[WhitneyLand]

In case you wonder where the current trends come from.

“Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen have parlayed their extensive ties with the president into an unabashed assault on universities and institutional science. In private text messages leaked to The Washington Post last year, Andreessen wrote that “universities are at Ground Zero of the counterattack.” He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point” and vowed that universities would “pay the price” after “they declared war on 70% of the country.” Most troublingly, Andreessen called for the National Science Foundation to receive “the bureaucratic death penalty.””

[lapcat]

Classic pulling up the ladder behind you.

Thiel went to Stanford, and Andreessen to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

[pstuart]

Not just that, but Andreessen got rich due to the work that came from CERN and he was working at NCSA developing Mosaic, which turned into Netscape.

That wealth was completely the result of work funded by the government, and the resulting initial wealth was his golden ticket into making even more.

[elgenie]

Also, Andreessen’s wife of two decades attended Stanford. Her billionaire father ensured that their surname (Arrillaga) is plastered all over the campus.

[qakHsj]

Yes, Musk as well. DOGE did the firing.

Musk uses Twitter to keep up appearances and routinely posts UBI propaganda that will obviously never materialize. Why would the guy who slashes social security (except for his corporations) introduce UBI?

The genuine worry is that these people have too much money and do seem unhinged. Thiel promotes the Antichrist and the apocalypse, Musk reposts weird Grok pictures of women as dark angels with wings as well as constant pictures of his mother. Material for a Hitchcock movie.

Both should be under anti-constitutional observation in the EU just like Scientology, which was also inspired by SciFi junk.

[ornornor]

> Musk

He’s been nuts for a while. See naming one of his (many many many) children some keyboard smash nonsense (supposedly the name of some guardian angel because he believes in that)

[EnPissant]

> He characterized Stanford and MIT as “mainly political lobbying operations fighting American innovation at this point” and vowed that universities would “pay the price” after “they declared war on 70% of the country.”

Oh? He vowed what? To make them pay the price? Or did he just predict a cause and effect and The Nation (your source) is libeling him?

[mc32]

Bureaucracy and momentum can lead to rot. It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection.

Companies tend to have restructurings and stack ranking. Obviously these have their downsides too. But they also serve to shake things up and reassess direction and needs. If you’re swimming in money often you can skip this till you hit the skids.

[p_j_w]

> It’s not a bad idea to tear things down and rebuild in order to extirpate that rot and misdirection.

Regardless of whether it’s actually a bad idea or not, there’s been zero effort by this administration to rebuild what’s been destroyed.

[miltonlost]

Move fast and break things is, in fact, a bad philosophy to work by and govern by. Especially when the people in charge admit to not wanting to rebuild.

[Gethsemane]

It's also all too easy to arbitrarily label something as "bureaucratic" and demand that it gets razed and rebuilt. I'm sure Palantir has some level of bureaucracy internally with all the new contracts it has won - perhaps we should also rip that apart?

Fact is that a university that must simultaneously handle education, research, publishing, estate management, legal stuff, media coverage, health and safety etc etc etc ends up being somewhat bureaucratic.

[LtWorf]

https://apnews.com/article/nuclear-doge-firings-trump-federa...

[superxpro12]

I summarily reject any notion that our "universities" are broken. This claim has been parroted around for the better part of a decade now. IT is an obvious right wing think tank target. Sprinkle in some heritage foundation too.

The reality is, these universities were independent institutions that did their jobs to teach without bias.

Only when fox news and right wing media captured all the news sources did "universities" suddenly become "liberal thinktanks".

Our science and research institutions arent broken. It never was. It's under attack by right wing propaganda to "bring them in line".

[insane_dreamer]

That's not at all what privatization does. It tears down a system built to benefit the public, and rebuilds a structure designed to profit a small number of individuals instead.

[raxxorraxor]

There certainly is a problem in universities and some of it might be a recent cultural development. It also isn't restricted to US universities either and some of it mirrors the a church that wanted to keep some knowledge under wraps. Publishing is also a perverted circus if you indeed are employed as a scientist and want to publish your work/findings.

That said, just razing everything down is probably not the solution, especially if there are indeed no ideas how to improve the current state.

[Ar-Curunir]

For that to work you need someone with good intentions doing the rebuilding. Fascists like thiel and andreesen don’t have good intentions.