Universities, like many institutions, have also become more like large incumbent businesses than previously - e.g. perpetuating their own existence over having strong core values.
Things like this are why Hillsdale College rejects all federal funds. So they can do what they want without threat of the government revoking funding[4].
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/biden-vaccines-delta...
[2] https://www.texastribune.org/2024/06/12/texas-title-ix-lgbtq...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/05/13/477896804...
[4] https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/the-co...
Biden/Obama: We want you to accept and protect everyone
Trump: I want you to deliberately reject certain races and nationalities, and close all the departments studying stuff I don’t like.
Which race are colleges not allowed to accept? Source for this?
See https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/17/defense-depa... for one example where it's particularly blatant.
I call bullshit on them wanting to ban women and black people from colleges, that is not what they mean when they say end "DEI", you are crazy.
Can you post a single link where they even hinted at wanting to ban black people and women from colleges? That is such an egregious accusation that you need more than just that they took down a page about a black guy.
Oh I’m sure it’s not as egregious as them wanting to ‘literally’ ban them. There’s no need for something quite that drastic. But think of how much nicer the place would be (not to mention more useful for networking) if none of these poor people were ever accepted in the first place.
Much like 90s rockers, they now rage exclusively on behalf of the machine.
that's because universities are now businesses first, research institutions second, and academic institutions third
Being annoyed, inconvenienced, or even negatively impacted by the speech acts of others is by design. To throw that out is to make a calculation that without freedom of speech, your perspective will be the natural default without activism to upset it. A dangerous assumption.
(Picking two random groups:) If you are Pakistani and are in a room of all Indian people, and the others say how horrible Pakistanis are and how research shows that Pakistanis are less intelligent or prone to violence, that is a very intimidating atmosphere and it would be hard to endure, much less speak up.
If that one Pakistani says the same about Indians, it's obnoxious and annoying, but it's no threat to anyone. The many Indians are not vulnerable. That's the difference.
Furthermore, the dominant groups in a culture tend to create systems and knowledge that support them to the exclusion of others - sometimes explicitly and intentionally. That's systemic discrimination - the system naturally generates it if you follow the usual path. It takes some effort to create space for other points of view.
Whether the typical DEI policies are optimal is another question. I haven't heard anyone come up with a great solution. Some pretend it's not a problem and there is no prejudice, which is absurd and not a solution; it's just sticking one's head in the sand - because they can, because they are not vulnerable.
Much like a right-winger or a Christian at one of these universities.
The policies didn't help the groups they were supposedly about helping, they helped the groups that were already dominant (race and religion matter a lot less in a group that's all upper class), whether by design or because they evolved to.
Do you have any evidence?
> Much like a right-winger or a Christian at one of these universities.
So is the first quote not based on evidence, but based on your ideology? There's no reason any vulnerable minority shouldn't be protected, though 'right-wingers' and Christians (usually meaning conservative Christians) are hardly vulnerable in the US, even if they are a minority on many campuses. They rule the country and always have, have access to every job and privilege.
The absolute narcissism on display here is crazy.
It destroys social trust, which is what the real radicals aim at. If you want to fight the far right, work to build it.
I think the DEI rule should be simply to ban intolerance, with some education about how norms can be intolerant of minorities, and the experience of being a vulnerable minority in a room of majority.
Weird how those specific Christians who think women and LGBT are people don't feel discriminated against.
It isn't just the dominate group, it is everyone.
So simplifying, if you have only 2 groups, one being 30% and the other 70% of the population, it would at first appear the 70% group has an advantage for finding jobs, but in reality they do not, as while they are favored at 70% of jobs, they are also competing against an equivalently larger group of people.
Anyway the implementation of racial preferences in college applications, and DEI has led to a system that systematical favors certain groups, and gaslighting that somehow this isn't the case.
I don't support Trump but liberals denying this reality, along with various other incredibly stupid woke positions, has led to the current situation, where we have a complete and utter imbecile running the country, because hey, at least he doesn't deny reality in regards DIE/social issues.
Never a smart thing to write; only a reflection on the author's blindness and arrogance - a toxic combination that is, indeed, what you describe.
> has led to the current situation
> he doesn't deny reality in regards DIE/social issues.
You have that right. But doing this is not always wise. Labeling people as immoral and ostracizing them, especially on 50/50 issues, is one of the reason why the American political system is so radicalized at the moment.
In his Second Inaugural, Lincoln threads the needle in a way that is frankly unachievable for even most skilled politicians. "Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other" seems like an acknowledgement of moral nuance, but he follows it up with, "It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces but let us judge not that we be not judged."
Speaking to a nation in which a part of it is in open revolt over the right to keep other humans as slaves is certainly an extreme case. But it isn't categorically different from any other political struggle. People are going to accuse one another of being immoral. It's the human condition. A legal system that protects this behavior is the bedrock of democracy. It doesn't matter how annoying you find the people doing the judging.
I guess some people were never in favor of freedom of speech, they just wanted a world where they faced minimal interpersonal conflict, and the current order for a while was serving that purpose.
Sure, agreed. But groups and institutions taking even a dime of tax money should not get to place a thumb on the scales of those arguments. US universities, in particular, chose a side and then silenced all opposing viewpoints.
