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OK now some actual critical theory: The conflict is class; it is not race or any other woke rubbish. Do billionaires really mind if the poor fight and never are able to organize to attack them? Does Bezos care if if we defund inner city police? Does Gates lose anything if rural whites refuse vaccinations and take ivermectin and iodine? How about Musk? The Zuck? Trump? No they do not. The more academic greed hardens the factions and enflames the outrage, the safer and the more power the billionaire elite retain. The Ivy League minority of the professionally aggrieved --upper middle class-- students, their nifty professors, and their families are the useful idiots carrying the banner for the billionaire class who profit from our perpetual factionalized discontent. Plato recommends that art (propaganda) be controlled by the elite. And indeed it is. Indeed it is.

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Ask any kid in any town in America to name the best college, and you’ll hear “Harvard.” The university isn’t fighting for its "survival," and the school president has exactly zero fear that Harvard’s acceptance letters will end up in the trash. It’s much simpler than that. College bigwigs are terrified of getting canceled themselves. They’ve got a lot at stake – million-plus salaries and all those admiring glances when they walk into the club for Sunday brunch.

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I attended an Ivy school in the '70s, and there was some pandering to the very vocal radical minority then: gay rights, black militants, anti-war activists. The big difference was that there was plenty of open dialogue and almost no canceling of controversial speakers. What cable TV and the internet have done is allow people to obtain their news and opinion from very narrow niches, essentially living in intellectual bubbles that never challenge their beliefs. This simply reinforces their existing beliefs and makes them think they are unassailable. And, as before, it is those who want to make radical changes who make the most noise - how many rallies do you remember that argued for 'staying the course' or 'supporting the Constitution?' (TEA party excepted)

"An unexamined life is not worth living," according to Socrates. We now have millions upon millions living unexamined lives. Colleges in particular should be citadels of self-reflection and exposure to different value systems, but as the author points out, this is not an economically winning strategy. Maybe we are rewarding the wrong kind of diversity?

How could that be changed?

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I teach at a college like Harvard and I agree that the illiberalism is getting worse and that it is getting worse because students, faculty, and administrators are afraid of a vocal minority. Handa is absolutely right that many of us keep our heads down because we fear being cancelled and we watch our language carefully to avoid being labeled as suspect. When I first started teaching many years ago, I could count on vibrant debates in my classroom. It is now harder for me to start vibrant debates and much harder for my students to participate in them.

But I would add two caveats to Handa's analysis. First, he suggests that the vocal minority largely come from the privileged class (graduates of Dalton etc). While certainly there are privileged students among the woke, the woke also include low-income students who arrive at college and realize when they meet their more privileged classmates how much they have missed growing up. They are understandably angry, and they turn their anger against institutions, including the institution that they attend.

Second, as other commentators have noted, while the New York Times may worry about losing subscribers, Harvard has no shortage of applicants; its market position does not explain why administrators pander to a vocal minority. Handa underestimates how many administrators as well as faculty actually believe in identity politics and are willing to sacrifice free speech, reason, and due process to achieve ideological ends. The most stunning aspect of this moment for me is not the students (young people have long rejected the values of their elders) but the behavior of people who should know better.

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I've seen the case made before that the changing economics of publications has incentivized them to "wokify." With Harvard the case is a little less persuasive that economics is at the root of it, although I think it is clear that administrators are incentivized to let the inmates run the asylum in prescisely the way the author describes. I've also seen it suggested that wokism is a convenient way for young academics to blow up the boomers who are still hogging all of the tenure, and who are otherwise untouchable by other means.

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This switch of clients began well before the web came along. Share value and globalism are the drivers.

In the corporate world, corporations stopped aiming for profit and aimed solely at increasing share value. Profit drives a business to please a broad base of customers who demand quality products. Localism encourages a company to pay its employees well so they can buy the products.

Share Value is driven by NYC and SF elites, who want to see a business based solely on stock manipulation. No products, no employees, no local factories, no customers. A successful business panders to NYC and SF elite tastes.

Universities made the same change for different reasons. Federal grants for research and federal student loans removed the need to serve and improve a LOCAL community of farms and businesses. The larger research universities make a large part of their income from Chinese students, so they are essentially working for China.

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It's a solid article but I doubt if this business and economic explanation is sufficient to explain this complete derangement that has gripped the academy. Catering to an elite educated group and class is one thing, but willingly handing the keys to anti-intellectual ideological extremists is quite another. It seems obvious that all the identitarian nonsense was flourishing in the 90's and that the internet accelerated this regressive trend in a manner that is consistent with the article. Nevertheless intuition would suggest that a solid collective behavioral and economic model--one that incorporates collective and individual cognitive science and evolutionary behavioral biology-- will someday reveal that the sudden displacement by the internet of our traditional sense making apparatus probably screwed us all up in ways that are far more profound than what is suggested in this piece. But still I imagine the points raised here by Sahil are not invalid.

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Interesting analysis. I'd look forward to hearing more along these lines.

The novel (to me) addition here is that pandering to "consumer" preference by elite universities is responsible for the shift (just as with media companies).

While media companies were pushed to this by the internet, your account of the shift in universities is that the softening of the patronage system of admission is the cause. I'm not sure I see the argument for this point; why does this new demographic of students have different beliefs than the old? In both cases they are coming from wealthy, elite families. So why did the old elites prefer liberalism and the new elites wokism? If the new system is meritocratic, why are the current top-achievers believers in wokism rather than tolerance?

Whether in your or others' scholarship, I'd love to hear more about some of the pillars of any account of the rise of illiberalism.

How did the "liberal, upper-class families" come to believe in woke illiberalism?

How did this minority view come to dominate and intimidate other voices into silence? (Including other students, and enough faculty and administrators to prevent institutional push-back in favor of either the status-quo or liberal values as such).

It seems the analysis here isn't opposed to the view of wokism on the popular ascent, but complementary to it. We still need an account of why wokism captures left-oriented hearts, and why it has out-competed its liberal form in the last 5-30 years in our elite institutions.

Your point that wokism need not be a plurality view among students (or journalists, etc.) is well taken. There are mechanisms in many institutions that empower vocal or motivated minorities.

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"I don’t think the root of the problem is that Harvard undergraduates have made a wholesale conversion to the woke religion. Rather, that a vocal minority has done so—and the college caters to that minority, working terribly hard to avoid offending those who belong to it. This isn’t stupid, and it isn’t weak-willed."

It's both stupid and weak-willed. It's also understandable: the various folks who operate the institutional machinery want to keep their jobs. And the only reason they are worried about their jobs is that they cannot trust the institution to protect them -- because the institution apparently lacks the intelligence and / or will to do so.

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When the Fed starting backing student loans > education costs skyrocketed!

Coincidence?

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Excellent analysis, and spot-on conclusion. We need new institutions.

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This is very insightful. I do believe there's a network of 'intellectual dark web' thinkers -- James Lindsay, Niall Ferguson -- who are making sense of this Matrix (digital) era.

However, you are wrong about one thing. Oxford is the best! 👩‍🎓😀

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How disturbing is the choice presented here. You can have "liberalism" at Harvard as long as the students are from elite backgrounds and are secure in their social class. You can have liberalism in a mass circulation paper of the past. But that "liberalism" depends upon avoiding stories about sexism and racism.

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No mention of Fox News and the conservative ecosystem? Come on…

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Sorry to sound so simplistic but really it's just about free speech and a free exchange of ideas being welcomed and encouraged, even unpopular ones. "I disagree with what you say and will defend to the death your right to say it".

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Although this is a shockingly shallow and occasionally mistaken analysis, I would like to underline a few points that I agree with. First, I agree that much of the illiberalism on view in American academic institutions is due to a small segment of the student population with a large investment in the symbolism of social justice. This is in stark contrast with the illiberalism in, say, religious institutions of higher learning, who are boldly controlled by outside donors. I hope we can be clear-eyed about both phenomena. I also hope we can recognize that the power wielded by the vocal student population is almost entirely the power of moral suasion. While the more conventional powers have not always been able to use their bs-detectors in a timely way, they generally maintain the ability to refuse the moral pressure when a group pretending to exercise moral authority is really just posing.

Second, I would agree with the general point about the loss of a geographic base, even if the applications stretch credulity. As social media and the internet in general have enabled the Times and a few other canny institutions to leverage their impressively wide and skilled reporting bases into institutions more national than they used to be, they have also gained a certain independence from local pressures to conform. The pinnacle institutions have no need to specialize narrowly, and I don't believe for a minute that this has shaped any move to the left either at Harvard or the Times, but it is an interesting trend to think about. The current movie about 'Storm Lake' Iowa presents a vital counterpoint to this misguided analysis, recognizing as it does how local interests are often manipulated by powerful outside corporate interests. Is liberalism likely to do better at the hands of academics or of corporations? While one hopes it is not either/or, the tenor of the recent "debate" over, for example, Critical Race Theory does not foster a lot of hope for a "marketplace of ideas."

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