Academia Libera Mentis: An oasis for learning

Thank you to paid FET supporters. Your support allows me to do things like:* Appear as an expert witness at the Senate Inquiry into Shared Equity (was 5th March)* Appear at the Senate Inquiry into Retirement (on Tuesday 12th March). * Conduct a seminar on housing economics for NSW regulator IPART (also 12th March)The season for change in higher learning is now.Not only have I started Fresh Economic Thinking as an independent place to do science—conduct research, teach, and engage in public debate—I am also involved as a mentor and teacher at Academia Libera Mentis.Academia Libera Mentis (ALM) is a new college based in a castle outside of Theux, Belgium, run by a team of academics to create an “academic oasis” for research and teaching and to challenge great minds. The image above is the new campus. It makes me think of the X-men, where gifted students got together in a castle for intensive training in their craft but also to build life skills. Here’s the pitch.Where once you were challenged intellectually and became responsible adults, university students find themselves in large impersonal bureaucratic systems that treat you as fragile and in need of protection from wrongthink. You are taught compliance and dogma, leaving you unprepared for the demands of work and adulthood. We – a group of outspoken academics, thinkers, and citizens – have seen our universities abandon you. Why waste your life in such soulless places? Come join our oasis in a beautiful castle in the Ardennes. Live on a campus with freedom of speech. Discover yourself and the world, and escape from constant fear and online distractions. An open community where art, aesthetics, movement, and genuine interactions are as important as academic content. Is this for you? It is not a place for passive consumers: it is where you will expand your thinking, become a more responsible adult, set up creative activities for others to join, design solutions to economic and social problems, and prepare for future jobs and studies. Graduates and academics will have made friends, acquired valuable critical and job-relevant skills, and developed improvements to major sectors of our society.Currently, the subject areas are economics, political economy, and health and well-being. If you are thinking of pursuing further education in these areas, consider this option. To begin over the next couple of years, the basic course structures are one-year live-in programs that start with 6-months of core curriculum then specialisation and research.* The Gap-Year Program is for high-school leavers and undergraduates looking for a challenge to expand their horizons and get exposure to new disciplines. * The Finishing Year Program is for recent graduates and professionals looking to spend time in deep learning about a topic, perhaps one outside their technical expertise. * The Avant-Garde Program is for young leaders looking to make a difference in the world. There are two actions to take if this sparks your interest. First, go here to the website to get the vibe of the place. It is very early days. Pricing is yet to be confirmed. At the moment, Nova Academia is for risk-takers and leaders. It is an experiment in learning. Second, attend the online information session on 16th March 2024 (which is unfortunately around midnight in Australia). As I noted, I am part of the mentorship group that students will have access to and will be teaching in early 2025 in some form about the economics of corruption and property markets. More details about the vision for this new education project are in the below document. Read more below from Paul Frijters about the problems he sees in modern universities that have left open a market niche for places like Academia Libera Mentis.Problems With the Modern UniversityProfessor Paul FrijtersWe observe three interconnected problems with modern academia. Each problem hampers universities’ ability to deliver on their mission to curate free and critical thought, produce new knowledge, and graduate students prepared to serve the needs of their communities.1. Bureaucratic bloatUniversities today are administratively bloated, a phenomenon also noted by many others (e.g., Raewyn Connell) that self-perpetuates via national and international bureaucracies. Bureaucracy naturally expands and expands, costing the time of academics and students. US universities in 2010 were found to function perfectly well with an administration-to-faculty personnel ratio of just 1 to 3, but the typical ratio observed that year was at least 5 to 3, and getting worse. Yale recently reported that it has as many administrators as it has students. This bloat represents easily 50 percent of all expenses in a university and perhaps more than that in terms of lost productivity, if one includes both additional expenses and the production prevented by over-regulation.An example of how this bureaucracy is self-perpetuating is seen in the process of accreditation. Accreditation agencies, whether private or public, largely measure the presence of administrative staff, policies, and requirements (processes, procedures, KPIs, progress reports, databases, ethics committees, and so on). In turn, accreditation is used as a prerequisite for student access to state loans, for purposes of fulfilling job requirements, or for academics to be able to apply for research grants from state agencies. Receipt of research income is then used in marketing to students and to pursue higher levels of accreditation. In this way, the university bureaucracy is both mandated and protected by the associated national and international institutions around accreditation, research grants, state job applications, and state loans. Only institutions with large endowments – either private endowments, as in the States, or state subsidies in the form of free public land or other state-provided resources – are able to keep up and become known as high-status universities in this bureaucratic race.Administrative bloat has many other consequences, amongst which is that many university functions now follow bureaucratic rather than academic logic, ignoring the purely academic benefits