Just What is a University For?

Stop Press: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is re-instituting consideration of SAT and ACT scores for its student applicants. Said Stu Schmill, MIT dean of admissions:

“We believe a [testing] requirement is more equitable and transparent than a test-optional policy.”

So that's all right.

But really, what the Sam Blazes is university for? To learn a skill? You could get that in an apprenticeship or in on-line courses.  To build character? Yes, but that is such a guy thing. Clearly, the ladies are telling us, with all the talk of micro-aggressions and lived experience, that they don't like being challenged. They want to be baby-sat.

OK, then maybe university is to learn the wisdom of the ages. Well then, of course, there would be no right or wrong. No cancel culture or lefty professors from stem to stern. That was the idea, back in the day. Oxford and Cambridge made their young ruling-class scions study the classics because they wanted them to know about all the ups and downs and ins and outs of being a ruling class. No holds barred, because for them the name of the game was that to hold onto political power as the ruling class you needed to be smarter than the other guys.

Of course, university was also where they trained the priests in the state church. That was the idea of George Eliot's Fred Vincy of Middlemarch going to Cambridge. To become a priest in the Church of England. That would be higher status than his father Mayor Vincy's status as a businessman in Middlemarch.

Then the Germans invented the research university to make Germany strong enough to deal with France.

Today, obviously, the point of the university is to churn out good little boys and girls that all know how to be activists and get into the non-profit sector in NGOs and activism. You know, I think that would be cool if such an education were an internship. But to charge $60,000 per year? I think that the ruling class should pay for the training of its shock troops and not make the shock troops pay for their training. Of course, back in the day you had to buy commissions in the army.

But then I'm just a cranky old guy that never liked school, and got the hell out of education as soon as I got me a bachelors degree in civil engineering. And then became an autodidact by reading all the thinkers on my own.

Thing is: I think that education teaches people how to fit into the existing society in a nice little salaried slot in some bureaucracy somewhere. It might be corporate or it might be government.

But what if the future is different? What if the nice assumptions of today get turned upside down and the good little boys and girls dutifully prepare for a life that is Gone with the Wind? I suppose that's what a chap like Peter Turchin is telling us with his notion of "elite overproduction." Joel Kotkin is saying the same thing with his idea of "the coming revenge of the disappointed."

The question is: will the disappointed take their revenge on the ruling class? Or on the middle-class Commoners?

The best thing would be if they all signed up as activists in movements that attacked each other rather than ordinary middle-class deplorable America. Because, you know, when people are angry, they just want to draw blood. And don't necessarily think too clearly about who is to blame for their misery.

The other interesting thing is, of course, that the overwhelming majority of disappointed college graduates are probably women. And I don't know how women -- liberal women -- act politically when they want revenge. Like I say: women expect to be protected. When they are not they attach to a new protector. But how would that work in today's world? I just don't know.