Comment by seec

The chemistry department teaches culture? nonsense.

Nonsense. Universities are just part of culture, it's tiny and most people do not participate and only receive the "products" coming out of universities. Culture is a broad concept and very region specific, it is not tied to academia. Universities have influence on culture but that's pretty much it.

Universities are supposed to teach valuable skills and knowledge. Outside of STEM fields they are increasingly failing at that task. Relativism is in full force and we are in the "post-truth" world largely because university produced some of the most garbage theories you could think of.

And universities have no business inserting themselves into moral arguments, otherwise it is basically a state sanctioned religion. But this is basically the problem, universities have become the ideological arm the power in place, exactly like it was when the Catholics dominated Europe and gave legitimacy to kings. Unsurprisingly there have been complaints of "neo-feudalism" which is just a repeat of the middle-age, that happened after the rise of Christianity, when universities were de facto Catholic institutions.

> but you need a good education to understand what "morality" means in this context.

Passive-agressive much ? Instead of attempting cheap low blows, maybe you can go through the trouble of explaining.

Morals can guide you for science and engineering choices but the whole point of those fields is that they shouldn't be limited by morals. I think you are confusing ethics and morals but it also seems like you are just arguing for some form of censorship.

>The collapse of the West started when the old Enlightenment morality - education of all kinds as a collective good - was replaced by the MBA culture of greed and vapid narcissism.

Vapid narcissism is an inherent human behavior and doesn't have much to do with universities but is largely linked to consumerism. I guess you could say that people go to university for credentialism in order to get a good pay to finally express their vapid narcissism. But the universities have nothing to do with the process and just a middle point in route to the goal. Which is basically the argument: credentialism is nonsense and cost a lot of money for no good results. If universities would be successful, one could easily argue that vapid narcissism should be going down actually but instead you get just another marker of uselessness. As for the MBAs, they can't be that big of an influence in the universities, it's mostly about bachelors and masters; why even bring this up ?

> DEI was a weak and ineffectual response to that. The dysfunction goes far deeper, and universities are now a vector of it rather than a bulwark against it.

DEI take its roots in universities, via feminism, gender studies and all kind of social sciences bullshit. Those fields were created precisely to fill the ranks because it was statistically impossible to have enough people clearing the bar for the hard studies even if they had wished to expand capacity. It was just a way to make people pay for a piece of paper that is supposed to give them legitimacy even though what happened is nothing short of endoctrinement.

Of course the universities are a vector of it, they created the dysfunction out of ideology and greed. It is just some a proto-religion that is trying to establish its authority. Nothing can tell you that better than the divide between the university "educated" women, voting left and the common man being either right-wing or closer to the center. Historically women are often the first followers of new religions (just go check who is doing new age bullshit) and they constituted the majority of early followers of Christianity.

So DEI was hardly a response, it was the result of a new religion that has no name trying to cement itself in the establishment. But it can only work if the men play along and so far the sentiment has been quite negative to say the least.