A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education

[Hume]

When you look at a culture, and you want to ask yourself: “Well, how did we go from Weimar Germany to Nazism?” Obviously, education is going to be a part of that, but it’s not in any way going to be the whole of it.

I don’t buy that Nazism is proof that higher learning doesn’t work. The point of fact is that the Nazis were very much against higher education in many ways and wanted to constrain and control it.

Opinion | A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

Making the case for a “useless” education.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Lionfish]

 

[Walt]

"I spent my whole educational experience without the DOE"

The DOE is the Department of Energy, so there does appear to be a hole in this person's education.

The ED combined government agencies into a single department. They existed since 1867. There is no one educated before 1867 posting on the internet.

 

[Matt Dillon]

When you look at a culture, and you want to ask yourself: “Well, how did we go from Weimar Germany to Nazism?” Obviously, education is going to be a part of that, but it’s not in any way going to be the whole of it.

I don’t buy that Nazism is proof that higher learning doesn’t work. The point of fact is that the Nazis were very much against higher education in many ways and wanted to constrain and control it.

Opinion | A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

Making the case for a “useless” education.

www.nytimes.com

Are you claiming you got a classic Liberal Education? I have doubts..

 

[Hume]

Are you claiming you got a classic Liberal Education? I have doubts..

I have doubts you are intelligent.

 

[Diogenes]

When you look at a culture, and you want to ask yourself: “Well, how did we go from Weimar Germany to Nazism?” Obviously, education is going to be a part of that, but it’s not in any way going to be the whole of it. I don’t buy that Nazism is proof that higher learning doesn’t work. The point of fact is that the Nazis were very much against higher education in many ways and wanted to constrain and control it.

The thread is a thin link-and-jab, not a serious discussion of the article it claims to defend. Hume started it May 22, 2026 by quoting a Weimar-to-Nazism line, asserting that Nazis constrained and controlled higher education rather than proving education itself fails, then dropping the NYT “Interesting Times” piece (Ross Douthat interviewing philosopher Jennifer Frey).

What the linked piece actually argues​

The NYT item is a Douthat podcast/interview with Frey, who built (then watched dismantled) the University of Tulsa Honors College. Frey had been hired around 2023 to create a Great Books/seminar-style program emphasizing the true, the good, and the beautiful rather than career pipelines. Enrollment grew sharply; it attracted students and donors. After a presidential/provost turnover, the new administration cut the budget dramatically (~90% in some reports), eliminated the dean and most dedicated staff, enlarged classes, and ended the seminar format that defined it. Frey was told her performance was fine but the college needed to “go in a different direction.” She remains on the philosophy faculty.


Her recurring claims:

• The humanities decline is driven more by administrators and institutional incentives than by student demand.
• Traditional liberal learning is formation of persons (judgment, reading, asking what is worth living for), not workforce training.
• Instrumentalizing the humanities as “soft skills for jobs” destroys the thing being sold.
• AI may clarify rather than bury the humanities: once machines handle a lot of analysis and generation, the remaining human work is deciding what questions matter, detecting slop, and exercising judgment that cannot be fully outsourced.

Douthat presses the usual objections (cost, reading collapse, politicization, whether the right or left is the bigger enemy of this model). Frey is a Catholic philosopher who ran a relatively traditional program; the interview treats both left specialization/identity capture and right vocationalism as threats.

Evaluation of the argument​

The formation case is the strongest part. A liberal arts education, done seriously, trains people to handle competing claims, read difficult texts, and live with unfinished questions. That is not the same as job training, and it is not the same as the politicized, low-rigor versions that dominate many departments. In an AI environment the comparative advantage of humans who can still read, synthesize history, and apply moral/political judgment is at least plausible. Treating college only as delayed vocational school already looks shortsighted.


The Tulsa episode is a useful cautionary tale about administration, not students. A program that grew and brought in money still got gutted after a leadership change. That pattern (bloat, mission drift, sudden “restructuring”) is familiar across higher ed. Blaming only “the students” or only “the market” misses the internal politics.


