Institutional Higher Ed
Is it Dead? Agents of GAE don’t Care
With few exceptions, institutional higher ed demonstrates it has no longevity. It would be a small mercy if it was enfeebled, but its not. In fact, for decades it has gathered steam propagating leftist agendas while propping up the administrative state party for the country of GAE (Globalist American Empire).
There is one area where signs of its demise are evident. Increasingly, the young are opting out of Indoctrination U. What does it get you really except the awesome opportunity to be berated, cancelled, and ridiculed, (or even assaulted!). This was the reality before the self-imposed Covid defeat. The one shining place remaining where someone could find a demonstrative skill that is a talent actually useful in life and transcends the Wokerati was (is?) the community college—like welding, electrical, HVAC, etc.
Do not expect the community college system to escape the inevitable contraction of institutional higher ed. The demographic shifts make them not immune to the abandonment of higher ed. Further, the politicization of the community college is also underway, if not a lagging indicator. In North Carolina, the community college system is already feeling the hurt—partly from the leftist white flag to stop living because of the flu, or something, but also because of something unstated: public education is losing market share top to bottom.
In 2019, 53 of the state’s 58 community colleges experienced enrollment growth after years of declines, and more growth was expected. But the pandemic dashed those expectations. By fall 2020, all but four community colleges saw enrollment declines.
So, how are colleges pivoting? What are they doing to reimagine recruitment?
For many, the answer is found in adult learners.
Now, IF the college system was healthy, then a one year dip in enrollment would not generate this concern. It would also discourage a marketing strategy to go after what amounts to boomers. There is something else going on, meaning, they see despite the momentary increase in enrollments, they are losing a key demographic to their sustainability. They are losing the young. Therefore, we need adult (read boomer, and maybe older Gen X) learners.
Nothing says loser, and planned decline than a strategy to lure more customers from a base that is dying. Don’t believe it? Check out how Ducati and Indian were eating Harley Davidson’s lunch. If you cannot attract new customers to indoctrinate—and yes, higher ed views their crop of students as customers in some way—you will be in decline.
Higher ed is losing, declining, headed toward obsolescence, albeit slowly. This new reality is partly because the smart people are figuring out that they do not need to load up debt for woke education and potential cancelling by teachers who believe in their own superiority. College administrators are also cowards, and will not help. Just ask the Duke Lacrosse players.
Education pioneer for the digital age, Justin Murphy, saw this downward trend (and got quite tired of being an education bureaucrat, which is what most instructors are becoming) and started his own business. He has been fairly successful.
In manner of focus, he is providing a quite different product from the community college which is dedicated to practical education.1 However, he has tapped into something brewing below the surface, but that which threatens institutional higher ed.
This creation of new models of education—highly personalized, free of woke despotism, engaged in real questions about life and beauty that the academy gave up decades ago, etc., is what many thirst for. Aristotle wrote the desire of man is to know. Murphy provided an option to learn for a affordable price.
If you read Murphy’s entire post, however, you will find he is frustrated, and understandably so. Being a merchant is tough work when there is an open market and a lot of competition. It takes away from what many “academics” love to do—think, write, reflect, and be at leisure. Murphy:
Building a business is way harder than I expected. Or rather, it might be more accurate to say that I dislike it more intensely than I expected. It consumes me worse than my institutional career consumed me. I only read a couple books in 2020, I get wretchedly irritable way too often, I gained a few pounds over the pandemic. But when you're fighting for a light at the end of the tunnel, and you can see the end of the tunnel and you like the end of the tunnel, a really hard year or two is sufferable. In academia, it was too easy to see the future, one pretty much knows where one will be if one continues to succeed, and the upside has hard constraints. In building a business, the outcome is terrifyingly open but the upside has no hard ceiling.
I do not blame Murphy for his reaction here, in fact I understand it. I would submit for consideration that not everyone can be a Socrates, but that modern academics (and I include myself in this) need to learn to be both businessmen, and parapatetics. In other words, the higher ed model is corrupting because it makes academics lazy (I am not saying Murphy is here, I am speaking in broad brush). Professors have become quite used to being a passive cog in the wheel. Students know their teachers only have motivation for themselves; their audience is mostly captivated and not earned.
We have all forgotten what it takes to do real work. We need to remove ourselves from the delusion that to teach means we cannot be concerned with the business side of teaching. So, what to do?
Murphy is on the right track. He has shown us what is possible. But, what is the scale here? Can the market support a plethora of new education endeavors like his? I don’t think so. The small education institution will not succeed to the scale it needs to—for the good life, for the republic—unless a new and more bold step is taken. Our political despotism needs more not less Justin Murphy’s. It also needs to leverage the few remaining higher ed institutions to make this happen.
