Sean McClure@sean_a_mcclure
Professors are hired and promoted based on research output, not teaching ability;
Courses rush through content instead of ensuring understanding;
Classroom is passive, not participatory;
Learning structure is 19th-century industrial instruction;
Students cram → forget → move on;
Everyone must follow the same learning style despite different backgrounds and cognitive styles;
Textbooks present sterile, finished knowledge (students never learn how ideas were discovered, why the structures exist, how concepts evolved, how theory grows);
Courses pretend fields are isolated;
Students learn procedures instead of understanding (e.g. math = symbol manipulation);
Dissent is punished, both socially and academically;
Top marks go to those who learn to write what professors want to hear;
Success comes from writing papers in the right style and mimicking intellectual fashions;
The entire culture encourages imitation;
Trains students to speak a dialect, not to express ideas (jargon signals “intelligence”);
Genuine intellectual risks are punished;
True debate is all but extinct (discussions are status games, signaling and pre-approved opinions);
Enforces a narrow moral and political lens on everything (thought policing and intellectual monocultures are the norm);
Ratio of administrators to teachers has exploded, shifting priorities to bureaucracy instead of education;
Students are treated as customers;
Grade inflation;
Teaching models do not reflect how people learn;
Lectures scale broadcasting, not learning;
Topics central to modern understanding are barely taught;
Modern developments take 20–30 years to become curricula;
System does not produce independent learners, it produces dependent ones;
Tuition is predatory;
Overproduction of degrees has devalued them;
Universities sell prestige, not skill.
…………but yes, now that AI is here we have a problem. Give me a break.
