Corporatist Universities and the Gilded Age

How Old the Corruption Really Is

A clan does not bring forth a demigod, 
Does not produce a monster unforeseen; 
Only a line of good or evil men, 
Bring happiness or terror in the end.

— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The top picture is the University of Oklahoma and the bottom is the Rothschild College at Vanderbilt University. You see this same architectural style around lots of universities and this is literally Gilded Age stuff. Granted, lots of universities were built during the time period but they didn’t have to copy the style. It’s hideously ugly. It has long made me want to replace it all with art deco which is what I was really thinking about in my comment on the Avengers, Architecture! article by

M. E. Rothwell

(which I can no longer embed-link now it’s since been paywalled.) Contemplating that inspired my recent meditations on what I termed terracore.

Goût Rothschild

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today - Wikipedia

How an ‘appetite for the best’ fuelled the Rothschild family’s renowned collecting style | Christie's (christies.com)

It’s the same thing as like, why are diamond engagement and wedding rings so expensive? Diamonds are literally space junk, and though all the large diamonds of varying colors you see in museums are worth quite a bit, diamond rings are price gouged to oblivion. Diamonds are literally space junk, though calling them that does make them sound cool. Diamonds are one of the more valuable minerals because they’re hard, hence the origin of terms like adamantine, adamantium, and just plain adamant which is a-damant = diamond. Speaking of superheroes and diamond rings, you would probably be better off getting his and hers Wolverine claws for your engagement or marriage, it’d certainly be cooler. Why are cheese and wine an expensive thing for rich snobs with nothing better to do? A bunch of people who lived in the ghetto and were in many cases literally named after the ghetto (roth-schild = red shield, denoting where they lived) basically got a lottery curse, except it was like a lottery of birth curse and decided to spend their money on things I’m very sure can’t be worth that much just like anyone who comes down with a lottery curse seems to.

All these social pressures for cheese, wine, cars that don’t work any better than regular cars, etc. just seems like a way to socially set money on fire. Sure, it doesn’t have an actual negative value, but there’s the trap. Overpaying for it is equal to basically setting money on fire and the people who didn’t actually work for their money want to set it on fire basically to spite the people who have to work is my impression. Why don’t we have spaceships and more science and technology and actually cool stuff? For that matter, why don’t we have more contemporary art? A bunch of worthless Old World politics, that’s why.

More Goethe:

America, You Are Better Off — A Poem by Goethe | Sketches (wordpress.com)

America, you are better off
Than our ancient continent.
You have no tumbledown castles
And no basalt deposits.
Your inner lives are not disturbed by
Useless memories and vain strife.
Use your time with confidence!
And if your children write poetry,
May a kindly fate guard them from writing
Stories of knights, robbers and ghosts.

It has long since been pointed out there is basalt in America, and metaphorically now America is full of worthless Old World politics too, though it feels almost like an insult to compare Old World politics to basalt. Basalt is after all just part of nature, new basalt forms by volcanoes after all, and it looks kind of cool, what with people like Lovecraft always making “cyclopean edifices” out of basalt in their stories. One thing that the terrible Rothschild taste could be replaced with is basalt buildings and I’d not mind at all.

As of the writing of this article, the article above is still my most-liked article. It discusses other sources and forms of the corruption in our current university system. Now I tend to think the corruption was there from the start and only now is attention being drawn to it, though I also think it’s genuinely become more pervasive as people wanted to be more “woke” and thought of being a professor as the ultimate “woke” profession like Dumbledore and Charles Xavier and what have you rather than wanting to be a doctor, lawyer, CEO, or any of the other popular professors. As I like to put it, congratulations, you’re a professor just like Dolores Umbridge, are you happy now? Of course they’re not, because they have always been delusional, but now everyone wants to challenge them on the delusions, probably just because as much as becoming an academic has become the ultimate “woke” profession especially in light of certain kinds of pop culture that still manage to be popular praise the Lord, people are also intensely aware of how much we need knowledge, real knowledge, not ideological posturing, if we don’t want to continue going back to the Dark Ages, which seems like another trend which has started decades ago seeing how old the Claudine Gay debacle is and all the rest of that, or how we haven’t had rocketships in decades, or new work on things like quantum gravity in decades. Society has been being subsumed by problems for decades and the problems themselves germinated over a century ago and sometimes more like centuries ago.

Another important factor is corporations feeding into and from universities and that kind of corporatism, which is where the DEI problems come from. Like are we really going to blame things on Black people? Black women helped with doing the calculations for a lot of the original space missions for crying out loud, it’s not Black people in general’s fault that corporations are incompetent and just trying to use diversity hires to cover their rear ends, even though it’s certainly the faults of individual idiots who happen to be Black like Claudine Gay and take up the deal. Lots of White idiots are to blame too, probably more White idiots than Black idiots or other diversity hire idiots to be honest because who do you think is doing the hiring anyway.

So when you see the problems going on now, just remember they are very old and be happy to see them being solved and feel powerful when you can do even the smallest thing against them. I don’t want to compare now to a current Gilded Age though because I think this is much bigger. I think what we’re seeing now is vastly bigger than that or WWIII or even a “Little Dark Age” but that’s just my personal opinion based on my personal experiences so that’s why I don’t do too much comparing the present time to older times. History doesn’t repeat but it sure does rhyme, and I see the rhyme here as being most certainly the culmination of several different patterns, some of which are millennia old and some of which are younger, and some of which are probably even older than millennia.