/pt/ – Petrarchan

>>3561 No, the US dumbed out mid century when conservative and liberal theses which failed to meet conservative and liberal scholarly criteria in their fields were readily accepted; meanwhile between 1948 and 1967 scholarly theses from labourite / social democrat / revolutionary social democrats | actual communists were required to meet the politically adjacent criteria of work in their fields: EH Carr minimum, EP Thompson / Christopher Hill / CLR James. The CIA sponsored a lot of the leftist academic work using emigre communists-against-Tankinost. The decline in the left's quality of work in the US started in the 1970s: reading Radical Amerika you can note the decline in quality as fewer and fewer historians edited it. Processed World was of a high quality, but that was restricted by being the results of a "turn to industry" from the left fragment workers in the 1970s. Commonwealth Universities collapsed in the 1980s. France in the 1990s. Germany still has a few universities here and there. >>3558 (OP) Yes, Honours theses are a good indicator of capacity for PhD study while avoiding the necrotic US quals system. The problem is you occasionally get a Kissinger. >3566 Humanities and Social Sciences don't work on volume, they work on Quality. If you look at the Soviet Academic system in HASS fields where they broke down Major Research Projects into Research Contributions, each Research Contribution was on a per-academic basis, and thus each component had to be quality checked for the Minsk History Department's major research goals to be functional. Ie: Peer review. * * * The only way to resolve this without seizing the universities and executing the nomenklatura, is to form collectives like Processed World and hold ourselves by peer review of scholarly works while working in wage labour to the highest scholarly standards and only publishing reviewed work. I decided to attach an image for amusement, it is about academics favouring idealism over praxis, and a different meaning of idealism over actually doing their fucking job.

>>3561 It started with the written word.

>>3588 read what >>3566 said. It is sort of like this >>3584 >Humanities and Social Sciences don't work on volume, they work on Quality. Retard take. the word in social sciences today is publish or perish. That is essentially what quantity over quality means. Citing a soviet style of academia is meaningless since they gave us niggers like Lysenko. your proposed solution under >*** might have some merit to it. Are you interested in a colab?

My professors, when I attended college, lamented the dilution and lowering of standards within living memory. And had real grief for the loss from what was before them. Their explanation was that administration forced changes from the top down, making things easier for common denominator, and allowing for more students (and by extension, more tuition). I keep my finger on the pulse of my alma mater (a small lib arts school), and I think >>3566 is correct. They (meaning the school admins) are pulling the chutes and shooting flares, even though enrollment has even risen from its recent lows. Money is thin. My guess is that the true reason is that the university system's managerial class, the administrators and bureaucrats, are trying to sacrifice the school for their wages and skin. If school boards had any sense, they would cast off those leeches, but unfortunately those types know how to persuade that their existence is necessary. And I think they will probably win, though it will doom universities in general, and be a total pyrrhic victory.

>>3588 read what >>3566 said. It is sort of like this >>3584 >Humanities and Social Sciences don't work on volume, they work on Quality. Retard take. the word in social sciences today is publish or perish. That is essentially what quantity over quality means. Citing a soviet style of academia is meaningless since they gave us niggers like Lysenko. your proposed solution under >*** might have some merit to it. Are you interested in a colab?

>>3584 I'm talking about people overall, not just academics. You're proving my point by failing to comprehend a one-sentence post.

>>3584 This is all really interesting. Any readings on western leftist historians and the CIA?

