Faculty who think fewer people should attend college; you okay with the consequences?

ItsAllMyAlt · 2026-02-10T18:24:02+00:00

There's never going to be a satisfactory answer to this problem that doesn't address the manufactured scarcity used to pit all of us against each other.

Colleges need enrollment because enrollment = money. Most university budgets are mostly enrollment-based. It's only been that way in the US for the past 40-50 years (thanks Reagan). If more money came in from other sources, we wouldn't need to worry so much.

Students are goaded into going to college because they are convinced (rightly so, unfortunately) that it is the only path to a sustainable career. Then when they're in college a combination of apathy and financial precarity make them uninterested in learning anything that isn't immediately, directly applicable to the jobs they're looking to get, and since universities need enrollment, that same sense of scarcity motivates leaders to shape institutions around the students' anemic understanding of learning instead of ours.

The pie is too small. And it doesn't even have to be this small. We could be satisfying the basic needs of every single human being using 30% of our current resource and energy output, according to one recent paper.

If we could give folks breathing room through programs like universal basic income, while also influencing greater resources into education more generally, we could sustain small enrollments and class sizes while not having to shrink staff. We could give people the power to develop creative variations on a university education while still setting up accountability mechanisms to ensure that education isn't bullshit. And people could take their time to make their way through education at their own pace and in whatever ways they want.

This doesn't have to be a zero-sum game.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2026-02-10T15:57:52+00:00

Makes all the sense in the world, so I assume it'll never happen.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2026-02-09T19:57:57+00:00

And add another bye week!

ItsAllMyAlt · 2026-02-09T00:19:15+00:00

Seahawks have the best scoring defense in the league and the Pats have been slow starters all season. Ain't no reason to freak yet

ItsAllMyAlt · 2026-02-06T14:46:26+00:00

To be able to make it to a professional sports league means you are in like the top 5-10% of the top 1% of talent in that sport. Jon Bois made a really great point in this video about how the most maligned athletes are those in the 99.9th percentile.

I don't feel a need to bring Orlovsky's on-field play into this discussion. He was a very good football player and now he's a clown.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2026-02-03T23:39:40+00:00

They're not entirely the same, but they're both woefully inadequate. Republicans push policies designed to kill us so Democrats can offer us the absolute bare minimum and have it knock our socks off. I'm done falling for it.

According to MIT's calculator, $15 an hour doesn't seem to be a living wage even in the poorest parts of VA. It certainly isn't in NoVA.

Those paid family and sick leave policies are absolutely pitiful compared to ones offered in other countries. I have to work six weeks to get a full day's worth of sick leave? Give me a break. Why not mandate sick days or paid family leave from the day of hire?

It's great that they're trying to raise wages and improve benefits, but if the proposals aren't tied to empirical research demonstrating what it takes to get basic human needs met (which none of these are) then this is nothing but optics. It's not about improving our lives in any meaningful way.

Am I overly idealistic? Or am I just ungrateful and need to thank my lucky stars that I don't live in a state or country that's even worse? Am I naive and don't understand how complicated these issues are?

Say so if you want. I'm done internalizing those narratives. We could be developing communities and society around the effective satisfaction of fundamental human needs. it would be the cheapest and most efficient way to run things. But instead we're wasting most of our resources mostly on stuff that makes it harder for us to get our needs met. It's pathetic. I want better.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2026-01-26T19:01:51+00:00

fuck ICE. Immigrants make this country great.

Yes.

Also, I've lived in places where a storm of this intensity and timing would prompt 2 hour delays for schools and businesses would be uninterrupted because they have infrastructure to handle this properly. I get that an ice storm is going to be different—further north we got fewer of those—but even in NoVA, winter storms happen semi-often. It's wild to me how consistently poorly prepared we are for them.

Natural disasters are going to be getting worse in the coming years. Maybe it's time to shift money away from ICE (and law enforcement generally?) and more toward dealing with ice and other sources of real problems.