It was inevitable that the silenced would eventually mobilise, and they did. And now the group has to abandon their arguments about allowing "punching up" and instead pontificate on "free speech".
Myself (and many others) argued over the last decade and more that the pendulum always swings back, so lets be a little less extreme in the left/right argument. I, on this site, got labeled a non-thinking right-winger apologist for pointing out that the mainstream views on transgender for minors does not match the views that the powers-that-be were pushing.
You can't push for normalising the silencing of views for well over a decade without you yourself eventually falling victim to the same normalisation.
Your comment surprises me, because at this point, there really isn't any contention over the fact that universities have been doing exactly this.
So while I am assuming that you don't actually know, I'll give you a short list of links (I'm not doing research that takes me more than 5m).
> What did US universities do to "silence all opposing viewpoints" on any issues?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/musbahshaheen/2024/06/05/stop-r...
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/blog/diversity-statemen...
https://www.thefire.org/news/anti-free-speech-trends-campus-...
https://www.thefire.org/facultyreport
https://www.hrdive.com/news/stop-requiring-diversity-stateme...
(UK, but still the same idea) https://www.thetimes.com/uk/education/article/kathleen-stock...
https://www.thefire.org/news/speaker-disinvited-uncomfortabl...
https://www.businessinsider.com/list-of-disinvited-speakers-...
And, finally, some charts: https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/ne...
Analysis of the data FIRE has collected reveals a clear political trend in the likelihood that a speaker will be targeted with a disinvitation effort. Speakers are far more likely to face disinvitation efforts from opponents to their political left than from those to their right. Since 2000, those behind the disinvitation efforts targeted speakers with views more conservative than their own nearly three times more frequently (97 attempts) than they targeted speakers with views more liberal than their own (36 attempts).
It pains me to say it, but it aligns with my experience.
> Did they kick students out of school because of their viewports? Claw back their financial aid? Get them deported? Physically harm them?
None of that is required to silence opposing views.
> I sure don't remember things like that happening in widespread manner to conservative students, let alone happening in a way that was organized top-down by the universities' leadership.
"Allowing only one viewpoint" doesn't require that the university administration has a top-down directive to expel students, only that they allow one viewpoint and silence the other.
Once again, that this happened is not in dispute, so I am left wondering where you were going with this response.
Yes actually! Almost every presigious/non public college has speech codes. And those speech codes have consequences. Up to, and including, expulsion if you keep breaking them.
Check out how well each college is doing here: https://www.thefire.org/colleges
They literally couldn't say "black man fighting against racism" about a civil rights icon without losing millions in funding. I have no idea how someone can argue that this kind of censorship targeting universities is acceptable
Just my 2 euro cents.
And what do you propose instead? I'm not seeing the EU doing any better than the US with their lowest socioeconomic class groups.
Talking points are nifty. But, at some point, you have to propose an actual solution that does something.
Bigotry exists. What are you going to do about it? It seems that the most popular answers right now vary from "Not a goddamn thing" to "Fuck those bastards."
(In reality, I'm pessimistic that there is much that can be actively done. The bigots who threw slurs at my immigrant ancestors didn't so much get better as much as just change epithets and targets. Sadly, so it goes.)
Key word „socioeconomic“ groups. It should not be racist policies based on skin color. Help poor people, help people growing up in shitty neighbourhods. True diversity is people with different life experiences. Sometimes it correlates with skin color, sometimes it doesn't. Just like poor economic situation and shitty upbringing.
> Bigotry exists. What are you going to do about it? It seems that the most popular answers right now vary from "Not a goddamn thing" to "Fuck those bastards."
Of course. Including among those so-called „anti racists“.
Slightly offtoic, but it's funny that modern „antifa“ is one of the most authoritarian-minded people I've met. While a good chunk of far-right people are full-on anarchistic-minded people. With about equal amount of bigotry on either side. People loooove abusing labels to further their agenda.
> (In reality, I'm pessimistic that there is much that can be actively done. The bigots who threw slurs at my immigrant ancestors didn't so much get better as much as just change epithets and targets. Sadly, so it goes.)
And then there're bigot immigrants who talk shit about locals. My country was a major source of migration two decades ago and it's horrible what our people would say about locals. Now tables switched and we got more incoming migration. And now we're on the other side of the same transaction guests not respecting our culture. Bigots are everywhere. But current policies tend to focus on one side of bigots which just breeds more resent on the other side.
That is, in fact, what a lot of those DEI programs did. The problem is that "lower socioeconomic status" is a high correlate proxy for "minority" in the US. There are simply a lot more minorities in the US in the lower socioeconomic brackets.
The problem, at the end of the day, is that the a lot of the market became zero sum. When there were lots of jobs and lots of college slots, nobody cared so much about affirmative action-type programs.
[1] https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/20-1199_hgdj.pdf
They could. They just preferred to play the victim.
Sounds like they are being forced to take the Morgan Freeman Approach to Ending Racism: stop talking about race. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2RwJlQdzpE
"Alarming proportions of students self-censor, report worry or discomfort about expressing their ideas in a variety of contexts, find controversial ideas hard to discuss, show intolerance for controversial speakers, find their administrations unclear or worse regarding support for free speech, and even report that disruption of events or violence are, to some degree, acceptable tactics for shutting down the speech of others."
