Ten Things People Often Forget When They Talk About English Composition

The title of this post is, I think, fairly self-explanatory--so without further ado let us get on with the list it promises, the items in which, I think, are also fairly self-explanatory.

1. Writing is a Skill.

2. Academic Writing is About Content First and Foremost, Not Form, with the Premium on Being Able to Communicate Clearly--Especially if the Subject Matter is Complex.

3. Form is Not Reducible to Formulas. (You Actually Have to Exercise Judgment in Their Use.)

4. You Can't Write Well Unless You Can Read Well.

5. General Knowledge Matters. (You Actually Need Knowledge of the World to Get the Most Out of What You Read.)

6. Don't Underestimate the Importance of the Reading That We Don't Do in School.

7. You Can't Write Well Unless You Can Actually Think.

8. You Can't Write Well Unless You Have Some Interest in What You Are Writing (and Therefore Thinking) About.

9. You (Probably) Won't Learn if You Think You Have Nothing to Learn.

10. You Can't Expect a Couple of Semesters of Writing Class to Completely Make Up for a Very Weak K-12 Training in the Relevant Skills.

Ignoring these ten not terribly convenient truths leaves the problematic remedy for the very serious problem of the actual average level of college students' writing skills even less effective than would otherwise be the case--and ignoring them is pretty much all that anyone seems to do in regard to them.

Value for the Money? Britain's Post-War Military-Industrial Record

Considering Britain's defense acquisitions policy when I was writing Geography, Technology and the Flux of Opportunity, and later the working papers that grew into The Long Drawdown: Britain's Military Retrenchment,1945-1979, it seemed to me that, if Britain's defense spending was a far cry from that of the far bigger and richer United States, and so could not have produced anything like the range and depth of American military capability, Britain also got less value for the money that it did spend. (Thus Britain, in spite of American assistance, significant sacrifices and initial ambitions ended up far, far behind the superpowers in the size and variegation and capability of its nuclear arsenal. Thus did Britain strain to maintain a carrier force of four small, obsolete ships built in World War II even as the U.S. deployed a force of twenty large ships capable of carrying large wings of supersonic fighters, including the first nuclear-powered supercarriers. And so forth.)

That situation seemed to me to partly be a matter of a pattern I noticed then and which has remained relevant down to the present (something to remember as Keir Starmer essays the Show Business for Ugly People performers' dream role of wartime leader), namely how exaggerated notions of what Britain could afford, and the addition to that of a second layer of exaggeration in outsized expectations of "doing a lot with a little" (like being a world power on a two billion pound a year budget), kept running up against an unforgiving reality that forced retrenchment time and time again. This retrenchment after retrenchment entailed a great deal of waste as one program, one project, was canceled after another without result in a way that quickly told.

However, Britain's industrial and monetary weakness had a more direct significance for the country's military projects. After all, Britain's industry was broadly far behind that of the U.S. in completeness (consider Britain's limitations in key areas like machine tools even then) and modernity (where the U.S. government substantially recapitalized the country's already world-class industry, Britain ran its already aged plant into the ground amid an all-out production effort), leaving it more reliant on imports for important inputs, while what it could make it would generally make with less efficiency than others--as testified by how circa 1950 labor productivity in British manufacturing was scarcely one-third that of the United States. Where defense orders are concerned the far more limited orders Britain's armed forces could be expected to place relative to their American counterparts, along with Britain's more limited ability to compete in the defense exports market, meant that the country's defense industry could not enjoy the economies of scale that the U.S. would. And in contrast with a U.S. that at the time had the benefit of a gold-backed dollar, Britain's weakened currency made any importation more taxing monetarily.

