Education Links, 6/15/2026
Greg Lukianoff on faculty ideology; Austin Scholar on Alpha's core commitments; Gad Levanon on AI used in business learning; Jacob Howland on anti-logic; The Wash U/Vanderbilt report on the humanities
Primo’s report looks at faculty at 55 elite and flagship universities, the same schools FIRE studied in its 2024 faculty survey, which includes 112,516 faculty members. He matched those faculty members to campaign-contribution records using Stanford’s Database on Ideology, Money in Politics, and Elections, also known as DIME, which includes more than 850 million itemized contributions going back to 1979.
…AOC, Sanders, and Warren, among the furthest-left members of their respective chambers, would appear only slightly left of center in a legislature made up of faculty contributors. That is the part of the report that should end the “maybe they’re mostly moderate Democrats” argument.
…Primo finds a leftward shift over time among both faculty donors and donors overall, but he also found that the faculty distribution is much narrower. The interquartile range — the spread of the middle 50% of the data — has “essentially shrunk to nothing over time” for faculty donors.
…That is how institutions become strange without realizing they are strange.
That last sentence says it all. The problem becomes, how can they ever go back to being un-strange? Lukianoff takes the institutionalist position: reform is possible. I take the brokenist position: it is unlikely to happen.
the thing that never changed is the three commitments that existed before the first kid ever walked through the door:
Kids love school.
Kids learn twice as fast in two hours a day.
Kids build life skills.
When I visited the Alpha School in Austin, I came away impressed with its focus on these commitments. It struck me as a more mature organization than UATX.
High-functioning organizations are centered around these sorts of clear commitments. Which projects do you take on? How do you do them? What will you absolutely not do? The best organizations are able to answer those questions. The organization’s principles are clear and widely understood.
At some point in their history, many institutions of higher education had these sort of cultural elements going for them. But the vast majority no longer have a core culture. They just drift along.
UATX has different advantages and disadvantages. One advantage that it has is flexibility. This is important today, with the external environment in such flux. American politics is highly volatile. AI poses challenges and opportunities. Legacy institutions carry a lot more baggage that holds them back from adapting.
But in contrast with Alpha school’s three clear goals, I believe that at UATX if you asked people what the university is about, you would get many different answers. Students and faculty are high in agency, which is great for launching initiatives and experiments but risks lack of coordination.
…This report asks a single question: who is using AI to directly teach, tutor, coach, or give feedback to a human learner?
The answer is a remarkable range of organizations, far beyond the edtech companies you would expect. The catalogue covers ten categories: K-12 tutoring, corporate workforce training, online higher education, university teaching, language learning, test preparation, interview and speaking preparation, special education, sports coaching, and a residual “other” bucket covering music students, student drivers, and homeschoolers. It surfaces hundreds of organizations and products from text that never set out to describe an education market
He refers to the AI Use Case dataset from the Burning Glass Institute. He concludes,
AI is not waiting for the education sector to invite it in. The first big institutional buyer is the employer. The first wide deployments are in performance-measurable domains. The first instructional shape is the coach, not the lecturer. The school version of this story is coming. The economy-wide version is already here.
the difference between speech and what Aristotle called “voice” (phōnē) — the verbal expression not of reason, thought, and judgment, but emotion — is rapidly being effaced. Indeed, the most troubling social phenomena of our time are all reflections of misology: the effective, if largely unconscious, hostility to logos that is perhaps the definitive characteristic of 21st-century life.
Academic culture has, for decades, perversely promoted misology…The assistant professor’s aggressive dismissal of DWMs, as they were then known, was an expression of academic radical chic: the view that the poets, statesmen, philosophers who founded and developed the Western tradition have nothing worthwhile to teach us, because their (unchosen) membership in certain groups stained them with some sort of indelible sin. What had long been regarded as essential was now understood to be accidental, and vice-versa; being white and male counted for more than being human. This was little more than voice — the communication of feelings of pain or pleasure, as in a dog’s bark — masquerading as speech.
He also sees AI as a threat to logos.
A committee of professors headed by Paul (not to be confused with Peter) Boghossian writes,
there is serious scholarship in every field we have studied, and at their best, the humanities and the social sciences are as rigorous and as fruitful as they have ever been. Taken as a whole, however, our review of the disciplines paints a mixed picture. Every field we have studied shows some signs of the pathologies sketched above: a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.
…there are those in academia who would question the value of disinterested inquiry, or even its possibility. But as we have argued, these doubts are the product of philosophical confusion; there is in fact no good reason to question either the coherence or the value of disinterested inquiry, however difficult it may be. It is largely for these reasons that we regard the failings we have pointed out as so serious. They are not mere problems in the administration or operation of a university, but strike at the very heart and soul of what a university should be for.
“Not this, but that,” eh? It would be funny if they used an AI to write the report.
Pointer from Kyle Saunders. To me, it looks like the professors are much more centrist than the typical humanities professor. Of course they are not brokenists like I am.
substacks referenced above: @
@
@
@
