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Cracks in the Ivory Tower: The Moral Mess of Higher Education
Academics extol high-minded ideals, such as serving the common good and promoting social justice. Universities aim to be centers of learning that find the best and brightest students, treat them fairly, and equip them with the knowledge they need to lead better lives.
But as Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness show in Cracks in the Ivory Tower , American universities fall far short of this ideal. At almost every level, they find that students, professors, and administrators are guided by self-interest rather than ethical concerns. College bureaucratic structures also often incentivize and reward bad behavior, while disincentivizing and even punishing good behavior. Most students, faculty, and administrators are out to serve themselves and pass their costs onto others.
The problems are deep and most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent. To justify their own pay raises and higher budgets, administrators hire expensive and unnecessary staff. Faculty exploit students for tuition dollars through gen-ed requirements. Students hardly learn anything and cheating is pervasive. At every level, academics disguise their pursuit of self-interest with high-faluting moral language.
Marshaling an array of data, Brennan and Magness expose many of the ethical failings of academia and in turn reshape our understanding of how such high power institutions run their business. Everyone knows academia is dysfunctional. Brennan and Magness show the problems are worse than anyone realized. Academics have only themselves to blame.
But as Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness show in Cracks in the Ivory Tower , American universities fall far short of this ideal. At almost every level, they find that students, professors, and administrators are guided by self-interest rather than ethical concerns. College bureaucratic structures also often incentivize and reward bad behavior, while disincentivizing and even punishing good behavior. Most students, faculty, and administrators are out to serve themselves and pass their costs onto others.
The problems are deep and most academic marketing and advertising is semi-fraudulent. To justify their own pay raises and higher budgets, administrators hire expensive and unnecessary staff. Faculty exploit students for tuition dollars through gen-ed requirements. Students hardly learn anything and cheating is pervasive. At every level, academics disguise their pursuit of self-interest with high-faluting moral language.
Marshaling an array of data, Brennan and Magness expose many of the ethical failings of academia and in turn reshape our understanding of how such high power institutions run their business. Everyone knows academia is dysfunctional. Brennan and Magness show the problems are worse than anyone realized. Academics have only themselves to blame.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published May 1, 2019
38 people are currently reading
401 people want to read
About the author
Jason Brennan
33 books137 followersJason Brennan is the Robert J. and Elizabeth Flanagan Family Professor of Strategy, Economics, Ethics, and Public Policy at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His books include Against Democracy and The Ethics of Voting.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
December 8, 2019
I was expecting to adore this book. To cheer. To applaud. To enjoy the righteous rage.
Then I moved through the stories that commenced the book.
Oh dear.
White men trying to explain how women and scholars of colour get an easy ride, and white men are disadvantaged.
Throughout the book, a series of straw men (!!!) are assembled. Cheating. Student reviews. Tenure. Neoliberalism.
And the writers showed - shock / horror - that these situations are much more complex than explored by some scholars in higher education.
Imagine some academics simplifying arguments or mis-configuring an analysis?
I am stunned. Not.
The reason a passionate and powerful diversity of arguments exist in academic life is so that we can read, learn, sort and sift.
What we have here are two men who are absolutely certain they are right. The humanities in particular is battered in these pages. Supposedly, the humanities are herpes of the university sector. No matter how painful - those damn humanities scholars just won't go away.
Jason Brennan, by the way, is a 'philosopher' in a business department. That is like being a proctologist in a waste removal business. A useful skill set, but inappropriately performed could lead to lawsuits. Phillip Magness is an economist, a discipline that post-the GFC has not marinated itself in excellence.
But what I find so amusing is the unreflexive empiricism of the monograph. I have never seen two men so excited by a data set as these two writers. Wow. Here is a survey. Let's over-represent this survey to pretend that it is generalizable.
Similarly, Henry Giroux is abused because he is a theorist. Sorry gentlemen. We live in theoretical times. You may be wedded to empiricism. Some of us are moving on. Theory has value in and of itself. I don't need a survey to explore a theory. The theory has life and meaning in and of itself.
