"I have not engaged with the point of view that the mission of higher education should focus on social justice."
You can only justify a mission by reference to another higher mission, and we don't need any commissions. Educational institutions should be allowed to pursue whatever agendas and ulterior motives they want to - just not with a single penny of public money. Everyone keeps talking about keeping big donors happy, but Uncle Sam (and his smaller state equivalents) donates more than all the rest combined, and these clown-shows having made a critical mass of his executive function neurons unhappy, he should simply stop doing so. You'll be amazed how quickly prestige evaporates when the money river gets dammed up. Money talks. Better than President Gay for sure, though that's a low bar. Harvard will literally race to kick Gay and everyone like her to the curb the minute it looks like anybody is getting even slightly serious about doing this.
Certainly not until the current members of the GOP establishment also get defunded or are otherwise escorted to the exit.
This is a good example of a consistent theme of cognitive dissonance one sees in centrist or libertarian-right commentary. On one hand there is a lot of defense of centrism, bipartisanship, compromise, working within the system, deference to the courts, criticism of 'extremism' and 'polarization' purportedly exacerbated by the primary system, etc.
On the other hand, any serious attempt to implement all the high level structural reforms that they favor (consciously or by implication if they can't overcome crimestop) - and even if they only amount to a return to the policies of the relatively recent past - would require what can only now because of the passage of time be considered to be utterly radical measures because likely to provoke a firestorm of opposition from the left without limit in terms of their willingness to escalate and turn up the heat by whenever means necessary to prevent such an outcome. This is what was actually playing out in Israel for months before the Hamas attack and may resume even in the midst of hot war because the leftists on their power-arrogating Supreme Court couldn't resist the urge to immediately fight back enough to make some typical dilatory excuse even just for a few more months.
The point is, it is incoherent to both favor real change and favor the individuals and behaviors which have been proven by consistent experience to make any such changes impossible.
The other issue with the Gay affair is that while some people link anti-Zionist/Jew rhetoric to the very roots of DEI, some treat it like a one off or a random malfunction of DEI specifically (Jews in the wrong category). That's also going to affect what you think needs to be done.
I don't think anything can change until the funding structure changes. As long as anyone with a heartbeat can generate massive loans to cover any tuition, housing, and fees costs for any reason, the universities are going to look something like this. As long as the goofy federal research funding system works the way that it does, the university is going to look the way that it does even if you change the coating of ideological justification paint on it.
The other big bugaboo is tax status. The nonprofit sector in general and the universities in particular are just ignoring regulations that are enforced with more stringency elsewhere. Nonprofit land is going to keep bloating and bloating while becoming more powerful and important until either the IRS starts enforcing the rules or the rules change. I don't think any conceivable Treasury would want the political controversy of actually enforcing the rules, so it's probably easier to just change them.
26 U.S. Code § 501(c)(3). Read the plain language and suspend your awareness of how most universities operate today under it and then compare the plain language to what most major universities do every day in every department. Particularly in terms of political activity and propaganda, a lot of the rules that are applied fairly stringently against say, religious entities, are just ignored as it relates to the practical operation of every university. If administrators lived in fear of what would happen to them if they strayed from the plain meaning of the law here, the US would be a very different place.
There is the additional problem that demoting her at this moment would appear to be a reaction to her Congressional testimony or her call on "anti semitism," when it should be for all the other decisions leading up to that.
Right. I think I understood that. But if liberal news media isn't going to recognize her leaving was a result of her testimony NOR her decisions leading up to it, I'm not sure timing matters.
Claudine Gay is exactly who they wanted her to be. But I think that's worth examining a little.
I noticed that she attended Phillips Exeter. My father-in-law did as well. Much, much earlier in time of course. Yet for some reason I immediately pictured him throwing snowballs with Claudine.
All these decades he's watched C-Span or the like and seen old classmates on TV.
To say that he's not been part of the inner circle in the manner of those old classmates would be to understate it by a million miles. But of course, as is often the case with intellectual outsiders, he's exerted influence in more valuable ways.
