Higher education is shockingly right-wing
drafts.interfluidity.com
drafts.interfluidity.com
I've never heard anyone describe left and right this way, and I don't think anybody but the author thinks like this.
This is the individualist/collectivist axis, basically.
I’m not sure I understand how equality factors in. It is certainly a cornerstone of classic liberalism that all people should be equal under the law. But that does not mean that all people are equal, really, and you’d have to be blind to some really obvious circumstances to think that. I’ve always seen “the left” as being more defined by the idea that society should be governed less by tradition and more by a conscientious choice about what rules produce the best outcomes wrt happiness and prosperity. “Freedom” (until the word was co-opted by neocons) was a major feature of this kind of leftist system. This makes the opposition to the right clearer, because they want the converse.
Many progressives talk a lot about equity, but I think it’s fair to say that there are a lot of differing opinions on that particular topic.
It's reductively conflationary to assume "left (or ring) wing" means the same thing to all readers around the world, or even in America or as small of a gathering as a local book club.
Define one's definitions of words clearly, or better yet, talk about specific aspects rather than collecting people into over-simplified, divided-and-conquered, hivemind duopolies that are somehow inflexible, unmovable teams set on an inevitable course of perpetual conflict.
The sentiment of most professors and new grads is left leaning. It's been that way for decades, maybe forever. Numerous polls show this to be the case. Anyone who's been on the internet or on a college campus knows this is true.
Higher education is funded by public dollars, which means taking them away from taxpayers (socialism, a leftist idea).
In order to offer something of value to the students, the professors have to be legitimate. They need to know what they are talking about. It wouldn't work as well for everyone in town to take turns being a professor, or to vote who is a professor, or some other egalitarian leftist method. And so by absolute necessity, a market is allowed to function, in which the school chooses the best professors, so it can attract paying students.
Apparently that single point justifies the title.
It's fascinating to claim that "egalitarian leftist[s]" are the ones who believe everyone is equally qualified to be an academic authority; in my experience, it's the right wing that has consistently believed that professors, scientists, and other academic authorities should be taken no more seriously than Joe Sixpack.
Seems like a stretch to say funding things with taxes is socialism. The practice of funding public-benefitting projects with taxes has existed for a couple thousand years before socialism was ever conceived.
Call me when we're talking seriously about nationalizing all land and giving the government an ownership stake in every corporation.
While that is definitely true, and I, too, would like to see some slack implemented in that system, I think the author will reconsider their position after realizing what being "right-wing" in 2025 really means.
(It should not be a de facto requirement to have a PhD to become a full-time faculty professor in university, but removing that requirement will rug-pull all of the PhD candidates for whom tenured professorship is their most viable career choice.)
In my opinion, modern right-wing ideologies are _deeply_ seeped in anti-intellectualism. From book bans to school waivers, the right-wing groupthink believes that education by way of personal responsibility, conservative values and individuaulism.
In their eyes, public education is a failed experiment which can only be remedied by private schools, homeschooling and increased parental involvement in curriculum planning. This works within communities that are well-founded and have involved and well-educated parents but introduces massive risks in literally any other environment (like the underfunded and under-resourced rural and ex-urban communities that push these values so hard).
We're already seeing the effects of this in Houston ISD. The state of Texas took over this school system two years ago because of "low performance" due to "wokism", amongst other things (in my opinion). They've implemented severely regressive policies, like book bans and timers, but one particularly egregious thing they're apparently vibing with is AI-generated worksheets. If you want your kid learning about the Harlem Renaissance from diffusion-generated art badly resembling art from the period, look no further than HISD. [^0]
What makes this especially egregious to me is that the state of Texas and our federal government spent so much energy banning things that looked too DEI...like books on the Harlem Renaissance, history articles about Black people doing cool things, or, shit, straight up banning the word Black in journal articles. Banning real knowledge and replacing it with wildly-wrong AI generated garbage is unspeakable, but educators speaking up on this apparently makes them "left-wing".
Education is supposed to be non-partisan, but educators, by and large, being extremely opposed to these developments forces their hand.
[^0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/his...
Or to accept that political discourse has moved on. For the first 2500 years of democracy, the dominant topic of discussion was economic - how to distribute society's material resources - so it made sense for 18th century French journalists to categorize politicians based on their policies on that topic. Now we have a post-economic democracy where the dominant topics are along the lines of what bathrooms trans people should use, so we've repurposed "left" and "right" to categorize people based on their opinions on that topic.
Moreover, I think lack of resources fuels most if not all social issues; if people had more money, today’s social issues would probably be less of a concern (though they wouldn’t immediately go away and we’d probably have new issues). The biggest “evidence” is that higher-income countries correlate with less social issues: compare Denmark and Spain to the DRC and Venezuela. One plausible cause: people become pacified when they have enough food shelter etc. and don’t have to work hard, I think most wouldn’t care about trans people using the “wrong” restroom at least enough to do anything serious.
However, I also think a lot of economic issues are caused by social issues, in that if we convinced more people to be altruistic and waste less money on fighting social issues (wars), more people would have more resources. All that to say: perhaps there’s no true dominant topic, and even if there is, focusing improvements on the economy or society will probably improve the other.
* Trump’s other notable actions involve immigration. The majority of illegal immigrants in the US are from poor countries. Many are immigrants primarily for an opportunity to be not poor. Others are immigrants because their home country is unsafe, which is probably fueled by their country’s poverty (justified by another correlation between national poverty and safety, and more plausible explanations).
It really isn't.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/651719/economy-important-issue-...
As an outsider who took a passing interest in the last presidential election, I couldn't meaningfully distinguish the candidates' economic policies (I think they both promised to cut taxes and increase government spending, while reducing inflation and the cost of living for ordinary Americans). But I could have told you where they stood on all the culture war talking points.
In hindsight, you could perhaps point to things Trump said as an intention to start a trade war with all major trading partners - the defining economic policy of his term so far. But at the time, 150% tariffs on China weren't seen as any more likely than a huge wall that Mexico will pay for.
- Democrats have a more positive view of how colleges impact the country
- Democrats have higher confidence that professors act in the public interest
- Republicans are more likely to view higher education as moving in the wrong direction
- Democrats are relatively unconcerned about professors bringing political/social views into the classroom, compared to republicans who are very concerned
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-gro...
> If "left" and "right" have any meaning at all, "right" describes a worldview under which civilized society depends upon legitimate hierarchy, and a key object of politics is properly defining and protecting that hierarchy.
Hierarchy is a natural consequence of variation in skills, experience, and work ethic. Meanwhile, the author's definition provided for "left" is so squiggly as to be nearly meaningless. It almost sounds like the mythical, non-totalitarian brand of communism that just hasn't quite worked yet:
> "Left", on the other hand, is animated by antipathy to hierarchy, by an egalitarianism of dignity. While left-wing movements recognize that effective institutions must place people in different roles — sometimes hierarchical, sometimes associated with unequal rewards — these are contingent, often problematic, overlays upon a foundational assertion that every human being has equal dignity and equal claim to the fundamental goods of human life.
In other words, "left" has hierarchy, but only begrudgingly, and other than that we're very virtuous.
It's truly difficult to get past this opening argument. If you're going to make a shocking claim (higher ed is right wing), you can't start with such a shaky foundation. What would a non-hierarchical University system even look like? Harvard being more prestigious than my local community college does not make higher education right wing.