The final critique must be logged - and loudly. The United States of America is not the world. International Higher Education is diverse, complex, distinctive and different. The USA is not a model, trope, strategy or trajectory for international higher education. Indeed, with an infusion of mobility theory - yes theory - international higher education can be revisioned with complexity, social justice and trans-local conversations.
Men mansplaining higher education. Yawn. These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along.
Then I moved through the stories that commenced the book.
Oh dear.
White men trying to explain how women and scholars of colour get an easy ride, and white men are disadvantaged.
Throughout the book, a series of straw men (!!!) are assembled. Cheating. Student reviews. Tenure. Neoliberalism.
And the writers showed - shock / horror - that these situations are much more complex than explored by some scholars in higher education.
Imagine some academics simplifying arguments or mis-configuring an analysis?
I am stunned. Not.
The reason a passionate and powerful diversity of arguments exist in academic life is so that we can read, learn, sort and sift.
What we have here are two men who are absolutely certain they are right. The humanities in particular is battered in these pages. Supposedly, the humanities are herpes of the university sector. No matter how painful - those damn humanities scholars just won't go away.
Jason Brennan, by the way, is a 'philosopher' in a business department. That is like being a proctologist in a waste removal business. A useful skill set, but inappropriately performed could lead to lawsuits. Phillip Magness is an economist, a discipline that post-the GFC has not marinated itself in excellence.
But what I find so amusing is the unreflexive empiricism of the monograph. I have never seen two men so excited by a data set as these two writers. Wow. Here is a survey. Let's over-represent this survey to pretend that it is generalizable.
Similarly, Henry Giroux is abused because he is a theorist. Sorry gentlemen. We live in theoretical times. You may be wedded to empiricism. Some of us are moving on. Theory has value in and of itself. I don't need a survey to explore a theory. The theory has life and meaning in and of itself.
The final critique must be logged - and loudly. The United States of America is not the world. International Higher Education is diverse, complex, distinctive and different. The USA is not a model, trope, strategy or trajectory for international higher education. Indeed, with an infusion of mobility theory - yes theory - international higher education can be revisioned with complexity, social justice and trans-local conversations.
Men mansplaining higher education. Yawn. These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along.
August 9, 2019
Cracks in the Ivory Tower by Jason Brennan and Phillip Magness
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
For many people, the last twenty years have exposed the incompetence of our elites. Starting in 2001, when America suffered a total intelligence breakdown to 2019, when the elites of America's elite intelligence apparatus incompetently attempted a coup against an amateur, who seemingly has handed the elites in government bureaucracy and politics their lunch on a regular basis, the elite has never been less competent. Why is that?
One reason may be that incompetence has become institutionalized through our elite educational institutions. How those elite institutions became corrupt is what this book is about.
Authors Brennan and Magness are Economics professors at one of the Ivy League universities they analyze. They approach the issues as economists and social scientists. They explain the present dysfunction of academia not as a matter of evil motives but the working out of an incentive structure that causes the three constituencies of the academy - the professors, the administrators and the students - to distort the university acording to their goals.
The authors make some extraordinary claims that they support with studies and analysis. For example, they claim that students don't really learn in their classes. One particular example they offer is English composition. Although colleges have progressively added more and more remedial English classes to address the problem of students unable to write or reason on a college level, students are not graduating from college with any greater facility in English. In fact, the authors describe the mandatory English requirement as a kind of racket by the universities who are able to expand English departments and extract more tuition funds from students.
Given the impassibility of students to education, the authors find that most university advertising is immoral and fraudulent. The authors frankly contend that if universities sold pharmaceuticals, they would be bankrupt from losing consumer protection lawsuits. The authors point out:
"In general, Arum and Roksa determined that about half of students gained no general reasoning and writing skills in college, about 40 percent gained very modest skills, and only the top 10 percent of students gained significant skills.67 That’s what $500 billion a year in higher ed spending on students appears to have gotten us."