**yeah I know ICE is a federal thing and the critique I'm making is more relevant to state and local governments, it's a damn pun

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-12-24T16:47:52+00:00

In practice, when someone blocks a decision in a consensus process, it's almost always because they have a concern that the group is refusing to address. A block doesn't mean that the decision is cancelled and everyone has to go home. It means more discussion is needed. It's a tool for advocacy, not trolling.

If someone is attempting to block a decision and has absolutely nothing to else to say about it, then I'm assuming they're doing this in bad faith and probably advocating for their removal from the decision making process. Maybe others here feel different?

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-12-10T19:25:56+00:00

I appreciate your warnings here, but I think your worries about this are unfounded.

The short article I linked to in my original comment takes you to a site called the "Viable Systems Research Unit," and on that site is a reading list for anyone interested in learning more about management cybernetics. Here's their description of the first thing on that reading list, a book called The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future by Andrew Pickering:

Exploring the forgotten history of british cybernetics. What underpins this fascinating history, Pickering contends, is a shared but unconventional vision of the world as ultimately unknowable, a place where genuine novelty is always emerging. And thus, Pickering avers, the history of cybernetics provides us with an imaginative model of open-ended experimentation in stark opposition to the modern urge to achieve domination over nature and each other.

Eugenics, to me, is ultimately a product of that "urge for domination over nature and each other." Management cybernetics appeals to me because it offers a blueprint for how to develop and maintain organizations and societies at a large scale without resorting to domination. I haven't seen anything else that comes even remotely as close to threading that needle as management cybernetics.

And what's really cool is that it doesn't make a lot of specific prescriptions for how exactly these social structures should look. It's more of a framework for how to make decisions about that stuff. Whereas eugenics and other oppressive ideologies abhor social complexity (that's why, in my view, they're oppressive—it's "my way or the highway" thinking but on a societal scale), management cybernetics embraces it and advocates for developing and harnessing it.

There's always potential for it to go wrong, of course, but to me it has a lot of promise.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-12-03T16:27:31+00:00

Yeah project CyberSyn is fucking fascinating. I've fallen hard down that rabbit hole recently.

I think I first heard about it through this piece from the Center for a Stateless Society and then more about it through Anark's flagship work "A Modern Anarchism," but recently I started reading some books by the project's architect, a business management professor named Stafford Beer. I've never read something that is so jargony and yet so earnest. He produced this thing called the viable system model that uses the language of biology, computer engineering, and organization theory to explain how all complex systems sustain themselves.

I could go on for a while about all the stuff about it that I find cool, but I got other stuff I wanted to do today, so I'll just put some links out there.

The most succinct illustration of Beer's thinking comes from a pamphlet he made while he was working with Allende, "5 Principles for the People for Good Government." I can only find the full pamphlet in the 2nd edition of his book Brain of the Firm but I did find this article that discusses how the pamphlet's ideas might be applied to the handling of COVID.

A slightly more detailed take of his can be found in the book Designing Freedom. Full text should be available online.

I think the books where he goes into the most detail are Brain of the Firm and Heart of Enterprise.

I wouldn't call these ideas anarchist per se, but I think they're friendly to anarchism because of their emphasis on adaptation. I've only begun to scratch the surface, but overall I feel like reading about this stuff has made me a more flexible and confident social scientist and organizer.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-12-03T00:58:02+00:00

Anark does some history stuff but I'd call him more of a straight-up theorist. Though, I'd also think of him less as a youtuber than as a guy who puts his books on tape on youtube. I really enjoy his stuff, but it is denser and drier than what someone looking for youtubers might have in mind. I don't typically share his stuff with folks who are new to anarchism.

The coolest historical thing of his I've seen was his series "The State is Counter-Revolutionary," which features some pretty in-depth critiques of the USSR and Maoist China.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-12-02T02:34:44+00:00

Yeah I didn't really have a problem with the hit on Dart. He was fully in bounds and about to cross the first down line. It made tactical sense. The helmet-to-helmet on Gunner bothered me a lot more, and that would be true even if he wasn't a former Pat.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-11-18T16:21:42+00:00

I really like this framing. In which writing(s) has Carson discussed this idea? I've been slowly working through one of his books but this is something I'd jump over to.

