limited to current authors. Much easier to read, if perhaps of much less educational value.

As for women, since women have not traditionally had to earn a living, there were, until recently, far fewer women spending the blood, sweat, and tears to get published. To insist on proportions reflecting their proportion of the population, instead of their proportion of actual published authors, would again force us either to read only random junk, or current authors.

If current authors are easier to read, they are not English literature. First of all, we cannot communaly judge their quality until they have stood a test of time. The top-grossing novels, or movies, of any given year are rarely the best-remembered. I despair of Dan Brown's chances.

And, too, in literature, the dead get a vote. Writing is immortal by its nature; everyone who ever wrote in English is still in the conversation. To read only the living would be the greatest discrimination.

Looks Like Science

Is well on its way to becoming just like Social Science. Are the new dark ages upon us?