College admissions are also a racket. A factor that determines college rankings is the admission rate; the lower the admission rate, the higher the ranking. Accordingly, colleges will flood schools with students who have no choice of admittance just so that those students will apply, be denied, and, thereby, increase the school ranking. The ranking game also explains why there is so much non-academic construction on college campuses.
Another depressing statistic is the growth of college administrators. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of college administrators has grown from 200,000 to 800,000.
As a result of all this, tuitions have gone up dramatically, but without any increase in educational achievement. The authors point out:
"Holding all else constant, these figures demonstrate one unambiguous trend in higher education. On average, it costs about 2.5 to 3 times as much money to receive a degree today than it did to receive the equivalent degree forty years ago. Again, these figures are adjusted for inflation, so they reflect the actual purchasing power of the dollar. Of course, this assumes, perhaps mistakenly, that a degree today and a degree forty years ago are the same thing and have the same value. Higher education’s annual operating costs make up one of the largest components of its expenses, and these, too, have skyrocketed. In 2015—the most recent year with complete statistics—the one-year operating expenses of the US university system topped $536 billion. Again, adjusting for inflation to current dollars, this figure is up from $167 billion in 1976. Those are absolute figures, but the cost per pupil has also risen dramatically, indicating that universities are educating fewer people per dollar that they spend. Although statistics did not record differences between public and private institutions until relatively recently, the average spending per equivalent full-time student at all universities in 1976 was about $21,000 in current dollars. Today, when we look at four-year institutions, it averages $54,000 at private universities and $41,000 at public universities.23 Again, these figures are in current dollars; we have adjusted for inflation. No matter how you look at it, the trends in university finances show that (1) college is costing its student consumers a lot more and (2) colleges are spending more per student educated. Compared to four decades ago, tuition intake and spending are up across the board. There are many reasons for these trends, including the distortions caused by student loan subsidies, the costs of regulatory compliance, the growth in spending on nonclassroom functions as well as the administrators who oversee them, and cost disease."
The best that can be said of elite universities is that they perform a kind of sorting function that allows the universities to select the best and the brightest, except as we have seen, elites have been gaming the system to put their unworthy scions into these universities, thereby creating a kind of corrupt aristocracy. (This last is a reflection on the recent news, not something from the book.)
America spends a lot of money on academics. As the authors point out, spending on academics is a matter of justice. Every dollar spent on academics is not spent on something that might be better at promoting social utility.
In any event, Americans as citizens and taxpayer need the truth and not merely slogans.
Please give my Amazon review a helpful vote - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
For many people, the last twenty years have exposed the incompetence of our elites. Starting in 2001, when America suffered a total intelligence breakdown to 2019, when the elites of America's elite intelligence apparatus incompetently attempted a coup against an amateur, who seemingly has handed the elites in government bureaucracy and politics their lunch on a regular basis, the elite has never been less competent. Why is that?
One reason may be that incompetence has become institutionalized through our elite educational institutions. How those elite institutions became corrupt is what this book is about.
Authors Brennan and Magness are Economics professors at one of the Ivy League universities they analyze. They approach the issues as economists and social scientists. They explain the present dysfunction of academia not as a matter of evil motives but the working out of an incentive structure that causes the three constituencies of the academy - the professors, the administrators and the students - to distort the university acording to their goals.
The authors make some extraordinary claims that they support with studies and analysis. For example, they claim that students don't really learn in their classes. One particular example they offer is English composition. Although colleges have progressively added more and more remedial English classes to address the problem of students unable to write or reason on a college level, students are not graduating from college with any greater facility in English. In fact, the authors describe the mandatory English requirement as a kind of racket by the universities who are able to expand English departments and extract more tuition funds from students.
Given the impassibility of students to education, the authors find that most university advertising is immoral and fraudulent. The authors frankly contend that if universities sold pharmaceuticals, they would be bankrupt from losing consumer protection lawsuits. The authors point out:
"In general, Arum and Roksa determined that about half of students gained no general reasoning and writing skills in college, about 40 percent gained very modest skills, and only the top 10 percent of students gained significant skills.67 That’s what $500 billion a year in higher ed spending on students appears to have gotten us."
