What for?

Tara Henley, former CBC reporter who turned independent, interviews Eric Kaufmann. He’s trying to set up a School of Heterodox Social Science within an existing British college. He offers a balanced and rational approach to the whole mess of Cancel and Woke and such, recognizing that censorship and orthodoxy are permanent in academia.

As I listen to discussions like this, I always drop back to the bigger question.

What do we need Universities for?

We emphatically DON’T need them for training or education in any meaningful way. Training ALWAYS happens on the job. When guilds are in charge, training is more formalized and organized, but it happens anyway. Even in professions that legally require a college degree like medicine or engineering, everyone understands that the REAL training starts when you step into the clinic or the factory or the construction site.

Universities serve exactly one purpose. They are the modern equivalent of the old College Of Arms, which formerly granted titles of nobility after examining pedigrees and military achievements.

NOT incidental: The website of the College Of Arms has a SPECIAL EMERGENCY NOTICE at the top right now, warning that every building in Britain must fly the Israeli flag. Orthodoxy starts at the source.

So all attempts to train heterodox thinkers within the University are a waste of effort. The real barrier isn’t inside the classroom, it’s in the ACCREDITING AGENCY that authorizes the college to issue titles of nobility.

Heterodox thinking comes from EXPERIENCE. Heterodox thinking develops FASTER AND EASIER if people dig into real jobs EARLY in life, BEFORE they’ve been indoctrinated and narrowed down by universities.

The specific realm of “social” “science” provides a nice controlled experiment via journalism. Newspapers had a lot more original and sharp thinkers when reporters started in country papers at age 14, hauling lead and learning to set type and feed presses. Now we require them to waste at least 8 years in the College Of Arms, where they acquire the heraldic habits of serving wealth and power.