782
MIT Shut Down Internal Grant Database After It Was Used to Research School’s Israel Ties
(theintercept.com)
this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2025
782 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
60553 readers
3755 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
“Come study with us! As a pillar of academia, we'll hide knowledge from you whenever it suits our political and financial interests. Higher education is all about close-mindedness and conservatism after all. We promise none of our students will be taught anything that makes them feel uncomfortable about reality. Welcome to college!”
In a capitalist economy, higher education is about maximizing profit.
Could academia today be seen in the future in a similar light as we look at the medieval church? It was the gatekeeper of philosophical education (largely on classist principles), to things like literacy, and used humanity’s curiosity and hunger for knowledge as a carrot on a stick to buy into an oppressive status quo.
Other than the medieval church, global academia has the fundamentals right, imho. The methods are flawed but the general goal is the right one.
The problem in the US is not a fundamental flaw in academia, but lack of political understanding that a state benefits from educated citizens and fundamental research that isn't immediately monetisable. That resulted in this weird situation, where the most prestigious facilities are just sport centers with a side hustle in education.
In the future the methods of today's global research will more likely be seen as something like greek philosophers. The goal of generating knowledge was right. The method of just writing down what your two remaining neurons, that haven't drowned in wine yet, produced and never verifying it, was... let's call it flawed from a modern perspective.
When the football coach is paid literally actually 100 times or more what the average professor is paid, we've royally fucked up our priorities. Coaches are making millions per year while adjunct professors are struggling to make ends meet. It's disgusting.
Edited to add: the head football coach at my undergrad university makes 9 MILLION, PER YEAR. And his current contract runs through 2029. Let's also not discuss how most of these contracts require they keep getting paid even if they're fired for poor performance. Meanwhile, annual mean wage for a professor is like 80-90k.
Oof
Yes this is actually exactly how they want to present themselves. More donor money from guess who?
*US Academia
Are you fucking kidding me mate? It’s bloody one of the top 3 universities in the world. It’s a pillar of global academia no matter which way you split it.
Like the baseball world series...
No ya muppet, higher education is not like a sport chiefly played in the US.
MIT in my heart is Nr.1!
... In making students commit suicide for frivolous IP lawsuits...
Otherwise is like baseball world series. "American exceptionalism"
What a moronic take, honestly mate.
You can generally rank things, this is a fact. It just so happens that when you rank some of the best universities globally, and many times from many groups in many countries, and you keep seeing MIT get into the top list it’s safe to say it’s factually good and not some out of place nonsense related to the Americans and their psyche.