The single thing that keeps turning legitimate, “I’ll hear you out” criticism of Donald Trump into garbage whining that makes me roll my eyes is the refusal to see obvious context.
You should read Eisenhower's farewell address. In literally the next point after his famous military industrial complex warning he gives exactly the same warning about the corruption of academia because of federal support.
Oddly, or not, the professoriate have ever since taught only one side of that whole.
I share that sentiment, but frequently once something is cut into stone, people stop reading it, en masse. They may scroll over the words, but ten to do so, without grokking them, so to speak.
How many people who have bowed to the religion of DEI have strolled through his memorial and forgotten that he strove to make society better by pushing people to strive to see each other on individual merits, regardless of race?
How can they not see that the enshrinement of race, regardless of which one, or ones, as a primary marker of advancement, would piss him off?
They read without comprehension, which used, and may still be, even if superficially, a basic tenet of childhood education. Reading comprehension, today, doesn’t seem to exist for vast swathes of the public.
Eisenhower’s speech should be taught in middle school, alongside the Gettysburg Address. However, we need reading comprehension brought back to the fore in education, for it to matter.
In addition to the erosion of basic educational skills ( blame points to the teacher's union administrators more than on classroom teachers on that), you also have the actual rewiring of the brain responding to cryptic 300 character limits on thought prevalent in social click bait media. Younger generations literally don't have the capacity to read and digest with accuracy any long format essay.
“Oddly, or not, the professoriate have ever since taught only one side of that whole.”
Sorry, that’s just not true.
I’ve little doubt academia have tilted left since then.
But it was nowhere remotely near so overwhelming.
Even by the early 80s, when it was all net left, there were still a significant minority who were not.
It is MUCH worse today than in the past.
Even 15 years ago cancel culture within academia was not widespread (though clearly it had started in pockets). The Gestapo was not yet out in full force
Andy G— I agree with you, from what I saw the 80s, 90s, and up to I'd say about as late as 2015, were very different. Lefty PC stuff was always a thing, but it really started getting extremely extreme in the couple of years before covid, and then, kablooey.
Indeed. In the final years of the 20th century there were at least people in the room during the drafting of job postings who would point out "Uhm... you can't say you are going to hire only women or minorities for this position. That's illegal" and people would listen. Anymore they can't even see that position from where they are standing.
I’m so grateful that I started my undergraduate degree in 1995, before the World Wide Web had even been adopted within the academy to any degree. I had old professors who did their undergrads in the 1950s. You could even smoke inside some buildings! What a different world that was. It was when I went back for grad school in 2007 that I saw how much had changed. And by the time I finished my PhD, it had gotten so much worse. Though I recently returned to university teaching (one class a semester on top of my non-academic 9-5 job), I don’t have much hope for the survival of the university given how politicized it’s become and how low the standards have fallen.
It seems like a lot of people took the Civil Right Act and in the name of what the Civil Right Acts was supposed to achieve, went and chucked it into the toilet— and flushed. DEI is outright racism, by the dictionary definition of the word, after all.
Of course, not arguing against your point, I just think Trump allowed it to accelerate, it would not be as bad as it is today if he had never run for president
Pat Robinson— I'd trace the roots further back in time— judging from what I witnessed in my part of the country, the woke shale (or PC shale, or whatever one wants to call the fungus of lefty tyrannies) was becoming very exaggerated even before Trump came along as a viable contender for the presidency. (I'll grant, other people in other regions and other professions may have experienced it differently.) But I would wholeheartedly agree with you that the woke reaction to Trump, it's been bug-shale insane.
Older progressives don’t mostly believe in actual woke - you know, oppressor-oppressed ideology, intersectionality, the whole nine yards. (Most do believe in PC on steroids. “Soft-woke” if you will).
Trump coming along mostly accelerated the ability of the woke to take over the totality of the left narrative and dialogue. With Trump in power, the center left to this day - and even during Biden - has been unwilling to “punch left” even a tiny bit.
Well they did it for maybe 8 seconds in the wake of October 7th, but quickly reversed course within days on that.
Maybe the woke wouldn’t have totally dominated had there never been a Trump presidency. But we will never know the counterfactual.
I agree it has gotten worse since the 80s, when I was in school. A Michigan State economics prof is responsible for turning me on to Milton Friedman, after all.
But I doubt that Eisenhower's warning about federal funding of university professors was ever a popular topic for the recipients of same to teach. And it has definitely not received the same attention as the military industrial complex warning does in those same classrooms.
When words get etched in stone, they become monuments for lefties to tear down. For communism to live, memories of better times or mistakes made must be destroyed.
Charlottesville, Georgia Guidestones, names of military bases…
The modern American university prof or admin has no idea that they’re immersed in an alternate universe. They’re like fish who don’t know that they live in water and that normal humans would perish if immersed in it for too long.
“The modern American university prof or admin has no idea that they’re immersed in an alternate universe.”
No, this is not correct.
You should act under the assumption that most people are neither that stupid nor that smart.
If this was as recently as 11 years ago (i.e. pre-Trump), then you might be right for *some* of them.
And I *will* grant that many, even most, of them don’t realize HOW leftist bubblish their world is.
But in addition to the ones who are hardcore leftist activist driving and delighting in where we are, most of them are in fact aware that academia is left-politicized.
The younger ones are happy with this and would be incensed if it were any other way. Social Justice rules, don’tcha know?
But essentially *all* of them know the reality of academia today, even if they don’t realize *precisely* how off their environment is.
And this Princeton head is simply being just like the MIT, Harvard and UPenn chiefs who testified to Congress in the wake of October 7th.
I don't know if that is entirely true. My direct contact with teaching in universities is 5 years out of date, admittedly, but I found a few things were very common:
1: Most professors had no idea how far left they were. They simply thought they were "more knowledgeable" and everyone else just didn't know enough.