College admissions are also a racket. A factor that determines college rankings is the admission rate; the lower the admission rate, the higher the ranking. Accordingly, colleges will flood schools with students who have no choice of admittance just so that those students will apply, be denied, and, thereby, increase the school ranking. The ranking game also explains why there is so much non-academic construction on college campuses.
Another depressing statistic is the growth of college administrators. Between 1980 and 2010, the number of college administrators has grown from 200,000 to 800,000.
As a result of all this, tuitions have gone up dramatically, but without any increase in educational achievement. The authors point out:
"Holding all else constant, these figures demonstrate one unambiguous trend in higher education. On average, it costs about 2.5 to 3 times as much money to receive a degree today than it did to receive the equivalent degree forty years ago. Again, these figures are adjusted for inflation, so they reflect the actual purchasing power of the dollar. Of course, this assumes, perhaps mistakenly, that a degree today and a degree forty years ago are the same thing and have the same value. Higher education’s annual operating costs make up one of the largest components of its expenses, and these, too, have skyrocketed. In 2015—the most recent year with complete statistics—the one-year operating expenses of the US university system topped $536 billion. Again, adjusting for inflation to current dollars, this figure is up from $167 billion in 1976. Those are absolute figures, but the cost per pupil has also risen dramatically, indicating that universities are educating fewer people per dollar that they spend. Although statistics did not record differences between public and private institutions until relatively recently, the average spending per equivalent full-time student at all universities in 1976 was about $21,000 in current dollars. Today, when we look at four-year institutions, it averages $54,000 at private universities and $41,000 at public universities.23 Again, these figures are in current dollars; we have adjusted for inflation. No matter how you look at it, the trends in university finances show that (1) college is costing its student consumers a lot more and (2) colleges are spending more per student educated. Compared to four decades ago, tuition intake and spending are up across the board. There are many reasons for these trends, including the distortions caused by student loan subsidies, the costs of regulatory compliance, the growth in spending on nonclassroom functions as well as the administrators who oversee them, and cost disease."
The best that can be said of elite universities is that they perform a kind of sorting function that allows the universities to select the best and the brightest, except as we have seen, elites have been gaming the system to put their unworthy scions into these universities, thereby creating a kind of corrupt aristocracy. (This last is a reflection on the recent news, not something from the book.)
America spends a lot of money on academics. As the authors point out, spending on academics is a matter of justice. Every dollar spent on academics is not spent on something that might be better at promoting social utility.
In any event, Americans as citizens and taxpayer need the truth and not merely slogans.
May 25, 2019
An interesting perspective on academia, through the lens of the incentives. The author's analyze various actors in an academic setting (professors, administrators, students, lecturers, etc.), look into the incentives these actors face, then analyze their behavior in light of these incentives.
Out of the articles I've read on the academia, this one strikes me as the most realistic. One reason for this could be that the author's have a lot of *domain knowledge* (as professors), and they couple this domain knowledge with empirical findings that stress test the various arguments. The author's are clearly biased in favor of a libertarian perspective, but they do a good job of challenging each argument against empirical data.
As a statistician, I appreciate that the author's did the work of tracking down the data and empirically testing the underlying claims of each argument. This leads to a lot of interesting findings. For example, Chapter 3 shows how, despite academic advertising (some of the promises they make are just crazy), universities don't deliver the *learning* (e.g. improved writing) that the advertisements promise. There's a particularly devastating example that studies how this behavior in academia would be viewed in the context of a drug company: Imagine if a drug company advertised a very expensive product, that took over 4 years to use. Now imagine that the drug company hadn't done any testing to make sure their drug works. The author's call this *negligent advertising*, which (I think) is a real legal term. But nevertheless, this is never pointed out.