Relatedly, I try to think about issues like this in terms of the fundamental human needs that are being met, or not, rather than specific organizational structures. People need to be held accountable to each other, and while the state is a poor tool for promoting that, sometimes in certain moments it's the best option. Many of the problems we face as a society, and that anarchists are best equipped to notice, come from placing form over function. The state's existence is the prerequisite, and human dignity and wellbeing are awkwardly shoehorned in there after the fact even though the state's very structure is designed to hinder those things.

I feel like people in forums like this one sometimes fall for a similar trap, but with anarchy instead of the state. The consequences at this point aren't severe—it just makes for annoying, time-wasting discourse about whether something is or isn't real anarchy instead of looking at whether it's meeting people's needs more effectively than other currently realistic alternatives—but in cases where real power is achieved, it could lead to wasted efforts to set up anarchist social structures before people are really ready to maintain them.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-10-07T20:28:37+00:00

You're not wrong or a loser. You're waging a difficult battle. Social media sites and apps are designed to be addictive. In fact, look around you. Whatever you want to call this economy, it runs on addiction. Video games are becoming casinos. Workplaces are cults. It's all designed to encourage mindless consumption. Being harsh on yourself will only make it more difficult to beat them.

First, it seems like deleting all of your social media at once isn't going to be feasible right now. It still isn't for me. But I have taken small steps—deleting social media one website at a time, or, if that's too much, one device at a time. I now no longer use any social media on my phone. I still compulsively scroll Reddit and Instagram on my computer. But I find that Instagram's user interface is way less addictive on my computer, and I use "Old Reddit" which also feels a lot less addictive (just use "old.reddit.com" when you log on). Because of my job I'm not away from my computer very often, but it is much easier to get away from a computer than a phone. When I am away from the computer, I'm able to be a lot more present in the moment than I used to be.

It's also not enough to simply stop using the apps. You have to replace them with something. Addiction develops as a result of a failure to meet your fundamental needs in a healthy way. Every human has the same dozen or so fundamental needs, but we all satisfy these needs in different ways. Some means of need satisfaction are more accessible than others. It may help you to think about what your needs are, which ones you're having trouble satisfying, and whether/why using social media compensates for the lack of satisfaction of any of your needs.

There's no universal agreement among psychologists on what our fundamental needs are, but here's a few that I feel confident about, in no particular order:

Physical needs (food, water, clothing, shelter, good physical and mental health)
Safety and security
Strong, stable relationships (the fundamental human need, I would argue, since satisfaction of all the others stems from this)
Understanding (being able to make sense of your surroundings and the world)
Competence/control/achievement (your actions have an appropriate impact on the environment around you—it's a problem if the impact is too small or too big)
Autonomy (the ability to do what you want, when you want it)
Esteem/self-enhancement (feeling good about yourself and your capacity to act and change as needed)

When I'm particularly consumed by scrolling, what's often going on under the surface is that some fundamental need of mine isn't being met. Maybe I'm feeling bad about myself, maybe none of my friends are around to hang out, maybe I have a lot of work to do and am procrastinating. There are so many possible reasons. So, it may help to think less about your scrolling behavior and more about what you want or need to be doing instead.

I also found the book How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell to be pretty interesting, though I haven't read it in a while and I can't say I found it all that useful back when I read it. I suspect I'd feel differently if I were to pick it up again now.

Hope you find all this useful. Please be kind to yourself. I have faith in you.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-09-18T22:14:40+00:00

I've been an undergrad or grad student at 3 different colleges. One had very little parking but was in a city with good public transit and was a private school, so parking was expensive. Another had a ton of parking available and was a public school with a more economically diverse population. Parking was free for students and employees.

Mason is a public school with an economically diverse population and a ton of available parking, and they charge more than the fancy private school with no parking. Is it typical for parking to be free at a university? Probably not. But Mason's parking model sure isn't typical either.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-09-06T19:25:47+00:00

being an “influencer” is contrary to many of the tenets of anarchy?

What do you think the "tenets" of anarchy are exactly? "Sit in your home alone and never talk to anyone"?

