Stanley Kurtz on Pinkerwashing Harvard; John D. Sailer on how to take over higher ed; Allison Schrager on separating universities; my review of "Who needs college anymore?" and more
Agree with the points about education. Especially the canard that if you don’t support giving Harvard billions of dollars, you don’t care about curing cancer. It’s always “curing cancer” for some reason. To make that point honestly, you’d need to answer a lot of questions first: is “curing cancer” something that would be handled by private enterprise, given that you’d think it would be quite lucrative? If all of these researchers are 2 years away from curing disease, could the universities dip into their endowments to keep them going? Is it necessary to give a billion dollars generally to the university to get the “cancer curing” benefits? etc. No one cheerleading for the universities is interested in having that discussion because, I presume, the original point is complete BS.
The Dan Williams comment misses something. Some may simply formulate things as “experts wrong, therefore everyone not an expert is right.” But the true formula is this: the experts have demonstrated that their approach lacks rigor, that they’re beholden to political forces and careerism to an extent that they’ll compromise their integrity entirely, and that the system that selects and promotes them as experts (the universities and the media, and the government) are all corrupted.
In contrast, there are many private citizens who have demonstrated rigor and integrity, and proven themselves to be “experts” in the sense of being more-or-less reliable. We really should celebrate this phenomenon as a corrective to the corruption of our institutions. There certainly are some marginal ideas that free ride on the shift, but the idea that there is a meaningful recognition of the wrong-ness of the elite class and a rise of people who practice rigorous thinking is a sign of how robust our society is.
Many of the things people point to today as signs of decay could easily be recast as a revelation of, and corrective to, the decay that was already present, and in that view this is something to be pleased about.
There are no “experts” there is opinion, hypothesis and analysis backed by supporting evidence and (as in AK’s essay writing approach) which also addresses the validity of opposing evidence/arguments.
A wise person consults a number of knowledgeable analysts and reviews their arguments and evidence and biases. I’ve known few “experts” who are consistently correct over time or in all situations. A wise person also considers the conditions under which they’d be proven wrong and is willing to frequently revisit their assumptions and forecasts.
It is also true that on many questions the aggregated wisdom of the crowds is more consistently accurate than any one “expert”
Confusing some partisan narrative on X or the media, constructed to signal to other group members
and amplified to maximize advertising revenues, with “wisdom of the crowds” would be insane. What has delegitimized some experts is their willingness to use their options as part of the in-group grooming exercises and out group othering sessions. This is really about personal branding and raising their status amongst consumers and funders of their output rather than trying to be “right”. Grant money and popularity aren’t necessitated correlated with accuracy and quality of forecasts. In the economy it is often not the highest quality product that gets the widest approval
If you believe the federal government ought to pick winners and losers, then you also should believe Alison Schrager's proposal to chop up the universities like you might divvy up a failed bank's good and bad assets. If you don't think the federal government either is good at picking winners or losers, or that it cannot because of the calculation problem, then you will not think much of the proposal.
What the universities are really selling besides the elevation of the spirit we all appreciate them for is membership in an adoptive noble family. Harvard can turn the daughter of a carpet salesman into someone suitable for public service or elite employment just by the entitlement. We don't grant titles in the US except when we grant titles, and we don't sell offices except when we sell offices. This is the main function of the schools and it also indicates why it's a poor use of federal funds.
While it does create a cadre of Janissaries fanatically loyal to Washington, a fanatically loyal cadre that cannot defeat the Taliban is not worth having. If they are just fanatically loyal to receiving infinite free government money until the end of time but have become so tired of winning that they cannot win anymore then it is time for them to be put to sleep.
Yes, just like you can be the Duke of Orleans or King of Albania, there are many fictive peerages that you can associate with in today's America that will provide you with certain entrees into certain offices of varying levels of desirability.
The college rot stems from marginal students who need marginal fields to study, in order to stay in school and pump that student loan money into college coffers. Marginal fields need marginal teachers who are jealous of the actually competent fields, and are the only ones with the time and temperament to deal with the bureaucracies.