2: The really crazy lefties didn't realize they were crazy lefties so much as believing themselves to be the only honest ones who really took things seriously.
3: Most professors, even at the relatively right wing GMU Econ department, were loathe to say that most research was false. Typically a given professor would say that sociology was mostly made up, and grievance studies, but anything approaching real science was almost all real. Bryan Caplan once told me he thought it was maybe 10% error, and under 10% fraud at most. David Levy, may his name never be forgotten, was much less sanguine as he yearly had his econometrics students seek out and replicate papers from their own data as a project, and very rarely did the papers replicate, but he was unusually skeptical. David Levy and Dan Klein were the only ones who I spoke with that estimated over 30% was trash, at least verbally. (I never asked Don Boudreaux it occurs to me... he might have agreed with Levy and Klein.)
Long story short, most professors believe the story of advancing human knowledge and pursuing truth, even if they simultaneously believe that any particular paper is fraud or incompetence on paper. Kind of the inverse of the deal where everyone thinks Congress is a bunch of corrupt grifters, but their congressman is just great.
I think in a way that is why they are so touchy and defensive about the whole thing. If everyone just keeps pretending they are all doing great noble work they can ignore the cognitive dissonance and just turn their nose up and make jokes about the crap departments that are taking over the university, and pretend the obvious fraud is just outliers. When people actually start looking and turning things up they have to face the fact that a huge portion of their industry, maybe even the majority, are fraudulent, and their own status is at risk.
Hammer, great to see you mention Bourdeax and Klein. I got into it with Bordeaux about a decade ago online over industrial policy and trade theory. I threw Ian Fletcher's theories to see what he would do. It was pretty funny. (The Internet is great -- a nobody from CA can have a public discussion with an award-winning economist.)
Also, I TAed for Dr. Klein years ago at UC Irvine when he was a young, idealistic, crusading libertarian. (He was the campus YAF advisor, which likely played a part in being denied tenure -- cancel culture was alive and well 30 years ago.) He mellowed a little since he married a Swede, but I still like reading his stuff. Haven't seen him in years though.
That's awesome! I still have a hard time imagining Klein even living in CA without getting into a fist fight every day :D He still is the crusader, running a hell of a lot of different programs and reading groups on campus. Small world though; Klein was my dissertation chair, and Boudreaux along with Levy were on my committee. I spent nearly as much time in Klein's groups discussing classical thinkers and new papers than I did in class any given week. I still work with Klein on stuff periodically since I left academia in 2020 (2 years and getting cancelled was enough for me) but I really need to make a trip back down to NoVA and visit campus. The only things I miss about the DC area are the GMU econ faculty, some friends and the restaurants. If you get into it and attend the talks and reading groups, GMU is about the closest you can get to the academic ideal of living the life of the mind.
He wouldn't like me now though... I'm more postliberal than libertarian. Dan never really "got" the idea that liberal-democracy requires a particular cultural milieu rooted not only in individual rights but also in virtue. And the Dan I knew especially rejected any transcendental source of those rights or of the definition of virtue.
Does he still use the Rink-o-nomics article with his Econ 101 classes? I still use his handout with my HS econ students.
He might have come around to your way of looking at things a bit; he's been very focused on virtue ethics and their ties to rights the last 5-10 years. Probably a no on the transcendental source, however.
Couldn't say what he teaches in Econ 101, or even if he has taught it in a very long time. He primarily teaches grad level Adam Smith courses to my knowledge, but then I didn't TA for him. I did like his Rink-o-nomics paper, but found that my second econ 110 course contained only two people familiar with skating rinks, so I kind of gave it up. I referenced the Beverly Hillbilly's in my first class, so it has been a learning curve of "what the hell do young people know?" for me :)
To be clear, that the average prof doesn’t think they are as far left as they are, I concur 100%.
My most important claim is that they know they that almost all of academia are leftists.
Sure they think they are “correct” in their leftiness - doesn’t almost any thinking person think they are correct, almost by definition? If you want to claim they are more confident than most that they are correct, sure I’ll agree with that too.
FWIW, my view of the GMU econ department from afar - so your closeup is far likely closer to the mark - is that re: leftist economics they would say as you said above, but that re: other social science fields most would be MUCH more harsh than you suggest, not merely grievance studies.
And Caplan’s views aligns with my view as well for economics (doesn’t mean we’re right, of course). Were your claims about *all* the rest of social science outside of grievance studies, or restricted to economics? E.g. social psychology, psychology?
“My most important claim is that they know they that almost all of academia are leftists.”
I disagree here, and might actually be able to find stats to back it up. Experience tells me that most professors think they are moderate centrists who lean left, when the reality is they are waaay the hell left. Mostly it is a reference point issue: they never interact with conservatives and think the very left bubble they live in is representative of everywhere.
I say I might have evidence because I think I recall where the reactions to Dan Klein’s studies of political bias in universities live, and long story short no one believed, or admitted, that there were 28::1 ratios of democrats to republicans in academia on the low side.
Re: correctness, there is a difference between “I think I am correct, but understand why people think differently because of other beliefs about the world that might be correct “ and “I think I am correct and everyone else would agree with me if they weren’t so ignorant.”
Re claims on fraud: I think most social science claims are taken too seriously by economists, and even if economics is better than all the rest (it is probably), economics is easily half fraud. There are basically zero filters to catch fraud in the process, and next to zero people even looking for it, so if we find 2-3% of published papers are fraudulent when we are not trying we should expect 40-60% to be fraudulent. It’s like cockroaches, if you see one too stupid to avoid humans there are 100 who aren’t living in your kitchen.
“I disagree here, and might actually be able to find stats to back it up. Experience tells me that most professors think they are moderate centrists”
I would indeed be *very* interested in seeing any data you have on profs thinking they are moderate centrists.