Anyway, I see from Google that Phillips Exeter has indeed been a (very) early adopter of DEI - just as you would expect - what could be more Yankee WASP-ish than that/it? And despite that, they are still wearing hairshirts over the issue - most recently an editorial from a scholarship alumna complaining that when she got there she found that some others still pay to attend, and that wasn't fair.
But the thing about Yankee do-gooders is - they like to keep a string attached: they like to retain a little shutoff switch so that they remain in control. Sometimes it's in the form of a little moral judgment they secretly keep in their pockets, as when they legalize drugs for the masses.
Other times it's their careful choice of plebeian, as with Gay, whom they've basically created. They paid to transplant her to New Hampshire. They paid to send her to Princeton. For whatever reason that didn't suit so they arranged Stanford instead. Of course this was leading up to grad school at Harvard, the mecca of the do-gooding Yankees. They gave her what I read is "the revered top prize" for her dissertation - a fact more salient than any cribbing.
To her credit, she signalled what she needed to signal - no small feat, I couldn't do it - by sticking with this trajectory that others laid out for her, culminating in her being labeled on the basis of her "dissertation" a "recognized expert" in a gobbledygook field that they had just invented and directed minority students to enter; and a "visionary" - the latter a stand-alone label that never needs elaboration. And thus: "first black-ish president of Harvard"!
People saying, I can't believe they didn't catch her poor citation practices, her failure to take sources and rearrange token words in the accepted academic manner - are wide of the mark. Do you imagine anyone read the papers she wrote? Do you further imagine anyone read those sources? Let alone compared them? Good Lord.
Does she know that? I doubt it. Academia seems to have taken the invocation to truth-seeking and twisted it around so that nobody in the humanities or social sciences ever utters a true word. Again: not her fault.
Here's where I depart from the rest of you: I feel sorry for her. It's a woman thing, perhaps. I can't help but get a cringey-creepy feeling when I think about her and what a bad month she's having.
And part of why I feel sorry for her is I see that the "elite" do this time and again - they stand someone up whom they know - if only in that cynical innermost circle - is hollow.
People might say, well, this was the best candidate they could find, for their diversity dreams.
I don't believe that a minute! There are certainly black intellectuals (not groomed by themselves) whom they could have chosen, and who would not - when something like this occurred (which, to be clear, is merely that she doggedly stuck to the script they and their lawyers gave her!) - have been easily ridiculed as this woman has been.
But that's just it: she wasn't really part of the inner circle, and they never meant her to be.
To me it's kind of tragic. It's not kind to pull the rug out from under people, to embarrass them; and it's doubly not kind to set things up so it will be easy to do so.
You express very gently what I often think in much harsher terms. "Affirmative Action" in college admissions survives because the connected have learned they can game the system by excluding real qualified students that "aren't our kind" while admitting those who won't knock their scions off their undeserved perch, all the while congratulating themselves on their virtuous policies.
As Cochrane details, she used her power to punish black and female faculty members who went off the DEI reservation (Hooven, Fryer and Sullivan), and in this way, climbed up the ladder at Harvard by stepping on the heads of more qualified representatives of the 'diversity community.' For that reason alone, I cannot muster any sympathy for her.
Not every opinion piece needs to act as a full argumentative essay, especially when a regular columnist’s basic position is defensible and well understood.
I think Cochrane is mistaken. It would be much easier to make a change of institutional direction in a "smoke-filled room" than to announce the change publicly; a public announcement would involve an open fight with the entrenched power base it has, itself, created. If Harvard and the other universities ever decide to move back, again, to the pursuit of truth, knowledge and excellence, they are much more likely to do it quietly than publicly.
Arnold frames the issue as a conflict between those who see the mission of the university as the promotion of all that is encompassed by the term woke, versus those who wish to restore its great traditional mission. I would put it differently. The first category I would describe as those who push a specious moralizing narrative for status, social leverage, and outright grift, and are insouciant about the consequent harm to others. The second category are those who passively let themselves be shoved around, and the institutions they value be destroyed, rather than face the ugly facts about what was happening and what needed to be done.
