I think I’ve been thinking about this same distinction in a slightly different way. If a bunch of people start doing some weird sort of thing, and if they mainly seek each other’s approval, then they’ll start identifying deep and real features that improve their process. It doesn’t matter if these people are doing pottery or history or poetry or physics, by working mainly for the approval of an audience that they know is also engaged in the same (or a related) project, they’ll make some progress in it. But if they primarily look for the immediate approval of masses of people who haven’t done anything like this before, they’ll produce trash, with some superficial glitz, but without developing real style or content.
If you’re too caught up in only peer review within the community, then the community can spiral out in extreme ways and produce things that no one cares about. But if you’ve got many different communities of this sort, with slight overlaps, each working for their own peers, then a community that spirals out too far gets cut off or pulled back.
When I was at the new faculty event with the chancellor two years ago, he talked about a vision of the university as a place where all kinds of excellence are pursued - and suddenly it makes sense that there would be sports teams and an orchestra as well as historians and physicists.
Yeah, maybe that's a good, deeper explanation of why the university is well-equipped to not produce trash -- because it provides the kind of community you're talking about. Relatedly, I wonder whether the desire to cater to online activists has steered at least some philosophers towards doing trashier work on trashier topics in the last decade or so...
Excellent piece. Great—even merely good—universities offer genuine community, and that is something distinct from mass lecture and warning labels on everything.
Do you think of trashworld as having a certain socially legible ideological valence, or as cutting across the lines usually drawn in the culture wars? The claim that the trashworld ideal of heterosexual partnerships is the trad one suggests that you identify the trashworld with the reactionary manosphere thing, but fwiw I think the same sort of dynamics and mindset underly online "content" culture across official left/right ideological lines. That piece everyone on this site was hating on the other day about the "hot mom facing discrimination for the conjunction of being hot and being a mom" strikes me as a left-coded output of trashworld, whereas trad influencers and hustle podcasters and such provide its right-wing complement. But it's all of a piece. (And I'd say the child-free millennial yuppies who get their politics from pastel-pallet Instagram infographics demand just as little from each other as the man seeking tradwife does from his partner. The "get my bag culture" of Gen Z, as Jasmine Sun put it memorably in a recent post (https://substack.com/@jasmine/note/c-138271834), is similarly cross-ideological.)
PS, I did my MA at U of T a couple years ago--alas, we didn't cross paths in my year in the department--and I enjoyed picturing the St. George campus as I read your "pitch" for the T(N)ASU.
Great question. I think that there is stupid and harmful content emanating from the left as well as from the right, and this includes intimate-relationship-related content. My general read is that the left-leaning people I'm thinking of tend to at least pay lip service to higher, pro-social values, while the right-leaning people I'm thinking of are more straightforwardly venal and extractive. This makes the former more insufferable, maybe, and the latter more, I don't know, dispiriting? I will say that a university that is constituted along my preferred lines would probably be less likely to drive people over to trashworld. (For example, I look at the "heterofatalism" thing in the NYT, and apparently that term originated from some scholar at Penn, and I'm like: "How are we in the same profession?"
That does sound right, hence the tendency to "virtue-signalling" on the popular left and (more recently) "vice-signalling" on the popular right. (Though to what extent playing lip service to higher values translates into sincere practice or promotion of such values is another question.) IMO/E, one point where the left- and right-wing emanations of trash culture don't diverge, though, is in their stance towards projects and bodies of knowledge without obvious wide utility: right-wing aversion to niche study takes the form of derision of "impractical" majors, etc.; the left-coded version takes the form of suspicion of "great books", suspicion of people who study other cultures out of concern for "cultural appropriation", suspicion of science, and suspicion in general of learning without a transparent (and correct) political valence.
This seems right. And in a way, both sides can be read as trying desperately to present themselves as living virtuously; maybe this is because it's hard for influencer types to admit their own frailty. Not sure. The lefties strain to re-interpret their own bad behaviour as in accordance with ordinary virtue, the righties level down virtue until their bad behaviour meets its requirements!
