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.
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.
This is 100% right. A good example is Northwestern. For years, including the 4 years my daughter was there, the school has done nothing institutionally to push back against the behavior of the illiberal minority there, whether in the student body or the faculty. Yet once Morty Schapiro announces his impending departure as President, he starts publishing articles here in Persuasion about combatting illiberalism and supporting heterodox thought. I can't think that this is coincidental.
The colleges are in the business of educating people into a state of ignorance about the party and embracing a distorted view of America at the present.
Agreed; Harvard itself -- the institution -- is not being forced to do anything illiberal for its survival. The administrators of the institution, on the other hand, can be replaced. No one decided not to attend Harvard because Joe Provost or Cathy President got replaced.
I shot my mouth off in a reply to JimT, and this may make more'n a few uncomfortable. But there IS such-a thing as right and wrong and True and false. Maybe I'm old (well, no maybe) but it's still True: People who lie to get their way aren't to be trusted at ALL, let alone bowed DOWN to. IMHO.
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?
I've been giving this some thought off and on. One thing that would HELP (not the ONLY thing, but one thing) would be for people to recall MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. That's been trodden down into the mud by most people. Or most LOUD people. To paraphrase:
"Judge a person on their character, instead-a the color of the their skin."
Admittted it's not necessarily LIKELY to happen, but could. If that WAS to be done, then a number of things would naturally fall out. When people say they want to FREE the marginalized from the oppressive constraints of society, and then go on to oppressively do away with the freedom of speech of anybody that disagrees with them? Well, it's not a case of, "Well, yeah, they're being a bit hypocritical, but the CAUSE." If one judges these people according to their character, then what one necessarily does is listen to what they say, and DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE, right?
How many people... How many of YOU support BLM? Well, most who do don't even know what BLM stands for. First of all, reparations for all Black people, to be decided on BY Black people. Right in their manifesto. Me? Two things I don't much cotton to is "manifestos" and giving money away without regard to need, and based SOLELY on the color of a persons skin.
But that's not the dangerous part. The founder, Patrisse Cullors ANNOUNCED they were dedicated Marxists. Won't trouble to find the link, because I've posted it before. And the aim of BLM is to LIBERATE Black people. From the oppressors who are actively working FOR THEIR DEMISE. Who is it, in reality, who's attempting to exterminate Black people?
Well, I've seen this FACT before, but saw it again from a Professor who's made it his JOB to look at facts about things. Do You know how many unarmed Black people were killed by police in 2020? Most white liberals would say 1,000, or even up to 10,000. What would YOU guess? Well, You see, the FACTS are otherwise. It's, in FACT, 18. Yeah, eighteen.
And why don't people KNOW it was 18 instead-a two or three ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more? You think BLM wants that to get out? The New York TImes?
The very DESIGN of this movement is that FEELINGS matter more than facts. That's one-a there FUNDAMENTAL RULES. And the law of the land these days is You can NOT hurt a person's feelings. Because, according to this theory, if You hurt a person's feelings then a) You're committing an act of VIOLENCE against them and b) You're invalidating there PERSONHOOD.
Serious as a heart attack. Wish it weren't so, but I've studied these people and that's what they say.
Should say, just IMHO, but I'm not all that humble when the facts are INTENTIONAL ignored and are so exaggerated that people buy this horse manure. Forgot to mention the Professor having the facts is Black, tho that shouldn't matter one Way or t'other.
It doesn't bother you that police killed 18 unarmed Black civilians? Or 60 unarmed civilians overall? You are passing along the canard that Black Lives Matter is a centralized organization, though in fact it is a decentralized movement, which means you are invested in demonizing the movement based on individuals rather than responding to their concerns.
I also said nothing about centralized or decentralized because it doesn't have any particular importance to the damage they're doing. I'm "demonizing" the movement, the individuals who are part of it and the people who support it. And I'm saying that if You look at their website OBJECTIVELY, You'll be surprised what their concerns are.