You can say it that way, and might not be wrong, but that language will be rejected by people on the other side, most people with no strong opinions on the issue, and quite a few people who should be in your tribe.
The language was confrontational, not persuasive. The way Kling framed it seems good to me. I doubt his framing convinces anyone to correct anything but it starts a conversation without bias.
What language would you use after initiation of a conversation without bias to convince someone who currently supports them that the social justice distortions should be purged from the Academy?
The only solution is new universities. Ave Maria and Hillsdale are the model. Fortunately the US is very different from countries like UK and Canada in that it is relatively easy to create new universities. If Ackman and the other donors had put their money in new institutions their values would be better expressed. As it is Ackman tried to find a go-around (I the donor get to spend any excess over $10mm, which Harvard saw right through) in order to spend the money as he saw fit when he could have just given the money to a smaller university.
The ratio of conservative students to progressive students at Hillsdale is 12:1.
Imagine sending your son or daughter to a school in which the viewpoint ratio was flipped; so 1:12, or 12 progressives students for every 1 conservative student. I don’t think either is a good model in general.
I think Hillsdale is a great fit for some conservatives, especially those looking for a faith-based school, where non-believers make up a small fraction of the school. I don’t think Hillsdale is a good fit for most secular libertarians, and certainly not for 99.9% of progressives.
I think BYU is a great fit for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but not a great fit for other Christians, but keep in mind that both Hillsdale and BYU have been labeled as Warning schools by FIRE. At these schools, free speech is held to a lower standard than other values. That might be okay for some, but be aware, these schools are not for everyone, and certainly if pursuit of truth is a priority then be prepared to be disappointed by the lack of free discourse around certain delicate topics.
FYI - there are only 13 colleges on FIRE’s list of 250 top colleges that have a more skewed viewpoint ratio than Hillsdale. Viewpoint ratio being the ratio of progressive students to conservative students or vice versa.
Here they are for comparison. A negative number indicates a conservative majority; positive is a progressive majority.
Liberty University: -20
Hillsdale: -12
Johns Hopkins: 13
Haverford: 13
Wellesley: 13
Howard: 14
Skidmore: 15
Rochester: 15
Macalester College: 16
Oberlin: 21
Scripps: 24
Grinnell College: 24
Occidental College: 36
Smith: 55
And here are the viewpoint ratios for some colleges with extremely high average SAT scores. Not as skewed as Hillsdale in terms of viewpoints ratio.
Yale: 4
MIT: 4
UC Berkeley: 5
Stanford: 5
Vanderbilt: 6
U. Of Chicago: 4
Duke: 3
Harvard: 3
But you bring up a great point. Hillsdale is a great fit for certain conservatives, just as Harvard is a great fit for certain progressives.
But where is the college for those who are neither conservative, progressive or religious?
Further, we need to think more carefully about the appropriateness of free speech in the case of a given classroom, on given college campus, within a certain church or faith-based school. Free speech is certainly not a good thing in all learning environments. Maintaining order, being productive, and being respectful might be more important. So in this sense, you’re right: Hillsdale might be a great model.
Can we get a Hillsdale College that has a more universal appeal? One in which the ratio of conservatives to progressives is closer to 1:1?
The lukewarm students are always going to be attracted to the mainstream universities, new universities attract extremists. You can take the top 20% of Ivy league rejects and create a student body that is more impressive than Harvard, at least by the time the students graduate.
I agree. Comparing ratios of progressives to conservatives as I’ve done here pretends that 12:1 is as bad as 1:12. Of course Hillsdale’s 12:1 is better than John Hopkins approximately 1:12. My simplistic magnitude comparison doesn’t capture the difference in potency between today’s progressive and today’s conservative, especially a Hillsdale conservative.