"Less than one-in-four students (22%) reported that they felt “very comfortable” expressing their views on a controversial political topic in a discussion with other students in a common campusspace. Even fewer (20%) reported feeling “very comfortable” expressing disagreement with one of their professors about a controversial topic in a written assignment; 17% said the same about expressing their views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion; 14%, about expressing an unpopular opinion to their peers on a social media account tied to their name; and 13%, about publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic. "
And as for examples, the sitting NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, who in hindsight was far more correct on everything COVID-related than the CDC was: had this to say about his experience at Stanford: https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-an-interview...
" I presented the results in a seminar in the medical school, and I was viciously attacked. ... It was really nasty: allegations of research misconduct, undeclared conflicts of interest… In reality, the whole study was funded by small-dollar donations."
"It was very stressful. I had to hire lawyers. I've been at Stanford for 38 years and I felt it was really, really out of character. At one point, the Chair of Medicine ordered me to stop going on media and to stop giving interviews about COVID policy. They were trying to totally silence me."
Bhattacharya who signed the Great Barrington Delaration, advocating for herd immunity and "focused protection" for the elderly? Just imagine how much larger the death toll would have been.
This page has a good list of concerns about Bhattacharya, including how the study mentioned in your link was flawed and one of the co-authors went on to admit the results were wrong: https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/jay-bhattacharya-has-a-h...
And as far as the great Barrington declaration is concerned, it is widely accepted now that the lockdown strategy failed, and that focused protection would have saved far more lives and caused far less economic harm and educational harm, which by the way, correlate with loss of life and loss of years of life. Even far left news outlets admit this now: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/covid-lockdowns-big-...
Is it?
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/impact-non-...
Most other private universities could have easily managed the relationship, but a mix of inertia and vindictiveness from certain alumni (eg. Ackman) messed it up.
Mind you, Dartmouth is also kind of unique in that their alumni relations team actually TRY to maintain a relationship. The other high prestige colleges (excluding USC) ignore you until they need to hit fundraising KPIs.
A Tuck or Dartmouth College grad will always fight for an alum if they make it to the shortlist - most other Ivy grads don't (Wharton kinda, but that's only for Wharton). This really helps build loyalty.
[0] - https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/19/trump-is-bombarding...
Yale and Dartmouth are similar in student body size, yet Yale has been hit by investigations [0] while Dartmouth has been spared.
[0] - https://www.ed.gov/about/news/press-release/office-civil-rig...
The Israel-Palestine protests (which sparked this whole university culture war issue) were fairly active at Dartmouth as well, but messaging around it was better handled by their admin.
The only conservative-ish and kinda prestigious college (not university) I can think of is Claremont McKenna, but they are drowned out within the larger Claremont community.
[0] - https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2024/11/2024-election-a...
[1] - https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2023/11/2023-election-s...
Dartmouth, sure, it may have a high energy protest scene and be smart and whatever. But no-one knows about it - not because they are crafty - but because it's in freakin Hanover.
You can drill down and infer some of the details about the funding programs.
I think this is the full list, NIH looks like a subset of overall HHS funding, and NSF is the actual single largest (around $2.5M)
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=report&tin=U3...
Wesleyan falls into a really weird bucket: a private liberal arts university, generally considered a "little Ivy" with a modest, slightly better than its competitors (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ivies) in terms of research clout. The impact of losing all scientific federal funding would be noticeable, but presumably, not fatal; I don't think they structured the operating costs of the university to be dependent on federal research funding like many other schools.
I grew up at Wesleyan- both my parents worked there, it paid for my university education, gave me access to the internet in the 1980s (via NSF funding), and gave me insight into liberal education, all of which prepared me to go off to a California university, maximize my education, and deploy that into my career. I think many people don't recognize the intense second order effects (mostly positive) of federal funding of research.
Wesleyan has a $250 million operating budget, so the (from what REPORTER indicates) $1.6 million in NIH funding represents 0.6% of their budget. In contrast, the $600 million in NIH funding to Columbia represents about 10% of its $6 billion operating budget.
So both in terms of absolute numbers and relative numbers, the NIH contributions to Wesleyan are de minimis.
of course we do - but we're sadly discovering how easy it is for the government to target and coerce these universities, with nobody stepping up to stop them
>"The Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States; but all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States;"
What does "general Welfare" mean in this context? Are those words just meaningless filler, or should they be interpreted to indicate that the spending must be in furtherance of another specifically enumerated power? I believe the latter (Madisonian take), but this is a contentious subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxing_and_Spending_Clause#Gen...
If you were to go the most direct route, you might want to let the actual "customers", the students, pay for it all, delayed until they have a job of course?
A different version of student loans, it's the university itself that lets them study for free to collect later. I have no idea how that would turn out, I'm sure there would be so many different cases, impossible for me to tell what this would mean and look like.
The biggest problem I can see right away is that it's probably going to increase inequality between institutions. Ever more sorting of the rich and the poor into different places, with huge disparity of funding. So, probably a terrible idea unless the goal is dystopia.
Which leads me back to my question: What is your alternative? I think the government is better than pretty much all others. Private donors are quite problematic to rely on, and you only get the 1% to have even more power over education.
If you take money from an entity, you become an extension of that entity.
