Why didn’t more professors oppose the Gramscian march or at least stick up for free speech?
Commenter “huxley” asks this question:
I’m trying to understand how academia slid further and further to the left…
I’m interested in Prof. Everybody, the academicians who watched and are still watching as their world was gradually taken over by the left.
Ideally, being a professor is a more serious calling than being a pipefitter or computer programmer. If nothing else it requires a commitment to academic freedom. Given the opportunity, we have heard many high, wise words to that effect. However, we have seen few efforts from the rank-and-file to uphold that commitment against the left over the past fifty years or so.
I’m wondering how that worked.
I don’t have the answer, but I have some guesses.
(1) Most people are afraid to speak up when their livelihood is threatened, and that’s not just people in academia. I’m not sure whether professors are less courageous than most, although they might be. But I don’t think that sort of commitment to liberty no matter what is common anywhere.
(2) That said, professors tend to work in the realm of ideas – except for those in more practical fields such as science, where ideas have more obvious consequences and require (or used to require) more proof. Leftism is an idea with some emotional attractiveness, and my guess is that professors may be more likely than others to be drawn to it, because of their general preference for dealing with ideas.
(3) Not only that, but much of the leftism advanced in the universities has employed race and the threat of calling someone a racist in order to first attract and then intimidate those who might object.
(4) For the most part, professors are people who have done well in school and never left it, staying to take on more power and prestige within that setting. Therefore I don’t think they are selected for courage, or for even necessarily for thinking for themselves (with exceptions, of course). For the most part, they have been very good at taking in information and then giving it back again, perhaps with a small advancement on current knowledge in a very circumscribed field. So there may be more people in academia who are selected for conformity, and they are less likely to buck the prevailing winds.
(5) My guess is that, particularly for professors in the sciences or in business, those who object to the leftward drift of the university have quite a few options in the private sector and may choose to leave the university rather than stay and fight. Professors in the humanities probably are more likely to be with the leftist program in the first place, but if they’re not, they probably have far fewer options outside of academia. And so they stay and keep their mouths shut.
(6) Not everyone did keep his or her mouth shut. I know some professors who stayed and fought. But it’s been a lonely battle over the years, and a frustrating and ultimately a losing one.
(7) The takeover of the academy by the left started a long time ago. I won’t quibble over when, but suffice to say it has been many decades. So there’s been a selection factor over the years as well, a factor that’s only increased over time. At a certain point it became well-nigh impossible for a new hire who didn’t toe the party line to be given a job in the first place. Therefore the number of professors on the other side (or potentially on the other side), has became smaller and smaller over time.
(8) Freedom of speech is one of those concepts that is probably difficult for a lot of people to defend when it involves speech they don’t like. I’m not sure why academicians would be any different in that respect, particularly since they deal in the world of ideas and like to be right.
I keep coming back to Allan Bloom and his 1987 book The Closing of the American Min when dealing with such matters. So I’ll give him the last word; here he is describing events at Cornell University in 1969, where he was a professor [emphasis mine]:
The [Cornell] provost was a former natural scientist, and he greeted me with a mournful countenance…there was nothing he could do to stop such behavior in the black student association. He added that no university in the country could expel radical black students, or dismiss the faculty members who incited them, presumably because the students at large would not permit it.
The provost had a mixture of cowardice and moralism not uncommon at the time. He did not want trouble. His president had frequently cited Clark Kerr’s dismissal at the University of California as the great danger. At the same time the provost thought he was engaged in a great moral work, righting the historic injustice done to blacks. He could justify to himself the humiliation he was undergoing as a necessary sacrifice. The case of this particular black student clearly bothered him. But he was both more frightened of the violence-threatening extremists and also more admiring of them. Obvious questions were no longer obvious. Why could not a black student be expelled as a white student would be if he failed his courses or disobeyed the rules that make university community possible? Why could the president not call the police if order was threatened? Any man of weight would have fired the professor who threatened the life of the student. The issue was not complicated. Only the casuistry of weakness and ideology made it so. No one who knew or cared about what a university is would have acquiesced in this travesty. It was no surprise that a few weeks later – immediately after the faculty had voted overwhelmingly under the gun to capitulate to outrageous demands that it had a few days earlier rejected – the leading members of the administration and many well-known faculty members rushed over to congratulate the gathered students and tried to win their approval. I saw exposed before all the world what had long been known, and it was at last possible without impropriety to tell these pseudo-universitarians precisely what one thought of them.
It was also no surprise that many of those professors who had been most eloquent in their sermons about the sanctity of the university, and who had presented themselves as its consciences, were among those who reacted, if not favorably, at least weakly to what was happening. They had made careers out of saying how badly the German professors [during the Nazi era] had reacted to violations of academic freedom. This was all light talk and mock heroics, because they had not measured the potential threats to the university nor assessed the doubtful grounds of academic freedom. Above all, they did not think that it could be assaulted from the Left or from within the university. These American professors were utterly disarmed, as were many German professors, when the constituency they took for granted, of which they honestly believed they were independent, deserted or turned against them. To fulminate against Bible Belt preachers was one thing. In the world that counted for these professors, this could only bring approval. But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were – that they alone manned the walls protecting civilization. Their collapse was merely pitiful, although their feeble attempts at self-justification frequently turned vicious. In Germany the professors who kept quiet had the very good excuse that they could not do otherwise. Speaking up would have meant imprisonment or death. The law not only did not protect them but was their deadly enemy. At Cornell there was no such danger. There was essentially no risk in defending the integrity of the university, because the danger was entirely within it. All that was lacking was a professorial corps aware of the university’s purpose, and dedicated to it. That is what made the surrender so contemptible.
These events occurred over fifty years ago, and those observations were published nearly thirty-five years ago. The only things that have changed are that the vast majority of professors don’t even pay lip service to free speech anymore, the threats against them if they did are more serious, and probably most of them know very little about how professors behaved in the Germany of the 1930s.
Let me doubly emphasize this portion of what Bloom wrote back then:
But to be isolated in the university, to be called foul names by their students or their colleagues, all for the sake of an abstract idea, was too much for them. They were not in general strong men, although their easy rhetoric had persuaded them that they were.
A few items to ponder:
Tenure is like a marriage between a dozen to fifty people. You can’t get tenured without having been very careful about how you make waves.
There are far more Ph Ds then there are faculty positions, and the disparity is growing every year.
Faculty are insulated from market forces.
Faculty governance is very weak, and professional administrators hold the real power.
Peter Drucker, who left Germany in 1933, wrote about three men he knew who became at various levels Nazis or Nazi enablers..
–Reinhold Hensch, who came from a working-class family, became an SS officer. He summed up his motivations to Drucker thusly: “Now I have a party membership card with a very low number and ***I am going to be somebody***.”
–Paul Schaeffer became editor of a major newspaper, believing he could influence the regime toward moderation. He disappeared when the front that he provided was no longer needed.
–An un-named professor, a distinguished biochemist and a “great liberal,” was expected by many to raise objections at the faculty’s first meeting with their newly-appointed Nazi watchdog. His main concern was about maintaining the level of research funding.
Knowing these people led Drucker to object to the Hannah Arendt “banality of evil” formulation:
“Evil works through the Hensches and the Schaeffers precisely because evil is monstrous and men are trivial…Man becomes the instrument of evil when, like the Hensches, he thinks to harness evil to his ambitions; and he becomes the instrument of evil when, like the Schaeffers, he joins with evil to prevent worse…I have often wondered which of these two did, in the end, more harm–the Monster or the Lamb; and which is worse, Hensch’s sin of the lust for power or Schaeffer’s hubris and sin of pride? But maybe the greatest sin is neither of these two ancient ones; the greatest sin may be the new twentieth-century sin of indifference, the sin of the distinguished biochemist who neither kills nor lies but refuses to bear witness when, in the words of the old gospel hymn, “They crucify my Lord.””
On the “protecting one’s job” point, I would add that certain positions in academia — especially in administration — have become much better paid during the past 20-30 years. I think that’s largely due to the federal government’s making it easier and easier to borrow for tuition, which in turn has made tuition rates rise like a helium balloon. Something psychological happens when you earn more than a certain amount. A $200K salary is much more precious, much more worth protecting, than say a $70K salary. Losing a job that pays an OK salary sucks, but it’s usually not life-destroying. Losing a job that pays extremely well — such as the 98th percentile — is like being kicked out of the Right People club. You lose your McMansion, your kids’ private schooling, your BMW and Tesla, your weekly trips to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods. You become just another schlub. So you’ll do a whole lot more to protect that job, including saying “How high?” when the customers, I mean the students, say “Jump!” (I think this also partly explains why universities have become so much more like country clubs than places of learning in the past two decades.)