Then there's the overload of bureaucratic staff necessary to deal with all the government bureaucracy.
The solution is simple, but impossible: get government out of schools. Stop funding or guaranteeing student loans. Stop funding research, preferably altogether but at least limit it to STEM fields. And get rid of all that Title XYZ bureaucracy.
The rot will start shrinking the moment all that precious marginal funding and all that useless staff disappear. The marginal students will have to pay for their own PhDs in puppetry and gender fluidentity. Those fields will persist for a generation or two, but without all the influence they have now.
Universities still have scholarships, and private student loans would still be a thing for good students studying for good degrees. There is zero need for government student loans.
Even at a state university the money spent on the football coach and on paying kids to perform football while not actually being college students, could fund quite a few scholarships. Privately.
Yeah, yeah, it all “pays for itself”.
What it’s currently paying for, locally, is razing a rather appealing Art Deco academic building, and its grove of academic oaks - for yet another practice field in addition to the ones they already have.
Heck, get rid of quasi-professional football - and maybe kids won’t want to go to college as much as before. They say that what alumni love is football. So make less to love, and shrink attendance. Thereby reaching the same goal.
You really know nothing about college football, do you?
There are about 6,000 colleges and universities in the US. Less than 300 have Div 1 football and only a small fraction of those are quasi pro or close.
As for the money, the quasi-pro teams generate funding for themselves and the rest of the schools athletics. Take it away and the money does not go to academics. In fact, a good football season results in more donations on the academic side.
Oh you’re right, I hate it in exactly the measure my family loves it.
However, the university just declines, despite all this football revenue. And somehow there’s always a football need … and what it paid for most recently was destroying a pretty and academic piece of campus. Odd since they’ve so often used eminent domain to expand the footprint of athletics.
6,000 colleges and universities and only a handful have really good endowments and other sources for non-federal scholarships. It gets thin after the top 100 and really thin after a few hundred more. The greatest need is at two year schools and lower tier public schools. Most of those have near nothing.
If you've ever heard of Rose Hulman you'd know it's a very good engineering school where at least 99% are good students studying for good degrees. Much of their aid is federal.
Bullshit. Did AK mention that? Did I? Did you previously?That has not been the question at any point until now. You lost on your point and now you're changing the topic.
Eh? I don’t have any idea what you are ranting about. I’d say from the tone of this message, you don’t actually believe I lost anything. I think I hit a little too close to home. Conversations would be pretty poor if one person controlled the content, so you lose there too.
The rot is earlier, in The Cult of Smart kinda social idea that all the smart folk should go to college, and everybody who makes any decisions should be college educated.
This combined with the secret, illegal discrimination against hiring and promoting Republicans so that only Democrats control the college/ expert status giving functions.
Cutting out govt seems like an excellent ideal that is a political non-starter. Attacking the racist, illegal practices is a small step, but the colleges, media, & Dems are howling loudly already.
Stone seems importantly off in his critique. That the environmental factors do not vary hugely but human outcomes do is the notable part. If I grow up in the same area, go to the same school, get the same glasses and vaccines as another kid, but I become a doctor and he becomes an inmate, that is notable and the variation demands explanation.
It would be interesting to see if twin raised in say Sweden and Cambodia have similar outcomes, but that really isn't what is relevant to the research questions. If we want to poke at nature vs nurture we need to hold somethings pretty constant and see what the differences are in the parts that change. Since we already know that people who grow up in stable rich western countries do pretty well compared to those who grow up in unstable poor countries the question of interest is more "Why do some people in stable rich western countries do better than others?"
I think there are LOTS more environmental variations than you mention but the point I assume you are making still seems valid even if they are never held even close to equal.
My understanding is that identical twins raised separately have amazingly similar outcomes.
Re: Pinker's rhetorical swindle, I agree, and I would ask what the ROI is on cancer research funding for Harvard. How many dollars per QALY are we talking here? Does he know? What's the path to eliminating Alzheimer's or climate change that Harvard's research faculty have sketched out, and how does that compare to those offered by other institutions? It sure seems pretty reductive to argue "the US has medical and technological problems it would like to solve; therefore, it needs Harvard."
