Marc Andreessen, a world class boob whose existence demonstrates that intelligence is not a prerequisite to great wealth, wants to destroy universities. Why? Because they do a bad job.
no way to fix American higher education without replacement, and there is no way to replace them without letting them fail. And in a sense, this is the most obvious conclusion of all time. What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? 1t fails and another company takes its place. That’s how you get progress. Below this is the process of evolution.
These places have cut themselves off from evolution at the institutional level and at the individual level, which is shown by the widespread abuse of the tenure system. We have just stalled out. We have built an ossified system, an ossified, centralized, corrupt system.
That’s baffling. I know I’m in the middle of a university, but judging by the quality of the students in my classes, their success on graduation (even without the social advantage of hanging out with spoiled scions of the rich at an ivy), and the reputation of American universities abroad, it is bizarre to say that our universities fail at their job. Given how starved they are by conservative legislatures, we’re doing a great job!
Andreessen himself has only an undergraduate degree in computer science from UIUC…he spent hardly any time in the university system before toddling off to get rich off the world-wide web. He’s not qualified to opine on the quality of our universities, especially since he turned a bachelors degree into a billion dollars. I think he was taught quite well, although having the ego of a conservative billionaire he probably imagines that his fortune and skills sprang fully-formed from his pointy, egg-shaped cranium.
He is not allowed to make an argument by analogy with evolution. He’s a techbro who probably never took a single class in biology.
He’s going to have to spell out what abuse of the tenure system
he’s talking about. Tenure is not a problem. Most of us professors don’t make a billion dollars from our careers, and giving us a tiny bit of job security as a sop to excuse a middle class salary after a demanding and disruptive decade or more of post-grad training doesn’t “ossify” universities. It definitely isn’t corrupt, except in the sense that some administrators, coaches, and regents get paid excessive sums.
What can I say? Andreessen is a very stupid man who might have benefited from more exposure to learning.
Srsly? Then why is Microsoft still around?
It is telling that, apart from a few meaningless buzzwords, he doesn’t actually say what he thinks is wrong with the US higher education system. He doesn’t specify how he’s measuring success, doesn’t point to any comparable systems elsewhere and explain how they’re doing better and in what ways, doesn’t identify what a university is for and how to tell whether it’s doing what it should be. He just spouts vague negativity and hostility.
Are we talking about opportunities for learning? Rigour of courses? Affordability and accessibility, particularly for the disadvantaged? Improved employment prospects for graduates? Improved societal outcomes from having an educated populace? Work satisfaction among teaching and non-teaching staff? Quality of research produced? Extent and durability of Communist indoctrination achieved?
It’s worth pondering that the source of Mr Andreeson’s “seed capital” coming out of the U of I was specific code that he — in cooperation with other students and with faculty — wrote to create Mosaic, which later he (working with others) extended to create Netscape. Which was then sold for a bunch of moolah to… America Online. So Mr Andreeson himself got substantial benefit from his undergraduate eduction (however short/distorted his memory may be).
I don’t think Andreessen is stupid. Just evil. Job security for the peons eats into billionaires’ profits, and their sense of superiority. And a healthy educational system which turns out critical thinkers is always a threat to their hegemony.
He got what he needed from the system to get what he wants. Everyone else can just fuck off and die (literally if need be).
Silicon Valley techbros would have literally nothing without the innovative research of our universities. People like Andreesen and Musk are the parasites.
Remember, partly because the browser war between Netscape and Internet Exploder, when Bill Gates was considered the most evil techbro around? He has had many successors since, including Andreessen ironically.
Also evolution via selection is very wasteful and leaves so many competitors in its wake. Not something to choose as a role model.
Assuming the benefit of getting a college degree from University of Minnesota hasn’t changed dramatically over the past 20 years, the cost to benefit ratio of said degree has decreased by about 10x or so (taking tuition cost from Google and adjusting for inflation). It’s probably much worse at Ivies.
Ugh, increased not decreased.
Hemidactylus @6: And in the meantime, Gates used his foundation to buy back pubic opinion on himself in order to convince people he isn’t actually evil.
Maybe we should beat people based on their wealth. Millionaires get a wrap on the knuckles. Billionaires, we break out the cat of nine tails.
And every year you execute the richest person in the world?
I will agree that there are big problems with the current university system, though I’m sure I would disagree about what those problems are. Even given that the “there is no way to replace them without letting them fail” doesn’t follow. You can build one or more schools of your new system and see how it work. If it is actually better it would grow and more would be created. Old universities would either have to adapt or they would eventually have no students.
This andreessen imbecile wrote: What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? 1t fails and another company takes its place.