>then, we should keep in mind that institutions typically evolve as they do because they work, and we subject them to the scythe of bean-counting rationality at our peril.
This is true, but would benefit from a better understanding of the historical forces that guided the university's evolution in the past.
Your Trash World Man seems like a close cousin to the Philistine or the "trousered ape" of similar discourses in the 19th/mid-20th centuries. And those figures of abuse were clearly part of the effort to establish, then defend, an ethos of professionalism to legitimate the passing of state power centers away from the aristocracy and into the hands of the bureaucratic upper middle classes.
The idea was that you could trust these sons of mere merchants to hold offices of power because they had high ideals of the new "professionalism," including scrupulous rule-following, intelligence, order, love of knowledge, etc., and that these ideals were inculcated through the professional certifying processes of formal education. It was especially important to distinguish this professional ethos from the grubby shop-values of the commercial classes from which most of the bureaucratic folks originally emerged, so various aspects of university culture emerged to demonstrate that profit was not a terminal goal. And yes, the university did recognizably serve as a temple to those values through much of the past two hundred years.
Mind, I love those values myself. But I suspect that society more broadly agreed to fund their public worship because they were associated with a rising power group. Erode the power and wealth of the professional classes through moral deskilling (https://crookedtimber.org/2025/07/31/moral-deskilling-or-why-you-spend-more-time-on-admin-than-doing-your-job/) and elite consolidation, and their faith starts to look less compelling. Or conversely, if you're part of an emerging tech-commercial-NGO hegemony eager to dismantle the power of the solo professional, then it makes strategic sense to undercut those values whenever possible and to support the masses' native anti-intellectualism to help you do so.
Either way, while I agree that the Newman-style university stood as a beautiful temple to various gracious, humane ideals, I doubt that its fate will stand or fall on the actual worthiness of those ideals. People ape the trappings of power, that's all.
This is a great comment; I appreciate the historical context, and the link to the post about moral deskilling and rising managerialism. And yeah, I didn't really give any thought in my post to how people who feel as I do (and you do) about these values might recruit power in their service. I suppose my imagined audience, other than my philosophy homies, is administrators at my university. I think my students are on the whole very lonely and disconnected from one another and the university, such that it is starting to resemble an "IRL MOOC". The further it goes in this direction, the harder it is to outcompete MOOCs for students, and the less equipped it will be to offer a whole lifeworld that serves as an alternative to what I'm calling "trashworld".
The real difference is the real desire for self improvement. The girl who learned Python has it. The gentleman scholar, not so much. If you have that desire for learning , you probably won’t be a trashville resident 😎
Maybe, although I can totally imagine people who, to their great credit, learn a lot from Coursera, but then find themselves shaped by trashworld values, b/c Coursera isn't trying to provide a "whole life-world" or whatever. That's why I think there's still a role for the brick-and-mortar university, even for people with the brains and grit to be autodidacts.
My field is religious studies and theology, and I totally agree with you. I also think that at least 80% of American academics would be soooooo uncomfortable thinking about the university this way.
Too many for a comments section, probably. But one thought is that for a significant number of American academics, the modern university has evolved to be something better and more scientific than what it was in its more religious past. The university is a crucial actor in that story of modernity. But I don’t think most of them are thinking of religion as a shape for community, or a method for producing or sustaining awe (which is more along the lines of what I hear you suggesting here). They would probably think of religion as something more historically determined.
This all tracks, although it seems so strange to NOT think of religion as giving shape to a community or as producing awe! I think that most academics grew up upper-middle-class, and may for that reason have some anxieties about certain aspects of the universities other than the narrowly academic ones. I didn't, and I don't!
