The Priestly Cycle of Universities: Why Do They Rise, Wokify, Fall and Rise Again?


Ed Dutton has been studying the histories of universities and notes how they are constantly changing. He sees them undergoing a life-cycle and identifies places like Stanford and Oxford as in an intellectually declining state

Along the way he notes the iron law that prestige not fixed. A university will be prestigious only as long as its teachers and students are high quality. Once a university's intellectual standards decline, so that university's prestige will decline.

One you start diluting student quality by letting in a "representstive" group of students rather than high merit students, you have set in train the destruction of that university's prestige. So the writing is on the wall for places like Stanford and Oxford. Degrees from there are still prestigious but will gradually become less so

I like Ed's claim that a high-achieving academic has to have both a top IQ and be socially non-conforming. That is a pretty good description of a high-functioning autistic and I note Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen's claim that the markers of high IQ and autism are essentially the same. So there is an academic type, as Ed says.

Ed likes to do a funny bit at the beginning of his videos but what follows is a serious exposition of his theory about the evolutionary stages a university undergoes



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