This industrial weaknesses, the diseconomies of smaller scale, and the reliance on more and more painfully gained imports, meant that there could be no comparison where the efficiency of defense spending was concerned. Indeed, they meant that it made less and less sense to try and maintain what was already an increasingly superficial self-sufficiency in this area, the more in as Britain could ill-afford the resources that trying to do so required absorbed. The country, after all, was in dire need of industrial rejuvenation in the post-war period, and if the sorts of writers who tend to take up the topic prefer to snivel and sneer at the outlays on the welfare state in those years (never mind that they were indispensable to social peace at home in that fraught period), the larger sums spent on the warfare state, and the direct and indirect consequences of that spending in that critical period, seem the real drag on a British economy that never got the rejuvenation it needed--a state of affairs that has endured down to the present, as, in line with the traditions of British neoliberalism generally and Blairite New Laborism particularly, the last remnants of Keir Starmer's promised "Green New Deal" fall by the wayside.

Punching Up, Punching Down, and the "Sense of Humor"

It seems that in recent years we have heard a lot about humor "punching up" or "punching down"--phrases useful because they do remind one that comedy does indeed punch out at something.

Still, one can argue that which direction one is punching in may make a great deal of difference morally.

When someone punches "up" the idea is that the target of the joke is someone life has treated fairly well, for aren't they sitting up there? They might prefer not to be laughed at all if they can help it, but fundamentally they're secure, or have reason to be, and so they "should be able to take a joke," especially one made by someone standing below them in the social scale, and essentially harmless.

By contrast punching down does the opposite, hitting out at those life has treated less well--less well than the one making the joke. They aren't so secure. The expectation that they "should be able to take a joke," especially from this source, isn't necessarily as reasonable. Frankly the mockery easily crosses the line into bullying, as those making the joke affirm when, if the butt of the joke protests, they retort "What? Got no sense of humor?"

Maybe they don't. And maybe they shouldn't be expected to have the "sense of humor" required to take another punch with good grace, having taken too many punches already just getting through the day, so that the only decent thing to do is to not add to their misery--or at least, acknowledge that after throwing a punch at them others have the right to criticize them for having done so.

Alas, these days those eager to defend the right of the bully to punch down with immunity are all too prone to present themselves as advocates of "free speech," and the mainstream media being what it is (and for all the evidences of degeneracy, has always been in significant degree), the organs of the press prone to treat their most dishonest claims with the respect they never show the truly downtrodden.

Is the Public Really So Interested in Sex Scandal?

The conventional wisdom has long held that "sex sells" and that the broad public has a profound fascination with "celebrity." Accordingly it seems entirely natural for the media to devote immense amounts of time to the coverage of "sex scandals."

However, as the turn of advertising in recent years demonstrated, the reality is more complicated than this rationale. It isn't "sex" that sells, but the "sex-y." And there is far more difference of opinion in the world about what is "sexy" than what is just "sex"--with this mattering because what people personally find to be sex but at the same time un-sexy is so repellent to them that they become outraged at the media showing it to them at all. And it is the case that a great deal of sex scandal is un-sexy in the extreme.

At the same time it seems that the fascination with celebrity just isn't what it used to be, with this going not just for many kinds of celebrity specifically (thus have we had the decline of the movie star and the supermodel and the sports star) but celebrity itself. The result would seem to be that, however much particular cases may confuse matters (pop singers admittedly do better than most, certainly to go by who the public Googles), the doings of celebrities are also a matter of declining interest for them.

Of course, one may respond to that by pointing out (as media critics have done since at least Thorstein Veblen, that the news media does not orient itself to the public at large, but rather a more limited portion of it--the portion that pays for subscriptions, the portion that advertisers most want to reach, a layer not too old or too young, comparatively affluent, and a good many other things going with all that besides. This is all the more the case given the importance of the Internet in the media world of today, and the subtler but still profound role of the "digital divide" in contemporary life--and that those who do spend lots and lots of time online differ in important ways from the rest of the public, in part because of what they bring to the web, but perhaps also because of how so much use of the web shapes their outlook. Still, it does at least go to show that the matter is more complicated than the truism might have it--and call into question just how much the attention to sex scandal is a matter of the media "Giving the people what they want" rather than the media "Giving the people what it wants to give them," in line with its ample motive to stress such fare.

Why the News Media So Loves Sex Scandals

In defending its devotion of immense amounts of attention, platform space, resources, to the coverage of tawdry stories the Talking Heads of the media often, explicitly or implicitly, blame the broader public.

