It"s Time To Rethink Education – Part 3 (The Future Of College)

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Over the next ten years, I suspect the concept of a college education will be questioned to such an extent, and by so many people, that all assumptions we currently hold dear will be discarded. The spark for this momentous shift will start, as is so often the case, with simple economics.

Too many young people have taken on too much debt to get jobs that didn’t require this education they were told they needed. We quite literally have an entire generation that understands this intimately, and this understanding will shape the way they see college, and education in general, as they raise kids of their own.

As I write this, I’m excited to say we live in one of the most extraordinary times in human history. The old way of doing things in virtually every aspect of human civilization has either broken down, or is breaking down as I write this. Communications, media, finance, money itself, etc. The list is seemingly endless, and education is no exception. In fact, I think education is an example of extremely low-hanging fruit and will be disrupted and decentralized in unimaginable ways in the years ahead.

If it was just a function of student debt, the changes in how human education functions going forward wouldn’t be as extreme as I expect. As I mentioned earlier, the problem of widespread debt serfdom is merely a catalyst for the paradigm level change I foresee. As younger generations who grew up with the internet start to question how schooling works, from kindergarten to grad school, it’ll become very apparent how archaic and stifling our current methods really are. I already highlighted many examples of this in Parts 1 and 2, so I’m not going to repeat myself. Today’s post will center around the concept of college, and whether or not people will perceive it as a useful experience in the decades to come. I suspect not.

As it stands today, there are two main reasons everyone thinks you need to go to college.

First, many employers (ridiculously) require a college degree to get a job.

 

Second, it’s become a societal norm and rite of passage.

There’s tremendous peer pressure to go to college so you’re not the person who gets condescending looks at the party when you sheepishly confess that you didn’t. In other words, we’ve created an irrational expectation for a college degree driven by the desire to attain specific employment and social opportunities. As such, all it will really take to end this ritual of going to college is a society wide mindset shift. These sorts of things can happen, and I fully expect this one will.

One contemporary example of how this sort of thing can take root can be seen in the burgeoning Bitcoin and crypto asset economy. This has been the most lucrative and dynamic spaces to work in over the past couple of years, and no one in it really cares what college you went to, or if you went at all. What matters at the end of the day is talent, and if you’re a talented programer you’ll find your spot. After all, we don’t even know who Satoshi Nakamoto is and it doesn’t matter. What matters is the code and it’s ability to fundamentally change the world. I think this the mindset of the future, where dominator hierarchies are replaced by merit based hierarchies (holarchies).

As Ken Wilber described (this will sound like gibberish unless you’ve read my work around Spiral Dynamics):

That lessening of green’s pervasive hostility and vindictiveness toward all previous stages of development is what we identied as “step one” in the requisite self-healing of green. There is at least a decent likelihood that this will—and to some degree already has—begun to happen. On the other hand, “step two”—the realization that growth holarchies provide the actual basis of the value judgments that green is already making, and that these growth holarchies also are the only truly effective means to displace the dominator hierarchies that green correctly ranks on the bottom of the list of social desirables—is a bit less likely to occur at the green level itself, but will most likely depend upon the transformation to integral 2nd tier. My strong suspicion, therefore, is that green will perform a good deal of step one on its own, and that this will have a very positive effect on culture at large. (And conversely, to the extent that at least this first step is not taken, then the self-corrective drive of evolution will continue to push, and push, and push into existing affairs, driving more Trump-like “disasters” as evolution redoubles its efforts to force its way through these recalcitrant obstructions.)

Many people reading this will say that what’s happening with Bitcoin and crypto assets is just an exception. Others will proclaim that it’s all just a tulip bubble anyway, and things will go back to the way they were after it pops. I completely disagree. Whether Bitcoin conquers the world or not time will tell, but the ethos it represents about the world (decentralization) isn’t going anywhere.

What was the right choice for an extremely bright young person over the last 5 years.
Go to college or work on Bitcoin?
This will be increasingly common going forward.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) December 15, 2017

Moreover, as I explained in yesterday’s post, my wife and I are seriously considering unschooling. I’m not just blowing smoke on this, I’m looking at potentially putting my money where my mouth is.

Not only that, but it’s increasingly clear to me that the college experience is in many ways making people dumber. To prove this point, I highly recommend everyone read an extremely important article written by two former professors at Evergreen college, Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, titled: Bonfire of the Academies: Two Professors on How Leftist Intolerance is Killing Higher Education.

