Andrew S. Bledsoe

Harvard faculty report that they've had to "trim some readings and drop others entirely, switch from novels to short stories, and that it’s difficult to keep assigning reading in the face of increasing student complaints."

Teachers vs Professors This has been on my mind since I first encountered it almost 15 years ago. When I was in high school, I had a few teachers in the humanities/social sciences who were really, really good: deep, serious thinkers, with lots of interesting views synthesized over decades of globetrotting experiences. As teachers, even at a nice private school, they were not real “winners” in the sense of climbing a prestigious career ladder, and neither did they publish academic papers. You could call them very advanced amateurs, and as dabblers they got to toy with lots of interesting ideas, kind of randomly assembled, without outside judgment. When I got to the University of Chicago, known for its life of the mind in the humanities, I didn't really find anybody who seemed to be as deep or as interesting a thinker as these teachers I encountered in high school. I always wondered why. Partially, it's because I got lucky with my teachers. They were the best we had. Maybe I didn't get so lucky with my professors. But today I may have figured it out: I think the actual reason is that my professors at UChicago were, in a sense, winners on an academic career ladder. It’s an extremely competitive environment, and they had somehow made it to the top. By definition, this is a tremendously powerful filter. And I think this had actually filtered against a whole group of people whom I consider interesting. This has become especially clear over the last few years, as a lot of traditional academia has been losing prestige rapidly: people are trusting the kind of professorial expert class less and less and less. It turned out that professors of ethics and sociology are just as unethical and susceptible to groupthink as the general public. And the general conformity of ideology and thought in academia is now well-known. These professional humanities academics may publish papers that are respected or even highly esteemed within their own niche communities, but this particular value system has long since been removed from what I consider interesting, or, in many cases, even related to the pursuit of truth. Reflecting on it, the heart of the matter is that those teachers in high school were unconstrained by convention and had been allowed to fully lean into their interests — kind of like the platonic dream of academia — whereas the professors I encountered in university, even when very successful, had been conformed by the academia-industry pressure cooker and their work sanitized, professionalized, and ultimately made uninteresting under the constraints.

The new academic wealth gap isn't your university. It's not even your advisor's connections. It's who knows Claude can turn 50+ research papers into a thesis chapter in 3 hours and who's still manually coding qualitative data. I just watched a sociology PhD skip 8 weeks of analysis. Here are the 9 prompts they used:

Iranian state media has released a video announcing that it will bomb US bases in the region using its F-4 Phantoms.

Please have a good thought for Gracie. She’s struggling — and so are we.

Imagine being at a university like Harvard or Oxford and using AI to think and write. The whole world is unpaywalled to you. The world's most beautiful and well stocked libraries are open to you. What a waste.