A New Kind Of University: Your Comments Wanted

Little Nate Confas, whom I have teased before (here, here, here) for his trusting in Great Brains to save us, has been suspended by those Great Brains from Ghent University for his sin against Equality, consisting in exposing conman Jason Arday’s plagiarism. Arday was black, and you do not go far in academia by blaming blacks for their crimes and misdemeanors. Indeed, you get nowhere.

The amusing part of the story is that the man responsible for Confas’s scaking, the very rector of Ghent, wears a dress and demands people call him “she”, and, even funnier, that this man gave a speech he cadged from AI, complete with fictional quotes. You have to laugh.

Woke was a university product. The fetish academics have for black and brown “bodies” is insatiable. Kids with small consciences, now the majority, are cheating with wild abandon using AI. Which doesn’t matter because of grade inflation. Men wearing dresses, as we saw, become women on campus. University of Michigan’s canceling grades turned out to be yet another way to DIE, using the pathetic excuse of “mental health”. University of California now has to teach incoming students basic addition and multiplication. Because of DIE and because lower schooling has suffered its own inflation.

There are more and deeper problems than woke and DIE. The majority of all research is wrong, exaggerated, or is insane or a scam. There are too many papers, too much research because of the pressure to publish and secure grants. The publishing bureaucracy and peer review is a bad, and well known, joke. There are too many professors, too many scientists, and far too much money lost to universities, whose budgets outrace inflation.

I could go on. And on. Then on some more. I could without end continue such tales, but to what point? It’s clear the idea of the modern university has fractured.

The university system lingers because of tremendous inertia. Employers still ask for “degrees”, universities are loaded with endowments and cash, a lot of that coming from government grants and guaranteed loans to students, but also not an insignificant chunk from older donors who retain fond memories of what universities used to be.

There is still the customary expectation that promising youth ought to attend university. And except for some engineering practices and a few desultory “think tanks”, there is hardly anywhere else for would-be scholars to go (except for Substack!).

Could we agree to dismantle the old system, then build anew? No, we cannot. You and I, dear reader, might so agree. But you and I are somewhat isolated from what is amusingly called the “mainstream.” By which I mean the great majority of ordinary people who have not heard of the many failings of universities and their irredeemable corruption, and so cannot be convinced that reform is even needed, let alone insufficient. And anyway, except for cobbling together the odd small outpost, building new requires vast resources and strong will, both of which are lacking.

We also cannot have our own Long March. Which university, for instance, would hire anyone who has any public record of “far right wing” (i.e. non-egalitarian) thought? If you think we can sneak in a few based young men who have managed to keep their timelines pure, according to woke lights, men who can keep silent until they gain tenure after many long years, think again. Silence, say those in thrall to Fantasy, is Violence. Participation is required. Scarcely any man can retain his grip on Reality in those circumstances.

There are still a few outposts in the creaking system, places like CalTech and MIT in the States, that hold onto parts of Reality. And there are a few bright lights spread around the rest of the world. Some of that work is still worthy. We would not want to lose the good that exists, while acknowledging cooperation in the system guarantees its perpetuation. And, boy, does it ever perpetuate.

Since universities cannot be destroyed or infiltrated, they need to be supplanted.

Part of the job will be done for us in the coming demographic crunch. Not enough kiddies to spread around and take out those juicy loans, you see. But it’s all relative. Little colleges may fall, but the big institutions won’t be going anywhere, and will still soak up oceans of money and time. We need another way.

Obstacles

Universities, like corporations, Burnham tells us, were lost when the professors farmed out administration. Grateful at first for the relief of the burdens of paperwork, professors thought they were buying free time to spend on scholarship, guiding youth, and camaraderie. Yet all bargains with the Devil backfire. You know the result: in the end, the administrators usurped the authority of professors. Professors are now mere employees, and not especially wanted or loved employees, of administrators.

Professors will not now be able to claw back their privileges. They won’t even know how. The administrators have won, and hire only those professors sympathetic to their DIE and other manias. Including the enormous bureaucratic ties with government, so that the symbiosis is greater than the sum of its parts. And more insidious.

Some suggest seizing the funds and grounds of universities, as King Henry of the magic 8-balls did with the Catholic monasteries. A nice fantasy. It won’t happen. Best we could do is lots of legal harassment, forcing universities on the defensive, which can be costly, but not crippling. Even that is unlikely.