Here are few excerpts:

At colleges and universities all over the country, students are protesting in increasingly virulent and sometimes violent ways. They demand safe spaces and trigger warnings, shouting down those with whom they disagree. It has become rote for outsiders to claim that the inmates are running the asylum; that this is analogous to Mao’s Red Guard, Germany’s brown shirts, the French Revolution’s Jacobins; and, when those being attacked are politically “left” themselves, that the Left is eating its own. These stories seem to validate every fantasy the Right ever had about the Left.

 

As two professors who recently resigned from positions at a college we loved, and who have always been on the progressive-left end of the political spectrum, we can say that, while none of those characterizations is exactly right, there is truth in each of them…

 

In 2015, Evergreen hired a new president. Trained as a sociologist, George Bridges did two things upon arrival. First, he hired an old friend to talk one-on-one to members of our community — faculty, staff, and students. We talked about our values and our visions for the college. But the benefit of hindsight suggests that he was looking for something else. He was mapping us, assessing our differences, our blind spots, and the social tensions that ran beneath the surface. Second, Bridges fired the provost, Michael Zimmerman. The provost, usually synonymous with the vice president for academics, is the chief academic officer at an institution of higher education. Zimmerman would have disapproved of what Bridges had in mind and would have had some power to stop it. But he was replaced by a timid (though well-liked) insider who became a pawn due to his compromised interim status and his desire not to make waves.

 

Having mapped the faculty and fired the provost, Bridges began reworking the college in earnest. Surprise announcements became the norm as opportunities for discussion dwindled.

 

The president took aim at what made Evergreen unique, such as full-time programs. He fattened the administration, creating expensive vice president positions at an unprecedented rate, while budgets tightened elsewhere due to drops in student enrollment and disappearing state dollars. He went after Evergreen’s unparalleled faculty autonomy, which was essential to the unique teaching done by the best professors.

 

All of this should have been alarming to a faculty in which professors have traditionally viewed administrative interference in academic matters with great suspicion. But Bridges was strategic and forged an alliance with factions known to be obsessed with race. He draped the “equity” banner around everything he did. Advocating that Evergreen embrace itself as a “College of Social Justice,” he argued that faculty autonomy unjustly puts the focus on teachers rather than students, and that the new VP for Equity and Inclusion would help us serve our underserved populations. But no discussion was allowed of students who did not meet the narrow criteria of being “underserved.” Because of the wrapping, concerns about policy changes were dismissed as “anti-equity.” What was in the nicely wrapped box turned out to be something else entirely.

Imagine being a parent who spent years of savings to send their child to Evergreen. Irate wouldn’t even begin to describe it.

In the decades to come, the people who will increasingly shape our world probably won’t have a college degree at all — and that’s probably a good thing.

*  *  *

If you liked this article and enjoy my work, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit our Support Page to show your appreciation for independent content creators.

Evergreen College Punishes 80 Students For Menacing Protests That Shut Down Campus

After standing idly by as radical cultural Marxists forced biology professor Bret Weinstein into hiding, the Evergreen State College administration has decided to penalize 80 students for their involvement with disruptive protests earlier this year that transformed the sleepy state school into a symbol of leftist repression.

Initially, College President George Bridges promised that no students would be held accountable for effectively seizing control of the campus library after a confrontation with Weinstein erupted into a full-scale riot last semester. That incident marked the beginning of months of demonstrations and protests aimed at punishing “racist” administrators, teachers, students and virtually anybody who disagreed with the students’ demands or their characterization of authority figures as racist, malevolent villains.

During the student uprising. school officials at the 4,000-student school received approximately 120 incident reports involving 180 students during the days-long series of protests, according to the Daily Caller.

“Of those 180 students, approximately 80 were found responsible for their actions,” Evergreen State spokeswoman Sandra Kaiser told The Olympian. “They received sanctions ranging from formal warnings, community service and probation, to suspension.”

An unidentified person who does not attend Evergreen State was also “arrested and permanently barred from campus,” an Evergreen spokesman said.

Video footage from the campus was widely shared on YouTube and social media. In one memorable video – recorded at the beginning of the protests over the administration’s refusal to fire Weinstein -  students at a tense community meeting can be heard going berserk, obscenely screaming about “racist white teachers” and “white-assed administrators.”

Weinstein, who published an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about his experience at Evergreen, and his wife were paid $500,000 by the school to settle a $3.8 million lawsuit he filed after he was forced to flee while students toting bats and clubs stopped and searched cars traveling through campus searching for him.

