Inside the "Forbidden Courses" at the billionaire-backed University of Austin
Inside the "Forbidden Courses" at the billionaire-backed University of Austin
revolution in education! A resuscitation of the university mission! To happen in, of all places, not the pompous old northeast or the debauched West Coast, not New York or California but the countr…
Some gems from the article.
... We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn. There was James, who studied computer science. Then there was Cameron, who also studied computer science. David and Peter studied computer science, while Luke and Albert studied computer science. As for Mike and Jason, the former studied computer science, whereas the latter studied computer science. Ethan was not unlike Max, in that both studied computer science. Some people studied business, too.
The students’ demographics were as revealing as their chosen majors. Roughly 80% were white. Over 70% were men. There was not a black man in the room.
(And if you need to leave to use the bathroom, you’ll get to pass by a massive oil painting of George W. Bush making the Hand of Benediction in front of the wreckage of 9/11, beside a Madonna-figure whose halo glows, I shit you not, with the Coca Cola logo.)
Peter springs to the center of the room. The air pressure changes. A buzz, a hum, a current about us. He brims with a frenzied energy. Something is happening. He is going to give us a taste of what’s to come, he says. This is the kind of intellectual activity we’re going to experience at UATX. We’re going to grapple with big issues. We’re going to be daring, fearless, undaunted. We’re going, he says, to do something called “Street Epistemology.”
What is Street Epistemology? He’ll demonstrate. It’s one of two things he does, the other being jiu-jitsu. “I don’t have a life,” he says. “I talk to strangers and I wrestle strangers.” But before we can do Street Epistemology, Peter needs to think of some questions.
“You gotta get into jiu-jitsu, man. I’m telling you.” Peter did jiu-jitsu. It’d changed his life. He spun around in his seat, scanned the rest of the bus, then whipped back to laser his eyes on me. “I could murder everybody on this bus and nobody could stop me. It’s a superpower.” I thought this over.
Many of the founders had participated in the same conservative think tanks: The Hoover Institution, The Manhattan Institute, The American Enterprise Institute. Many had contributed to The Free Press, the digital paper founded by Bari Weiss in 2021, the same year UATX was announced. Many were friends or fans of Jordan Peterson. One UATX founder was even double-dipping, delivering lectures at both UATX and Peterson’s forthcoming Peterson Academy. One had been fired from Princeton University after sleeping with a student and “discouraging her from seeking mental health care,” per an official university statement. One had been accused of assaulting his girlfriend. (The charges were dropped.) Another had had a talk at MIT canceled after comparing Affirmative Action to “the atrocities of the 20th century.” And so, beneath their optimism, there churned bitterness and indignation at their mistreatment by the Thought Police—sour feelings they sweetened with their commitment to “free and open inquiry.”
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We numbered 50 or so. We came from places like Harvard and Stanford and UChicago and MIT and U Penn.
So this is what we call a “career limiting move.”
it's amazing how schools like these can graduate battalions of fools and people still take their diplomas as certificates of wordliness
If you’re talking about the “elite” schools - Ivy or otherwise - there’s a little bit more to it.
A resume is a really, really low bandwidth way to get a feel for someone. Of that’s all you have to go on for starters, it at least tells you which gauntlets they’ve already run. It’s like hiring someone who has worked at Apple or Google for ten years.
As a simplifying assumption, think of ability as a normal distribution - a bell curve. The average on Stanford grads may be higher than those of Liberty University, although there still may be enough overlap that you can’t say that any given candidate is better from one or the other.
If you’re talking about someone who transferred out of Harvard to go to Austin University or whatever they’re calling themselves, that opens up an entirely different set of questions.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. I think it's a bit rude to try to explain the concept of reputation. the only other content in what you're saying seems to amount to "it's not a noisy signal of workplace ability," which (a) is only a fraction of the social power these degree stamps hold (b) is not true (c) apparently is supported by the summoning of a bell curve, the holy symbol of naive applications of statistics to concepts of ability
(EDIT: I apologize for being prickly, I'm not on much sleep so I hope you can cut me some slack on that)
No worries about the lack of sleep. I’ve been there and then some.
I do think however that you’re misinterpreting my argument to at least some extent.
First, it’s a completely noisy signal. It’s also, unfortunately, the only thing we have when a CV lands on our desk. It obviously decreases in importance as the number of positions held/publications made/other experiences increase. If someone were to have a dozen pubs in reputable journals and ten years experience working in what I’m interested in, I’m not going to take their school into account. The other, later work is much more relevant. If on the other hand they transferred from MIT to Liberty University and that’s the only data point I have, that’s what I am going to need to go off of. I have a lot of resumes to look at, and still have to do my regular full time job. I’m not arguing that it’s not noisy. I’m just pointing out that if we consider something like a weighted function in CV evaluation, the fewer items there are, the higher the weights assigned to non-preferred variables might be. I’ve collaborated with researchers from some of the most respected institutions in the world, and other than arrogance I can’t say that they had a whole lot in common.
Second, I do not think ability falls on a bell curve. I believe talent is a highly skewed distribution. It might get more normal the more you remove sources of variability - I don’t think you could pick someone at random off the street and ask them to write up a Bayesian classifier, but if you reduced the sample down to stats/ML grads, you’d probably find some are better and some are worse but you might see a meaningful average being drawn. I was just trying to make it easier to visualize. I am an actual data scientist (well, complexity theorist), and I am not naive about data.
In terms of social power, that’s absolutely one of the main reasons people pay the outrageous tuitions for those institutions. I do need to note for anyone reading along that those same institutions will waive tuition if your family income is below $150k or so, so do not write them off. We need more diversity.
well, I am one of those researchers at a top institution. all I can say is that I do not think the people at such places are actually on a different level than those at your more general R1. who goes where has a lot more to do with social clubs and research tastes than anything else.
I'm also a little puzzled because you write about tuition write offs (which I benefited from as well) but those are only really relevant to undergrads, who I think it would be questionable to describe as often being researchers.
Dawg you should put “mansplaining” on your resume
Completely tangential but I'm idly wondering now what are some domains where things being on a bell curve would be an intriguing thing to talk about.
it'd be only quantifiable things. first thought: # of hotdogs you can eat in 10 minutes.