You cannot start a new university cast in the old mold. It would fall to corruption and the old moribund organization almost immediately. Besides which, it’s far too expensive. And then there are all the laws, which despite some recent successes, are all bent toward DIEing, Equality and grants.

An Idea

The university is, or ought to be, the anthesis of Equality. It ought to be the bastion of Superiority and Discrimination.

Here, then, is an idea along those lines, which retains what is good or salvageable in the old system, while also building a parallel accreditation apparatus, one which can gain more respect and honor than that conferred by universities alone.

I’ll give it to you by example. What I want to do with the Class I teach here is to make certain requirements of students (Thursdays except in summer; I do this online, since no Western university would dare hire me). These requirements are not to us important in themselves. But they would be such that in an series of meetings, the students could demonstrate to me to my satisfaction that they understand and have completed the requirements. This would be like the old-fashioned oral exams, common in dissertation defenses.

The point is that I know what I want, and I know if a student knows what I want him to know. These would be not be easy requirements. No amount of AI or other cheating would be of any use, because AI cannot be relied on in “face-to-face” conversations.

There would be no excuses, no extra time for the umpteen and increasing number of medical diagnoses for “mental health” students at universities now have.

It would be my judgement, subject to no appeal. In the end, the student would receive a letter from me. Not a form letter, but my assessment of that student’s knowledge. And that’s it.

This is similar to how British sailors used to test for Lieutenant. After a certain period of time spent “in grade” (Midshipmen), sailors would go before a Board of Captains, who would quiz them, in person, on the most intricate details of sailing and seamanship. As above, no excuses were brooked. It was brutal and searching. It was pass or fail. There were many failures.

I suggest just such a Board of Reality Scholars.

This would have no legal structure; or, at least, not in any immediate formal way. A band of brothers, invitation only. These Scholars could be inside or outside universities: their place of employment irrelevant. A singular group of like-minded scholars, each responsible for his own material and students, but where it is recognized there is a shared commitment to Truth and Reality. Even if, as is inevitable, not all Scholars agree on all matters. And one which, when for instance an Employer sees a letter or recommendation for some Student from this Board, that letter is greatly respected and trusted.

Universities used to have this respect. They do not now. They have “degrees” and grade-inflated GPAs, which are largely unpredictive of any intellectual or other merit. Or which are even useless, or worse.

This Board must stick to its own administration, even those parts which are drudgery. The same was true in the old Royal Navy. The Navy that took over the world.

Students could be anywhere, of any age, and doing anything. It would be up to each Scholar to decide how to best teach what he knows, and at what length. This includes even the current in-class teaching at normal universities. We would not exclude any good from any university, regardless of how woke it otherwise is.

Brick and ivy buildings are, thankfully, not necessary. Material is mostly free these days. The internet is a vast depository. Books are cheap, libraries are plentiful. There is little bar to entry to any who want to study. There is no need to “go easy” on students, either. The goal is not, like universities now, to maximize numbers of Students.

What the Board lacks is collegiality of Students and Scholars. Since it would be somewhat informal, to get around the world’s DIE-based laws, official gatherings would be difficult. There will always be some enraged Equalitarian, or power-hungry politician, ready to sue for “discrimination” to cry “Feelings!”. When, of course, the very purpose of the Board is discrimination. It would therefore have, at first, limited official standing or accreditation. Letters from the Board would not, at first, be useful to enter fields which require licenses, such as medical or law school. Nor would traditional universities deign to recognize the Board’s authority for purposes like matriculation.

It would, at first, be very small in number or influence. It would be unknown and ignored, and when not ignored, ridiculed and scoffed at. Good professors devoted to Truth and Reality, well fed, would see little or no reason to join. Again, at first. But you would be surprised what a dedicated like-minded group of men can do. That is, if you have read history, you would not be surprised.

There are any number of organizational details to be hashed out. Simply, I suggest modeling this Board on the Catholic Church’s maintenance of its hierarchy (e.g. no women voting). How many other 2,000 year-old organizations do you know? They are clearly doing something right in maintaining its Magisterium.

I like the simple name Board of Scholars. I have a motto: Veritas et Realitas. We want people to say, “Sure, you have a ‘degree’ from Harvard. But do you have a letter from the Board?”

What say you?

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