I think I’ve been thinking about this same distinction in a slightly different way. If a bunch of people start doing some weird sort of thing, and if they mainly seek each other’s approval, then they’ll start identifying deep and real features that improve their process. It doesn’t matter if these people are doing pottery or history or poetry or physics, by working mainly for the approval of an audience that they know is also engaged in the same (or a related) project, they’ll make some progress in it. But if they primarily look for the immediate approval of masses of people who haven’t done anything like this before, they’ll produce trash, with some superficial glitz, but without developing real style or content.
If you’re too caught up in only peer review within the community, then the community can spiral out in extreme ways and produce things that no one cares about. But if you’ve got many different communities of this sort, with slight overlaps, each working for their own peers, then a community that spirals out too far gets cut off or pulled back.
When I was at the new faculty event with the chancellor two years ago, he talked about a vision of the university as a place where all kinds of excellence are pursued - and suddenly it makes sense that there would be sports teams and an orchestra as well as historians and physicists.
Yeah, maybe that's a good, deeper explanation of why the university is well-equipped to not produce trash -- because it provides the kind of community you're talking about. Relatedly, I wonder whether the desire to cater to online activists has steered at least some philosophers towards doing trashier work on trashier topics in the last decade or so...
Excellent piece. Great—even merely good—universities offer genuine community, and that is something distinct from mass lecture and warning labels on everything.
Yeah, totally agree. But it's unfortunate how often community, etc. are treated as dispensable!
Do you think of trashworld as having a certain socially legible ideological valence, or as cutting across the lines usually drawn in the culture wars? The claim that the trashworld ideal of heterosexual partnerships is the trad one suggests that you identify the trashworld with the reactionary manosphere thing, but fwiw I think the same sort of dynamics and mindset underly online "content" culture across official left/right ideological lines. That piece everyone on this site was hating on the other day about the "hot mom facing discrimination for the conjunction of being hot and being a mom" strikes me as a left-coded output of trashworld, whereas trad influencers and hustle podcasters and such provide its right-wing complement. But it's all of a piece. (And I'd say the child-free millennial yuppies who get their politics from pastel-pallet Instagram infographics demand just as little from each other as the man seeking tradwife does from his partner. The "get my bag culture" of Gen Z, as Jasmine Sun put it memorably in a recent post (https://substack.com/@jasmine/note/c-138271834), is similarly cross-ideological.)
PS, I did my MA at U of T a couple years ago--alas, we didn't cross paths in my year in the department--and I enjoyed picturing the St. George campus as I read your "pitch" for the T(N)ASU.
Great question. I think that there is stupid and harmful content emanating from the left as well as from the right, and this includes intimate-relationship-related content. My general read is that the left-leaning people I'm thinking of tend to at least pay lip service to higher, pro-social values, while the right-leaning people I'm thinking of are more straightforwardly venal and extractive. This makes the former more insufferable, maybe, and the latter more, I don't know, dispiriting? I will say that a university that is constituted along my preferred lines would probably be less likely to drive people over to trashworld. (For example, I look at the "heterofatalism" thing in the NYT, and apparently that term originated from some scholar at Penn, and I'm like: "How are we in the same profession?"
That does sound right, hence the tendency to "virtue-signalling" on the popular left and (more recently) "vice-signalling" on the popular right. (Though to what extent playing lip service to higher values translates into sincere practice or promotion of such values is another question.) IMO/E, one point where the left- and right-wing emanations of trash culture don't diverge, though, is in their stance towards projects and bodies of knowledge without obvious wide utility: right-wing aversion to niche study takes the form of derision of "impractical" majors, etc.; the left-coded version takes the form of suspicion of "great books", suspicion of people who study other cultures out of concern for "cultural appropriation", suspicion of science, and suspicion in general of learning without a transparent (and correct) political valence.
This seems right. And in a way, both sides can be read as trying desperately to present themselves as living virtuously; maybe this is because it's hard for influencer types to admit their own frailty. Not sure. The lefties strain to re-interpret their own bad behaviour as in accordance with ordinary virtue, the righties level down virtue until their bad behaviour meets its requirements!
