When I was getting my history BA the distinction they made was low medieval (approximately 410-1066 i.e. Alaric to William) versus high medieval (approximately 1066-1400). The low medieval period is characterized by breakdown of central authority in the early years followed by slow re-establishment of governments based around vassalage and the church. I don't see anything happening now as a parallel.

The occam's razor of conspiracy theories is not to attribute to intentional malfeasance emerging from smoke filled rooms that which is adequately explained by incompetence and a*s covering.

Isn't there a meme about this?

In my teens: The radio is playing my jams!

In my twenties: The bar is playing my jams!

In my thirties*: The grocery store is playing my jams!

*Or after, as the case my be.

Obviously it was Roger McDowell.

Got it now I understand.

Is there a typo or some nuance about polls versus people who showed up to actually vote I am not getting?

I am struggling to understand how voters under 30 could have 'supported Biden by large margins' but 'Trump probably narrowly won 18-29 year-olds.'

It's all about give and take. I've always been a proponent of broad tolerance of speech and being as hands off as possible. All I can go by is the news reports and I'm open to the possibility that a lot of this is greatly exaggerated. The algorithm rewards rage and controversy not perspective.

However what isn't lost on me is that I'm pretty sure the people out protesting are the same ones who refuse to tolerate mere discussion of contentious topics in classrooms or speakers with whom they disagree on whatever topic speaking to a group that wants to hear them in a lecture hall. And yet they would ask their audience to give them a benefit of the doubt we all know they would never in a million years extend to others. Hence why even the most fair minded people have become skeptical. The kinds of broader principles one might appeal to were purged from this type of activism long ago.

The thing is I doubt I'm all that far off from a policy perspective. I'd have stopped military aid and running diplomatic interference for the Israelis decades ago. However even extending maximim charity to the student and faculty activists I do not think it is fair or reasonable to ask regular tuition paying students to submit to being endlessly held hostage.

I think that might be another take that's becoming dated. There's always a conversation to be had about the ROI for the marginal student and/or the marginal school. That issue was a lot more acute with the glut of students during and in the years following the great recession. My understanding is that one upside of a full employment economy is that it was driving a correction. More jobs, even not great ones, meant fewer students of the kind most likely to fall through that sort of gap. Pity Trump seems hell bent on reversing it.

The more important questions I think revolve around whether colleges have no choice but to require the students that want to attend class to accommodate the never ending Palestine party, as it obstructs walkways and open spaces, or worse periodically paralyzes educational or administrative functions by occupying buildings or engaging in other disruptions. It can be added to long standing questions about whether it really is a good idea to have some Dean of student life equipped with the latest in feminist thinking investigate alleged felony sex crimes among the student body, run admissions departments as thinly veiled probably illegal racial balancing bureaucracies, and threaten the STEM departments with sanction if they refuse to lower their standards because someone somewhere might be upset about the demographics of the class and/or professoriate.

Sorry for being unclear, my gripe comes down to my belief that we're de facto funding the institutions. Most students could not get the kind of credit on the terms they do, if at all, but for the public backing. Without students able to get that money, the economics of even wealthy private institutions change considerably.

I would much rather live in a gray area on this topic or under the fiction that we're really funding the students.
Making that work requires a sense of propriety from the administrative leadership at these institutions that I do not detect. At a certain point if the public via elected officials decides they don't want to support schools that operate under bizarre and backwards theories of race or sex or whatever else that's way out of step with the values of the average tax payer I don't think they have to or that the students as an intermediary cures the issue. The result of that would be a 'get out of jail free' card the universities don't deserve and puts the taxpayer in the pickle of either funding nonsense (which is ironically highly self destructive to the universities themselves) or nothing at all.

Hopefully that clarifies.

You think it's bizarre to discuss the article that is the subject of the post?

I want to be persuaded by that argument but am struggling as to whether I actually am. Where (I think) we're aligned is that I do not want the government using the heavy hand. I think it is bad for all involved and society more generally.

If the institutions themselves hadn't been so hellbent on thumbing their nose at their benefactors and the wider public it would be a lot easier for me to say it's the students spending the money not the government. However followed to it's logical conclusion we end up in a place where in order to fund education and research the government has no choice but to also put its thumb on the scales for deeply antisocial and illiberal ideologies with no democratic mandate, with the only alternative being to take the tax payer money and go home. That's a terrible place to be and feels to me like a false choice.

Heh, I was at UMD followed later by the 'also ran' state law school when these sorts of debates were in their post PCU, Clintonesque nadir. There were some traces I recognize mostly in retrospect but it was not something that loomed particularly large.

My concern about giving an alternative approach a hoity toity title is that it may well concede premises about legitimacy of the criticisms that I'm not prepared to. Which isn't to say I disagree with your general philosophy.