>>3754 > If school boards had any sense, they would cast off those leeches I think there's basically 2 reasons why this won't happen. 1. The past 50-ish years of American education policy has been driven by an expanding cascade of student rights under federal law. So for example, students with disabilities like ADHD have the right to special low-distraction testing facilities. Those testing facilities are basically just empty rooms, but they have to be guaranteed to meet certain standards to guarantee that no violations of anyone's federally-protected rights to education. That means that someone on a uni campus must now be employed to schedule the rooms with the students and to sit around outside the rooms to make sure that there's not obvious cheating happening. This is now one of the bare-minimum services that a uni must provide in order to avoid a federal civil rights lawsuit. Now in response to case 1, you might imagine that the Trump admin might simply tear up the last 50 years of education policy, and it's true that they might. But it's also true that they might lose out on this kind of thing in court after a bunch of litigation. Boards will be very reticent to cut this level of admin bloat until there is a SCOTUS decision giving an all-clear. That's going to be a long wait, if it ever happens. So for the time being the unis will keep paying someone to sit at the testing center who is charged with making sure that nothing is happening in the empty rooms, and that no one goes into the empty rooms without scheduling first. It's cheaper than losing that lawsuit. 2. At the really research-heavy unis, tenured faculty simply will not go back to the work of doing their own administrative labor. That was the arrangement before the uni admin class appeared -- the X committee would govern X and occasionally hire a grad student to do some marginal tasks involved with X. This led to a pretty minimalist university without many of the student services that are now considered irreplaceable. With the flood of federal funding in the mid-century, research faculty decided to ditch this arrangement and hand more and more of the administrative labor to a professional admin class. In exchange, the research faculty could spend more time in the lab, teaching grad students, and generally doing the types of work that could lead to more grants and awards. This was a win-win for many decades. But now the feds have turned off the grant tap and that research model is going to be completely non-viable for many. Many unis are going to propose a compromise solution where the research faculty get funded with hard money (grants are "soft" money) but they have to teach a lot of classes that are currently taught be grad students and adjuncts. For many research faculty, this is akin to losing their jobs. And that's teaching. Most tenured faculty (both researchers and teachers) would consider administrative labor to be simply so far beneath them that many would switch careers. A lot of research faculty would rather walk away from academia rather than take a job that's 70% teaching and 30% administrative labor.

>>3772 Good explanation. I didn't think of point two. On point one, I saw students' rights rife with abuse. Look, I do think that there's probably some legitimate grievances. But there was a lot of hand-holding for ADHD or "autistic" students, and basically zero for anyone who had a real medical issue or physical impairment (I have some personal animosity in this regard, however). But that aside, I agree with what you say regarding the status quo marching on until some sort of judicial decree. I work in the environmental sector, and it's the same way at the moment with red tape surrounding land use. Some change is rumbling, but it's not clear which way it's going to swing. Still, I think also, at least in my experience, students' rights and students' privileges have begun to overlap. There seems to be a lot of money being thrown around in the attempt to keep students life at a certain quality, which I think of as largely sheltered. Now, I do think that there is a conflict for me here, namely that if university is a place of learning and research, then it makes sense for it to be somewhat sequestered from the prole-ization, but also that if educational demands are sinking, then what is the point of dumping money into "student life"? Again, though, this is probably apart of the bloat. Regarding point two, my college had very little research, so I didn't think of it. In fact, my alma mater seems to still utilize some of that older model, where faculty will hold terms as administrative positions, and ergo not teaching, and then going back to teaching when the term is finished. I'm guessing that the main prospect for these research-orientated academics is that you get to research, and if there is the addition of administrative work, then why not make more money in the private sector.

>>3790 It's interesting that 3/4 of your examples are protests (and, I'm no expert, but left leaning protests in particular) against Communist states, is there is a particular reason for that pattern? Do you think their causes can be extrapolated to the Western climate today? Are there any texts by the Shanghai 89 and Prague 68 protesters or sympathizers you recommend?

>>3843 >protests In 1956 the Hungarian Central Workers Committee of Greater Budapest took government for 6 weeks until surrendering. In 1968 the formal government of Czechoslovakia supported and reinforced the organisation, and after intervention the strikes. So I think we can say that these are deeper than "protests." Shanghai formed its nth Commune to once again be repressed The best citation I can find in Harman's partiinost (Trot-Cliffite) Class Struggle in Eastern Europe is VV Kusin (1972) _Political Groupins in the Czechoslovak reform movement_ London. Shanghai 89 is even harder to track down because the western press didn't bother and its all horizontal party communications. You'll notice that the quality of reporting on Eastern issues drops off after Team B take over the CIA and stop hiring revolutionary social democrats kicked out of their soviet style society. Why in the East? Eastern control narratives relied on working class integration into nominal control structures, so workers refusing to participate in co-management or workplace democracy structures disestablished state control. Secondly, I view soviet socialism as a higher form of capitalism in that it opened up "Human resources" and labour quality, as well as social services, as forms of capitalisable commodity. Allowed for a higher level of struggle, and the forced formal unionism allowed for a greater degree of informal and spontaneous unionism in crises.

>>3858 I didn't mean a diminutive by "protest," but I accept your idea that they were some kind of intrinsic internal contradiction. So, if workers do not want to work within a paradigm supposedly formulated for them, you see that as the most legitimate expression of self governance? That makes sense. Can you say more regarding the higher level of struggle within Soviet style socialism? Is it because of the truer expression of self governance that reveals itself? That's an interesting idea; is there any texts that write about that or is it your own thought?