1. Thank God I took a science based degree albeit only shortly after Pontius was a Pilot.
And
2. It would be an interesting clinical research project to see where the overlap came in reduced intellectual capability between early onset dementia and undertaking certain arts based degrees
1) Aesthetics matter. A lot. Adding arts to STEM to make it STEAM is a good thing.
2) STEM people have to be able to work with people and know how people work. Some of the nastiest progressives I know are computer science grads who think that if society was coded (as in computer code) just right, we'd have the perfect society. People are not computers, and as such they cannot be programmed. Quit trying to program the perfect progressive society. Nobody died and made you Claude.
3) Demographic studies (gender studies, ethnic studies, etc.) are lite at best and navel-gazing at worst. There is nothing that these fields add in terms of value that they could not do better as part of a more comprehensive humanities or social science field, such as sociology, history, literature etc., that would regularly subject their assertions to real analysis.
Lots of arts-types make for perfectly vile and insane progressives. At least STEM gives one a much better shot at appreciating concepts such as distributions and probability, a passing awareness of the laws of physics, and, more often than not, the concept of objective truth.
Truly it depends on your faculty.. my first year sociology 101 course includes three weeks dedicated to stats and reading them and another three weeks dedicated to methodology, quant and qual. Which is a lot for poor students gleefully under the impression that maths was a thing of the past for them.
One of my best classes for learning how to evaluate scientific papers actually was a psychology class (behaviourism), surprisingly medical school was quite light on examining studies analytically.
This affair makes a mockery of the wide world of black scholars, writers, teachers etc who obtained their credentials legitimately - not stealing the work of others and not fabricating a life story. All on the faculty and administrators of Cambridge who facilitated this farce.
You have to wonder. What exactly are people who support changing (lowering) standards for non-whites actually saying? They are saying that they view them as their inferiors, that they can’t meet the same standards as whites. So who is the real racist here and is this the real source of “systemic racism?”
When I got my anthropology degree in the early-90s, the discipline was very conscious of the ‘softness’ of it’s scientific bona fides, and making fanciful and/or emotional claims was very much frowned upon. What a stellar tactic, making rigor racist, to undo 100 years of effort at culling Rousseauian twaddle.
I admit to reading this more for the pleasure than any particular insight, since none of this is new - but a pleasure it was!
It reminded me of giving up politics and philosophy for French because class with these clueless kids waxing lyrical, but inanely, about their clearly very broken world models was just too much.
I think the police part of this was underdone, though. This is merely the latest, and far from the gravest, symptom of something very badly wrong with the UK's police.
Apart from a thorough purge of the management ranks, I'm not really sure what the solution is.
As someone who has just recently completed a higher degree research thesis... It took 5 months for my thesis to go through my University's checks BEFORE it got to the examiners themselves. This includes a Turnitin check. That process can take another 3 or 4 months of the examiners disagree too much on the merits of the thesis.
Not only that, but my supervisors would have gotten into MAJOR trouble if they let me get to the stage of submission and my thesis failed an internal review or Turnitin. Never mind whatever the hell went wrong in the faculty hiring committee...
ALL those people need to be subject to as much public scrutiny as Arday himself. And the lot of them horse whipped, fired, then rehired to be summarily horse whipped again and then fired bodily. I don't know HOW so many checks can fail like that.
Also, education 'scholarship' is so thoroughly contaminated with theory (I was shocked as an undergrad what my friends in Education were subjected to and gave impromptu common room lectures on theory to help them make sense of the garbage and see that it is garbage) the only thing for it is fire or nuclear amounts of glycol phosphates.
I agree that shifting teacher training exclusively to universities was a mistake. It truly should be an apprentice-type model to ensure young teachers get in classrooms and learn quickly whether they're cut out for it.
Part of the problem is that there's no feedback mechanism to the universities about the quality they're producing. Most teachers from any institution can get a job, even if they only last a couple of years. Universities, if nothing else respond to incentives quite quickly sometimes.
"That doesn’t mean that all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences are empty. They’re not. Only the theory subjects were fatuous and without intellectual merit."
Back in the day, that being the late 1980s, when I read Computer Science at Cambridge certain fellow CompSci students had a habit of attending lectures in the Philosophy department because a) they were in the same building as some of ours and thus b) it was a way to spend the hour between lectures a couple of days a week when we had a gap.