"the medical, engineering, and business schools could form a new entity"
I don't remember the numbers from the last time I saw something but I'm skeptical the political distribution among engineering faculty has changed much in the last few decades other than directly from having more women and minorities who are more liberal generally. Less certain but similar for medical and business. Note that while overt discrimination in hiring is a problem in these schools, the bigger problem is an aversion to even apply to some of the most progressive departments. I'm guessing that aversion isn't much of an issue for these schools at most universities and not the overt discrimination either except for white males and maybe Asian males.
I'm not sure how much Pinker and Kurtz have an actual disagreement, as opposed to a difference of emphasis. I would agree that Kurtz's emphasis is somewhat more representative of the reality at universities.
Maybe the real disagreement is over Kurtz's statement that universities have forfeited all "legitimate claim" to public funding. If what it took to reform universities was this level of crushing punishment, that would be right. But I think what Columbia's initial response to Trump's demands indicated is that universities will respond to incentives, even if the demands go a ways beyond what is reasonable.
For whatever reason, universities attract conflict-avoidant people and especially conflict-avoidant leaders. I think a modest amount of punishment for the very real lawlessness and bias would have been enough to bring about change, as long as the demands were somewhat reasonable. There was no need to destroy the research mission of the universities.
Unfortunately the demands made of Harvard were not reasonable.
Seems like Trump is always making “unreasonable” demands. But I think he understands that if you make unreasonable demands, you are more likely to get a better (from his point of view) result than if you start off by making “reasonable” demands. The hard left understands this, too. Unreasonable is a moveable feast.
They should be treated like any other large organization that engaged in a decades long conspiracy to discriminate in hiring and product offering - say, only selling their product to white people or only hiring right wing men. That is, their management and trustees should be sued or jailed and the entity itself sued by the DOJ and by victims and prevented from doing business with the government for years or being forced to operate under a consent doctrine.
Maybe something like Wells Fargo. Sure, the company (or university) can continue to exist and to sell its product - but not with any of its former management or trustees running it, only with some of the former managers in jail or sued or banned from the industry for life, and after billions in legal judgments.
Do that to a dozen universities and suddenly the new trustees and deans gain an appreciation for the law and the risks of skirting it by being “cute”.
Some of this I'd be in favor of, other parts seem over the top. I don't think jail time is a legal punishment for violating anti discrimination law. The problem with suing the universities for all they're worth is that, again, you kill the golden goose.
There are plenty of colleges and universities with smaller endowments - suing the universities and distributing some of the settlement to those denied admissions or jobs is a just punishment.
And if there are deans and trustees who actively designed and led a conspiracy to violate civil rights laws., criminal prosecution may be warranted and civil suits should be a given.
Most of their activities weren’t arguably illegal pre SCOTUS rulings so it would be more fair to apply criminal penalties only from recent activity (which continues to be criminal at many universities and even at companies).
Here’s an interesting article from 2023. They mistake hiring with “headcount” (which is what is actually measured, meaning if an older white person retires and they hire a white person to replace them it doesn’t count as a “hire”), but still:
Is it possible that some rando nobody has a better reform policy for Harvard etc than a genius like Pinker? I think it’s possible, tho I’m more a common sense guy than an expert. We need respect, by elites, for those who disagree. How?
Quotas. Define “non-partisan” as meaning 30% Dems & 30% Reps, minimum, or else failure to fulfill requirements for tax exemption benefits. Professors, Trustees, administrators—with separate partisan HR offices to get the best Reps or Dems available. Quotas will will work better, and far far faster, to get real viewpoint diversity than Pinker’s idea, or Robbie George at Princeton, or any other proposal I’ve seen.
Including merely replacement with diverse colleges like UATX. Registered Republican in 2024 or before, or for at least the last 8 years. With the HR Rep group able to exclude those deemed not Republicans after consultation with a Congressional Office of Viewpoint Diversity, Republican Committee ( or Dem for Dems). Or some other working but not perfect system to hugely reduce the inevitable attempts to cheat. Liz Cheney & other registered Rep Never Trump folk would be eligible, and likely even hired by an Ivy+, but would still be more Rep friendly diverse than almost any current Ivy+ President or newly hired professor.