In early June, classes at Evergreen were canceled for three days after the school received a threat of violence on campus. In an disturbingly ironic twist, the school later had to send an email kindly asking students to stop forming vigilante patrols armed with blunt weapons.

The threats forced Evergreen State to shell out approximately $100,000 to rent a nearby minor league baseball stadium for its commencement ceremony, which had traditionally been held on the campus quad, which is called…wait for it…Red Square (the is derived from its red-brick surface).

It was around this time that public opinion appeared to turn against the students, as the protests were roundly mocked in the media, inspiring some Washington State lawmakers to threaten to revoke the school’s funding.

In a troubling sign for the school administration that no doubt played into their decision to punish the offending protesters, enrollment at the school plunged by 5% for the current academic year, leaving the school with a $2.1 million budget shortfall.

When The Left Turns On Its Own

Authored by Bari Weiss, op-ed via The New York Times,

Bret Weinstein is a biology professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., who supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

You could be forgiven for thinking that Mr. Weinstein, who identifies himself as “deeply progressive,” is just the kind of teacher that students at one of the most left-wing colleges in the country would admire. Instead, he has become a victim of an increasingly widespread campaign by leftist students against anyone who dares challenge ideological orthodoxy on campus.

This professor’s crime? He had the gall to challenge a day of racial segregation.

A bit of background: The “Day of Absence” is an Evergreen tradition that stretches back to the 1970s. As Mr. Weinstein explained on Wednesday in The Wall Street Journal, “in previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus — a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning.” This year, the script was flipped: “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave campus for the day’s activities,” reported the student newspaper on the change. The decision was made after students of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

Mr. Weinstein thought this was wrong. The biology professor said as much in a letter to Rashida Love, the school’s Director of First Peoples Multicultural Advising Services. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles,” he wrote, “and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away.” The first instance, he argued, “is a forceful call to consciousness.” The second “is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” In other words, what purported to be a request for white students and professors to leave campus was something more than that. It was an act of moral bullying — to stay on campus as a white person would mean to be tarred as a racist.

Reasonable people can debate whether or not social experiments like a Day of Absence are enlightening. Perhaps there’s a case to be made that a white-free day could be a useful way to highlight the lack of racial diversity, particularly at a proudly progressive school like Evergreen. Yet reasonable debate has made itself absent at Evergreen.

For expressing his view, Mr. Weinstein was confronted outside his classroom last week by a group of some 50 students insisting he was a racist. The video of that exchange — “You’re supporting white supremacy” is one of the more milquetoast quotes — must be seen to be believed. It will make anyone who believes in the liberalizing promise of higher education quickly lose heart. When a calm Mr. Weinstein tries to explain that his only agenda is “the truth,” the students chortle.

Following the protest, college police, ordered by Evergreen’s president to stand down, told Mr. Weinstein they couldn’t guarantee his safety on campus. In the end, Mr. Weinstein held his biology class in a public park. Meantime, photographs and names of his students were circulated online. “Fire Bret” graffiti showed up on campus buildings. What was that about safe spaces?

Watching the way George Bridges, the president of Evergreen, has handled this situation put me in mind of a line from Allan Bloom’s book “The Closing of the American Mind.” Mr. Bloom was writing about administrators’ reaction to student radicals in the 1960s, but he might as well be writing about Evergreen: “A few students discovered that pompous teachers who catechized them about academic freedom could, with a little shove, be made into dancing bears.”

At a town hall meeting, Mr. Bridges described the protestors as “courageous” and expressed his gratitude for “this catalyst to expedite the work to which we are jointly committed.” Of course, there was also pablum about how “free speech must be fostered and encouraged.” But if that’s what Mr. Bridges really believes, why isn’t he doing everything in his power to protect a professor who exercised it and condemn the mob that tried to stifle him?

The Weinstein saga is just the latest installment in a series of similar instances of illiberalism on American campuses. In March, a planned speech by Charles Murray at Middlebury ended with the political scientists escorted off campus by police and his interviewer, Professor Allison Stanger, in a neck brace. In April, a speech at Claremont McKenna by the conservative writer Heather Mac Donald had to be livestreamed when protestors blocked access to the auditorium.

Shutting down conservatives has become de rigueur. But now anti-free-speech activists are increasingly turning their ire on free-thinking progressives. Liberals shouldn’t cede the responsibility to defend free speech on college campuses to conservatives. After all, without free speech, what’s liberalism about?