Weaknesses and missing pieces:

• Cost and opportunity cost are real. Many students and families cannot treat four years as formation first.
• Actual campus humanities often look nothing like Frey’s seminar ideal; they frequently prioritize theory, identity, and activism over the canon she wants. Defending “liberal arts” without specifying which version is incomplete.
• The Weimar analogy Hume used is historically sloppy. German universities were excellent and produced both Nazis and their opponents. The Nazis did seize and ideologize education (purging faculty, controlling curricula, Gleichschaltung). High literacy and technical skill did not prevent catastrophe; they were also used by the regime. Education is necessary for a free society and insufficient by itself.
• AI’s effect is still speculative. It can flood the zone with fluent mediocrity as easily as it can raise the premium on genuine judgment.

How the forum treated it​

The thread did not engage any of that. It treated the post as another opportunity for status jabs rather than testing Frey’s claims against enrollment data, reading scores, graduate outcomes, or the Tulsa administrative record. That is typical of the site: a provocative link plus a historical one-liner, then personality combat. The substance—whether a non-instrumental education in the Western tradition is still worth defending when machines write and analyze—went untouched.

Tulsa Honors College Cut: Liberal Arts Defense | Shared Grok Conversation

Assess and evaluate: https://www.justplainpolitics.com/threads/a-defense-of-a-liberal-arts-education

grok.com

 

[Hume]

The thread is a thin link-and-jab, not a serious discussion of the article it claims to defend. Hume started it May 22, 2026 by quoting a Weimar-to-Nazism line, asserting that Nazis constrained and controlled higher education rather than proving education itself fails, then dropping the NYT “Interesting Times” piece (Ross Douthat interviewing philosopher Jennifer Frey).

What the linked piece actually argues​

The NYT item is a Douthat podcast/interview with Frey, who built (then watched dismantled) the University of Tulsa Honors College. Frey had been hired around 2023 to create a Great Books/seminar-style program emphasizing the true, the good, and the beautiful rather than career pipelines. Enrollment grew sharply; it attracted students and donors. After a presidential/provost turnover, the new administration cut the budget dramatically (~90% in some reports), eliminated the dean and most dedicated staff, enlarged classes, and ended the seminar format that defined it. Frey was told her performance was fine but the college needed to “go in a different direction.” She remains on the philosophy faculty.


Her recurring claims:

• The humanities decline is driven more by administrators and institutional incentives than by student demand.
• Traditional liberal learning is formation of persons (judgment, reading, asking what is worth living for), not workforce training.
• Instrumentalizing the humanities as “soft skills for jobs” destroys the thing being sold.
• AI may clarify rather than bury the humanities: once machines handle a lot of analysis and generation, the remaining human work is deciding what questions matter, detecting slop, and exercising judgment that cannot be fully outsourced.

Douthat presses the usual objections (cost, reading collapse, politicization, whether the right or left is the bigger enemy of this model). Frey is a Catholic philosopher who ran a relatively traditional program; the interview treats both left specialization/identity capture and right vocationalism as threats.

Evaluation of the argument​

The formation case is the strongest part. A liberal arts education, done seriously, trains people to handle competing claims, read difficult texts, and live with unfinished questions. That is not the same as job training, and it is not the same as the politicized, low-rigor versions that dominate many departments. In an AI environment the comparative advantage of humans who can still read, synthesize history, and apply moral/political judgment is at least plausible. Treating college only as delayed vocational school already looks shortsighted.


The Tulsa episode is a useful cautionary tale about administration, not students. A program that grew and brought in money still got gutted after a leadership change. That pattern (bloat, mission drift, sudden “restructuring”) is familiar across higher ed. Blaming only “the students” or only “the market” misses the internal politics.


