My university has a "committee on committees". I kid you not. It is a faculty committee to identify folks to serve on university level committees, and it has existed for at least 30 years based on my time as a faculty member.
The biggest issue with the faculty committees is that they are staffed with folks willing to spend time writing reports such as the Yale one and so are the folks that one would LEAST want to serve on a committee like this (ie spend time on something that is irrelevant to the real world and will be dumped later into the black hole of central admin with no actions instead of focusing on teaching and scholarship).
They are over focused on "process" and not hurting anyone's feelings (remember "words are violence" and "silence is violence" at the same time based on the messaging of the progressive left) so are unable to bluntly state the problem and suggest solutions.... That said, I have seen administrative dictates be worse as they often further entrench administrative bloat while forcing unworkable solutions upon folks (and depending on their political beliefs, these administrators can make things worse in regard to the issues that lead to the loss of trust in higher ed).
Unfortunately I dont have the answer on how to get out of that circular mess, particular when the institution is a private one so there is no oversight from outside (ie a state legislature).
>>through grade inflation that renders degrees meaningless, through political homogeneity that produces ideological conformity, through administrative expansion that consumes resources without academic justification, and through a culture of self-censorship that punishes heterodox thought<<
I understand what your individual concerns are, and that you align with the many people who are on a different side of the political and social spectrum than the 99.83% of Yale and other 4-year, and most of the 2-year college faculty and administrators.
What both this elite group of 10, and you, elide is that the school also serves to protect out-and-out child pornographers, child sex abusers, and adult rapists. Here are the best-known offenders from this school. There is at least one, if not more, on every campus of any size: Eugene Redmond (44 year faculty Yale medical school), Jed Rubenfeld (law school), Antonio Lasaga (Geology/Geophysics - 20 year sentence for rape and child porn in 2002).
Much like the Catholic Church, LDS Church, most Protestant and Evangelical (Bible-Based) churches, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, most US college and high school athletic programs, sex offenders are protected even with the massive, multi-billion-dollar lawsuits and judgments paid out to date. Surely you are familiar with the story of Lou Anna Simon at MSU, the President who called the FBI to silence the female Olympic gymnasts who'd complained to her staff (she denies she ever heard such reports) about what now-imprisoned Larry Nassar did to them. For the record, he would get off by doing painful, horrible, lengthy pelvic exams on young female gymnasts. Most of them testified against him in public, in tears, humiliating themselves for a public that has likely already forgotten the situation.
I was directed away from a Rhodes Scholarship, Watson Fellowship, and admission with scholarships to the Iowa and UCI Writers programs and Claremont Graduate School in art following my rape by a named chair of literature in 1983, shortly after my 21st birthday. This fine gentleman's father was a well-known physician and President of the American Cancer Society. He had made a substantial donation to the school (Pomona College) and lo and behold, his "gifted" son had this position in his early 30s.
I only realized that my situation wasn't an "isolated incident" when writing about the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State when I was way up in my 40s. Writing for pay, by the way. We won't discuss the way that people with zero real publications like to teach "creative writing" or how schools like Yale and USC give high paid tenured positions to people who not only can't write or teach, their days revolve around drug/alcohol abuse and what I wrote above - preying on innocent young students, the less sophisticated and less-wealthy the better.
After my rape, the community police officers practiced with me what defense attorneys would say, how they would question me. They also told me I was lucky. They suspected my rapist of not just rape and sexual violence against students and local prostitutes, but also of being a serial killer. They thought he was the reason for the unidentified bodies they'd found in nearby mountain and desert areas.
Now, many years later, I look at cases like the Gilgo Beach/Long Island Serial killer and think, well maybe there was a reason this man died in a "single car accident" on Mount Baldy Road where I'd tried to kill myself twice following what he did to me. I'm sure those officers were right. But what could they do? He was the son of a powerful and rich man (likely a Democrat from Washington, DC lol).
There's so much more to this. These "institutions" reflect little to nothing of the wording of their founding fathers and their "values" are best depicted in horror films.
This committee's outcome was so very, very predictable. A groupthink institution produces a groupthink report. Kick that can.
But what more could they have done? The distrust of academia derives not from its messaging, or how academia frames what it does, but from the structure and character of contemporary academia—its elitism, its political homogeneity, its epistemic closure, its institutional narcissism. Its incentives and disincentives.
Academia is an unsustainable walled garden. It can't be fixed. The walls will crumble away and all the high-maintenance exotic cultivated plants will die, replaced by aggressive hardy weeds that thrive in the native ecosystem.
This is good news, right? Academics love sustainable ecosystems!
This website could actually be useful if they weren't using AI to write the posts, as they obviously are. It has potential, but if the goal is to point out hypocrisy and incompetence in higher ed, this isn't the way.
