As a former community college/small college instructor, there are several steps. One is to smash, Reagan style, faculty unions where they have already appeared. Second, the financial aid that is provided to students needs to be returned to the private sector, which will insist that the loans terms and availability are based upon the employment prospects of the students requesting the loans. No loans for degrees in Gender Appreciation. Third, abandon obsession with distance education and return college and universities to residential colleges where the students---for perhaps the only time in their lives---will be immersed in an intellectually (and socially, and athletically) vibrant community the shows them the ADVANTAGES and DISADVANTAGES of communal living. Fourth, return to standardized tests like the SAT as dominant factors in admissions. High School transcripts and and grades are worthlessly inflated.
I think we are seeking an answer to the problem of how to provide higher education through creating new systems for accomplishing the task but forgetting that these new systems are just as vulnerable to the kind of corruption that the old systems are. The problem is not the system but the people within it. Until we change as a people, no system of education will fix our ills. The problem is not in the system but in ourselves.
Addressing the concern with accreditation at such an institution, just my 2 cents based on running a small business for a decade and being a graduate student for the decade prior. Accreditation is very helpful to get into a top tier graduate program, but less important for getting a job. If you can think, and communicate and have a good job history nothing can stop you from ultimately moving forward in a career, and before long no one will even ask where (or if) you went to college. BUT, and I say this with sincerity, we have had enough issues with college grads at our business coming in and thinking they're ready to call all the shots, or trying to push their personal values on the entire company, that applicants with a college degree are quite honestly less likely to be hired at my company than an individual who has no degree but can engage in a good interview and has a decent work history. We just need people that can think and solve problems well, and that can be harder to come by than I'd like.
As a recently retired academic with teaching and administrative experiencde, here are a couple of observations about this concepts:
1. Agree with Blittman, "Alt-anything" as a name cause more problems than it solves;
2. As the Austin University gambit illustrates, such endeavors need to be very careful about roll-out; too-grandiose a vision; too cynical and homogeneous a representation of all academia; careful planning about how to deal with the accreditation monopoly;
3. Another set of stakeholders is non-traditional (i.e. older or in-service) students. This is a large market and full of people with real world experience as well as less patience for new leftish, social justice warrior games;
4. I very much agree with the idea of building out from an established and accredited university v. starting something de novo. While Chicago is an intriguing option given its history, perhaps a public university outside of the coastal enclaves and with real incentives to fill a new market niche would be appropriate. I''d also think about a place with a strong and decisive leader...e.g. Mitch Daniels at Purdue.
5. I would definitely be up for teaching and participating in a well-conceived effort along these lines.
I'm a professor and an academic, so I'm a friendly critic of academia. I've been working on some of these ideas for a while now. If you or Mr. Eisenberg are interested in a longer conversation you can find me through my Substack (https://osiris.substack.com), or email (editor@osiriscodex.org). In brief:
Most people interact with Academia as students, but--while students are important--academia is performs far more functions in a society that mere pedagogy. In order to cultivate a real "alt-ac" those capabilities must be replicated. First, academia performs new research, forwarding human knowledge, and sharing that knowledge freely. Second, academic institutions aggregate and distribute capital and other resources to support research and education when market incentives alone are insufficient to fund that education and research. Finally, academic structures create and assign status and validation to ideas and individuals which serves as signals of legitimacy to people outside the institution, and which partially compensate researchers for sharing their ideas freely rather than taking those ideas to market.
The internet (my actual area of study) is changing many of the dynamics of the information economy of which academia is a part, creating a market opportunity for 'alt-ac.' Substack and podcasts (for example) aggregate wealth from around the world to support production of research and educational materials. Many such topics were previously too uncommon in smaller social units to support research through the market, requiring university funding. Now it is possible for a few thousand people distributed globally to fully fund research and education in fairly esoteric topics. While the market is already adapting to some requirements, there are others where purposeful planning will be necessary to create the institutions that will compete in the market.
