The premise is false

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.