purpose
catdynamics | March 30, 2011A university is a self-perpetuating oligarchy.
A university chooses its own members, restricts membership, and governs from self-selected internal member promotion.
QED
Ok, so this a somewhat platonic abstraction of a private university, and the selection is from the meta-pool of members of the ensemble of universities, that are suitably like the particular university.
But, a self-perpetuating oligarchy it is.
Public universities, well, it gets complicated - they may be totally under external control or under nominal external control or have some open feedback loops to the external world…
gregladen | March 5, 2009Dawkins gave a talk that could be criticized as not particularly new, in that his main idea is that human brains are too powerful and adaptable to continue to function primarily within an adaptive program serving as a proper adaptive organ. Instead, human brains think up all sorts of other, rather non-Darwinian things to do. This idea has been explored and talked about in many ways by many people. Kurt Vonegut Jr.'s character in Galapagos repeatedly, in a state of lament, quips "Thanks, Big Brain..." as evidence accumulates that our inevitable march towards extinction is primarily a…