What, Exactly, is the Purpose of a College?
The Right’s Attacks on Education, and the Shifting Material Basis of an Institution
Those of you who follow my twitter will, as is often the case with my articles, be a little bit ahead of the curve on this one:
The article that Nick Land (twitter handle @Outsideness, which, insanely, is not a taken Medium handle) linked to is this one:
If you actually read the article (which I presume that most of the people cheering for or booing Land won’t) the story is just:
‘I kept doing research into genetic causes of IQ variations, students kept protesting me, administrators kept telling me to tone it down, and then I eventually wrote a tweet that sounded really fucking racist — so much so that I had to take it down and make another tweet clarifying what I meant. And then they declined to rehire me when my contract expired, because I made a huge nuisance of myself and they clearly wanted to quietly deal with that’
Now, Nick Land really wants to portray this as some sort of indictment of the university system. Keep in mind that he himself was, in his youthful association with the CCRU, ejected from Warwick for being a meth-addled troublemaker, with the final straw being that he allegedly tried to sell drugs to a student. That this isn’t commonly included as context for his love of anti-university ideas (for example, Moldbug’s idea of The Cathedral) is a bizarre omission.
Nick Land, we need to keep in mind, has a personal bias against higher education. The idea that it secretly isn’t that important, or might even be actively harmful, is clearly something that is important to the preservation of his own ego.
The professor who was not rehired was ‘fired’ because there were repeated customer complaints about them, and at fifteen thousand dollars (as opposed to the 50 dollars of my mother’s day) a semester for a low-end school, colleges have to act like modern-day businesses rather than the weird medieval holdovers that they were within living memory. That Land objects to this is made even funnier by his own advocacy of treating everything, very much including the state, like a for-profit top-down company.
That being said, this is not an article devoted to shitting on Land — I’m merely doing so on my way to a more interesting point.
Nick’s objection ties into a broader debate, ongoing, about what it is that higher education is really supposed to be for. Who are they supposed to serve? And how are they supposed to serve them?
Are they supposed to serve students, by getting them ready to enter the workforce? Are they supposed to serve professors, by providing them with a space to engage in research? Are they supposed to serve society, by providing a place where higher ideals can be discussed? And so on and so on.
When, and where, students have to go into massive amounts of debt for an education — as is the case in America, and as is slowly becoming the case in various parts of Europe, there can really only be one answer: it is job training. The promise of higher future income is the only thing that can justify tens of thousands (on the lower end!) of dollars in debt — and an influx of students (i.e., customers) is the only thing that can keep many lower-end (we’ll circle back to this) American universities afloat.
And, have no doubt, they are closing more often now — what we are seeing is the transition of an industry from one mode to another. This, of course, involves some amount of creative destruction. The often-repeated prediction is that the bottom 25% of universities will close or merge in the next 20 or so years — though, of course, who knows.
At no debt, and perhaps 50 dollars a semester — or, even, as is the case in many European countries, students being effectively paid to attend university — the whole thing was (and is) much muddier. In such a relatively decommodified, and often state-subsidized, space the matter of whose interests are to be served was something that could be left unclear. It was not, after all, a matter of life-and-death (or, perhaps, merely poverty-and-prosperity — though the line between these two conflicts is thin) to anyone involved in the day-to-day running of things.
For some schools, though, they will not go broke without students — these are the higher-end schools. Harvard and Yale, and so on. These schools exploit their tax-exempt status to run their property and finance management divisions — which their much smaller educational divisions exist not just to train people for, but to steer them towards. In the (now deleted, likely due it to seeming as though Pete Buttigieg might become president — remember those days?) words of Matt Yglesias:
A more reflective version of Pete Buttigieg might have some thoughts on the way elite universities, despite their high-minded aspirations, in practice seem to exist primarily in order to actively steer people into these consulting/banking careers.
Approximately nobody shows up on campus for first-year orientation saying “I want to be a management consultant” — nobody even knows what that is — but somehow 20 percent of the graduating seniors end up doing that. Is that a good system?
There is some speculation that online education might emerge to fill in the gaps — after all, it does seem more suited to the sort of job-training focused paradigm that modern business-colleges must adopt.
This will, of course, utterly destroy the spirit of departments and campuses for faculty. The physical structure of the university campus has a massive role in creating the scholarly community of professors and adjuncts, and without it the entire academy-as-such is likely to dissolve — a program designed to produce nurses and coders as quickly as possible will be unlikely to create new philosophy papers.
This is inevitable, and will be unmourned by the new paradigm — what use would it even have for such irrelevances?
Of course, if there will be nothing left below the top-tier of currently existing colleges, then those remaining Harvards and Yales will begin to look significantly less legitimate — they will no longer exist at the top of a massive and learned community, but will be merely be isolated playgrounds for the children of the fabulously wealthy.
All this, of course, spells the ultimate death-knell for the ‘academic freedom’ (I honestly find the whole thing so alien that I cannot really be bothered to care about it) that inhabitants of the old paradigm —on both the Left and the Right—so greatly lament the vanishing of. In the words of Graeber:
…We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure.
There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet.
And of course — yes — the internet is where we are. Still, it seems odd that I am expected to support myself on other things while doing this as a mere hobby. I have my Patreon, which I must in vain hope flog before you:
But, at the time of this writing, that makes about $26 a month. Last month, my full payments from Medium came out to $19.89. If my income-growth predictions hold up, I expect to make a little under $54 off this whole thing at the end of this month. The irony of my being called a grifter over this is really quite cutting to me. If I wanted to make money dishonestly, running an incredibly controversial and mostly irrelevant blog seems to be just about the highest-effort lowest-reward way of doing so.
While, yes, this new change in how innovative ideas are produced — i.e., only if your desire to do so is essentially so strong as to be suicidal — is personally awful for me, it is clearly leading to greater and greater innovation. In the words of noted asshole Nyx Land (not to be confused with the more popular Nick Land, mentioned earlier, who she has slavishly named herself after):
My answer to this is that the proliferation of YouTube channels, podcasts, and blogs is a new rennaissance of ideas in the West. Never before in human history has there been so much smooth surface for ideas to be promoted and spread by almost anyone. Without any hierarchy of editors and advisors determining which ideas get to be published and which don’t, there is a bloom of difference that allows for discussions to take place with both form and content that would be rejected by academics.
…What this all creates is a space for discussion that is faster and more open than any humanities departments could ever hope to be, even in the most liberal and progressive cases. This has, of course, resulted in many cases where reactionary ideas have found a space for their ideas to spread, and certainly influenced “real world” politics greatly as a result, but this is truly an unconditional process that will favor whoever can stay caught up… it’s only a matter of time before some sort of proper response to right-wing amateur theorists and propagandists forms that can adapt to the 21st century.
The only part of this that is incorrect is the idea that this is a smooth space in which competition is unconditional. This is a space that works according to the rules and structures set out by the massive online platforms that we are forced to use. The least of these is that the bad takes of formerly-successful intellectuals get more attention than the good takes of relative unknowns:
Do you think that I can say whatever I want on Medium? Or on Twitter? Or that the structure of these platforms doesn’t bias discussion in favor of some directions, and against others? Get real.
Of course, the academy had its own biases and limits — but it is no use pretending that we are now any freer.