Handle & Sweeny & other gaming objections are real & serious, over the long term. But not for the next few years.
And, there’s no other policy more likely to get rapid reform, which is what the USA needs. Peaceful, respectful arguments to counter other arguments. Agreement to disagree.
"Is it possible that some rando nobody has a better reform policy for Harvard etc than a partisan insider like Pinker?"
I'd say almost certainly. Pinker may be a vegetarian fox on a diet with a full stomach, but he's still a fox and not who you want to rely on to reform hen house security.
Quotas were tried, and failed, for racial equality opportunity, so the goal became equity. Those the Ivy+ had, succeeded in getting far more less capable Blacks accepted.
There are no cases of political quotas being tried and failing to improve the number of folk for whom the quotas were established.
Quality, not equity, is a real possible issue—the pipeline for Republican academics in many fields is pretty empty. But I’d be fine both with far less qualified Republicans teaching Women’s Studies, or getting rid of that course of study.
In the transition phase, maybe 10-20 years, Rep professors of many humanities will be less “qualified”, as well as less Dem/ progressive oriented, as current profs and the current recent grads. Rep professors now at Hillsdale, or at Your State U, will suddenly become interesting to the Ivies, and most of the best Rep intellectuals will be encouraged to join faculties. Because of quotas and money and the reality that the quality of teachers is far less important than the quality of the students.
The “badness” is similar to badness of prison. A bad place for bad people to be kept, but better for society than no prison; the criminal committing crime is the original bad thing, prison the least bad reaction.
The (open) secret, illegal discrimination against hiring Reps by colleges for decades, especially since the Roe v Wade decision, is the badness the quotas are trying to reform.
Like other folk who don’t like quotas, you don’t offer anything better. Quotas are better as well as more realistic than getting govt completely out of funding, and better than any “tearing them down (w/o details)”, and far faster (better!) than very very very slow replacement of the the top 100 or so endowed colleges.
Thanks for the opportunity to remind myself of why quotas are bad, so I do agree with that!, yet they remain a better a reform than any other. “Viewpoint Diversity” without metrics won’t be as good.
That's a good one. That was the original concept for things like affirmative action. But there was never a transition, it just got more and more heavy-handed over time until you had someone like Ibram X. Kendi explicitly saying that we had to have discrimination, basically forever.
"I came away from this book thinking that without the lavish government support that colleges and universities currently enjoy, replacement would be the more likely scenario."
Maybe I'm totally oblivious to something but here's my opposite view. Colleges get government money from student aid, research dollars, and state funding to public universities.
Less student aid means college shifts more towards wealthy parents. Maybe some extras like lavish facilities for student entertainment go away but that is less than certain.
Less research funding means research schools become more like the non-research schools. Maybe that would mean less bias towards the far left?
Less state funding shrinks these schools, especially the two year schools and lower tier more focused on lower economic students.
Seems smaller with wealthier students and less research focused but most wouldn't be much different. What am I missing?
I would be curious to hear you comment on the evolution of Richard Hanania’s thought. These days he beats the drum pretty hard for mainstream media, universities and the expert class.
The Schrager solution is pretty good. It would destroy interdisciplinary fields that connect hard science with some of the humanities--philosophy of science, which is close to my heart, would be one of the casualties. The more scientific branches of anthro would probably be another. But this might be a price worth paying.
It might be unconstitutional to break them up, though.
Agree with the points about education. Especially the canard that if you don’t support giving Harvard billions of dollars, you don’t care about curing cancer. It’s always “curing cancer” for some reason. To make that point honestly, you’d need to answer a lot of questions first: is “curing cancer” something that would be handled by private enterprise, given that you’d think it would be quite lucrative? If all of these researchers are 2 years away from curing disease, could the universities dip into their endowments to keep them going? Is it necessary to give a billion dollars generally to the university to get the “cancer curing” benefits? etc. No one cheerleading for the universities is interested in having that discussion because, I presume, the original point is complete BS.