>then, we should keep in mind that institutions typically evolve as they do because they work, and we subject them to the scythe of bean-counting rationality at our peril.
This is true, but would benefit from a better understanding of the historical forces that guided the university's evolution in the past.
Your Trash World Man seems like a close cousin to the Philistine or the "trousered ape" of similar discourses in the 19th/mid-20th centuries. And those figures of abuse were clearly part of the effort to establish, then defend, an ethos of professionalism to legitimate the passing of state power centers away from the aristocracy and into the hands of the bureaucratic upper middle classes.
The idea was that you could trust these sons of mere merchants to hold offices of power because they had high ideals of the new "professionalism," including scrupulous rule-following, intelligence, order, love of knowledge, etc., and that these ideals were inculcated through the professional certifying processes of formal education. It was especially important to distinguish this professional ethos from the grubby shop-values of the commercial classes from which most of the bureaucratic folks originally emerged, so various aspects of university culture emerged to demonstrate that profit was not a terminal goal. And yes, the university did recognizably serve as a temple to those values through much of the past two hundred years.
Mind, I love those values myself. But I suspect that society more broadly agreed to fund their public worship because they were associated with a rising power group. Erode the power and wealth of the professional classes through moral deskilling (https://crookedtimber.org/2025/07/31/moral-deskilling-or-why-you-spend-more-time-on-admin-than-doing-your-job/) and elite consolidation, and their faith starts to look less compelling. Or conversely, if you're part of an emerging tech-commercial-NGO hegemony eager to dismantle the power of the solo professional, then it makes strategic sense to undercut those values whenever possible and to support the masses' native anti-intellectualism to help you do so.
Either way, while I agree that the Newman-style university stood as a beautiful temple to various gracious, humane ideals, I doubt that its fate will stand or fall on the actual worthiness of those ideals. People ape the trappings of power, that's all.
This is a great comment; I appreciate the historical context, and the link to the post about moral deskilling and rising managerialism. And yeah, I didn't really give any thought in my post to how people who feel as I do (and you do) about these values might recruit power in their service. I suppose my imagined audience, other than my philosophy homies, is administrators at my university. I think my students are on the whole very lonely and disconnected from one another and the university, such that it is starting to resemble an "IRL MOOC". The further it goes in this direction, the harder it is to outcompete MOOCs for students, and the less equipped it will be to offer a whole lifeworld that serves as an alternative to what I'm calling "trashworld".
TIL that 'trashworld' is actually a term of art. Great piece!
Thanks, Abe! Yes, it's a good, neutral, unbiased term of art. ;-)
The real difference is the real desire for self improvement. The girl who learned Python has it. The gentleman scholar, not so much. If you have that desire for learning , you probably won’t be a trashville resident 😎
Maybe, although I can totally imagine people who, to their great credit, learn a lot from Coursera, but then find themselves shaped by trashworld values, b/c Coursera isn't trying to provide a "whole life-world" or whatever. That's why I think there's still a role for the brick-and-mortar university, even for people with the brains and grit to be autodidacts.
My field is religious studies and theology, and I totally agree with you. I also think that at least 80% of American academics would be soooooo uncomfortable thinking about the university this way.
Yeah, any thoughts about why this is?
Too many for a comments section, probably. But one thought is that for a significant number of American academics, the modern university has evolved to be something better and more scientific than what it was in its more religious past. The university is a crucial actor in that story of modernity. But I don’t think most of them are thinking of religion as a shape for community, or a method for producing or sustaining awe (which is more along the lines of what I hear you suggesting here). They would probably think of religion as something more historically determined.
This all tracks, although it seems so strange to NOT think of religion as giving shape to a community or as producing awe! I think that most academics grew up upper-middle-class, and may for that reason have some anxieties about certain aspects of the universities other than the narrowly academic ones. I didn't, and I don't!