It would be semi-plausible to me if it were 15 years ago.
I would be quite shocked if it were in the last 5 years.
Even the last 8.
Because I’m sorry, as low an opinion of academia as I have, i don’t believe they are morons. They know who has been elected. They read the (leftist-biased) news. They know the NYT at least leans left.
Now my one apology is that i use the term “leftist” to refer to anyone left of center. I know that many, especially on the left, reserve it for the hardcore radical left. So this is not about whether professors see themselves as “leftists”, it’s whether they see academia as left of center.
So we are not arguing whether they see themselves as radical, or as far left as they actually are. If you wanna claim the average prof sees themselves as center-left, then we aren’t really disagreeing about *that* much.
And you are acknowledging that they see academia as left-of-center. Which was the point.
But moderate centrist? And more importantly, that their fellow professors are *not* left of center (the original question)? Sorry.
I will try and find the reaction essays tonight. Most were surprised to be told that there were massively more registered democrats than republicans.
Now, to your point, if we are saying "leftists" is "anyone registered democrat or that leans left of center" then ok, they kind of understand that, I agree. However most academics really do think they are pretty centrist, moderate Democrats, and not as over the horizon away from center as they actually are.
By way of an example, economists on campus are often considered very right wing. In reality, the vast majority of academic economists are Democrats who tend to think markets work better than other Democrats. Caplan references the survey stats on that in his book "Myth of the Rational Voter."
It isn't a matter of academics being morons, but rather their reference set for "normal" is waaaay skewed. Everyone they interact with during their working day is selected to a greater or lesser extent to match their belief set, and those at the low end of selection are explicitly there to learn to think more like the academics. Relative to their reference group a particular academic might believe they are a centrist, if only because they think this DEI thing might be a little over blown.
"And if the government starts using the clout it gets from the funding it provides to sciences and engineering to invade that academic freedom...."
The govt requires that all their grants and loans come with mandatory strings attached around racial classification—not a cent goes out without learning the race of every person involved and the racial balance of every group involved, with thumbs put on the scale for the "underrepresented". This was never protested or considered a political imposition.
Obama and Biden both submitted something called a Dear Colleague letter which stripped due process rights from male students accused of sexual impropriety, not even allowing their accusers to be cross-examined. This was never protested or considered a political imposition.
The Obama admin also submitted another Dear Colleague letter that replaced "gender identity" with sex, which forced any schools taking funding to allow boys into girls' sports, bathrooms and locker rooms. This was never protested or considered a political imposition.
But what is the action of the federal govt that's forced all these Ivy Leaguers to suddenly howl with outrage and break out the weepy platitudes about academic freedom? Forcing them to protect their own Jewish students! This is the line that's too far for them, the act they are still very reluctant to undertake, even as their reputations tank and their funding gets yanked.
Inside the rubber room that is the Ivory Tower, where an ideological lobotomy is mandatory if you want to get ahead, every group gets their own safe space and bias-response team, except when it comes to Jews, whose existence requires "context". In their case actual violence is treated like speech, whereas for every other group speech is considered violence.
And Eisgruber is Jewish! Imagine how good his salary and benefits must be, and all the other perks of being an official American aristocrat, if he's willing to sell out his own people. The Ivy League should be padlocked by the EPA, as it is a toxic sewer.
The "live and let live" and "leave me the eff alone" pleas - while perfectly understandable - promote personal disengagement in a world that needs individuals to step up NOW to protect their rights and liberties. Does the radical Left have any sympathy at all for a Trump supporter voicing these sentiments? We all know they would not - but simply double down on their decades-long agenda.
i had an employee once who had a master's degree in "gender studies" from an ivy league university. apparently her final paper was on the "patriarchal oppression of lipstick" (i'm not making this up).
i suppose no one at Estee Lauder wanted to hire someone who took such a dim view of cosmetics so she ended up in my costume shop doing "women's work" to pay off her considerable student loan debt. oh, the irony!
one day she had a melt down and accused everyone in the shop (mostly women from eastern europe and homosexual men) of being racists, screaming that she couldn't "work with racists." i stopped her and said if she felt that way, she needed to leave, which she did.
she was back at work the next day, as if nothing had happened and the shop, normally filled with the noise of women and homosexual men chattering on about nothing, was silent as a tomb. i took her into another room and told her that after her tantrum of the day before, she could not come back now that she realized that "i can't work with racists" was not an excuse her landlord would accept when the rent was due.
she actually tried to collect unemployment, which i denied. i had plenty of work she could have done, had she not been so warped by her "education."
the university took her money and in return, failed to prepare her for any kind of real life other than that of a resentful activist, which probably doesn't pay all that well.
I love these true life examples of how these ‘advanced degree types’ (like your former ‘gender studies’ employee) are so ill prepared to work and function in society these days.
Smart to get rid of her early. If an employee exhibits woke tendencies (even closet or latent ones), they should be quietly sidelined until they quit. They are dangerous.
yes, you know those people are trouble. i had no idea that she had a Masters degree in oppressive lipstick until after she was gone. i cared about two things- how well does she sew and does she fit in with the temperament of the shop. i've fired some highly skilled people simply because they were pains in the ass and disturbed the vibe of the workshop.
this woman was a completely unremarkable person until she wasn't. she had gone out to lunch with 2 other girls and apparently a homeless guy had made a come on remark to one of the girls. she made a joke of it ("hey, there's my next husband") and the woman in question took offense on behalf of the homeless guy(!)- not on behalf of her female co-worker who was being accosted by a man who hadn't seen a bar of soap in god knows how long!
hence, When Wokes Collide. how does a person decide which under represented victim class to feel offended for? in this case, i guess, a curvaceous caucasian woman ranked as more "privileged" (and thus less deserving) on the scale of bleeding heart liberal concern than a street man of hispanic background.
when i got back from lunch, there was a huge ruckus going on, with her packing her sewing supplies and yelling about how she couldn't work with racists. i was stunned.
the girls filled me in on the background after she had gone.
