Within their academic ecosystems, grievance scholars hire new faculty members with similar moral commitments who’ve written for the same journals. Eventually, they institutionalize their ideas in the larger academic system. This process, which has been propagating laundered ideas for at least three decades, now has enough “scholarship” behind it to have a significant cultural impact.
But what can be done?
That’s one of the interesting problems. The other stable and metastable local optima are only reached by, effectively, deplatforming viewpoints that are at least tolerable – and maybe even helpful.
“What can be done?”
Mike Gonzalez writing at the Claremont Review in an interesting article on the invention of the “Hispanic” tag offers the following solution:
“ Those of us who believe that individual responsibility is a far better route to success than racialization can still reverse what Ylvisaker, Samora, Alinsky, and the rest have wrought. Our first enemy is ignorance. The radicals who victimized America have done their best to cover their tracks: general unawareness of how, and why, the U.S. today is mired in identity politics makes the victimhood narrative harder to defeat. That is the reason the myths still exist, and why we must dismantle them.”
A good task for the intellectuals to take up.
And to give credit where credit is due Alex Tabbarok has an interesting post at Marginal Revolution this morning on Illuminating sex differences through the disaggregation of personality measures, a piece in line with this myth busting recommendation. And Thinking Aloud too has an excellent piece this morning on “Self-Refuting Scholarship.”
But for the rest of us, we can support and recognize good independent scholarship and cut off the money supply to universities.
Link to Lorenzo’s self-refuting scholarship piece: http://lorenzo-thinkingoutaloud.blogspot.com/2019/12/self-refuting-scholarship.html
Markets in everything.
Lower the transaction costs so we can buy a greater variety of ‘jargon’. Standard PSST discovery tool. People shouldn’t have to go to college to sound funny.
> At the beginning of the 2010s, 58 percent of Republicans believed that colleges and universities had a positive impact on the course of the country,
The universities are entirely dependent on public government support. When a large fraction of the country opposes what universities are doing, there will absolutely be large political consequences. This is a new phenomenon; people who have long trusted academia, have recently learned to distrust them.
When respected conservatives like Roger Scruton say, “Get Rid of Universities Altogether”, he clearly respects the core knowledge piece of universities and STEM in particular. But universities are investing into salaried political culture warriors in both faculties and administrations that will rightfully trigger a blowback.
I couldn’t read the whole article due to lack of WSJ subscription, but it’s not clear to me that terms like “cisgender, fat shaming, heteronormativity, intersectionality, patriarchy, rape culture and whiteness” aren’t recognized as political rather than scholarly. Yes, it’s true that the woke left likes to tell itself that its ideas are factual rather than political — one definition of “political correctness” is treating a set of political views as indisputable factual truths, i.e., “correct”, rather than ideological opinions. However, I see no evidence that society more broadly has somehow been hoodwinked into viewing such language as scholarly, in the same category as physics, medicine, economics, etc. Don’t confuse woke twitter with society at large.
Kling’s three-axis model seems more on the mark. Progressives express their views using the language of oppressor-oppressed of which terms like cisgender, fat shaming, etc. are examples. Everyone recognizes such language as the language of progressivism but progressives, regardless of whether such language was developed in grievance studies journals, like to elevate their political views to the status of established fact. The grievance studies departments are playgrounds for progressive activists masquerading as serious scholars and so their journals are filled with progressive oppressor-oppressed language.
Well, you can cut down the universities, the public ones at least. No more Purdue, no more Ohio State, no more University of Alabama, etc. Kill off the social science departments at least. That’ll make everybody so much happier, and it’ll save the taxpayers some money. For a while.
But after that while …. the best profs in the law schools are going to drift off to Harvard is my bet — some place that seems like a more “complete” university. The aeronautical engineering professors will wind up at MIT or Berkeley or some other school which also offers French Literature and Sociology and Psychology and Political Science and other “useless” things your state legislature got rid of. The billionaires will go on sending their offspring to Yale and Cornell and Stanford. The foreign students will aim at USC and UCLA rather than Kansas State. The more affluent parents in your red state paradise will move heaven and earth to get their kids into high schools which will prepare their kids for universities in the red states — and once the kids are gone off to school, they won’t be coming back to careers and lives in their home states.