Like most ideas, this is easier said than done. Of course, there are materialistic considerations, i.e., funding and student recruitment, etc., which, upon examination, are minor compared to the second issue: academic thought. With a deep examination of how we arrived here, one finds the problem is much more severe than just allowing non-post-modern thinkers, e.g., an alt-academy. Instead, the arc of the past 500 years leads only here; it is directional and gravitational. Once one moves in this direction, one can only end here.
Though most will argue that the issues go back, at best, 50 years, this is not the case, and the modern academy is merely the culmination of centuries of thought, which has repressed specific thoughts by the sword. Which thoughts precisely? It is Scholastic and Aristotelean. Though this may be thought crazy, those most likely to advance these positions, i.e., Catholics, could not be professors at Oxford or Cambridge until 1871. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the rest of the American flagship institutions finally allowed entry in the 1930s. Do you not think this influenced the direction of modern thought? In other countries, the Jesuits, the Catholic intellectuals in that era, were expelled and disbanded during the critical 'enlightenment' period.
As a result, we have Kant's ironic dogma against dogmatism, which leads directly to the dogmatic bigotry we are now experiencing. Nietzsche correctly said the entire modern intellectual movement was against Christianity, which he properly understood as Catholic Christianity.
What are the results? First is a fierce hatred of 'natural law' seen in the modern gender dysphoria movements. Then one gets a materialist thought process that sees only oppressor and oppressed and liberation from economic tyranny as nirvana. Finally, one gets a deification of the environment: "thus spoke Zarathustra."
The only way to do an alt-academy is to reject the modern intellectual's fundamental religious principles and myths, returning to a different way of thought. This rejection, however, requires a religious conversion away from materialistic rationalism, which makes even my colleagues at Catholic institutions scoff.
Why not give them a REAL WORLD education and prepare them to be free thinkers with capabilities to be good employees AND wise business people? The current universities do not. I know many that have done very well without any college. I say give the students a true ROADMAP for finding where they can fit in and thrive in their future career, and help them get a vision, finances, relationships and wellness. They graduate ready, willing and able to take on the world in the best way possible for THEM, the end user. In my world they also do not come out with life crippling debt. Please check out 1lifefullylived.org This could be a/the model for the life skills programing.
Everything you wrote is desperately needed. But why not give it a real name? Alt- anything seems akin to the far right nuts. Why not call it the XYZ University of Liberal Arts or someone's or some place's name?
A right wing re-education camp with the goal of making its founders billionaires. Loury: “You could be a billionaire with this idea." Trump would love it!
Great essay, although I agree it would be easier and more efficient to reform a few universities rather than start brand-new ones. Mr. Eisenberg suggests "wealthy individuals and families, many of them right-leaning, who could make the idea into a concrete reality. They could provide the seed funding to foster this bulwark against campus groupthink and its poisoned fruit." Yeah, because *that* won't result in elitist, overpriced right-wing-addled universities with little in uncommon with their far-left academic siblings.
How will you fund this so that it's not hijacked by someone, anyone with an agenda?
Because really, wouldn't it be easier, as others have suggested below, that we 'take back' our universities one at a time?
if you call it "alt-" you have already been defeated. If this comes to light, it should reclaim the mantle of University and Academy - without any qualifiers.
I'm all for alternatives, but the root of the problem must still be addressed. This happened in the first place because the leeches spread like a cancer with essentially no resistance. Until the students and faculty fight back, the cancer will only get worse.
Well, in a way, I think the creation of a new academy is inevitable. It's already underway. I encourage this type of approach to accelerate it or even get in front of it.
Institutional education at lower (public schools, K-12) and higher (grad schools) levels is imploding in a self-inflicted collapse, as they have responded so incoherently to the COVID pandemic. Tuition rates are skyrocketing, student loans are in a bubble that must certainly burst or be tax-payer bailed-out, and the meaningfulness of a degree from an elite institution, or almost any well-known institution is rapidly waning. Our government, culture and our academic institutions are cracking; the Pareto distribution means we can no longer support the dead weight within each.