Wow. Quite the morality tale! Need to have the kids start reading all the old fairy tales and books of years past that taught the laws of unintended consequences. These recent generations seem to be completely unaware of the pitfalls from going through life with blinders on and believing that they’re the only ones here and they’re all that matters.
NanaW yes, kids need to start reading. Period. I, as did Chris, visited an Eastern college last week. This one — phones left outside, laptops in dorm rooms, just books, Socratic discussions, props presented on whiteboards, conversations, critical thinking applied. Breathtaking and a beacon of hope. It can be done.
I feel for the sad, lonely, desperate folks who invented the likes of “norm porn.” Looking for love in all the wrong places. Egads.
"[T]his compact between the government and universities where the government has, ever since World War II, asked universities to perform research on behalf of the American people that the government funds - it's been really important to America's preeminence in science and engineering. It has made the country stronger, and it has made our universities the best in the world…"
This is classic hostage puppy talk. Sure funding research into rocketry or AI or heart disease is important and may be best done in a university so some of it is indeed what the universities do. But as you note, that's not all that they do, in fact it may be a minority of what they do. These days much of the funding goes to studying the harm that fatphobia enforced by the white patriarchy causes lesbian BIPOC land whales or similar. More actual rocket research is done by private companies like SpaceX, actual AI research done by OpenAI and actual Heart Disease research is done by drug companies
“It’s the Big Bang theory of politics: Nothing ever happened, but then OH MY GOD TRUMP. There is silence and darkness, but then from the eternal nothing blossometh inexplicably and magically that which is cruel and orange. And the world gasps, or something.”
I’ve been thinking about this for a bit but have not followed thru.. maybe you guys can help me ..
1) did government start funding research before these shit holes had billion dollar endowments?
2) if they were really doing important research, wouldn’t they make more money if they funded it themselves, and the owned patents on important things ?
It's like when I hear how outrageous it is that Trump has little respect for district judges. Hmm... you know it's almost like there were several high profile and controversial events in recent memory involving the Bad Orange Man and district judges that might color his perceptions of them. Nah, drawing a blank here.
Its getting harder and harder to be a liberal fascist public employee grifter these days. BTW, do take in Tucker’s interview of Alex Jones today. Its a barn burner.
Brilliant, allows Alex to correct the record on what he actually said about Sandy Hook and his Trump-like persecution by lawfare. Truth sneaks out...eventually.
A while back I read a memoir by a woman who escaped from North Korea. She later attended Columbia University. She told her teenage son that she would only pay for him to go to Columbia if it was to study science. Otherwise she was afraid it was too similar to North Korea!
The real issue is money… funding from the government. Money taken, on threat of force (all government is force) from citizens, and always wantonly, and often with malicious aforethought, wasted on “in your face”’research projects the robbed citizen would never support. The Regime, and all who support it and live off of it, know their grifting ways are threatened. That’s what they mean by “politicized.” It now means the taxpayer isn’t going to fund my pursuit of “that which is right in my own eyes.”
Feel the need to kiss some ass for just a sec. Substack is a quality platform. Lots of great writers. Plenty to learn. Nobody does it better than Chris Bray though. Always insightful, always brings the receipts, laugh out loud wit, and so important… dives right in then drops the mic and signs off. Doesn’t take a day out of your life to read through all his thoughts. Well done and much appreciated.
So, I wonder at the spiral down to this absurd, stupid behavior and I harken back to the e of east coast universities to Trotsky during the late 1920s - after he was kicked out of the USSR. I think this fucker must have cut a romantic figure to be embraced for decades. Ok, hind sight being 2020, how stupid are people - even better - how stupid are the Ivy League educated? Pretty fucking stupid.
Truly. If one is “dashing” it seems to cut off the flow of blood to the brain for many impressionable types, and they promptly swoon over whatever drops from the honeyed lips of their idol. The Trudeau/Newsom Affect.
You should read Eisenhower's farewell address. In literally the next point after his famous military industrial complex warning he gives exactly the same warning about the corruption of academia because of federal support.
Oddly, or not, the professoriate have ever since taught only one side of that whole.
Ken Braun— That Eisenhower speech should be inscribed on stone.
I share that sentiment, but frequently once something is cut into stone, people stop reading it, en masse. They may scroll over the words, but ten to do so, without grokking them, so to speak.
How many people who have bowed to the religion of DEI have strolled through his memorial and forgotten that he strove to make society better by pushing people to strive to see each other on individual merits, regardless of race?
How can they not see that the enshrinement of race, regardless of which one, or ones, as a primary marker of advancement, would piss him off?
They read without comprehension, which used, and may still be, even if superficially, a basic tenet of childhood education. Reading comprehension, today, doesn’t seem to exist for vast swathes of the public.
Eisenhower’s speech should be taught in middle school, alongside the Gettysburg Address. However, we need reading comprehension brought back to the fore in education, for it to matter.
In addition to the erosion of basic educational skills ( blame points to the teacher's union administrators more than on classroom teachers on that), you also have the actual rewiring of the brain responding to cryptic 300 character limits on thought prevalent in social click bait media. Younger generations literally don't have the capacity to read and digest with accuracy any long format essay.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
I read Lincoln's second inaugural every time I'm in D.C. And I tear up every time.
“Oddly, or not, the professoriate have ever since taught only one side of that whole.”
Sorry, that’s just not true.
I’ve little doubt academia have tilted left since then.
But it was nowhere remotely near so overwhelming.
Even by the early 80s, when it was all net left, there were still a significant minority who were not.