They were invited to leave at one point because the Philosophers were being lectured on logic by someone who had very odd ideas about logic and who was very upset when the CompSci-ers used symbolic logic, boolean algebra and the like to prove that he was talking total tosh. I don't recall all the details but N Mandela and M Thatcher featured in the lectures (guess which was the goodie according to the lecturer) and the lecturer was particularly upset when the two were replaced by Cat and Dog in the "logical analysis" and it was shown that you could make either "good" depending on, IIRC, which order you stated various things
That's regrettable. I'm glad that at the University of Melbourne from the late 70s to the early 2000s Brian(?) Salter taught formal logic very well and without ever mentioning Dame Thatcher or Mandela, nor insofar as I recall cats or dogs.
A chat with a mathematician (I think at Warwick) on Twitter reminded me to add a little detail about my set theory & logic subject, which was co-taught by the maths and philosophy departments.
Very briefly, the maths department lecturer was much, much better than the philosophy department lecturer, and the maths department tutors were much better than the philosophy department tutors. This became so notable that I recall conspiring with three or four other people to go over to the maths department, find out who all their postgrads and post-docs were, and look out for those names when attending tutorials in set theory & logic.
Have to laugh at some of the thinking on this from someone bragging about a 1st class degree.
"My Father died in 911." Well, maybe you should direct any questions you have to your government that has been interfering in M.E. affairs for over 120 yrs, not out of concern for the people there, but for pursuing commercial gain for their own corporations and geostrategic aims . The young lady likely has little say in her country's political system, given she's female and likely a Saudi citizen with no practical political say, and most of the 911 terrorists were Saudis.
"My ancestors were slaves." Well young lady, it likely has a lot to do with where you are in life today, compared to the descendants of slaves. You are not responsible for what your forebears did, but you certainly benefited from their actions.
This isn't just another little internet outrage anymore. Universities, the police and other institutions need to be purged of these politics, or we are heading into another dark age.
Something else to consider is the expansion of higher education. Standards were lowered across the board, but it was humanities and arts subjects that expanded the most. And this, in turn, accelerated a process of de-intellectualism.
I studied a combined English and Film Studies degree at a Russell Group uni in the mid 2000s. This was pre-woke yet it was clear that not all modules were equally rigorous. There were also no required subjects, leaving students free to select the lightest load for themselves. I got First after First after First in all my essays and I'm not gifted or anything (I got rejected from Oxbridge and Warwick).
The fact is, too many students had been allowed to enrol in my course who were not cut out for uni and, since grading basically occurs on a curve, all you had to do to stand out far above the norm was write well-researched, well-argued essays with correct use of footnotes and no grammatical errors. You didn't have to be particularly original; it was enough to cite the right sources and write clearly (although to my credit there were definitely some modules where I went beyond, as the subjects interested me).
It was quite the realisation, as I'd come from a high school environment where I was smart but nowhere near the top of the class, so I wasn't expecting to excel at my degree straight off the bat. Yet when I looked at my friends studying medicine, law and engineering, it was clear that their courses had not been dumbed down. I remember a friend working super hard on her law dissertation (which I read and was very impressed by) only to get a high 2:1. I know she put in more effort than me, and yet I got a high First.
In short, for the humanities to recalibrate they need to stop being the dumping ground for below-average and mediocre students who shouldn't really be going to uni. Cohort sizes need to come right down. And theory departments (Race Studies, Gender Studies, etc.) need to be culled entirely.
Having met my wife at Oxford in the 80s I can confirm that Jurisprudence (which she read) was probably twice as hard as my Geography degree - it certainly took twice the hours. And the ‘philosophy of geography’ module on my course was without doubt comparatively the most ‘woo woo’ load of nonsense. Wish I had thought about trying to do that module stoned: especially Marxist geography which was palpable boll****.
Excellent commentary.
My immediate thoughts are :
1. Thank God I took a science based degree albeit only shortly after Pontius was a Pilot.
And
2. It would be an interesting clinical research project to see where the overlap came in reduced intellectual capability between early onset dementia and undertaking certain arts based degrees
The Oresteia is sometimes subtitled “From Vengance to Justice.” A big step forward, but backsliding is often promoted as Justice.
Random observations:
1) Aesthetics matter. A lot. Adding arts to STEM to make it STEAM is a good thing.
2) STEM people have to be able to work with people and know how people work. Some of the nastiest progressives I know are computer science grads who think that if society was coded (as in computer code) just right, we'd have the perfect society. People are not computers, and as such they cannot be programmed. Quit trying to program the perfect progressive society. Nobody died and made you Claude.
3) Demographic studies (gender studies, ethnic studies, etc.) are lite at best and navel-gazing at worst. There is nothing that these fields add in terms of value that they could not do better as part of a more comprehensive humanities or social science field, such as sociology, history, literature etc., that would regularly subject their assertions to real analysis.