Honestly, who cares that the State Dept, for instance, is full of graduates from the Kennedy School, or Georgetown, or that the think tanks are full of grads from Chicago or Stanford, when 80% of those people are carried by the other 20%, and when the significance of those positions wanes in importance as our civilization collapses.
Parents are also ahead of this phenomenon, pulling their children out of public and private schools in record numbers to home school or find alt-education for them. A prestigious degree is not as important to them as passing on their values and beliefs, preserving their families, keeping their children away from "the beast."
In a recent episode of the podcast series "What is Money" with host Robert Breedlove, his guest, Eric Weinstein, himself a leading intellectual, called out the crypto community, specifically the Bitcoin billionaires, to put their newfound wealth to use for the greater good, to fund these type of academic aspirations, to challenge and compete with the endowments of the large elite schools. Michael Saylor, the Microstrategy CEO, himself a BTC enthusiast(!) has set as a personal goal, the moving of education from the rotting institutions to an open source learning environment where all can participate much more easily. Mike Rowe, (and others,) has challenged the idea of college as a necessity for everyone, and encouraged the advanced schooling of skills and trades as an alternative to the degree-mad crowd.
There are many more examples, U of Austin being only one. Ralston College, Hillsdale, Wyoming Catholic, St. Johns and more. It's really quite exciting and I disagree that parents and students will not choose these academies over the others. Many will; beliefs, individual and family values, and culture override the promise of success among the herd.
If there is a way to invest in it, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a stampede to put money into it. The future is bright.
The hope is laudable, but I suggest the method is wrongheaded. See https://improvinghighereducation.wordpress.com/2022/01/29/understated-higher-ed/
As a former community college/small college instructor, there are several steps. One is to smash, Reagan style, faculty unions where they have already appeared. Second, the financial aid that is provided to students needs to be returned to the private sector, which will insist that the loans terms and availability are based upon the employment prospects of the students requesting the loans. No loans for degrees in Gender Appreciation. Third, abandon obsession with distance education and return college and universities to residential colleges where the students---for perhaps the only time in their lives---will be immersed in an intellectually (and socially, and athletically) vibrant community the shows them the ADVANTAGES and DISADVANTAGES of communal living. Fourth, return to standardized tests like the SAT as dominant factors in admissions. High School transcripts and and grades are worthlessly inflated.
More to come based on comments to this comment.
I think we are seeking an answer to the problem of how to provide higher education through creating new systems for accomplishing the task but forgetting that these new systems are just as vulnerable to the kind of corruption that the old systems are. The problem is not the system but the people within it. Until we change as a people, no system of education will fix our ills. The problem is not in the system but in ourselves.
Addressing the concern with accreditation at such an institution, just my 2 cents based on running a small business for a decade and being a graduate student for the decade prior. Accreditation is very helpful to get into a top tier graduate program, but less important for getting a job. If you can think, and communicate and have a good job history nothing can stop you from ultimately moving forward in a career, and before long no one will even ask where (or if) you went to college. BUT, and I say this with sincerity, we have had enough issues with college grads at our business coming in and thinking they're ready to call all the shots, or trying to push their personal values on the entire company, that applicants with a college degree are quite honestly less likely to be hired at my company than an individual who has no degree but can engage in a good interview and has a decent work history. We just need people that can think and solve problems well, and that can be harder to come by than I'd like.