Hillsdale is 12:1 with an average SAT of 1425. Pretty darn good for a compromise, but I’m looking for better than Hillsdale.
Is it possible to build a university system which actively institutionalizes a balance of near 1/1 for faculty, admin and students? How would this be done? Should it be done?
Oddly, it makes me think of a political Harry Potter, and the need to bring in more Griffendorfs or whatever.
A dozen or so universities have approximately 1:1 at the student level, but it’s almost certainly not intentional. It could be done quite easily though, but I doubt any are trying,
Should it be done? Like any entrepreneurial venture, it depends; if people demand it, then yes, but it’s an emergent phenomenon. If people don’t want it, your business should suffer losses.
I have no data on the faculty or admin being anywhere near 1:1, but it could be done as well. Schools hire for bias on certain topics. Churches hire based on beliefs. You could hire based on belief with a balanced target rather than a biased target.
Thanks for the reply. It seems like a valuable way to market and differentiate a university. "Our students represent the top 5000 conservative and top 5000 liberal minds."
I don't think it's much of an institution yet, but they at least have an impressive group of people listed on their Board of Advisors, so....I dunno, I guess that counts for something, anyway.
What you and Cochrane have observed isn't really a question. It's more the transition of institutions built using the framework shared by the GI and Silent generations to those built on the framework favored by the Boomer generation.
For me Claudine Gay represents many of the issues that make Haiti the development disaster that it is.
I can only assume that her parents, being highly skilled mulatto immigrants to the US in 1960's, were probably the victims of Duvalier's negritude policies and like many other Haitians of the wrong cultural and social background they decided it was better to leave Haiti than risk life and limb by staying. This also seems to be the case of her famous cousin Roxane Gay's family.
Yet despite being a very renowned public figure you hardly ever hear about her Haitian background beyond the superficial mention of her immigrant parents. Why not use the word "refugees"? She's made racial relations the focus of her academic career (*) and yet she - and those journalists who are supposed to cover the academic world - seems to make a conscious effort not to mention the circumstances of her parent's departure from Haiti and her relation to the island nation. What's her opinion on Haiti's peculiar nationality law? No opinion??
What's her opinion on the relative success of Haitian-Americans and Haitian-Canadians? Does she think they could contribute to the land of their ancestors? How exactly?
I'd like to hear the best reasons for higher education to focus on social justice. No strawman please.
You kind of touched on it but maybe Claudine Gay is the only thing she can be. How much more could she be like Lawrence Summers (in the best, least caustic ways) without meeting his fate?
While Arnold's comments are familiar to me, and I largely agree with them, they don't make me "feel good." They make me sad. Two points.
1) I disagree, or at least hope to disagree, that the current academy is a lost cause. I'm hoping competition will set it straight, for example, pressures from withholding of significant alumni contributions; competition from other academic institutions that have maintained their focus on truth-seeking, e.g. U. Chicago; and the loss of applicants for admission to some of the more notorious campuses.
2) What's happening in the academy is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. For some reason, King Lear comes to mind.
"I have not engaged with the point of view that the mission of higher education should focus on social justice."
You can only justify a mission by reference to another higher mission, and we don't need any commissions. Educational institutions should be allowed to pursue whatever agendas and ulterior motives they want to - just not with a single penny of public money. Everyone keeps talking about keeping big donors happy, but Uncle Sam (and his smaller state equivalents) donates more than all the rest combined, and these clown-shows having made a critical mass of his executive function neurons unhappy, he should simply stop doing so. You'll be amazed how quickly prestige evaporates when the money river gets dammed up. Money talks. Better than President Gay for sure, though that's a low bar. Harvard will literally race to kick Gay and everyone like her to the curb the minute it looks like anybody is getting even slightly serious about doing this.
Will never happen.
Certainly not until the current members of the GOP establishment also get defunded or are otherwise escorted to the exit.