I was busy a year ago thinking through this problem and wrote a proposal to create a new higher ed. I called it the New Ark of the Covenant. I then had to put it aside because, I needed more business minded people to help me think it through. I also needed to make money immediately. My big audacious goal was very much set in the future.
What did I propose? A brief synopsis is apropos.
Start with a loose knit band of several entrepreneur thinkers/teacher to offer programs. Jeremy Griffon (already linked) mentions a bit of this. Murphy put his version into action. We need more Murphy like offerings from many different people.
Engage individual teachers in their areas of interest to craft courses that are a) talented and camera friendly, b) savvy, c) not boring, animated d) and willing to give individual interactive feedback. Asynchronous and synchronous. There needs be some human to human interaction outside the static internet even if it is facetime.
Pay teachers well—passs on the lack of overhead to the teachers. And, offer the students a competitive price that they do not need to take out loans to learn—massively undercut the largess of modern higher ed. Beat them on their price; beat them in quality.
Engage in MOUs with the good colleges who would be willing to transfer credit to their institution. Not everyone can move to a decent institution, at least in the beginning. So, why not get started slow, online?—we have lives, families, jobs, etc. For many, time is of the essence. The MOU would have to be worked out with each institution to create a new informal institution of higher ed to run parallel to modern institutional higher ed—that is, it needs to be a dagger into their heart. The aim is to kill modern higher ed, while remaking it in a New Ark of the Covenant. When a person, or his family is ready to move, they can transfer to the brick and mortar institution in the network, continue their education without losing their “work.”
The online aspect would offer retreats to students to learn face to face with the profs who are a part of the online team they are most attracted to and paying for—some places are already doing this. They are doing it way below the radar.
Sun & Steel. It is my belief, health in all forms, not just the mind needs to be promoted, and required. Lifting, yes, but more. Any physical activity to get us to think healthy, and be healthy is required. But more. We need real skills too. To be a good citizen—and a good provider—we need to learn to weld, engage in metalurgy, Mechanics, woodshop, etc. Planting, growing, zoology (raising cows, chickens, hogs, goats, etc., too. We need practical skills to be able to be as much as possible, functional human beings. We need to relearn real work, real effort, and depend less on our cosmopolitan dollars to hire others.
We need to possibly do away with grades. No this is not some Evergreen leftist justification. It is the same means to a different end. The end is what matters here. What matters is if we learn, not the grade we make. Grades tell us nothing. In fact, their use is a feature of modern higher ed. We need to be more discerning people at who has talent and who does not in the business world. Either way, what matters is the learning. This will take profs a big rethink on how they teach and what they teach. Can you imagine Socrates handing out grades? Or did he and Aristotle accept their students, and….teach them?
Small example of point 6: I changed the brakes on my car yesterday. I had people drop by the garage in my cosmopolitan neighborhood gawk as they saw me fire up the air compressor and air ratchet. Everyone wondered 1) where I learned to do it, and 2) why I was doing it. I could just hire someone. “Why would I?,” I asked. I can take it to someone to do it for 4 times the price I am doing it now. Or I can feel accomplished by doing the work myself. One person commented, I wish my husband could do that. Indeed.
We are increasingly slavish to the food supply. We have no idea how to combat against this. The New Ark would teach you how to be self-sufficient and protect your family by your own efforts. Imagine a community of people who could do this? The implications are a serious challenge to GAE. An education that does not include this, is an education teaching you to be slavish to the forces of government (or GAE).
We alo need to give solid center-right professors an escape hatch. They need to find a home to do what they are passionate to do—teach, and engage in the deep questions of this life. Modern higher ed has cancelled them; it is time to walk away from modern higher ed and give good people a place to go. Imagine deigning to say something positive about BAP book, or Millerman…you will not be a received well. Time to look for another job.
This I admit, is a tall order. But, I see no way out of our current predicament unless we rethink all of it. Griffon thinks that practical education and liberal education is separate. I do NOT. Are they different? Yes. But they need to be brought together for a PURPOSE. in my scheme the intellectual and the practical have an effect on the soul. My big audacious idea tried to meld the two because, well, at this time, I think it is prudentially “liberal” (I hate that word, what it does is make us more human) to do so.
I omit in this post that I have heard institutional educators recently actually say they are happy to lose students because they won’t mask, or do not want to mask. One person said to me good riddance to them. What does that tell you? They do not care if they lose as long as they are right. This is everything wrong with academics because it lacks academic skepticism about the world around us—much less the government with which they are beholden. And that is the likely problem—they are agents of GAE because they are GAE (a Globalist Academic Empire inside an empire).
Kudos to Murphy and others who have blazed the path, and have been successful. It is time to do more, and time is wasting.
There are a few, precious few institutions (mostly private) that get it and where a real education may be found. For the rest? Let higher ed die.
While I would quibble with quite a bit in this—good citizens need to have well formed souls—this piece is quite helpful and asks a lot of the right questions.