A shot at universities heard around the blogosphere

Like most people, I had no idea about the Thiel Fellowships until I read about it at Slate, where Jacob Weisberg rips into the idea and the man behind it.  Peter Thiel made his first huge gazillions from PayPal, and he is now an investor in new ventures including, yes, Facebook.

Thiel is offering fellowships to young and creative entrepreneurs.  So, what set off Weisberg?  Because, of the logic that the fellowships are founded on:

"University is a tremendously valuable experience, but when entrepreneurs are ready to launch, they should do so immediately, rather than sticking around to satisfy expectations of a full four years of college or eight of grad school,” said Elon Musk, who co-founded Tesla Motors, SpaceX, and PayPal. Musk himself stopped out of his graduate program before classes began to co-found his first company Zip2, which he sold to Compaq for $307 million.

It is pretty much a Kobe Bryant approach--Thiel says that if you are entrepreneurially as talented as Bryant is in basketball, then why go to college and waste time when you can get going right away?  And even more:

"Because education seeks to impart past knowledge, when you are trying to create a technological breakthrough, you have to create new knowledge, and there is no way to teach that. There was no course at University of Arizona on ‘‘how to cure aging.' Hopefully, this program will allow others to work on ambitious projects themselves, before they've taken on a crippling amount of student debt,” said William Andregg, CEO and co-founder of Halcyon Molecular.

There are many reasons to applaud this idea, and a whole bunch of reasons to critique it as well.  However, looks like Weisberg kind of lost it and let his emotions take over:

Where to start with this nasty idea? A basic feature of the venture capitalist's worldview is its narcissism, and with that comes the desire to clone oneself—perhaps literally in Thiel's case. Thus Thiel fellows will have the opportunity to emulate their sponsor by halting their intellectual development around the onset of adulthood, maintaining a narrow-minded focus on getting rich as young as possible, and thereby avoid the siren lure of helping others or contributing to the advances in basic science that have made the great tech fortunes possible. Thiel's program is premised on the idea that America suffers from a deficiency of entrepreneurship. In fact, we may be on the verge of the opposite, a world in which too many weak ideas find funding and every kid dreams of being the next Mark Zuckerberg. This threatens to turn the risk-taking startup model into a white boy's version of the NBA, diverting a generation of young people from the love of knowledge for its own sake and respect for middle-class values.

Secular Right points out, correctly, that most students (and their professors, too?) are not in universities because of their love of knowledge for the sake of knowledge:

Knowledge for “its own sake”? What planet does Jacob Weisberg live on where American university students are seeking knowledge for “its own sake”? The American university racket is by and large one of credentialing and signalling. Most college graduates are unabashed philistines. Their primary goal in life is to seem intelligent, not be intelligent.

 Reason summarizes Weisberg:

 as a critique, this is shoddy stuff. But as a window into the Weisberg worldview, it's very valuable indeed. Count the assumptions:
1. Intellectual development halts when you leave school.
2. Entrepreneurs do not "help others" or "contribute to advances in basic sciences."
3. Launching a startup is a "white boy" thing.
4. Respect for middle-class values and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake are inconceivable if you avoid the higher-education path that Jacob Weisberg followed. But Thiel's the guy who wants to clone himself.

As Ken Robinson so charmingly and funnily describes, education in its current structure is geared mostly to create university professors in the image of the current ones.  It is heights of narcissism right there.  If Thiel wants to provide another opportunity for the young, talented and creative minds, why not?  The only unfortunate aspect of the Thiel Fellowships seem to be the ideological motivations of the backer.  But, hey, aren't a good chunk of the university faculty dogmatically ideological as well?

Above all, I would argue that the Thiel Fellowship is merely yet another piece of evidence pointing to the growing unhappiness with the academic-industrial-complex.

BTW, Claudia Dreifus tweets that she and Andrew Hacker will be on BookTV on Sunday, Oct 24th @ 7:00 ET, to discuss their book, Higher Education?