Genius does not scale

A model of academic failure

Photo of higher education in the Soviet Union, by Vitaliy Karpov

This article was inspired by a note by Lucy Beney.

It has been my privilege and pleasure to work with some extremely talented people during my career. One thing they all have in common is that their ability was evident long before they entered higher education. In some cases, these colleagues only enrolled in a university because without the first-class degrees they would go on to earn, they could not be taken seriously by the establishment.

As an undergraduate in London, England in the early 1990s, I was not a good student. I was always curious, but my love of reading had diminished by the age of eighteen. If it were not for university reformation under the John Major government, designed to mitigate significant youth unemployment after the first wave of globalisation, I would probably not have been allowed to study for or obtain a degree myself. Except, perhaps, via the university ‘clearing’ system which allocated surplus course places to under-performing hopefuls.

Did I benefit from higher education at the taxpayers expense? Absolutely. Did I need a three-year full-time course to learn what I needed to, absorbing the education that has stayed with me through the decades? Certainly not. I probably would have learned more, and transitioned into the workplace more smoothly, via a vocational course which included a work placement, but that model was denigrated by the new universities at the time.

My psychology BSc course straddled an unfortunate space which was accredited by the British Psychological Society as a professional qualification, but included no explicit pathway into employment. As the first in my family to remain in education after the age of fifteen, I had no employment contacts to exploit via social or professional networks. If I had been a better student and a true believer, I might have ended up working at the now-notorious Tavistock Clinic in north London, which was somewhat affiliated to my university’s psychotherapy department, since shuttered.

I now believe the core difficulty in higher education arises from the dispute between ability being either a natural, or manufactured product. If we assume that one in a thousand people exhibit precocious talent, and one in a million people deserve the title of ‘genius’, in a country with a population of a given size, there will be a fixed number of talented people and a fixed number of geniuses. The assumption that higher education can manufacture talent, or indeed genius, depends on the understanding of the individual as a blank slate, ready to be filled with knowledge. This would make the universities analogous to the steam-powered factories which enraptured Marx and Engels, assumed to be the key means of production in the early Victorian era.

It is essential to revolutionary Theory that humans are capable of being reprogrammed, in order to bring about the perfectible Socialist Man. If education merely supports and enables the natural ability of the individual to learn and to think, no amount of education will create new talent, genius cannot be manufactured, and therefore Man is not perfectible after all. This disappointment might have lead to postmodern nihilism, as the working classes enjoyed better living standards during post-World War II reconstruction, and unreasonably refused to support the soixante-huitards all the way to the new Bastille.

In the past, people mostly learned as they worked, becoming experts at their job through specific training and experience. With 50% of young people in Britain now expected to attend university, where they will learn in a manner not necessarily appropriate to the work they will actually end up doing, they are likely to end up with less domain-specific knowledge than they would have acquired directly in the workplace. However, they will learn a great deal of Theory about the world and how it supposedly works, which may or may not be useful.

In his essay Against Theory, Will Self poured scorn on the likes of Judith Butler, and the impoverishment of the intellect that slavish obsession with academic speculation was causing. Contemporary academic papers, particularly in the humanities but potentially in any field since the advent of the ‘fake woke’ across the academy, can be depressingly unimpressive. Motivated reasoning has taken place of attempts at objectivity. It is almost as if having accepted that true objectivity is difficult or impossible, following the postmodern critique, many academics have abandoned the effort to produce the reproducible entirely. Unless of course by ‘reproducible’, they mean repeating dogma uncritically, without pausing to examine their own positionality as comfortably-off Westerners.

I get a strong sense of attempts to please supervisors and their particular ideological positions when reading research, rather than intellectual curiosity or a quest for new discoveries. The academy is recycling pseudo-religious countercultural beliefs from fifty years ago, long since discredited by actual research. Janet Raymond wrote ‘The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male’ in 1979, and yet we are carrying on today as if this work was never written.

Even at a senior level, the capture of the institutions by Theory has led to the destruction of genuine academic work. In the case of Susan Pickard, Professor of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, the cancellation of her latest academic book was not as insidious as the implication that the work would have been published if it had paid fealty to the very same Judith Butler that Will Self railed against. A cancelled book can be published elsewhere, but a compromised book remains in the corpus, and poisons the well of knowledge.

It is more than obvious from reading their contemporary output that institutions of higher education have become self-serving in ensuring their continued growth as businesses. If the quantity of available talent is naturally occurring and finite, rather than manufactured from a malleable human resource which can be scaled up with greater production capacity, there must be a limit beyond which the university is incapable of producing anything of value. And yet the only limit on the growth of the institution is the capital it can raise, on the basis of the number of students it can attract from around the world.

Certainly there are talented overseas students who have benefited from studying in Britain, but that source of revenue is short-term. Firstly, that PhD student who studied in London a few years ago is now a lecturer somewhere else, quite possibly overseas. Secondly, machine learning is already eating up undergraduate tuition fees. The recent ‘AI teaching’ scandal at the University of Staffordshire was the logical outcome of a permissive attitude to the use of large language models. As the university’s own guidelines state:

“You can use tools to support your creative and writing processes but the end product must have been produced by yourself and as a result of your own research and learning.”