Weaknesses and missing pieces:

• Cost and opportunity cost are real. Many students and families cannot treat four years as formation first.
• Actual campus humanities often look nothing like Frey’s seminar ideal; they frequently prioritize theory, identity, and activism over the canon she wants. Defending “liberal arts” without specifying which version is incomplete.
• The Weimar analogy Hume used is historically sloppy. German universities were excellent and produced both Nazis and their opponents. The Nazis did seize and ideologize education (purging faculty, controlling curricula, Gleichschaltung). High literacy and technical skill did not prevent catastrophe; they were also used by the regime. Education is necessary for a free society and insufficient by itself.
• AI’s effect is still speculative. It can flood the zone with fluent mediocrity as easily as it can raise the premium on genuine judgment.

How the forum treated it​

The thread did not engage any of that. It treated the post as another opportunity for status jabs rather than testing Frey’s claims against enrollment data, reading scores, graduate outcomes, or the Tulsa administrative record. That is typical of the site: a provocative link plus a historical one-liner, then personality combat. The substance—whether a non-instrumental education in the Western tradition is still worth defending when machines write and analyze—went untouched.

Tulsa Honors College Cut: Liberal Arts Defense | Shared Grok Conversation

Assess and evaluate: https://www.justplainpolitics.com/threads/a-defense-of-a-liberal-arts-education

grok.com

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz


I never read your crap

 

[Diogenes]

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz I never read your crap

It appears that you do.

Meanwhile, I believe a reasonable inference could draw a parallel between what the Nazis did and what Elon Musk calls the "woke mind virus", albeit there is a structural difference in the way leftists have informally imposed de facto policies that closely mirror the Nazis' tactics sans the enabling legislation.

@Grok agrees.

 

[Hume]

It appears that you do.

Meanwhile, I believe a reasonable inference could draw a parallel between what the Nazis did and what Elon Musk calls the "woke mind virus", albeit there is a structural difference in the way leftists have informally imposed de facto policies that closely mirror the Nazis' tactics sans the enabling legislation.

@Grok agrees.

you are a fucking idiot

 

[Yakuda]

When you look at a culture, and you want to ask yourself: “Well, how did we go from Weimar Germany to Nazism?” Obviously, education is going to be a part of that, but it’s not in any way going to be the whole of it.

I don’t buy that Nazism is proof that higher learning doesn’t work. The point of fact is that the Nazis were very much against higher education in many ways and wanted to constrain and control it.

Opinion | A Defense of a Liberal Arts Education in the Age of A.I.

Making the case for a “useless” education.

www.nytimes.com

We have a supreme court justice that cant tell us what a woman is. Education is extremely important but kids today are not being educated. They arent being taught HOW to think they are being WHAT to think. "Is it going to be on the test?" is all you need to know about education in America.

 

[Hume]

We have a supreme court justice that cant tell us what a woman is. Education is extremely important but kids today are not being educated. They arent being taught HOW to think they are being WHAT to think. "Is it going to be on the test?" is all you need to know about education in America.

Who cares what the definition of woman is. Boring.

 

[Yakuda]

Who cares what the definition of woman is. Boring.

People with brains. It doesnt surprise me that you're bored

 

[Hume]

People with brains. It doesnt surprise me that you're bored

bye

 

[Diogenes]

you are a fucking idiot

How so?


The inference is reasonable as a comparison of institutional tactics. The structural difference I named is the right place to start, and it should be kept in view.


Elon Musk’s “woke mind virus” is identity politics that amplify racial and sex antagonism while claiming to reduce them; hostility to merit; suppression of speech and even of questioning; and heavy transmission through schools and universities. He has called Yale an “epicenter,” treated it as civilization-level risk, and tied it to cancel culture.

What actually resembles Nazi university policy​

The Nazi project was: seize the gatekeeping institutions, purge the wrong people, rewrite the curriculum, and make dissent costly. On those mechanisms, contemporary elite-campus practice has shown a real family resemblance, even without a Civil Service Law of 1933.


