The market speaks.

Saw this evil piece today from some engineering nerd who believes they’re at the peak of critical thought.

For too long, these colleges have clung to the notion of being uniquely “noble”, insulated from market pressures and buffered by government funding and external endowments.

A particularly stubborn myth is that liberal arts education has a monopoly on cultivating critical thinking. This belief not only discounts the intellectual rigour demanded in Stem fields but also perpetuates an outdated hierarchy of disciplines. Critical thinking is not the sole attribute of literature and philosophy department

Rather than worry about funding cuts or condemning their threat to academic purity, liberal arts institutions should embrace a market-oriented mindset.

Fears about “dumbing down” degrees or commodifying education can be addressed through market accountability and employer feedback.

Now I’m no longer in school, it’s been years. And I know there are a range of “sympathies” toward higher education (ideological state apparatuses and all that jazz), and I could also imagine good points being made about the need for better engineering in the United States and the west.

But I still hated this article telling schools to bow down to the free market, shut down their English departments, and recognize the engineers at Palantir as the pinnacle of human thought.

  • purpleworm [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    8·
    14 days ago

    No, and the liberal arts theoretically are cool and good and more people should receive a “liberal” education by that definition of liberal, the issue is that the people deciding what is taught are incentivized to make unhelpful decisions:

    The puzzled reader may ask: how could a learned liberal professor have forgotten these elementary axioms familiar to anybody who has read any exposition of the views of socialism? The answer is simple: . . . the social status of professors in bourgeois society is such that only those are allowed to hold such posts who sell science to serve the interests of capital, and agree to utter the most fatuous nonsense, the most unscrupulous drivel and twaddle against the socialists. The bourgeoisie will forgive the professors all this as long as they go on “abolishing” socialism.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/mar/11.htm

    And I don’t just mean refutations of socialism, though those abound, I mean more general wrong-headedness that is prolific in colleges in neoliberal society.