Where, exactly, is the line supposed to be drawn between ‘supporting processes’ and the ‘end product’? At precisely the time when UK universities should have been emphasising the value of in-person, human-scale education if they had any foresight whatsoever, Staffordshire showed us the future of the sector.

Higher education has perhaps been the only growth industry in the West, other than tech hype. As I wrote regarding the work of Samuel Pisar, actual industrial production was long ago offshored to communist regimes which control wages and direct industrial relations from an authoritarian state apparatus. Even the tech industry itself, the darling of the Western stock markets, is an outgrowth of computer science courses in the universities, combined with the manufacturing power of communism.

We would not have trillions of dollars pouring into so-called artificial intelligence stocks if it were not for an army of programmers produced each year by universities from Cambridge to Cluj to Bangalore, backed by the ability of the Nvidia-Arm symbiosis to produce chips at scale in China.

The fact that ‘AI’ tools produce meaningless slop for the time being cannot be allowed to distract us from the fact that Western economies have been moribund since capitalism ended in 2008, with concurrent declines in inflation-adjusted incomes for their working classes. Perhaps the ‘cost of living crisis’ decried by Western progressives is a direct result of the globalisation which they ceased criticising after the labour movement’s last-gasp ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999, the end of class analysis, and the rise of identity politics to fill the gap.

It is so much easier to write a paper tearing down science than it is to make a genuine scientific breakthrough. And so we have students trained in sophistry attempting to argue that humans can change sex, or that science itself is problematic because of its ‘whiteness’, while typing out their thesis on a computer which they cannot begin to understand the workings of.

Perhaps after exceeding its capacity to add value to society, the business of Higher Education has become decadent. Its excesses are part of the Cultural Revolution phase which came lately to the West, after our governments first lost their faith in the ability of capital to self-regulate markets, and then in the ability of citizens to make rational decisions about their potential exposure to a respiratory virus. Chinese history teaches us that the Red Guard are the first against the wall when the fever subsides. As Maoism gives way to Dengism, unproductive pseudo-intellectual decadence of the bourgeoisie will no longer be tolerated.

The problem-reproducing nature of Theory will only persist in a tolerant society, but that is apparently not the direction of travel. For example, it seems you can only become an executive of the British Broadcasting Corporation with a certain perspective on the world, and a relentlessly positive view of transvestites for some reason, which you broadcast to a new generation. The value of this perspective is not necessarily accruing to society in general, but to the individual who uses political networks for personal advancement. They may think of themselves as being on the Left, but they are not good communists, yet.

Under the regime of a western Deng or a Xi, any perspective which is not of the Party will be eliminated. And so if for example the Party decides that transgenderism is not compatible with its plans for the national birth rate, that BBC executive will be out of favour. Have you noticed the lack of cross-dressing Chinese influencers, despite the hegemonic hold on youth culture of TikTok? Perhaps Western decadence is not in the five-year plan.

The news that Netflix is to borrow billions of dollars in order to acquire Warner Brothers suggests a potential solution for the Western university sector. This monopolistic consolidation is not unprecedented, if we cast our minds back to the purchase of Columbia Pictures by Sony in 1989. While the analogue hardware business of Sony was considered compromised by the relative failure of the Betamax system in the consumer market, its Betacam variant was dominant among professional video users. Sony made high-quality TV sets and broadcast cameras profitably, enabling it to pay for Columbia with $3.4 billion US dollars in cash, back in the day when $3.4 billion was considered a lot of money.

Elite universities, the BBC and the Guardian are sitting on billionaire endowments, in some cases dating back to the era of the transatlantic slave trade, so they are safe from reality for now. However, it is feasible that today’s tech companies could buy or build universities to deliver the kind of graduates they need, without the intersectional drama or the expense and inefficiencies of contemporary academic administrations.

A key difference is that the universities don’t own ‘intellectual property’ in the way that movie studios do, thanks to the concept of author copyright in the West. Traditional colleges are platforms and publishers, not owners of academic works. An alternative model is being developed by Jordan Peterson, who outgrew his university due to his YouTube presence and trade book sales, creating his own platform under his own brand and presumably ownership. I see no reason why in time the Peterson Academy can’t be as successful as the London School of Economics set up by Fabian conspirators against capitalism, or much more so.

I predict that academic journals will be the first to go, because their business model is preposterous. Discussing a research proposal with a sponsor, I was reminded that so-called ‘open access’ journals charge academics for the privilege of putting their work online for free, despite relying on the free labour of other academics to review and edit the work. If you’ve ever been in a rock ‘n roll band, you’ll be aware that ‘pay to play’ is a shake-down operated by sleazy music venue and festival owners who will accept bribes to put your band on a bill with better-known acts.

Given that the cost of publishing online is tending towards zero, and much of what is being published in supposedly ‘peer-reviewed’ journals is not worth the cost of digital paper, the academic publishing racket will be disrupted sooner rather than later. Whether the second and third-tier universities survive in their current form remains to be seen.