Protesting attracts reprisals. Universities taught people, both explicitly and by example, to stand up for what they believed in, but have undersold students on how dangerous that is. Universities could have done a better job explaining that certain injustices are load-bearing, and that calling them out will make half the country hate you.
The right witnessed riots over the past decade. These riots were in response to police brutality and perceived racism. The ideas behind anti-racism spawned a perceived new ideology - "wokism". This frightened the right. Intellectuals on the right mapped the origins of this new ideology to philosophies from elite institutions. Therefore, these institutions must be punished to be kept in check.
It's really that simple..
What I find interesting about this guy is that in a way he actually is "caving" to the demands of the administration. This uni president advocates for more heterodox thinking - which is in alignment with what the Trump admin wants as well... maybe that's why Wesleyan won't be punished..
But this kind of political talk is against the guidelines. Good hackers don't care about any of this. So Javascript is getting crazy, huh?
1) Despite an appearance of being "left leaning" (according to polls of faculty political sentiment) they continue to gatekeep education behind prohibitively expensive tuition that is out of reach of lower economic strata without crippling debt, and have simultaneously struggled to produce graduates whose economic differential easily makes up for that expense and lost work time.
2) They enjoy a tax free status while receiving significant tax money despite many failing to grow their student bodies in tandem with the growth of the US population, leading to people questioning whether they deserve those benefits as institutions that serve the public.
3) There is a sentiment that basic literacy and numeracy of graduates has dropped over the last decades outside of a narrow area of studies, because of a shift to a model where students are customers buying a credential instead of getting an education.
(These are all interrelated, of course.)
My interpretation: As the country has entered the post-industrial era, holding a college degree has increasingly become a table-stakes credential for entering the white collar labor force. The higher education system has struggled or failed to grow to meet increased demand for these credentials, which both drives up the cost and increases selectivity of higher-ed institutions. A lot of people get burned by this and become locked out of and, crucially, geographically separated from labor markets that now constitute the majority of US GDP. This split causes non degree holders to view degree holders as their class enemies, and the universities as the class gateway that divides them.
[1] https://thebaffler.com/latest/one-elite-two-elites-red-elite...
Any decent History Prof. could have explained to the U's that openly taking one side in long-term cultural wars was not a viable long-term strategy.
(Or, maybe that's why so many universities cut their History Dept's so brutally? Though "just shoot inconvenient messengers" is also not a viable long-term strategy.)
am·biv·a·lence /amˈbiv(ə)ləns/ noun
the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.
>A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions?
There are a lot of very real things that are rotten in academia if you exclude the social politics center to this article.
So when people see they're loosing federal funding... yeah, some will think along the lines of "eh, whatever, fuck 'em, maybe they'll figure out how to clean their own house." Especially if the university is also known for both sitting on a large endowment and for prioritizing self-serving administrators over doing academics.
The regime could be rolling dissidents into mass graves and the only valid point of discussion for most people here would be packing algorithms.
this is mostly true of elite schools (who nowadays are mostly selling a brand more than an education), not so much of state schools
But that might be counter to their whole nature. Doesn't mean anyone's being irrational though. They're now de-facto gatekeepers on entering the professional class. I don't think it's unreasonable for the gate-kept to have opinions about the -keepers.
Maybe the elites. State schools and small colleges are not flush with cash and many have been shuttered or severely downsized recently. Though they could still spend their limited funds better.
True othering comes from people living in different worlds and hating the other person’s world.
[1] I did not read the the article but I’ve read this argument in a Graeber article.
This really feels like bad phrasing, when people read that they roll their eyes. Basically every major republican politician went to college, nobody is attacking universities, they're trying to help the students.
They agenda was either openly the opposite or they ignored the students. Except when they think they are too progressive and attack then verbally.
In this case, they're trying to make universities more fair and to reduce government waste in universities by removing DEI programs. There's lots of logic to that.
The other side is just part of the worldview of the rampant anti-intellectualism which Trump rode to power.
None of which is to say that mistakes weren't made in the institutions. They were. Mistakes were also made by the critics. Populism, sadly, has a habit of celebrating their worst and elevating them to heights they flat out can't handle.
But that is true of everything we do loans for, nowadays. The amount of consumer debt that people contort themselves into justifying is insane. If you want to use that as evidence that grade schools are failing in education, I can largely agree with you.
I don't think the OP actually said this specifically. But the economy truly had, for a while, bifurcated in outcomes for people with degrees vs. everybody else. You shouldn't need a degree to live a decent life, but now we are in a timeline where you can put DoorDash on Klarna installments.