This is a good example of a consistent theme of cognitive dissonance one sees in centrist or libertarian-right commentary. On one hand there is a lot of defense of centrism, bipartisanship, compromise, working within the system, deference to the courts, criticism of 'extremism' and 'polarization' purportedly exacerbated by the primary system, etc.
On the other hand, any serious attempt to implement all the high level structural reforms that they favor (consciously or by implication if they can't overcome crimestop) - and even if they only amount to a return to the policies of the relatively recent past - would require what can only now because of the passage of time be considered to be utterly radical measures because likely to provoke a firestorm of opposition from the left without limit in terms of their willingness to escalate and turn up the heat by whenever means necessary to prevent such an outcome. This is what was actually playing out in Israel for months before the Hamas attack and may resume even in the midst of hot war because the leftists on their power-arrogating Supreme Court couldn't resist the urge to immediately fight back enough to make some typical dilatory excuse even just for a few more months.
The point is, it is incoherent to both favor real change and favor the individuals and behaviors which have been proven by consistent experience to make any such changes impossible.
The other issue with the Gay affair is that while some people link anti-Zionist/Jew rhetoric to the very roots of DEI, some treat it like a one off or a random malfunction of DEI specifically (Jews in the wrong category). That's also going to affect what you think needs to be done.
And she's gone...
I don't think anything can change until the funding structure changes. As long as anyone with a heartbeat can generate massive loans to cover any tuition, housing, and fees costs for any reason, the universities are going to look something like this. As long as the goofy federal research funding system works the way that it does, the university is going to look the way that it does even if you change the coating of ideological justification paint on it.
The other big bugaboo is tax status. The nonprofit sector in general and the universities in particular are just ignoring regulations that are enforced with more stringency elsewhere. Nonprofit land is going to keep bloating and bloating while becoming more powerful and important until either the IRS starts enforcing the rules or the rules change. I don't think any conceivable Treasury would want the political controversy of actually enforcing the rules, so it's probably easier to just change them.
What rule(s) do you think aren't enforced?
26 U.S. Code § 501(c)(3). Read the plain language and suspend your awareness of how most universities operate today under it and then compare the plain language to what most major universities do every day in every department. Particularly in terms of political activity and propaganda, a lot of the rules that are applied fairly stringently against say, religious entities, are just ignored as it relates to the practical operation of every university. If administrators lived in fear of what would happen to them if they strayed from the plain meaning of the law here, the US would be a very different place.
I suspect universities do not surpass the minimum threshold in subsection (h).
As for religious entities, I'm only aware of issues with campaigning for candidates and I'm not aware of universities doing that.
There is the additional problem that demoting her at this moment would appear to be a reaction to her Congressional testimony or her call on "anti semitism," when it should be for all the other decisions leading up to that.
And the reporting I saw attributed her firing to allegations of plagiarism.
Yes. I only meant that original complaint.
Right. I think I understood that. But if liberal news media isn't going to recognize her leaving was a result of her testimony NOR her decisions leading up to it, I'm not sure timing matters.
Claudine Gay is exactly who they wanted her to be. But I think that's worth examining a little.
I noticed that she attended Phillips Exeter. My father-in-law did as well. Much, much earlier in time of course. Yet for some reason I immediately pictured him throwing snowballs with Claudine.
All these decades he's watched C-Span or the like and seen old classmates on TV.
To say that he's not been part of the inner circle in the manner of those old classmates would be to understate it by a million miles. But of course, as is often the case with intellectual outsiders, he's exerted influence in more valuable ways.
Anyway, I see from Google that Phillips Exeter has indeed been a (very) early adopter of DEI - just as you would expect - what could be more Yankee WASP-ish than that/it? And despite that, they are still wearing hairshirts over the issue - most recently an editorial from a scholarship alumna complaining that when she got there she found that some others still pay to attend, and that wasn't fair.
But the thing about Yankee do-gooders is - they like to keep a string attached: they like to retain a little shutoff switch so that they remain in control. Sometimes it's in the form of a little moral judgment they secretly keep in their pockets, as when they legalize drugs for the masses.