Winning elections could work.
> Watching the video of this poor woman at Tufts who was abducted by federal agents —I wrote my blog today about that. I think the government is spreading terror, and that’s what they mean to do.
Brother, a blog post is, quoting you, a “nice conversation.” A New Yorker interview is a nice conversation.
Getting rid of legacy admissions… guess who wins elections? The sons and daughters of politicians! Whereas grandstanding on X or Y achieves nothing.
Give me a break.
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.
This is an excellent way of explaining why some injustices are ignored and others decried. Thank 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?
The regime could be rolling dissidents into mass graves and the only valid point of discussion for most people here would be packing algorithms.
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.)
this is mostly true of elite schools (who nowadays are mostly selling a brand more than an education), not so much of state schools
[edit: I should admit that it's been 20 years, things may have shifted a lot]
(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.
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.
I live my life palms down, not palms up.
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 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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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...
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 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.
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.
It's bizarre to see it all playing out in the open.
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.
I’m not sure Universities are to blame for this so much as lazy ass HR departments looking for an easy filter.
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.)
Such as?
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.
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?
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_homosexuals_in_...
- https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230294158_9
- https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-030-00994-6
> 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.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_segregation
- https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/white-supremacist-ideals-o...
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.
Great example! So... what happened to Bernie in the Democratic party?
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.
Worker vs Employer aren't actually 2 groups of people, unless you really consider corporations as people.
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.
But then why are they supported, for the most part, not by the most oppressed masses, but by the oppressive elites?
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/
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.
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…
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
(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 think a lot of companies like to appeal to the idea of a meritocracy. I'm just saying this could make it a convincing appeal.
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.
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 don't think your "quote" says what you think it says.
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"
[1]: https://www.infobae.com/sociedad/2023/11/12/si-decia-lo-que-...
[2] https://www.cronista.com/economia-politica/Macri-Si-les-deci...
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_p...
https://www.thedoe.com/article/conservative-college-professo...
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Now you are proposing this work doing/training aspect be cut off. What is your replacement? You have to come up with one that gets trainees hands on experience, as well as provides economies of scale benefits for expensive experimental apparatus or sample or data/compute resources, fosters collaboration and idea generation, and shares this work with other grant funded researchers in the field so that they might further their own efforts.
Or, you could just not blow the whole system apart with a broadside strike, and enjoy the striking benefits in fields like medicine we have enjoyed over the decades.
Roth says the Wesleyan board is supportive; maybe they are just lucky.
The whole purpose of elections is tangential to merit. There's important reasons to have them, but finding the 'best' candidate isn't one of them.
How they got there from jesus saying rich people can't go to heaven is one of those theological acrobacies they criticise so much in catholics, but don't disregard doing themselves when suits them.
Look I'm not saying we don't have these but the set of positions that are neutral is much smaller. Thanks to the political whipping boys de jour any position of power within academic or educational institutions has become politicized.
Except the alternatives! No form of government is more effective, competent, just, or free of corruption.
Once you start electing other jobs, like judges or plumbers, then you get whoever you elected, rather than necessarily a person able to do the job.
In other words, getting elected is a specific skill set. Doing the job is a different skill set. In most fields those skill sets do not overlap.
Even in govt the overlap is marginal. Which is why some elected officials are pretty useless at actually "governing".
To my American friends all I can say is "you voted for this".
What method do you prefer?Trust in the market and chose the one with the highest price, or, choose the one recommended by most, aka the popular choice or the elected?
"popularity" does not imply competence. Popularity is easily gamed and bought. Given that unlimited business money can be spent on elections, it's mostly bought.
I'm not sure what you mean by market, or highest price, but I assume you mean the above?
The opposite of elections is appointment. Based on competence. So, for example, in my company I want job x done well, so I appoint a person based on their ability to do x.
Of course this assumes I want x done well. If I'm elected, and I want x done badly, then I can appoint someone based on other factors, like ideology or loyalty etc.
The problems are two fold. The first is vetoing of bad ideas. No leader is right 100% of the time, and when they are wrong, someone must have the power to veto. There must be some way for reason to triumph over power, and a leader who chooses to be responsible is capable of deferring to expertise.
The second is succession. A good leader today may be succeeded by rotten leader tomorrow, but both have the same legitimacy, because the legitimacy comes from power alone and not reason.
> effective, competent, just, or free of corruption.
These things are a result of culture, not a result of the government itself. The government influences culture, but they are first and foremost functions of culture, specifically a culture of tolerating speaking truth to power, dissent, critical thinking, tolerance, and solidarity.
Which makes a lot of sense if you say the same thing about Christianity. Christian isn't something you are, Christianity is something you do.
Both have hallowed dogmas that are poorly understood by their followers, the constitution and the bible/teachings of jesus respectively.
Even avoiding things like gerrymandering, are voters choosing politicians or are politicians choosing voters?
Do candidates send out emails asking for you to talk to your friends, or do they ask for more money? Do candidates have principled stances founded on an underlying philosophy, or do they focus on issues that are emotional in order to drum up support.
I think "why do candidates ask for money" is a very very important question to ruminate on as is "why are we talking about abortion and race rather than health and housing"?