I would recommend You read Wilfred Reilly's "Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About." Unless facts would confuse You, it's good reading.
I am also more upset about the street violence. It represents the results of concentrating poverty, of denial of job opportunities, of lack of policing resources from society at large, and other structures of oppression. The thing is, police violence is the tip of that iceberg, showing what is underneath, imposing itself where self-assertion runs contrary to it to make sure the social order stays as it has been set up. You don't believe it? I have heard it from the mouth of police.
When hundreds of thousands took to the streets in response to the horrifying video of Chauvin on Floyd, they were not witless tools of Marxists or fellow travelers with revolutionaries. They were normal human beings unwilling to be part of such a system. When America manages to create an alternative where "your beautiful suburbs" are not hunkered down against invasions of color, then no one will be talking reparations or socialism.
The thing is, all these demonstrators believe police oppression is a real thing. It isn't. I don't care what You heard from a policeman's mouth, the statistics SHOW it.
And what You Leftists refuse to believe is that an individual as some agency in determining where they end up in life. Do I claim the deck isn't stacked?
But this idea that there's systemic racism is as false as can be. Not many, or really, any people know that who haven't read Wilfred Reilly's book. I'm still reading it. Finish today or tomorrow. But that much is clear as day to those how can SEE.
You? You'd probably read it and learn totally, completely, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Because Your in denial. I don't BLAME You for it, John Evans-Klock. The BLM-1619 Project-CRT REGIME? Well, they own the media, the institutions like universities and the government. The woke corporations.
You can tell their as near to pure evil as can be by the fact that if anybody contradicts The CRT REGIME, they tend to get fired. Very effective, that. But telling...
Hi jt - sorry for ghosting. I have much more time Th to Sun than Mon to Wed. I'm kind of interested in what Wilfred Reilly has to say, but it's likely to be a long time before I read his book. Just too many other priorities. You are part of conspiracy thinking with this business about BLM/CRT "owning" the media, universities and government. I accept that such institutions have a civil rights agenda and tend to suppress alternative view points. But they do acknowledge facts, and I fear the Fox News crowd does not. There is plenty of evidence of systemic racism and sexism.
has a pretty good survey of research on the subject, with a Nobel prize winner as an author. I have seen examples of both. Of course now we have some reverse discrimination with affirmative action, but I have a strong sense from both research and personal experience that the traditional White male privilege is still stronger by far than any reverse discrimination going on. And that doesn't even get into the ways that past discrimination continues to make itself felt.
that found no greater likelihood of police shootings of Black suspects, once the frequency of crime is corrected for, also found that less extreme violence is, in fact, still more likely even after such correction. Police beat up Black "suspects" more frequently than "justified" suspicion could account for. Which is actually what the police will tell you, if you get them off the record.
There are plenty of police, I would say the vast majority, who have no discriminatory intent whatsoever. Yet a substantial portion of that majority has no concept of de-escalation (much less any actual training in it) and a strong tendency to equate young black males with threat. Body cams have made a huge difference, because now police will self-police. We need more of that progress.
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.
Excellent point. To me, it seems logical that there are plenty of academics who are true believers of this misguided critical social justice ideology. After all, the ideology itself germinated within academic circles. I do feel that—while university faculty has historically sympathized with causes on the left—these true believers are limited to a handful of disciplines in the humanities. Could it be that engineering, and mathematics faculty—for example—feel they will overstep if they challenge certain beliefs outside of their disciplines? Part of the problem, perhaps, is the way critical social justice scholars have manipulated language as a way to serve their causes. Who wants to be the person who criticizes social justice and antiracism? This stands even if certain terms (e.g., racism, white supremacy, diversity) clearly no longer mean what they used to just a few years ago. I imagine that many faculty members have come to realize, though, that the ideology behind these critical social justice fields of study is clearly in opposition to what used to be the ethos of academic institutions. By just scratching the surface, it seems clear to me that these “critical” fields of study see empiricism and logic as part of oppressive powers (white/colonialist ways of acquiring knowledge) while altogether denying objective reality. How many faculty members are troubled by this? How many have seen what happens to those who do not toe the line (Peter Boghossian, Gordon Klein, as most recent examples who have gone public), feel intimidated and/or choose to turn a blind eye?