Think of that Great Purification going on for a hundred years, or two hundred. Won’t it be sweet!
Pedagogical Adversarialism! Or, in other words, “Trials as Classes”.
That is, every class is a two-person bipartisan commission appointed by members of their own party, with equal time and trial or debate procedures so that the students / audience, as “judges” have no choice but to pay close attention to the best both sides can offer, because their final grade will depend on successfully answering both halves of the questions, each half graded by the professor belonging to each party.
The ‘Single Voice’ Model is Over.
Conservative Marxism! Of course!
Come on, give me a break. Oh, sure, because the adversarial design of our common law trial system was Marxist before Marxism was cool, or before Marx was born, and by centuries.
It’s ridiculous and sad to confuse ‘Marxism’ with the dialectic method, “a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned arguments.”
You may have noticed that all Communist / Marxist regimes acted immediately to end the dialectic contestability of any proposition related to the state ideology with faux-scientistic, “The synthesis is settled!” insistence.
At any rate, dialectic is between two interlocutors or conversants, while adversarialism is directed to towards a judging audience with incentive for each advocate to catch and counter every abuse by their opponent. Dialectic seeks to determine a shared synthesis, while adversarialism more often seeks binary choices on a case by case basis, but always while preserving both sides opportunity to make their full case in their own words.
Which system is best depends on context. The more a subject resembles a hard science with controlled experiments, the more valuable is the dialectic method. The more contestable a discipline or field of academic inquiry – for instance, certainly anything involving human affairs – the more necessary it becomes to let both sides have their say in an civil and controlled but fundamentally adversarial process.
It seems to me that in an era of intensifying ideological polarization and failure of modes of rational persuasion, “Dialectic Is Over”, which means the single lecturer model of teaching is also over.
So: Two Teachers. Fire against Fire. Pedagogical Checks and Balances.
Tax exempt education orgs must not discriminate based on political beliefs — and the fact that most academic grievance studies have no Republicans should mean they’ve been implicitly discriminating. There are far more Republicans than Blacks, and there should be at least as many Rep Professors (including perhaps a few Black Rep profs).
Political diversity should be a political requirement for the politically granted tax exempt status. And eligibility for Fed. student loans. And any Fed. research funds.
Republican students need to sue their “diversity” advertising schools who have few Rep professors for false advertising. And win.
In parallel, the Feds should be developing on-line testing to allow students to earn general subject matter credits thru on-line courses, from colleges or non-colleges. With a “Federal” University Bachelors” degree.
The Federal gov’t can change to require only STEM BS degrees, where needed, or a High School diploma plus HS skills – which many HS grads don’t quite have. Again, more Fed gov’t testing. Because the Dem dominated teachers have allowed the destruction of gov’t education for many, maybe most students.
The polarization in the US is due to the many decades of accepting college discrimination against Christians and Republicans in hiring professors. This needs to be honestly stated and known.
More Conservative Marxism! Use the power of the state to lift up your arguments because the marketplace has failed!
‘Market Failure’ in the marketplace for ideas is most definitely a thing. After all, the intellectual analogies to unfair and anticompetitive practices, barriers to entry, and ‘restraint of trade’ is what non-progressives are complaining about in terms of asymmetric censorship, deplatforming, cancel culture, and so forth.
The progressive error is to take a true but rare deviation which justifies an exception to business as usual, and then have that exception swallow the rule and apply it to everything where normal treatment would frustrate their goals.
The conservative error is a knee-jerk overreaction to that abuse, and to incorrectly affiliate any of those claims with progressivism itself, and thus to reject even the ones that are both accurate and used to harm them.
Progressives have useful idiots on their own side, but with things like this, they also have them on the other side.
The marketplace of ideas was a terrible metaphor to begin with – no wonder it’s chock full of “market failures”.
Tie department funding to student loan repayment rates?
I mean, if they object, that will be them openly advertising that their grads aren’t getting ahead.