gimmedatacc
Kraken
- Joined
- Jul 12, 2025
- Posts
- 3,083
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I get it, during the pre-modern era universities were the only place where you could gain advanced knowledge. It was the place where you could meet and receive lectures from the big shots who contributed groundbreaking theories to their respective fields.
But today you can learn basically anything on your own thanks to the internet. The common counterargument to this that that I kept hearing was "But Dr. X is teaching it!". I could find some student who recorded Dr. X's online classes and ask him to give the video files to me, if they're not uploaded on youtube already.
Then one may argue that the real point of universities is conducting research, which I would accept if 90% of the papers published weren't trash. I think it's basically an open secret in academia that many, many papers cherrypick or just outright lie about the results and the data. Sometimes it gets called out like the recent scandal with the stanford psychology professor, but the vast majority of the time it doesn't. I've seen far more credible papers from the R&D departments of private companies than labs of universities.
All of that on top of the fact that I believe that academia is an extremely toxic space to be in. Thanks to tenure, professors can get away with anything short of sexual abuse, but according to the news many fail at even that. If Dr. Y the power tripper is the head of your department and says "dance monkey dance", you MUST do it because who are you going to complain to?
So in short, I believe that universities fail at teaching and fail at research. They are an extremely outdated concept, and should be replaced with independent self-study and research-only organizations. Change
But today you can learn basically anything on your own thanks to the internet. The common counterargument to this that that I kept hearing was "But Dr. X is teaching it!". I could find some student who recorded Dr. X's online classes and ask him to give the video files to me, if they're not uploaded on youtube already.
Then one may argue that the real point of universities is conducting research, which I would accept if 90% of the papers published weren't trash. I think it's basically an open secret in academia that many, many papers cherrypick or just outright lie about the results and the data. Sometimes it gets called out like the recent scandal with the stanford psychology professor, but the vast majority of the time it doesn't. I've seen far more credible papers from the R&D departments of private companies than labs of universities.
All of that on top of the fact that I believe that academia is an extremely toxic space to be in. Thanks to tenure, professors can get away with anything short of sexual abuse, but according to the news many fail at even that. If Dr. Y the power tripper is the head of your department and says "dance monkey dance", you MUST do it because who are you going to complain to?
So in short, I believe that universities fail at teaching and fail at research. They are an extremely outdated concept, and should be replaced with independent self-study and research-only organizations. Change