The pressure to conform becomes a lot stronger when someone is working in an industry where it is difficult to change companies or organizations and keep the same or higher level. I believe this is true in academia for people having or near to getting tenure, except for those who are actually famous.
“For the most part, professors are people who have done well in school and never left it, staying to take on more power and prestige within that setting. Therefore I don’t think they are selected for courage, or for even necessarily for thinking for themselves (with exceptions, of course)”
It is especially ludicrous that admissions department at Ivy League colleges are marking down Asian applicants on grounds of **not having enough courage**. What on earth would a university administrator know about courage?
Good responses, all. neo, that was a good passage from Bloom.
I would underline the competitive aspect. Tenured faculty jobs are extremely so. My guesstimate is that it’s about as hard to get a tenured position in a nice city as it is for an actor to be hired for a TV soap opera or sitcom.
Some years back I recall a woman in Massachusetts who killed or tried to kill a rival for a teaching job.
Here’s a suggestion: higher education attracts and retains the worst sort of organization man. As the quantum of good character among the professional-managerial stratum suffers its relentless secular decline, the professoriate grows worse with the rest of them (but always below the median in moral quality).
–Reinhold Hensch, who came from a working-class family, became an SS officer. He summed up his motivations to Drucker thusly: “Now I have a party membership card with a very low number and ***I am going to be somebody***.”
That’s new to me and perfectly illustrates my point. If you’re a former nobody who’s become a somebody, you’ll do (almost?) anything to keep from going to back to being a nobody.
My guesstimate is that it’s about as hard to get a tenured position in a nice city as it is for an actor to be hired for a TV soap opera or sitcom.
There are 1.4 million post-secondary teachers in the United States. Among them, they work a mean of 70%-time, so that’s just shy of 1,000,000 FTE. The ranks of f/t professors and associate professors stand now at 360,000. There are about 52,000 working actors in the United States, whose earnings are so erratic the Bureau of Labor Statistics will not provide an estimate of the mean or the median.
Here is Sayre’s Law:
The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low
There are variations on the phrasing and other discussion here.
I agree completely with Neo’s #1 and John P. above. Is the salary and membership in the Right People Club a small thing? No it is quite large, IMO. But I think the point of Sayre’s Law is an issue of; what do these members of the club spend their time doing once they’ve cemented their position? Mostly, they fight over little scraps of power and money and position in the internal pecking order. They may give lip service to higher moral and ethical issues of the day, but those issues are a distant third place compared to Sayre’s Law.
Here’s a hypothesis: they never gave a rat’s patoot about free speech per se. Free speech is for peers, and you’re not a peer. They care about their professional prerogatives and that’s it.
I have a family member in academia, my political opposite, and I’ve wondered a lot about the appeal of leftist ideology therein. In part I think it’s the intellectual appeal of a system, one that can be constructed to fashion the ideal society. Perhaps it seems obvious to a scholar that with higher-level thinking, applying the trained mind, one can come up with a plan that the rest of us would never imagine, let alone know how to execute. Perhaps they see it as their duty to apply their gifts to make a wonderful world for everyone. That’s assuming their goodness, their divine intent. It does seem that everyone involved in their movement seems convinced of their superior virtue.
Perhaps they despise the messiness of a representative democracy, fraught with trial and error, inequality, and what they assume are avoidable tragedies. If they design the perfect system, with perfectly smart people at the top, they think, it has to be better than what we have now.
What they don’t see is the inevitability of such a system going bad, with power concentrated among a corrupted, narcissistic few. I wonder, did they also not see the necessity of an authoritarian approach, as what we’re witnessing, to implement their ideal plan? Or was that assumed to be a hopefully temporary necessity?
Perhaps they despise the messiness of a representative democracy, fraught with trial and error, inequality, and what they assume are avoidable tragedies. If they design the perfect system, with perfectly smart people at the top, they think, it has to be better than what we have now.
Here’s a hypothesis: only a tiny minority have some conception in their head of an ideal political order. What they have in their head is a tendency to other-directedness and an abiding belief that people outside their social circles are stupid and unworthy. For some, their other-directedness determines their social outlook. For others, it’s arrogance and malice that’s the primary vector.
What they don’t see is the inevitability of such a system going bad, with power concentrated among a corrupted, narcissistic few.
They live and work in such a system. Again, it doesn’t bother them so long as they have the amenities they prefer.
If you’re a former nobody who’s become a somebody, you’ll do (almost?) anything to keep from going to back to being a nobody.
Bess Truman and Pat Nixon seemed content to be left in peace.
My first wife graduated and started teaching English at the local high school. She was always a lefty and at that time I was somewhat a lefty myself. Marriage was already on the rocks but when she started teaching slowly but surely thought of herself as a “professional” and coped an attitude about my line of work. Thing is I made twice her salary BUT I wasn’t a professional!
We finally divorced. Later on I was eating at our old favorite TexMex restaurant and guess who was the waitress? My ex wife! I asked her what’s up? She told me she was making some money for Christmas. I said oh good … for a moment I thought you decided to be a “professional” waitress.
Years later I did apologize for saying that.
Anyway to this day she’s typical academic lefty that has the attitude of being better and will never change.
I believe it was Victor Davis Hanson who pointed out that Hollywood and academia provide the modern equivalent of feudalism for employees.
If you’re not on top, you’re a serf at the whim of your master. Grad students and adjunct faculty have little control of their lives within the system.
Perhaps another factor that today’s academics are conditioned to subservience. I suspect that wasn’t so true in the past, when the system was smaller.
JanMN…”I’ve wondered a lot about the appeal of leftist ideology therein. In part I think it’s the intellectual appeal of a system, one that can be constructed to fashion the ideal society.”
This would seem to be a better fit for traditional Marxists…who did have a ‘system’ of sorts, albeit a pretty lame one, than of today’s Progs, in the case of whom it’s hard to find anything resembling a system that is even semi-coherent.
Thing is I made twice her salary BUT I wasn’t a professional!
You might not be in a certain sense of the term. Not all professionals are good earners and some tradesmen are fine earners. (School teachers are salaried employees but lack the autonomy, the mastery of arcana, and the capacity to contribute to a given body of knowledge which characterise ‘professionals’ in this certain sense). The boundaries between strata and sub-strata are always going to be matters of dispute; most people not employed by teachers’ unions would classify schoolteachers as common-and-garden bourgeois rather than haut bourgeois.
The mean annual salary of secondary school teachers is currently $66,000 a year and they get excellent fringes if they’re on the contract. Inneresting she was moonlighting in December.
in the case of whom it’s hard to find anything resembling a system that is even semi-coherent.
The system is their upraised middle finger at the rest of us.
Jack..”when she started teaching slowly but surely thought of herself as a “professional” and coped an attitude about my line of work. Thing is I made twice her salary BUT I wasn’t a professional!”
There was a black guy, called Obsidian I believe, who used to blog and comment at blogs. In his experience, he said, black women who had college degrees would not marry a man who had no such degree, however lame her degree and however successful the non-college man might be.
He also said, “Watch out, white guys!…If this pattern hasn’t yet shown up in your world, it will.”
There must be a better name for it; “virtue signaling to oneself”. How do you improve your self-image–to yourself? Things you’ve done, I suppose. But if you haen’t been further from school than summer vacation–if that–since the age of five…what can you have done except academia?
I’ve done various things as they’ve come onto my plate which have gained praise from others, or probably would if I described them. Most of them would have been foreclosed if I’d been an academic all my life. One example: I saved a guy’s life at an accident, said the EMT guys. I did that because I remembered my Army first aid. Civilian first aid doesn’t teach you how to deal with this particular injury, so, without the Army….
And if you value above all else accumulated classroom seat time, or facing those who value accumulated classroom seat time, the opinions of those whose accumulated seat time is woefully lacking cannot be of much value. Not to mention their class. Their objections…. Hell, their votes….
I remember learning a whole lot about how things worked in the real world working for a guy who ran a small business. What was new to me was common knowledge to pretty much everybody else. Everybody knew stuff, taxes, government, payroll, dealing with people, helping friendly competitors.