It is MUCH worse today than in the past.
Even 15 years ago cancel culture within academia was not widespread (though clearly it had started in pockets). The Gestapo was not yet out in full force
It is MUCH worse today.
Andy G— I agree with you, from what I saw the 80s, 90s, and up to I'd say about as late as 2015, were very different. Lefty PC stuff was always a thing, but it really started getting extremely extreme in the couple of years before covid, and then, kablooey.
Indeed. In the final years of the 20th century there were at least people in the room during the drafting of job postings who would point out "Uhm... you can't say you are going to hire only women or minorities for this position. That's illegal" and people would listen. Anymore they can't even see that position from where they are standing.
I’m so grateful that I started my undergraduate degree in 1995, before the World Wide Web had even been adopted within the academy to any degree. I had old professors who did their undergrads in the 1950s. You could even smoke inside some buildings! What a different world that was. It was when I went back for grad school in 2007 that I saw how much had changed. And by the time I finished my PhD, it had gotten so much worse. Though I recently returned to university teaching (one class a semester on top of my non-academic 9-5 job), I don’t have much hope for the survival of the university given how politicized it’s become and how low the standards have fallen.
I remember people smoking in class, too. Everyone wanted to be Hannah Arendt, it seemed.
Oh well, the world needs fry cooks too.
lol
It seems like a lot of people took the Civil Right Act and in the name of what the Civil Right Acts was supposed to achieve, went and chucked it into the toilet— and flushed. DEI is outright racism, by the dictionary definition of the word, after all.
There is the point, 2015, what happened shortly after that?
Trump.
As in everything else, this insanity is the woke reaction to Trump.
Trump may have been the trigger pull, but mag was loaded, slide racked, and hammer cocked over the preceding 2 decades.
Trump brought the Left's irrationality into the open. But he didn't cause it. 5 decades of postmodernism did that.
Of course, not arguing against your point, I just think Trump allowed it to accelerate, it would not be as bad as it is today if he had never run for president
Trump, indeed, was the accelerant the country needed.
Pat Robinson— I'd trace the roots further back in time— judging from what I witnessed in my part of the country, the woke shale (or PC shale, or whatever one wants to call the fungus of lefty tyrannies) was becoming very exaggerated even before Trump came along as a viable contender for the presidency. (I'll grant, other people in other regions and other professions may have experienced it differently.) But I would wholeheartedly agree with you that the woke reaction to Trump, it's been bug-shale insane.
For sure it started before that, but Trump was the trigger for the explosion of what are basically purity tests
I mostly but not entirely agree.
Older progressives don’t mostly believe in actual woke - you know, oppressor-oppressed ideology, intersectionality, the whole nine yards. (Most do believe in PC on steroids. “Soft-woke” if you will).
Trump coming along mostly accelerated the ability of the woke to take over the totality of the left narrative and dialogue. With Trump in power, the center left to this day - and even during Biden - has been unwilling to “punch left” even a tiny bit.
Well they did it for maybe 8 seconds in the wake of October 7th, but quickly reversed course within days on that.
Maybe the woke wouldn’t have totally dominated had there never been a Trump presidency. But we will never know the counterfactual.
I agree it has gotten worse since the 80s, when I was in school. A Michigan State economics prof is responsible for turning me on to Milton Friedman, after all.
But I doubt that Eisenhower's warning about federal funding of university professors was ever a popular topic for the recipients of same to teach. And it has definitely not received the same attention as the military industrial complex warning does in those same classrooms.
That was my point. I agree with yours, however.
When words get etched in stone, they become monuments for lefties to tear down. For communism to live, memories of better times or mistakes made must be destroyed.
Charlottesville, Georgia Guidestones, names of military bases…
Here’s a link to his speech. It’s good to dwell upon the points he made.
https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwight-d-eisenhowers-farewell-address
The modern American university prof or admin has no idea that they’re immersed in an alternate universe. They’re like fish who don’t know that they live in water and that normal humans would perish if immersed in it for too long.
“The modern American university prof or admin has no idea that they’re immersed in an alternate universe.”
No, this is not correct.
You should act under the assumption that most people are neither that stupid nor that smart.
If this was as recently as 11 years ago (i.e. pre-Trump), then you might be right for *some* of them.
And I *will* grant that many, even most, of them don’t realize HOW leftist bubblish their world is.
But in addition to the ones who are hardcore leftist activist driving and delighting in where we are, most of them are in fact aware that academia is left-politicized.
The younger ones are happy with this and would be incensed if it were any other way. Social Justice rules, don’tcha know?
But essentially *all* of them know the reality of academia today, even if they don’t realize *precisely* how off their environment is.
And this Princeton head is simply being just like the MIT, Harvard and UPenn chiefs who testified to Congress in the wake of October 7th.
Deliberately, disingenuously dishonest.
He knows.
They almost all do.
I don't know if that is entirely true. My direct contact with teaching in universities is 5 years out of date, admittedly, but I found a few things were very common:
1: Most professors had no idea how far left they were. They simply thought they were "more knowledgeable" and everyone else just didn't know enough.
2: The really crazy lefties didn't realize they were crazy lefties so much as believing themselves to be the only honest ones who really took things seriously.
3: Most professors, even at the relatively right wing GMU Econ department, were loathe to say that most research was false. Typically a given professor would say that sociology was mostly made up, and grievance studies, but anything approaching real science was almost all real. Bryan Caplan once told me he thought it was maybe 10% error, and under 10% fraud at most. David Levy, may his name never be forgotten, was much less sanguine as he yearly had his econometrics students seek out and replicate papers from their own data as a project, and very rarely did the papers replicate, but he was unusually skeptical. David Levy and Dan Klein were the only ones who I spoke with that estimated over 30% was trash, at least verbally. (I never asked Don Boudreaux it occurs to me... he might have agreed with Levy and Klein.)
Long story short, most professors believe the story of advancing human knowledge and pursuing truth, even if they simultaneously believe that any particular paper is fraud or incompetence on paper. Kind of the inverse of the deal where everyone thinks Congress is a bunch of corrupt grifters, but their congressman is just great.
I think in a way that is why they are so touchy and defensive about the whole thing. If everyone just keeps pretending they are all doing great noble work they can ignore the cognitive dissonance and just turn their nose up and make jokes about the crap departments that are taking over the university, and pretend the obvious fraud is just outliers. When people actually start looking and turning things up they have to face the fact that a huge portion of their industry, maybe even the majority, are fraudulent, and their own status is at risk.
Hammer, great to see you mention Bourdeax and Klein. I got into it with Bordeaux about a decade ago online over industrial policy and trade theory. I threw Ian Fletcher's theories to see what he would do. It was pretty funny. (The Internet is great -- a nobody from CA can have a public discussion with an award-winning economist.)
Also, I TAed for Dr. Klein years ago at UC Irvine when he was a young, idealistic, crusading libertarian. (He was the campus YAF advisor, which likely played a part in being denied tenure -- cancel culture was alive and well 30 years ago.) He mellowed a little since he married a Swede, but I still like reading his stuff. Haven't seen him in years though.
Out of curiosity, how did/do you know them?
That's awesome! I still have a hard time imagining Klein even living in CA without getting into a fist fight every day :D He still is the crusader, running a hell of a lot of different programs and reading groups on campus. Small world though; Klein was my dissertation chair, and Boudreaux along with Levy were on my committee. I spent nearly as much time in Klein's groups discussing classical thinkers and new papers than I did in class any given week. I still work with Klein on stuff periodically since I left academia in 2020 (2 years and getting cancelled was enough for me) but I really need to make a trip back down to NoVA and visit campus. The only things I miss about the DC area are the GMU econ faculty, some friends and the restaurants. If you get into it and attend the talks and reading groups, GMU is about the closest you can get to the academic ideal of living the life of the mind.
He wouldn't like me now though... I'm more postliberal than libertarian. Dan never really "got" the idea that liberal-democracy requires a particular cultural milieu rooted not only in individual rights but also in virtue. And the Dan I knew especially rejected any transcendental source of those rights or of the definition of virtue.
Does he still use the Rink-o-nomics article with his Econ 101 classes? I still use his handout with my HS econ students.
He might have come around to your way of looking at things a bit; he's been very focused on virtue ethics and their ties to rights the last 5-10 years. Probably a no on the transcendental source, however.
Couldn't say what he teaches in Econ 101, or even if he has taught it in a very long time. He primarily teaches grad level Adam Smith courses to my knowledge, but then I didn't TA for him. I did like his Rink-o-nomics paper, but found that my second econ 110 course contained only two people familiar with skating rinks, so I kind of gave it up. I referenced the Beverly Hillbilly's in my first class, so it has been a learning curve of "what the hell do young people know?" for me :)
Thanks for the great comment. Food for thought.
To be clear, that the average prof doesn’t think they are as far left as they are, I concur 100%.
My most important claim is that they know they that almost all of academia are leftists.
Sure they think they are “correct” in their leftiness - doesn’t almost any thinking person think they are correct, almost by definition? If you want to claim they are more confident than most that they are correct, sure I’ll agree with that too.
FWIW, my view of the GMU econ department from afar - so your closeup is far likely closer to the mark - is that re: leftist economics they would say as you said above, but that re: other social science fields most would be MUCH more harsh than you suggest, not merely grievance studies.
And Caplan’s views aligns with my view as well for economics (doesn’t mean we’re right, of course). Were your claims about *all* the rest of social science outside of grievance studies, or restricted to economics? E.g. social psychology, psychology?
“My most important claim is that they know they that almost all of academia are leftists.”
I disagree here, and might actually be able to find stats to back it up. Experience tells me that most professors think they are moderate centrists who lean left, when the reality is they are waaay the hell left. Mostly it is a reference point issue: they never interact with conservatives and think the very left bubble they live in is representative of everywhere.
I say I might have evidence because I think I recall where the reactions to Dan Klein’s studies of political bias in universities live, and long story short no one believed, or admitted, that there were 28::1 ratios of democrats to republicans in academia on the low side.
Re: correctness, there is a difference between “I think I am correct, but understand why people think differently because of other beliefs about the world that might be correct “ and “I think I am correct and everyone else would agree with me if they weren’t so ignorant.”
Re claims on fraud: I think most social science claims are taken too seriously by economists, and even if economics is better than all the rest (it is probably), economics is easily half fraud. There are basically zero filters to catch fraud in the process, and next to zero people even looking for it, so if we find 2-3% of published papers are fraudulent when we are not trying we should expect 40-60% to be fraudulent. It’s like cockroaches, if you see one too stupid to avoid humans there are 100 who aren’t living in your kitchen.
“I disagree here, and might actually be able to find stats to back it up. Experience tells me that most professors think they are moderate centrists”
I would indeed be *very* interested in seeing any data you have on profs thinking they are moderate centrists.
It would be semi-plausible to me if it were 15 years ago.
I would be quite shocked if it were in the last 5 years.
Even the last 8.
Because I’m sorry, as low an opinion of academia as I have, i don’t believe they are morons. They know who has been elected. They read the (leftist-biased) news. They know the NYT at least leans left.
Now my one apology is that i use the term “leftist” to refer to anyone left of center. I know that many, especially on the left, reserve it for the hardcore radical left. So this is not about whether professors see themselves as “leftists”, it’s whether they see academia as left of center.
