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Does this piece from Terry Eagleton, arguing 'It’s time to abolish the #university', quite work as satire in the era of #Rishi Sunak's 'rip-off' degrees?
'The fact is that all we really need are business schools. Apart from the odd laboratory here and there, we could abolish universities altogether and save ourselves a stupendous amount of money. It’s true that this might leave hordes of young people with time on their hands, but this was never a problem in the days of National Service. In any case, universities are flagrantly self-contradictory institutions. Having being dragged out of the Middle Ages and forced to become efficient, they now look more like Tesco’s head office rather than ivory towers.'
https://unherd.com/2023/08/its-time-to-abolish-the-university/
The comments section also contains an amusing take on the #humanities:
'... virtually the whole of the Humanities runs as a 1 trick pony. You can test this for yourselves by looking at the adverts for departmental seminars. The approach taken will almost always be this: take a small fact or occurrence from the periphery of the subject in question, then simply point out that said fact/occurrence shows us that the dominant view is not only incomplete, but also oppressive to the periphery. Then re-centre the subject on to said periphery as the new standard, thereby overthrowing the old oppressive order of things. They apply this simple methodology to everything.'
Even if it was true once, isn't this a rather dated way of describing the humanities today?