The fearless pursuit of fame and glory
Exactly a week after former New York Times opinion columnist Bari Weiss unveiled the creation of a hypothetical new “university” stacked with advisers united by “a common dismay at the state of academic and a recognition that we can no longer wait for the cavalry,” two riders in that brave regiment have resigned their commissions.
Robert J. Zimmer, the chancellor of the University of Chicago, and Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, quit the University of Austin’s advisory board on Monday.
Just one week. It seems so embarrassing for the project.
“As is often the case with fast-moving start-ups,” a statement from the University of Austin said, “there were some missteps.” It noted that its website “initially failed to make clear the distinctions between the Founding Trustees and the Advisory Board.”
That’s the thing, though – universities aren’t usually “fast-moving start-ups.” That’s more profit-making entrepreneurial go-getter language than it is serious intellectual language. If you start up a university too fast you might find yourself holding a steering wheel connected to nothing.
While advisers were “aligned in general” with the project without necessarily endorsing everything the University of Austin says or does, the trustees “bear responsibility for those things.” This, the statement claimed without elaboration, “led to unnecessary complications” for advisers like Zimmer and Pinker.
Hahahaha we can imagine the panicky conversations. “Wait, what? I didn’t mean to sign up for all this crap!”
That’s the trouble with ideas: there’s overlap everywhere, and it’s easy to get confused, or recruited into something you don’t want to be in. Clearly that’s what happened with Zimmer.
Zimmer said in a statement posted to a UChicago news site that he’d resigned from his advisory role on Thursday. He wrote that while he valued the “new organization” and its commitment to freedom of expression, it “made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views.”
Some overlap and some sharp divergence.
It’s like the rupture with Pharyngula and similar – there’s still a massive amount of overlap there, but one issue made it all untenable.
The University of Austin, which is unaccredited and has yet to break ground on a physical campus, was launched last Monday and is “dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth,” according to a triumphant post to Weiss’ Substack.
See that’s already a red flag, at least to me. You don’t want to flatter yourself too grossly in your advertising. You don’t want to claim too much for yourself because…well because everything, really. Because conceit is repellent, it’s trumpish, it’s absurd, it’s an accident waiting to happen. Screaming “WE ARE THE NEW FEARLESS WARRIORS” is just not cool.
I thought you were leading up to a comparison with that group (whose name I have forgotten) that Dawkins and others created that had Edwina Rogers (sp? the Republican lobbyist who liked to wrap presents in sheets of dollar bills) as its Executive Director. That seemed like a not-fully-thought-through venture from the get-go.
If Weiss and others want to know in what way “academia has failed students”, she only need look at her own principles. Too many schools are being run on a free-market model, with the students as consumers rather than scholars. Making the student happy is the goal of education administrators these days. FTE, completion rates, degrees awarded, etc…nothing in the accounting about lessons learned, projects completed, research undertaken, etc.
This is just another way of crapping on teachers, when in reality there are good teachers and bad teachers, and everything in between (teacher quality is quite literally a spectrum, but the quality is often subjective and hard to measure). Now we are being told, by administrators on one side and students on the other, not to mention our colleagues in the humanities, that we may not teach certain things. We are told that we may not offend the student or challenge the student’s ideas. If that is what Weiss is working to overturn, I applaud her efforts. However, it looks like the main goal is to inculcate libertarian doctrines That isn’t education, it’s indoctrination.
I think this pretty much sums it all up…
https://theap.substack.com/p/ive-heard-you-have-some-questions?r=1fwc7&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=
Screechy – Ah yes – The Secular Policy Institute. I remember the name only because I had to look it up recently because I too had forgotten. The “thought leaders” – exactly so. Do not call yourself a Thought Leader and do not sign up to any organization that calls you a Thought Leader. Ever ever ever ever ever.
Now you made me waste 10 minutes checking the SPI website. What an embarrassingly amateur affair. Nothing of substance updated since 2016. Almost no-one listed with any real name recognition. No recent activist campaigns or lists of legislation to watch. Broken links. Pages lacking formatting. Just the odd waffling and content free blog newsletter from the CEO.
Just stop embarrassing us all and shut the thing down please!
I read through the APU FAQ on the Substack page.
All I could think of was Apu (the Simpsons character) and Auxiliary Power Unit (found in aircraft).