Shayan Doroudi

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.