I think we are making a mistake by fighting for the typical institution to be free to open inquiry. The path forward is to create pockets of dissent that are sufficiently insulated from the dominant cultural pressures in academia to nurture talent and develop ideas that can assert themselves when the opportunity strikes. Paradoxically, these pockets will probably have to restrict entry or expression to some extent in order to successfully build up institutions that are not captured by the dominant ideology.
Doctor Hammer is correct- these pockets will not be left alone by the censorious. You can choose to fight or choose to knuckle under, you won't be allowed to walk away and mind your own business.
I think the problem with the pockets of dissent strategy is getting squashed legally and through regulatory means. So long as the gov is taxing to pay for universities, all closed indoctrination centers, controls student loans, accreditation, all that, the closed universities will not allow dissident institutions. That before the typically infiltration of leftists.
That said, I think you are probably correct that the best way to deal with the corruption of the existing system is to start up new institutions to create an alternative system. (At this point there has to be plenty of potential faculty driven from the academy, so it shouldn't be too hard.) I would just add that overthrowing the current system such that they will allow an alternative will require severing the attachments to the government who would control them.
I would guess from what Kling quotes that Stanford didn't cave. There have been multiple instances where UChicago didn't cave, including a policy statement. And then there's Hillsdale and a long list of conservative schools. Grove City College made a decision more than 50 years ago not to take federal money so they couldn't be controlled by govt. It's bad at many or most schools but far from all. Don't try to make it something it isn't.
Do you have that long list of conservative schools? I can think of Hillsdale and Grove City, Hampton Sydney if I can recall, maybe Ave Maria in FL... but then I am tapping out.
Grove City really is an exemplar, and doesn't even take student loans because of government attempts to dig their claws in, but that as much demonstrates how far one must go.
Successfully creating alternative bastions of countercultural thought will definitely require targeting legal and regulatory obstacles that stand in the way. But on the margin the free speech team could improve our approach simply by lending support to existing heterodox institutions, or at least not targeting them for special opprobrium.
An organization like FIRE for example views religious schools as some of the worst offenders against free speech and I think this is a huge mistake. It’s true that these schools will restrict certain kinds of speech, but the fact that they restrict DIFFERENT kinds of speech than everywhere else is extremely valuable. On the margin, they actually expand the space of ideas being researched and discussed rather than contracting it.
We need to drop FIRE’s approach based on this fallacy of composition that supposes that each individual campus must be value neutral in order to optimize the broader educational ecosystem. It’s not true, and if we don’t snap out of it and do everything we can to build strongholds that offer something different I fear we will end up handicapping our University of Austins and Stanford free speech symposiums by caving to pressure and well intended naïveté on our own side that insists you have to let progressive activists have a seat at every table in the name of open discourse.
Ahh yes, I see what you mean now. I tend to agree, although I think the difference stems from questions of the assumptions of what the "university system" is. I think it is reasonable to say that any government funded university (how does one define that?) must have free speech absolutely, but private/religious schools can do what they want. Of course we have a really muddy system with the gov. up to its elbows in things.
I wrote about a similar point a while ago relating to public k-12 teaching CRT/CSJ. So long as there is lots of government control of these powerful indoctrination centers, we are going to be fighting about what types of ideas are indoctrinated. Universities are different because they are optional (sort of) but the same issue abounds: so long as the government pays there will be fights about what gets taught, and people will want to use that power to crush those that disagree.
So in a way I agree with FIRE: the only way to ensure broad enquiry is to say all government funded schools must be free speech, with the understanding that non-government funded schools need not be.
On the other hand, I think that isn't a sustainable practice. The power to censor is too great, too tempting, and so the only way out is to get government out of funding universities.
Arnold writes, "I cannot picture a future in which academia is characterized by open inquiry. Those attempting to save it... are fighting for a lost cause." Good Lord, I hope you are wrong. Ill-founded ideas tend not to work and the "marketplace of ideas" will tend to reject them... eventually. As a positive example, "Modern Monetary Theory" has been a fad roundly rejected by the evidence of extremely loose fiscal and monetary policy during 2020-2021 leading to the consequent high inflation of 2022. We haven't heard much from the MMT "school" lately given how wrong they have been.
I hope that the marketplace of ideas remains vital at the academy and elsewhere once current, adverse trends and fads prove to be ineffectual.
I cannot picture the process by which academia recovers. Suppose we define recovery as "10 percent of the faculty in humanities and social sciences articulate right-of-center viewpoints." How is that going to happen?