Before a general election there is a primary and before a primary there is fundraising. In order to succeed in a primary, in general, you have to do OK at fundraising. Fundraising is not dissimilar to an election and it happens before primaries. This means money votes first, which is why it feels like we have a "democracy" approved of by those with money, we literally do.
Money votes first.
Also, fundraising is a signal of democratic appeal. Some fundraise with mass collections of smaller donations.
Still, I agree that money has too much influence. So what do you think, as a democratic citizen, should we do about the influence of money? It's our country. The moneyed influences love that you are distracted, on the sidelines, debating rather than acting.
Voting is the definition and core mechanism of democracy: Government by the consent of the governed, to protect their rights, their lives, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
What's bizarre is, probably in a place where you have the benefits of centuries of overwhelming success, your extreme attempts to redefine it.
cui bono?, other than dictators. What has worked better than democracy?
> if your culture does not support the concept of good "democratic" governance, and no one strives for the institutions and constitutions to support it, you might be better off with a benevolent dictator, for as long as they last before a not-so-benevolent one.
Which culture? Democracy has been an incredible success all over the world - unprecedented success in history in most places it's taken hold.
Yours are the old propaganda of dictators - our 'culture', that undefined nonsense people cite for their prejudices, isn't compatible. The question is, why do you take up their cause?
They also love that you are sitting on the sidelines distracted, criticizing, rather than acting as a democratic citizen.
Can you name a monarchy that is nearly as free, safe, and prosperous as advanced democracies? That is less corrupt? Is China? (No.)
> These things are a result of culture, not a result of the government itself.
How do you explain all the cultures around the world with successful democracies that meet my descriptions? How about Taiwan and (formerly) Hong Kong - same cultures as communist China, far more free, prosperous, non-corrupt, safe ....
There is also the issue of rights. What right does someone have to rule me without my consent? Who the heck are they, other than thugs with guns?
Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom.
Andorra, Belgium, Denmark, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and Sweden.
Liechtenstein and Monaco.
There are just plenty examples of corruption among the people we elect, everywhere.
We've always heard that the college tenure system encourages freedom of expression and academic freedom without the pressure of potential job loss. Instead what we have iscollege professors and administrations who move is absolute lockstep and have acted like jack-booted Gestapos to crush and punish First Amendment expression where some people merely said "maybe we shouldn't bomb children".
Norm Finkelstein, who is a national treasure, does not have tenure. He is a world-authority on these issues. Why doesn't he have tenure? Because he embarrassed Alan Dershowtiz by exposing him as a rampant plagiarist and general fraud.
Int he 1960s we had the National Guard open fire on anti-Vietnam protestors at Kent State, killing several, to repress anti-government speech. I swear we're not far from college administrators open firing on protestors directly.
The collaboration between colleges (particularly Columbia) and the administration pales in comparison to the anti-Vietnam era. Colleges are standing by letting agitators attack protestors (ie UCLA) and then later using that violence as an excuse to crush the protest. They're cooperating with law enforcement to crush protests.
But they're going beyond that. These protestors who have been illegally deported have largely been named and targeted by college administrations as well as organizations like the Canary Mission.
Think about that: colleges are knowingly cooperating with people who are black-bagging people protesting against genocide, fully knowing they will end up in places like prisons in El Salvadore.
I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.
In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.
I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.
But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.
Like, c'mon, are we really still doing this now? Roth himself is sensible enough to not be, in his words, "blaming the victim" at this point, what calls you to essentially do it for him anyway? It's nothing but out of touch at this point, and adds nothing to the discourse but conspiratorial noise. If I may assume a rough age based on your forthrightness, any single kid in school in 2020 was and is a lot less culpable for this current moment than you or I. We can set an example and be mature enough to own that, instead of, I don't know, forever being tortured by the real or perceived condescension of kids.
Exactly. Its a communications problem.
Its hard to have a decent critical conversation when one side has a biased view about $symbol. Both communicating parties need to reach the same interpretation of a message, otherwise the conversation is broken. Thats why you shouldnt say the N-word or throw out a heil heart on stage (unless you want to hide behind this ambiguity). Or why its so difficult to have critical conversations with strong believers, for you its just evolution or vaccines but for the other side it may affect the core of their identity and the ape goes defense mode.
The result is that the discourse does not deal with differentiated cases but _only_ with simplistic labels like "chill speech", "woke", etc. because the more biased side drags it down into the mud.
For instance, the "chill speech" label is actually dependent on the "racist" label that initiated it. If a case shows clear racist behavior, then dismissing the lefts reaction as censorship is unjustified or biased. The other way works too, if there is no racist behavior, the censorship blame would be justified.
And since you cant look into peoples heads to clearly identify racist intentions, it falls back to interpreting messages. The problem with biased people is, they are not aware even of their unawareness. If you would ask Musk whether he is a neo-nazi, his response would be something like "hell no". Fast forward the dystopian timeline and his response might be "always have been".
The left has IMO more unbiased awareness about systemic issues -- but is not free of bias either. The right is in its core biased indentity politics about $culture -- but is not totally host to tribalism either.
My advise, avoid popular symbols at all cost and if you come close to using one, augment it with case specific background, even a vague "_unjustified_ chill of speech" would suffice. If someone opens with "the woke left" and shows no signs of differentiation -- or even better, acknowledgement of core leftist topics -- i mentally turn away. The comment you replied to was about personal anekdotes and projections and the one symbol that rubs me the wrong way too, even before trumps abuse.
