I don't think they are being endlessly held hostage. I don't think they ever were, and to the extent that they were, it was very brief and highly localized.
This feels a lot like the people saying Portland is a war zone in 2020 as though the vast majority of Portland wasn't going about its business as though nothing was happening.
I think this is true of virtually any serious philosophical, political, or scientific ideas, though. I don't know what it says about them other than that they are difficult to master and most people are intellectually lazy.
You’ve got some of them getting hired as they walk off the stage and others who walk off the stage and walk across the street and join a protest demanding student loan relief.
I mean, good for them if they do, but I don't think you have many students going straight into intentional unemployment unless they have enough money that student loans probably aren't an issue.
I think he's right that people broadly conflate critical theory with Marxism, and are particularly afraid of critical theory, even if I am quite certain that they know as little about critical theory as they do about Marxism, and perhaps less.
From early in its radio history through its early television days in the 1960s, Bertrand Russell was a fixture on the BBC, including doing segments in which he would talk about philosophical ideas, particularly those of the first half of the 20th century (famously lampooned here). It would be amazing if we could have someone come on TV and talk about major intellectual movements of the last century or so, including critical theory. I think more people would like it if they knew more about it.
The conversation we should be having, but are not, because it's a difficult conversation to have, is what do we want universities to be for? Should it serve a purely intellectual purpose (in which case, the "bad actors" are inevitable, and I think a feature, not a bug)? Should it prepare young people for careers (generally or specifically)? Should it be the home of the vast majority of our research, from basic to applied? Should it have a broad or narrow collection of majors? Etc.
Some of these are highly compatible purposes for a university, and some are significantly less so, or even contradictory. Currently, at least in practice, universities are trying to be all of them and more, or at least big tier 1 public schools and the bigger private universities are.
American conservatives have been increasingly hostile to the university's intellectual purposes, either desiring to get rid of this purpose entirely, or reset it to some time in the past when, they believe, it was just teaching the important ideas of the past, and not innovating in any way (except, perhaps, in interpreting the ideas of the past). Basically, the American conservatives who think the university should have an intellectual function at all are the most rigid of the Scholastics.
2025-03-18 08:36:09
While I think there are plenty of faculty at universities large and small whose own academic work is terrible, and virtually all university faculty teach from a particular perspective, some of which are better, or more flexible, than others, I genuinely believe that the general public's view of the university as "ideologically captured," or overrun with "postmodernism" (as a general rule, the more a person uses that word, the less they understand it), are wildly blown out of proportion. In fact, I think something very different is happening at universities, in some ways the exact opposite of what so many people ignorantly (as in, they don't actually know what's going on at universities) criticize for: 1) The ever-increasing size of university administration, and in particular, upper-level administration, which is both a financial burden to the universities and pretty significantly alters the way universities function; 2) The philosophy of university administration, which has increasingly dominated university administrations and boards since the 90s, of treating the university like a corporation/business generally, which has also changed the way universities function, and resulted in an increased focus on schools, departments, majors, and even individual faculty who have a good "R.O.I.", particularly those that increase post-graduation salary numbers (STEM for the last decade or two, but also business, science, econ, and the practical majors); 3) related to both (1) and (2), the increased adjunctification of the university, so that whereas people who freak out about universities are freaking out about some tenured professor somewhere they heard about on the internet, who is teaching undergrads radical ideas, most of the professors kids will actually have, especially at state schools, will be low-paid adjuncts who have absolutely no job security or academic freedom, and generally toe whatever line the department/administration wants them to or risk losing their poorly paid, over-worked position.
If you want to fix universities differently, and have them produce better, more well-rounded educations, instead of focusing on "pomo" professors and Marxists*, you'd focus on those 3 things, which are rapidly destroying universities as they existed even when many of us were there (for me, that's the mid-to-late 90s, when people were already lampooning them as P.C.U., but still).
*If you have never seen the Zizek-Peterson debate, I recommend not watching it, but there is a funny moment in which Zizek asks Peterson to name some Marxist professors, and of course, Peterson is unable to do so. Then Zizek says he knows of two (one of whom was David Harvey; I can't remember the other). I know of maybe half a dozen in the U.S. (more elsewhere), and I suspect Zizek knows at least that many, but of the half a dozen I know of, none excluding Harvey actually teach Marxism or from a noticeably Marxist perspective. One of the ways that American universities have failed so many is in not teaching them what Marxism is, which means for so many of y'all, Marxism is merely a poorly seen and completely misunderstood spectre haunting academia.
