Circumstances required that I revisit a University from which I had graduated lo these many years ago. Some observations:
An institution which supposedly encourages discussion & debate is unable to compete with technology. Students wander between classes with their faces down, scrutinizing the small screen in their hands. It is understandable that, this far into the academic year, the attractive fountains, statuary, and architecture which surround them no longer capture their attention – they have had lots of time to observe and appreciate those. But Spring’s magnificent blooming shrubs and blossoming trees on the well-kept grounds also fail to distract them from their silent communion with their cell phones.
There still are male students — a surprising number of whom have a distinctly foreign look. However, the student body is predominantly female these days. Close observation of female pulchritude was a favorite time-waster in my student days. Were young females actually more attractive back in those days? Or is it that my age-related decline in testosterone now allows for a more objective evaluation?
Certainly, young women seem to plump up faster these days. One can make a reasonable guess at a female student’s years at university by assessing her Body Mass Index. And the acres of exposed flesh are generally not titillating, defiled as their bodies too often are by excessive tattoos. As those females age, and taut young skin sags and wrinkles, those tattoos are going to become even less attractive. We should always keep our eyes open for future business opportunities – any team that develops a fast, painless, affordable method for removing tattoos will be raking in profits from middle-aged women a decade or so from now.
The most interesting observation was that graduate students have unionized! Tenured academics trip over themselves demonstrating their allegiance to the cause-du-jour – such as the treatment of trans-gendered Iranian illegal immigrants. But those same academics have no room in their expansive consciences for the one group of abused individuals for whom they are directly responsible. Underpaid graduate students toil in dismal basements keeping the academic wheels turning, yet they do not merit the attention or support of their tenured masters. Those graduate students are the modern academy’s lumpenproletariat – and now they are railing against the machine.
It is sad and discouraging that the institution at the root of much of the West’s material success has withered so abysmally. Your observations were, necessarily, of outward and visible signs of decay. A bit of reading and/or viewing of so-called academic matters shows the rot going to the very core of the academy. How much longer can it survive on the capital of years past. This situation reminds me of Western Europe. Take away the historical artifacts and museums - and what is left?
No question that academia has failed – and continues to fail, proudly even! But is it stolen glory for universities to claim to be at the root of the West’s former success?
James Watt had been a technician at the University of Glasgow and had learned much about the properties of steam from working with Professor Black – but did the university really spawn his later success in improving the steam engine? Did universities lead the way on metallurgy, or did they merely codify the discoveries made by men working in the foundries? Rockefeller created the modern oil industry without the benefit of a college education.
To jump to more modern times, we have Bell Labs to thank for much of modern electronics, including solid state devices, the cell phone network, and even the discovery of the cosmic microwave background – not any university. Needless to add, Apple was founded by university dropouts.
Of course, many advances were made by graduates of universities – Einstein was working outside academia as a patent clerk when he made his major advances. Have the universities been claiming more credit than was their due?
The hopeful implication might be that we are losing less than we might fear with the decline of academia into woke irrelevance. Andrew Carnegie – another guy who revolutionized an industry without the benefit of a college education – had the opinion that anyone who could read could learn anything, hence his donation of Carnegie Libraries across the US. How much more true is that in these days of internet access to anything?
William Shockley got his undergraduate education at Caltech and his Ph.D. at MIT. He was later a professor at Stanford. John Bardeen got his first degree at Wisconsin and his Ph.D. at a Princeton. Walter Brittain’s undergraduate and advanced degrees were from the universities of Oregon and Minnesota. That’s right, the inventors of the transistor all ha Ph.D.s from American universities, as did most of the scientists at Bell Labs. It’s unlikely that they would have invented the transistor in a garage while only having a high school education.
The universities of the West have fallen far in the decades since these men attended but let’s not throw out the baby with the bath water. It’s no longer the eighteenth century, when someone tinkering in the garden shed could invent or discover something that would change the world.
