> With its 29 cantilevered roof planes and its clerestory glazed windows, it will quickly become the highlight of campus tours. Prospective students will look on with envy. Maybe it will attract more applicants.
I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top.
Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.
one conspiracy theory i have been stewing on for years is that the luxuriousness of modern colleges was an intentional move to neuter the political power of the youth following the student unrest of the 60s and 70s.
somebody made a conscious decision to turn college into a little utopian island divorced from reality to quell protests. students get their own on-campus entertainment venues, sports teams, luxurious dorms and dining halls, rec centers and gyms, on-campus health services. for some students this is designed to keep them content and docile, but for others its designed to let them learn about the injustices of the world while being quarantined away from it so they cant affect change.
and the most insidious part of it is that they're the ones paying for it (with interest!). by the time they are kicked out of this little cocoon, they're saddled with enough debt that they have no choice but to grind away at a job they hate for a few decades
If you’ve ever read science fiction about life in the ruins of an advanced culture, but you were irritated with how it skimmed over what the process of the fall was like— well, we sure have a wealth of those details now.
"Giant donations, he’s come to realize, often increase the university’s bills, generating new operating expenses for projects that may have only tenuous links to the university’s core mission. The new fixed costs cannibalize existing funding streams, increasing pressure to grow revenue."
I recently graduated (class of '25), and the thing I heard most often about my school's management was that over the past couple of decades, they more closely resembled a real estate holding company than a research university.
> He remembers when that building came up, back in 2001, replacing a grove of elm, beech, and oak trees on campus. The old arts center hadn’t been cheap: $17 million was real money at the turn of the millennium.
They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. There are many "temporary" Quonset huts around here twice that age. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.
When I was at university, my institution was investing $millions in building various new building. A grumbled to my supervisor, who explained to me that this was important to attracting new students.
It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.
I misread the title as "The Missuses of the University" and thought this might be the next iteration on the "Real Housewives" franchise: "Real Housewives of the University".
Sorry, didn't mean to distract from the serious topic at hand.
Beautiful essay. Such quiet scathing critique. Written from the POV of a history professor witness:
> The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza.
These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...
Johns Hopkins University is not a university. Many other "Universities" are not universities either.
"Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related.
I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.
i think the only people that realize this are people that are actively doing research in academia. not even the undergrads at the school realize that teaching undergrads is at best a side-hustle for the institution.
i've seen so many "our tuition pays your salary so you you need to XXX" type rants I've seen from disgruntled students/parents over the years and i've always bit my tongue when it comes to setting the record straight.
Johns Hopkins has a business school, the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, which was peculiarly not mentioned in the essay. You'd think their own business school would be capable of bringing fiscal sanity to the university?
"Limp signs on the fencing announce the opening of the SNF Agora Institute, by which, he’s informed, the university is “building stronger global democracy."
"In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..."
Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas.
What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?
A wise man once told me that a company or organization has enough professors or high level academics they must also run the show. They won't like it but they have to. You shouldn't have a layer above and pretend they know better. They will inflate the importance of stuff they can understand and ignore everything important.
A friend of mine was the head lab technician at a large prestigious research university.
I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process.
From talking to my friend, I realized:
- most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job
- they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible
- the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding
- the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc
Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.
I cherish my UCSD education and (equally, if not more) all the socializing that came with it.
The concept (and aims) of university faces the same headwinds of any business based on intellectual property in America: artificial moats of IP law.
China's manufacturing success partially stems from the government's inability to enforce IP law.
Thankfully, ideas want to be free, and LLMs give us the best-yet UI to information.
To me, Hacker News is a university. It's a place where I come to learn (from thousands of "teachers") and these "teachers" are actually also students, learning as well.
Title could be "The Museums of the University". This is not only a US phenomenon, some European universities are essentially becoming museums if you look at their budgets and administrative priorities.
Fun read focused on the financial misallocations and warped sense of priority of the administration. The reason, of course, is that the university has lost its way, and if you want to know what their functional aim is, as chaotic as it may be, ask "who benefits?".
Of course, the university lost its way quite some time ago. Indeed, education in general has. But if we focus on the university, the basic question we should be asking - one that should inform all of our decisions and actions - is "for the sake of what?".
What is the university for?
If you ask most people, perhaps especially since the War when university attendance exploded, the answer will likely be "to get a job". So, the university, it is supposed, is primarily an institution centered around career training and preparation. Indeed, if you grew up during the last half century, you might have grown accustomed to hearing a certain negative encouragement to attend university, namely, that if you wish to avoid working at McDonald's - which is taken to be the worst fate imaginable - then you must have a college degree. This was an unquestioned iron rule that insinuated a certain conception of the primary purpose of unviersity education. In communities dominated by blue collar workers, the university was sold as one's ticket out of the ostensibly dreary world of manual labor into the ranks of the white collar professional classes.
(Gen Z begs to differ; interest in the so-called trades has increased by 1500%.)
Now, assuming university education is job training, we might wish to ask whether they are effective at this task, especially given the astronomical costs of tuition to which students are yoked after graduation. Here, the answer is far from clear and one suspects negative for most graduates.
Even so, the concept of university-as-job-training-center itself is a debasement of the original purpose of the university. The primary purpose was historically embodied by the liberal arts, which is to say, the free arts. These are opposed to the so-called servile arts. Guess into which "job training" fits best. The liberal arts as originally taught were not the liberal arts as we imagine them today. The foundation of what you might call undergraduate education was the trivium and the quadrivium. The first taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric in order to prepare students to be able to reason, evaluate arguments, and to make arguments themselves. It freed a person by developing basic intellectually competence. In the second, students were taught arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Despite what are for us today some strange names, these prepared the student for quantitative reasoning: quantity as such, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space-time. From there, students continued onward to study philosophy, medicine, theology, law, and so on. The purpose of these liberal arts was to produce a free man, free because he is enabled to pursue the truth.
Even the so-called research university demotes the primary function of the university by making pedagogy a kind of afterthought or concession. Eduating students is secondary; the primary aim of faculty is research.
Of course, people used to attend university at the age of 14, the age at which we typically enter secondary school, so the boundaries have shifted, but I would nonetheless argue that education - and especially the university - should return to its roots as an intellectual community of faculty and students oriented toward producing free human beings capable of seeking the truth. Research should take place in dedicated institutes. Students are a long way from research anyway, which in any case tends to be specialized. The trades should be taught in trade schools and institutions focused on producing competence in those areas. Institutional function should be clear so that an institution can acheive its end successfully instead of trying to be everything and nothing. Focused study of spec...
28 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 59.4 ms ] threadhttps://www.motorious.com/articles/highlights/don-bolles-car...
I got an ad the other day for a school (a mostly reputable one). They were talking about their award winning dining hall food... and the photos are over the top.
Borrow a pile of money, to help fund a pretty campus, and get a degree with limited job prospects, then wonder why you're drowning in debt for decades seems to be the trendy thing to do.
somebody made a conscious decision to turn college into a little utopian island divorced from reality to quell protests. students get their own on-campus entertainment venues, sports teams, luxurious dorms and dining halls, rec centers and gyms, on-campus health services. for some students this is designed to keep them content and docile, but for others its designed to let them learn about the injustices of the world while being quarantined away from it so they cant affect change.
and the most insidious part of it is that they're the ones paying for it (with interest!). by the time they are kicked out of this little cocoon, they're saddled with enough debt that they have no choice but to grind away at a job they hate for a few decades
There's a great student op-ed about _a_ proposed solution (firing the deans): https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/11/29/anderson-burea...
They tore down a building less than twenty five years old to build a fancier one with fewer actual teaching spaces. There are many "temporary" Quonset huts around here twice that age. This institution is the top recipient of federal research funding. Their fiduciary responsibility with our tax dollars appears to be in name only.
It's an unfortunate truth that decisions to attend a given university are often made based on an image in the student's (or their parents) head about what a university should look like, rather than things like academics.
Sorry, didn't mean to distract from the serious topic at hand.
> The university’s vice provost of student affairs gives the final speech. She has the students stand up and applaud the university president, to thank him for the hats. From the podium, she turns to face the president and applauds along with the audience. Here’s a woman who knows on which side her bread is buttered. The professor recognizes the name: she’s the official in charge of disciplining students who protest genocide in Gaza.
These days, I think often about the historical turn of events in Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, where the reign of the adhocracies started by taking over buildings like Convocation Hall (mid-lecture) at University of Toronto...
"Johns Hopkins Labs" would be a more accurate name as less than 10% of revenue is tuition related.
I'm not sure why folks including professors continue to view these places as primarily about teaching students or academics. These $100-$250 million building projects are pretty inconsequential when research grants and contracts bring in more than $4.5 billion per year.
i've seen so many "our tuition pays your salary so you you need to XXX" type rants I've seen from disgruntled students/parents over the years and i've always bit my tongue when it comes to setting the record straight.