There are other interesting analyses of different parts of academia. They analyze how student evaluations motivate teachers to give easy assignments, and that students typically reward more extroverted professors in these evaluations. They show that averaging grades across classes, where professors don't have a common agreement for what grades means, doesn't really make sense. They show that academics typically used moralizing language to hide underlying incentives, and give a devastating example of this based on arguments made in favor of tenure. They show how departments that don't have high student demand convert themselves into "gen ed" requirements, which is a form of *rent seeking*. They show how advanced degree programs, such as PhDs in English departments, benefit both administrators and professors, so they keep afloat, even if they aren't a good deal for the students. Finally, they show that over 50% of students in a historical set of surveys admit to cheating (Duh).
Overall, this is a good book on academia, and it's closely related to Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education". But if the incentives work the way the author explains, and academia is such a large conglomerate, it's hard to see what to do.
Out of the articles I've read on the academia, this one strikes me as the most realistic. One reason for this could be that the author's have a lot of *domain knowledge* (as professors), and they couple this domain knowledge with empirical findings that stress test the various arguments. The author's are clearly biased in favor of a libertarian perspective, but they do a good job of challenging each argument against empirical data.
As a statistician, I appreciate that the author's did the work of tracking down the data and empirically testing the underlying claims of each argument. This leads to a lot of interesting findings. For example, Chapter 3 shows how, despite academic advertising (some of the promises they make are just crazy), universities don't deliver the *learning* (e.g. improved writing) that the advertisements promise. There's a particularly devastating example that studies how this behavior in academia would be viewed in the context of a drug company: Imagine if a drug company advertised a very expensive product, that took over 4 years to use. Now imagine that the drug company hadn't done any testing to make sure their drug works. The author's call this *negligent advertising*, which (I think) is a real legal term. But nevertheless, this is never pointed out.
There are other interesting analyses of different parts of academia. They analyze how student evaluations motivate teachers to give easy assignments, and that students typically reward more extroverted professors in these evaluations. They show that averaging grades across classes, where professors don't have a common agreement for what grades means, doesn't really make sense. They show that academics typically used moralizing language to hide underlying incentives, and give a devastating example of this based on arguments made in favor of tenure. They show how departments that don't have high student demand convert themselves into "gen ed" requirements, which is a form of *rent seeking*. They show how advanced degree programs, such as PhDs in English departments, benefit both administrators and professors, so they keep afloat, even if they aren't a good deal for the students. Finally, they show that over 50% of students in a historical set of surveys admit to cheating (Duh).
Overall, this is a good book on academia, and it's closely related to Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education". But if the incentives work the way the author explains, and academia is such a large conglomerate, it's hard to see what to do.
January 31, 2020
Cracks in the Ivory Tower is very well-written and compelling book. Each chapter explores what the authors believe are fundamental problems with higher education, from advertising to cheating. The basic explanations for most of these issues aren’t bad people or bad ideologies, but bad incentives. Brennan and Magness make an effort to detail issues and offer explanations that are non-partisan or non-ideological. This isn’t a book bashing “campus activists” or “corporate interests.” However there were multiple times in my opinion where the authors’ biases seemed pretty apparent, and although I’m pretty willing to roll my eyes and move on, this will unfortunately alienate many otherwise sympathetic readers. Despite this, Cracks in the Ivory Tower is good and convincing, especially the chapters on evaluations and grading. Even if you disagree strongly with a particular section, you’ll undoubtedly find enough content intriguing and informative whether your an academic, administrator, or simply have a casual interest in higher education.
July 28, 2019
Read this if you want to come away with a practical view of how higher education could be fixed and where it has gone wrong. It's neither "neoliberalism" nor "cultural marxism," it's simple incentives that happen to work in an especially nefarious way because they appeal to so many of our ideals about education and it's relation to achieving a better life, or even being a better person. Unfortunately, such incentives are leading young people (and their parents) to spend lots of money and go deeply into debt to acquire a product that frequently does not deliver what it promises.
But good news: grade inflation isn't actually real.
But good news: grade inflation isn't actually real.