Thinking about those guys voting compared to an English lit grad–minus Shakespeare and Twain because reasons–who has to vote his student loan and try to keep his hours up at Starbucks. And how would a professional academic see the issue(s).
Plenty of room for rationalizing going along to get along.
I believe it was Victor Davis Hanson who pointed out that Hollywood and academia provide the modern equivalent of feudalism for employees.
Certain categories: graduate students aspiring to a research degree (absent in teaching institutions and often not numerous in research institutions), p/t and adjunct faculty, and untenured f/t faculty. They don’t treat the rest of their employees badly, though now and again you get a malign character in the apparat. Where I used to work, it was the VP for Administration who treated people like dirt. One of the administrators outside his cone who had to deal with him said he was the most mendacious individual with whom she had ever worked. He’d repulse you within minutes, so it’s not as if his superordinate and collateral administrators didn’t know he was a sh!t; he was left in place for seven years.
He was unusual. For all but a few of them, hourly employees and non-faculty salarymen are pairs of hands, too unimportant to abuse.
Richard Aubrey:
traumatic pneumothorax?
David+Foster,
It’s called hypergamy and it is alive and well in white guy world and anywhere else heterosexuals attempt to unite.
R T Firefly…”It’s called hypergamy and it is alive and well in white guy world and anywhere else heterosexuals attempt to unite.”
But the definition of Value applied by women in hypergamous behavior can and will vary by society….a medieval princess, for example, would be most unimpressed with your scholarly credentials. Indeed, even 50 years ago, the Degree did not have the extreme social value that it has today.
Speaking of hypergamy, there is Hypergamouse:
https://www.webtoons.com/en/challenge/hypergamouse/maternal-instincts/viewer?title_no=423082&episode_no=25
You better believe “hypergamy” is alive and well today. My own grand daughter is a teacher and beautiful young woman. Every time she got a new boy friend I’d ask her … what’s his major? Her answer EVERTIME … Pre Med!
A couple months ago she married her PHD and he worships the ground she walks on.
In “The Road to Serfdom”, written in 1944, Hayek pointed out that between WWI and WWII, college professors universally were either fascists or communists. They all disdained capitalism. Nothing has changed.
The bigger problem with female hypergamy isn’t that women marry up (and are frequently looking to trade up — that’s the bit which catches lot of guys out down the track), it’s that in a welfare state and divorce system which overwhelmingly favor females, the State = Big Daddy is the Übermensch of Alpha Males.
Re German Academics, the standouts must be Ms Arendt’s squeeze Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt.
At least in these two cases, it was Complicated.
No, that’s it. You got it. That is who, in significant measure shows up for the openings in the first place.
Oh, you might rake history over and turn up an academic here and there who has gone to the wall. But like most institution dwellers, part of the reason they can tolerate the environment in the first place is their burrowing quest for security.
Did you read the MacWhorter Atlantic article linked here the other day? He was doing ok till he got all whiney toward the end. Why? Ostracism! shunning! exclusion! Unfair! Even if you don’t lose tenure … “Whaaa the pain!”. Why, did you know that not being affirmed is harmful to your health? Who could be expected to be brave in the face of that? Sure, you can lord it over 19 year olds … if they don’t talk back. But being shunned in the faculty lounge? That is too much to ask.
It’s one thing for a typical niche seeker to stand masked and hidden in a crowd and then to dart forward and whack some guy upside the head with a bike lock, before slinking back. That’s the kind of masculinity and moral courage a herd animal can be expected to muster.
Quite another to expect him to stand on his own two feet and call a halt to the BS, when a crazy woman might start shouting at him as a result.
In “The Road to Serfdom”, written in 1944, Hayek pointed out that between WWI and WWII, college professors universally were either fascists or communists. They all disdained capitalism. Nothing has changed.
Paul in Boston:
I haven’t read Hayek, but that sounds extreme.
How about Mortimer Adler and Robert Hutchins, who started the Great Books program at U Chicago? The Great Books came later, but Hutchins taught at Yale Law in the 20s before going on to administration at Chicago. He hired Mortimer Adler to teach at Chicago in 1930.
Perhaps that was true in Europe, where fascism/communism was more a true binary.
Are we not all beginning to see that Class is Back in a big way?
I bang on a lot about (puts on a coy expression) HBD = Human Biodiversity, but Class is huge too. Far more than Race, we pretend that Class Awareness and differences don’t matter. But they do. Hugely.
Members of the Upper Middle Class will do almost anything to Keep Caste, and this goes for the Middle-Middle in trying to grab onto the rapidly being raised rope ladder. The Lower Middle Class is just trying to figure out why their hours got cut and their kid is on meth and doesn’t have time for these games.
All you have to do in order to promote ***and keep people loyal to*** a successful ideology is make it upwardly mobile.
Curtis Yarvin states that he had one set of grandparents from a very red background. His grandmother (IIRC) from Brooklyn on the Vistula would attend CPUSA meetings in Fifth Avenue Coops and be treated with some consideration if not outright deferred to on some issues. Ideology gave her a parallel pedigree in the non-material world — strange catnip for a Marxist Materialist, but there you go.
college professors universally were either fascists or communists.
Either someone has misinterpreted Hayek or Hayek was nuts.
The Lower Middle Class is just trying to figure out why their hours got cut and their kid is on meth and doesn’t have time for these games.
https://www.drugabuse.gov/publications/research-reports/methamphetamine/what-scope-methamphetamine-misuse-in-united-states
Less than 1% of the population has made use of meth in the last year.
Two very recent posts from an academic who has just begun his retirement:
On Students Today:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/leaving-the-blight-of-higher-education-part-i-farewell-students/
On Faculty:
https://orthosphere.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/26040/
om. Sucking chest wound. He’d been on his Harley, took a curve at more than twice the posted speed. Unassed his bike and, we figure, during the resulting caroms, bank shots and ricochets, picked up the stub of a branch in his chest before coming to rest on our driveway apron.
Not having been shot, there was little chance of a through and through so I didn’t roll him over to check.
Eventually, there was a lady helping, keeping track of his brachial pulse. Offduty cop came along and stabilized the guy’s head. The helmet was the full thing, chin bar and all, so I sent my son to get a bolt cutter in case the guy puked. Cop didn’t like that but I said, just in case.
Cop asked the lady what her medical background was. “I’m a nurse.” Looked at me. “Infantry”. “Cool,” he said. Later I asked him if he’d been jerking my chain on account of some insouciance, given the issue. Nope, he said. First responders like to find former military on scene because,”they know what to do and don’t choke,”.
But…… Infantry…..? Not getting into the faculty lounge, by golly.
This quote I recently read in George Saunders “A Swim in the Pond in the Rain” seems fitting for this topic:
Writing about Gregor von Rezzori’s classic “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite,” Deborah Eisenberg pointed out the great harm that can be done by a handful of evil people, as long as they have the “passive assistance of many, many other people who glance out of the windows of their secure homes and see a cloudless sky.” She goes on to list the sins of such passive people: “carelessness, poor logic, casual snobbery—wither social or intellectual—inattentiveness.” (page 295)
Art+Deco:
https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Picket-Fence-Outside-Middle-Class-ebook/dp/B076KVC6C3/
And since we all seem to be off on a Shakespearean Excursion today:
MIRANDA
O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t!
PROSPERO
‘Tis new to thee. (Way to go, Prospero! Laconic ain’t in it.)
There are more things, in Heaven and Earth, Art+Deco,
Than are dreamt of in your official statistical grubbings.
it’s that in a welfare state and divorce system which overwhelmingly favor females, the State = Big Daddy
The pattern of child custody and child support decisions are often a scandal. The welfare state does not ‘overwhelmingly favor females’. The major components are Social Security (in re the bias in favor of women is a function of differences in life expectancy and general division of labor in households). Medicare (ditto), Medicaid financing l/t care (ditto), and Medicaid financing medical care (which can replace a husband’s employer paid insurance but is open on equal terms to male and female low earners). Other notable components, like Medicaid, are open to men who meet the eligibility requirements (these would be SSI, SNAP, Section 8, unemployment compensation &c). Veterans benefits flow overwhelmingly to men and disaster relief payments to all segments of the population evenly. Hands on programs for criminal defendants, indigent plaintiffs, people on the spectrum between normal and insane, and people with cognitive impairments have (if I’m not mistaken), a disproportionately male clientele. TANF is mostly women with ba*tard children, but it’s a modest sliver of the welfare system.