Other times it's their careful choice of plebeian, as with Gay, whom they've basically created. They paid to transplant her to New Hampshire. They paid to send her to Princeton. For whatever reason that didn't suit so they arranged Stanford instead. Of course this was leading up to grad school at Harvard, the mecca of the do-gooding Yankees. They gave her what I read is "the revered top prize" for her dissertation - a fact more salient than any cribbing.
To her credit, she signalled what she needed to signal - no small feat, I couldn't do it - by sticking with this trajectory that others laid out for her, culminating in her being labeled on the basis of her "dissertation" a "recognized expert" in a gobbledygook field that they had just invented and directed minority students to enter; and a "visionary" - the latter a stand-alone label that never needs elaboration. And thus: "first black-ish president of Harvard"!
People saying, I can't believe they didn't catch her poor citation practices, her failure to take sources and rearrange token words in the accepted academic manner - are wide of the mark. Do you imagine anyone read the papers she wrote? Do you further imagine anyone read those sources? Let alone compared them? Good Lord.
Does she know that? I doubt it. Academia seems to have taken the invocation to truth-seeking and twisted it around so that nobody in the humanities or social sciences ever utters a true word. Again: not her fault.
Here's where I depart from the rest of you: I feel sorry for her. It's a woman thing, perhaps. I can't help but get a cringey-creepy feeling when I think about her and what a bad month she's having.
And part of why I feel sorry for her is I see that the "elite" do this time and again - they stand someone up whom they know - if only in that cynical innermost circle - is hollow.
People might say, well, this was the best candidate they could find, for their diversity dreams.
I don't believe that a minute! There are certainly black intellectuals (not groomed by themselves) whom they could have chosen, and who would not - when something like this occurred (which, to be clear, is merely that she doggedly stuck to the script they and their lawyers gave her!) - have been easily ridiculed as this woman has been.
But that's just it: she wasn't really part of the inner circle, and they never meant her to be.
To me it's kind of tragic. It's not kind to pull the rug out from under people, to embarrass them; and it's doubly not kind to set things up so it will be easy to do so.
I hope she doesn't get fired.
She resigned.
You express very gently what I often think in much harsher terms. "Affirmative Action" in college admissions survives because the connected have learned they can game the system by excluding real qualified students that "aren't our kind" while admitting those who won't knock their scions off their undeserved perch, all the while congratulating themselves on their virtuous policies.
As Cochrane details, she used her power to punish black and female faculty members who went off the DEI reservation (Hooven, Fryer and Sullivan), and in this way, climbed up the ladder at Harvard by stepping on the heads of more qualified representatives of the 'diversity community.' For that reason alone, I cannot muster any sympathy for her.
“ So this essay does not deserve a good grade.”.
Hoist by your own petard :) …..again.
Not every opinion piece needs to act as a full argumentative essay, especially when a regular columnist’s basic position is defensible and well understood.
I think Cochrane is mistaken. It would be much easier to make a change of institutional direction in a "smoke-filled room" than to announce the change publicly; a public announcement would involve an open fight with the entrenched power base it has, itself, created. If Harvard and the other universities ever decide to move back, again, to the pursuit of truth, knowledge and excellence, they are much more likely to do it quietly than publicly.
The woke got Larry Summers. The anti-woke got Claudine Gay.
The dogs bark. That hardly matters if the caravan just moves on.
Arnold frames the issue as a conflict between those who see the mission of the university as the promotion of all that is encompassed by the term woke, versus those who wish to restore its great traditional mission. I would put it differently. The first category I would describe as those who push a specious moralizing narrative for status, social leverage, and outright grift, and are insouciant about the consequent harm to others. The second category are those who passively let themselves be shoved around, and the institutions they value be destroyed, rather than face the ugly facts about what was happening and what needed to be done.
You can say it that way, and might not be wrong, but that language will be rejected by people on the other side, most people with no strong opinions on the issue, and quite a few people who should be in your tribe.
