OMG, I could go on a historical journey here about the religious roots and immense bureaucratic structures that have sustained the universities we now have, but I don't think I need to because informed readers will be able to see right away that Helen's is a baseless fantasy.
PragerU is really carrying on, isn't it, Helen. In just the way you predicted. So is TrumpU. Perhaps send them your essay about Othello and ask if that will be enough so they will offer you a teaching contract.
I mean, all the libraries that PragerU has built. Magnificent. All the collaborative teams of independent scholars they've put together and given funding to for original research. Astounding. All the people they've educated who are working now with their quality degrees. Amazing.
Delightful coincidence: after being recommended Bardi's *The Calculus Wars* a whole year ago (gasp--such a long time!) I'm finally reading it and today passed the page where Leibniz is trying to establish what became the Prussian Academy of Sciences.
Neither unis nor scientific societies are simply "what form when humans get together to study things." They are deliberately and politically created institutional structures. Like other such academies, the Prussian Academy also didn't turn into a uni.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_…
Leibniz knew this when he was trying to establish a scientific academy in Berlin. He was already a member of the Royal Society in London and he knew the work and the finances that would be required. 
If you’re even a tiny bit as aware as Leibniz and you already have highly functioning knowledge-making institutions like unis, colleges, & research institutes in your society, you would probably not be wasting your time making as ridiculously unmoored an argument as Helen does.
Good response from Helen Pluckrose. It’s worth circumventing her block to read it (though she also insists that those she has blocked shouldn’t be reading her threads; so make your call).
I don’t have time to respond to Helen’s thread. But Ted took the time, so please read this:
About Helen Pluckrose's repeated claim that "universities are, at root, scholars co-operating with each other & pooling resources," I'll repeat that, no, historically, universities are political projects that did not come into existence without instigation at governmental levels.
Helen is free to dream about a non-existent world in which, after the destruction of universities, free scholars would form hands-around circles from the middle of which library, laboratory, office, and other university buildings would magically appear. We should not believe it.
Helen Pluckrose also claims that "Zealous Social Justice scholars & activists don't want to acknowledge that any of the people criticising their methods actually share their goals of opposing right-wing populism, racism, sexism, imperialism etc."
Helen, I look forward to the day when you mount an actual critique of specific methods in the social sciences and humanities. It seems, however, that day is a far way off.
I will also be excited when you begin opposing right-wing populism, racism, sexism, and imperialism.
I will also be excited when you begin opposing right-wing populism, racism, sexism, and imperialism.
That you agreed to have a white nationalist one-man organization organize a conference for you and your close collaborators does not point in the direction you claim you're going. I'd recommend you change course, and show us how you've changed course.
PS: In case it wasn't clear earlier in this thread, the proposals that Leibniz wrote to get an academy set up in Berlin, he wrote them for Prince-elector Frederick III of Brandenburg. Leibniz couldn't just found one himself. He needed the ruling aristocrat's approval & support.
To give you my personal examples, I went to the second-oldest university in Germany, which "was founded in 1409 by Frederick I, Elector of Saxony and his brother William II, Margrave of Meissen, and originally comprised the four scholastic faculties."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig_U…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig_U…
I studied for a year in Ottawa: "Founded in 1942 as Carleton College, a private, non-denominational evening college to serve veterans returning from WWII, the institution was chartered as a uni by the provincial gov in 1952 through The Carleton U Act."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carleton_…
I got my PhD from UBC: "In 1877, 6 years after BC joined Canada, the Superintendent of Education, John Jessop, submitted a proposal for the formation of a provincial uni. ... The BC University Act of 1908 formally called a provincial uni into being."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universit…
@threadreaderapp unroll
