The Unmaking of the American University
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
That breaks down when there isn't open discussion on campus. Communists were jeered but essentially allowed on campus in the 60s and 70s, even at the height of the cold war.
The left now holds a place of orthodoxy in the universities and power structures. Whether the 'right' can break it back into an enforced balance is yet to be seen.
Until then, the central tie of an otherwise diverse institution will break down and break into fragments. Which would be a shame. The opposition needs to "live" somewhere!
Note that the current wave of attacks are all justified by safetyism, they're pushed by an anti-semitism task force that's encompassed any anti-war sentiment.
Not if they're systematically wrong about everything. There's no need to keep an intellectual disease vector in the academy any more than there would be a moral obligation to open your windows to the malaria mosquitos.
Climate change and medicine are the largest, most visible aspects of this, but it's intellectual dishonesty all the way down.
Note that this has got much worse since about the Obama era. There are no true small-c conservative intellectuals any more.
I think that's a misleading telling of the history. During the 40s and 50s a lot of people were fired for suspected or real links to communism and some schools even demanded loyalty oaths. Courts struck down a bunch of laws that were used to fire people but many rulings didn't land until the 60s. Angela Davis was famously fired in 1969.
Universities should be places where truth is sought without prejudice.
Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”: “Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.””
> The left now holds a place of orthodoxy in the universities and power structures.
Eco: “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”
> Whether the 'right' can break it back into an enforced balance is yet to be seen. . . . The opposition needs to “live” somewhere!
Eco: “However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
Yes, the Trump administration fucked over a decade of university research with his weird DEI campaign. That same fuckery also blew up all kinds of research grants not tied to universities. I'm sure some of us here know someone directly impacted by that decision. It was cruel and ruthless.
Otherwise, everything else that article talks about is a nothing-burger.
I can't tell you my professors' political beliefs, nor did I care. I went to school to learn about the world and topics that interested me. If there was a professor who tried to radicalize me or speak about things I didn't agree with, I would have dropped the class.
Some students are like me, and are there loving the process of learning. Other students couldn't care less, and are happy just to get the grade and get out of there. Either way, if a teacher is going to make a course an extension of their personal beliefs, I highly doubt any student will suddenly assimilate if they didn't already agree. They'll just bitch to their friends that the professor is some wacko, and roll their eyes.
No no, some conservatives are just trying to do what they love doing and that's get academics worked up and divided for empty rhetoric.
This attitude bothers me a bit. It robs you of being proven wrong. You might be right, but you might also be wrong. If you consistently avoid listening to why you might be wrong, you rob yourself from the chance to learn, which is why we all go to school.
Throughout my entire education, not once did I have to deal with a professor who was some ideological firebrand.
The right has invented a narrative to falsely justify their efforts to censor all education and shape nationwide discourse in their favor. Because they can't win any other way.
There’s roughly 1.5 million post-secondary instructors in the United States, roughly half full-time.
Estimates of conservative faculty range between 7-15%. (FIRE, where the 15% figure comes from, probably overestimates due to their conservative bias.)
So approximately 50,000 to 110,000 conservative faculty. You’re off by a couple orders of magnitude.
There’s over 500 faculty working at Liberty University alone, never mind the other, larger Evangelical Christian schools.
I essentially agree.
Though “progress” connotes improvement.
Brave New World was extremely “progressive.”
(Seems I was missing a /s)
Just like blasphemy etc in religion have no actual basis aside from being in a direction other than the direction of the religion.
To one group progress looks a lot different from what it looks like to another group, we can’t just say “progress” any more than we can say “blasphemy”.
Of course institutions tasked with coming up with new lofty ideas and fleshing out large all-encompassing paradigms are going to be full of people who are biased towards leftist thought! Just as how police officers, who deal with a never ending stream of shitheads every day, are biased towards rightist thought.
The real core problem here is this framing of "liberals" as an outright enemy, rather than as fellow citizens to have a dialog with, as advanced by the right wing media machine over the past several decades.
The appropriate framing is rather how we create checks on these institutions to keep them from running off into the weeds. Both for wider society, and also for the effectiveness of the institutions themselves. And that's certainly not with just outright destruction as the overly simplistic populism has settled into.