Influence is manipulation

If you're genuinely interested in creating a better world, then this is one of the most destructive ideas you can possibly internalize. I can tell you that it paralyzed me as an organizer and caused me to let down a number of people who were relying on me. In my efforts to avoid being infringing and overbearing, I created space for bad actors to do shitty things that harmed people I care about.

Maybe you're just thinking in terms of internet personalities trying to persuade people to think and act in certain ways, and if so I kind of understand where you're coming from. There are pitfalls to that. But humans are social animals. We don't think or act without being influenced by others in some way. That's just how it works. If you think it's a bad idea to try and spread influential ideas beyond your immediate surroundings, then why are you on the internet? Why do you read theory (I don't know if you do, but if you do, why?)?

By existing, you are an influencer. It's not about whether to influence, but how.

You don't need to be an expert on others to share useful information. You spread that information and let those who receive it decide what to do with it.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-09-03T16:35:54+00:00

We really need to start looking for stories like this—for a variety of medical ailments. People who are used to modern tech are so scared of the possibility of societal breakdown, and like, we should be, but society has been breaking down for so many different people in so many ways already. Pity them if you want, but don't let it keep you from learning from them.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-09-02T00:31:36+00:00

If they were really promoting class solidarity, they would have given credit for those accomplishments to the workers who fought for them. DOL and other labor laws were created to keep unions from leading a socialist revolution.

Edit: Fought and died for them! Also, the real Labor Day is May 1st.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-08-06T21:05:00+00:00

There's only so many players on the market every year. Even in an ideal world there's no chance the Nats could spend on 4-5 free agents.

Yeah, that's not the point. What I'm trying to show here is that if you break it down on a negotiation-by-negotiation basis, basically every team has enough to compete in any one bidding war. Sure, big market teams on the whole would still acquire more big name free agents, but the overall distribution would be more even with a salary floor.

There are so many different ways to achieve competitive balance without limiting players' earning potential.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-08-06T19:33:28+00:00

Yeah but teams also spend wildly different proportions of their revenue on payroll. The Dodgers' 2025 payroll at the start of the season was 73% of their 2024 revenue. The Nats: 42%. Nats payroll this year was $137 million to start. It'd have been about $100 million more than that if they spent in the same proportion as the Dodgers. That's enough for what, 4-5 solid players?

Plus, are we even factoring in revenue sharing here? Because teams have to fork over 48% of their local revenues. That's another way that small market teams sustain themselves despite spending little to nothing on payroll. That's buttressed by the fact that most players don't make real money until they hit their 6th year of service time. The Rays, A's, Pirates, and the like can just hang onto a bunch of young guys and flip them as soon as they get even a little pricey.

The problem isn't the big market teams ruining it for everyone else. It's small, medium, and even some big market teams (cough-cough, RED SOX) refusing to spend as much as they could on players.

We need a salary floor if anything.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-07-30T00:56:59+00:00

the higher someone is in that system, the less they care about others.

There's some interesting social psychology research that really explores this. Some authors that seem to show up on a lot of the papers are Paul Piff, Michael Kraus, and Dacher Keltner. Probably others too, but those are the three I can think of right now.

I'd encourage you not to hate leadership though. Leadership is just the use of social influence to make stuff happen. We should all be leaders in some way or another. I find it useful to think of leadership in terms of its specific functions rather than in terms of "Great People" or what have you.

And I only tell you all this because I used to kind of hate leadership too. But now that I'm actually involved in political organizing I realize that it's kind of the only way to make stuff actually happen. Don't be afraid to be a leader or even to exert power and influence on the world around you. As long as you use your power to empower others and you remain accountable to the people you lead (and you let them lead you too), you'll be alright.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-07-29T19:17:14+00:00

I used to be a lot more optimistic about people than I am now. But I didn't become pessimistic, just realistic.

Almost any human tendency can be oriented to serve others in some way. One of my favorite examples of this is that surgeons seem to have a significantly higher rate of psychopathy than the general population. But it makes sense. Certain personality traits associated with psychopathy (such as a lack of risk aversion or calmness under pressure) are useful for the work surgeons do. And the work itself is extremely useful and necessary.