This is a great comment. Especially that last bit about the so many administrators and faculty believing fervently in the ideology. Absolutely correct and a crucially important point. It's going to be a long time before ideologically driven tenured faculty age out, and many of us are rightly concerned that core freedoms such as free speech are being forever lost in the meantime. The biggest error most people fell into was to misdiagnose the ideology as a youthful fad that would pass if we just ignored it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The question of why the upper middle classes have shifted to wokeism is a good one. I think some old-fashioned class analysis is useful here. They're joining forces with globalisation to further the interests of a class of professionals who are just like themselves at the expense of the indigenous working classes. Entry to this class is past the woke gatekeepers. Ability to manipulate the jargon is the new table manners.
"Entry to this class is past the woke gatekeepers. Ability to manipulate the jargon is the new table manners."
Yah. That last sentence is GREAT.
Thing about wokeism is that it ORIGINATED in academia. The book "Cynical Theories" describes how Critical THeory of the 70s came outta 60s Post-Modernist nihilism. Critical Race Theory came in the 80's. I can't recall, but think by the mid-2000s it turned into what the authors called "Applied CRT." CRT, which was mainly a political movement than any kind-a scholarly theory, turned to activism. And it was then, I suspect, that it started taking over academia. To the point that if You wanted to advance in Your career, You HAD to believe in CRT.
The fundamental tenet of Applied CRT is to be an ACTIVIST. Radical Feminism, LGBT, Queer Theory, Disableism and all that ensued.
The best way to get heard, is by being in the class of "marginalized" people. I don't call people "marginalized" when they're powerful enough to own academia, the media, the culture, and the Democratic Party. Granted, some of these groups who go into identity politics are the smallest FRACTION of Americans. But they have the power to decide what's allowed and what's not.
"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.
I think a general consensus is putting the blame where it deserves. On the institution's administrators who wanna keep their plush jobs, and that they and the institutions they work for ARE basically a bunch of weak-willed people.
I don't have children, so ICBW about this: I suspect that the vocal minority never HAS had anyone tell them, "NO! YOu're being UNreasonable." Maybe that's just me.
But the internet has changed the game. Companies might hire those who have acquired their knowledge cheaply online ahead of those who have taken out tens of thousands in loans to learn how to apply Kimberley Crenshaw to laying Tarmac at a prestigious academy.
The internet has been here for 20 years, and the game has not changed. And we've just had a pandemic-forced experiment with online-only education for a year and a half. The result is that absolutely everybody is desperate to get offline again! So the game is not going to change anytime soon.
Check out FAIR. It needs more clout (I think feel people have been so conditioned to political narratives that they are skeptical of bipartisan institution) but I feel it is certainly a place to start. As far as education goes, critical thinking should be prioritized as soon as children master reading and math. Never have critical thinking skills mattered more. I like the alternative curriculum FAIR has created.
There are plenty of right-wing institutions out there. They just have very little credibility left because they are paid for by the 1 percent and have, in general, sold their souls. They don't provide insight or perspective, they provide talking points for a blather contest.
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! 👩🎓😀
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.
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".
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."
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.
Well, unless we see mass political violence take hold in this country, then no one profits
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.
This is 100% right. A good example is Northwestern. For years, including the 4 years my daughter was there, the school has done nothing institutionally to push back against the behavior of the illiberal minority there, whether in the student body or the faculty. Yet once Morty Schapiro announces his impending departure as President, he starts publishing articles here in Persuasion about combatting illiberalism and supporting heterodox thought. I can't think that this is coincidental.
The colleges are in the business of educating people into a state of ignorance about the party and embracing a distorted view of America at the present.
