This by Kevin Kelly is useful: “Class 1 problems are caused by technology that is not perfect, and are solved by the marketplace. Class 2 problems are caused by technology that is perfect, and must be solved by extra-market forces such as cultural norms, regulation, and social imagination.”
The complexity of our present trouble suggests as never before that we need to change our present concept of education. Education is not properly an industry, and its proper use is not to serve industries, either by job-training or by industry-subsidized research. Its proper use is to enable citizens to live lives that are economically, politically, socially, and culturally responsible. This cannot be done by gathering or “accessing” what we now call “information” – which is to say facts without context and therefore without priority. A proper education enables young people to put their lives in order, which means knowing what things are more important than other things; it means putting first things first.
— Wendell Berry (2005)
No one is sure what Blake meant by mentioning ‘dark, Satanic mills’ as part of what Jesus would have seen and moved among, but the candidates include early industrial sites, Druidic temples and (I’m afraid) Anglican parish churches. The point, though, is that we are being asked to imagine that the incarnate God moved and worked even in the middle of the cruelty, hypocrisy and exploitation that are an inseparable part of every human community’s history. ‘Jerusalem’ is being built, even while all the signs in society around us seem to negate the vision.
What we need is the rekindling of desire – the sheer passionate longing to see a social order at which the Holy Lamb of God might look without heartbreak. Arrows of desire; the courage and endurance of mental fight; the struggle to keep this imagination alive and burning – this is what we pray for. The poem looks back to an imaginary past and forward to an imagined future, but at its heart is the question: ‘do you truly want to live in Jerusalem? Because if you do, you need to remember that it is always already here and now; because even where justice and love seem to be defeated, the Holy Lamb of God is present.’
— Rowan Williams, from Candles in the Dark
Between 1980 and 2016, the wealthiest 1 percent of university endowments had already grown tenfold — from an average of $2 billion to $20 billion, after adjusting for inflation. Harvard University, Yale and Princeton University did this by averaging annual return rates nearly double those of endowments valued below $100 million, as are those of most investment funds for public, private and community colleges. Similarly, this year’s median endowment among all schools gained 27 percent, roughly half the rate for the top Ivies.
In my forthcoming book “Bankers in the Ivory Tower,” I show that elite schools grew their endowments by investing large amounts early in private equity and hedge funds led by their own alumni — which helped both the schools and their graduates.
As has often been noted, institutions like Harvard, Yale, and MIT are hedge funds that happen to have universities attached to them. “Charitable” giving to them is little different than “charitable” giving to Elon Musk.
The contemporary American university is an enormous Kafkaesque bureaucracy teetering on top of a small Dickensian sweatshop. If we don’t count the sports teams and the research institutes, the university consists of preindustrial artisans, the instructors, divided between a small and shrinking group of elite tenured artisans and a huge and growing number of impoverished apprentices with no hope of decent jobs — with all of the artisans, affluent and poor, crushed beneath the weight of thickening layers of middle managers.
Apart from useful research, most of which could be done just as well in independent institutes, the product of all but the most prestigious American universities consists of diplomas which are rendered progressively more worthless each year thanks to credential inflation. According to the Federal Reserve of New York, the underemployment rate for recent college grads — that is, the percentage working in jobs that do not require a college diploma — was 40% at the end of March 2021. True, workers with college diplomas tend to make more than those without them — but at least some of the premium comes from Starbucks baristas with B.A.s pushing high school graduates into even worse jobs.
In a productive economic sector, labor-saving technology and/or the factory-style division of labor result in what might be called the virtuous circle of industrialism: Prices for consumers fall, wages for workers rise, and the ratio of managers to productive workers stays the same or shrinks. In the American university, however, technological stagnation, artisanal production, and administrative bloat result in rising prices for consumers, falling wages for the majority of productive workers (nontenured instructors) and more and more bureaucrats per worker over time.
two quotations on the metaverse
Facebook, it’s now widely accepted, has been a calamity for the world. The obvious solution, most people would agree, is to get rid of Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg has a different idea: Get rid of the world. […]
His goal with the metaverse is not just to create a virtual world that is more encompassing, more totalizing, than what we experience today with social media and videogames. It’s to turn reality itself into a product. In the metaverse, nothing happens that is not computable. That also means that, assuming the computers doing the computing are in private hands, nothing happens that is not a market transaction, a moment of monetization, either directly through an exchange of money or indirectly through the capture of data. With the metaverse, capital subsumes reality. It’s money all the way down.
The truth is, a thriving metaverse already exists. It’s incredibly high-functioning, with millions of people immersed in it for hours a day. In this metaverse, people have built uncountable custom worlds, and generated god knows how many profitable businesses and six-figure careers. Yet this terrain looks absolutely nothing the like one Zuckerberg showed off.
It’s Minecraft, of course.
(I am not returning to blogging as such, not until 2022 at the earliest, but it occurred to me this morning that I still need a place to put quotes I want to remember and use later, so I’ll keep using the blog for that.)
Almost-November rose.
hiatus
This will be my last post on this blog in 2021: I’m shutting down for the rest of the year. I’ll revisit things in January to see if I want to resume.
In the meantime, I’ll still be doing my weekly newsletter and my utterly-boring-to-everyone-except-me photo blog.
topics
This is related, in a way, to my previous post: After reading yet another invitation-disinvitation story, I think every university should – in the interests of full disclosure, honesty, and charity – prepare a list of Topics On Which Dissent Is Not Permitted and send that list to everyone who is invited to speak. That way prospective lecturers will know in advance whether they hold views that are not tolerated at those universities and can decline the invitation immediately rather than having to be canceled later on.