Where is the University Going? 

There is an old saying: He who pays the piper calls the tune. As long as universities take huge funds from the taxpayer as state institutions do they should expect external control.

Extensive, root canal-level reform is needed. Some universities need to be "taken out behind the barn" because they are too far gone.

An interesting discussion. I am shocked that the corporatization of the university was not addressed more. If students are customers and we have to "keep the numbers up," please donors, and be "accountable" for the employability of graduates, does this not fundamentally compromise academic freedom, and undermine the projects of seeking truth, producing democratic citizens with critical thinking skills, and advancing human knowledge?

Good panel, good talk. Thanks!

Professors are driven by money, power, and prestige, even in the limited amounts available to them. Every member of the faculty might be represented by a point on a 3D graph according to the level of each of these drivers he currently enjoys, and by another point representing what he most wishes for. Such profiling which mixes the objective and subjective, would be a good starting point for rooting out the motivations on the part of the faculty that result in politicized departments on the one hand, and the cynical, passive acceptance on the other. Interdepartmental groups need to form to explore these motivations with the goal to root out the malignancy and re-shape communities of basic inquiry.

Google's AI overview: According to a 2024 meta-analysis of studies conducted between 1939 and 2022, the average IQ of undergraduate college students in 2022 was 102, which is slightly higher than the general population average of 100. This is a 17-point decline from 1939, when the average IQ was around 119. The researchers attribute this decline to the increased accessibility of higher education over the past 80 years. One change this suggests is that the traditional mission of the university be revised accordingly (or, perhaps acknowledged).

I am glad I retired when I did. College is not about education, it is not even about preparing people to work. I taught Sound Engineering for 15 years. Half the students admitted to the program will never have a future in sound engineering. And this is why most college graduates in Sound Engineering across America are doing something else within 2 years.

Beyond reform in the uk. But then the geopolitical and.economic is starting to take over fhe philosophical ones. Fees too high - home students moving to apprenticesjips. Chinese students in STEM challenging for security reasons. We've now moved on to "plunder" India for those profitable students, but we've got tye genai effext. This last 2 years attendance on campus collapsing. Bluntly the model is changing and fast. It's more about taking market share than growing the pie. I see a revolution in higher education inthe near future.

Stanley Fish sometimes manages to say true things, but often not.

Yes yes yes educate professionals and dont bleat about truth or your great moral purpose

Yes you all deserve Trump

Unified political conformity creates the Trumpian backlash

Quite disappointing. Most participants here stay very much at the surface. They do not reflect critically about their own activist days in the post 68 period. Did they know what they were doing then? Was it unquestionably good for society that ideologically influenced and uninformed youths stopped US engagement against the totalitarian regime of North Vietnam? Did they ever go back to examine the politics of North Vietnam? Didn’t their generation create the ethics of academic activism that now blows in their face? Aren’t political attacks on the University a natural consequence of decades of mono-culture, activism, and partisanship? It is so obvious that even in this select forum, everyone is speaking to each other from a shared basis of political positions, comfortably on the liberal side. These people are not at all used to talking to people who have other opinions or values, a different reading of history (perhaps one exception on the panel). Without radically questioning that and the past 40 plus years of getting to that place, their institutions have no chance of revival.