Darwin may be the last example of the lone scholar who made such a contribution but even he attended Edinburgh and Cambridge. In that sense, Wallace is a better example since he left school as a teen. But these were 19th century men and we’re in the 21st. Biology was in a primitive, observational stage two hundred years ago. Watson and Crick both had doctorates. Times change.
The dichotomy brings to mind the Ancient Greek description of episteme vs. techne; knowledge vs. craft or art. I don’t think it’s an either/or proposition, rather a this/and.
Having said that, I can’t resist adding that Darwin’s hypothesis on the origin of species has lately been shown to lack the creative power to account for entire new body plans; but this hypothesis is not permitted in today’s academy. Small changes within species occur by mutation and natural selection - surely. Entire new species - given modern understanding that cells are not mere globules of undifferentiated protoplasm, and given the tremendous amount of new specified information necessary (the informational component of organisms contained in DNA has been ignored until recently) - simply cannot be accounted for by random, unguided processes. These biological discoveries came about by university-trained scientists like Stephen C. Meyer. He and other former academics, however, had to go outside the traditional university and found dedicated institutes, outside the academy, to continue this groundbreaking work. Darwinism, in the academy, has become more a religion than a fact-based scientific theory. This sad fact, and many others like it, is exemplary of what has gone wrong with the modern university - beset as it is with ‘revealed truths’ rather than analyzing facts with testable, falsifiable hypotheses.
That’s a useful distinction. Inventing the transistor is a very different accomplishment from putting existing pieces together to make a personal computer. There is no personal computer without microprocessors and there’s no microprocessor without the transistor. Microprocessors and transistors were invented by men who invested years of their lives studying at university. Inventing those items required a deep knowledge of physical science that would have been difficult to acquire in the pre-internet, pre-AI era. In this new era, universities may become obsolete or, at least, less important.
To be fair, evolutionary biology has progressed significantly since Darwin’s time. Darwin did not have the benefit of knowledge of genetics. Like Wallace, Darwin was more of a naturalist than a scientist and his ideas reflect that observational bent. Using Darwin’s original conception of biological evolution is like using Newtonian mechanics to design a GPS system.
Heterodox theorists such Stephen Meyer think evolutionary biology is stuck in the 19th century. Much like Justice Jackson, Dr. Meyer is not a biologist. He’s a philosopher. Sadly, philosophers have been wrong about almost everything concerning science. Contrariwise, the most important modern development in epistemology came from quantum mechanics, which philosophers still struggle to understand.
My beef isn’t with Darwin, who as you rightly say, put forth his hypothesis with what was known in his day. What modern academics have done with his theory, though, is to make a fetish (a religion, really) of Darwinism. They brook no diversity of thought.
Mayer et. al. clearly have the better scientific argument. He is a Ph.D. in the history and philosophy of science. I have not seen a flaw in his (or his many citations) biological facts or inferences. His (and numerous others) mathematical/statistical arguments are mostly beyond me, but make sense. His critics “scientific” arguments consist mostly of ad hominem quasi responses like “creationist”. It is this execrable descent of the nature of even discussion of evolution in the so-called academy today, which is my objection. As I don’t judge historical figures, generally, by today’s sensibilities - I don’t denigrate Darwin for ignorance of facts which did not emerge until a century or more. Doing precisely that is a hallmark of today’s “progressives” - condemnation of people throughout history for not acting, in the past, according to the left’s so highly refined wisdom received just last week from ivy covered halls within hallowed ivory towers.
There is no question that, in the past, the best of universities did make a positive difference. Universities certainly could make a difference today and in the future – but they won’t, for the reasons CW states so eloquently.
An old boss once told me – there are two ways to learn anything. One way is to discover it for yourself; the other way is to have someone tell you, either face-to-face (eg a university lecture) or through the medium of print.
Carnegie was a great believer in what we might call the self-directed student, able to learn through the medium of books. My guess is that the great scientists outside the universities at Bell Labs had mostly been such self-directed students. The universities did not teach them; rather, the universities provided an environment where they could learn through their own efforts by investing their own time. Clearly, such an environment does not require all the expensive overhead of today’s woke academy.