July 14, 2019
Good one
I love it when a book aligns with my world view. I’ve had a chance to see the failures of higher ed as an employer , as an adjunct and as an advisor and board member. This book just scratches the surface. Administrative bureaucracies grow like kudzu. Students enter the workplace with little knowledge, few skills and a ton of debt. As a society, we aren’t getting our money’s worth. If someone can figure out how to fix the credentialing problem or get schools to manage their costs and stop behaving like country clubs it might be fixable. Read Caplan’s book too. It’s great.
I love it when a book aligns with my world view. I’ve had a chance to see the failures of higher ed as an employer , as an adjunct and as an advisor and board member. This book just scratches the surface. Administrative bureaucracies grow like kudzu. Students enter the workplace with little knowledge, few skills and a ton of debt. As a society, we aren’t getting our money’s worth. If someone can figure out how to fix the credentialing problem or get schools to manage their costs and stop behaving like country clubs it might be fixable. Read Caplan’s book too. It’s great.
July 1, 2020
An absolute hot mess of a book. Don't waste your time.
Full review here: https://www.academia.edu/42030045/How...
Full review here: https://www.academia.edu/42030045/How...
July 30, 2020
Jason Brennan and Philip Magness present a clear and very readable critique of higher education. Having followed their work online for a while, there wasn’t a lot new to me. However, these are important criticisms with which many may not be familiar (or they are not familiar with the research that backs up the criticisms). The main lesson of the book is that the main problems of academia are not caused by bad people but by out of whack incentives for faculty, administrators, and students. The problems they focus on are: universities make lots of claims about supposed benefits that they don’t actually deliver on; student evaluations are an invalid and harmful way of evaluating teaching effectiveness; grades and GPAs are too inconsistent to be meaningful; general education requirements don’t work and are just ways for departments to get students (and money); and universities produce too many PhDs and do so primarily for their (and the professors) own standing and reputation; and lastly, students learn very little but cheat a lot. For each of these, there are incentives for otherwise well-meaning individuals to act in ways that make higher education worse.
None of this is good. As an academic, I have direct experience with pretty much each of these and their criticisms certainly fit with that experience. Unfortunately, the authors don’t have solutions: they end by saying that the only way to fix higher education is to change the incentives, but no one (including themselves) have the incentive to make the changes. (Maybe COVID will disrupt higher education enough to change some of those – so long as I don’t lose my job!)
I think Bryan Caplan’s critique of educationThe Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money is a better overall book about the problems of education; but Brennan and Magness do look more closely at factors that Caplan doesn’t take on. So these go well together.
None of this is good. As an academic, I have direct experience with pretty much each of these and their criticisms certainly fit with that experience. Unfortunately, the authors don’t have solutions: they end by saying that the only way to fix higher education is to change the incentives, but no one (including themselves) have the incentive to make the changes. (Maybe COVID will disrupt higher education enough to change some of those – so long as I don’t lose my job!)
I think Bryan Caplan’s critique of educationThe Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money is a better overall book about the problems of education; but Brennan and Magness do look more closely at factors that Caplan doesn’t take on. So these go well together.
February 18, 2021
I thought this was a pretty good book for thinking about the incentives for an organization that fails to get a fair amount of flack for the nonsense it often produces. Some stuff I thought was particularly good was the arms race explanation for cheating and the horrible incentives for professors and faculty as well as administrators.
This topic is not thought about enough, and both Phil and Jason made an important contribution in writing this. As always, with Jason's books, they're somewhat cynical, and I feel like I am a worse person having read them, but they definitely cultivate a sense of thoughtfulness and perhaps an upsetting form of enlightenment.
I'd definitely say this was worth a read.
This topic is not thought about enough, and both Phil and Jason made an important contribution in writing this. As always, with Jason's books, they're somewhat cynical, and I feel like I am a worse person having read them, but they definitely cultivate a sense of thoughtfulness and perhaps an upsetting form of enlightenment.
I'd definitely say this was worth a read.
August 13, 2019
This book takes a deep look into the business ethics and the incentives that drive higher education in the United States. Definitely a dark view as you can tell from the cover. The book raises a lot of good questions for higher education worker to consider and to think if what we do is best for the students, society, and how we use our finances from taxpayers. Much change is needed and the authors paint that picture well. The book is a first step to draw attention but much more work is needed to figure out how to fix problems at a massive government organization.