"They made us do it!" they say--for instance, when they saturated the public consciousness with coverage of the prosecution and trial of one Orenthal James Simpson for over a year--as they reminded us after Mr. Simpson's recent passing when it became a cliché of the coverage of the event that his trial "captivated the nation."

Of course this was a lie, a lie highly characteristic of how media functionaries cognize the world in its being a lie, and a very stupid one at that by even the very low standard of intelligence prevailing among the operators of the media-industrial complex, but also in its inversion of reality in the way to which said operators are so prone. For the public didn't force them to subject it to "All O.J., All the Time" in 1994-1995. It was the news media that forced "All O.J., All the Time" on the public.

So did it go, a couple of years later, when the sickening reduction of the news to tabloid garbage escalated yet again in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. More clearly than was the case with O.J. the public was repulsed by the affair--as it demonstrated by punishing the Republican party in the mid-term election that caused them to be subjected to the sordid episode day and night, night and day, so much so as to cause some commentators to suggest that the "culture war" had peaked and the world was moving on.

Those commentators were (sadly) wrong about that, the two parties and the political tendencies they stood for too committed to culture war to give up on it, as the last quarter-century has shown us. But the public revulsion at the whole episode was very real.

Still, that never caused the media to back off or even tone down the practice, as we have been reminded time and again in the generation since--and frankly there was no reason to expect the media to do so, since it has never been the slave to public taste that its functionaries so much whine about being. The truth is that they give the public sex scandal because rather than this being demanded of them, or their misapprehension about "what the people want." And it only partly has to do with how such stuff appeals personally to a press corps consisting of people who think, act, speak the part of gossipy courtiers to "the power elite."

What matters most is the fact that, contrary to the pretensions certain currents within identity politics sex scandal is entirely unthreatening to the status quo. A scandal in the world of high finance or government procurement, in the treatment of workers or the operation of the criminal justice system, in the exposure of consumers to danger or the environment to pollution--all of these tend to involve crimes of the powerful against the public, the exposure of which crimes often proves the tip of a very large iceberg, and attention to which makes many question the status quo. (What we misleadingly call "Watergate" went way, way beyond the planting of a few listening devices.)

Because of their nature sex scandals are very, very unlikely to do that. Indeed, they tend to shore up the status quo because they divert attention from (or eliminate space for) other, more material, matters, and indeed to the extent that the public does respond to them the associated sanctimoniousness, moral panic, appeals to prejudice that in this way as in so many others show the press corps to be a pack of Julius Streichers, fan the flames of culture war, with the results this past quarter of a century has shown. This is all the more the case given that, just as the Scythian philosopher Anacharsis observed of written laws, the unwritten standards against which the conduct of sex scandal offends, like cobwebs, catch the smaller and weaker actors, but not the really big malefactors. Some movie actor or independent film producer may be ruined by even a totally baseless charge--but others in spite of a whole multitude of well-founded and well-evidenced charges go on to the highest offices in the land and keep them, not even visibly slowed down by their rake's progress through life. And so the Streichers sink their teeth into them, grateful for the excuse to cover this and not something else as they set about their bad day's work.

Political Centrism and the Flying Car

Political centrism, in the sense of the self-styled "anti-extremist," "non-ideological," "neither left nor right" ideology that emerged in the early Cold War and has constituted the American mainstream ever since, is best understood as conservative Anti-Communism. However, that ideology has been confusingly labeled "liberal" because (in contrast with those who more commonly bear the conservative label in the U.S.) it accepts the conservative understanding that life is not static; that occasionally small changes are necessary to preserve the big things that matter; and that defeating a radical challenge may require some degree of compromise--and what that understanding seemed to require of them in their moment. In the wake of a generation of world war and depression and fascism, with the old order discredited and mass movements evident everywhere and the Soviet Union a force in the world, simply preaching pessimistic bromides about "human nature" and the rest was simply not going to suffice to ward off what centrist conservatives saw as the challenge from the "extreme left," a necessity existing not only for their crushing hopes in Communism but their being given hopes in the capitalism that the centrist was determined to preserve, the system being made to "work for everyone" (or at least, the vast majority of the public persuaded that it could be) a precondition of its survival. Moreover, the advent of the consumer society, New Deal-style reform and Keynesian political economy had them believing they had the tools to do just that at tolerable cost, especially as the post-World War II boom got underway.

