This article is probably full of nuanced observations but lost me at "deep state". Ugggh.
These are people long tenured in their jobs who know how to fast track or slow walk policy. Depending largely on their politics and mission they can steer departments the way they want almost regardless of the new boss or outside influence.
Makes a lot of sense to me that they would also exist in universities.
If you are going to talk about the “deep state” and not cite anything at all you deserve a good eye roll.
Any institution that has “renewal” in their name is ideologically driven.
This decade, at least.
[^1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33496246 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33831936
There is a valid point to made about administrative bloat eventually bogging down any organisation | domain unless actively worked against ... but the point missed here is that hair clogs the drains of any regime regardless of whether it is obscured by "Progressive" or "Capitalist" dogma.
They article raises many good points, and then pivots into an unneccesary coupling of "bad" with "liberal" and "progressive" ideals and posits that such management excess wouldn't happen in a market driven degree mill.
This, of course, is just silly.
Where are you seeing this? Can you quote it?
> As Catherine Liu argues in a recent book, the PMC is comprised of educated professionals who embrace a moralizing progressive ideology while believing that it can be realized only in a top-down, hierarchical manner.
...
> Consistent with Liu’s description of the PMC, university administrators “labor in a world of floating signifiers, statistics, analytics, projections, predictions and identity performativity, virtue signaling, and affectual production.”
at first as describing the opinion that US university admins are disguising their busy work behind a cloud of "liberal progressive" smoke and that presumeably other locales and times would see other topical issues being used (ie. it's not intrinsically linked to a political ideal)
However they were followed by:
> While there is no denying that many professors are politically liberal, many still adhere to the principles of pluralism and recognizing the existence of multiple viewpoints on controversial issues.
> More than the faculty, the academic PMC is the source of the dogmatism that haunts contemporary academia.
which had me wondering; I'm not in the US and I'm always struck by the apparent ever present need to shoehorn "Left" V. "Right" and at best gently curse with backhanded references ( "despite being politically liberal, many of the common staff still lack blinkers" etc).
The conclusion is that all this needs to be flushed away:
> Whether they have any commitment to preserving the complex ecology required by institutions of learning in a market-driven society is another question entirely.
and that conclusion follows what I saw as weak and weasly implication that (US) progressive liberal values were tied somehow to administrative self perpetuating at the expense of that they were supposed to serve.
I'll admit it's a weak bias, but it comes across as white anting all the same (to my non US eye).