My university has a "committee on committees". I kid you not. It is a faculty committee to identify folks to serve on university level committees, and it has existed for at least 30 years based on my time as a faculty member.
The biggest issue with the faculty committees is that they are staffed with folks willing to spend time writing reports such as the Yale one and so are the folks that one would LEAST want to serve on a committee like this (ie spend time on something that is irrelevant to the real world and will be dumped later into the black hole of central admin with no actions instead of focusing on teaching and scholarship).
They are over focused on "process" and not hurting anyone's feelings (remember "words are violence" and "silence is violence" at the same time based on the messaging of the progressive left) so are unable to bluntly state the problem and suggest solutions.... That said, I have seen administrative dictates be worse as they often further entrench administrative bloat while forcing unworkable solutions upon folks (and depending on their political beliefs, these administrators can make things worse in regard to the issues that lead to the loss of trust in higher ed).
Unfortunately I dont have the answer on how to get out of that circular mess, particular when the institution is a private one so there is no oversight from outside (ie a state legislature).
I read their report and the NYT article.
>>through grade inflation that renders degrees meaningless, through political homogeneity that produces ideological conformity, through administrative expansion that consumes resources without academic justification, and through a culture of self-censorship that punishes heterodox thought<<
I understand what your individual concerns are, and that you align with the many people who are on a different side of the political and social spectrum than the 99.83% of Yale and other 4-year, and most of the 2-year college faculty and administrators.
What both this elite group of 10, and you, elide is that the school also serves to protect out-and-out child pornographers, child sex abusers, and adult rapists. Here are the best-known offenders from this school. There is at least one, if not more, on every campus of any size: Eugene Redmond (44 year faculty Yale medical school), Jed Rubenfeld (law school), Antonio Lasaga (Geology/Geophysics - 20 year sentence for rape and child porn in 2002).
Much like the Catholic Church, LDS Church, most Protestant and Evangelical (Bible-Based) churches, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, most US college and high school athletic programs, sex offenders are protected even with the massive, multi-billion-dollar lawsuits and judgments paid out to date. Surely you are familiar with the story of Lou Anna Simon at MSU, the President who called the FBI to silence the female Olympic gymnasts who'd complained to her staff (she denies she ever heard such reports) about what now-imprisoned Larry Nassar did to them. For the record, he would get off by doing painful, horrible, lengthy pelvic exams on young female gymnasts. Most of them testified against him in public, in tears, humiliating themselves for a public that has likely already forgotten the situation.
I was directed away from a Rhodes Scholarship, Watson Fellowship, and admission with scholarships to the Iowa and UCI Writers programs and Claremont Graduate School in art following my rape by a named chair of literature in 1983, shortly after my 21st birthday. This fine gentleman's father was a well-known physician and President of the American Cancer Society. He had made a substantial donation to the school (Pomona College) and lo and behold, his "gifted" son had this position in his early 30s.
I only realized that my situation wasn't an "isolated incident" when writing about the Jerry Sandusky case at Penn State when I was way up in my 40s. Writing for pay, by the way. We won't discuss the way that people with zero real publications like to teach "creative writing" or how schools like Yale and USC give high paid tenured positions to people who not only can't write or teach, their days revolve around drug/alcohol abuse and what I wrote above - preying on innocent young students, the less sophisticated and less-wealthy the better.
After my rape, the community police officers practiced with me what defense attorneys would say, how they would question me. They also told me I was lucky. They suspected my rapist of not just rape and sexual violence against students and local prostitutes, but also of being a serial killer. They thought he was the reason for the unidentified bodies they'd found in nearby mountain and desert areas.
Now, many years later, I look at cases like the Gilgo Beach/Long Island Serial killer and think, well maybe there was a reason this man died in a "single car accident" on Mount Baldy Road where I'd tried to kill myself twice following what he did to me. I'm sure those officers were right. But what could they do? He was the son of a powerful and rich man (likely a Democrat from Washington, DC lol).
There's so much more to this. These "institutions" reflect little to nothing of the wording of their founding fathers and their "values" are best depicted in horror films.
This committee's outcome was so very, very predictable. A groupthink institution produces a groupthink report. Kick that can.
But what more could they have done? The distrust of academia derives not from its messaging, or how academia frames what it does, but from the structure and character of contemporary academia—its elitism, its political homogeneity, its epistemic closure, its institutional narcissism. Its incentives and disincentives.
Academia is an unsustainable walled garden. It can't be fixed. The walls will crumble away and all the high-maintenance exotic cultivated plants will die, replaced by aggressive hardy weeds that thrive in the native ecosystem.
This is good news, right? Academics love sustainable ecosystems!
"We demanded the clot shot and racist DEI policies. Why are we distrusted?"
This website could actually be useful if they weren't using AI to write the posts, as they obviously are. It has potential, but if the goal is to point out hypocrisy and incompetence in higher ed, this isn't the way.