In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.
I think the fair comparison isn't they have a degree and I don't, it's they have a better life/savings/house/car than me, which is enabled in general by getting a degree, which becomes the common contention point.
Why not? One thing is the campaign, another one is exercising his power. To quote a famous Argentinian President: "If I said what I would do, they wouldn't have voted for me".
I think this probably the case as well. If I look back at how my own views shifted, the shift very likely would’ve happened regardless of if I’d attended university, assuming everything else was the same. It wasn’t the university that resulted in the shift as much as it was my getting out of my local bubble out into the world and experiencing it for myself.
Basically any kind of life experience that brings a young person to actually think and more deeply consider the world around them is likely to result in some level of individuation and shift away from inherited views. It’s perfectly natural and healthy.
For example, universities burned a lot of political capital, and opened themselves up to a great deal of legal liability, with aggressively pursing affirmative action policies. When you depend on public grants, it’s probably a bad idea to publicly discriminate against the racial group that comprises the majority of taxpayers.
As to what universities should have done, the answer is “just dribble.” Universities should be places that are just as eager to research effective approaches to mass deportations as all the DEI stuff they do.
> not used race to discriminate on certain out groups ( https://asianamericanforeducation.org/en/issue/discriminatio... )
Since we have documentation of discrimination in university admissions for over a century, I don't think this particular issue produces "broader sympathy now".
In fact, I will be speechless if I ever learn the new administration policies do not lead to even higher levels of, but I suppose different, discrimination. Check back in 6 months.
Such as?
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
It's bizarre to see it all playing out in the open.
I see this a lot and it’s a concerningly reductive argument. Say what you want about a lot of colleges but when you talk about that mission you are talking about public colleges. Most have far lower endowments and most are very reasonably priced or free for instate students.
Georgia and California are great examples of this. The support for these institutions that used to come from states has gone down enormously while the cost of goods has gone up.
As a result it is not unreasonable to me for them to charge out of state and international students much much more. Georgia shouldn’t be subsidizing the college degrees of Alabamans, nor California of Arizonans.
All that to say the economics here are far more variable than people give much thought to and it’s easy to point at headline grabbing numbers that don’t reflect reality.
Schools rent the ones pressuring kids…their parents and society is.
[edit: I should admit that it's been 20 years, things may have shifted a lot]
https://www.thedoe.com/article/conservative-college-professo...
I wonder if that’s related to universities often being places where ‘reasoning’ is taught.
And then by extension, that tells you a lot about the arguments on either side…
Students want to feel like their time spent studying is worth it, not a weird blend of trivia, online classes you finish in a week or useless skills that you spend months practicing and lose 6 months after the class.
Millions of people could be working productive manufacturing jobs, instead they are doing effectively nothing all because of a disproven belief from 100 years ago that if you study enough you will increase your innate intelligence.
A lot of these examples have been pretty thoroughly debunked as either non-existent, or about something other than the professors expressing "conservative views".
This one is, I assume intentionally, anonymized and so we can't actually verify that it happened or what the circumstances around it were. But I'll call out one of the most common "views" I've heard on college campuses from professors that got in trouble for something was that "professors should be allowed to sleep with their students." So if professors are taking heat for thinking that they should be able to take advantage of barely legal kids... I don't really care.
If there are legitimate examples of professors just expressing that they have conservative beliefs, then that is suspicious because school administrators and alumni tend to lean pretty conservative themselves, and often make the final decisions on such issues after a frustrating amount of investigation.
If you're a billion-dollar company that only hires college grads, it feels like there's gotta be value to you in making sure there's more meritocracy in the process of getting degrees.
It would also change who the customer is so that the university doesn't "owe" the student a degree which makes the evaluation that universities do a little less rigorous.
If you look at the people on the actual political left in the US (Bernie, AOC, etc) are they talking about identity politics? Last time I checked they were talking about the problems that impact non-billionaire Americans: Healthcare, Social Security, Raising Minimum Wage, and other efforts to improve quality of life for Americans.
The only times I ever hear about identity politics is when I listen to conservatives describe what people on the left are talking about.
Yet, that's what they did. Repeatedly. After he already demonstrated how much worse he would make things.
Oh yeah, he denied that he would execute the planes for how he would make things much, much, MUCH worse, that had been very openly stated by his close associates.
That's enough for it to "make sense" to you, I suppose.
Why has that shifted? Can we blame the university system and their "marketing" that has pushed a degree as the One True Way of leaving the working class? If so, that's an understandable reason to be anti-university.