Of course, the post-war boom, after all, was the product of a host of exceptional circumstances which did not, could not, last, obviously in trouble by the late 1960s, and a thing of the past by the 1970s (at least, where the advanced industrial world was concerned). Meanwhile the memory of war and depression receded, and if there was a sense among Western elites that deprived and traumatized millions may have been susceptible to socialist appeals, few seem to have thought 1975 at all comparable to 1945 that way--perhaps in part because they did not think much could be done about it at a price they thought acceptable. Meanwhile the right pulled harder in its direction, and a center that had never been all that much in love with reform followed more readily, the more easily in as the apparent threat from the left faded away to nothing in what was supposed to be "the end of history" and "globalization" made it appear to be the case that they couldn't go another way even if they wanted to do so. Delivering improvements in people's lives, or even hopes of such improvement, no longer seemed necessary, for the logic went, There Is No Alternative, and when others reminded the center of how it had once been reform-minded its politicians and commentators were apt to snap "You're still on that?" in that way of authority figures flabbergasted that people they thought their inferiors would presume to so much as recall to them past promises (or crimes).

The attitude toward the flying car is symbolic of that. The promise of the mid-century centrist that the system could deliver the goods came down to the promise of a "world of tomorrow" that was a better version of the world of today. In the world of today the automobile was at the very heart of the "Keynesian Fordist" model, which had at its core the "automotive-industrial complex" that, nourished by the "military-industrial complexes"' colossal orders and other subsidies (like highway systems), gave the country and the world cars, suburbia and all that went with them. The world of tomorrow, improving on that, would give a whole society's people wings as it had (presumably) given them wheels, making those cars fly, an image that can seem to symbolize the centrist promise in its combining constancy with positive change. However, it has since become fashionable to sneer at the thought of the flying car--less because of the technical implausibility or physical hazard such vehicles may represent, or the ecological failings of a society which tried to put every person in a plane the way it had a car (at least, with anything resembling today's technological base), but because of the discomfort of authority with having recalled to them the promises of a better world they made when it was convenient, miserably failed to keep, and would prefer forgotten.

Universal health care? You're still on that?

Flying cars? You're still on that?

The List of the 100 Most Web-Searched People and What it Says About Celebrity Today

The web traffic analysis company Glimpse recently published its list of the 100 people most searched for in 2024 (based on its sampling of Google's traffic).

As might be guessed in this exceptionally fraught election year the presidential election was significant in the rankings. (Thus did Donald Trump make the #1 position, Kamala Harris #10, while such figures as Elon Musk and Joe Rogan also owe their places in the upper ranks of the list to the election, these placing at #3 and #20, respectively.)

But what about the figures from the world of entertainment who more conventionally dominate the list? These were present, too, of course, accounting for seven of the top ten spots--with six of them coming from the music world, starting with Taylor Swift at #2, and continuing with Ariana Grande at #4, Drake at #5, Billie Eilish at #6, and so on. Athletes do pop up here and there, with Cristiano Ronaldo at #9, LeBron James at #14, Travis Scott at #15, but they are a weaker presence (while in the case of Scott one would wonder whether he would rank so highly without his association with Swift), all as even those who have made a significant name for themselves as actors tend to have a strong presence in music as well, as with Selena Gomez at #18. Only with Tom Holland at #38 does an actor who is not also well-known as a singer or rapper first appear (while one might wonder if he is not, like Scott, helped in this by his higher-ranked and more musical girlfriend, his Spider-Man franchise co-star Zendaya, who in 2024 was up at #28).

All that seems to affirm the view that amid this period in which, amid cultural fragmentation and much else, traditional celebrity is in decline, the pop stars are doing better in holding on to their cultural cachet than their counterparts in sports, acting and certainly fashion.