July 1, 2020
A unique viewpoint that rips apart the need to pay professors to teach indebtness to students and call it a 'rounded education'.
After reading this, my opinion towards Polytechnic schools was rethought. A school that teaches you what you want to learn. I feel that should be standard and not weird.
After reading this, my opinion towards Polytechnic schools was rethought. A school that teaches you what you want to learn. I feel that should be standard and not weird.
February 6, 2022
A carefully defined thesis supported by empirical data, Brennan & Magness argue problems in university's ultimately come down to bad incentives for stakeholders. They make a compelling case for their thesis, and it leaves one wondering what, if anything, can be done about it.
Seriously worth the read if you're thinking about going to university or thinking about pursuing an academic career.
Seriously worth the read if you're thinking about going to university or thinking about pursuing an academic career.
June 28, 2025
Masterpiece. Will make you unable to trust academia ever again. Shows how bad incentives make normal people act in a way that causes damages to others even though that's not necessarily their intention. Teaches you the mechanisms of academic bureaucracy and inefficiency. The authors, weirdly, are academics.
May 27, 2020
Normies shouldn't write books before they can understand the topic and learn to make a complete sense of what they are talking about.
May 16, 2021
[Imported automatically from my blog. Some formatting there may not have translated here.]
Fun fact: I've been involved with "higher education" off and on, mainly on, since 1969. An undergrad for four years, a grad student for … too long a time, a non-tenure-track instructor for seven years, and winding up as a diligent employee geek for 25 years. I won't say I'm an expert, but I kept my eyes open.
Another fun fact: my separation agreement with the University Near Here allowed me to keep my library borrowing privileges, including Interlibrary Loan. And when I requested this book via Interlibrary Loan, the library responded: "Nah, we'll just buy it, and put it on hold for you."
I can't help but think that was a gutsy move on their part. Even though this book is published by the Oxford University Press (respectable!) and has two academic authors, Jason Brennan (McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University) and Phillip Magness (American Institute for Economic Research), it's fundamentally subversive of most features of the modern American university.
The authors make the following complaints about higher ed:
Faculty, administrators, and students face bad incentives that cause them to advance their selfish interests instead of working for the common good of their institution.One description of administrators particularly rang true: "Administrators respond [to the demand that they appear "busy"] by filling their schedules with meeting after meeting, with a large percentage of those meetings being little more than administrators reporting to each other about what happened at other meetings."
I can report that this behavior filtered down to those lower on the totem pole.
Universities promote themselves shamelessly with gauzy websites, self-advertisements, festooned with meaningless slogans. UNH's "on the edge of possible" is mentioned as a good (by which I mean: bad) example. (I commented on this dreadfulness back in 2016.) Worse, universities don't even deliver on even their nebulous promises; students don't learn much that's useful. Student evaluation of teaching is garbage. Calculating GPAs is an inherently incoherent methodology; the results are meaningless. Academics relentlessly seek their own self-interest while cloaking themselves in the language of morality. Gen eds don't work; they're mostly established to serve the needs of the influential faculty and their departments, instead of students. There are too many low-quality PhD programs which (inevitably) oversupply low-quality PhDs. This wastes everyone's time and money. Students cheat. A lot. Universities waste a lot of taxpayer money; justice demands reform.One description of administrators particularly rang true: "Administrators respond [to the demand that they appear "busy"] by filling their schedules with meeting after meeting, with a large percentage of those meetings being little more than administrators reporting to each other about what happened at other meetings."
I can report that this behavior filtered down to those lower on the totem pole.
Brennan and Magness acknowledge that their treatment only scratches the surface. They don't even touch some topics, most notably athletics and leftist political activism. That's OK; what they do discuss should (but probably won't) cause some serious soul-searching in academic halls.
[And another fun fact: Jason Brennan is a UNH alumnus.]
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews