A former college instructor and PhD sheds light on the problems in modern academia, beyond the recent controversies at Harvard. The author hopes that donors like Bill Ackman will address the issues discussed in their essay. The full article is available in the comments, with excerpts shared on Twitter and a YouTube channel to explore.
Thread Text
@colonelkurtz99 - Colonel Kurtz -Controversy, Depp/MeToo/Manson Etc.
π£π£π£π£π£π£π£π£
WHAT YOU DONβT KNOW ABOUT UNIVERSITIES TODAY
EX-COLLEGE INSTRUCTOR & PhD TELLS TRUTH ABOUT THE PROBLEMS YOU HAVENβT HEARD OF β¦ YET.
(Reposting a final time for those whoβve been stirred up by the Harvard Claudine Gay controversies but donβt know thatβs only the tip of the academia iceberg.)
Video Transcript AI Summary
Claudine Gay and Harvard are facing criticism online and in the media for various issues in academia. The problems include diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), racial preferences in admissions and hiring, high tuition fees, administrative bloat, ideological imbalance in faculty and administrative hires, grade inflation, exploitation of student athletes, unnecessary vanity building projects, focus on irrelevant topics, reliance on part-time adjunct labor, and a flawed peer review process. These issues highlight the need for reform and better allocation of resources in universities.
Speaker 0: Alright. So Claudine Gay and Harvard are getting absolutely pummeled online today and yesterday in the media and on Twitter x. There are just a lot of people who are paying attention now. What I've been saying as a Former professor, former lecturer, PhD, went through a top 20 graduate program, spent like 20 years in that field. What I've been saying for a while now is that there are huge problems with academia that have existed now for decades, and I've been getting in recent years much worse.
And a lot of them are not things that are being discussed. So I actually came up with a list, a long list, and I posted it to my Twitter. And I wanna talk about it just briefly, lay it out. Okay. So yes, of course, DEI is a problem.
Yes, of course, racial preferences in admissions and hiring, big problem. And that is one of the Complaints that I have with academia, that is one that is being exposed a lot through this Claudine Gay situation because People have now looked into her background, her academic background, and they have discovered that her academic record is very paltry and that if she were a white man, comparably, then she wouldn't have gotten that position. And so there's an entire conversation now that has arisen online. I'm very glad about racial preferences, not only in hiring, but also in admissions criteria. Even after the Supreme Court rules that, henceforward, it's illegal.
Affirmative action in school admissions is illegal. The schools have been very blatant about the fact until recently, and they're they're now they're kind of trying to hide it. So, like, Harvard didn't publish its early admissions racial data because they don't know want people to know that they, like a lot of schools, they are continuing with their unfair hiring practices and illegal hiring practices. So anyway, DEI, definitely problem. The whole DEI philosophy, It's in it's in a number of the classrooms, yes, depending on what courses you're taking, but also just in the way that administrators govern a university.
There's, you know, it's not just about bias in the classrooms with professors who let their political ideology slip into They're teaching or in some cases make it very prominent. It's also about the climate, the campus climate that's created by administrative attitudes and administrators very, very, very much to the left just like, just like faculty. And, of course, they're drawn from the faculty often. But that's not it. So we've got out of control tuition and fees and astounding astounding cost to go to college.
Look, I just don't see how anyone could look at the cost of going to college at an American university and how they could look at that graph showing the inflation of college tuition and fees. And the fact that to go to even a decent school now not let's not even talk about Harvard, but to go to a decent school now. It is so so offensive and how the inflation has not kept pace with anything else. That's what happens when the government heavily subsidizes something. And do you realize do you realize there's been an explosion in administrative bloat?
And I've talked about it before. But there even, you know, you can go online and get articles statistics about how many administrative staff there are at major universities compared to students. It's, you know, I saw like Harvard, there are 2,000 more administrators and staff at Harvard. 2,000 plus more than there are students. It was something like crazy like that.
And if you look at a graph, you'll see that the number of solid tenure track teaching positions that we think of as real professors have gone down dramatically over the years at the same time that administrative bloat, all of these usually pointless bureaucratic positions have been exploding. And just like in the government, just like in our government, you know, bureaucracy, it begets more bureaucracy. And then you have all these people trying to justify their jobs. You know? People like, for instance, DEI officials and title 9 coordinators and sexual assault investigators.
And so another thing I talked about, Kangaroo Title IX courts unfairly punishing male students who were accused of assault harassment without due process, without real due process. I mean, you look into that. It's just insane. We have also extreme ideological imbalance in faculty and administrative hires. And look, I am not at all suggesting that when the faculty of, you know, say a history department, when they sit down to decide which candidates gonna consider which candidates they're gonna hire.
That they say, oh, this guy, we get the sense that he's a Republican and also he's a straight white male, so we're not gonna hire him. No. It's more to the tune of this person's, dissertation seems more timely or it it's, or they just have a natural preference towards certain dissertation topics in certain courses of study. And, of course, they understand understand that certain courses of study should be discouraged. And then when it comes to, you know, hiring a straight white man versus, you know, a gay black woman, They can't so the hiring committees, of course, they can't put it in writing.
We're only going to consider female candidates or black female candidates or what have you, but they talk about it. It's very common. Like everybody knows. And so you have a tremendous imbalance in hiring practices and frankly, it's illegal in some ways. Great inflation, particularly in certain disciplines where some are worse than others.
But Harvard, you know, their average GPA now is a 3.8. You look at a graph of that the way it's been shooting up. The overprominence of I'm going to get in trouble with some people. But in my opinion, the overprominence of sports, particularly, like, with what I saw at my school, college football, And, yes, a kind of exploitation, I think, of student athletes by the NCAA, who at times, you know, they're making the the schools are making a ton of money, off of some of these star players and some of these great teams. And the students, yeah, I understand they get free tuition, free room and board.
Yeah. It's not nothing. And maybe it's a little heavy to call it exploitation. Some of you don't like that. You say, oh, well, they signed up for it.
Okay. But let's just say that it's still not a fair practice. So anyway, I'm not wanting to do away with all college sports or tell you can't watch your football or whatever. But I'm just saying that This is something that needs to be looked at perhaps too. If we're doing if we're doing a kind of inventory of the universities and some of their issues.
Unnecessary vanity building projects that don't actually facilitate real learning. So much donation money goes to building projects Do you know that? And look. It's one thing if it's a building that's actually needed and it's done in such a way so that, Yeah. It looks nice, but it's not just sucking up unnecessary funds.
You know, like, at at one of the schools that I taught at, They spend $1,000,000 a year apparently on the budget for flowers for for flowers and gardening and stuff on campus. Okay. Maybe that's necessary. Maybe it's not. But I'm just saying there is a ton of money that is going to these schools whether government money or it's endowment or it's, you know, it's new donors, tuition, parents writing the checks, whatever.
And I'm just not sure that we're really thinking through well, I'm sure that we're not really thinking through the spending and what the budgetary constraint should be and what real learning requires and what it doesn't. The preference in many academic fields for small ideas, irrelevant points of focus or politically fashionable topics that don't actually advance real knowledge or promote real intellectualism. There is a number of professors in certain fields in particular, at least I know in in humanities, can attest to this. There's a real sort of siloing of interest. You're often encouraged to in your studies to pick, like, small topics and don't really go out on some big limb.
Just look at what some Other largely irrelevant people have written about it that nobody cares about because your average academic book, even John McWhorter was talking about this in his recent article in the New York Times. The average academic book is like basically read by no one. So there's just this smallness in general, not with everyone, not with all professors. Okay. And and there's still a lot of smart people in these fields even if I think politically imbalanced.
But, but there's just a lot of like small ideas and small thinking and people are really constrained. And it's really in a lot of ways, more of a monastic environment in that sense than people, people might realize. Right? And of course, the academy does have its roots in the, the monastery and there you can see where the The this need for orthodoxy and conformity comes from. Right?
It is kind of in in the blood of academia, so to speak, as an institution. So these are problems. I think that it's a problem that you have so many, classes now taught by part time poorly paid adjunct labor or grad students. And even at a place like Harvard, you're gonna Huge chunk of classes that are being taught by poorly paid or ill prepared, generally part time Agilever or 1 year instructorships or grad students. And these are, like, generally speaking, you know, not great jobs.
And I don't think people understand how so much of the money going to the universities is going to the salaries of administrators and DEI officials and disability officers. Right? Because there are so many people trying to game the system now at universities to get their kids extra time on tests and stuff They have them declared disabled because they have ADHD. And I am sorry. I've talked about this before.
It offends people, but I do not recognize ADHD as like a disability like blindness that should be accommodated. People need to get used to living in the real world. When these kids go into the real workforce, Are they going to get extra time by their bosses to complete projects because they've got ADHD and a lot of people are getting strung out on these medications, by the way. Every semester when I was teaching, I would have 1 or 2 students that looked strung out and I would talk to them not even about that just to see how things are going. And inevitably, you know, they would talk about I'm having such a hard time.
I'm so tired and stuff. And I'd say, well, how long have you been on stimulants? And they would look at me like surprise. I'm like, yeah, I get it. You're strung out.
What else? What else? Peer review? You know, to be published academically, you have to almost always go through a peer review process, which means that like other Professors or experts are reading your work and either approving it or telling you you have to change this or what have you. And the peer review process in a lot of ways is very broken.
I'm not gonna get into that, but it but it is. And this is a problem in the sciences, the hard sciences as well. So anyway, Everybody check out my Twitter, check out my channel colonel Kurtz 99 on YouTube. I talk about celebrity controversies and all kinds of other stuff and academia lately and philosophy
@colonelkurtz99 - Colonel Kurtz -Controversy, Depp/MeToo/Manson Etc.
@colonelkurtz99 - Colonel Kurtz -Controversy, Depp/MeToo/Manson Etc.
ββ
π’π’π’
Iβm so pleased to have been published in The Daily Wire this morning because as a former college lecturer and PhD I have a lot to say about the current situation with Harvard, MIT, UPenn, Claudine Gay, but more importantly the state of modern academia in general.
Iβve been waiting 20 years for donors like Bill Ackman @BillAckman to wake up and I hope he can broaden his focus to the problems I lay out in this essay.
Full article linked in comments but it requires registering. Iβll post some of the best excerpts throughout the day here on Twitter. Check out my YouTube channel as well.
