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The Problem with Universities

Extract from personal correspondence with PDM.

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The inflection of Univ education to techno-bureaucracy is built on top of an institution which is and has always been elitist in its structure and ethos. What has gone wrong, IMHO, is not that there is a coterie of right-minded administrators and their lackeys now running the show, rather that this the meritocratic and elitist nature of the thing has been twisted and captured by a group alien in spirit and mind to the foundations of the academy itself.

 Education (and, yes, science), is anti-democratic and it is the “democratization” (commodification, adulteration etc etc) of it which is reducing the noble calling of this grand feudal institution to mush.

 The vast expansion of public higher education after WW2 may be looked at part of the brief period of social democracy which followed upon the depredations of the war. It was also clearly a desire of the electorate to provide the benefits of education to their children (even in my little lower middle class and working class East End of Houston). But they were sold a bill  of goods. Whatever learning acquired had to be recaptured in the interests of the technocratic and … the neo-liberals. The cost of such being passed over onto the students and their parents themselves, as the State withdrew its support. The banks, which are printing money (what else is debt to a bank?) on the backs of all this, jumped in to capture this “market”.

 The University needs more, not less elitism, and should cost a hell of a lot less than it does. Which should mean less for professors as well as far fewer administrators.

On this point I recently twat: https://twitter.com/geogeoplots/status/1304136748348272640. As usual, whistling in the wind.

 I don’t know what I’d do if I were young again but I was always dubious about the expressed goals of universities and ended up there only by chance, I can see in retrospect. Not that I don’t consider myself as part of the natural ruling intellectual elite. Just that I think I belonged to it through my own efforts and starting at an early age, when, for ex, I used to read encyclopedias. For fun.

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Critical Race Theory Is a Hammer Looking for Nails.

In a racist society a racialized response to racism is to he expected. It will not, alas, bring an end to racism, rather reinforce it.

Critical race theory is an ideology in most senses of the word. But to attempt to personally exonerate (“white”) racism by allowing that it is not attitudinal rather systemic is vain. How can anything be systemic without involving attitudes?

Critical race theory is a hammer looking for nails. There are plenty of nails around, so no need to go turning every little nub into one.

Awareness of racism is but one tool among others, because, to adopt another piece of jargon, race is one among many intersections of the wider problem of class, caste and gender inequality.

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Malheureusement, les idées de Foucault & Derrida (disons de #biopolitique & #deconstruction) se sont échappées en anglais pour devenir virulentes. Comme si le milieux français, où les abstractions prolifèrent, conférait une immunité contre la prise d’idées trop au sérieux [Tweeted on geogeoplots] 

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As Adorable as They May Be

Children, adorable as they universally are, function as little germ factories with a suboptimal sense of personal space and hand hygiene.

– Anjana Ahuja FT 1-2 Aug. p 7

On cancelling Halloween: “I don’t think allowing lots of little hands to rummage through sweets would be a good idea.”

– Jamie Dowery Guardian 13 Sept

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Sid Meier’s Memoir

I was a fan. Of video games. But that was back in the Pleistocene of the computer age.

I did get beyond Pong, all the way to Pac-Man, Bizarro and Tempest, the last my fav. But that was before the RNA of FRP (fantasy role playing) games infected that genre ;-).

At the same time I discovered something even more amazing: basic word-processing, which was then itself infected by HTML.
For a while I was absorbed with the possibilities of hypertexts. Wrote a couple of fortunately unsuccessful grant proposals to markup a corpus of writing in creole languages, create a data-base, etc.
Though I remained vested in Texts, I admit to having passed hours on Flight Instructor with a then young nephew of Nasrin’s, Bob / Babak. Also, used to play Super Mario with another adolescent son of a colleague in Edmonton. The adults would go off into another room and drink their beer.
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On Sep 10, 2020, at 15:06, XX wrote:
Wow–cool!  The ghost-writing by your niece.  I didn’t know you were a fan of computer games.  I guess this is a bit sophisticated for my 12-year-old grandson, but he says he wants to be in the gaming world as a career!

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On 2020-09-10 14:52, George Lang wrote:

I don’t know why I feel the atavistic urge to signal that my niece Jennifer Noonan ghosted Sid Meier’s (the inventor of Civilization) Memoir!

 

 

On Sep 10, 2020, at 15:06, XX wrote:

Wow–cool!  The ghost-writing by your niece.  I didn’t know you were a fan of computer games.  I guess this is a bit sophisticated for my 12-year-old grandson, but he says he wants to be in the gaming world as a career!

On 2020-09-10 14:52, George Lang wrote:

For these with a past or a present or an interest in computer games; myself, but the first. I don’t know why I feel the atavistic urge to signal that my niece Jennifer Noonan ghosted Sid Meier’s (the inventor of Civilization) Memoir!