All very interesting questions.

You entirely miss Dr. Anderson’s point. He loves the idea of the original university culture with its high professional standards. He believes that culture served generations of Americans well before it was lost. I was in the academic-science trenches from 1961-2000, and I saw the deterioration year after year. Dr. Anderson’s lament is not for his own economic survival; it is for the loss of a glorious ideal that goes back centuries.

As to a Ph.D. certifying any qualification, a famous academic ecologist justified awarding doctorates to weak students by saying, “They get government jobs, so what’s the problem.”

About that Mathematics Association of America:
https://somethinghappeninghere.wordpress.com/2020/10/11/according-to-the-mathematics-association-of-america-2-2-5/

Yep, as “rational” as the square root of two!

It was like this even in the 1980s when I was getting my Computer Science degree. We were sternly warned not to collaborate on programs that had to be completed perfectly to pass the classes. Yet in the computer labs you would always see the Chinese students huddled together around the same computer speaking Mandarin and blatantly violating the rules. Yet they never were punished. I knew back then that we were headed for trouble. I remember going to training (once employed) with many of the courses attended by a majority of Chinese nationals flown in. The questions they asked were very probing and it was clear they were part of projects to appropriate technology to develop their own systems rather than become expert in the systems they were training on.

I had still assumed even up to that point that only the best would actually be awarded a PhD.

Almost 40 years ago, my friend’s daughter asked to read Grandpa’s dissertation, earned in the 1940s. Grandpa asked her why she wanted to read something written for the sole purpose of confirming what a group of people wanted to hear.

There are several perspectives one can take on this. One that interests me, is the future of mathematical discovery. It seems there was a time when the greatest geniuses in the field (I am thinking of Gauss or Euler) prospered mainly via royal patronage. Then by the time of, say, Riemann, we’ve entered the university era, but it’s still very elitist. After World War II, we have the era of Big Science and intensive state patronage of the university system. Meanwhile we have the information age, and increasingly large fractions of the population attending university.

Now it’s the age of social media too, and the universities are dumbing down, a kind of village for vocational training that everyone passes through, and where the permanent residents are a lumpenprofessoriat whose scramble for citations, somehow also generates the opinions that steer our overgoverned expertocratic societies… I apologize for the awkward turns of phrase, I’m just trying to put into words the actual role of universities in our university-centric societies.

Given that this is the new structure of society, my question is, where will fundamental discoveries come from in this situation? There could be a return to patronage of the exceptional, but by elements of the rich, e.g. hedge fund managers who came from a STEM background. Perhaps intellectual standards will continue to be maintained at elite institutions (though the Ivy League’s trend doesn’t instil confidence that they will be maintained), or perhaps a new cohort of elite institutions will emerge, e.g. those which resist turning woke while also avoiding scrutiny by the enforcers of woke.

There’s also the possibility that whole new avenues for scholarship and achievement will open via the Internet. Certainly Internet also allows crackpots and mediocrities to self-publish; but I think there will also be a few Internet niches outside the academy, where thought of genuine quality and originality flourishes.

Finally, there’s the role of AI, whether in partnership with humans or eventually on its own. So one might look to all the places in the world where advanced AI is developing – spy agencies, Big Tech, academia focused on AI – as places that might also give rise to advances in math (and other disciplines of high abstraction).

Who would have thought the academic system of a America would have been taken over by a bunch
of chow mein salesmen? I know these midgits are not smarter they just cheat! Class must be real fun with all these slant eyed little bastards chattering away in Chinese!

The Amish, Mennonites and Hutterites are the closest I can see that have established their own self-sufficient communities. They lack the necessary defenses to repel the PTB should it come to that, but this is compensated for by a belief that worldly death is only a stopover on the way to eternity.

You must first organize enough of your neighbors to agree to form a self-sustaining community. No easy task in itself.

Then you must have a plan for the community to supply each person in the community with the necessities: energy, food, clean water, shelter.

Then the community must agree on community values, and any who are unwilling to adhere to those values must leave. This is necessary for cohesion and mutual trust.

Then you need to arrange for community defense, because if your community can accomplish the above, you will be a target for the Powers That Be (PTB).

After that, life will be hard but sustainable and the community can grow into other things like “universities, stores, hotels, movie industry, medical establishment, etc.”

We need our own universities, our own stores, our own hotels, our own movie industry, our own medical establishment, etc.

We should learn from a group of tribsemen who have proven to be very sucessful over the years. A band of brothers with their own schools, culture and way of life. Perhaps the Mormons or the Maya. Noooooo. Maybe the Swiss. Hmmmmmm. Who to emulate? I wonder.

And only those who really want to come along can be included. Some, who refuse to follow the rules, will have to be shunned.

Almost a cult. Accepting the fact that we are indeed deplorable.

Any such undertaking is going to cost money. We have to accept the fact that TANSTAAFL.

There are many problems, for which the solutions are always extremely vague. What exactly does “form our own communities” mean? Can this be defined for once? Preserving our traditions and intellectual life? How? What exactly do we need to do, what resources do we need to gather, and how do we at least get started? What are we even supposed to be striving towards? Is there any strategy here or just more platitudes?

I, like other people, am just some normal idiot, but I have some capacity. What do we do with our capacities if we share your concerns? Delete netflix? Stop going to college? Ok. Done. Now what?

Get over it. Adjuncts in the hard sciences can get paid $100 per hour and it’s not hard work. No publish or perish – no rat race – show up a few hours a week and pass all the students. Tutor on the side, buy land, become a landlord.

We have to walk away from established institutions and build alternatives.

This is what I have been saying. We need our own universities, our own stores, our own hotels, our own movie industry, our own medical establishment, etc.

I have been in the academic world, and though it’s been a couple of decades, I have seen enough to believe your take on the state of it all now. I thank you for this great exposé, Mr. Anderson. Still this article being an exposé wouldn’t do a bit of good if it were sent to every email inbox at every university in the country. They don’t care. As you say, they want the big bucks from the foreign students. Regarding the “wokeness”, as with the Chinese Cultural Revolution 1.0, this thing is too far gone, and the academics are far too cowardly to do anything about it now.

I appreciate your suggestions in your final paragraph. As I was reading I thought of one thing that you didn’t mention. The way the universities stay flush with money, besides getting the high-paying foreign students (see Peak Stupidity‘s post “Chinese Students at American Universities” in which we note that it’s not just a “STEM” thing anymore), it’s the guaranteed backing of student loans by the US Feral Gov’t that does it. Stop that, somehow, and the university bubble will pop like a balloon.

Regarding the industrial espionage, I have some experience via my Chinese sources on that too – see “Chinese grad students and airbag espionage”.