As a recently retired academic with teaching and administrative experiencde, here are a couple of observations about this concepts:
1. Agree with Blittman, "Alt-anything" as a name cause more problems than it solves;
2. As the Austin University gambit illustrates, such endeavors need to be very careful about roll-out; too-grandiose a vision; too cynical and homogeneous a representation of all academia; careful planning about how to deal with the accreditation monopoly;
3. Another set of stakeholders is non-traditional (i.e. older or in-service) students. This is a large market and full of people with real world experience as well as less patience for new leftish, social justice warrior games;
4. I very much agree with the idea of building out from an established and accredited university v. starting something de novo. While Chicago is an intriguing option given its history, perhaps a public university outside of the coastal enclaves and with real incentives to fill a new market niche would be appropriate. I''d also think about a place with a strong and decisive leader...e.g. Mitch Daniels at Purdue.
5. I would definitely be up for teaching and participating in a well-conceived effort along these lines.
Richard Harris
Professor Emeritus
Rutgers University-Camden Campus
Good idea, unfortunate naming. Alt-anything has negative, even obscurantist connotations. Why not just call it free-thought-academy?
Glenn,
I'm a professor and an academic, so I'm a friendly critic of academia. I've been working on some of these ideas for a while now. If you or Mr. Eisenberg are interested in a longer conversation you can find me through my Substack (https://osiris.substack.com), or email (editor@osiriscodex.org). In brief:
Most people interact with Academia as students, but--while students are important--academia is performs far more functions in a society that mere pedagogy. In order to cultivate a real "alt-ac" those capabilities must be replicated. First, academia performs new research, forwarding human knowledge, and sharing that knowledge freely. Second, academic institutions aggregate and distribute capital and other resources to support research and education when market incentives alone are insufficient to fund that education and research. Finally, academic structures create and assign status and validation to ideas and individuals which serves as signals of legitimacy to people outside the institution, and which partially compensate researchers for sharing their ideas freely rather than taking those ideas to market.
The internet (my actual area of study) is changing many of the dynamics of the information economy of which academia is a part, creating a market opportunity for 'alt-ac.' Substack and podcasts (for example) aggregate wealth from around the world to support production of research and educational materials. Many such topics were previously too uncommon in smaller social units to support research through the market, requiring university funding. Now it is possible for a few thousand people distributed globally to fully fund research and education in fairly esoteric topics. While the market is already adapting to some requirements, there are others where purposeful planning will be necessary to create the institutions that will compete in the market.
Like most ideas, this is easier said than done. Of course, there are materialistic considerations, i.e., funding and student recruitment, etc., which, upon examination, are minor compared to the second issue: academic thought. With a deep examination of how we arrived here, one finds the problem is much more severe than just allowing non-post-modern thinkers, e.g., an alt-academy. Instead, the arc of the past 500 years leads only here; it is directional and gravitational. Once one moves in this direction, one can only end here.
Though most will argue that the issues go back, at best, 50 years, this is not the case, and the modern academy is merely the culmination of centuries of thought, which has repressed specific thoughts by the sword. Which thoughts precisely? It is Scholastic and Aristotelean. Though this may be thought crazy, those most likely to advance these positions, i.e., Catholics, could not be professors at Oxford or Cambridge until 1871. Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the rest of the American flagship institutions finally allowed entry in the 1930s. Do you not think this influenced the direction of modern thought? In other countries, the Jesuits, the Catholic intellectuals in that era, were expelled and disbanded during the critical 'enlightenment' period.
As a result, we have Kant's ironic dogma against dogmatism, which leads directly to the dogmatic bigotry we are now experiencing. Nietzsche correctly said the entire modern intellectual movement was against Christianity, which he properly understood as Catholic Christianity.
What are the results? First is a fierce hatred of 'natural law' seen in the modern gender dysphoria movements. Then one gets a materialist thought process that sees only oppressor and oppressed and liberation from economic tyranny as nirvana. Finally, one gets a deification of the environment: "thus spoke Zarathustra."
The only way to do an alt-academy is to reject the modern intellectual's fundamental religious principles and myths, returning to a different way of thought. This rejection, however, requires a religious conversion away from materialistic rationalism, which makes even my colleagues at Catholic institutions scoff.
Why not give them a REAL WORLD education and prepare them to be free thinkers with capabilities to be good employees AND wise business people? The current universities do not. I know many that have done very well without any college. I say give the students a true ROADMAP for finding where they can fit in and thrive in their future career, and help them get a vision, finances, relationships and wellness. They graduate ready, willing and able to take on the world in the best way possible for THEM, the end user. In my world they also do not come out with life crippling debt. Please check out 1lifefullylived.org This could be a/the model for the life skills programing.
Al, here is a road map I wrote in June. I am trying to pull energy and money around it. I hope we can speak 206-396-0446. https://www.sleeplessinseattle.info/p/we-need-fair-witnesses
Everything you wrote is desperately needed. But why not give it a real name? Alt- anything seems akin to the far right nuts. Why not call it the XYZ University of Liberal Arts or someone's or some place's name?
A right wing re-education camp with the goal of making its founders billionaires. Loury: “You could be a billionaire with this idea." Trump would love it!
Great essay, although I agree it would be easier and more efficient to reform a few universities rather than start brand-new ones. Mr. Eisenberg suggests "wealthy individuals and families, many of them right-leaning, who could make the idea into a concrete reality. They could provide the seed funding to foster this bulwark against campus groupthink and its poisoned fruit." Yeah, because *that* won't result in elitist, overpriced right-wing-addled universities with little in uncommon with their far-left academic siblings.
How will you fund this so that it's not hijacked by someone, anyone with an agenda?
Because really, wouldn't it be easier, as others have suggested below, that we 'take back' our universities one at a time?
if you call it "alt-" you have already been defeated. If this comes to light, it should reclaim the mantle of University and Academy - without any qualifiers.
I'm all for alternatives, but the root of the problem must still be addressed. This happened in the first place because the leeches spread like a cancer with essentially no resistance. Until the students and faculty fight back, the cancer will only get worse.
Well, in a way, I think the creation of a new academy is inevitable. It's already underway. I encourage this type of approach to accelerate it or even get in front of it.
Institutional education at lower (public schools, K-12) and higher (grad schools) levels is imploding in a self-inflicted collapse, as they have responded so incoherently to the COVID pandemic. Tuition rates are skyrocketing, student loans are in a bubble that must certainly burst or be tax-payer bailed-out, and the meaningfulness of a degree from an elite institution, or almost any well-known institution is rapidly waning. Our government, culture and our academic institutions are cracking; the Pareto distribution means we can no longer support the dead weight within each.
Honestly, who cares that the State Dept, for instance, is full of graduates from the Kennedy School, or Georgetown, or that the think tanks are full of grads from Chicago or Stanford, when 80% of those people are carried by the other 20%, and when the significance of those positions wanes in importance as our civilization collapses.
Parents are also ahead of this phenomenon, pulling their children out of public and private schools in record numbers to home school or find alt-education for them. A prestigious degree is not as important to them as passing on their values and beliefs, preserving their families, keeping their children away from "the beast."
In a recent episode of the podcast series "What is Money" with host Robert Breedlove, his guest, Eric Weinstein, himself a leading intellectual, called out the crypto community, specifically the Bitcoin billionaires, to put their newfound wealth to use for the greater good, to fund these type of academic aspirations, to challenge and compete with the endowments of the large elite schools. Michael Saylor, the Microstrategy CEO, himself a BTC enthusiast(!) has set as a personal goal, the moving of education from the rotting institutions to an open source learning environment where all can participate much more easily. Mike Rowe, (and others,) has challenged the idea of college as a necessity for everyone, and encouraged the advanced schooling of skills and trades as an alternative to the degree-mad crowd.
There are many more examples, U of Austin being only one. Ralston College, Hillsdale, Wyoming Catholic, St. Johns and more. It's really quite exciting and I disagree that parents and students will not choose these academies over the others. Many will; beliefs, individual and family values, and culture override the promise of success among the herd.
If there is a way to invest in it, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a stampede to put money into it. The future is bright.