The "Neo" Liberals of the Democratic Party and the Centrist Outlook

For quite a number of years those few who mention the "neoliberals" who came to prominence within the Democratic Party in the 1980s at all (a tendency identifiable with such persons as Gary Hart) have mainly been centrists (a Jonathan Chait, a Bill Scher) who, either in extreme ignorance or extreme bad faith, claim to know nothing of "neoliberalism" in the sense in which it has been more commonly used--as a term referring to an economic theory, policy, model of global significance in the way popularized by David Harvey some two decades ago in his book A Brief History of Neoliberalism.

Of course, in pointing this out it is only fair to acknowledge that the Democratic Party neoliberals did embrace neoliberalism in the other, Harvey, sense of the term, exalting markets and attacking government as they maligned social programs, labor unions and government workers as the source of the country's "uncompetitiveness," and singing odes to "entrepreneurs" and the "information age" that has been so important to the associated propaganda (Gary Hart, indeed, a Democratic party counterpart to the information age-hype besotted Newt Gingrich, with whom he found much common ground in their days together on Capitol Hill--as Gingrich himself owned). Still, these neoliberals were not embracing a label that, as yet, had not become so closely attached to the economic policy-model with which most identify the term today. Rather, certainly to go by what that key theoretician of the movement Charles Peters had to say, the "Neo" liberals defined themselves in relation to "Old" liberals in the American sense, rather than liberalism in the eighteenth century, "libertarian" sense that is elsewhere the more common usage, and which is evoked in the term "neoliberalism."

In considering that opposition I think it would be a mistake to downplay the extent to which there was a fundamental clash of economic ideas that had them on opposing sides when the "neoliberal turn" came. However, as Charles Peters spelled it out in the version of "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" he published in the May 1983 edition of his magazine The Washington Monthly, Old liberals were guilty of four particular failings not simply reducible to being wrong on economic policy, abiding by the rules "Don't Say Anything Bad About the Good Guy" (and "Don't Say Anything Good About the Bad Guys"), "Pull Up the Ladder," "The More the Merrier," and "Politics are Bad and Politicians Are Even Worse."

Unpacking all this what one got was a condemnation of "Old" liberals for attachment to particular principles, disadvantaged groups, and established programs, and their aversion to "grubby" politics--the Old liberal commitment to using government to help the disadvantaged, and the traditional Progressive insistence on honest, "clean," government--which may be usefully compared with the standard of legitimate discourse that is so central to centrism. Neither that standard of discourse, nor centrism, are explicitly raised in Peters' "Manifesto"--indeed, the meaning of these terms is rarely ever spelled out in part let alone whole in American discussion (for many reasons)--but almost always relevant to explaining American politics, then as now, because of the way it permeates so many premises and assumptions that are not always spoken, and of which they are not always conscious. As described here the centrist prides themselves on the "non-ideological," "pragmatic," "pluralistic," "civil" politics they regard as the hallmark of "adults in the room" sanity, maturity and responsibility, in which they reject principled stands and talk of right and wrong as "ideological" and "ethical" and "extremist," instead overseeing the unavoidably grubby haggling among interest groups, none more or less worthy than any others and who had best be civil toward each other and not put each other down and make reasonable compromises with each other if they were to get along and keep a liberal society from sliding down the steep and slippery slope to an Orwellian hellscape that their ideology says that anyone's doing anything else whatsoever will surely produce. Peters accused the Old liberals of having sinned against all that by defending particular groups and policies, by taking principled stands on what is right and wrong and ethical and not ethical, by being ready to be adversarial in their commitments and the "good guys vs. bad guys" view to which all this led, and their distaste for what any normal person would recognize as corruption. Meanwhile Peters stressed what good players by the centrist rules the "Neo" liberals were by contrast in talking up their supposedly "nothing is sacred" attitude when it came to doing what they thought needed to get done to "move the country forward" (their eagerness to kill Social Security and other "entitlements," their spoiling for a chance to be "tough" with labor and schoolteachers and the rest) that saw them not just ready to reject and punish supposed "good guys" but "reach across the aisle" to work with the supposed "bad guys" in the spirit of "bipartisanship" so dear to the centrist (as Hart was to do with Gingrich).