Let’s say there are ~250k humanities and social science faculty and ~250 at UChicago. It seems daunting to think that we would need 100 UChicago’s full of relatively right-leaning faculty.
That said, we have to try. Even one additional university of decent size and a fair number of non-progressive faculty can have an outsized impact. BYU sends more undergrads to PhD programs than any school other than Cornell and is especially strong in econ and adjacent fields. I’m sure that makes a difference of some kind.
Or think of George Mason Econ. If it weren’t for Tyler, Bryan and Robin may well have not gotten an academic job. The impact those two people alone have had is remarkable and it largely happened due to the actions of one person in one academic department.
Supply and demand. College education is expensive. Students attend college for two reasons, not mutually exclusive, but also not universal - to get an education (imagine that!) and/or to punch a timecard to enable moving to the next step, i.e. a job or graduate/professional school. If a college is ineffectual in serving one or both purposes, students will go elsewhere and/or their parents (one might hope) will balk at paying for expensive bachelors' degrees in favor of institutions that provide a better bang for the buck.
That's the theory behind school vouchers for K-12. Supply and demand should work even better at the college level given that demand for college is (likely) more elastic and the fluid ability to switch majors, transfer to better schools, or stop going altogether. But perhaps the market mechanism is too broken in this industry for supply and demand to work its magic.
Censorship won't matter if the relentless destruction of language isn't stopped. Every word from the keyboards of the Persons of Progress is twisted and bloated into uselessness. Discourse has become impossible.
For those of us who believe in freedom of speech and thought and indeed in the expression of this, in whichever format it takes MUST NEVER give up on the mission to ensure that these freedoms remain an intrinsic part of “the human condition”. If we are instructed to speak and think in a way which totally takes away our personal autonomy then, my friends, there will be no culture, no artistic expression, no sociological debate, no freedom whatsoever to express yourself will lead to the end of humanity as we know it!
There has to be a point in time where the rebellious counter culture energy of youth throughout history opposes this orthodoxy, no? And at some point colleges will have to respond and/or older woke profs will be replaced by their counter-culture juniors, right?
Picture it. :) I even believe that some well-thought interventions by state legislatures concerning state schools could help, not that I know what they are.
I think we are making a mistake by fighting for the typical institution to be free to open inquiry. The path forward is to create pockets of dissent that are sufficiently insulated from the dominant cultural pressures in academia to nurture talent and develop ideas that can assert themselves when the opportunity strikes. Paradoxically, these pockets will probably have to restrict entry or expression to some extent in order to successfully build up institutions that are not captured by the dominant ideology.
Doctor Hammer is correct- these pockets will not be left alone by the censorious. You can choose to fight or choose to knuckle under, you won't be allowed to walk away and mind your own business.
I think the problem with the pockets of dissent strategy is getting squashed legally and through regulatory means. So long as the gov is taxing to pay for universities, all closed indoctrination centers, controls student loans, accreditation, all that, the closed universities will not allow dissident institutions. That before the typically infiltration of leftists.
That said, I think you are probably correct that the best way to deal with the corruption of the existing system is to start up new institutions to create an alternative system. (At this point there has to be plenty of potential faculty driven from the academy, so it shouldn't be too hard.) I would just add that overthrowing the current system such that they will allow an alternative will require severing the attachments to the government who would control them.
I would guess from what Kling quotes that Stanford didn't cave. There have been multiple instances where UChicago didn't cave, including a policy statement. And then there's Hillsdale and a long list of conservative schools. Grove City College made a decision more than 50 years ago not to take federal money so they couldn't be controlled by govt. It's bad at many or most schools but far from all. Don't try to make it something it isn't.
Do you have that long list of conservative schools? I can think of Hillsdale and Grove City, Hampton Sydney if I can recall, maybe Ave Maria in FL... but then I am tapping out.
Grove City really is an exemplar, and doesn't even take student loans because of government attempts to dig their claws in, but that as much demonstrates how far one must go.
Successfully creating alternative bastions of countercultural thought will definitely require targeting legal and regulatory obstacles that stand in the way. But on the margin the free speech team could improve our approach simply by lending support to existing heterodox institutions, or at least not targeting them for special opprobrium.
An organization like FIRE for example views religious schools as some of the worst offenders against free speech and I think this is a huge mistake. It’s true that these schools will restrict certain kinds of speech, but the fact that they restrict DIFFERENT kinds of speech than everywhere else is extremely valuable. On the margin, they actually expand the space of ideas being researched and discussed rather than contracting it.
