Why are universities collapsing?

The classic purpose of a university is was simple and elegant: gather the smartest people, have them do cutting-edge research, and let that research trickle down to students so they graduate at the absolute frontier of human knowledge.

Except that, well, nah, it's no longer like that.

I asked forensic scientist David Klatzow why.

I can list the lecturers who were any good whatsoever in my years at Wits on the fingers of a mutilated hand.

— David Klatzow

Universities get government subsidies for every research paper their academics publish. So the pressure to produce papers is relentless. David experienced this firsthand: after his first year as a lecturer, the dean sent him a message noting he hadn't published anything. Same message in year two. By year three, David told the dean he found it intolerable, and he left.

The problem isn't just that the pressure exists. It's what the pressure does to people.

Academics chop single papers into tiny fragments, called the "least publishable unit", to squeeze out three or four publications instead of one decent one.
Some cheat outright, because their careers depend on volume, not quality.
Nobody repeats previous experiments to verify them, because there's no kudos in replication. It costs money, time, and equipment, and it doesn't get you tenure.

In 2005, John Ioannidis published a paper titled "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False", which has become one of the most downloaded and cited papers in modern science. His argument, basically, is that most published research findings are, well, false.

Put another way, almost all peer-reviewed science is garbage.

Yet we're told to "trust the science"?

Nope.

Why should I "trust the science"?

Then the drug companies got involved, funding research and conclusions favouring, well, the drug companies. The entire Covid scam is one such example, with loads of "peer-reviewed" papers on SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, and mRNA jabs, all of which turned out to be pharmaceutical fear porn to make billions of dollars.

All of it is junk science.

Why the journals are broken

David identified two structural problems that make academic journals inherently untrustworthy:

Advertising money. Journals publish material that pleases their advertisers. If a journal publishes something at odds with a major advertising client, the client threatens to withdraw. Journal editors answer to shareholders, not to truth.
Corrupt peer review. Editors send papers to reviewers likely to give a favourable review, because they need to publish, not reject.
This isn't a point made by David, but I will add that there are also financial, political, and cultural agendas going on. Big Pharma makes a lot of money from its products, and many politicians are bought.

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.

— Dr Marcia Angell, former editor-in-chief, New England Journal of Medicine

I recommend listening to my conversation with Simon Goddek, a scientist who questioned the peer-review process behind the PCR test that the whole world ended up using.

The moral of the story

David's conclusion, and I think he's right, is this:

50% or more of what you learn at university is wrong by the time you get out. The only way to remedy that is to inculcate a culture of learning, of questioning, of going back to basics. And that is not being done. It's regurgitation.

I dropped out of varsity.

David walked away from his lecturing post rather than play the publish-or-perish game.

We both turned out fine.

Maybe the real education, as Mark Twain said, starts after you've forgotten everything you learned at school.

You can skip the video by listening to Jerm Warfare on most podcast apps. As I type this, I don't think I'm banned anywhere anymore. Spotify banned my podcast during Covid, but they've since lifted the ban.

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