Taking the package altogether one can see this as not just an attack from the more rightward element within the Democratic Party on its more leftward element and its supporters and causes reflective of "the neoliberal turn," but (entirely consistent with that direction of attack given centrism's essential conservatism) an attack on the liberals that used centrist political theory as an important basis, one that most certainly mattered. In sneering at those who use terms like neoliberal the aforementioned Bill Scher quipped that "nobody has spotted a neoliberal in the wild since Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign"--apparently ignorant of the fact that if the exposure of an extramarital affair destroyed Gary Hart's political career (how quaint that notion seems today!), and that not in 1984 but 1988 when Hart was very much "spottable in the wild," Bill Clinton, a prominent figure in the Neoliberal movement as chair of the Democratic Leadership Council, continued to bear the standard for the tendency. And indeed, bore it all the way to the White House with, whatever Mr. Scher may think or claim to think, Charles Peters himself lauding Clinton's ascent in a piece in a not-so-very-obscure newspaper called the New York Times as "The Second Coming of Neo-Liberalism," and, of course, Bill Clinton living up to the expectations of him as a neoliberal in both senses of the term during his two terms in office, which have defined the Democratic Party ever since--and in turn, defined American politics ever since, not least through how they have again and again brought the party defeat, with all its implications for the national political scene as a whole.

Did the Digital Age Exacerbate "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire Syndrome?"

You have probably at some point heard the line that Americans who are not well-off often support right-wing economic policies not because they think they are good for the poor (indeed, often do so in spite of being persuaded that they are not) because they expect to personally benefit from a regime of effectively regressive taxation, few or no rights for workers, etc. when they someday join the ranks of the rich--sooner than later returning to a station that seems to them so natural and proper that one may speak of them in their present state as "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaires." Just how widespread and deeply rooted this tendency actually is has long been a matter of argument (some go so far as to say that it is why "socialism never took off in America," some think it frankly irrelevant to the larger course of American political history), but few seem to go so far as to deny the existence of people who think in such terms altogether.

Accepting that one may well wonder about the implications of the age of the Internet for such thinking.

Considering that it seems relevant that the Internet, contrary to the (asinine) cyber-utopian propaganda, has proven itself much more useful to the right than the left--which is significant as it is the ideas of the right and not the left that are conducive to, indeed endlessly promote, the "syndrome." Central to it is the belief that, as Kurt Vonnegut had it, it is very easy to make money--indeed, to make really big money in no time at all--which the right certainly promotes with its stress on "opportunity," "entrepreneurship" and the "self-made man," seizing on "tech" in particular for a latterday basis for such images, most obviously through the cults those espousing and influenced by such ideas built up around figures like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, and Silicon Valley more broadly. Meanwhile there is what those technologies made possible, what indeed can seem indicative of their real macroeconomic significance (manipulating information rather than things), like the supposed "democratization" of stock trading that gave rise to a day trading boom in the 1990s that is probably inextricable from the simultaneous dot-com hysteria that did so much to add the glitter to names like Gates' (Dow Jones 1 Million, Today!) and the subsequent rise of "crypto" that drives the belief that if not everyone can be a "tech billionaire" they can still make a fortune speculating on the ripples that the activity of tech billionaires sends through the market. For many seemingly even more accessible, there is the idea that in an age of "social media," "podcasting" and "influencers" anyone with an Internet connection and a camera with aspirations to being an artist, journalist, "thought-leader," etc. can achieve celebrity and all its rewards.

Amplifying all this the media, in line with its political and social biases even more than its stupid sensationalism, seizing on the "success stories," relentlessly promoted the illusion that slanted accounts of one-in-a-million and often totally random "successes" were somehow a rational life plan for everybody, as they totally ignored what really happened to the vast majority of persons walking this path. Those who were ruined by that "startup" or that speculative endeavor. Those who went out on the Internet and found that to be online is generally to be either ignored or abused--ignored so completely that they suspect there are no real human beings online or abused so brutally that they think that the only human beings online are of that species of human scum we call "trolls."

