Aside from massive student
debt and risible employment prospects for Ph D’s, the early 21st
Century University has other profound problems. The disciplinary structure is a
mess of different geological strata, excluding the 21st century and its
urgent need for focused departments dealing with hitherto “interdisciplinary”
subjects like Cognitive Science.
In the age of the ubiquitous
smartphone, students are asked to perform an acting job in pretending that
their professors are more competent than those available through a single click
on a browser. In the age of readily available neatly archived knowledge , a
mafioso level scam is implemented with “anonymous” review , cartels of
professors introducing their students to the fleshpots of the conference
circuit , and interlocking boards of capi – sorry, journal editors. Of course,
this feeds into the “tenure “ scam, where a historical deal between the state
and scholar to secure academic freedom for the latter is now a dead letter.
The solutions are blindingly
simple. All basic courses are now available for minimum charge of the web.
Academic articles can transparently be posted for equally transparent peer
review and appropriately edited by the original writer. , who might
alternatively agree to disagree or ignore. Cui bono the present system?
The corporation-dominated university and immensely profitable journals to start
with.
Yet there is a darker agenda
at work. The demonic social forces unleashed by the attempted neoconservative
coup of 2000-2008 have been transmuted into a paralysis of political will. It
suits purveyors of neoliberalism that students of political science can be
indoctrinated to look away from the Wiki leaks revelations of how diplomacy
actually works. It suits them also that psychology students are not taught the
elements of objective math models of reality and the real political order.
All this can easily be
changed, and this is but a short foray into the area .Apart from the crisis in
replicability of results and consequent retraction of papers that characterizes
21st century science, there are vast swathes of potential knowledge that remain unexplored as a result of the
idiot savant microfocus of current science. “Dark energy” and “dark matter” are
too well-known to be rehearsed here, are suggestive of a stage of crisis in
science, but are mirrored in other areas. Examples are the fact that the “dark
energy”/default network of the brain is currently suggested as absorbing
metabolic process even when no cognition is taking place; linear models of the
neuron are clearly too simple; the “dark nucleotides” result in non-coding rmas
that actually code by any computing definition; and so on.
The recent accidental
(sorry, “serendipitous”) discovery of CRISPR mechanisms now means that
gene-editing is at the stage that Monsanto assured us a generation ago they had
achieved. This opens a Pandora’s box of speculation about corporate influence
on science, already accepted in medicine to the extreme that corporations have
gotten so concerned about academics whoring themselves that they have started
to do their own replication studies.
. Contemptible as such influence is, the problem is deeper
still. It is clear, after the bail-outs post-2008, that the number one value in our society is the right
of quants to fiddle with numbers and, by financializing the economy, introduce
what has become a neo-feudal system. The state pays for this economized status
quo - using taxpayers’ money against
them – and then requires that the universities produce graduates to work in
this Procrustean Uber/taskrabbit dystopia in the name of “competitiveness” in a
market that has been carefully jury-rigged.
The result is that talented artists are being removed from the gene line
as it becomes too expensive for them even to afford the white picket fence, let alone
the house. It should be the duty of universities to ensure that humanities and
arts graduates assert the transcendence of the realities to which great art
points, be that transcendence achieved through language (like Mallarme) or conceived
of as contact with an objective reality (like Beethoven). Nothing of the sort
happens; indeed. this writer has sat at
seminars with classical music students forced to endure disquisitions about
Beyonce videos. If it is all about feelings – as distinct, say, from exploring
the stack depth in Beethoven’s recursive motif in the fifth - why bother with reality and value judgement?
Similarly, the social sciences feature instruction in
Atheism 101 (using the Dover
trial as a straw man) and – more subtly – an injunction to the students to
regard political facts only insofar as they are relative to psychology.
Famously, the Kerry 2004 campaign was ill-advised along these lines. Of course,
you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in you, and such
weak epistemological fences are easily breached later in life.
So what can be done? It is clear that we cannot proceed
further without looking at the goals of the larger society, which should
include human beings living healthily in safe communities and free to explore
their relation with a reality conceived of as wonderful. Tertiary education is
a critical part of this, and has become subverted. So we can insist on total
transparency in all research and pedagogy as a first step. We do not have to
resort to new age woo-woo whose only virtue is a radical assertion of the
reality of subjectivity; the current structure of the academy leaves unexplored
many fertile areas of research on things
meaningful to people. We can in fact build a structure of research and teaching
built on a set of ineluctable propositions about humanity’s relation to reality
that cannot, even in principle, ever contradict best practice in science
One is to insist – the central
Bionoetics propositions - that we humans
are a process in which the universe has come to know itself, and that math
exemplifies this. Before the acceleration of mathematical knowledge in the
renaissance, we built sophisticated societies based on co-operation through
language; since then there has been a vast acceleration Mathematics is neither
more nor less than the most elliptical and precise expression of the cosmos
knowing itself through us. This is irrefutable (as distinct from true, a
slippier concept); the index of access to an objective reality through all the
travails of constructivism, psychologism etc is the litmus test of math models
working in areas like QM. Math contains access to entities historically
conceived of as Platonic (cosine, pi, e,….etc) as well as reflections of
our cognitive and social systems. Indeed, math may be illogical as anyone who
struggled with infinities knows; it may work in contexts it shouldn’t with “bad”
methods like non-converging infinities and QFT; underlying its success is
surely something deeper than “cognitive” operations.
In the social sciences,
students should indeed be taught the techniques of graph traversal that
constitute modern literacy. Yet it should be done in a context in which it is
made clear to them that in the political sphere they are objects more than
subjects, not to believe everything they think as our century has witnessed development
of expertise in implanting narratives. In the arts it should be insisted that artists
are often consumed by a vision of a reality transcendent to them, and the
formal techniques they use (like Beethoven’s stack, and his innovation of the diminished chord) should be explicated in properly respectful
fashion.
Medicine should indeed focus
on health rather than illness and preventive rather than cure or (the other
extreme) “prospective medicine, with Prozac being introduced to countries newly
told they’re depressed. Biology is in such crisis that it is the poster child
for new explanatory schemas in science. Psychology does not yet exist, 150 +
years after its initial replicabilty crisis. For the moment, we might insist on “psychological’ concepts like simultaneity
copying their correlates in physics…..
Now, of course, we have to make money. Or do we? For it is clear that the current model involves
burdening students with debt so they will later be dutiful consumers. If there is a revenue
stream, it will be in interdisciplinary degrees with max $1k a year fees and
astutely chosen research topics like those mentioned above. That may never make much money, but presenting
it as an alternative is a radical and salutary acy.
However, there is another possibility; introducing the
scheme to students of science and the arts as an entrée into a vast, numinous,
transcendent reality unavailable to them in the other colleges they are
contemplating. For social scientist aspirants, we might point out that the
activism that most of them are drawn to requires intimate knowledge of the
forces in our complex society, and being told it is all relative to their minds
is useless. For performing artists, we can stress that sophisticated performance
is likewise a profoundly revolutionary political
act and one for which they should demand
respect
