Read This

This will be an unusual post, consisting of little more than a name, and a link.

First the name: Josh Barro. He writes a blog called Very Serious which you can visit by clicking on that link. Mr. Barro describes himself as a journalist, and was indeed once a senior editor and columnist at Business Insider. Coincidentally, he is the son of economist Robert Barro, currently a prof at Harvard, who I saw give more than a couple of talks during my career. Small world.

Now, the link:, it is given below, and is to one of the posts on the junior Barro’s blog. I provide it here because, as all my readers know, bad behaviour by those who work in universities, both administrators and faculty, is a recurring topic on this blog. I first read the post linked below just this past week, and although it was posted in January of 2024, it lays out almost everything I think is and has been wrong with universities, and explains it all very well.  Although it is focused on US universities, the problems with Canadian universities are the same, except that the Canadian ones get considerably less public funding on average. Whether that makes them better or worse than their US counterparts, on average, is an open question, I think.

So, if you want a very well-written article on why you should not trust anything that comes out of universities today, read it. I would add that you should also read all the footnotes at the end – there’s lot of good info in those, too.

https://www.joshbarro.com/p/universities-are-not-on-the-level