The Dan Williams comment misses something. Some may simply formulate things as “experts wrong, therefore everyone not an expert is right.” But the true formula is this: the experts have demonstrated that their approach lacks rigor, that they’re beholden to political forces and careerism to an extent that they’ll compromise their integrity entirely, and that the system that selects and promotes them as experts (the universities and the media, and the government) are all corrupted.
In contrast, there are many private citizens who have demonstrated rigor and integrity, and proven themselves to be “experts” in the sense of being more-or-less reliable. We really should celebrate this phenomenon as a corrective to the corruption of our institutions. There certainly are some marginal ideas that free ride on the shift, but the idea that there is a meaningful recognition of the wrong-ness of the elite class and a rise of people who practice rigorous thinking is a sign of how robust our society is.
Many of the things people point to today as signs of decay could easily be recast as a revelation of, and corrective to, the decay that was already present, and in that view this is something to be pleased about.
The canard is that curing cancer is the only useful goal of research. You are the pot calling the kettle black. Reality is somewhere in the middle.
There are no “experts” there is opinion, hypothesis and analysis backed by supporting evidence and (as in AK’s essay writing approach) which also addresses the validity of opposing evidence/arguments.
A wise person consults a number of knowledgeable analysts and reviews their arguments and evidence and biases. I’ve known few “experts” who are consistently correct over time or in all situations. A wise person also considers the conditions under which they’d be proven wrong and is willing to frequently revisit their assumptions and forecasts.
It is also true that on many questions the aggregated wisdom of the crowds is more consistently accurate than any one “expert”
Confusing some partisan narrative on X or the media, constructed to signal to other group members
and amplified to maximize advertising revenues, with “wisdom of the crowds” would be insane. What has delegitimized some experts is their willingness to use their options as part of the in-group grooming exercises and out group othering sessions. This is really about personal branding and raising their status amongst consumers and funders of their output rather than trying to be “right”. Grant money and popularity aren’t necessitated correlated with accuracy and quality of forecasts. In the economy it is often not the highest quality product that gets the widest approval
If there were quotas requiring 30% Reps, some of the better Rep private citizens would be sought after by the colleges to become professors.
That general process would also be good for colleges.
If you believe the federal government ought to pick winners and losers, then you also should believe Alison Schrager's proposal to chop up the universities like you might divvy up a failed bank's good and bad assets. If you don't think the federal government either is good at picking winners or losers, or that it cannot because of the calculation problem, then you will not think much of the proposal.
What the universities are really selling besides the elevation of the spirit we all appreciate them for is membership in an adoptive noble family. Harvard can turn the daughter of a carpet salesman into someone suitable for public service or elite employment just by the entitlement. We don't grant titles in the US except when we grant titles, and we don't sell offices except when we sell offices. This is the main function of the schools and it also indicates why it's a poor use of federal funds.
While it does create a cadre of Janissaries fanatically loyal to Washington, a fanatically loyal cadre that cannot defeat the Taliban is not worth having. If they are just fanatically loyal to receiving infinite free government money until the end of time but have become so tired of winning that they cannot win anymore then it is time for them to be put to sleep.
Harvard and its peers are a tiny part of the college population.
Yes, just like you can be the Duke of Orleans or King of Albania, there are many fictive peerages that you can associate with in today's America that will provide you with certain entrees into certain offices of varying levels of desirability.
The college rot stems from marginal students who need marginal fields to study, in order to stay in school and pump that student loan money into college coffers. Marginal fields need marginal teachers who are jealous of the actually competent fields, and are the only ones with the time and temperament to deal with the bureaucracies.
Then there's the overload of bureaucratic staff necessary to deal with all the government bureaucracy.
The solution is simple, but impossible: get government out of schools. Stop funding or guaranteeing student loans. Stop funding research, preferably altogether but at least limit it to STEM fields. And get rid of all that Title XYZ bureaucracy.
The rot will start shrinking the moment all that precious marginal funding and all that useless staff disappear. The marginal students will have to pay for their own PhDs in puppetry and gender fluidentity. Those fields will persist for a generation or two, but without all the influence they have now.