Confronted with the disappointment they are far more likely to meet with than the success the good conformist that Authority and Conventionality encourage everyone to be will take to heart the teaching that, whatever the facts, they "have no one to blame but themselves"--and so, returning to Vonnegut, "blame and blame and blame themselves," and hate themselves, with their only potential escape from such hatred of themselves their redeeming themselves their trying again and this time succeeding. Others, less thoroughly conformist, having invested themselves in an unfortunate enterprise, and not for the first time, may question the Conventional Wisdom--and often go only so far. Having seen how entrepreneurship and hard work does not pay off, they may simply decide that "life" is a "cheat and a snare." However, others may well take a harder look than that at what they have been made to believe, begin to understand that going through life thinking oneself a "Temporarily Embarrassed Billionaire" is insanity for an individual, and worse still for a society made up of them, and start to come to grips with those realities from which they have all their lives been told to look away. And that is the most interesting, and potentially meaningful, part of the story.

What Might We Hope for From a System of Higher Education?

Lately I have been writing a fair bit about the failings of "the higher learning in America." Considering the failings raises the matter of the standard by which the system is being judged to have failings--and that in turn raises the question of what the system should be like, as against what we actually have.

For the purposes of this post I think it best to stress broad desiderata rather than specifics of their realization. These would, at a minimum, include the system's being such that:

* Personal finances and social background will be no barrier to an individual's not only attending college but achieving in college--all as no one is forced to go to college by a "credentialing crisis" compelling the acquisition of "unnecessary" degrees for the sake of being able to land employment offering a "living wage," or simply because they "don't know what to do with themselves" at the end of high school.

* While any system affording a measure of academic freedom and scope for innovation will guarantee that performance will not be perfectly identical across institutions, the standard of education across the entire system would be uniformly high, and perceptions of the differences based on an institution's practical performance rather than social snobbery and caste prejudice masquerading as "meritocracy" and other such idiocies of the "Cult of the Good School." Accordingly the possession of a college degree will command respect as an indication of the expected competency regardless of which institution granted it.

* At least the higher-performing portion of the body of K-12 graduates will finish their studies at that level genuinely prepared for college-level study, should they elect to continue their education there (as we cease to rely on college to make up for the failings of lower levels of schooling). At the same time college instructors will not be assigned a class until they themselves have been properly trained to oversee a class of the type in question (as against the present system where the hardest teaching might well be dumped on unprepared junior personnel for the sake of administrative convenience).

* No college instructor would be expected to accept a life of poverty and insecurity as the terms of their job, the competent teacher would not be penalized for failing to produce research, the competent researcher would not be required to grudgingly bear a teaching load as the price of being able to do their research (or spend their whole lives jumping through hoops to get hold of inadequate sums of grant money), and the burden on instructors of the college's administrative tasks would be kept to the absolute minimum.

* The content of teaching within "the Academy" would correspond to the world's actualities as its scholars ascertain them, rather than falling into irrelevant Scholasticism, or worse, political indoctrination, such that professors of their subjects would have meaningful expertise to lend society at large. (Those looking for an example of the extreme opposite of this ideal can find it in academic economics as it has been these past many decades.) The elimination of the hierarchy among institutions would simplify this, insofar as it would eliminate the dominance of the training of instructors and editing and publication of scholarship by a very small number of institutions (a fact that, again citing the example of economics, contributed to the degeneration of science into dogma).

* Students would have the benefit of transparency from their administrators regarding everything demanded of them academically or in other ways, and what they can expect in the way of the return on their effort in and out of the classroom--with this extending to the career prospects entailed by particular lines of study (instead of the generalities, pieties and outright lies that students are offered instead about what they might hope for from their major).

* The sciences would flourish on campus--and the liberal arts flourish along with the sciences--with the two being seen as complementary and even symbiotic rather than in contention with each other.

Do I see any chance of reform meaningfully moving American higher education in such a direction? I must admit that I do not even see a chance of meaningful discussion of such standards for the system, let alone means for enabling it to attain those standards--the microscopic room within the mainstream today for discussing anything of consequence at all guaranteeing that, the more in as any serious discussion of education is apt to quickly raise matters far, far beyond the narrow understanding of the subject on which our so-called "pragmatists" so naggingly insist.