It’s fascinating to learn what kind of posts twitter prioritizes now that the code is public. Confirmed something I suspected for years: you get rewarded for sticking to one set of keywords and hammering on them, and your tweets get penalized for being too diverse. If I retweeted news about universities and only universities all day without offering much commentary my posts would do a lot better than they do writing a thread about a new topic each week. Ditto if I focused only on Greek philosophy or only psychoanalysis. Well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’m gonna pull this apart real quick because it neatly illustrates how ideology impedes concrete analysis. The modern university tells itself a story about its own origins; intellectuals analyze changes to the institution in relation to this imaginary history.

I use “intellectuals” in Gramsci’s sense, as usual: editors at the New York Times count as “intellectuals” in this sense.

This is simply 100% false.

As the crisis of the university deepens and becomes increasingly public, it’s inevitable that grifting talking heads and verbose mediocrities will start to talk about it more.

Most of these people will have no fucking clue what they’re talking about. The name “liberal arts” does not come from the fact that the people who studied them were “free” 🤪🤪🤪

Moreover, the medieval university was almost exclusively a professional school. It trained doctors, lawyers, and priests. People who didn’t need money didn’t study medicine.