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.
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.
2025-03-17 06:01:56
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.
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.
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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.