Agreed; Harvard itself -- the institution -- is not being forced to do anything illiberal for its survival. The administrators of the institution, on the other hand, can be replaced. No one decided not to attend Harvard because Joe Provost or Cathy President got replaced.
correct
I shot my mouth off in a reply to JimT, and this may make more'n a few uncomfortable. But there IS such-a thing as right and wrong and True and false. Maybe I'm old (well, no maybe) but it's still True: People who lie to get their way aren't to be trusted at ALL, let alone bowed DOWN to. IMHO.
Yah, that's it.
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?
I've been giving this some thought off and on. One thing that would HELP (not the ONLY thing, but one thing) would be for people to recall MLK's "I Have a Dream" speech. That's been trodden down into the mud by most people. Or most LOUD people. To paraphrase:
"Judge a person on their character, instead-a the color of the their skin."
Admittted it's not necessarily LIKELY to happen, but could. If that WAS to be done, then a number of things would naturally fall out. When people say they want to FREE the marginalized from the oppressive constraints of society, and then go on to oppressively do away with the freedom of speech of anybody that disagrees with them? Well, it's not a case of, "Well, yeah, they're being a bit hypocritical, but the CAUSE." If one judges these people according to their character, then what one necessarily does is listen to what they say, and DO THE EXACT OPPOSITE, right?
How many people... How many of YOU support BLM? Well, most who do don't even know what BLM stands for. First of all, reparations for all Black people, to be decided on BY Black people. Right in their manifesto. Me? Two things I don't much cotton to is "manifestos" and giving money away without regard to need, and based SOLELY on the color of a persons skin.
But that's not the dangerous part. The founder, Patrisse Cullors ANNOUNCED they were dedicated Marxists. Won't trouble to find the link, because I've posted it before. And the aim of BLM is to LIBERATE Black people. From the oppressors who are actively working FOR THEIR DEMISE. Who is it, in reality, who's attempting to exterminate Black people?
Well, I've seen this FACT before, but saw it again from a Professor who's made it his JOB to look at facts about things. Do You know how many unarmed Black people were killed by police in 2020? Most white liberals would say 1,000, or even up to 10,000. What would YOU guess? Well, You see, the FACTS are otherwise. It's, in FACT, 18. Yeah, eighteen.
And why don't people KNOW it was 18 instead-a two or three ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE more? You think BLM wants that to get out? The New York TImes?
The very DESIGN of this movement is that FEELINGS matter more than facts. That's one-a there FUNDAMENTAL RULES. And the law of the land these days is You can NOT hurt a person's feelings. Because, according to this theory, if You hurt a person's feelings then a) You're committing an act of VIOLENCE against them and b) You're invalidating there PERSONHOOD.
Serious as a heart attack. Wish it weren't so, but I've studied these people and that's what they say.
Should say, just IMHO, but I'm not all that humble when the facts are INTENTIONAL ignored and are so exaggerated that people buy this horse manure. Forgot to mention the Professor having the facts is Black, tho that shouldn't matter one Way or t'other.
It doesn't bother you that police killed 18 unarmed Black civilians? Or 60 unarmed civilians overall? You are passing along the canard that Black Lives Matter is a centralized organization, though in fact it is a decentralized movement, which means you are invested in demonizing the movement based on individuals rather than responding to their concerns.
Wilfred Reilly is a Black professor.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/45733289-taboo
Gimme a break. Read what i said again. I don't think I said that it didn't bother me. What bothered me MORE was that 51 Black CHILDREN died by gun violence in one CITY (Chicago). https://medium.com/illumination-curated/the-uncomfortable-art-of-being-an-ally-c2a91bfe0ad5
I also said nothing about centralized or decentralized because it doesn't have any particular importance to the damage they're doing. I'm "demonizing" the movement, the individuals who are part of it and the people who support it. And I'm saying that if You look at their website OBJECTIVELY, You'll be surprised what their concerns are.