You are implicitly equating marginal students with financially needy. Maybe there is a correlation but they aren't the same.
Universities still have scholarships, and private student loans would still be a thing for good students studying for good degrees. There is zero need for government student loans.
Even at a state university the money spent on the football coach and on paying kids to perform football while not actually being college students, could fund quite a few scholarships. Privately.
Yeah, yeah, it all “pays for itself”.
What it’s currently paying for, locally, is razing a rather appealing Art Deco academic building, and its grove of academic oaks - for yet another practice field in addition to the ones they already have.
Heck, get rid of quasi-professional football - and maybe kids won’t want to go to college as much as before. They say that what alumni love is football. So make less to love, and shrink attendance. Thereby reaching the same goal.
You really know nothing about college football, do you?
There are about 6,000 colleges and universities in the US. Less than 300 have Div 1 football and only a small fraction of those are quasi pro or close.
As for the money, the quasi-pro teams generate funding for themselves and the rest of the schools athletics. Take it away and the money does not go to academics. In fact, a good football season results in more donations on the academic side.
Of course, the kids aren’t playing for free now, so there goes some of that supposed gift.
Oh you’re right, I hate it in exactly the measure my family loves it.
However, the university just declines, despite all this football revenue. And somehow there’s always a football need … and what it paid for most recently was destroying a pretty and academic piece of campus. Odd since they’ve so often used eminent domain to expand the footprint of athletics.
Whatever problems there are with college athletics, you've said nothing to suggest they cause significant problems on the academic side.
6,000 colleges and universities and only a handful have really good endowments and other sources for non-federal scholarships. It gets thin after the top 100 and really thin after a few hundred more. The greatest need is at two year schools and lower tier public schools. Most of those have near nothing.
If you've ever heard of Rose Hulman you'd know it's a very good engineering school where at least 99% are good students studying for good degrees. Much of their aid is federal.
The question is whether it comes from my unwilling pocket or your willing pocket. Your willing hands belong in your own pocket, not mine.
Bullshit. Did AK mention that? Did I? Did you previously?That has not been the question at any point until now. You lost on your point and now you're changing the topic.
Eh? I don’t have any idea what you are ranting about. I’d say from the tone of this message, you don’t actually believe I lost anything. I think I hit a little too close to home. Conversations would be pretty poor if one person controlled the content, so you lose there too.
Keep your hands out of my pockets.
The rot is earlier, in The Cult of Smart kinda social idea that all the smart folk should go to college, and everybody who makes any decisions should be college educated.
This combined with the secret, illegal discrimination against hiring and promoting Republicans so that only Democrats control the college/ expert status giving functions.
Cutting out govt seems like an excellent ideal that is a political non-starter. Attacking the racist, illegal practices is a small step, but the colleges, media, & Dems are howling loudly already.
Arnold,
One of your best - loved the "misanthropic assertions".
Stone seems importantly off in his critique. That the environmental factors do not vary hugely but human outcomes do is the notable part. If I grow up in the same area, go to the same school, get the same glasses and vaccines as another kid, but I become a doctor and he becomes an inmate, that is notable and the variation demands explanation.
It would be interesting to see if twin raised in say Sweden and Cambodia have similar outcomes, but that really isn't what is relevant to the research questions. If we want to poke at nature vs nurture we need to hold somethings pretty constant and see what the differences are in the parts that change. Since we already know that people who grow up in stable rich western countries do pretty well compared to those who grow up in unstable poor countries the question of interest is more "Why do some people in stable rich western countries do better than others?"
I think there are LOTS more environmental variations than you mention but the point I assume you are making still seems valid even if they are never held even close to equal.
My understanding is that identical twins raised separately have amazingly similar outcomes.
Re: Pinker's rhetorical swindle, I agree, and I would ask what the ROI is on cancer research funding for Harvard. How many dollars per QALY are we talking here? Does he know? What's the path to eliminating Alzheimer's or climate change that Harvard's research faculty have sketched out, and how does that compare to those offered by other institutions? It sure seems pretty reductive to argue "the US has medical and technological problems it would like to solve; therefore, it needs Harvard."
