The issue of universities

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I just returned from a tour of British universities with our 16 -year -old twins. Children cannot wait to end the school and start their grades, and I am excited about them. I grew up around universities. My father was academic for more than 60 years. My sister also. I am with Niles Gilman, former assistant adviser to Birkly, who wrote: “No other institution has ever invented anywhere in educating the wide population to a high level of technical competence, nor in creating conditions to discover new facts around the world and the concepts of the world, nor in preserving the knowledge that was already created.” The UK has an advantage over the United States in having a government that is mostly recognized.

However, universities in an international crisis are farther than Donald Trump. Perhaps there is no other current institution in sympathy with our time. In fact, this is the reason that Trump Attack them.

Universities were built on the implicit claim that there is a hierarchical sequence of knowledge. At the summit, there are people who spend a lifetime in gathering experience, achieving credits such as doctorate and professor, and testing the results they reached in the writings reviewed by their peers. What academics approved about climate change or racism are simply more valid than the opinions of random people. This distinction is always offended, but in particular in an era in which every ignorance can be broadcast on social media. When the US Minister of Health urges Robert F. Kennedy Junior, parents on “conducting your own research” in vaccines, it denies the basic principle of academic circles. The right of populists constantly takes this position. I wonder why the academics are “biased” against them.

The scientific investigation requires what the former president of Colombia University Lee Bolinger calls “abnormal openness to ideas.” But polarized people do not want to open up. They want academics to support their opinions. I watched this dynamic last month at an event at the University of Paris Science Po. Many university presidents in Europe and North America have gathered to express a common message: their institutions will not take positions on political issues, such as the war in Gaza. Individual academics and students can form their own opinions.

However, every time the head of the University of Talking tried, a convincing student from a group of demonstrators supporting clothing in the public and reads a statement by several minutes, accusing the official of the official “complicit with the Israeli genocide.” The demonstrators did not want to discuss. They drowned any attempts to one of them by making homogeneous noise on the sound systems they brought. I do not think they did anything to help people in Gaza, whose problem is not Western universities but rather the Israeli army.

“Why do many universities hate?” I asked Cornelia Wall, head of the Hereti School in Berlin, the hall. Her answer was that both demonstrators and some governments wanted to control the “material” of what universities said. In fact, Wall said, what was distinguished from the academic circles was not the essence of it, but the “process and the method” that I followed to reach “common facts and knowledge.” Unfortunately, I ignored, those goals were “very internal” for most critics.

During the speeches of the demonstrators, many of us spread in the hall on our smartphones – the devices that removed focus and reading skills. Now artificial intelligence has begun to cause greater damage to universities. It’s really He writes many students ’articles. The first workers to be replaced by artificial intelligence may be middle university students.

Reducing universities takes different forms in different countries. In the United Kingdom, it expresses itself by reducing higher education in the state and hostility to immigration that supports these institutions. It exceeds the average rotation of the British Manchester University of Manchester, but which institution gets more assistance from the government?

I see the effects of my daughter, now in her first year at a British university. It has a great academic experience, at least when the university works. It has just started for a period of five months without any education, and is assumed due to budget discounts. I used to think that a Bachelor’s degree in the United Kingdom, which is supposed to be for three years, was in fact only 18 months to give long vacations. It is now less.

Universities such as Bologna (founded 1088), Sorbon (1253) and Harvard (1636) are among the oldest institutions operating in their countries. It will survive. But they may shrink to class connotations, diploma factories, fun gardens, and network clubs.

Email Simon in [email protected]

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