I reply: What a crock of excrement! Businesses often experience failure. And, a good business will examine what went wrong and correct that in the next effort. ONLY AN IMBECILE WOULD SUGGEST THAT BUSINESSES SHOULD BE SCRAPPED AT EVERY FAILURE. THE GOVERNMENT OF THIS COUNTRY, UNDER THE MUMP CULT, IS NOW A FAILURE. MAYBE WE SHOULD DESTROY THE MUMP CULT AND HAVE SOMETHING ELSE (BETTER) TAKE ITS PLACE! ISN’T HE SOME SORT OF BILLIONAIRE BUSINESSMAN? MAYBE HE SHOULD BE DESTROYED AND SOMETHING BETTER COULD TAKE HIS PLACE! IN INDUSTRY A FEW DECADES AGO THERE WAS A SYSTEM THAT WORKED AND SHOULD BE USED BY HIGHER EDUCATION: IT WAS CALLED CONTINUOUS PROCESS IMPROVEMENT.
end of angry shouting.
Andreesen’s code sucked. I found 5 easy exploits in an afternoon of review, and that was without looking for fancy stuff. Netscape was proof that being good is irrelevant in tech – market size and position is everything. Then you survive or perish based on the stock market and after that shakes out you can write some real software or … quit and become a venture capitalist and spend the rest of your life sticking your finger up people’s butts and commenting on the flavor.
shermanj@#13:
(explodes into flaming fragments over this:)
What happens in the business world when a company does a bad job? 1t fails and another company takes its place.
Yeah, well, that’s what happened to two of Andreesen’s companies, except he got really rich in the process. Yech. I share your rage on that topic.
Boeing has failed and been replaced? Exxon has failed and been replaced? The car companies, which could not compete with the Koreans and Japanese have failed and been replaced? Ugh. Andreesen is a perfect example of the tech bro who gets extremely rich then emerges, like a butterfly of wisdom, prepared to pontificate about anything they know nothing about.
<sarcasm> Gee, Andreeson, how many of those “failed” companies have you participated in buying since you turned yourself into a v/u/l/t/u/r/e/ “venture capitalist”? Oh, wait, at least three of them went through the process called “reorganization” provided by Title 11 U.S.C. ch. 11 and got a fresh start, not a failure. </sarcasm>
Why do the rest of us have to suffer while these malignant narcissists try to get revenge for the humiliation they experienced as children for their inadequacies?
DrVanNostrand @ # 5: Silicon Valley techbros would have literally nothing without the innovative research of our universities.
The whole “tech” sector would have literally nothing without the decades-long investment of taxpayer megabucks into electronics by the government during/after WWII. Yet they persist in strutting around proclaiming their own genius and independence.
Was Xerox PARC a university or governmental? Much innovation came out of that. And Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was affiliated with a private university. Anyway GUIs leapt from PARC to Apple and Microsoft. Other stuff like ethernet and mice came from Xerox.
The web was crafted at CERN which is intergovernmental but on a NeXTcube made by a private company run by Jobs and Perot. The OS was Mach (private Carnegie Mellon) and BSD (public university developed but derivative of AT&T Unix from private Bell Labs).
The web is often confused with the internet, which got its start with DARPA. So a government started backbone.
Hemidactylus, Xerox PARC was neither a university nor a governmental entity; it was a research center established by Xerox Corporation in 1970.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)#History)
—
In passing, I see in the news that “Donald Trump’s presidential administration has exempted smartphones and computers from the 125% levies imposed on imports from China as well as other reciprocal tariffs, which experts had cautioned might cause electronic consumer prices to dramatically spike in the US.”
(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/12/trump-administration-smartphones-computers-china-tariffs)
—
I myself had to purchase a smartphone in 2020, life was becoming too difficult without one.
BTW, I can’t ever imagine having to try to read a book on that tiny screen.
@4 Rob: This is the guy who wrote the techno-optimist manifesto, in which he proposes that we should use a thousand times as much energy and will find ways to do it without global warming, which means he doesn’t know what conservation of energy is. He also says that “societies like sharks grow or die”. He’s stupid as well as evil.
monad@21– Humans currently generate around 20 terawatt of power. Even if we were to generate 20 petawatt of power, it would still be less than a thousandth of the solar energy incoming. The effect on global warming from heat generated by energy production is trivial, even at 1000x current values.
The problem with Andreesen’s projection isn’t conservation of energy. It’s everything else about it (environmental, political, entrenching privilege, encouraging damaging infrastructure development now based on unachievable promises of future tech to make it harmless, etc., etc.).
@ Morales
Heh. Purchased my first ever mobile phone (cell phone in American) in 2017 – a “smartphone” of course. Congratulations on being even more of a dinosaur.
Imagine. It’s easy if you try. ;-)
In landscape the screen width is similar to a paperback.
But no one is insisting the phone in your pocket is your only device. Tablets, laptops – still a thing, Captain.
@22 chrislawson: Yeah, currently the heat we generate isn’t the problem in itself. But my understanding is the earth absorbs about 120 petawatts from the sun, so if we were to generate 20 petawatts that would be about a 1/6 increase in the total. You have different figures?
I also agree that’s not the main problem with that manifesto, I just thought that’s a good example of where it’s obviously ignorant as well as evil. A lot of these people seem to genuinely think growth can be infinite and the laws of physics are just one more thing for the boffins to fix.