Building a New University? Niall Ferguson By James Reed

“I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken,” writes academic Niall Ferguson. Of course, he is right here as many of us have been saying for years. Professor Ferguson does not have any faith in the on-line university, seeing it as merely a supplement to the real bricks and mortar places. Thus, he is going about building a new university. I wish him luck, but seriously, at this late stage of the game, this has been left too late; it should have been done in the 1970s after the Left gained victory. And, Ferguson wants to preserve the traditional structure, which will be plump for infiltration and ultimate corruption. No, something more radical is needed since mainstream academic thought does not deal with the realities of the time, such as for example the critique of Covid vax culture, which has been conducted by on-line sources. Thus, I disagree with Ferguson’s dismissal of the virtual university, which has come to exist from necessity.

https://www.bloombergquint.com/gadfly/niall-ferguson-america-s-woke-universities-need-to-be-replaced

“If you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” — a lighthearted depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League college — you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter. Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology” known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship.
Some say that universities are so rotten that the institution itself should simply be abandoned and replaced with an online alternative — a metaversity perhaps, to go with the metaverse. I disagree. I have long been skeptical that online courses and content can be anything other than supplementary to the traditional real-time, real-space college experience.”

He does not agree with on-line option, but insists that the present universities, even the once best cannot be cured of their woke pathologies, the latter of which I agree with. Hence he wants to build a new university.

“My fellow founders and I have no illusions about the difficulty of the task ahead. We fully expect condemnation from the educational establishment and its media apologists. We shall regard all such attacks as vindication — the flak will be a sign that we are above the target. In our minds, there can be no more urgent task for a society than to ensure the health of its system of higher education. The American system today is broken in ways that pose a profound threat to the future strength and stability of the U.S. It is time to start fixing it. But the opportunity to do so in the classic American way — by creating something new, actually building rather than “building back” — is an inspiring and exciting one. To quote Haidt and Lukianoff: “A school that makes freedom of inquiry an essential part of its identity, selects students who show special promise as seekers of truth, orients and prepares those students for productive disagreement … would be inspiring to join, a joy to attend, and a blessing to society.”

Good luck with that one, but as I said it is far too late to save the conventional university, even given good intentions. But, have a go, all one has to lose is vast amounts of time and money, just to get nowhere, or at least, back where we are now.