That's still nearly true, if not true. 60% of jobs are white collar. 40% of the workforce has a degree. Data quality starts to decline somewhat here, but it is expected that 20% of degree holders work in trades or manual labour jobs. So, degree holders only just barely make up a majority on that basis. And maybe not even that as blue collar is usually considered to be more than just trades and manual labour, not to mention that we haven't even delved into other collars (e.g. pink collar) that further take from the degree holding population.
That seems to be missing the elephant in the room - they sent kids in their most formative intellectual years to immerse themselves in a culture where there is a very high child:adult ratio. Then the kids come back with this wild culture that would make a lot of sense to a bunch of teenagers and young adults. It isn't just that the kids individuating, it is dumping them into one of the most elitist, authoritarian and artificial subcultures society maintains - populated mostly by near-juveniles I repeat - giving them independence to form themselves and discovering that dislocates them from their parents subculture.
It should be obvious that will happen but parents tend to be pretty dumb. No real training course for parenting I suppose.
Should they be doing these things?
Maybe I've read too much Caplan, but credential inflation seems to be wasting the new generation's best years.
I don't accept an argument of personal responsibility in this case, because student loans target one of the most vulnerable groups: Inexperienced and with a great need. To me, this is malicious.
I'm all for personal responsibility, in this point I'm more on the conservative side, but reality also includes that humans are not perfect machines, and targeting their weaknesses is easy and impossible to avoid as an individual. This principle does not work when it's an individual against sophisticated well-funded organization (here, there is not one but many who influenced policy), even worse when it's someone too young or too old for their brains to be at their best (not yet experienced enough in the one case, the brain no longer working at its best in the other).
Meanwhile, 68% support the Supreme Court’s ban on Harvard’s affirmative action admissions policies: https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4411246-majority-supp...
Universities, as institutions, were actively working against the public on both of these issues, from legal clinics trying to block deportations to extensive programs of racial preferences. It’s not surprising many people don’t want the taxpayer to subsidize that.
But then why are they supported, for the most part, not by the most oppressed masses, but by the oppressive elites?
It's an inferred promise, not an implicit promise. Lots of schools do try to make it an explicit, qualified promise (e.g. "80% of grads work in their field!"), and even more are shifting towards becoming what are effectively vocational schools, but this was never the intended purpose of a liberal arts education.
1. They are institutions of "indoctrination" by the other side. Faculty are something like 98% registered democrats and many subjects ("X studies") have an explicitly left-leaning bent.
2. They have tax advantages and other significant government subsidies.
3. They exercise significant amounts of ideological control over the narrative for their groups of people.
4. They are exclusionary of people outside the club.
Add to that the fact that universities are getting increasingly expensive and real life outcomes for college-educated people are getting worse. The perceived costs used to come with significant benefits, but the costs are getting higher and the benefits are reducing, so there is less tolerance for giving them favored status.
It's almost like they produce something of actual value.
The political landscape also changes regularly - I don't think the Republicans of a few decades ago were attacking schools so vigorously, so I'm not sure going further back than that for examples is relevant either.
> efforts of left-wing people in the 60's-90's to reduce their influence on society.
Can you elaborate on this?
> Universities today, though, have a status that religious organizations have never reached. Not only being tax free but also heavily taxpayer-funded, and with a university credential being virtually required for most jobs.
I suspect that if you go back not even that long ago, you'd find religious institutions having nearly as much importance, particularly in how faiths would prevent others from joining the workforce or society itself. In any case, I wonder what % of jobs actually do require a university education these days. I would not expect a majority of them to, but maybe I'm wrong.
I don't think you're wrong about the axes for "academic intelligence" or "political outlook". But those are just two of many. Geographic, racial, economic, class (in the European sense), language, culture .. these are all equally valid, and likely to vary more in a university than in a workplace (even in the military).
(Yes, yes, there's vapor-ware, and useless products, and certainly "fake jobs". Those existed in the '40s, too, and in any other time period or economy you care to look at.)
In my view, the problem is that white collar workers stopped thinking of themselves as Workers. Any of us who rely on a company for a paycheck (and, perniciously, in the US for health insurance) aren't Capital, even if we make high salaries. Maybe we're aspiring to join that class - we'll hit the startup lottery, or FIRE, or our IRA portfolio will go up forever - but we ain't yet. (That's fine, by the way: I'm using Marxist terms, but I'm not a Marxist. Pursuing financial independence, and the real - even if remote - possibility of attaining it is what's made the US such a dynamic economy.)
However, allowing our aspirations for wealth, or the relative comfort of white-collar jobs, to lead us to identify with the political goals of Capital - or worse, to adopt an elitist attitude towards people who work in what you call the "real economy" - is what's got the US into the mess we're currently in. That's the "genius" you identify in the present system, and the origin of the cruelty within it.
In reality, we're all Working Class (well, 99% of us are - although that proportion is way out of whack on this board, of all places!), and we need to (politically) act like it.
The Overton Window moves. Upper marginal tax rates above 90% were not just a position but the actual law in USA during the 1960s, but now are seen here as "far left". Seatbelt requirements were initially felt to be over-intrusion by government, and are now seen by almost everyone as just common sense. And so on and so forth.
(Companies do subsidize that limited set of schools, and pretty heavily, but it probably has more to do with social connections than economic merit.)
The system might break down to the point that what you're suggesting makes sense. On the other hand, "Indebted Worker" (from any of the three types above) allows companies a lot of power over their employees, so it might not.
I’m not sure Universities are to blame for this so much as lazy ass HR departments looking for an easy filter.
They will shutter academic departments but continue to pay a football coach more than the University president.
Not all schools do this but it is part of the conversation, sports spending has grown out of control along with everything else.
But there's an entire other set of equivalently bad-faith exclusionary and authoritarian ones that presented as in opposition of them. Those weren't actually very powerful before, but may get empowered depending on how things go.
The ideas that it’s ok if your child becomes a liberal, or that there might be good reasons why people who undertake higher education often become less conservative, are too horrible to contemplate. So they settle for “universities are bad.”
To tip my hand: I personally think universities don't have more people rallying to their defence because they have abdicated their responsibilities to provide space for open inquiry, and have instead allowed themselves to be institutionally & ideologically captured by a group of people with activist leanings and fringe beliefs not held by 90+% of Americans.
My answer to my question above is "in the past two decades, the universities could have done more to protect speech across the board and not pick favourites to protect and others to abandon, as they have clearly done. In the last two years they could have refused to tolerate lawlessness on their campuses (not just 'speech' but actual law-breaking, including assaults, going unprosecuted) instead of turning a blind eye when the criminality was from a favoured cause du jour." I think if Universities had not abandoned their leadership duties, they wouldn't have Trump bringing the hammer down on them with so much public support.
It's the little things like tv shows or movies with characters who seem to glorify ignorance, people who state self deprecating things like "I'm bad at math" and wear it like a bizarre badge of honor, etc.
I don't think your "quote" says what you think it says.
I can largely agree that it, similar to other things, has become too expensive. I cannot agree that it is not worth it for folks that can do it.
Totally inverted? Of course not. But there is a very real portion of individuals for whom debts exceed earnings and it is very much in the data. But if you want to ignore reality to win on semantics go right ahead.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-relationship-between-...
Again, I can agree if you are claiming it is of diminishing benefits. I'll go further and agree that there have been predatory practices to get people to take out loans they shouldn't take out. This is directly addressed by your source. Which, notably, still supports that people have higher incomes after graduation.
What I cannot at all agree with is it being "inverted." Nor can I agree that they are failing to educate people. By the stats I have seen, this just isn't the case.
The public is entirely within its rights to ensure that publicly supported universities are pursing activities consistent with the public’s values and ideology. That’s different than the public second guessing experts about verifiable facts.
Worker vs Employer aren't actually 2 groups of people, unless you really consider corporations as people.
The majority of the Democratic party is the group being actually shifted by the Overton window away from the actual political left. They are mostly centrists, and not leftists. Frequently they are conservatives. I wish Harris suggested half of the policies that got ascribed to her, but she was honestly to the right of Clinton.
Musk, Trump and the billionaires in their administration sure look like "oppressive elites" to me. Can you name multiple oppressive elites?
Edit: I think you answer your own question here. The actual oppressive elites have convinced the masses (and you) that there's a different amorphous group of "oppressive elites" that aren't the obvious ones standing right in front of your eyes. Obligatory https://xkcd.com/1013/
As for things that aren't "facts," but are nonetheless extensively studied and have wide consensus: should universities, for example, teach that the Civil War was actually about states' rights and that slaves benefitted from slavery? There is no historical evidence for these claims, yet a large percentage of the public believes them due to punditry, party loyalty, and other truth-distorting forces.
> In 2023, Florida banned DEI initiatives in its public university system. The ban resulted in changes to the state’s African American history curriculum, including a reinterpretation of the effects of chattel slavery to include that enslaved people gained beneficial skills.
Should universities fall in line with this kind of thinking, or is there a moral imperative for educators and academics to push back against propaganda? I think it's clearly the latter. Otherwise, the university system just becomes a Soviet-style state organ, good for only certain kinds of STEM.
Second, you said:
> As to what universities should have done, the answer is “just dribble.” Universities should be places that are just as eager to research effective approaches to mass deportations as all the DEI stuff they do.
That sounds like you're saying that universities should be blank slates, essentially devoid of values. But they should also kowtow to the values and ideology of the public...? So which is it?
In my opinion, given that academia is (by definition) the vanguard of knowledge, it must hold to its own set of internal values and principles, not ones delivered by outside forces. Pursuit of knowledge should be the primary driving force and not, for example, commercial pressure to bolster "clean coal" at the expense of sustainable energy.
Third, I should remind you that, in all likelihood, at least 50% of the population believes that universities today are pursuing activities consistent with their values and ideology. They pay taxes, too — perhaps even more taxes than conservatives. In a democracy, the plurality should not have dictatorial control over things like university policy; it's tantamount to taxation without representation. These things must be decided by consensus-building, not royal decree.
Also, as an aside, I suspect that when affirmative action was first introduced, a majority of the public still opposed civil rights and desegregation. Was that "DEI"? Barring direct state intervention, should universities have acquiesced to the masses? I stand by what I said: popularity is a poor barometer for educational value and policy.
People with a more authoritarian bent view dissent itself as objectionable. That's central to their whole worldview. Any institution or social organization that allows debate or questioning things is a problem for them.
In terms of soft power: Huge cultural movements (driven by left-leaning people) against church attendance and in favor of atheism really began in the 1960-1990 period. The hippie movement and all things associated with it, as well as the new age movement are big parts of this.
In general, I think you underestimate how much power religion had in 1950's America. It was constantly pushed on young people, and if you wanted to get a good job, you had to have "strong moral character" that was demonstrated by where you went on Sundays.
> In general, I think you underestimate how much power religion had in 1950's America. It was constantly pushed on young people, and if you wanted to get a good job, you had to have "strong moral character" that was demonstrated by where you went on Sundays.
I don't think I do, because that is basically what I said in my last paragraph :) My point was that religious institutions certainly had a tremendous amount of power and influence not that long ago - in disagreement with you saying that universities have reached a point that religious institutions never have.
What I meant there was about the level of state funding and state support. The bachelor's requirement is also more universal than the church requirement was.
The reason that it happens is that these institutions have been captured by a new ideology. Facts, evidence, reason: these don't matter any more. All that matters is conformity with the ideology that has no better name than "woke" (If I knew a better name I'd use it, because the term does upset people.) But the fundamental issue isn't the woke teaching, it is WHY it happens: the median humanities lecturer in the West is either far-left or completely incapable or unwilling to challenge far-left ideology.
A coordinate result is that they also use their judgement and teach a lot of woke rubbish. There is little internal pressure within the university not to teach courses with descriptions like this:
> This course examines the representations, contexts, and politics of gender, sexuality and the media. By interrogating the discourses of gender and sexuality as they are 'mediated' in a variety of forms (including television, film, popular music, social media, advertising), we will examine the construction and disruption of categories of gender and sexual identity, and their intersection with other identity frameworks.
If you talked this way in real life, you would be ridiculed and rightly so. Interrogating the discourses? Really? Construction and disruption of categories of sexual and gender identity?
Yet there are no classes taught by people with equivalently ridiculous fringe views on the other end of the spectrum. In fact, not even centrist perspectives are tolerated. Can you imagine a course at a public American university that looked at the development of gender ideology neutrally, covering founding figures like John Money and the cruel experiments he did on young boys?
The Overton window of the university barely overlaps with the Overton window of the real world.
Also I take issue with your 50% claim. I think it is likely that the vast majority of the public is opposed to using public money to teach far-left politics (Marxism, gender ideology, etc.) to young impressionable minds.
Every company has a board of directors who are natural persons, and ownership eventually is traceable back to natural persons, and their officers are natural persons. Grouping people up doesn't make them unpersons.
Worker and employer not your preferred languahe? Call it worker and manager, worker and executive, worker and CEO. Whatever you want. But the sentiment is very real. It is about treating the workplace as an antagonistic, conflict-driven, zero-sum environment. If I win, you lose. If you win, I lose.
I don't think that is how real workplaces actually work. I like my employer and I like my boss. Without them, I'd be out if a job. Without me, they'd be out of a worker. I don't think we have opposing interests at all.
It is definitely identity politics. It is the original identity politics: Marxism. The proletariat against the bourgeoisie and all that rubbish.