to activities and focusing instead on finding and privileging reasons for the bureaucracy’s own existence. This leads to a perennial search for problems that can be exaggerated and turned into a justification for more administration (e.g., ‘Is there a problem I can pretend to solve by creating an additional compliance problem?’).A clear example of this is seen in human subjects ethics policies, which today involve many committees and result in the strange reality that social science academics, whose job it is to do research about humanity, are bound by rules that in no way bind millions of businesses and government departments that treat people far worse than they are treated in most research involving human subjects. The bureaucracy has created a kind of administrative ritual, justified by the need to be careful when doing research with human subjects, that demands yet more administration, goes far further than the law of the land, and naturally crowds out individual responsibility.2. Universities as businesses The modern university has become a business run for the personal glory and profit of its management, rather than an institution serving a public-good function that reflects the desire for knowledge in a whole community. Universities are now large property owners, suppliers of visas, organisers of consultancy services and places where business and management careers are made, all of which feed a commercial but not necessarily a community mission. Universities today play a real ‘game of mates’ (Murray and Frijters, 2022).This new orientation has many consequences. One is an inability to effectively caretake the physical and mental health of students, because the question of ‘what good could we do’ is neither the starting point nor any longer built into the self-image of the university. A second is the loss of a positive community story, leaving a vacuum that is now filled with self-hatred and divisive doomsday stories. A third is that relevant research has been replaced by performative research. Fourth, truth is no longer treated seriously, having been replaced by feel-good promises. Fifth, public lectures have reduced in importance and publishing is increasingly seen as a pure status game, leading to territorial issues. Worst of all perhaps is the demise of the university as a place where people try to solve community problems. 3. Mediocrity and cowardice Second-rate and disconnected teaching, based on what students with limited understanding enjoy hearing, is coupled in today’s universities with disconnected theories that are largely for sale (e.g., content for schools of medicine influenced by Big Pharma, theories on taxation and private property pushed by billionaire think tanks, and old textbooks rehashing tired theories that dominate the market and from which disciplines cannot escape). With mass teaching have come low-quality students, dragging standards down, but also the reality that university activities become relevant to institutions (including the state) wishing to manipulate whole populations – reducing universities’ independence.Immersive teaching and travel are seen today merely as risks, rather than core activities, by university managers who do not weigh the risks versus benefits of university activities with respect to fulfilling a community service role.The result of these trends, coupled with broader social trends over the past generation, are alarming. Cognitive outcomes and several indicators of university success in the West are now visibly suffering relative to a mere 20 years ago. Not only do our children have lower IQs and a reduced capacity to think abstractly, but the mobility of young people is lower. On top of this, the returns to college graduation vary widely by degree, and facing large numbers of negative-return degrees, over 50 per cent of Americans think degrees are not worth the cost.These problems feed into each other and mutually reinforce a bad equilibrium for the system as a whole. The incentives are strong for university staff who are low-quality and demotivated to find ways of avoiding higher-quality demands or demands to reduce bureaucracy (which would lead to layoffs). A peer-review system that has metastasized into a mechanism for punishing real innovation and reward for super-specialists by established territorial groups spawns textbooks and academic societies reflecting those territories, creating more barriers to real renewal. The increased importance of research status signaling makes all of this worse, as ‘winning’ on the terms of the existing system becomes more important, punishing innovation and broad thinking even more.Joy and spiritual meaning have been replaced in today’s universities by dull, low-quality mass teaching and mass research. Strong lock-in effects make escape for existing universities nigh impossible. As early as 2012, we observed that an Australian university wanting to do something about quality or bureaucracy would upset the unions, the existing students, the local politicians, and even the alumni (who would suddenly hear from their own university that the degree they thought was great was in fact not great). New entrants would face extreme pressures to copy the basic failed model, both due to demands for bureaucracy by accreditors and students, and due to the need to look good on signalling measures (rankings, research income, etc.). A pessimist might think the only way to change is for the whole system to eventually lose legitimacy and then implode as the demand for education finds substitutes abroad and in external institutions, like homeschooling.With great upheavals, making a portion of the population lose faith in the state and in the many institutions associated with power and money, come new opportunities. The signs that we may be at such a juncture now are seen in the increasing percentage of people who have lost faith in the news and in local politicians (shown in surveys like this one), the prevalence of beliefs that standards have fallen, and the rising percentage of people opting out by homeschooling or paying for private education rather than trusting the state. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe