A lot of Americans support these attacks on universities. Why do people harbour this much animosity towards these institutions? Is there anything they could have done differently in the past decade or two to have broader sympathy now, or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?
There are some reasons that I think you probably know, which don't receive enough time and attention
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.
I have multiple family members that are frustrated with higher learning because their children came out of the system more liberal-minded than when they entered. In this politically divided climate they feel like the university system “stole” their children from them.
In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.
> In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.
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.
But the most likely life experiences to do that are ones that put a person in touch with new ideas and new situations. Universities are much better positioned to generate such experiences than, say, most jobs. To some degree, those that have attempted to be at least nominally more diverse (economically/racially/...) are also the sorts of places where students are more likely to meet other people who are not like them in some important ways, and this has always been the sort of experience that preferentially tilts most people towards liberal/progressive ideas.
I believe students are much more homogenic than you find in school (eg dumb people are around) or in joining the military (you meet conservative people).
There are many axes on which to measure homogeneity or diversity.
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).
That sort of breaks out as to personal values versus Overton window. It has been an extreme shift towards authoritarianism in the US -- to the point where case after case of folks with moral courage call it out despite where they stood even 10 years ago.
Younger people with student loans, credit card balances, and good health might eventually become older people with retirement savings, investments, and poor health.
> In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.
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.
Also to some degree there is anti-elitist backlash after being told you need to have a bachelor's, which is very expensive at these universities, but also it's basically impossible to get an entry-level white collar job without one these days; and for a while the economy bifurcated with different outcomes for white-collar knowledge vs. blue-collar workers.
60% of the US workforce these days is white collar, and it's one of the great illusions of our time. Most of these jobs only exist to keep busy the 60% of the US workforce that has a degree. In the 1940's about 30% of the US workforce was white collar and only 5% had degrees. What caused this change? It's probably because blue collar workers made so much money and had so much leverage that businesses shipped all their jobs overseas. Blue collar people actually make real things and perform useful toil for society, whereas now they're working fake jobs for less money which they're told has higher social status. It's genius the way the system works. The way it takes from people (student loans, less pay) while persuading them they got a better deal. But how can you have a society where the majority of workers are administrators? Well you needn't look any further than America to find your answer. One day the music is going to stop and other nations, like China, whose workers held no such delusions of grandeur, will have the advantage. Their illusion is that the government is a dictatorship of proles, which makes people think it's high status to be a prole. Plus when your government is officially one big labor union, you can effectively ban unions from interfering with production.
One of the reasons white collar is desirable is the physical toll that work over a lifetime can take on a persons body. So, in one sense, it could be perceived as a better deal. Whether it actually is or not is another thing.
Chinese industry is not known for caring overly much about the long term effects on the bodies of their workers. They have more.
And yes, I find it scary to think of what the world is competing with in China. It is hard to compete with their brutal workforce ethics (or lack thereof) and as they seem to be getting well on top of technology too the future is theirs it seems.
Chinese working hours are mostly long to balance out low productivity. This worked for Japan until it did not; Japanese growth stalled until Japanese workers were poorer than Taiwanese or South Koreans by some measures. And China is racing fastest towards demographic collapse, particularly in its largest, most productive cities by. People 60 and older make up 37% of the population in Shanghai, and there the TFR is 0.6.
"White collar" labor, in a service / knowledge economy doesn't mean "not making real things". Most (?) people on this board do something software or science or product related. Software is real, even if it's intangible. Research is real, even if it's inscrutable. Heck, Design is real, even if it's ineffable.
(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.
A lot of white collar work is just larping as the 1%. It's due to the over-manufacturing of elites. Roles that exist to keep people busy while confering illusory social status aren't very useful to society. Freedom and usefulness comes from humility and devotion to others. For example, you don't need to be in the 1% to have financial independence. You just have to not spend money on things that cargo cult the 1% like a fancy home, fancy car, and fancy dress, since that's a weakness in yourself that the 1% exploits to keep folks dependent on paychecks. Refusing to covet what the 1% has is how you act like a true 99%er. Not through politics, but by changing what's in your heart.
I agree with everything you say about elite over-production, chasing social status, and cargo-culting material goods. It is indeed, bullshit, that makes many exploitable - which, of course, is the whole point, from the "system's" point of view. On an individual level, for those of us in sufficiently privileged positions, breaking that dynamic is as you say.
However, I don't think you can ignore politics! "Changing what's in your heart", does diddly if you're, say, working in the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. It took a +century of dedicated labor activism and political effort to get to a point where any workers at all could dream of breaking free, and in the US we've arguably backslid in recent decades. Continued political action and worker solidarity are desperately needed.
Difference in perspective, man. I practice "collective giving" by donating money and time to help those less blessed than I have been, and by voting for measures I believe will strengthen society, even if they're against to my (narrowly defined) economic self-interest. We're all part of the collective, and owe each other that.
I disagree with everything you just said. It's like you have the complete opposite morality as me.
I think there are more valuable things you can give people than money. I like to enrich others by writing open source code and blogging about it. It's scalable. It doesn't make me poorer. It provides others with entertainment, useful tools, and most importantly knowledge.
Giving money to the desperate offers a bad return on investment for society. Money is better given to people who are having the most impact enriching society.
Voting is about as impactful as praying.
Every altruistic person has a responsibility to look after their self-interests first. Since if you're not strong and healthy, then you won't be capable of giving to others.
Finally, you don't owe anyone anything. The moment people expect you to give, it stops being a gift.
> I think there are more valuable things you can give people than money.
I do agree with you about that. In the context of labor law (where this discussion started), the most important - a 40-hour work-week, overtime, minimum wage, worker-safety protections, the right to unionize, federal holidays - don't directly redistribute money, but they make life better for everyone. Public education, state-funded universities and health-care systems: same. Public roads and bridges. Research institutions. I will vote to raise my own taxes to support all of those things. More directly, I am a YIMBY (google it, if you're not familiar with the term), even if it hurts my home's value.
Like you say, you and I have very different moral frameworks. Yours is certainly ascendant in the US right now. I don't think it's going to go well, but let's check back in a few years and see if either of us have changed our minds?
Those policies ostensibly make life better for people, but the main reason they exist is because they stimulate technological development by driving up the cost of labor. Societies where labor was cheap, like dixie and ancient rome, weren't going to get us to the singularity. Their smart people were too comfortable. As for YIMBY now that's something we can agree on.
And this anti elitist backlash will lead to… greater wealth inequality as the middle class is forced to cash out their equity and investments in a down market to be gobbled up by the top 1% like Elon Musk.
Ironically, many elite universities are actually either free or nearly free, for lower-income students. The super-rich probably don't care. While we middle-class families don't qualify for need-based aid, and are on the hook to pay outrageous sums, largely to subsidize the aid for others.
Lower economic strata doesn't take on debt, they get aid and free rides, cherry work study jobs to put some money in the pocket too. It is the middle class or upper middle class that insists in eschewing their state school benefit for a more or less comparable school in another state (or without favorable scholarship and aid package) that take the brunt of the loans.
I sure had to. Work study sure was nicer than the crap jobs I'd had but no cake walk: I graded a lot of homework and exams as well as helping a lot of rich kids ace their class.
[edit: I should admit that it's been 20 years, things may have shifted a lot]
Work study jobs vary a lot. Some of them are just wiping whiteboards after the lecture ends in the 300 person classrooms or walking around the library taking headcount every 30 mins. Front desk shifts at the dorm were also another easy one; hand over a package every now and then just do homework or slack off otherwise. Other ones probably work you like a dog and it isn't clear to be fair what the best ones might be as far as working in homework at the same time unless you get an upperclassman to tell you.
While not about resentment towards universities specifically, I thought this article in The Baffler [1] did a good job of framing a dynamic that, I think, contributes to this phenomenon.
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.
Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves? Me neither. That’s a they-hate-me-cause’-they-ain’t-me kind of logic.[1]
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.
I don't think you're necessarily drawing the right conclusion from what the GP said. It seems more likely to me that non-degree-holders aren't resentful about not having a degree, but are resentful that white collar work more or less requires a degree these days. It wasn't always that way; degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.
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.
> degree holders used to be a minority in white collar work.
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.
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.
> Remember all those people who are resentful (of course that word) towards degree-holders because they wish they had one themselves?
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.
The political and ideological divide speaks for itself, but on behalf of the common folk universities have been failing their core mission - to provide the people with a quality education. The inversion and disconnect between the cost of tuition and economic outcomes is stunning. Too many kids who don't know better are pressured into pursuing higher education and taking on massive debt, only to graduate without any job prospects or reasonable hopes of paying off their loans. The salt in the wounds is that universities are flush with cash, yet its spent on anything and everything except for the welfare of the students.
> The salt in the wounds is that universities are flush with cash, yet its spent on anything and everything except for the welfare of the students.
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.
Recent events alone do not fully represent the affairs of the past 2+ decades. Community, state, ivy, all levels were gorging themselves on federal funding and endowments. I have no comment on the current admin, but blatantly inefficient use of funds is an understatement.
Charitably, they may mean "the proceeds from their endowments" (or maybe "engorging their endowments", if that's even a proper use of the word), but I think that's a weak point. Proportionally very, very few institutions have significant endowments.
It feels to me like part of the disconnect is that education and job training isn't necessarily the same thing. For many majors improving economic outcomes is not the core mission.
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.
> but on behalf of the common folk universities have been failing their core mission - to provide the people with a quality education.
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.
Have they been failing at their core missions, though? You say there has been an inversion/disconnect between cost of tuition and economic outcomes, but looking at the data doesn't back that. At least, I have yet to see anything that supports an inversion. Diminished returns maybe. Certainly a good case to not take out loans to get into school if you don't have a reasonable chance of graduation.
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.
Tuition is skyrocketing and wages are stagnant. I'm not making a hard claim about inversion of ROI, but I don't need to. What's the reason for college becoming so expensive?
You know it's kind of rude to dismiss someone when they clarify and then stuff words in their mouth?
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.
I'm not dismissing, I'm pointing out that you made a hard claim, even if you didn't intend it.
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.
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.
People in the 1960s were murdered for protesting. You might imagine that this motivated an end to protest, and everyone calmed down. But in fact, it didn't. The very best way to motivate increased protest is to act like a bunch of monsters.
The right's problem with universities is the same as the left's problem with churches:
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.
Left leaning, but authoritarian, governments have also cracked down on universities. The issue isn't the political lean.
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.
> 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.
It's almost like they produce something of actual value.
This is a conversation about American politics, so I don't think how other countries acted is relevant.
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.
In terms of use of hard power against religion: Mandatory prayer in school was outlawed in 1962. Teaching creationism in public schools was banned in 1987. Teaching the Bible (and other religious texts) in public schools is mostly banned. Title VII of the civil rights act prevented employers and many other institutions from discriminating based on religion in 1964. These were all passed by the left.
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.
School prayer was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Does that count as being 'passed by the left'? I'm not sure about the others but thank you for the examples.
> 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.
Yes, in those cases, a left-leaning supreme court made a ruling on a case brought by a left-leaning plaintiff with support from left-leaning nonprofits.
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.
There's a highly emotional Right-Left culture war going on in America. Many of our "flagship" universities conspicuously sided with the Left - at least on most of the "litmus test" issues. And where universities didn't do that, the Right found it advantageous to talk up the association & outrage anyway.
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.)
I probably have a skewed sample, but in my observations those with the best reasoning skills tended to have a mix of views that would be labelled "left" and "right". The better the reasoning skills the less likely they were to just agree with things like "trans women are women" or "capitalism is the best economic system" and the more likely they were to dissect the statement and terms.
Actually, even there there would be caveats. E.g. maybe Russia would benefit from climate change? Maybe the cost benefit curve with my time discounting and likely tech advancement means its not worth doing anything about now?
Billionaires shifted the overton window by pouring money into extreme right-wing media outlets and social media platforms. Every other existing institution now appears "left-wing" by comparison. That's not universities' fault.
Not true, at least on social issues, which is what the universities are getting burned for. Policy positions that were mainstream in 2000 are now painted as far-right.
That's how society progresses though. Before 1865, slavery was mainstream and abolitionists were weird radical crazies. Before 1965, "Jim Crow" laws that said non-whites had to use different bathrooms and drinking fountains were mainstream, and people who opposed them were seen as unreasonable.
And back in the 1960s a planned economy was normal and reasonable, and many progressives openly called for normalisation of sex with teenagers. Sometimes shifts in attitudes are progress. Sometimes they're just a random walk. Sometimes the left is right, sometimes the right is.
I'm not sure either of those are particularly progressive -- the current president seems to be a fan of tariffs, a form of planned economy popular in the 19th century (and condemned by most economists since, who favor free trade). And child brides are a common feature of many right-wing religious groups, argued on the grounds that that people (particularly female) traditionally married in their teen years.
Yes, opposition to gay marriage was so mainstream that even Barack Obama campaigned supporting Clinton's Defense of Marriage Act. Even in the Democratic primaries, as late as 2008, being pro gay marriage was seen as a liability.
I don't know that it's painted as far right as much as conservative (which it is) and by some as bigoted.
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.
> Policy positions that were mainstream in 2000 are now painted as far-right.
Painted? Historically, there is a bunch of groups that were opposed to homosexual rights. I wonder how do you think those organization are "painted" on the political spectrum?
> Policy positions that were mainstream in 2000 are now painted as far-right.
Maybe that speaks something about a country that still has the KKK, and allowed its African American population to vote in 1965, not even 40 years before 2000.
Honestly man since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left in the US threw their whole weight into pushing the Overton window on identity politics/intersectionality to the point that "real" old time leftists and communists (like my father) were treated like some sort of conservatives, lol. They went way past the sustainable point.
I feel like the people who say things like "communists were treated like some sort of conservatives because of identity politics" are telling on themselves.
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.
I'm saying that the problem isn't identity politics, but that the American right is terrified of actual policies from the American Left. And they're so terrified they have to make a bid deal of the more divisive social policies (characteristic of the term "identity politics") rather than their economic policies that are incredibly popular.
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/
They talk about identity politics all the time. It is us vs them on everything. Worker vs employer is the quintessential example. Two groups that in the real world must work together, and do. But in the mind of the political left they are not just people that occasionally have adverse interests but mostly shared interests (my success is yours). No, they are sworn enemies.
I don't think you know what "identity politics" are, which is kinda funny to me. I would love to have discussions where identity politics meant "Worker vs Employer".
Worker vs Employer aren't actually 2 groups of people, unless you really consider corporations as people.
Well firstly, bodies corporate are obviously legal persons and nobody with any clue disagrees with that. But that isn't what I am talking about.
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.
Hum, kinda. Trump has tainted a lot of concepts by associating with them, and those should fall outside of our culture as soon as he loses power.
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.
Provide a way to get a lower-cost credential without using the tuition to subsidize research/athletics/arts/social programs.
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.
I've got the ticket to get in the gate and I'm pretty resentful of having to get it. Looking back there were a lot better ways to spend 4 years and 100k.
Honestly, it feels like the kind of thing that companies which actually want merit-based graduates should want to subsidize more aggressively.
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.
Why do they want meritocracy? The companies I've seen up close want "certified Smart Kid", in which case nearly any degree will do; "pre-trained worker", in which case they require a degree in a particular field; or "someone well-connected", in which case they want someone from a limited set of schools.
(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.
Most people don't care about university protests. They're largely a means to get laid while achieving nothing and at worst destroying their own university. As long as they don't spill out into the surrounding town any outrage is essentially theater.
It was the progressive push of theoretically neutral institutions taking stands on moral politics. People who were fine with universities being staffed with liberals, but neutral in practice, realized their tax dollars were subsidizing institutions that were actively taking a side in national politics.
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.
Because torturing people is illegal and contrary to our fundamental values, while deporting illegal immigrants is a very popular and sensible policy that is uncontroversial everywhere except the United States of Exceptionalism.
Torturing people was considered very cool and very legal until quite recently. Some of the leaders involved in Iraq and Afghanistan era torture are still in positions of power. And I would not be shocked in the slightest if it came back under Trump II.
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.
First, what is a "fact"? For example, is climate change a fact? Prominent members of the current administration do not seem to think so; they're basically a step removed from labeling it woke and DEI.
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.
The issue isn't the universities teaching "woke facts" or something. I think most people accept that university lecturers should be able to use their judgement to decide what to teach. The issue is their conduct in engaging in racial discrimination. That is unpopular and unlawful.
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.
Yes you are right. They shouldn't be researching how to racially discriminate at all. They should be focused exclusively on researching effective mass deportation instead of DEI.
>or is people's ambivalence towards elite universities 100% irrational?
am·biv·a·lence /amˈbiv(ə)ləns/ noun
the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone.
Ambivalence seems like a rational take on post-secondary education in the US. I'd say an unwavering opinion (positive or negative) would be irrational. It's such a complex beast that serves so many roles and touches so many lives.
>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.
One thing I haven’t seen anyone mention in the replies. There are millions of conservative parents who sent their children to college and then “lost” those children when they turned into a “liberal.”
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.”
I can't speak to universities specifically, but I've always felt there has been a strain of anti-intellectualism underlying a great deal of mainstream America for as long as I can remember.
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.
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.
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.
I'm referring to threats to pull hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding if certain demands aren't met. But yes, there are also plenty of rhetorical attacks.
Yeah fair enough. I agree Trump was elected democratically and he's acting on behalf of "the people" when he threatens to pull funding. Perhaps attack was the wrong word.
From what I've been able to gather, a mix of jealousy for not being involved with institutions along with some form of Dunning Kruger effect thinking that the institutions have no merit or value (i.e. the individual thinks they could do better / have no need / are somehow subject to the outcomes of the institution).
I think there's class warfare practically baked in with how paying for college works today. Imagine trying to determine how much a fancy car costs, and being told "it depends on how much money you have". That's on the upper-middle-class side.
The other side is just part of the worldview of the rampant anti-intellectualism which Trump rode to power.
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.
Yes they went to universities. No, they are not trying to help the students. They don't even pretend to be trying to do so. They are nit trying to make it cheaper and they are not trying to make it more accessible.
They agenda was either openly the opposite or they ignored the students. Except when they think they are too progressive and attack then verbally.
I mean, at a minimum, they think they're helping students. Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse, that doesn't make sense.
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.
>Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse
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 can't find the source of that quote (possibly a misquote?), but if I had to guess, he's saying he sold people on the problem, knowing they wouldn't like the solution. Everyone likes the idea of fixing the budget deficit, and some people like the idea of cutting wasteful government spending, but the act of fixing the budget means people lose jobs, and lives are destroyed. Even though it has to happen, people don't like watching it happen.
I don't think your "quote" says what you think it says.
I think they were thinking of Carlos Menem's "si hubiera dicho lo que iba a hacer, no me votaba nadie” , but AFAIK thats a misquote [1]
A more recent Argentinian president (Mauricio Macri) said a similar thing though: " If I had told them everything I was going to do, they would have voted to lock me up in an asylum" (Tl mine).
Original [2]: "Si les decía todo lo que iba a hacer, votaban por encerrarme en el manicomio"
> Nobody would vote for a politician who just makes things worse, that doesn't make sense.
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.
For the original argument above about Republicans and college I would focus more on things like who has been trying to make student debt as something special, something near impossible to get out of.
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).
In what way does an intellectual race to the bottom help students? If students want to learn on the cheap they can use the internet.
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.
apologies, I meant to suggest that Trump & MAGA are very hostile towards universities and Trump is threatening to pull so much federal funding some colleges may have to close, and a lot of Americans seem OK with that. I'm not making a value statement on that, Trump was elected to run the government, hence him reallocating funds (in this case) is part of our democratic process. People chose to put him in charge because they wanted him in charge.
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.
Hard not to see this as a class war that has been fed by some of the personalities that were big in the "conservative" sphere for a long time. Modern podcast influencers are big, but this isn't exactly a new thing. Rush and his ilk were big on lashing out against "ivory tower" theories. And they didn't invent the idea. Just went after easy targets.
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.
I think it's actually extremely simple.. because the herd mentality is extremely simple. Intellectuals think it's complex because intellectuals love complexity..
This is what happened..
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..
Nothing about this is new - the right has harbored a particular hatred for "academics" and "intellectuals" since at least the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. Today's fear of "wokism" is just the prior generation's fear of "cultural marxism" with a new coat of paint.
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?
I think you'll find that no matter how crazy it gets or what it bleeds into, it's never going to be acceptable to discuss here. As soon as people get a whiff of "politics" they're going to start flagging. Especially if they see the "T" word.
The regime could be rolling dissidents into mass graves and the only valid point of discussion for most people here would be packing algorithms.
You're framing this in an odd way if you want neutral responses. Is withdrawing federal funding an attack? The government has always used the power of the purse as a lever to influence many institutions, including universities, and it often uses this mechanism to exert influence for ideological purposes. The most famous example is withholding funding for roads until states mandated a drinking age of 21. It's how the federal-state power asymmetry works. The disturbing thing is that Congress isn't really the one exerting it in this case, not that it's being used at all.
As for the roads example, which would go to my second point if I understand you correctly, I think the analogy is limited: roads aren't gate-kept by admissions committees for certain intangible criteria for who can ride on them, with an artificial limit on how many cars overall, while they receive federal funding. If that was happening, then you'd have a similar situation to what universities are doing.
It's not meant as an analogy for this case, so don't worry about it too much. My only point in bringing it up is an example of evidence for prior governments being more than willing to use funding as a lever to influence the policy of institutions they are not directly responsible for. I don't believe it was to be 1:1 to make that point, as indeed it is not.