What language would you use to convince those people to purge all the social justice distortions out of the Academy?
The language was confrontational, not persuasive. The way Kling framed it seems good to me. I doubt his framing convinces anyone to correct anything but it starts a conversation without bias.
What language would you use after initiation of a conversation without bias to convince someone who currently supports them that the social justice distortions should be purged from the Academy?
The only solution is new universities. Ave Maria and Hillsdale are the model. Fortunately the US is very different from countries like UK and Canada in that it is relatively easy to create new universities. If Ackman and the other donors had put their money in new institutions their values would be better expressed. As it is Ackman tried to find a go-around (I the donor get to spend any excess over $10mm, which Harvard saw right through) in order to spend the money as he saw fit when he could have just given the money to a smaller university.
The ratio of conservative students to progressive students at Hillsdale is 12:1.
Imagine sending your son or daughter to a school in which the viewpoint ratio was flipped; so 1:12, or 12 progressives students for every 1 conservative student. I don’t think either is a good model in general.
I think Hillsdale is a great fit for some conservatives, especially those looking for a faith-based school, where non-believers make up a small fraction of the school. I don’t think Hillsdale is a good fit for most secular libertarians, and certainly not for 99.9% of progressives.
I think BYU is a great fit for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, but not a great fit for other Christians, but keep in mind that both Hillsdale and BYU have been labeled as Warning schools by FIRE. At these schools, free speech is held to a lower standard than other values. That might be okay for some, but be aware, these schools are not for everyone, and certainly if pursuit of truth is a priority then be prepared to be disappointed by the lack of free discourse around certain delicate topics.
FYI - there are only 13 colleges on FIRE’s list of 250 top colleges that have a more skewed viewpoint ratio than Hillsdale. Viewpoint ratio being the ratio of progressive students to conservative students or vice versa.
Here they are for comparison. A negative number indicates a conservative majority; positive is a progressive majority.
Liberty University: -20
Hillsdale: -12
Johns Hopkins: 13
Haverford: 13
Wellesley: 13
Howard: 14
Skidmore: 15
Rochester: 15
Macalester College: 16
Oberlin: 21
Scripps: 24
Grinnell College: 24
Occidental College: 36
Smith: 55
And here are the viewpoint ratios for some colleges with extremely high average SAT scores. Not as skewed as Hillsdale in terms of viewpoints ratio.
Yale: 4
MIT: 4
UC Berkeley: 5
Stanford: 5
Vanderbilt: 6
U. Of Chicago: 4
Duke: 3
Harvard: 3
But you bring up a great point. Hillsdale is a great fit for certain conservatives, just as Harvard is a great fit for certain progressives.
But where is the college for those who are neither conservative, progressive or religious?
Further, we need to think more carefully about the appropriateness of free speech in the case of a given classroom, on given college campus, within a certain church or faith-based school. Free speech is certainly not a good thing in all learning environments. Maintaining order, being productive, and being respectful might be more important. So in this sense, you’re right: Hillsdale might be a great model.
Can we get a Hillsdale College that has a more universal appeal? One in which the ratio of conservatives to progressives is closer to 1:1?
The lukewarm students are always going to be attracted to the mainstream universities, new universities attract extremists. You can take the top 20% of Ivy league rejects and create a student body that is more impressive than Harvard, at least by the time the students graduate.
"Can we get a Hillsdale College that has a more universal appeal? One in which the ratio of conservatives to progressives is closer to 1:1?"
Conquests Second Law:
2. Any organization not explicitly and constitutionally right-wing will sooner or later become left-wing.
If you ask yourself deep down where you are most likely to be free, don't you already know 12:1 would be wildly better then 1:12?
I'm not deeply religious but I sent my kids to a religious because they didn't mask my kids and let them have a normal childhood.
I agree. Comparing ratios of progressives to conservatives as I’ve done here pretends that 12:1 is as bad as 1:12. Of course Hillsdale’s 12:1 is better than John Hopkins approximately 1:12. My simplistic magnitude comparison doesn’t capture the difference in potency between today’s progressive and today’s conservative, especially a Hillsdale conservative.
