Trump to Sign Order Shuttering Education Department
President Trump plans to sign the order on Thursday, according to two White House officials. The department cannot be closed without the approval of Congress.
in a recent interview that the entire system of American higher education should be shuttered and abandoned.
There is, Andreessen argued in a Jan. 28 exchange with Lex Fridman, a podcaster and research scientist at M.I.T.:
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? It 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.
在最近的一次訪談中，他表示整個美國高等教育體系應該被關閉和廢棄。
安德森在 1 月 28 日與麻省理工學院播客兼研究科學家 Lex Fridman 的交流中指出：
如果不進行替換，就沒有辦法修復美國的高等教育，同樣，如果不讓它們失敗，就沒有辦法替換它們。從某種意義上來說，這是有史以來最明顯的結論。在商業世界中，如果一家公司做得不好，會發生什麼事？這家公司失敗了，另一家公司取代。這就是你取得進步的方式。下面是進化的過程。
這些地方在製度層面和個人層面都已經脫離了發展，終身任職制度的普遍濫用就體現了這一點。我們只是停滯了。我們建立了一個僵化的體制，一個僵化的、集中的、腐敗的體制。
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Thiel’s solution: abandon democracy in favor of technology, including the exploration of cyberspace and outer space:
Unlike the world of politics, in the world of technology the choices of individuals may still be paramount. The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism.
他發表2009了一篇論文《自由主義者的教育》，在文中他宣稱「我不再相信自由和民主是相容的」。他補充說：
自1920年以來，福利受益者的大幅增加和選舉權的擴大（這兩個領域對自由主義者來說是出了名的艱難），使得「資本主義民主」的概念變成了一個矛盾的說法。
蒂爾的解決方案是：放棄民主，轉而支持技術，包括對網路空間和外太空的探索：
與政治世界不同，在科技世界中，個人的選擇仍然至關重要。我們世界的命運可能取決於一個人的努力，這個人建立或傳播自由的機制，使世界安全地適應資本主義。
自上任以來，川普總統及其任命的官員一直支持保守派科技精英的利益，他們在 2024 年向川普和他的共和黨同僚提供了數億美元支持。
Since taking office, President Trump and his appointees have supported the interests of conservative tech elites who in 2024 backed Trump and his fellow Republicans with hundreds of millions of dollars.
Henry Farrell, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, described the kind of thinking that prevails among the tech elite, in an interview with Paul Waldman:
Is this idea of the world as a place where you have striving individuals, perhaps small teams, who really are the heroes of the story? These are people with — well, they’re men, not entirely but nearly all men, with grand ambitions and grand flaws who set out to remake the world according to their values.
This gives a certain kind of mentality, a certain kind of sense to Silicon Valley people, that they are an elite following in the footsteps of other elites, like Robert Moses, the guy who made modern New York City what it is, like Teddy Roosevelt. And so you get these biographies rubbing shoulders with a biography of Elon Musk, effectively suggesting that Elon Musk is just the latest of a series of world-bestriding colossuses, these fantastically great men who really have grand ambitions, who reshape the world in their ambitions.
約翰霍普金斯大學政治學家亨利法雷爾在接受保羅沃爾德曼採訪時描述了科技精英中普遍存在的這種思維方式：
這個世界上是不是充滿了奮鬥的個人，或許還有小團隊，而他們才是故事中的真正英雄？這些人——好吧，他們都是男性，雖然不完全是男性，但幾乎都是男性，他們有著遠大的抱負，也有著巨大的缺點，他們打算根據自己的價值觀重塑世界。
這給了矽谷人一種特殊的心態、一種感覺，即他們是追隨其他精英腳步的精英，例如羅伯特·摩西 (Robert Moses)，他是將現代紐約市打造成現在這個樣子的人，還有特迪·羅斯福 (Teddy Roosevelt)。因此，你會看到這些傳記與伊隆馬斯克的傳記相提並論，這實際上表明伊隆馬斯克只是一系列橫跨世界的巨人中的最新一位，這些偉人確實有著遠大的抱負，他們用自己的抱負重塑世界。
法雷爾認為，認識到科技公司執行長的這種想法對於理解這個問題至關重要。
Recognition of this kind of thinking among tech C.E.O.s, Farrell argued, is essential to understanding this question.