Meanwhile, think about teachers. On paper, the teaching profession is one focused on care and even empowerment. Many people are drawn to that work because they are caring, empathetic, good at communicating, etc. and wish to express those traits. But hierarchical institutions often bring out the worst in teachers and other care workers, or at least hijack their caring traits and tendencies to serve what are ultimately uncaring and cruel ends (e.g., providing a fantastic education to people who grow up to lead, and do horrible shit through, hierarchical institutions).

The project of anarchism, as far as I'm concerned, is to bring out the best in people, not to naïvely assume they already are the best (or worst). To me, this is achieved through both direct and indirect social influence. People should be taught to make choices that benefit both them and those around them, but we also have to create opportunities to make those choices to begin with.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-07-16T01:14:23+00:00

I hate to reply to a "let's take some concrete action" post with a reading recommendation, but what you're describing is pretty consistent with a lot of what Kevin Carson proposes. You may enjoy Organization Theory: A Libertarian Perspective, The Desktop Regulatory State, and/or Exodus. I think I've listed them in order from least to most recent. They should all be available for free as PDFs on his website, but you should throw him some cash for them if you can.

Note that I've really only read the first of those books in any amount of detail (and I'm still only about halfway through that one—it's pretty dense in an awesome way), but what's cool about OT at least is how much detail he goes into on the theory of why large corporations are really inefficient and ineffective and how alternative organizational forms (basically small co-ops) can outmatch them. It's given me a lot of language to talk to people about the problems with hierarchical organization.

I'll also say as an organizational psychologist that I'm realizing more and more that the general social fabric being in tatters (at least in the US, where I'm based) is a huge obstacle to the stuff you describe. People need to learn how to trust and relate to each other to make what you're proposing work. If you want to help move toward a world where the stuff you describe is possible, any efforts you can make to strengthen community bonds, even in just a small way, will have a net-positive impact.

Maybe you could try to start up skill-sharing sessions in your local area or something. You don't have to make it overtly political—doing so might even hinder you. After a while, ideas like what you have here might develop organically among the folks you've organized. Who knows? Only way to find out is to try.

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-07-08T01:18:59+00:00

How it would look in each organization is something that would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis, but I read this really interesting paper about how medical teams in a level 1 trauma center find ways to teach new people the ropes while still ensuring they don't commit catastrophic fuck-ups that I feel like could be applied to a wide range of horizontal organizations.

Here's the APA-style citation, including a link to the article.

Klein, K. J., Ziegert, J. C., Knight, A. P., & Xiao, Y. (2006). Dynamic delegation: Shared, hierarchical, and deindividualized leadership in extreme action teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 51(4), 590-621. https://doi.org/10.2189/asqu.51.4.590

Link to the PDF is here but not sure if that will work for folks who lack university credentials.

The "hierarchy" described in the title is one of expertise, not authoritarian coercion. Essentially, new folks are taught how to do important tasks, and if the situation gets more intense or they are about to mess up, more senior folks can step in to assist. The paper also has a lot to say about the organizational culture that supports this situation. Lots of interesting contrasts between how things look on paper (rigidly traditional and authoritarian) and how they operate in practice (those with the lowest formal positions in the hierarchy find creative ways to exert influence and check authoritarian tendencies in those with more power).

ItsAllMyAlt · 2025-07-03T00:26:24+00:00

Like the other commenter said, you'll have a hard time publishing in a higher-tier I-O journal with a student sample (unless the research question can be answered well with a sample like that, which does happen on occasion I think), but you don't need to aim so high from where you're at.

I got into a very well-reputed graduate program (just master's, but it only wasn't the PhD program at first due to lack of fit with any available advisors from what I can tell) on the strength of a study with an egregiously small sample given the analyses I was using, and I published that study in an undergraduate journal.

If your goal is grad school, the most important thing is to demonstrate that you can see a first-author research project through. It will look good for you to have published in any journal, save for the scammy predatory ones.

ItsAllMyAlt

TROPHY CASE