They are certainly not beyond you but were probably not well articulated. I’ve encountered material from the Discovery Institute from their early period (90s) but the most recent was on Peter Robinson’s Uncommon Knowledge, in which Meyer, Berlinski, and Gelernter were guests (link below). I remember the statistical arguments well because of their errors.
The basic argument was that the series of events required was so unlikely as to be nearly impossible. The trouble with this argument is that the sine qua non of the unlikely events’ observation is that the events occurred. As the trio were making their argument, I was screaming at the screen, “Haven’t you guys heard of the Anthropic Principle?”
The argument is fleshed out in detail in this article by Hans von Storch in his critique of climate ‘science’ statistics. In this context, rare climate events are given unwarranted statistical significance. His example is the Mexican Hat, a natural rock formation in southern Utah. Briefly, he gives the (wrong) statistical analysis concerning whether the Mexican Hat is natural or man-made. If you drive around the Southwest and observe a million piles of rock, only one in a million will be in the shape of a guy wearing a sombrero. Hence, the probability that the Mexican Hat is natural is one in a million, so it’s most likely man-made, i.e., intelligent design.
Quoting von Storch:
Obviously, this argument is pretty absurd - but where is the logical error? The fundamental error is that the null hypothesis is not independent of the data which are used to conduct the test. We know a-priori that the Mexican Hat is a rare event, therefore the impossibility of finding such a combination of stones cannot be used as evidence against its natural origin.The same trick can of course be used to “prove” that any rare event is “non-natural”, be it a heat wave or a particularly violent storm — the probability of observing a rare event is small.
This paper made such an impression on me that I visited the Mexican Hat in 2019 to see for myself.
Umm.. no. There’s a lot of physics you have to know to come up with a transistor and I’m sure those guys all took a bunch of classes on electrodynamics, quantum mechanics, and solid state physics. While it is possible, in principle, to learn these things by candlelight while ensconced in a garret, it’s far more likely that they learned them in class by attending lectures, working problem sets that some TA corrected, brainstorming with fellow students, and talking to their professors.
Having smart people around you to bounce off ideas is of immeasurable help, including faculty and students. Shockley’s thesis was entitled Electronic bands in sodium chloride, which is some solid state physics closely related to semiconductor physics. His doctoral advisor was a brilliant physicist who undoubtedly provided important guidance. A university is not just a bunch of lecture halls populated by boring speakers droning on to their hapless audience. Science is, above all, a collaborative enterprise.
Science should be, inter alia, a collaborative enterprise. But what happens when most of the potential collaborators are focused on climbing the academic greasy pole, kowtowing to the Global Warming Scam, and ignoring the evidence when necessary?
There are definite advantages to collaboration – seeing things through someone else’s keyhole; getting alerted to connections and parallels of which one was unaware; facing the hard discipline of explaining one’s assessment to perceptive informed sceptics. That kind of environment might happen in a university … or it might not. It might happen in a Bell Labs too.
The issue of evolution is a good example of the utter failure of today’s academy. It is clear that natural selection occurs (just as conscious selective breeding by farmers occurs), but it can only be a part of a more complex story. Most of the academics who support evolution are not interested in science, only in crushing religion. If they were really interested in science, they would be working hard to uncover the rest of the story – a truly fascinating challenge! But that search for the truth is not happening in today’s universities.
Sure, we agree the academy is currently corrupt and useless, for the most part. Your previous comments were about universities as they were in the past.
I don’t know if that’s true, re: evolutionary theory. There are a few noisy people like Dawkins who lately mostly cares about crushing religion, though I must say that his book The Selfish Gene is superb. My sense is that many are quietly working on the rest of the story; you just don’t hear about it.
As to my understanding of Darwinism and its rebuttal by Stephen Meyer, I defer to John Walker’;s review of Meyer’s first book - Signature in the Cell. Though they are only part of a larger argument, similar statistical methods are applied in his second book - Darwin’s Doubt.