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I don't think they are being endlessly held hostage. I don't think they ever were, and to the extent that they were, it was very brief and highly localized.
This feels a lot like the people saying Portland is a war zone in 2020 as though the vast majority of Portland wasn't going about its business as though nothing was happening.
There's a simple way to stop the "never ending Palestine party," just as there was to end the "never ending Vietnam party" 55 years ago.
I think this is true of virtually any serious philosophical, political, or scientific ideas, though. I don't know what it says about them other than that they are difficult to master and most people are intellectually lazy.
You’ve got some of them getting hired as they walk off the stage and others who walk off the stage and walk across the street and join a protest demanding student loan relief.
I mean, good for them if they do, but I don't think you have many students going straight into intentional unemployment unless they have enough money that student loans probably aren't an issue.
I think he's right that people broadly conflate critical theory with Marxism, and are particularly afraid of critical theory, even if I am quite certain that they know as little about critical theory as they do about Marxism, and perhaps less.
From early in its radio history through its early television days in the 1960s, Bertrand Russell was a fixture on the BBC, including doing segments in which he would talk about philosophical ideas, particularly those of the first half of the 20th century (famously lampooned here). It would be amazing if we could have someone come on TV and talk about major intellectual movements of the last century or so, including critical theory. I think more people would like it if they knew more about it.
The conversation we should be having, but are not, because it's a difficult conversation to have, is what do we want universities to be for? Should it serve a purely intellectual purpose (in which case, the "bad actors" are inevitable, and I think a feature, not a bug)? Should it prepare young people for careers (generally or specifically)? Should it be the home of the vast majority of our research, from basic to applied? Should it have a broad or narrow collection of majors? Etc.
Some of these are highly compatible purposes for a university, and some are significantly less so, or even contradictory. Currently, at least in practice, universities are trying to be all of them and more, or at least big tier 1 public schools and the bigger private universities are.
American conservatives have been increasingly hostile to the university's intellectual purposes, either desiring to get rid of this purpose entirely, or reset it to some time in the past when, they believe, it was just teaching the important ideas of the past, and not innovating in any way (except, perhaps, in interpreting the ideas of the past). Basically, the American conservatives who think the university should have an intellectual function at all are the most rigid of the Scholastics.
While I think there are plenty of faculty at universities large and small whose own academic work is terrible, and virtually all university faculty teach from a particular perspective, some of which are better, or more flexible, than others, I genuinely believe that the general public's view of the university as "ideologically captured," or overrun with "postmodernism" (as a general rule, the more a person uses that word, the less they understand it), are wildly blown out of proportion. In fact, I think something very different is happening at universities, in some ways the exact opposite of what so many people ignorantly (as in, they don't actually know what's going on at universities) criticize for: 1) The ever-increasing size of university administration, and in particular, upper-level administration, which is both a financial burden to the universities and pretty significantly alters the way universities function; 2) The philosophy of university administration, which has increasingly dominated university administrations and boards since the 90s, of treating the university like a corporation/business generally, which has also changed the way universities function, and resulted in an increased focus on schools, departments, majors, and even individual faculty who have a good "R.O.I.", particularly those that increase post-graduation salary numbers (STEM for the last decade or two, but also business, science, econ, and the practical majors); 3) related to both (1) and (2), the increased adjunctification of the university, so that whereas people who freak out about universities are freaking out about some tenured professor somewhere they heard about on the internet, who is teaching undergrads radical ideas, most of the professors kids will actually have, especially at state schools, will be low-paid adjuncts who have absolutely no job security or academic freedom, and generally toe whatever line the department/administration wants them to or risk losing their poorly paid, over-worked position.
If you want to fix universities differently, and have them produce better, more well-rounded educations, instead of focusing on "pomo" professors and Marxists*, you'd focus on those 3 things, which are rapidly destroying universities as they existed even when many of us were there (for me, that's the mid-to-late 90s, when people were already lampooning them as P.C.U., but still).
*If you have never seen the Zizek-Peterson debate, I recommend not watching it, but there is a funny moment in which Zizek asks Peterson to name some Marxist professors, and of course, Peterson is unable to do so. Then Zizek says he knows of two (one of whom was David Harvey; I can't remember the other). I know of maybe half a dozen in the U.S. (more elsewhere), and I suspect Zizek knows at least that many, but of the half a dozen I know of, none excluding Harvey actually teach Marxism or from a noticeably Marxist perspective. One of the ways that American universities have failed so many is in not teaching them what Marxism is, which means for so many of y'all, Marxism is merely a poorly seen and completely misunderstood spectre haunting academia.