The Engines of Truth Are Stalling. By Thomas Barlow at Quadrant.
In the 1970s and 1980s, academic staff made up more than 60 per cent of the Australian university workforce. Today, the ratios have flipped, with non-academic staff now making up around 60 per cent of the total workforce. …
The implications should be clear. An administrative class will typically find prestige and revenue more interesting than truth, and bureaucracy always rewards conformity. So, while we may still imagine universities as being full of people beavering away in labs and libraries, trying to discover or invent something new and true and potentially controversial, only a minority are personally pursuing such goals. For the administrative majority there is a different agenda.
You can see this distinction on YouTube. Look up the infamous 2023 congressional hearing on anti-Semitism, at which the then presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT squirmed like clumsy politicians. Then compare their feeble efforts with almost any public talk or interview recorded in the late twentieth century by someone like Richard Feynman or Milton Friedman. You’ll gain an immediate grasp of the contrast between administrative and truth-seeking psychology. …
Mass training centers:
Fifty years ago, hardly anyone went to university. In developed nations, only about one in ten school leavers attended university. Today, university enrolment rates globally are around 40 per cent. … In Australia, in 2024, 57 per cent of those aged twenty-five to thirty-four had a university degree. …
One does not need to be a genius to grasp that teaching students with a broader range of intellectual abilities will likely necessitate a watering down of content and a lowering of standards. …
Easy marking and grade inflation are a gauge for this “consumer is right” mentality, in which regard it seems telling that a Harvard analysis last year … showed that A’s now make up 60 per cent of grades awarded to Harvard undergraduates, up from less than 25 per cent twenty years ago.
Although I am not aware of a similar study in Australia, the incentives and behaviour here are similar. Australian universities now accrue $12 billion a year (or 27 per cent of their total revenues) from fee-paying international students. All that money has proved a persistent inducement for soft marking, low fail rates, and lowering standards in parts of our institutions. …
Funding by bureaucracy:
Partly this trend is a consequence of funding frameworks that systemically encourage quantity of outputs rather than quality of outcomes. One manifestation of this has been an explosion in the number of people pursuing PhDs, often without regard to their actual ability for knowledge discovery. (In Australia, our universities graduate around eight PhDs for every new academic position opening.)
An even graver symptom, though, is the volume of research production. There are now over 6 million supposedly peer-reviewed papers being published each year across all languages and fields. Many of these papers are completely useless and irrelevant. Many are never cited or even read by anyone other than their authors. The modern scientific literature is one of history’s great triumphs of quantity over quality. …
Political bias that reflects that of the funders:
The political bias of the Western academy is often downplayed. The more hubristic on the Left see the one-sidedness as evidence that intelligence correlates with their own views—a position that requires wilful blindness of the considerable variations in academic political attitudes over time, countries, and different disciplines. …
As universities turn into political monocultures, they typically experience a narrowing of scholarship. …
“Fact checkers”:
But there is another, and greater, corruption as well. For, having been accorded special status as arbiters of what is true and false, a growing cohort of politically minded individuals in Western universities have begun also to set themselves up as arbiters of what is right and wrong. This has led to the emergence of ideological gatekeepers in a host of disciplines, who strive to shut down heretics while offering an easy ride for those who conform to their favoured political narrative. …
In 2024, a study of over 6,000 faculty at fifty-five universities and colleges in the United States conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that 27 per cent of faculty say they are unable to speak freely for fear of reprisals from students, administrators or other faculty. An astonishing 35 per cent of faculty said they had toned down their writing for fear of consequences — a four-fold greater rate of self-censorship than was reported for a similar survey in 1958, during the McCarthy era. …
One especially prevalent example of politicisation is identity-based discrimination in hiring, promotions, and admissions. Typically, it is the administrative class, not the scholarly class, that most keenly prioritises identity over truth. Yet it is remarkable how quickly the scholars have fallen into line.
I have watched academic discussions, in which participants have felt compelled to contextualise their contributions with either prideful or self-denigratory observations about their own personal cultural and sexual identities — as if who they are matters more than the truth of what they have to say. There is even a campaign in parts of the scientific community to get authors of scientific publications to cite others not based on their work’s relevance but based on criteria of ethnicity and sex. This is called “citation justice”. …
Are universities worth reforming, or should we just burn them down?
Most universities still have many faculty members who are genuine knowledge seekers in the old-fashioned sense: people who believe in the truth, who love their disciplines, and who want to adhere to rigorous scholarly ideals. This is a fact that must be remembered, no matter how bad things seem. Such people really do still exist — and in significant numbers.
The problem is that they have been sidelined. Yet if there was a way of handing them the institutional reins, and if research-granting schemes could be redesigned to identify these types rather than the blowhards and activists, we would quickly rediscover the treasure that sits within our institutions and the ethos of the academy would change very rapidly.
Over the centuries, universities/monasteries have been through previous cycles of politicization and decay, but eventually recovered. So, they probably will this time too.