Hillsdale is 12:1 with an average SAT of 1425. Pretty darn good for a compromise, but I’m looking for better than Hillsdale.
I would prefer a Hillsdale for agnostics, or the college version of this K-8 https://www.challengerschool.com or this K-12 https://www.thalesacademy.org.
Is it possible to build a university system which actively institutionalizes a balance of near 1/1 for faculty, admin and students? How would this be done? Should it be done?
Oddly, it makes me think of a political Harry Potter, and the need to bring in more Griffendorfs or whatever.
A dozen or so universities have approximately 1:1 at the student level, but it’s almost certainly not intentional. It could be done quite easily though, but I doubt any are trying,
Should it be done? Like any entrepreneurial venture, it depends; if people demand it, then yes, but it’s an emergent phenomenon. If people don’t want it, your business should suffer losses.
I have no data on the faculty or admin being anywhere near 1:1, but it could be done as well. Schools hire for bias on certain topics. Churches hire based on beliefs. You could hire based on belief with a balanced target rather than a biased target.
Thanks for the reply. It seems like a valuable way to market and differentiate a university. "Our students represent the top 5000 conservative and top 5000 liberal minds."
That would be cool, especially if students were respectful.
University of Austin, too: https://www.uaustin.org/
I don't think it's much of an institution yet, but they at least have an impressive group of people listed on their Board of Advisors, so....I dunno, I guess that counts for something, anyway.
Yeah, give it five or ten years.
What you and Cochrane have observed isn't really a question. It's more the transition of institutions built using the framework shared by the GI and Silent generations to those built on the framework favored by the Boomer generation.
For me Claudine Gay represents many of the issues that make Haiti the development disaster that it is.
I can only assume that her parents, being highly skilled mulatto immigrants to the US in 1960's, were probably the victims of Duvalier's negritude policies and like many other Haitians of the wrong cultural and social background they decided it was better to leave Haiti than risk life and limb by staying. This also seems to be the case of her famous cousin Roxane Gay's family.
Yet despite being a very renowned public figure you hardly ever hear about her Haitian background beyond the superficial mention of her immigrant parents. Why not use the word "refugees"? She's made racial relations the focus of her academic career (*) and yet she - and those journalists who are supposed to cover the academic world - seems to make a conscious effort not to mention the circumstances of her parent's departure from Haiti and her relation to the island nation. What's her opinion on Haiti's peculiar nationality law? No opinion??
What's her opinion on the relative success of Haitian-Americans and Haitian-Canadians? Does she think they could contribute to the land of their ancestors? How exactly?
(*) An article I found mentions "the roots of competition and cooperation between minority groups" as one of her academic subjects. I wonder if that includes blacks and Haitian mulattos. https://news.yahoo.com/claudine-gay-5-things-to-know-about-harvards-first-black-president-192249156.html
Now we shall have a test of the Cochrane-Kling hypothesis. Gay has resigned.
Well, interesting .. she's gone
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2024/1/3/claudine-gay-resign-harvard/
I'd like to hear the best reasons for higher education to focus on social justice. No strawman please.
You kind of touched on it but maybe Claudine Gay is the only thing she can be. How much more could she be like Lawrence Summers (in the best, least caustic ways) without meeting his fate?
While Arnold's comments are familiar to me, and I largely agree with them, they don't make me "feel good." They make me sad. Two points.
1) I disagree, or at least hope to disagree, that the current academy is a lost cause. I'm hoping competition will set it straight, for example, pressures from withholding of significant alumni contributions; competition from other academic institutions that have maintained their focus on truth-seeking, e.g. U. Chicago; and the loss of applicants for admission to some of the more notorious campuses.
2) What's happening in the academy is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. For some reason, King Lear comes to mind.
I think the biggest factor in competition setting this straight is whether employers hire less from these schools.