by s1artibartfast | 2025-04-15 19:12:34+00:00
[edit] Don't kill the messenger...

I think the clearest and most cogent articulation I have seen was given by Marc Andreesen back in January, in a 4 hour podcast on Trump policy with Lex Friedman, starting at 58 min. His position was that University reform is not possible. Instead, the institutions themselves need to be destroyed so that new institutions can replace them with more agreeable values [1].

Relevant highlights IMO:

> I mean, think of the term academic freedom, and then think of what these people have done to it. It’s gone. That entire thing was fake and is completely rotten. And these people are completely giving up the entire moral foundation of the system that’s been built for them, which by the way, is paid for virtually 100% by taxpayer money.

...

>the population at large is going to realize the corruption in their industry and it’s going to withdraw the funding.

...

>Okay, so let’s go through it. So the universities are funded by four primary sources of federal funding. The big one is a federal student loan program, which is in the many trillions of dollars at this point, and then only spiraling way faster than inflation. That’s number one. Number two is federal research funding, which is also very large. And you probably know that when a scientist at the university gets a research grant, the university rakes as much as 70% of the money for central uses. Number three is tax exemption at the operating level, which is based on the idea that these are nonprofit institutions as opposed to, let’s say, political institutions. And then number four is tax exemptions at the endowment level, which is the financial buffer that these places have. Anybody who’s been close to a university budget will basically see that what would happen if you withdrew those sources of federal taxpayer money, and then for the state schools, the state money, they all instantly go bankrupt. And then you could rebuild. Then you could rebuild.

...

>Suppose you and I want to start a new university, and we want to hire all the free thinking professors, and we want to have the place that fixes all this, practically speaking, we can’t do it because we can’t get access to that money.

...

>Charlie Munger actually had the best comment, this great investor, Charlie Munger has great comment. He was once asked, it’s like General Electric was going through all these challenges, and he was asked at a Q&A. It said, “How would you fix the culture at General Electric?” And he said, “Fix the culture at General Electric?” He said, “I couldn’t even fix the culture at a restaurant.” It’s insane, like obviously you can’t do it. Nobody in business thinks you can do that, it’s impossible. Now look, having said all that, I should also express this because I have a lot of friends who work at these places and are involved in various attempts to fix these. I hope that I’m wrong, I would love to be wrong, I would love for the underpants gnome step two to be something clear and straightforward that they can figure out how to do. I would love to fix it, I’d love to see them come back to their spoken principles, I think that’d be great, I’d love to see the professors with tenure get bravery, it would be fantastic

https://lexfridman.com/marc-andreessen-2-transcript/