There are more things, in Heaven and Earth, Art+Deco,
Blah blah blah. Meth still isn’t a common problem for the families of skilled wage earners.
Richard Aubrey:
That’s why I thought it was traumatic pneumothorax. I took a two day advanced wilderness first aid class that got into splinting for femoral fractures, serious hypothermia, burns, debridement and wound care and such but didn’t cover your situation. Serious business. I’ve read that the combat arms first aid is much more sophisticated and capable now. I’m not a veteran, my father was combat infantryman, NCOs rule.
Two very recent posts from an academic who has just begun his retirement:
Zaphod:
Thanks. This is the sort of first-hand account from academics in the trenches (as opposed to those skirmishing publicly in the war) that I was looking for in the previous topic.
Zaphod,
Just started on that e-book today. Very good so far. Came across it via Sarah Hoyt’s blog. She’s another wonder-writer-to-read like Neo who I first came across years ago via the good Dr. Sanity and the “Sanity Squad” podcasts.
I recall a professor quoted decades ago about the part of the 60s in which fire-breathing leftists were put up for academic Boards, and were tolerantly welcomed by the not-so leftists on those Boards on the principle of ‘everyone’s entitled to her own opinion’, hail-brother-and-well-met.
After that system had persisted for some years, and the balance on the Boards now tilted to the left, did the new majorities up-vote the memberships of new candidates who tilted insufficiently left? Hell, no. ‘They slammed the door’, said the good professor, and denied membership to all political wrong-thinkers. THAT was their answer to equality, and still is.
Speaking of the Class system in America, this monologue from yesterday’s edition of Tucker Carlson is excellent.
https://video.foxnews.com/v/6234807741001?playlist_id=5198073478001#sp=show-clips
I’m an academic, an adjunct for many years and then hired full-time at a community college.
As an adjunct, to stay employed one keeps one’s head down and does not spout off about politics except with friends (trusted fellow adjuncts). The assumption in the faculty lounge was always “We’re all good leftists here.” Figuring out that bias was not difficult.
I remember that a full-time faculty member (in the business department) at one of the places I taught was followed across campus by a leftist prof who was berating her loudly for her conservative views. Simple social pressure.
Community colleges have traditionally been less political, and quite a few talented conservatives end up there for that reason. My own college is located in a comparatively rural and conservative area.
However, a couple of years ago a colleague was hounded out of his job because he made a favorable comment in class about Brett Kavanaugh. A student was offended and reported to the Title IX coordinator. The colleague, who did not have tenure, tried to fight it, failed to get promotion, had a heart attack due to the stress of administrative harassment, and when he returned from medical leave decided to retire. (This was his second career.) The whole process was treated as a confidential employment matter, so no one really had a chance to defend the victim.
I once had a student who was grateful because I allowed him to write essays about conservative ideas–an insight into what some other teachers have been doing.
Last year we were handed political placards to put up. I refused. Luckily the pandemic hit shortly afterward and we were all distracted by it.
I don’t have any answers here. But I think that partly the universities try very hard not to hire anyone conservative by asking for statements of teaching philosophy and so forth. In most fields the conservatives can be identified by their research interests and publications and therefore can be silently blacklisted. Then there is a certain level of harassment by some administrators to keep the faculty in line, which can be stepped up to dispose of unwanted faculty members if necessary. And sometimes other faculty members will step up to berate their colleagues who seem to be out of line.
It will be terribly sad when all the tenured but unemployed “professors” and “administrators” must learn to cod or service solar panels and wind farms. When something is unsustainable or no longer of any value people will stop paying for it (such as solar panels and wind farms for essential power). Although until then there is a lot of ruin in a nation.
…did the new majorities up-vote the memberships of new candidates who tilted insufficiently left? Hell, no.
Insufficiently Sensitive:
Back when I was a sensitive, young, non-academic poet I resented the predictable logrolling of academic poets in assigning prizes. If my side was in charge, I was sure, it wouldn’t be that way.
Then Allen Ginsberg got hold of the reins for a time and all his Beat poet friends got all the prizes. I’m still fond of Ginsberg, but that’s just the way it is.
Of course, in the 21C American poets are the most SJW/PC group this side of the inner circle of Black Lives Matter.
@J:
You touch on Title IX. Most of us know that there is no due process under Title IX proceedings and it’s off into Star Chamber territory.
We’ve talked a bit in this thread about how Academia has become what it is today and Neo covered just about every possible angle (surprise!) in her musings. But once the Long March succeeded, the Left had to get to work to shore up their positions and make them impregnable. Clearly Title IX is a big part of this.
It’s not just that Cthulhu Always Swims Leftwards (Yarvin, I think said this), it’s the in-built ratchet that gets us every time. It’s much harder for us to drag things back than it is for them to push things forwards into the eternally just around the corner golden age.
I won’t say burn everything down. Not after two coffees. But some even mildly injudicious use of the wrecking ball I could go with.
om. My Army first aid was fifty yeas ago. Lots of new stuff. Clotting factors in bandages, “combat lifesaver” a step down from medic to stabilize things until the doc arrives.
My dad was in WW II, Infantry platoon leader and sometimes company commander until they could find another captain.
Point is, were I on an academic-for-life track, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to learn that, and the guy would be dead. And I wouldn’t have that to look back on as part of who I am. I’d need….something else. Something academic.
Youtube has lots of footage of “harvey rescue”. Not many of those guys look like professors or even grad students. Now, the numbers of such mean that not a lot of them will be anywhere off campus. My point, again, is that those guys can think well of themselves–damn straight–while not being up to the faculties’ social requirements.
Again, this is about my concept which must have a better name, “virtue signaling to oneself”. What does the professor have? He needs it to be Important.
Oh, yeah. youtube has “American Dunkirk” about the self-organized evacuation of lower Manhattan on 9-11. Lower class all the way.
And see Peggy Noonan’s “Welcome back, Duke” post 9-11.
I won’t dispute any of the aforementioned reasons offered for why academia embraced, with ever deeper hostility, animus toward America’s founding principles.
The fact that they have is all that matters. They are at war with truth itself, evidenced by their rejection of any facts, logic or reason that contradicts their narrative/agenda.
In doing so, I find myself firmly upon the side of Jefferson; “I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”
I increasingly view America’s ‘teaching’ profession as, in the aggregate, having embraced evil.
J:
Thank you too. I look forward to more of your comments.
@Richard Aubrey:
Re: “Virtue Signaling to Oneself”
How about ‘The Narrative Void’?
“Humankind cannot bear very much reality” is a line from a T.S. Eliot poem that has always been popular on the Right. While the Left does not have a monopoly on utopian thinking, it has never embraced realism. The Right, on the other hand, has always had an element that accepts the reality of the human condition. Not everyone on the Right or even a majority. One reality of the human condition is that most people, even the sober minded, prefer the escapism of fantasy to reality.”
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=22947
We all tell ourselves stories to make sense of the world and ourselves. Especially ourselves. Left and Right. Even those Libertarian Clown Car Drivers.
It’s powerful stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
For those who might prefer a video doco on Bernays, I recommend:
–“The Century of the Self (Full Documentary)”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
It’s from a leftie perspective, but that don’t mean it’s junk. Quite eye-opening. Cuts both ways.
i take issue with the dismissive attitude displayed against pipefitters and computer programmers, and by inference all those other folks who go to work every day so that the elite can survive. If your pipes leak or your lights won’t light, or your car won’t start, I bet you don’t call the local professor.
And God help you if someone tries to break into your house. “Who you gonna call?”
i take issue with the dismissive attitude displayed against pipefitters and computer programmers,
Another Mike:
S’alright!
I wrote that and I’m a computer programmer. There was also a time when I wore a blue-collar shirt with my name embroidered in an oval. I was an IBEW guy.
I have no condescension towards working folks. I’m an ex-hippie as well and I should be on the other side from good people like you and most here, but I learned a thing or two.
But the “Professor” could fix anything, and yet they all stayed stuck on that island, and he didn’t get either girl. A profound conundrum.
Another Mike:
“…pipefitters and computer programmers” was a private joke. Unless you’re an alpha programmer, basically you’re … a software pipefitter.
My point about professors was that their profession does have a certain amount of commitment to a higher mission attached.