I would recommend You read Wilfred Reilly's "Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About." Unless facts would confuse You, it's good reading.
I am also more upset about the street violence. It represents the results of concentrating poverty, of denial of job opportunities, of lack of policing resources from society at large, and other structures of oppression. The thing is, police violence is the tip of that iceberg, showing what is underneath, imposing itself where self-assertion runs contrary to it to make sure the social order stays as it has been set up. You don't believe it? I have heard it from the mouth of police.
When hundreds of thousands took to the streets in response to the horrifying video of Chauvin on Floyd, they were not witless tools of Marxists or fellow travelers with revolutionaries. They were normal human beings unwilling to be part of such a system. When America manages to create an alternative where "your beautiful suburbs" are not hunkered down against invasions of color, then no one will be talking reparations or socialism.
The thing is, all these demonstrators believe police oppression is a real thing. It isn't. I don't care what You heard from a policeman's mouth, the statistics SHOW it.
And what You Leftists refuse to believe is that an individual as some agency in determining where they end up in life. Do I claim the deck isn't stacked?
But this idea that there's systemic racism is as false as can be. Not many, or really, any people know that who haven't read Wilfred Reilly's book. I'm still reading it. Finish today or tomorrow. But that much is clear as day to those how can SEE.
You? You'd probably read it and learn totally, completely, and ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Because Your in denial. I don't BLAME You for it, John Evans-Klock. The BLM-1619 Project-CRT REGIME? Well, they own the media, the institutions like universities and the government. The woke corporations.
You can tell their as near to pure evil as can be by the fact that if anybody contradicts The CRT REGIME, they tend to get fired. Very effective, that. But telling...
Hi jt - sorry for ghosting. I have much more time Th to Sun than Mon to Wed. I'm kind of interested in what Wilfred Reilly has to say, but it's likely to be a long time before I read his book. Just too many other priorities. You are part of conspiracy thinking with this business about BLM/CRT "owning" the media, universities and government. I accept that such institutions have a civil rights agenda and tend to suppress alternative view points. But they do acknowledge facts, and I fear the Fox News crowd does not. There is plenty of evidence of systemic racism and sexism.
https://www.nber.org › papers › w22014
has a pretty good survey of research on the subject, with a Nobel prize winner as an author. I have seen examples of both. Of course now we have some reverse discrimination with affirmative action, but I have a strong sense from both research and personal experience that the traditional White male privilege is still stronger by far than any reverse discrimination going on. And that doesn't even get into the ways that past discrimination continues to make itself felt.
The famous Roland Fryer paper
https://www.nber.org/papers/w22399
that found no greater likelihood of police shootings of Black suspects, once the frequency of crime is corrected for, also found that less extreme violence is, in fact, still more likely even after such correction. Police beat up Black "suspects" more frequently than "justified" suspicion could account for. Which is actually what the police will tell you, if you get them off the record.
There are plenty of police, I would say the vast majority, who have no discriminatory intent whatsoever. Yet a substantial portion of that majority has no concept of de-escalation (much less any actual training in it) and a strong tendency to equate young black males with threat. Body cams have made a huge difference, because now police will self-police. We need more of that progress.
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.
Excellent point. To me, it seems logical that there are plenty of academics who are true believers of this misguided critical social justice ideology. After all, the ideology itself germinated within academic circles. I do feel that—while university faculty has historically sympathized with causes on the left—these true believers are limited to a handful of disciplines in the humanities. Could it be that engineering, and mathematics faculty—for example—feel they will overstep if they challenge certain beliefs outside of their disciplines? Part of the problem, perhaps, is the way critical social justice scholars have manipulated language as a way to serve their causes. Who wants to be the person who criticizes social justice and antiracism? This stands even if certain terms (e.g., racism, white supremacy, diversity) clearly no longer mean what they used to just a few years ago. I imagine that many faculty members have come to realize, though, that the ideology behind these critical social justice fields of study is clearly in opposition to what used to be the ethos of academic institutions. By just scratching the surface, it seems clear to me that these “critical” fields of study see empiricism and logic as part of oppressive powers (white/colonialist ways of acquiring knowledge) while altogether denying objective reality. How many faculty members are troubled by this? How many have seen what happens to those who do not toe the line (Peter Boghossian, Gordon Klein, as most recent examples who have gone public), feel intimidated and/or choose to turn a blind eye?