I sympathise, but I disagree.
Lots of arts-types make for perfectly vile and insane progressives. At least STEM gives one a much better shot at appreciating concepts such as distributions and probability, a passing awareness of the laws of physics, and, more often than not, the concept of objective truth.
I don't disagree. I support academic well-roundedness regardless if you come from a STEM direction or a libarts direction.
(Full disclosure: I have an engineering degree and a business degree from two highly respected Southern US public universities.)
And knowledge of prob and stats is an essential part of a great bullshit detector.
And, yeah, either the bridge holds or it doesn't. Feeeeelz don't come into play.
Truly it depends on your faculty.. my first year sociology 101 course includes three weeks dedicated to stats and reading them and another three weeks dedicated to methodology, quant and qual. Which is a lot for poor students gleefully under the impression that maths was a thing of the past for them.
One of my best classes for learning how to evaluate scientific papers actually was a psychology class (behaviourism), surprisingly medical school was quite light on examining studies analytically.
It still is.
This affair makes a mockery of the wide world of black scholars, writers, teachers etc who obtained their credentials legitimately - not stealing the work of others and not fabricating a life story. All on the faculty and administrators of Cambridge who facilitated this farce.
The soft bigotry of low expectations....
As I noted in more detail in this comment elsewhere on substack - https://substack.com/profile/13379579-francis-turner/note/c-296179748
You have to wonder. What exactly are people who support changing (lowering) standards for non-whites actually saying? They are saying that they view them as their inferiors, that they can’t meet the same standards as whites. So who is the real racist here and is this the real source of “systemic racism?”
When I got my anthropology degree in the early-90s, the discipline was very conscious of the ‘softness’ of it’s scientific bona fides, and making fanciful and/or emotional claims was very much frowned upon. What a stellar tactic, making rigor racist, to undo 100 years of effort at culling Rousseauian twaddle.
At UNSW in the 90's at least one toilet stall had some graffiti just above the toilet roll "arts degree please take one".
I saw similar at UQ in the same period. A version of it may have even finished up in Semper Floreat, the student newspaper.
Really well-written, and beyond the excellent prose I absolutely adore the flavorful anglicisms. I want to learn to speak/write like that.
Gosh, thanks!
I admit to reading this more for the pleasure than any particular insight, since none of this is new - but a pleasure it was!
It reminded me of giving up politics and philosophy for French because class with these clueless kids waxing lyrical, but inanely, about their clearly very broken world models was just too much.
I think the police part of this was underdone, though. This is merely the latest, and far from the gravest, symptom of something very badly wrong with the UK's police.
Apart from a thorough purge of the management ranks, I'm not really sure what the solution is.
In the US Glenn Loury and John McWhorter acknowledge the gap.
It's my impression that the gap is generally acknowledged but it's ascribed to racism, internalized racism, internal colonization, etc. and so on.
Helen, Loury discusses this with Charles Murray author of the Bell Curve here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sR7gCoJijjI&pp=ygUaZ2xlbm4gbG91cnkgY2hhcmxlcyBtdXJyYXk%3D
Loury has always been very brave about tackling this. I may not agree with all of his conclusions but his guts are admirable.
That’s right.
As someone who has just recently completed a higher degree research thesis... It took 5 months for my thesis to go through my University's checks BEFORE it got to the examiners themselves. This includes a Turnitin check. That process can take another 3 or 4 months of the examiners disagree too much on the merits of the thesis.
Not only that, but my supervisors would have gotten into MAJOR trouble if they let me get to the stage of submission and my thesis failed an internal review or Turnitin. Never mind whatever the hell went wrong in the faculty hiring committee...
ALL those people need to be subject to as much public scrutiny as Arday himself. And the lot of them horse whipped, fired, then rehired to be summarily horse whipped again and then fired bodily. I don't know HOW so many checks can fail like that.
Also, education 'scholarship' is so thoroughly contaminated with theory (I was shocked as an undergrad what my friends in Education were subjected to and gave impromptu common room lectures on theory to help them make sense of the garbage and see that it is garbage) the only thing for it is fire or nuclear amounts of glycol phosphates.
there must be a difference in expectations between sinecures for onside political activists and ordinary doctorates
The creation of Education faculties and departments was a mistake. Keeping them is becoming worse.
I agree that shifting teacher training exclusively to universities was a mistake. It truly should be an apprentice-type model to ensure young teachers get in classrooms and learn quickly whether they're cut out for it.
Part of the problem is that there's no feedback mechanism to the universities about the quality they're producing. Most teachers from any institution can get a job, even if they only last a couple of years. Universities, if nothing else respond to incentives quite quickly sometimes.