As a programmer I have no such illusions. I’m basically knocking holes in walls, snaking cables and using a multimeter to see if the signals are going where they are supposed to and making stuff happen.
huxley. Sort of like the head flint knapper a hundred thousand years ago. Kept people from starving.
Worked in a college field project back in the day. A little, very little but not zero, supercilious attitude directed my way. I was also, without being consulted, presumed to be acting as a combination guard dog and plow horse. At a reunion forty years later, I discovered I’d been appreciated. Not too hasty.
I’ve always been partial to the implicit threat in the last two lines of Kipling’s poem, “Tommy”.
“An’ Tommy ain’t a bloomin’ fool.
“You bet that Tommy sees.”
Geoffrey Britain:
“In doing so, I find myself firmly upon the side of Jefferson: ‘I have sworn upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ ”
I wondered last summer as the rioters knocked down monuments, just when they would decide that quote on the Jefferson memorial would have to be obliterated.
There are lots of things at work in this but I think JanMN at 4:35 hits on the most central: the feeling on the part of smart people that they should be running the world, or at least designing the system governing it, because they are so smart. I’ve seen both higher ed and high tech up close and in that respect they are very similar. The tech industry is leftist for much the same reasons as academia. Look at Bill Gates, so confident that he knows how to fix everything.
Zaphod @ 8:30pm,
That zman post you linked sums up the narrative I have constructed for myself on why things are such a mess. We are all writing a story of what we perceive every minute of every day. The less that story coincides with what is actually happening, the more insane things become. Far too many of our fellow citizens are living tragically false narratives.
I don’t think you go far enough back. The tendency of the universities towards Marxism goes back to the very beginning. “The beginning,” for the American university as we understand it, is the last decade or two of the nineteenth century. That is when many of them were established, and when most of them adopted the organizational forms that we are used to today.
Marxists were already well established as university professors at that time. And to the extent that non-Marxists made up a majority, there was, nonetheless, already a feeling that Marxism was the true religion. Marxism was the future. All of the then-new “social sciences” (sociology, psychology, anthropology) drew heavily from Marxist ideas.
Whittaker Chambers, writing of his experience becoming a communist in the 1920s, observed that, while few university intellectuals ever actually joined the party, they could be counted on to be sympathetic, “fellow travellers.”
The leftward drift was built in from the start.
This is a very insightful post and comment thread. I will add that it is often very difficult to notice when one’s own philosophical fellow travelers have gone over the line. I think that’s the issue with a lot of academics. They’ve rationalized away the sins of their compatriots for too long and now its too late.
I am behind enemy lines here and will point out one other thing – the Academy has two missions: to transmit knowledge and to develop knowledge. The reward structure has long favored development. This has worked well in the sciences – reward those who reveal new things about the natural world. But in the humanities it has been a source of the trouble. The way you make a name for yourself is to come up with a radical new idea – the more radical the better.
“followed across campus by a leftist prof who was berating her loudly for her conservative views. Simple social pressure.”
That’s not “simple social pressure”. That’s harassment and stalking.
Here is an academia story from back in the day that indicates that there used to be some debate in academia on political issues. A professor put up an anti-Vietnam War poster on his office door. Two doors down, a professor put an American flag on his door. The professor in-between put up a DMZ sign.
For 25-30 years after the end of WW2, academia was an expanding job market. Newly-minted Ph.D.s had no problem finding a tenure-track position. With the decades-long expansion of doctoral programs, the supply of newly-minted Ph.D.s exceeded the number of tenure-track positions that needed to be filled. The progressively worsening market for tenure-track positions had, shall we say, a “chilling effect” on the expression of dissenting views in academia. If you want to keep your job, and you know that job was hard to come by, you are not going to jeopardize that job by saying something that upsets the dominant narratives on campus.
Too bad I missed most of this post. I was doing a bad thing yesterday…my wife and I got on an airplane (!) and traveled to that den of depravity, Florida, to visit our daughter and scout out real estate. And no, we didn’t wear 2 masks.
My 40+ experience followed this trajectory at the private liberal arts college I was employed: From the early 80s up to about 2000 things were quite good. Yes, most of the faculty were liberal, but a bit more in the classic sense, ie they were left of center. While I was right of center, there were a few more of us, and are opinions were actually considered and reasoned with. I had quite a few friends in the humanities and social studies. Around 2000 the administration began a push to hire more “women and people of color”. They used this seemingly nice idea to also screen such applicants for a more left view. The classic liberal faculty were taken in by this ruse. And as more of those faculty began to retire, the hiring of more and more leftists accelerated. By 2010, I had the remaining classic liberal friends in the humanities and social studies appalled by what had happened under their noses, but by then it was too late. Now, all of us have retired and the process is complete. I see no way back except for a complete collapse of the system. Even math, science, and engineering are going down. In the near future don’t go to any millennial doctor or get on any airplane designed by millennials..take the Boeing Max for example… A very sad situation that will ultimately lead to the collapse of the US.
I can speak first hand on how difficult it is to actively fight CRT contents (thankfully at my school not yet mandatory), and some of these are truly offensive (and actually racist). It takes a lot of time and effort to fight this constant sloganeering and find good, but short, single sentence, counter-arguments that would sufficiently confuse the other side. In science and engineering, we are all very busy people, and no-one has hours needed to understand what actually happened in Minnesota — when the alternative is to just see the video and say ‘sure, being an anti-racist sounds nice’?
Further, many of my colleagues, highly intelligent and creative, can buy into arguments regarding ‘structural barriers to advancement’ because they come from societies in which these barriers are still very real — for example, caste systems. Others heard stories from their parents (or were children at the time) about cultural revolution and know what can happen if you challenge your ‘Red Students’. Finally, some funding agencies have been doubling down on perceived structural issues in what amounts to struggle sessions requirements for getting grants.
I think all this will not end well, unfortunately. Although, I see that there is a mild counterwave now, after Trump’s removal from office — NYT debunking Smith story is, I believe, a sign of a ‘Grey Period’ coming to our Cultural Revolution (ht/ Dikotter), as are all these news about France and England pushing back.
This is all, of course, stray-voltage, the oldest tactics meant to distract from foreign money in politics.
}}} The takeover of the academy by the left started a long time ago. I won’t quibble over when, but suffice to say it has been many decades.
Pretty much a century. I assert it actually began after WWI — yes, ONE — as a direct result of The Great War.
I’ve been making the case for that since reading this:
What We Lost In The Great War
https://www.americanheritage.com/what-we-lost-great-war
I claim that the old, Classical Liberals, so proud of the accomplishments of The West, so arrogantly sure that humanity was on the cusp of Godhood, saw what stupid humans could do with the gifts they’d created and recoiled in abject horror, then turned like a spurned woman against The West.
The result was PostModern Liberalism.
PostModern Liberalism (“PML”) is nothing short of a societal cancer. Literally, not figuratively. It attacks every aspect of the twin foundations of Western Civilization:
1) The inheritance of Greek Thought and Ideal
2) The basis of Judeo-Christian moral and work ethos
Deconstruction, Moral Relativism, Structuralism, Hermaneutics….
It attacks other aspects of Western Civ, much of which is derived from those two, such as meritocracy, individualism, free speech, etc.
We now live in a time when there are pretty much no Classical Liberals left, and at least 95% of “liberals” are, in thought and deed, PMLs.
And it’s been tearing away at us for most of the last century.
We live in interesting times, indeed.
An excellent recent article by Katherine Kersten in First Things traces the emergence in the 19th century of an “Adversary Culture” among intellectuals which has spread its influence throughout our cultural institutions and shapes our basic stance towards our society and and its traditions.
“We are heirs to the sensibility that gives a prime role to indignation at society’s inevitable failures and conceives of human flourishing as requiring a “jail break” from social convention. Thus, a person who thinks himself cultivated and critically aware—part of the enlightened crowd—has a sense of personal identity “conceived in opposition to the general culture.” The striking commercial success of On the Road, Jack Kerouac’s account of the countercultural “beat” lifestyle, revealed the large audience of university-educated people who were very much part of 1950s “conventionality,” yet who resonated with the oppositional ethos of Kerouac’s misfits.”
Academics are always tempted to view themselves as superior to the ordinary run of society, if for no other reason that it justifies their existence. The lack of status and material reward commensurate with their self-image may add some resentment as well. An intellectual class dominated by this mindset is perfectly primed to accept such notions as ubiquitous ‘systemic racism”, “white supremacy”, oppressive “heteronormativity”, etc. And the appeal of the New should not be underestimated – a whole lot of PhD dissertations are just waiting to be written in these new directions.