Documented patterns, not slogans:

• Faculty political composition is heavily left-skewed, especially in humanities and some social sciences and at elite schools. Ratios vary by study and field; the direction does not. That is not proof of a conspiracy, but it is the soil in which orthodoxy grows.
• DEI statements functioned as a hiring screen. In fall 2024, about one in five U.S. faculty job ads still asked for DEI-related materials; private schools more than public. That is an ideological loyalty test in all but name. After political and legal pushback the explicit requirement has dropped sharply, which itself shows the practice was policy, not spontaneous weather.
• Speech and inquiry were constrained by a mix of student pressure, administrative risk-aversion, Title IX/DEI offices, professional-association norms, and social punishment. FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and the disinvitation/self-censorship literature document this for years. That is not book-burning in the square. It is still constraint of higher learning.

So: purge-by-hiring-and-promotion, capture of student and administrative machinery, and curriculum recoding around a moral-political frame. Those are echoes of Gleichschaltung’s toolkit. My point that this arrived without enabling legislation is correct and important. It arrived through foundations, accreditors, HR, student affairs, professional associations, and prestige competition. That is informal coordination plus de facto policy, not a Rust ministry issuing decrees from Berlin.

​

The differences are not decorative.

• Coercive monopoly. Nazis dismissed people by statute, backed by police and later far worse. Campus orthodoxy wrecks careers, chills speech, and sorts who gets hired. It does not exile, imprison, or kill. Treating those as interchangeable cheapens the history and inflates the present.
• Legal form. 1933 was state law plus Führerprinzip. The recent campus pattern was polycentric: no single ministry, many overlapping incentives. That makes it harder to see and, in some ways, harder to repeal—until legislatures, donors, courts, and enrollment pressure arrived.
• Exit and reversal. People could leave universities, found new ones, move to red-state systems, or wait out a political cycle. After 2023–25, Michigan, MIT, Harvard FAS and others dropped required DEI statements; multiple states banned them at public campuses. Nazi university policy was not similarly reversible from inside the Reich.
• Content and aim. Nazis imposed a racial-biological state ideology and needed technicians for war. The campus pattern is closer to a moralized identity framework plus administrative risk management. Related family of ideas (the individual subordinated to a group story; dissent as contamination) is not the same program.

Calling the parallel “close” on tactics and “not close” on power, violence, and legal architecture is the accurate cut. “Leftists informally imposed de facto policies that closely mirror the Nazis’ tactics sans the enabling legislation” is a fair description of method.

The useful conclusion​

The interesting claim is not “universities are Nazi Germany.” It is that a free society can lose academic freedom two ways: by statute from above, and by coordinated informal capture from inside the institutions that were supposed to protect inquiry.

The second path does not need a Reichstag Fire Decree. It needs hiring screens, speech norms treated as moral law, and administrators who fear activists more than they fear error. That path is real. Equating it with 1933 is not required in order to take it seriously.

 

[Hume]

How so?


The inference is reasonable as a comparison of institutional tactics. The structural difference I named is the right place to start, and it should be kept in view.


Elon Musk’s “woke mind virus” is identity politics that amplify racial and sex antagonism while claiming to reduce them; hostility to merit; suppression of speech and even of questioning; and heavy transmission through schools and universities. He has called Yale an “epicenter,” treated it as civilization-level risk, and tied it to cancel culture.

What actually resembles Nazi university policy​

The Nazi project was: seize the gatekeeping institutions, purge the wrong people, rewrite the curriculum, and make dissent costly. On those mechanisms, contemporary elite-campus practice has shown a real family resemblance, even without a Civil Service Law of 1933.


Documented patterns, not slogans:

• Faculty political composition is heavily left-skewed, especially in humanities and some social sciences and at elite schools. Ratios vary by study and field; the direction does not. That is not proof of a conspiracy, but it is the soil in which orthodoxy grows.
• DEI statements functioned as a hiring screen. In fall 2024, about one in five U.S. faculty job ads still asked for DEI-related materials; private schools more than public. That is an ideological loyalty test in all but name. After political and legal pushback the explicit requirement has dropped sharply, which itself shows the practice was policy, not spontaneous weather.
• Speech and inquiry were constrained by a mix of student pressure, administrative risk-aversion, Title IX/DEI offices, professional-association norms, and social punishment. FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and the disinvitation/self-censorship literature document this for years. That is not book-burning in the square. It is still constraint of higher learning.