"That doesn’t mean that all disciplines within the humanities and social sciences are empty. They’re not. Only the theory subjects were fatuous and without intellectual merit."
Back in the day, that being the late 1980s, when I read Computer Science at Cambridge certain fellow CompSci students had a habit of attending lectures in the Philosophy department because a) they were in the same building as some of ours and thus b) it was a way to spend the hour between lectures a couple of days a week when we had a gap.
They were invited to leave at one point because the Philosophers were being lectured on logic by someone who had very odd ideas about logic and who was very upset when the CompSci-ers used symbolic logic, boolean algebra and the like to prove that he was talking total tosh. I don't recall all the details but N Mandela and M Thatcher featured in the lectures (guess which was the goodie according to the lecturer) and the lecturer was particularly upset when the two were replaced by Cat and Dog in the "logical analysis" and it was shown that you could make either "good" depending on, IIRC, which order you stated various things
That's regrettable. I'm glad that at the University of Melbourne from the late 70s to the early 2000s Brian(?) Salter taught formal logic very well and without ever mentioning Dame Thatcher or Mandela, nor insofar as I recall cats or dogs.
A chat with a mathematician (I think at Warwick) on Twitter reminded me to add a little detail about my set theory & logic subject, which was co-taught by the maths and philosophy departments.
Very briefly, the maths department lecturer was much, much better than the philosophy department lecturer, and the maths department tutors were much better than the philosophy department tutors. This became so notable that I recall conspiring with three or four other people to go over to the maths department, find out who all their postgrads and post-docs were, and look out for those names when attending tutorials in set theory & logic.
Very clever! I'm afraid that at Melbourne, iirc, we were sufficiently few that I'm not sure we really had separate tutes at all, in practicr
Wise planning. Indispensable when developing a curriculum
Have to laugh at some of the thinking on this from someone bragging about a 1st class degree.
"My Father died in 911." Well, maybe you should direct any questions you have to your government that has been interfering in M.E. affairs for over 120 yrs, not out of concern for the people there, but for pursuing commercial gain for their own corporations and geostrategic aims . The young lady likely has little say in her country's political system, given she's female and likely a Saudi citizen with no practical political say, and most of the 911 terrorists were Saudis.
"My ancestors were slaves." Well young lady, it likely has a lot to do with where you are in life today, compared to the descendants of slaves. You are not responsible for what your forebears did, but you certainly benefited from their actions.
Every time I think we’ve reached peak parody, they surprise me!
This isn't just another little internet outrage anymore. Universities, the police and other institutions need to be purged of these politics, or we are heading into another dark age.
Something else to consider is the expansion of higher education. Standards were lowered across the board, but it was humanities and arts subjects that expanded the most. And this, in turn, accelerated a process of de-intellectualism.
I studied a combined English and Film Studies degree at a Russell Group uni in the mid 2000s. This was pre-woke yet it was clear that not all modules were equally rigorous. There were also no required subjects, leaving students free to select the lightest load for themselves. I got First after First after First in all my essays and I'm not gifted or anything (I got rejected from Oxbridge and Warwick).
The fact is, too many students had been allowed to enrol in my course who were not cut out for uni and, since grading basically occurs on a curve, all you had to do to stand out far above the norm was write well-researched, well-argued essays with correct use of footnotes and no grammatical errors. You didn't have to be particularly original; it was enough to cite the right sources and write clearly (although to my credit there were definitely some modules where I went beyond, as the subjects interested me).
It was quite the realisation, as I'd come from a high school environment where I was smart but nowhere near the top of the class, so I wasn't expecting to excel at my degree straight off the bat. Yet when I looked at my friends studying medicine, law and engineering, it was clear that their courses had not been dumbed down. I remember a friend working super hard on her law dissertation (which I read and was very impressed by) only to get a high 2:1. I know she put in more effort than me, and yet I got a high First.
In short, for the humanities to recalibrate they need to stop being the dumping ground for below-average and mediocre students who shouldn't really be going to uni. Cohort sizes need to come right down. And theory departments (Race Studies, Gender Studies, etc.) need to be culled entirely.
Lots of really good observations there.
Agree quite strongly, and ten times more strongly when the places are publicly funded.
Having met my wife at Oxford in the 80s I can confirm that Jurisprudence (which she read) was probably twice as hard as my Geography degree - it certainly took twice the hours. And the ‘philosophy of geography’ module on my course was without doubt comparatively the most ‘woo woo’ load of nonsense. Wish I had thought about trying to do that module stoned: especially Marxist geography which was palpable boll****.