"the medical, engineering, and business schools could form a new entity"
I don't remember the numbers from the last time I saw something but I'm skeptical the political distribution among engineering faculty has changed much in the last few decades other than directly from having more women and minorities who are more liberal generally. Less certain but similar for medical and business. Note that while overt discrimination in hiring is a problem in these schools, the bigger problem is an aversion to even apply to some of the most progressive departments. I'm guessing that aversion isn't much of an issue for these schools at most universities and not the overt discrimination either except for white males and maybe Asian males.
I'm not sure how much Pinker and Kurtz have an actual disagreement, as opposed to a difference of emphasis. I would agree that Kurtz's emphasis is somewhat more representative of the reality at universities.
Maybe the real disagreement is over Kurtz's statement that universities have forfeited all "legitimate claim" to public funding. If what it took to reform universities was this level of crushing punishment, that would be right. But I think what Columbia's initial response to Trump's demands indicated is that universities will respond to incentives, even if the demands go a ways beyond what is reasonable.
For whatever reason, universities attract conflict-avoidant people and especially conflict-avoidant leaders. I think a modest amount of punishment for the very real lawlessness and bias would have been enough to bring about change, as long as the demands were somewhat reasonable. There was no need to destroy the research mission of the universities.
Unfortunately the demands made of Harvard were not reasonable.
Seems like Trump is always making “unreasonable” demands. But I think he understands that if you make unreasonable demands, you are more likely to get a better (from his point of view) result than if you start off by making “reasonable” demands. The hard left understands this, too. Unreasonable is a moveable feast.
They should be treated like any other large organization that engaged in a decades long conspiracy to discriminate in hiring and product offering - say, only selling their product to white people or only hiring right wing men. That is, their management and trustees should be sued or jailed and the entity itself sued by the DOJ and by victims and prevented from doing business with the government for years or being forced to operate under a consent doctrine.
Maybe something like Wells Fargo. Sure, the company (or university) can continue to exist and to sell its product - but not with any of its former management or trustees running it, only with some of the former managers in jail or sued or banned from the industry for life, and after billions in legal judgments.
Do that to a dozen universities and suddenly the new trustees and deans gain an appreciation for the law and the risks of skirting it by being “cute”.
Some of this I'd be in favor of, other parts seem over the top. I don't think jail time is a legal punishment for violating anti discrimination law. The problem with suing the universities for all they're worth is that, again, you kill the golden goose.
There are plenty of colleges and universities with smaller endowments - suing the universities and distributing some of the settlement to those denied admissions or jobs is a just punishment.
And if there are deans and trustees who actively designed and led a conspiracy to violate civil rights laws., criminal prosecution may be warranted and civil suits should be a given.
Most of their activities weren’t arguably illegal pre SCOTUS rulings so it would be more fair to apply criminal penalties only from recent activity (which continues to be criminal at many universities and even at companies).
Here’s an interesting article from 2023. They mistake hiring with “headcount” (which is what is actually measured, meaning if an older white person retires and they hire a white person to replace them it doesn’t count as a “hire”), but still:
www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-black-lives-matter-equal-opportunity-corporate-diversity/
Is it possible that some rando nobody has a better reform policy for Harvard etc than a genius like Pinker? I think it’s possible, tho I’m more a common sense guy than an expert. We need respect, by elites, for those who disagree. How?
Quotas. Define “non-partisan” as meaning 30% Dems & 30% Reps, minimum, or else failure to fulfill requirements for tax exemption benefits. Professors, Trustees, administrators—with separate partisan HR offices to get the best Reps or Dems available. Quotas will will work better, and far far faster, to get real viewpoint diversity than Pinker’s idea, or Robbie George at Princeton, or any other proposal I’ve seen.
Including merely replacement with diverse colleges like UATX. Registered Republican in 2024 or before, or for at least the last 8 years. With the HR Rep group able to exclude those deemed not Republicans after consultation with a Congressional Office of Viewpoint Diversity, Republican Committee ( or Dem for Dems). Or some other working but not perfect system to hugely reduce the inevitable attempts to cheat. Liz Cheney & other registered Rep Never Trump folk would be eligible, and likely even hired by an Ivy+, but would still be more Rep friendly diverse than almost any current Ivy+ President or newly hired professor.