However if I had to pick at it a little, it would be this question of whether there really is a hard line between private and public, at least to the extent the privates, SLACs, Ivies, whatever, receive public grants and most importantly the backdoor subsidy of federally backed student loans. That doesn't mean the government can just come in and shut things down for no reason other than speech it doesn't like but it does mean that all of the direct and indirect money has always been subject to the democratic process. In terms of what the Trump administration is doing it seems to fall under pulling strings everyone for reasons I will never comprehend forgot were, and always have been, attached.

Yea I would say there is a fundamental failure to understand that the strongest bulwark against the kind of authoritarianism experienced in the 20th century is well functioning liberal institutions.

Yesterday evening I happened to come across this substack post by a former chancellor of UC Berkeley. I know nothing about him but it seems relevant.

https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/how-did-academia-not-see-it-coming?

The essay includes some academic terms and references to people I had to look up but does a good job articulating something that has seemed obvious to me since these debates about academia, "wokeness," etc. emerged. The embrace of these various theories of post truth, and deconstruction, to say nothing of bordering on conspiratorial levels of cynicism about the liberal project or that truth even exists, ultimately result in a kind of unilateral disarmament. After all, if all of the institutions and values underlying small l liberalism, and the basis of Western systems of government, are nothing but shams designed to empower the usual suspects, how do you defend them when a reactionary right says 'yes, we agree, just not about which particular suspects'?

You can't, and nevertheless that's exactly the point the modern university, and academically saturated organs of society like journalism have spent recent years conceding. You don't get the credibility back over night and there's no way to request a redo. All of which to say is that something like this from NYT is probably too little, too late.

I'm visiting my alma mater for the first time in years next month for an event for my older son's baseball team. I am curious to see what it's like. The last time I can clearly recall being on campus was to attend a basketball game around 10 years ago.

I went to the big state flagship which seems like it might be less of a flash point. There was a lot of visible activism when I was there but the place is too big to disrupt like you read about at small schools, the exception being post game rioting.

I agree with you that the results will be bad. What's happening is probably best understood as Extremely Online lashing out.

What I would nevertheless like to see, assuming anyone and anything survives, is a restoration of the idea that these institutions are to be sober and humble stewards of the money and privileges bestowed on them.

I think the unfortunate reality is that they brought this on themselves. Contra what David said above no university, public or private, is entitled to public money. Public universities are creations of the state, private universities are eligible for what they get, including via federally backed loans, by virtue of following (lots and lots of) rules set by the government.

Historically they've gotten that money because of the belief that they are providing a valuable service to the broader citizenry, and the country as a hole. The youthful antics are tolerated to the extent they have to be for institutions to complete their larger mission. But the funding is allocated for the students doing what Jaybird mentioned, i.e. completing their coursework and getting a degree. It isn't to create a forum for the endless accommodation of the most self indulgent types of activism. If that's how it ends up being used, or even just perceived as being used, it's no mystery that eventually someone is going to start yanking it back, including by enforcement of all the rules the schools certify they're following to the letter.

Make no mistake, I think we are all going to lose if that happens in a comprehensive way, but it's a completely predictable consequence.

Similar reaction. My gut has been to say the Republicans have a majority, let them figure it out. At the same time the last thing you want to do is end up empowering Trump. The courts are slow but they aren't giving him carte blanche.

I'm holding out for teleportation technology capable of beaming me from my couch to a barstool at the pub up the street. Or more importantly from the barstool back to my couch.

Dave Mustaine narrowed the responsibilities down to talking to God, going to court when you have to, showing up to work on time, and paying your bills.

I think that's a lot of it. Could we have done this better and greater vision? 100%. But it's hard to imagine a country this big and low density turning out the way a geographically small, high density country does. There's also the decrease in cost of short haul passenger flights over the last decades. Crappy for climate change but sensible enough from a consumer cost and efficiency perspective.

There was an article a few weeks ago by Kevin Williamson called 'Where's the Omelet?'

https://thedispatch.com/article/trump-putin-ukraine-war/

It is mainly about Trump's foreign policy and Ukraine in particular but I think the general sentiments could be applied writ large. He is going to break a bunch of eggs with the implication that he's making an omelet (the best omelet, an omelet,
so good, people tell me there's never been one better, not in the history of our country) except that at the end there won't actually be an omlet, just a mess.

I think you're right that at this current moment there's not much the Democrats can do besides let this play out to some degree. Elections have consequences and they lost. Eventually they then have to come up with a vision about what a better future (or omelet) actually looks like, and sell it with something resembling a authenticity. For the time being it's probably too early for that. Things had to get really messed up during the Bush years before Obama calibrated a compelling counter punch. I expect this will be similar.

Sure, if there is a bill with true bi-partisan backing or in fact would be good for Democrats strategically (i.e. your 80/20 issue) there's no harm in hopping on that train. Go for it. But that's not what the core fights in Congress are going to be over. It's all going to be about whether massive cuts in Medicaid are made as a partial offset for tax cuts weighted towards the wealthiest. That ain't an 80/20 issue and the Republicans need to be left to do that one on their own, if they even can.

I don't know why they'd give on anything without something in return. Let the Republicans own all of this.