So we are not arguing whether they see themselves as radical, or as far left as they actually are. If you wanna claim the average prof sees themselves as center-left, then we aren’t really disagreeing about *that* much.
And you are acknowledging that they see academia as left-of-center. Which was the point.
But moderate centrist? And more importantly, that their fellow professors are *not* left of center (the original question)? Sorry.
I will try and find the reaction essays tonight. Most were surprised to be told that there were massively more registered democrats than republicans.
Now, to your point, if we are saying "leftists" is "anyone registered democrat or that leans left of center" then ok, they kind of understand that, I agree. However most academics really do think they are pretty centrist, moderate Democrats, and not as over the horizon away from center as they actually are.
By way of an example, economists on campus are often considered very right wing. In reality, the vast majority of academic economists are Democrats who tend to think markets work better than other Democrats. Caplan references the survey stats on that in his book "Myth of the Rational Voter."
It isn't a matter of academics being morons, but rather their reference set for "normal" is waaaay skewed. Everyone they interact with during their working day is selected to a greater or lesser extent to match their belief set, and those at the low end of selection are explicitly there to learn to think more like the academics. Relative to their reference group a particular academic might believe they are a centrist, if only because they think this DEI thing might be a little over blown.
When you’re “the smartest person in the room” you must try to enlighten the poor ignorant souls who just don’t see the correct way to think.
Well, sure - but doesn’t that apply to at least 75% of us who comment on Substack, let alone blog?
I’m certainly guilty of it.
https://xkcd.com/386/
The difference is we don’t call it education.
"And if the government starts using the clout it gets from the funding it provides to sciences and engineering to invade that academic freedom...."
The govt requires that all their grants and loans come with mandatory strings attached around racial classification—not a cent goes out without learning the race of every person involved and the racial balance of every group involved, with thumbs put on the scale for the "underrepresented". This was never protested or considered a political imposition.
Obama and Biden both submitted something called a Dear Colleague letter which stripped due process rights from male students accused of sexual impropriety, not even allowing their accusers to be cross-examined. This was never protested or considered a political imposition.
The Obama admin also submitted another Dear Colleague letter that replaced "gender identity" with sex, which forced any schools taking funding to allow boys into girls' sports, bathrooms and locker rooms. This was never protested or considered a political imposition.
But what is the action of the federal govt that's forced all these Ivy Leaguers to suddenly howl with outrage and break out the weepy platitudes about academic freedom? Forcing them to protect their own Jewish students! This is the line that's too far for them, the act they are still very reluctant to undertake, even as their reputations tank and their funding gets yanked.
Inside the rubber room that is the Ivory Tower, where an ideological lobotomy is mandatory if you want to get ahead, every group gets their own safe space and bias-response team, except when it comes to Jews, whose existence requires "context". In their case actual violence is treated like speech, whereas for every other group speech is considered violence.
And Eisgruber is Jewish! Imagine how good his salary and benefits must be, and all the other perks of being an official American aristocrat, if he's willing to sell out his own people. The Ivy League should be padlocked by the EPA, as it is a toxic sewer.
Brilliant takedown, as always Chris. Your writing is superb!
The sad fact is WE let it happen.
It sucks being caught between a "live and let live" and a "leave me the eff alone " mentality.
Thats what got us in trouble; if the former is not the case than it only makes the later worse.
They were all too happy to take our decision to not make a decision as their priority.
The "live and let live" and "leave me the eff alone" pleas - while perfectly understandable - promote personal disengagement in a world that needs individuals to step up NOW to protect their rights and liberties. Does the radical Left have any sympathy at all for a Trump supporter voicing these sentiments? We all know they would not - but simply double down on their decades-long agenda.
The conundrum of the wrath of those who just wanted to be left alone is likely coming fairly soon.
For sure. It's already underway.
We had no other choice
Fantastic post!
Thanks!
i had an employee once who had a master's degree in "gender studies" from an ivy league university. apparently her final paper was on the "patriarchal oppression of lipstick" (i'm not making this up).
i suppose no one at Estee Lauder wanted to hire someone who took such a dim view of cosmetics so she ended up in my costume shop doing "women's work" to pay off her considerable student loan debt. oh, the irony!
one day she had a melt down and accused everyone in the shop (mostly women from eastern europe and homosexual men) of being racists, screaming that she couldn't "work with racists." i stopped her and said if she felt that way, she needed to leave, which she did.
she was back at work the next day, as if nothing had happened and the shop, normally filled with the noise of women and homosexual men chattering on about nothing, was silent as a tomb. i took her into another room and told her that after her tantrum of the day before, she could not come back now that she realized that "i can't work with racists" was not an excuse her landlord would accept when the rent was due.
she actually tried to collect unemployment, which i denied. i had plenty of work she could have done, had she not been so warped by her "education."
the university took her money and in return, failed to prepare her for any kind of real life other than that of a resentful activist, which probably doesn't pay all that well.
I love these true life examples of how these ‘advanced degree types’ (like your former ‘gender studies’ employee) are so ill prepared to work and function in society these days.
Good story Carolyn .
Smart to get rid of her early. If an employee exhibits woke tendencies (even closet or latent ones), they should be quietly sidelined until they quit. They are dangerous.
yes, you know those people are trouble. i had no idea that she had a Masters degree in oppressive lipstick until after she was gone. i cared about two things- how well does she sew and does she fit in with the temperament of the shop. i've fired some highly skilled people simply because they were pains in the ass and disturbed the vibe of the workshop.
this woman was a completely unremarkable person until she wasn't. she had gone out to lunch with 2 other girls and apparently a homeless guy had made a come on remark to one of the girls. she made a joke of it ("hey, there's my next husband") and the woman in question took offense on behalf of the homeless guy(!)- not on behalf of her female co-worker who was being accosted by a man who hadn't seen a bar of soap in god knows how long!
hence, When Wokes Collide. how does a person decide which under represented victim class to feel offended for? in this case, i guess, a curvaceous caucasian woman ranked as more "privileged" (and thus less deserving) on the scale of bleeding heart liberal concern than a street man of hispanic background.
when i got back from lunch, there was a huge ruckus going on, with her packing her sewing supplies and yelling about how she couldn't work with racists. i was stunned.
the girls filled me in on the background after she had gone.
