Avoid comments about naivety and instead focus on the actual content at hand. Exhibit the maturity that your writing and education seem to indicate.

The internet is an autistic medium. When you called my views "dangerous", I thought you were taking the discussion a little too seriously, so I responded with a playful retort (notice the wink). Obviously, the humor was lost in transmission.

Regardless, I am not organizing any kind of rebellion. This is simply a fun intellectual tussle. When I start gathering troops on the moons of Yavin IV, we can talk about dangerous.

Anyway, Powers is enough by himself to disprove your assertion about academic research as garbage.

I already acknowledged in a previous comment that there was some good stuff coming out of the university. It's just mostly garbage in the humanities. It's a high enough ratio of garbage to fully justify the "The anti-college bias in the hacker community" that you originally complained about.

(2) Taken as a whole, the research from all departments in our university system is valuable. It seems that we are primarily addressing (2) here.

The relevant questions as I see it are:

1) Does the average student have a net increase to his knowledge from attending the university?

2) If yes, is there a net increase from the classes and school work?

3) If yes to 2), is the net increase greater than what the student would otherwise be doing.

4) If yes to 3), is it worth the money?

5) Is a university education worth subsidization from the government?

6) Is the net output of university research a net positive?

7) Is the research worth subsidization from the government?

8) If no to 5), should the university be actually disestablished- ie, all ties between it and the government cut off?

My answers:

1) Debatable. Some courses are quite good, especially in the sciences. But there are a number of courses that are actually destructive of knowledge. In several of the fields I know very well - sociology, economics, and architecture - the main output of the courses seems to be elaborate lessons on why 1 + 1 is 3, and why ugliness is beautiful and beauty is ugly. I actually think the net effect of architecture education in particular is actually negative.

2) Most of my learning in college came from clubs, other students, and independent reading. The net effect of classroom education is probably negative for most people.

3) In my case, I have learned way more outside of the classroom than in it. The benefit of the college years was lots of free time.

4) Unless you are rich, it's not worth paying sticker price for a private college. The price of a public college is not much greater than the cost of living in a city, so you should probably go just because it's a lot of fun. But you should rely on yourself and peers for actually learning, not classes.

5) I'd say absolutely not.

6) In some of the sciences the output is definitely a net positive. In the social sciences, law, architecture definitely not. Those fields have done incredible damage. In literature or history, well, it's about 99% garbage with 1% guys like Powers, David Fischer or Bryan Ward-Perkins. So I guess that's a net positive, if only because bad literature doesn't harm anyone, you can just ignore it.

7) Outside the scientific fields, no. There is simply not enough good output to justify the hundreds of billions of dollars that universities receive.

8) I am a disestablishmentarian - especially with regards to the humanities. The government should not be in the business of telling its subjects what to think. There should be no subsidies. All credentialing laws requiring a degree to perform a profession should be revoked. All laws that allocate funds based on holding a PHD or institutional affiliation should be revoked. Universities should lose their non-profit status and be taxed like everyone else.

I encourage you to read about some of the research being done here, and I'd be interested to know how it fits in with your preconceived notions.

Well, there seems to be no way for me to actually view the output of the project. So until I can see the results, or see evidence of someone outside the university enjoying the results, it does indeed fit my notions that most academic work seems to be produced for the benefit of those producing it, with little contribution to society as a whole.