I am libertarian in the practical sense. I am considered very conservative at my university and very liberal at my church. I have spoken out in favor of free speech and other basic rights issues several times over the years. It does no good and it is punished. There is so much stupidity that is advanced from so many well intentioned people who want to feel important that you can’t stop it all at the faculty level. Even if you succeed in the short term the same issues keep coming up.
I have been compared to Hitler in Faculty Senate meeting for sins such as asking how much something would cost and which budget it was coming out of. Questions that were not answered. The owner of the bar I favor had a group of progressives threatened to boycott her business if she continued to allow me to drink there. She told them that most of her customers were factory workers and similar and that if they boycotted because of my Faculty Senate vote I would probably not have to buy my own beer for a month because everyone would cheer my actions. Had she caved to the threats life would have been less rich. (Only two of us out of around 60 voted against the proposal. It’s not like I am even effective.)
I watched the first episode of Catch-22 recently. By the end I looked at my son and said “I am Clevenger.” I still give into the temptation to point out the obvious occasionally even knowing it is stupid.
Art imitates life …
“Personally, I liked the university. They gave us money and facilities, we didn’t have to produce anything! You’ve never been out of college! You don’t know what it’s like out there! I’ve WORKED in the private sector. They expect *results*.”
Ray Stanz, “Ghostbusters”.
Our society has put formal education and celebrity on pedestals of worship, as possessing the insight, wisdom, and virtue of superhuman deities, for a century … while summarily dismissing wisdom presented outside those channels as not worthy of consideration or trust.
And our society has also put “non-profit” status on a pedestal of worship and trust, while treating those honest enough to state their intent to profit with perpetual suspicion and the application of restraints in a manner reminiscent of Gulliver.
No wonder they like life on those pedestals … basking in the glow of blinded trust.
The blind, leading the blinded.
Its envy, pure & simple.
Consider that your garden variety pHd. has spent at least 16 years chasing that credential and then has to go thru the post doc steeplechase to get anywhere near a tenure track position.
By the time they get their first real job, they’re already showing a little gray around the temples, living in marginal neighborhoods, and finding themselves out-earned by skilled plumbers, electricians, and HVAC technicians.
It is just humiliating for someone with their intellectual heft to not be a member of the order issuing nomenklatura.
Hence the attraction of socialism.
Someone once said that pHd’s know more & more about less & less, and in my experience, some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met have more initials after their last name than they do before their first.
Like they say, some things are so stupid only an intellectual could believe them.
I think you missed the fact that for a lot of people who earn the PhD, they do as a form of external validation that they are smart – I admit it was a motivation for me, but unlike most, I recognize it. That is an indication of self-esteem issues. In addition, academia is an environment where, if you go with the flow, security and lack of accountability are goals you can attain if you go with the flow, which is a further incentive for those who have issues with insecurity.
I spent 10 years in academia and DID speak up. I was kind of looked at as a heretic for doing things like challenging the department chair by suggesting that using the photocopier (which we did at the first school I taught at) as a shared printer was cheaper than having a share laser printer AND for pointing out that it was illegal to have specify numerical goals by race and gender for faculty hires and admissions and that having them was prima facie evidence of guilt in a discrimination suit. I ended up with a chair trying to change my contract so I could not apply for tenure (despite being one of the top funded/publishing department faculty members with good teaching evals, a mentoring award, and more prestigious national service than the full professors), having him try to SWAT me, and having my grad students subject to petty harassment. Fortunately, a PhD in Health Services Research and Policy was quite employable in the private sector. While I miss teaching and students, I do NOT miss the politics – crap like that would not be tolerated in my for-profit company if only because it would cost the firm money.
I think there is a corollary to Sayre’s Law, that academic politics is so nasty not just because the stakes are so small, but because too many academics are insecure and passive-aggressive as a result.
Hi, Holly. That’s an interesting point about the dual mission of the modern university. Putting that together with the other point above about community colleges suggests that in schools with a research element in the humanities, one is likely to find the greatest agitation for Wokian thought; and it’s because that urge to publish, for example, is basically absent from the community college scene that such agitation is less there.
@George Avery:for a lot of people who earn the PhD, they do as a form of external validation that they are smart
In my case it wasn’t that at all. It was because I loved what I studied and I was getting paid to study it. (In the sciences most people don’t pay to get a PhD, they get paid, because graduate students are the workforce of the sciences.) Since I was holed up in the lab all the time I wasn’t getting a lot of social validation for “smartness” anyway.
I was the only PhD in my extended family (still am) but they describe me as “the kind of doctor that doesn’t do you any good”.
Had I wanted to stay in academia there were moves I should have made in graduate school but didn’t, and maybe I would have liked academia better had I done those things. Among those moves would have been keeping quiet about my opinions when they diverged from the consensus.
Fortunately my skills were transferrable to the private sector. The thing I miss most is having so much time off. True, academics typically are not paid in the summer but that’s fixed by simple budgeting, and you’d be surprised (or not) by how many PhDs fail to do that. What I do not miss are the students: the endless repetition of excuses and complaining and trying to get by with as little work as possible. And I do not miss the stultifying political conformity.
I started college in 1960 and remember the free speech movement. The college administrarors would talk a good game but when push came to shove, they would fold up like a paper sack. We joked that there was nothing more craven or cowardly than a college president.
Main problem for academics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjzC1Dgh17A
physicsguy @ 8:36am,
Well that was uplifting! 🙂
ObloodyHell @ 8:58am,
Makes sense. Woodrow Wilson, after all, was a College Professor and eventual President of Princeton, along with being our President during WWI and he certainly helped usher in huge, Progressive changes in our nation.
Bob,
Thank you for sharing your experiences. That’s very sad. Glad to hear the bar owner had/has your back!
“Professors in the humanities probably are more likely to be with the leftist program in the first place, but if they’re not, they probably have far fewer options outside of academia. And so they stay and keep their mouths shut.” – That sums it up better than anything I have ever read. I would bet that academia as well as Hollywood although overwhelmingly Left contains far more conservatives than we realize but they are cowed and when you are paying rent or a mortgage the first of every month comes very fast.
One for the mix:
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2021/02/why-would-iowa-want-to-kill-tenure.html
I hope that we will see more bills like this in other state legislatures.
I responded, or tried to respond, to Huxley’s question on another thread. Neo did a much better job here. I haven’t been in academe as long as physicsguy–30 years instead of his 40–but I can offer the following experience-informed points in addition to everything that has been said here.
Speaking out at faculty meetings doesn’t work.
Writing e-mails to colleagues doesn’t work.
Writing memos to university administrators doesn’t work.
Writing letters to state and federal legislators gets a mixed response, but mostly crickets.
Most people are cowards when their paycheck and health insurance are in play. We academics are no different.
Too many people have an exalted, unrealistic picture of higher education. It’s a business like any other. It shouldn’t be, but it is. As William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has pointed out repeatedly, higher education is actually more ruthless than the most heartless Big Corporation when it comes to protecting its money and its perks. It fights dirty and it has deep pockets.
There are four ways to stop the sh*t we are seeing now.
The first is action by state legislatures. Iowa’s example is an encouraging sign. Action at the federal level would help enormously, but I think we can forget about that happening in the near future.
The second is strategically chosen, successful, and extremely costly lawsuits. That’s why I support Legal Insurrection, FIRE, and Speech First.
The third is to stop giving to your alma mater, and to tell them why. I stopped years ago.
And the fourth is for parents to stop sending their children to four-year colleges. That’s where the people on this forum can make a difference.
“And the fourth is for parents to stop sending their children to four-year colleges. That’s where the people on this forum can make a difference.”
One step further would be better — we need to break the model of “every child goes to college” that the left has grown for the past 30 years or so. Nearly every college student I met, or heard in recorded interviews, has bought into the notion that “education” is important (meaning a college degree), sold to them by people whose job basically is selling an education. Starve the beast– stop feeding the cancer.
I wasted 20 years as a non-leftist adjunct in the Humanities, looking and applying for full-time jobs but never quite making the final cut. Teaching 4 classes, two at different schools, kept the bills paid, but grading 300-400 papers per quarter for less than full-time pay, and having to budget smartly for a summer of no income, gradually took its toll.