Well, it is, isn't it? They required complete loyalty to the ideology before accepting any faculty: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm...
They shouldn't have gone that far.
I understand you’re fighting for what you believe in. Keep going, you’re almost there.
In your mind, what do you think I believe in?
I ask this because the only point I made in that message was in response to the "bend the knee" comment.
The one side required "bend the knee". Now the other side requires it. Why be surprised?
Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.
Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.
> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,
Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?
The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.
As an outsider it's always funny to see people write about the "American Left", as if there were any leftist movements of national importance in the US. As if Food Not Bombs had at some point had a majority in congress or something, it's just a ridiculous idea. If that happened there would be a bloody purge, Pinochet style but bigger.
Good that the free-speech absolutist Musk is there to ban everyone on Twitter who calls him out on his lies, trying to buy democratic elections, and do nazi salutes.
> Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.
Lithium-ion batteries in badly made cars are prone to ...combustion.
The constitutional republic was designed to protect from one person's whims but that ideal seems to have crumbled when the rest of the republic has been co-opted, controlled or simply ignored. In Europe we always knew that US claims to have the best democratic system were hubristic nonsense, no maybe more in the US realise the fragility of government.
Given how many stories there are about children seriously at odds with their parents about political issues, I don't think that is a good idea. At all.
Do you want to be judged by how your parents think or behave, or think that is acceptable?
The US's universities are one of its greatest assets, if not the greatest. The repercussions of this are highly damaging.
If governments granted rights then they would be privileges not rights. In western tradition governments exist to protect rights, such as the freedom of expression, not to grant them. If you believe these are human rights, rather than your privilege as an American, then you must protect their rights to seek justice too.
People are already being robbed of due process, which means they are robbed of the process that determines their right to "protections" and citizenship status. Almost all authoritarian regimes presume the right to rob people of the protections of their state. You perceive citizenship to be some indelible legal status, but citizenship can be revoked either tacitly or explicitly which is a prelude to the violation of someone else's rights and their human dignity.
The law can't protect or enforce itself. If the ruling regime chooses not to be bound by law then what should happen or what is supposed to happen is supplanted by what can happen. Even a cursory look of what can happen in authoritarian regimes should turn anyone's stomach.
You can try to design systems where one group of people don't have all the might, and so those who balance them are somewhat adversarial in their goals and desires. We always thought the US had such a system, but when you put law enforcement and the military under a single group, and give the other two groups no teeth, you really don't have that sort of system.
Wrong! The people are ultimately responsible for reigning-in their governments and are the ultimate source of any rules or rights that the governments end up enforcing.
If you think that the ultimate authority is with the government, then you have justified every authoritarian regime out there.
One is based on order and rule. You have a leviathan, an absolute ruler, who imposes order on society.
The other is one based on freedom and law/justice. A society based on affirmative mutual consent and a system orthogonal to power to handle disputes.
Unfortunately, power determining the outcome of disputes is the default, and a system of law or justice cannot enforce itself without the participation of those bound by it. The core founding principle of western society is solidarity via collective bargaining, what other option is there than other than to submit to someone more powerful than any individual?
Do you want to submit to a man, or submit to an idea? If you submit to an idea you must defend it. If you submit to a man, you deny your own agency and your own rights.
What is the basis of that assertion? If you go back as far as the Greeks, this only holds true if you focus on one specific city-state, and ignore that said city-state disenfranchised foreigners and legally permitted the ownership of slaves. Similar problems occur if we attribute western civilization to the Romans.
Out of the enlightenment we get John Locke who provided much of America's founding philosophy:
Locke argued that a government's legitimacy comes from the citizens' delegation to the government of their absolute right of violence (reserving the inalienable right of self-defense or "self-preservation"), along with elements of other rights (e.g. property will be liable to taxation) as necessary to achieve the goal of security through granting the state a monopoly of violence, whereby the government, as an impartial judge, may use the collective force of the populace to administer and enforce the law, rather than each man acting as his own judge, jury, and executioner—the condition in the state of nature.
My claim is that this is isomorphic to solidarity via collective bargaining when you account for the idea that the government being an impartial judge is not black and white but grey.
I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.
The idea of the social contract has issues. For one, the fundamental of contract is consent, which is missing.
Realism tells us that we do not delegate anything to the state.
I can see where you're getting this, but I would disagree. Western civilization is inseparable from the Greeks and Romans. What you are describing sounds more like a particular development that occurred in Northern Europe which resulted in a radical re-engineering of social structures, ultimately culminating in parliamentary democracy. I don't know enough of the history well enough to determine whether this happened because of the reformation, a scientific revolution, economic changes, or whatever other reason we could come up with, but I do understand the trend that you're talking about. Today we would broadly associate it with Anglo-American liberal democracy. The issue I took with your comment was that I don't think there's a compelling case to be made that "the West" is predicated on these values, since historically speaking they are comparatively new.
There is some scholarship that tries to make this argument (e.g. I can remember reading an article many years ago which tried to argue that western civilization originates in the Near East after the adoption of massed-infantry by the Hittites), but the more of it that I read, the more convinced I became that it was simply an attempt to view history through the lens of contemporary attitudes (e.g. of Anglo-American liberal democracy being the culmination of all historical development).
