Hi, I'm a cultural and intellectual historian of early modern Britain and Scandinavia. Currently pursuing a PhD at the University of Oxford, looking at 18th-century scholarly culture and identity at the universities of Oxford and Copenhagen.
Hope to engage in interesting conversations on a wide range of subjects. Let's keep in touch!
India Shows the US How Not to Do Affirmative Action
While the Indian system of quotas has worked in public universities, the US has done far better at opening up the ranks of the elite, writes Mihir Sharma.
I also believe there's maybe one risk with #universities being in charge of the #moderation aspects of running a server: what if some of its employees are not being aligned with its #publicRelation stance on either a policy issue or an internal affair (e.g. #harassment)?
I suggest that the infrastructure and costs of such #academic-related servers could be taken charge of by #university but that moderation should be done by some external group - eg a learned society
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Both the CSIRO ON Prime and ON Accelerate programs are now open for applications. All Australian #universities and research organisations with an idea that could be relevant in market should look to apply. The application is simple and only takes about an hour to complete.
The cost to participate is FREE. You could get FUNDING. And for ZERO EQUITY. Not all members of teams need to be in universities, either.
Early stage / just trying to work out who is the key market for your research product?
ON Prime is for you. Go here: https://lnkd.in/gYbW9pDj
Starting to commercialise your research or get your product into market?
ON Accelerate is for you. Go here: https://lnkd.in/gPGS_ps6
Please share with your research teams within universities and research groups! #research#funding
For those of you with your #headinyourhands about the stalled 'negotiations' to allow the UK to (re)enter the EU's #Horizon#research programme.... here's something to brighten your evening; @tomgauld on mixing up your research proposal & your book manuscript.
'Negotiations' for the UK to rejoin the #Horizon research programme continue.... #JeremyHunt's in #Brussels trying (again) to get a discount because we've missed the first two years of the new programme.
Problem is that we caused that delay not the EU, and the feeling at the #EuropeanCommision is that they're not going to offer a discount because the UK can't get its ducks in a row.
Meanwhile #universities are hemorrhaging #researchers departing for somewhere they can get Horizon money now!
"To point out that right-wing culture warriors conflate academic freedom and free speech is, in a sense, to give them too much credit. In practice they subscribe to ‘free speech’ and ‘academic freedom’ only when, and to whichever ideological ends, it suits them."
PS: I support this move. It will help establish ROR as the #standard ID for institutional affiliation. RINGGOLD IDs are #proprietary and ROR IDs are in the #PublicDomain under #CC0.
How do you keep small independent communities both small and interesting?
-- pixl97 @ HN
One inspiration I've had comes from thinking about intentional communities --- communes, utopian towns, and the like. The thought occurred some years back that amongst the most successful intentional communities are college towns. These are, hands down, some of the best places to live, and certainly on a per-population basis, in the US and Canada, based on a wide range of measures (though housing costs tend to be higher than surrounding areas).
There are a slew of smaller, non-dominant, and often quite small towns to be found around the world, though the US might be a good exemplar, whose central focus is often a university or college. Some public, some private (though virtually all benefit by public financing of research or student aid / loans).
These virtually always contrast sharply with surrounding towns, even for relatively small schools.
As to what makes these tick ... I don't have any solid evidence, but I've a few theories:
There are a number of associated populations for the institutions, with widely varying residency periods. Students pass through in 2-8 years typically (net of transfers, drop outs, extended undergraduate programmes, a/k/a "five year" and "six year" plans, and graduate / professional programmes). Faculty tend to remain much longer, often much of their professional career (40+ years). Alumni may settle in the region (though most do not). And there is the "town" (vs. "gown") component, which may be sympathetic, adversarial, or a mix of both --- residents of the community who are not directly affiliated with the university. (Instances of town-gown conflict, including actual armed battle and shooting wars, date back to mediaeval times, e.g. the St. Scholastica Day riot of 10 Feb 1355.)
The school itself has a central organising principle and mission, which many other intentional communities lack.
The school has associations with other institutions, organisations, and agencies, some of higher learning, many not, and tends to form strong relationships with government, business, cultural, and religious sectors.
Since the 19th century, official government recognition of the significance of both higher education and research has resulted in an increasing degree of official sanction and financial support, initially the German Humboldtian model, technical schools (e.g., M.I.T., founded in 1861 in large part to support the U.S. Navy's newfound interest in steam propulsion), land grant universities (organised in the US under national acts of 1862 & 1890), and the modern research university (largely spawned by the Manhattan Project and Vannevar Bush's Science, The Endless Frontier (1945) and formation of the US National Science Foundation, and widely emulated in other countries). In the UK there is a distinction made between the Ancient Universities (Oxford, Cambridge, St. Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Dublin), the Red Brick Universities, chartered in the 19th century, the Plate Glass Universities, chartered between 1963 & 1992, and ... whatever comes after. See: https://www.ukuni.net/articles/types-uk-universities.
Note that universities themselves don't necessarily make money directly (through tuition), though some are extraordinarily wealthy (e.g., Harvard ($50 billion), Yale ($40 billion), Stanford ($38 billion), Princeton ($35 billion), see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universities_in_the_United_States_by_endowment). Those funds tend to come from grants (both government and privately-funded research), alumni donations, and increasingly technology licensing. In the case of Stanford, real estate is a massive contributor. Schools often also benefit from tax breaks and other legislative relief and exemptions.