This is a great comment. Especially that last bit about the so many administrators and faculty believing fervently in the ideology. Absolutely correct and a crucially important point. It's going to be a long time before ideologically driven tenured faculty age out, and many of us are rightly concerned that core freedoms such as free speech are being forever lost in the meantime. The biggest error most people fell into was to misdiagnose the ideology as a youthful fad that would pass if we just ignored it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The question of why the upper middle classes have shifted to wokeism is a good one. I think some old-fashioned class analysis is useful here. They're joining forces with globalisation to further the interests of a class of professionals who are just like themselves at the expense of the indigenous working classes. Entry to this class is past the woke gatekeepers. Ability to manipulate the jargon is the new table manners.
"Entry to this class is past the woke gatekeepers. Ability to manipulate the jargon is the new table manners."
Yah. That last sentence is GREAT.
Thing about wokeism is that it ORIGINATED in academia. The book "Cynical Theories" describes how Critical THeory of the 70s came outta 60s Post-Modernist nihilism. Critical Race Theory came in the 80's. I can't recall, but think by the mid-2000s it turned into what the authors called "Applied CRT." CRT, which was mainly a political movement than any kind-a scholarly theory, turned to activism. And it was then, I suspect, that it started taking over academia. To the point that if You wanted to advance in Your career, You HAD to believe in CRT.
The fundamental tenet of Applied CRT is to be an ACTIVIST. Radical Feminism, LGBT, Queer Theory, Disableism and all that ensued.
The best way to get heard, is by being in the class of "marginalized" people. I don't call people "marginalized" when they're powerful enough to own academia, the media, the culture, and the Democratic Party. Granted, some of these groups who go into identity politics are the smallest FRACTION of Americans. But they have the power to decide what's allowed and what's not.
"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.
I think a general consensus is putting the blame where it deserves. On the institution's administrators who wanna keep their plush jobs, and that they and the institutions they work for ARE basically a bunch of weak-willed people.
I don't have children, so ICBW about this: I suspect that the vocal minority never HAS had anyone tell them, "NO! YOu're being UNreasonable." Maybe that's just me.
When the Fed starting backing student loans > education costs skyrocketed!
Coincidence?
Excellent analysis, and spot-on conclusion. We need new institutions.
First, there have to be people willing to pay for those institutions. And those people do not exist.
But the internet has changed the game. Companies might hire those who have acquired their knowledge cheaply online ahead of those who have taken out tens of thousands in loans to learn how to apply Kimberley Crenshaw to laying Tarmac at a prestigious academy.
The internet has been here for 20 years, and the game has not changed. And we've just had a pandemic-forced experiment with online-only education for a year and a half. The result is that absolutely everybody is desperate to get offline again! So the game is not going to change anytime soon.
IF/when they do that, there might be light at the end of this darkness.
Check out FAIR. It needs more clout (I think feel people have been so conditioned to political narratives that they are skeptical of bipartisan institution) but I feel it is certainly a place to start. As far as education goes, critical thinking should be prioritized as soon as children master reading and math. Never have critical thinking skills mattered more. I like the alternative curriculum FAIR has created.
There are plenty of right-wing institutions out there. They just have very little credibility left because they are paid for by the 1 percent and have, in general, sold their souls. They don't provide insight or perspective, they provide talking points for a blather contest.
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! 👩🎓😀
I hadn't recognized the name. James Lindsay was co-author of "Cynical Views." TY for introduction to Niall Ferguson.
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.
No mention of Fox News and the conservative ecosystem? Come on…
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".
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."