I realized at the last faculty meeting I attended that it was a small club that was increasingly unlikely to ever admit me as a member, so I stepped away.
I still don’t know what I’m going to actually do full-time, since I have 20 years of experience that don’t matter anywhere else but higher ed.
Ty Ping,
“Starve the beast–stop feeding the cancer.”
Yup. Unfortunately. I know a lot of people who are still doing important work at my institution (they’re dedicated teachers too), but it’s being done against a stiff headwind. And it’s under threat.
Sorry about the time you invested as an adjunct. Have you considered teaching at a private secondary school, especially a parochial school? I’ve seen how things are done at a few of those, and it reminds me of what higher ed used to be. Serious material taught seriously. Best of luck with your plans.
The crucial point remains unaddressed in either the post, or in the comments I have read. That point is the true nature of the “Universitat”, that is now called here, the University. That true nature is still what it was in 1088 A.D. was the first Universitat of scholars. That means, a corporation of scholars, founded by the government of the Holy Roman Empire, to solve a political problem.
That problem was the lack of people who could be counted on a loyal to the Emperor over the Pope, who were sufficiently literate to work as government clerks, who would still talk to the Emperor, or any other ruler, if the Pope excommunicated them. Most government clerks were still churchmen, loyal to the Pope. Excommunication was a deadly political weapon of the Popes that could virtually shut down a government. The Universitat of Bologna, in 1088 A.D., was created to educate people sufficiently to be reliable government clerks.
For the next 450 years, universities did that job better and better, strengthening the power of the State over the power of the Church. Eventually, rulers could break with the church and join the Reformation, because their university-trained clerks would be loyal to them in spite of excommunication. By the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the fatal words for Papal domination of religion were at the core of the Treaty, … “Ius Regio, … Ius Religio”. An english translation is “whoever rules, … his religion”. University-trained clerks were the enablers of this change.
This strengthening of the State has always been the core market for the University System. It has resulted, since the beginning of the industrial revolution, in universities supporting a wide range of ideologies that are reactionary against the continuing industrial revolution, at its core definiton:
“When a society moves from allocating resources by custom and tradition (moderns read here, by politics) to allocating resources by markets, they may be said to have undergone an industrial revolution” Arnold Toynbee-1884
The Soft Marxists of The Franfurt School, and their “Critical Theory” are just the most recent wave, in wave after wave of ideologies, that seek to strengthen political allocation of resources by the State, and not at all coincidentally providing jobs for university-trained government clerks who need not undergo the rigor of STEM disciplines to get them. If universities do *not* support such ideologies, then their first and most important market, and patron, will begin shrinking in comparison with the enormously more productive worldwide market networks of the continuing industrial revolution. Eventually, university hierarchs would suffer if they do nothing, so encouraging these reactionaries against industrial society is a natural move for them, … again.
We need means to pass knowledge from one generation to the next without strengthening the State at every turn, just to justify the existence of that means. In the University, and its dependent public schools, we do not have such a means.
It’s not just academia, it’s across all corporations. The problem is the same. Conflict avoidance, selective enforcement, duplicity empowering prevarication.
Years ago Ralph Nader wrote: “If you regulate an industry, any industry, and you don’t enforce uniformly, the unethical will bankrupt the ethical every time.”
Professors represent a most important form of trustee; trustees of knowing; of what is known. But the corporation that employs them is duplicitous; has normalized prevarication and rhetorical racketeering, for money and for expediencies of conflict avoidance that make administrative life easier.
All around us we find malignant examples of failed trusteeship. It pervades our institutions, all of which are corporate entities of varying tax status from government agencies, universities, unions; from public schools to publicly traded SEC listed corporations.
The moralisms dominating our modern era have become little more than an inventory of masking behavior for malignant dispositions and personality disorders among those seeking authority over others. They trade in distemper, prevarication and duplicity. The most prominent among them are protected by corporate media engaging in the monetization of fraud, pretending that somehow monetizing willful orchestrations of falsehoods is not commerce but instead free speech.
Failed trustees. Failed trusteeship. Malignant institutions. That they become terrible, punishing and pathological workplace environments only accelerates the creeping ennui of institutional disease.
Private sector corporations in commerce have a form of built in apoptosis; sufficiently malignant they go bankrupt and die. We are not so fortunate with large foundations and institutions; particularly government. They don’t self-modulate death by bankruptcy. These mammoths of malignancy require great and disproportionate trauma to decease.
Not even the holy temples of “Science” are immune. If you haven’t heard this, please allow me to repeat a simple wisdom: “There is no such thing as Science. There is only scientific method and the lack thereof. All else is politics and prevarication.”
The great crisis in modern civilization is the collapse of trustee culture across its institutions. It goes deeper than the fabulisms of Marx, Gramsci, Foucault and others.
To paraphrase Rupert Sheldrake, a hard problem is the misapplication of rational materialism to the modern era. The rational materialist world view and the scientism, eugenics and racialism is has fostered is a failed world view.
We are in serious trouble. Scientism cannot save us. Hate Speech laws cannot save us. Inculcating Racialism cannot save us. Legalism and selective enforcement cannot save us.
No society, culture, corporation, state or family can long survive recurrent failures of trusteeship. The trustee role is far greater and imminently more important than appointed figureheads ritualistically seated on their collective asses pretending to serve the greater good by avoiding conflict.
Trusteeship has become a lost competency in the modern era. One only need look at the depravities of the FBI, the federal judiciary and Congress to see the depth of duplicity and depravity that comprise the new malignant normal.
Simple. The school hires a bozo to teach. Eventually, that bozo hires other bozos and before you know it, it’s bozos all the way down.
“(2) That said, professors tend to work in the realm of ideas – except for those in more practical fields such as science, where ideas have more obvious consequences” [Neo]
This is one of the points made over and over again in Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society. As he points out there are no repercussions for intellectuals being theoretically wrong. They simply move on to the next theory and let others clean up the mess they left behind. This is one explanation of the constant rehashing of socialism under the guise that it just hasn’t been done correctly yet; there is no correct way to do it so we make a mess and try it again.
It brings to mind Jester Naybor’s above quote from Ghostbusters (@9:37 am, that the real world expects results) and also reminds me of the aphorism attributed to Yogi Berra:
It’s the second part of that aphorism that intellectuals outside of the practical professions rarely grasp.
Also as a former academic who resigned his tenured position 30 years ago, I think Holly’s observation (above @ 8:24 am) about promulgating and advancing knowledge at the university is spot on. Her comment about the humanities is precisely correct:
Holly, I think Thomas Sowell would agree.
All around us we find malignant examples of failed trusteeship.
[snip]
The moralisms dominating our modern era have become little more than an inventory of masking behavior for malignant dispositions and personality disorders among those seeking authority over others.
[snip]
The great crisis in modern civilization is the collapse of trustee culture across its institutions. [glissmeister @ 2:51 pm]
Thank you glissmeister! That last observation should be cut in stone.
The conservatives didn’t have a chance.
Take Neill Macaulay for example.
A Citadel graduate. Served in Korea long after the war ended.
Served in Castro’s army of rebellion.
According to him, he was just fighting for the poor and downtrodden in Cuba.
He received a stolen plantation from Castro, who then stole it from him a year or so later.
After getting personal treatment from Strom Thurmond to get back into the US, he earned an advanced degree from UT Austin and becomes a “learned” university professor in Hispanic countries and affairs.
You see, according to his own book, “A Rebel in Cuba,” Neill was aligned with Castro on Castro’s communism, but stated when Castro’s folks told him the land is not his that “… all must work for the common good of the country [Cuba]. But some do this better by working on their own account. I am one of these. I am an individualist.”
That was too much for him. His communism was only if it affected others and not him or his family.
Just like today.
@ “The conservatives didn’t have a chance.”
The problem with the conservative political identity movement is the preponderance are not conservationist in any way, shape or manner. They assume and promote the identity “conservative” to rationalize their distempers and ambitions. They are not interested in conserving anything more than their self-interest.
Romney, McConnell, Murkowski, Thune and the rest of that brand of beltway ilk are not conservative. They are Provincials. They seek province. They seek title. They seek the province that suits their self-interest and the incumbent vanities and spoils of their inflated identity. Thus they prance and parry officiously with all the backbone of a voracious woodworm.
Again we find more failed trustees. No mutualism. Self-dealing, pernicious and unfit for authority over others. These are people who enjoy special rights. Just ask them. They are better than you because.