So, you say, that's really interesting, dred, but how do you translate that to online communities, especially those for which locality and location are not central elements, as they are for brick-and-mortar institutions.
I don't know, though ... I've been pondering just that for a decade or so.
The insight does suggest a few solution-shaped objects and/or characteristics, however:
A key failing of venerable fora is that the membership often becomes exceedingly stale. Not only do new members fail to arrive, but the more interesting and dynamic members of the old guard often leave as both the noise floor rises and the clue ceiling drops. Reward for participation simply decreases. Universities subvert this by pumping fresh students through. I suspect HN's YC affiliation and fresh founder classes in part aids HN in this regard.
A forum is almost certainly not a freestanding enterprise but an adjunct to another institution or set of institutions. Again, HN serves, but does not profit, YC.
Universities are mission rather than profit driven, and both teaching and research are a key element of that mission. This ... plays poorly with the notion of a VC-funded online community start-up. Ezra Klein in a podcast on media earlier this year noted that a key challenge in organising new ventures is that the profit motive and VC / investor interests tend to conflict strongly with journalism's prerogatives.[1]
Several of the most successful previous online communities formed either directly through or closely affiliated with educational institutions. The Internet itself, email, and Usenet directly, Facebook originated on the campus (and with the student body) of the most selective-admission university in the world, and I'd argue that Slashdot's early tech-centric membership was at least strongly academic-adjacent.
Universities are focused not only on the present moment, that is, streams, but on accumulated wisdom and knowledge. Here, HN is less a model than, say, Wikipedia and the Wikimedia foundation, in which something of a community forms through the editor community which creates (and fights over) the informational resources being created. Wikipedia doesn't quite have a social network, though various discussion pages and sections approach this.
On the "small" bit, there's both a selective-admissions and graduation element that academia shows. That is, you don't just let anybody in, and, after they've "completed the course", they're graduated and moved on, with the exception, again, of faculty and staff. Just how that translates to an online community I'm not entirely sure.
Another element of the "small" bit is that universities are organised: into colleges (that is, interest areas), departments (specific faculty), courses (specific topics of study or interest) and sections, that is, specific groups or meetings of students for lecture and/or discussion. Individual class size is a key dynamic, and much of the experience of the past 75 years or so shows the challenges of scaling lectures and the profoundly different characteristics of a small seminar (say, 5--15 students), a modest upper-division class (25--30), and moderate-to-large lectures (50 -- 1,000 or more students). Strong interactivity is sharply curtailed above about 15 students, and the options for interactivity above about 50--100 are near nil. Choosing how groups are organised, who's permitted in, and what size limits exist, as well as communications between various divisions (sections, courses, departments, colleges, universities) all come into play, as I see it.
And then there's politics. One of the notorious elements of universities is how various divisions rival amongst one another, gatekeep, define what is in (or out) of a specific discipline's remit, resist challenging new concepts, and form cliques and fads ... just like any human domain, only more so. I have a nagging suspicion that online communities might in fact have similar tendencies, and that these would also have to be subverted somewhat to avoid pathological development.
There are a whole slew of other factors --- techical capabilities, UI/UX, online abuse, legal issues, privacy and identity, spam, propaganda, surveillance, censorship, etc. So many dumb ways to die.
"How the $5500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works" (14 Feb 2023), interviewing Tim Hwang. Specifically: "If you’re able to aggregate a lot of attention online, we just have this almost religious faith that there’s just some way that you’ve got to be able to turn this into money. You will become a Google. You will become a Facebook.... [T]he flip side of that [is] that if you come to a V.C. and you say, I want to do a subscription business model, they’ll say, well, I don’t know — we don’t have a whole lot of examples of that really blowing up, so why don’t you just do advertising?" https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/14/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-tim-hwang.html Which is to say: unless you're planning a pure-play advertising monetisation model, which is to say, the Sidam Touch (advertising turns everything to shit), you won't get funding.
PS: These skills and strengths can come from any discipline. But I'd say the news is esp good for the #humanities. If so, when will this sink in? When will H enrollments start growing again? When #universities stop cutting back H departments?
Reflecting on the worsening financial crisis in #higheeducation, Prof.Charlie Jeffery, VC of University of York, told the Guardian, that we 'could be reflecting [on] the importance of universities to the economy in various ways: you [could] actually put in more public funding & don’t put it all on the individual shoulders'!
So what does that actually mean for how we think about financing #universities
A couple of weeks ago I looked at exactly this issue for @NWBylines
This is some powerful words from @ngas and at the heart of the issue is how we value and use knowledge. Critical social-cultural-technological tools to take on the real and growing existential challenges
An interesting data-led evaluation of the UK's Research Excellence Framework (REF) summarised in the LSE blog today. The #academy seems to know it's a poor system but is paralysed from lobbying meaningfully for an alternative.
"Our results support concerns that the REF may have enhanced the concentration of research output in elite #universities [...] The rest of have either been unaffected or negatively affected by the REF"