Handle & Sweeny & other gaming objections are real & serious, over the long term. But not for the next few years.
And, there’s no other policy more likely to get rapid reform, which is what the USA needs. Peaceful, respectful arguments to counter other arguments. Agreement to disagree.
Hold on there. Let's turn that question around.
"Is it possible that some rando nobody has a better reform policy for Harvard etc than a partisan insider like Pinker?"
I'd say almost certainly. Pinker may be a vegetarian fox on a diet with a full stomach, but he's still a fox and not who you want to rely on to reform hen house security.
Quotas are bad. Bad for racial equity and also bad for political partisan equity.
Quotas were tried, and failed, for racial equality opportunity, so the goal became equity. Those the Ivy+ had, succeeded in getting far more less capable Blacks accepted.
There are no cases of political quotas being tried and failing to improve the number of folk for whom the quotas were established.
Quality, not equity, is a real possible issue—the pipeline for Republican academics in many fields is pretty empty. But I’d be fine both with far less qualified Republicans teaching Women’s Studies, or getting rid of that course of study.
In the transition phase, maybe 10-20 years, Rep professors of many humanities will be less “qualified”, as well as less Dem/ progressive oriented, as current profs and the current recent grads. Rep professors now at Hillsdale, or at Your State U, will suddenly become interesting to the Ivies, and most of the best Rep intellectuals will be encouraged to join faculties. Because of quotas and money and the reality that the quality of teachers is far less important than the quality of the students.
The “badness” is similar to badness of prison. A bad place for bad people to be kept, but better for society than no prison; the criminal committing crime is the original bad thing, prison the least bad reaction.
The (open) secret, illegal discrimination against hiring Reps by colleges for decades, especially since the Roe v Wade decision, is the badness the quotas are trying to reform.
Like other folk who don’t like quotas, you don’t offer anything better. Quotas are better as well as more realistic than getting govt completely out of funding, and better than any “tearing them down (w/o details)”, and far faster (better!) than very very very slow replacement of the the top 100 or so endowed colleges.
Thanks for the opportunity to remind myself of why quotas are bad, so I do agree with that!, yet they remain a better a reform than any other. “Viewpoint Diversity” without metrics won’t be as good.
"transition phase, maybe 10-20 years"
That's a good one. That was the original concept for things like affirmative action. But there was never a transition, it just got more and more heavy-handed over time until you had someone like Ibram X. Kendi explicitly saying that we had to have discrimination, basically forever.
Great roundup, thanks
"I came away from this book thinking that without the lavish government support that colleges and universities currently enjoy, replacement would be the more likely scenario."
Maybe I'm totally oblivious to something but here's my opposite view. Colleges get government money from student aid, research dollars, and state funding to public universities.
Less student aid means college shifts more towards wealthy parents. Maybe some extras like lavish facilities for student entertainment go away but that is less than certain.
Less research funding means research schools become more like the non-research schools. Maybe that would mean less bias towards the far left?
Less state funding shrinks these schools, especially the two year schools and lower tier more focused on lower economic students.
Seems smaller with wealthier students and less research focused but most wouldn't be much different. What am I missing?
I would be curious to hear you comment on the evolution of Richard Hanania’s thought. These days he beats the drum pretty hard for mainstream media, universities and the expert class.
I have been ignoring him for a long time. He still seems very immature to me, sacrificing intellectual integrity for the goal of getting attention.
His shtick has become contrarian's contrarian, which puts him squarely in 2018 Resistance Lib territory
The Schrager solution is pretty good. It would destroy interdisciplinary fields that connect hard science with some of the humanities--philosophy of science, which is close to my heart, would be one of the casualties. The more scientific branches of anthro would probably be another. But this might be a price worth paying.
It might be unconstitutional to break them up, though.
Thanks for reading and translating Delaski's book for us!