> I think it's fair not to say that it is not the core founding principle. I think it's probably more correct to say that it's the theory of power that must be true to support human rights or ideas of freedom.
I don't have a strong opinion on this one way or the other, but you may be interested to know that there is a considerable tradition which rejects this conclusion in the reactionaries. Some element of the tradition rejects the premise of human rights entirely, but others are rooted in a far more critical reading of power and how it (ostensibly) must operate. Most people who have read into these issues will be familiar with the reactionaries who reject human rights as a principle, but very few are even aware of the sort who reject the prescriptions of the sort of governance you are describing while (at least nominally) sharing its aims re: justice and freedom.
The parent comment has a definition of “rights” that admits their existence… and I think what you’ve demonstrated is that you have a different definition of “rights”. In other words, you’ve demonstrated that you haven’t really grasped the underlying meaning that the parent comment is getting at, and you’re instead responding to the words that they used to express it.
If you start with a definition for “rights” you can make arguments about whether they exist. But if you start with a different definition and get to a different conclusion, it doesn’t mean you’ve discovered some logical flaw in the argument, it just means that the two of you have failed to communicate with each other.
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but "to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER" and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God. Thomas Paine - The Crisis
Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God - Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (https://www.monticello.org/research-education/thomas-jeffers...)
If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come. It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death! John Henry -- Give me liberty or give me death.
You say you have no power and so let the world inflict itself on you, these were men that inflicted themselves upon the world. These men chose reason over comfort. These men chose not to be slaves through their action.
More like the two other groups (the elected group more so than the appointed judges) willingly gave up their teeth.
The rule of law is crucial to a free, just, and good society but you conflate the rule of law with the law saying what you would have it say. If the law is changed or the powers given under law are used in a way you do not like then that is not unlawful.
Dictators vary in how much they rely on law. Some have used law to do their evil: take Hitler. Some do their evil outside the law. This tells us that in truth the rule of law is but one part of what we need to have a good society.
You may be overgeneralizing here, only the US has enshrined freedom of expression in their constitution. Pretty much in any other western government such protections do not exist and freedom of expression has been under attack for a long time
(Edit: Oh, and the Bill of Rights gives parliamentarians quite an extreme version)
it's enforced nowhere, since the European Convention on Human Rights has never attacked any of its members for putting people in jail or fining them for what they posted online. So, you can have all the laws on paper that you want, if nobody respects them, they might as well not exist.
Are you talking about the US at the moment?
- https://www.context.news/big-tech/us-prison-social-media-cra...
- https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3rnzp4ye5zo
- https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/dec/04/un-human-rig...
Basically freedom of expression is fine, as long as you don't:
- criticize the genocide that the US government is partial to (and funds) in Palestine
- criticize the US government for backing out of all climate deals
- criticize Trump for being orange and weird and Musk for being a robot?
I wonder if in recent political history we can find a parallel with some parties in Germany and Italy in the past century.
Sounds very progressive considering voting for the African American population came about in 1965, and having McCarthyism in the 50s (which was basically persecution of free speech and freedom of expression, the same thing the Trump administration is doing atm).
Freedom of expression being "enshrined" in the Constitution sounds good, but if it comes with no voting if I am black, and with being persecuted for leaning left, maybe that's not exactly "freedom of expression".
Easy
Who is going to buy this?
Harvard chose to roll over for Trump, and I think the main reason is that the board of the Harvard Corporation largely agrees with him.
"They’re excellent schools, and they have excellent scientists, and if one of Vice-President Vance’s kids is sick, he’s going to want the doctor to have gone to one of these schools; he’s not going to want them to have gone to Viktor Orbán’s university."
"People have said to me, “Well, you take all that money from the government, why don’t you listen to them?” The answer is, because the money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath."
"I don’t have to agree with the mayor to get the fire department to come put out a fire. And that’s what they’re saying to these international students: “Well, you came to this country. What makes you think you can write an op-ed in the newspaper?” Well, what makes you think that is, this is a free country. "
But it does come with some reasonable level of consideration and appreciation.
You’re applying social norms that exist between humans, based on feelings, to a completely different relationship that includes no feelings at all. Would you like another government, with another political direction opposed to yours, to start asking you for appreciation?
Maybe the government should appreciate them not the other way around.
All my high school and college education was at free schools/colleges in my home country, paid for by taxpayer money. All incredibly competitive places, with very high maintenance costs compared to the other colleges around, not a single US dollar was invested in me and here I am paying taxes and improving this place.
The bargain the US gets from this is one of the biggest reasons it can do what it does, the investments it makes are compounded by the work of the people that it never put a dime for.
I literally don't know anybody who has any desire of expressing gratitude to their boss for the "opportunity" given to them. What kind of servile lapdogs do consider their work an "opportunity"? How about the bosses realize that without workers, their businesses will implode, and thank their workers for the "opportunity" to have a working business instead?
Jobs are an exchange of a worker's time and skills for a wage. If you expect workers with a touch servility on top, I suggest you go back to the medieval times of lords and servants.
Hard disagree on both needing each other.
Employers can't exist or build their own riches without workers, while workers have existed for thousands of years, much before employers. If we are considering the relationship in adversarial terms, always remember that workers are the only ones actually producing anything of value.
