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John Quiggin's avatar

The idea of university as a transformative experience was specific to a time when only a small proportion of young people went through it. Most came from well-off backgrounds where they could afford to spend four years finding themselves, or else they were bright and ambitious enough to succeed in doing that while also securing their future.

But if it becomes economically necessary that most of the workforce have post-school education or training, that doesn't work any more. University is primarily a continuation of school for most students, not a new and radically different experience. Those interested in the telos will be looking at graduate school (assuming this survives Trump)

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Leo Francis's avatar

This sounds odd to me:

"That is because despite Jonathan Haight’s famous piece claiming colleges have a choice between accepting that their telos is truth or that it is social justice, I know of no one who actually would say the latter is the telos. What Haidt offered, I think, is an odd false dichotomy—a choice between one thing that no one really thinks and another thing that many people do think, but mistakenly so."

Any number of Higher Ed leaders and students have claimed over the last so many years that their institutions exist for the sake of diversity. That is more or less the guiding principle behind the explosive growth of DEI bureaucracy. How could you not know of anyone asserting "social justice" as the telos of a university? Do you not know how to use Google?

Also, the way the above statement is phrased implies a misunderstanding of Haidt's (NOT "Haight’s") observation. He did not present universities with two choices. He presented an unbiased search for knowledge and truth as the traditional understanding of the purpose of the university. And then he pointed out that it's the universities themselves who have instead chosen to pursue social justice. He didn't say they must choose between one or the other, he pointed out that they have already discarded the former for the latter. And, yes, I believe he then proceeded to express his own support for the former. And good for him.

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