Wow. Quite the morality tale! Need to have the kids start reading all the old fairy tales and books of years past that taught the laws of unintended consequences. These recent generations seem to be completely unaware of the pitfalls from going through life with blinders on and believing that they’re the only ones here and they’re all that matters.
NanaW yes, kids need to start reading. Period. I, as did Chris, visited an Eastern college last week. This one — phones left outside, laptops in dorm rooms, just books, Socratic discussions, props presented on whiteboards, conversations, critical thinking applied. Breathtaking and a beacon of hope. It can be done.
I feel for the sad, lonely, desperate folks who invented the likes of “norm porn.” Looking for love in all the wrong places. Egads.
Reading with comprehension would fix a lot of things.
It’s exciting you found a decent university!
What a happy ending!
"[T]his compact between the government and universities where the government has, ever since World War II, asked universities to perform research on behalf of the American people that the government funds - it's been really important to America's preeminence in science and engineering. It has made the country stronger, and it has made our universities the best in the world…"
This is classic hostage puppy talk. Sure funding research into rocketry or AI or heart disease is important and may be best done in a university so some of it is indeed what the universities do. But as you note, that's not all that they do, in fact it may be a minority of what they do. These days much of the funding goes to studying the harm that fatphobia enforced by the white patriarchy causes lesbian BIPOC land whales or similar. More actual rocket research is done by private companies like SpaceX, actual AI research done by OpenAI and actual Heart Disease research is done by drug companies
Rocketry and AI are nearly all done by the private sector. Academia is quite irrelevant except maybe for training students in the basics.
studying the harm that fatphobia enforced by the white patriarchy causes lesbian BIPOC land whales
I’d actually read that.
It's not a million miles away from the stuff Steven Hayward unearths so it probably exists (see https://stevehayward.substack.com/p/peak-academic-absurditythe-sequel )
Eisgruber’s polemic about government and academia made me think of nothing so much as the horror trope of the human centipede.
Just a self replicating machine of endless crap.
You write like an artist. Wonderful.
“It’s the Big Bang theory of politics: Nothing ever happened, but then OH MY GOD TRUMP. There is silence and darkness, but then from the eternal nothing blossometh inexplicably and magically that which is cruel and orange. And the world gasps, or something.”
Completely agree. I love a well-turned phrase and Chris is very gifted with those. “That which is cruel and orange”…Hahaha!
I’ve been thinking about this for a bit but have not followed thru.. maybe you guys can help me ..
1) did government start funding research before these shit holes had billion dollar endowments?
2) if they were really doing important research, wouldn’t they make more money if they funded it themselves, and the owned patents on important things ?
The Universities end up owning the patents, and the proceeds from it, even if Gov't funded the research.
A great deal if you can get it… why am I not surprised? Another terrible deal for the taxpayers
As always - Expenses are born by the taxpayer, profits accrue to the well connected.
Good questions.
🔥it all
NPR, the broadcast version of The Atlantic...
Brilliant!
It's like when I hear how outrageous it is that Trump has little respect for district judges. Hmm... you know it's almost like there were several high profile and controversial events in recent memory involving the Bad Orange Man and district judges that might color his perceptions of them. Nah, drawing a blank here.
Its getting harder and harder to be a liberal fascist public employee grifter these days. BTW, do take in Tucker’s interview of Alex Jones today. Its a barn burner.
Brilliant, allows Alex to correct the record on what he actually said about Sandy Hook and his Trump-like persecution by lawfare. Truth sneaks out...eventually.
“Trump appears in the later chapters of the story, not in the opening scene.”
Brilliant. This perfectly sums up the lunacy of TDS discourse.
A while back I read a memoir by a woman who escaped from North Korea. She later attended Columbia University. She told her teenage son that she would only pay for him to go to Columbia if it was to study science. Otherwise she was afraid it was too similar to North Korea!
lol
The one good thing I have to say about Columbia U is that it is nearby the Hungarian Pastry Shop which had (has?) a killer poppyseed strudel.
100 percent true. I wish I had one with a cappuccino right now.
The real issue is money… funding from the government. Money taken, on threat of force (all government is force) from citizens, and always wantonly, and often with malicious aforethought, wasted on “in your face”’research projects the robbed citizen would never support. The Regime, and all who support it and live off of it, know their grifting ways are threatened. That’s what they mean by “politicized.” It now means the taxpayer isn’t going to fund my pursuit of “that which is right in my own eyes.”
Feel the need to kiss some ass for just a sec. Substack is a quality platform. Lots of great writers. Plenty to learn. Nobody does it better than Chris Bray though. Always insightful, always brings the receipts, laugh out loud wit, and so important… dives right in then drops the mic and signs off. Doesn’t take a day out of your life to read through all his thoughts. Well done and much appreciated.
So, I wonder at the spiral down to this absurd, stupid behavior and I harken back to the e of east coast universities to Trotsky during the late 1920s - after he was kicked out of the USSR. I think this fucker must have cut a romantic figure to be embraced for decades. Ok, hind sight being 2020, how stupid are people - even better - how stupid are the Ivy League educated? Pretty fucking stupid.
My apologies for being vulgar but, really?
Truly. If one is “dashing” it seems to cut off the flow of blood to the brain for many impressionable types, and they promptly swoon over whatever drops from the honeyed lips of their idol. The Trudeau/Newsom Affect.
I agree.