Without workers, garbage won't be collected, water won't be delivered to households, buildings won't be built, and food won't be grown.
The people pushing the paternalistic narrative telling us that we should be "grateful" for the "opportunity" to merely work for a wage have forgotten the French Revolution, the Bolshevik revolution, and all the strikes and revolutions of workers that have advanced our rights to where we have them today. The 5 day work week and the 9-to-5, child labor protections, and workers' rights were not brought to you by the employers. In fact, employers often actively resisted those, and had to be put in their rightful place by their workers.
> It’s nice for wellbeing to be grateful for everything good that happens
Judging by what happened to the employers and the rich during the workers' revolutions, it's probably a good advice for the wellbeing of the work-givers to start practicing daily gratitude towards their own employees. You see, it's just the workers that find themselves more often in the possession of pitchforks and torches.
Again I agree with everything you say but disagree on the part about needing each other/gratitude. The worker also wants all that, and for it to happen, they need collaboration and exchange/division of labor, for which they are allowed to be grateful for.
In many skilled professions, you are more likely to see the boss thanking the worker, for chossing to work there and provide their badly needed skills, than the other way around.
It probably depends on the local unemployment rate.
Guess which category "reasonable ... consideration and appreciation" falls into.
Put another way, if you read North Korean state media, you will find that they always have a reasonable level of consideration and appreciation for their government.
I'm not sure I understand. If I want a medical doctor, I'm not looking for someone based on his political views or spirited independence from the Hungarian government, but for someone with training in a very narrow discipline, namely medicine. I really don't want someone who is more interested in "the modern and the postmodern" prescribing me meds, but I do want someone who conforms to the current pharmacological standards.
The University President in question does not even run a medical school; Wesleyan does not, to my knowledge, teach anyone the art of medicine, however highly it might rank as a liberal arts institution. Semmelweis University in Budapest, however, is older than the United States, is the largest healthcare provider in Hungary, and is ranked among the top 300 universities in the world. Therefore, if I had to chose between someone who went to Wesleyan and someone who went to Semmelweis, which I'll take as "Viktor Orbán's university," I should much rather have the Hungarian who actually knows medicine rather than the liberal arts PhD who might be able to lecture me on what postmodernism should mean to me.
The OP is expressing dismay at this obviously compromised position. There is no purportment or strawmen that I can detect.
Regardless, I absolutely agree with you, except for one thing: I would have no problem being under care of a Hungarian, but I doubt you’d ever see a MAGA enthusiast saying he prefers that than an American doctor.
btw, you got my upvote
Also, economic decline is a much greater threat to the US than military decline. China is eager to dethrone us economically; an invasion of the US would be extremely costly and highly unlikely even if the US' military were significantly smaller.
We should expect better rhetoric from the rector of a liberal arts university.
Unfortunately I can't read the actual article to see what the rest of his argument was like. I wish that HN would automatically provide links to bypass paywalls.
What we are seeing now is entirely the fault of university administrators who failed to deal with the issue when it started.
"the protesters created a “Jew Exclusion Zone” where in order to pass “a person had to make a statement pledging their allegiance to the activists’ view.” Those who complied with the protesters’ view were issued wristbands to allow them to pass through, the complaint says, which effectively barred Jewish students who supported Israel and denied them access to the heart of campus."
> You have prominent Jewish figures around the country who get comfortable with Trump, it seems to me, because they can say he’s fighting antisemitism: “He’s good for the Jews.” It’s pathetic. It’s a travesty of Jewish values, in my view.
But I'm not sure how that is connected to what you wrote.
They kowtowed to some of the militant Zionist interests involved in that endowment in order to attain a fractionally higher return, and betrayed their students.
They kowtowed to the fascist administration on the grounds that it was threatening 400 million dollars in grants, and betrayed their students to the point of facilitating a project to unilaterally deport many of them based on Constitutionally protected quasi-private speech.
At this point I don't think they want or deserve to be called a university. Let's go with "Tax-exempt investment fund".
The article makes the point that it's cowardly to cave to administration pressure to limit the activities of anti-Israel/Pro-Palestine protesters.
Someone on the other side of the issue could make the argument "it is cowardly to kowtow to a small but vocal minority who justifies interfering with other students' ability to learn, as 'free speech'".
It is dishonest to describe non-speech activity such as intimidation and forceful prevention of access, as "speech", even if you like the motivation or outcome. "Speech" is talking with words. Physically using your body to prevent someone else from acting in a desired way, is something other than "speech".
Take for instance University of Pennsylvania. In 2023, student anonymously projected "Let Gaza Live" onto a building. The next day then-college president Liz Magill publicly called in the FBI to investigate this as an "antisemitic hate crime". She was later forced to resign for "not doing enough" to combat alleged antisemitism.
It would be even more useful if you were able to show that the effect of such student protests moving progress forward exceeded the effect of the student protests moving progress backward, like the Cultural or Iranian Revolutions. I think you'd not be able to show it.
I’m 60, and I have a fair bit of learning to do yet. And as the father of a student in roughly the 18-22 I would be proud to see her standing up for views that she feels strongly about whether her knowledge is fully complete or not.
pseudolus•1w ago