We need to drop FIRE’s approach based on this fallacy of composition that supposes that each individual campus must be value neutral in order to optimize the broader educational ecosystem. It’s not true, and if we don’t snap out of it and do everything we can to build strongholds that offer something different I fear we will end up handicapping our University of Austins and Stanford free speech symposiums by caving to pressure and well intended naïveté on our own side that insists you have to let progressive activists have a seat at every table in the name of open discourse.
Ahh yes, I see what you mean now. I tend to agree, although I think the difference stems from questions of the assumptions of what the "university system" is. I think it is reasonable to say that any government funded university (how does one define that?) must have free speech absolutely, but private/religious schools can do what they want. Of course we have a really muddy system with the gov. up to its elbows in things.
I wrote about a similar point a while ago relating to public k-12 teaching CRT/CSJ. So long as there is lots of government control of these powerful indoctrination centers, we are going to be fighting about what types of ideas are indoctrinated. Universities are different because they are optional (sort of) but the same issue abounds: so long as the government pays there will be fights about what gets taught, and people will want to use that power to crush those that disagree.
So in a way I agree with FIRE: the only way to ensure broad enquiry is to say all government funded schools must be free speech, with the understanding that non-government funded schools need not be.
On the other hand, I think that isn't a sustainable practice. The power to censor is too great, too tempting, and so the only way out is to get government out of funding universities.
Arnold writes, "I cannot picture a future in which academia is characterized by open inquiry. Those attempting to save it... are fighting for a lost cause." Good Lord, I hope you are wrong. Ill-founded ideas tend not to work and the "marketplace of ideas" will tend to reject them... eventually. As a positive example, "Modern Monetary Theory" has been a fad roundly rejected by the evidence of extremely loose fiscal and monetary policy during 2020-2021 leading to the consequent high inflation of 2022. We haven't heard much from the MMT "school" lately given how wrong they have been.
I hope that the marketplace of ideas remains vital at the academy and elsewhere once current, adverse trends and fads prove to be ineffectual.
I cannot picture the process by which academia recovers. Suppose we define recovery as "10 percent of the faculty in humanities and social sciences articulate right-of-center viewpoints." How is that going to happen?
Let’s say there are ~250k humanities and social science faculty and ~250 at UChicago. It seems daunting to think that we would need 100 UChicago’s full of relatively right-leaning faculty.
That said, we have to try. Even one additional university of decent size and a fair number of non-progressive faculty can have an outsized impact. BYU sends more undergrads to PhD programs than any school other than Cornell and is especially strong in econ and adjacent fields. I’m sure that makes a difference of some kind.
Or think of George Mason Econ. If it weren’t for Tyler, Bryan and Robin may well have not gotten an academic job. The impact those two people alone have had is remarkable and it largely happened due to the actions of one person in one academic department.
Supply and demand. College education is expensive. Students attend college for two reasons, not mutually exclusive, but also not universal - to get an education (imagine that!) and/or to punch a timecard to enable moving to the next step, i.e. a job or graduate/professional school. If a college is ineffectual in serving one or both purposes, students will go elsewhere and/or their parents (one might hope) will balk at paying for expensive bachelors' degrees in favor of institutions that provide a better bang for the buck.
That's the theory behind school vouchers for K-12. Supply and demand should work even better at the college level given that demand for college is (likely) more elastic and the fluid ability to switch majors, transfer to better schools, or stop going altogether. But perhaps the market mechanism is too broken in this industry for supply and demand to work its magic.
What is the antonym of "Diversity"? "University". - Peter Theil
Censorship won't matter if the relentless destruction of language isn't stopped. Every word from the keyboards of the Persons of Progress is twisted and bloated into uselessness. Discourse has become impossible.
For those of us who believe in freedom of speech and thought and indeed in the expression of this, in whichever format it takes MUST NEVER give up on the mission to ensure that these freedoms remain an intrinsic part of “the human condition”. If we are instructed to speak and think in a way which totally takes away our personal autonomy then, my friends, there will be no culture, no artistic expression, no sociological debate, no freedom whatsoever to express yourself will lead to the end of humanity as we know it!
There has to be a point in time where the rebellious counter culture energy of youth throughout history opposes this orthodoxy, no? And at some point colleges will have to respond and/or older woke profs will be replaced by their counter-culture juniors, right?
I just heard (can't find confirmation) that Mackey was sentenced to 10 years.
Twitter Troll Tricked 4,900 Democrats in Vote-by-Phone Scheme, U.S. Says https://nyti.ms/39lrlrq
Picture it. :) I even believe that some well-thought interventions by state legislatures concerning state schools could help, not that I know what they are.