"In 2017, the institute was endowed with a $150 million gift from a Greek shipping fortune..."
Here is Johns Hopkins' problem in a nutshell. Taking money from billionaire "philanthropists" and global organisations to put an intellectual veneer onto their vested interests. Johns Hopkins has done this in a number of areas.
What kind of "stronger global democracy" would this be? There is no global democracy and no global government, yet. How interested are shipping magnates in democracy as opposed to plutocracy?
I always assumed that the research being done at these schools was done by top tier scientists with grad students who cared deeply about the research, had excellent attention to detail and impeccable scientific process.
From talking to my friend, I realized:
- most of the grad students were people who didn't want to get a corporate job
- they wanted to extend their college experience as long as possible
- the absolute lack of discipline and rigor they showed to their experiments was astounding
- the lead academic was usually someone passionate and dedicated and often had to "herd cats" to get anything done ON TOP OF coordinating funding, lab space etc
Really opened my eyes to "how the sausage is made" when it comes to research.
The concept (and aims) of university faces the same headwinds of any business based on intellectual property in America: artificial moats of IP law.
China's manufacturing success partially stems from the government's inability to enforce IP law.
Thankfully, ideas want to be free, and LLMs give us the best-yet UI to information.
To me, Hacker News is a university. It's a place where I come to learn (from thousands of "teachers") and these "teachers" are actually also students, learning as well.
No King of Siam needed when the executives running the place competently wield their foot guns.
[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/white_elephant
Of course, the university lost its way quite some time ago. Indeed, education in general has. But if we focus on the university, the basic question we should be asking - one that should inform all of our decisions and actions - is "for the sake of what?".
What is the university for?
If you ask most people, perhaps especially since the War when university attendance exploded, the answer will likely be "to get a job". So, the university, it is supposed, is primarily an institution centered around career training and preparation. Indeed, if you grew up during the last half century, you might have grown accustomed to hearing a certain negative encouragement to attend university, namely, that if you wish to avoid working at McDonald's - which is taken to be the worst fate imaginable - then you must have a college degree. This was an unquestioned iron rule that insinuated a certain conception of the primary purpose of unviersity education. In communities dominated by blue collar workers, the university was sold as one's ticket out of the ostensibly dreary world of manual labor into the ranks of the white collar professional classes.
(Gen Z begs to differ; interest in the so-called trades has increased by 1500%.)
Now, assuming university education is job training, we might wish to ask whether they are effective at this task, especially given the astronomical costs of tuition to which students are yoked after graduation. Here, the answer is far from clear and one suspects negative for most graduates.
Even so, the concept of university-as-job-training-center itself is a debasement of the original purpose of the university. The primary purpose was historically embodied by the liberal arts, which is to say, the free arts. These are opposed to the so-called servile arts. Guess into which "job training" fits best. The liberal arts as originally taught were not the liberal arts as we imagine them today. The foundation of what you might call undergraduate education was the trivium and the quadrivium. The first taught grammar, logic, and rhetoric in order to prepare students to be able to reason, evaluate arguments, and to make arguments themselves. It freed a person by developing basic intellectually competence. In the second, students were taught arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Despite what are for us today some strange names, these prepared the student for quantitative reasoning: quantity as such, quantity in space, quantity in time, and quantity in space-time. From there, students continued onward to study philosophy, medicine, theology, law, and so on. The purpose of these liberal arts was to produce a free man, free because he is enabled to pursue the truth.
Even the so-called research university demotes the primary function of the university by making pedagogy a kind of afterthought or concession. Eduating students is secondary; the primary aim of faculty is research.
Of course, people used to attend university at the age of 14, the age at which we typically enter secondary school, so the boundaries have shifted, but I would nonetheless argue that education - and especially the university - should return to its roots as an intellectual community of faculty and students oriented toward producing free human beings capable of seeking the truth. Research should take place in dedicated institutes. Students are a long way from research anyway, which in any case tends to be specialized. The trades should be taught in trade schools and institutions focused on producing competence in those areas. Institutional function should be clear so that an institution can acheive its end successfully instead of trying to be everything and nothing. Focused study of spec...
I learned a new word today!
Qatar $7.7 billion
China $6.4 billion
Saudi Arabia $4.7 billion
These countries are not making donations to support democracy and freedom.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/12/nx-s1-5711359/us-colleges-5-b...