But why does the university cave in so easily? Why is the Dean himself crawling on the floor to apologize for basically nothing? Are they afraid of bad PR? or lawsuits? Why?
Most people cave in when it's time to make such decisions. A lot of folks would chose a cookie in the short term, while desiring to have a six-pack on the medium outlook.
In business or education, you fail as a leader every time you don't make that trade-off: every time when you take a quarterly one-time gain against the long-term interest or profits of the corporation, or when you fail to protect freedom of speech and the right of innovators to take risks just because the "safe path" is easier for now.
I think Paul Graham touches on this very well in his latest essay:
>> Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. <<
>> For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left <<
https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/
The argument is sophisticated and hard to summarise, but essentially, the author argues that "enlightenment liberalism" (i.e. the sort of philosophy that dominates universities) has a flaw at its centre that both creates Marxists and causes "enlightenment liberals" to constantly give in to the demands of those Marxists. The cycle goes like this:
1. Liberals assert that henceforth all with be free and equal, and that these things are self-evidently desirable (i.e. using reason alone).
2. Some liberals observe that life is full of inequalities and lack of freedoms. Because everyone is supposed to have equal opportunities, and because liberalism is generally uninterested in historical or traditional justifications for things, unequal outcomes demand an explanation which they find in the assumption of oppressive hierarchies. These liberals become Marxists.
3. They demand affirmative actions be taken in order to rectify these supposed oppressions. Embarrassed by the existence of inequality and lack of freedoms after declaring that their society is meant to have neither, liberals agree to these demands.
4. Realising they got what they wanted with little resistance, and that inequalities and lack of freedoms still exist, Marxists return to step 1.
In this framework the cause is nothing as simple or skin-deep as bad PR or lawsuits. Perhaps fear of those does play a role, but the author argues that the core reason is that the university is staffed by people who are genuinely embarrassed and upset by Marxist critique. Lacking intellectual ammo or a coherent philosophy of inequality, they invariably cave in when faced with outspoken demands that appear to align with their own agenda of equality.
[0] Free read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/longterm/unab...
What's awkward is I've now read at least three apparently compelling and logical explanations for the left/right divide, but some of them contradict each other in various ways.
Weird enough, the article gets a lot right, the critique of liberalism is on point IMO, but I don't really see the point of bringing this to the table. Radical liberalism is self-defeating as the framework fails to acknowledge the power relationships, thus is not surprising that liberal principles can result on illiberal consequences when tried to being pursued. Marxism was not even a thing when the french revolution became a bloodbath, and you can even say taking this event in account, Marxism is more descriptive on the outcomes of revolution than prescriptive.
On my perspective, on the recent events, I see only liberalism eating itself, and certainly I see little Marxist relationship with clear marxist tenants like workers taking control of their economic results. That's unless you're a liberal writing on a liberal magazine, doing mental gymnastics to avoid seeing the failures of liberalism, then you can loosely define Marxism and blame it all on it.
Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication. There's a large population at least roughly familiar with what Marx believed and far more importantly, what happened everywhere his followers took power. The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews. It's not saying he invented the whole thing from scratch.
BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
It's pretty convincing when you read third party accounts of Marxism by right wing spokesman who have a lot to gain to equating what they don't like to Marxism. When you read either Marxists (plenty of others besides BLM) or the ones who you call Neo-Marxists, you find Marxists sighing when not Marxism is called Marxism, and the so called "Neo-Marxists" criticizing Marx.
>arbitrary notion of two economic classes to slightly less arbitrary notion of two races.
Every classification is arbitrary, although you can argue about it's usefulness or consistency.
>A few other bits of jargon have been renamed, but otherwise the belief framework is intact.
Except the most essential part which makes the framework consistent. But hey, if you squint hard enough even a dog can be a cat.
>Marx is by far the most famous proponent of this kind of dual class oppression/revolution based framework. Someone really deep into the history of that stuff might prefer the term Hegelianism, but it's hardly more useful for communication.
Marx is known for a lot of things, to be honest I don't be surprised if some isolated community believes that Marx had babies for breakfast, this is an effect of being an ideological boogeyman. Regardless of what you think of communism, it should be hard to deny the depth of his philosophical and historical points, if not that it's a regular POV. With that in mind, adding more legends to the Marxist black legend should be considered the opposite of useful communication.
>The essay does acknowledge that the underlying worldview pre-dates Marx, and the term Marxism is thus merely a useful handle to describe that bundle of worldviews.
Yes, as mentioned this is exactly my main problem with the essay, the author even spells out my main point, but still framing this as a external factor "corrupting" liberalism.
>BTW: Quillette is not a liberal magazine and Hazony is a highly conservative Jewish nationalist.
I was not familiar with the writer, and mixed the liberal term with the more American Libertarian. My mistake.