So: purge-by-hiring-and-promotion, capture of student and administrative machinery, and curriculum recoding around a moral-political frame. Those are echoes of Gleichschaltung’s toolkit. My point that this arrived without enabling legislation is correct and important. It arrived through foundations, accreditors, HR, student affairs, professional associations, and prestige competition. That is informal coordination plus de facto policy, not a Rust ministry issuing decrees from Berlin.

​

The differences are not decorative.

• Coercive monopoly. Nazis dismissed people by statute, backed by police and later far worse. Campus orthodoxy wrecks careers, chills speech, and sorts who gets hired. It does not exile, imprison, or kill. Treating those as interchangeable cheapens the history and inflates the present.
• Legal form. 1933 was state law plus Führerprinzip. The recent campus pattern was polycentric: no single ministry, many overlapping incentives. That makes it harder to see and, in some ways, harder to repeal—until legislatures, donors, courts, and enrollment pressure arrived.
• Exit and reversal. People could leave universities, found new ones, move to red-state systems, or wait out a political cycle. After 2023–25, Michigan, MIT, Harvard FAS and others dropped required DEI statements; multiple states banned them at public campuses. Nazi university policy was not similarly reversible from inside the Reich.
• Content and aim. Nazis imposed a racial-biological state ideology and needed technicians for war. The campus pattern is closer to a moralized identity framework plus administrative risk management. Related family of ideas (the individual subordinated to a group story; dissent as contamination) is not the same program.

Calling the parallel “close” on tactics and “not close” on power, violence, and legal architecture is the accurate cut. “Leftists informally imposed de facto policies that closely mirror the Nazis’ tactics sans the enabling legislation” is a fair description of method.

The useful conclusion​

The interesting claim is not “universities are Nazi Germany.” It is that a free society can lose academic freedom two ways: by statute from above, and by coordinated informal capture from inside the institutions that were supposed to protect inquiry.

The second path does not need a Reichstag Fire Decree. It needs hiring screens, speech norms treated as moral law, and administrators who fear activists more than they fear error. That path is real. Equating it with 1933 is not required in order to take it seriously.

I ignore all text not authored by the person posting.

 

[Diogenes]

I ignore all text not authored by the person posting.

Is that so? Why?

 

[Yakuda]

bye

Whats funny is its seem you actually think of yourself as an "educated" person. You like to copy and paste stuff about philosophy as if that makes you really intelligent yet you cant seem to figure out why the definition of words matter. You cany figure out why some us might be concerned that a woman who will be deciding issues that could affect peoples lives for decades cant tell us what a woman is. What else cant see tell us? I REALLY try being nice to you but you make it so difficult and clearly you have neither the will nor ability to engage in a rational conversation. As result there is no reason to take anything you say seriously.

 

[Hume]

Whats funny is its seem you actually think of yourself as an "educated" person. You like to copy and paste stuff about philosophy as if that makes you really intelligent yet you cant seem to figure out why the definition of words matter. You cany figure out why some us might be concerned that a woman who will be deciding issues that could affect peoples lives for decades cant tell us what a woman is. What else cant see tell us? I REALLY try being nice to you but you make it so difficult and clearly you have neither the will nor ability to engage in a rational conversation. As result there is no reason to take anything you say seriously.

I have never seen you discuss anything about philosophy.

 

[Yakuda]

Is that so? Why?

Most because Hume is a textbook example of what happens when people spend too much time in an education system controlled by leftists. They're weak minded, they lack the ability to articulate a rational argument, they onl repeat what they've been "taught" and have no idea what to do when anyone disagrees with them.

 

[Diogenes]

You like to copy and paste stuff about philosophy.

Hmmm. @Hume, is that true?

I ignore all text not authored by the person posting.