And what of Democrats? For those who may ask, here’s my question: “What is it about conducting politics as a vast ongoing criminal enterprise that you do not understand?”
Political machines depend upon corporations and corporate networks which amplify individual power and syndicate interests to suppress the influence and interests of other individual persons in society individually, mutually and collectively. This is why they target and pack positions of authority in subject corporate entities with fellow travelers. Now the syndicates are transnational.
During the 1990s I became acquainted with the son of a senior Politburo member of the former Soviet Union.
He said a most interesting thing: “You American’s amaze me. You can put a man on the moon but you can’t figure out communism. It has nothing to do with politics and ideals and everything to do with crime and power. It’s a vast criminal syndicate that infiltrates, dissembles and corrupts everyone and everything. There is only power, and power only comes from the party.”
Party Uber Alles.
By any means necessary.
What domestic American political party comes to mind?
Before I forget to do so and this thread becomes buried beneath the quickly shifting sands of time, I am obligated to recognize here and now the excellent contributions made by those who have had, and still do have, careers in academia: which would apparently include Hubert, Fredrick, Avery, Bob, Holly, Mac, Mica and physicsguy among others.
I also found Super Genius’s remarks linking academic success and esteem with “creativity” which is presuppositionally defined within a system of structured opposition, to be a useful contributing insight.
First off, what happened was not 50 years ago in many departments, but was already deeply set in the early ’50’s. Certainly in the humanities at the University of Miami, 1961. My mother, as a *very* educated Cuban emigre (but I repeat myself for that time period) took graduate classes at U of M. She was horrified that they were all communists.
Second, as others have often commented, it is a religion for them and they are single minded in progressive/statists advancement.
Finally, and this kind of ties into the idea of politics/philosophy acting as a religion, I had a conversation some 15-20 years ago with a dear friend from Iran. I told him I saw pictures of Iran in the ’50’s, ’60’s etc., and they seemed so Western. He said they were. I asked how that could have changed so quickly? He is not a religious man, nor was his family in Teheran. They are still not, and he is not. He married an American woman, and his children identify as bread and butter American. He said the vast majority around him in Iran, prior to late ’60’s and early/mid ’70’s were not religious; none were zealots. They loved America. But he said that a weird phenomenon started-similar to what we are now seeing with these woke people. He said that the person who talked like they were the most religious/ascetic–and certainly the Imans that were the most this way-were given more credence. People would defer to them. The end results was increasing radicalization of the Imans, and the regular folk would out religion their neighbors. To my appreciation, a vicious circle. But I guess in the Ayatollah’s appreciation a virtuous circle. We are seeing the same here. I am not sure how this will end there, nor here. They tried their Spring Revolution and it was unsuccessful
I echo DNW’s comment @ 6:17pm
I really appreciate the comments from all those with personal, first hand experience. Thanks for making time to write them. It is very informative for us Plebes!
It was Roger Scruton’s #oikophobia—the aversion to home—that answers your question, I think: “Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested.” https://sisu.typepad.com/sisu/2006/06/a_political_cul.html
DNW and Rufus,
Thanks. I think we in academe owe our non-academic fellow citizens an explanation of how and why things went so badly wrong. After all, you’re paying for a lot of it, which is doubly outrageous when so many non-insulated people’s livelihoods have been destroyed this past year. Some of us have tried/are trying to stop or reverse the rot, but it’s a steep uphill battle–kind of like Dak To in 1967 but not nearly as bad (tip of the hat to our own Richard Aubrey, who may have been there). The worst that can happen to us is we get fired. Or relieved of administrative duties (thow me in that there briarpatch!).
Anyway, I’m not optimistic, but I’ve been wrong plenty of times so I hope I’m wrong about this. Public, vocal pushback from parents of college-age kids is crucial.
Sissy Willis…”“Oikophobia is a stage through which the adolescent mind normally passes. But it is a stage in which intellectuals tend to become arrested.”
This is a good explanation re a certain type of intellectuals…for example, someone who grew up in a small town in Alabama where his intellectual interests were not respected, and who has never gotten over the resentment. But what about those intellectuals (academics) who themselves grew up in intellectual environments, went to academically-oriented private schools, etc…I think this category probably represents a much larger % of the mix than it did 20 or more years ago. But for these people, true Oikophobia would require turning hard conservative.
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Academia cannot be reformed, the takeover is overwhelming, the defenses are well thought out and the effort required is not affordable.
However, it can be bypassed, and this is the greatest opportunity ever presented to move to a free market in the provision of educational services.
What if state legislatures required all State Universities to provide equivalent credits via examinations. The instruction needed to pass these examinations would be provided by the free market. Students receiving these credits would receive the same degree as those who sat through the courses, and could mix actual classes with credits via exams to attain their degrees.
In my state of Texas, and probably in most other states, there are detailed definitions of requirements for credit transferability. These can easily be used to create credentialing exams, which the free market providers can use to develop course material.
The MOOC expansion is a partial move in the right direction, but students should be able to acquire education from any source and earn the same academic credits via testing as by sitting through the classes. This would create an explosion of free market providers of educational services and end the current abused monopoly status of academia.
The credentialing exams should also allow retaking, with higher grade points reflecting life experience and added study. The tests should not be pass/fail, but actually indicate the test score. To stop indoctrination, an appeals procedure staffed by volunteer alumni should allow review of grades where other than multiple choice questions are part of the grade. Total transparency at the student’s option should be required.
In the fast approaching world of the future, continual education will become the norm. It is time to open the provision of educational services to the free market in a truly meaningful way.
Credentialing via testing would do it.
But what would happen to our colleges and universities many will ask? The most likely result would be their changing to offer continuing education to older adults. In the highly automated world of the future people will look for ways to use their abundant leisure time. Study in communities of scholars will find a very large market.
Instead of enslaving the young with impossible debt, they will become competitors in offering rigorous study in the huge variety of fields that humans find interesting.
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Arnold Kling is also looking at education, and looks at this post.
http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/neo-on-academic-corruption/
He cites three factors: government money; emasculated culture; and affirmative action.
Here is a good summary of the Bloom book:
https://theclosingoftheamericanmind.com/
I continue thinking that tax-exempt status should be taken away from colleges that have been discriminating against Republicans.
Allowing students to gain credentials thru testing would be a fantastic step.
Neo, Arnold is also having a Fantasy Intellectual Team that looks interesting. You’re on the list of possible bloggers that might be drafted.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1UfxlKq9zg4o_ULquNsfs5neLFX2Zwnwb/edit#gid=351237869
Current first season rules here: http://www.arnoldkling.com/blog/fits-details/
The education system in the West is run by the filthy tribe swill, who yearn for the “good old days” of their Messiahs – Lenin and Stalin – who they helped murder FIFTY MILLION across Russia and Eastern Europe. But those do not count since they were mostly only Goyim!!!
Robert Nozick’s article, “Why Do Intellectuals Oppose Capitalism?,” is highly relevant. See https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/why-do-intellectuals-oppose-capitalism
A brief excerpt:
“Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued people in a society, those with the most prestige and power, those with the greatest rewards. Intellectuals feel *entitled* to this. But, by and large, a capitalist society does not honor its intellectuals. Ludwig von Mises explains the special resentment of intellectuals, in contrast to workers, by saying they mix socially with successful capitalists and so have them as a salient comparison group and are humiliated by their lesser status. However, even those intellectuals who do not mix socially are similarly resentful, while merely mixing is not enough–the sports and dancing instructors who cater to the rich and have affairs with them are not noticeably anti-capitalist.
“Why then do contemporary intellectuals feel entitled to the highest rewards their society has to offer and resentful when they do not receive this? Intellectuals feel they are the most valuable people, the ones with the highest merit, and that society should reward people in accordance with their value and merit. But a capitalist society does not satisfy the principle of distribution “to each according to his merit or value.” Apart from the gifts, inheritances, and gambling winnings that occur in a free society, the market distributes to those who satisfy the perceived market-expressed demands of others, and how much it so distributes depends on how much is demanded and how great the alternative supply is. Unsuccessful businessmen and workers do not have the same animus against the capitalist system as do the wordsmith intellectuals. Only the sense of unrecognized superiority, of entitlement betrayed, produces that animus.”
Yuri Bezmenov described the targeting of Academia 40 years ago after defecting from the Soviet Union. Methinks there’s a good case for arguing the west has lost the Cold War… at least is far behind.