Category: colleges and universities

The failure of academia: a take by William Deresiewicz in The Chronicle of Higher Education

November 26, 2024 • 10:00 am

The Chronicle of Higher Education is regarded as the most reputable site for news and opinion about American higher education. Not that you’ll agree with everything in it, but the article below, by William Deresiewicz, an author and critic who taught English at Yale for ten years, seems to me the most accurate and eloquent indictment about where American academia has failed in its mission. (Deresiewicz also wrote Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life, an indictment of Ivy League and other “elite” colleges.)

Nearly all the explanations for Trump’s victory over Harris involve in part a rejection of American elitism and wokeness (they’re connected, of course), and to Deresiewicz, the results of the November 5 election not only show that “the politics of the academy have been defeated”, along with “its ideas, its assumptions [and] its policies and practices,” but also that the rejection of Harris is connected with the public’s rejection of woke academia. As I said yesterday, the public’s respect for and confidence in higher education has dropped in recent years, and dropped quite sharply.

Below is figure from a recent Gallup poll.  If you lump together those Americans who have a “great deal of confidence” in higher education with those having “quite a lot of confidence”, the composite percentage dropped from 57% in 2018 to 36% last year. That’s a substantial fall!  And I agree with Deresiewicz’s view that the reason for this fall is connected with the defeat of Kamala Harris. Despite Harris’s conscious decision to look more centrist after her nomination, it was too late: the Democrats had already established themselves as the Party of Wokeness, with the center of gravity of the party, and Biden) having moved towards extreme Leftist “progressivism”:

Click the headline below to read Deresiewicz’s take:

There are some telling data in the second paragraph, and I’ve bolded the part giving evidence that the wokeness pervading the Democratic party and American universities, whose faculty are overwhelmingly Democratic, played a role in the election:

Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.

“Among swing voters, it ranked first”! They didn’t ask about the view that “sex in humans is a spectrum,” something codified into law by the Biden administration but not mentioned by Harris, but many voters who rejected the Democrats surely knew about this, too.

Here’s Deresiewicz’s view on how the teachings of elite colleges trickled down to the public, who rejected them on November 5:

Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.

It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.

People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. . . [The author recounts the story a woman, a black graduate of Berkeley, who called into an NPR station on the air, saying that black people were fed up with being called “racists” when they simply opposed Biden’s policy of nearly open borders.]

Deresiewicz explains why academia (and the Left in general] has become more extreme. The leftward and largely unhinged shift has, he says, been spearheaded by “studies” department and other departments “not answerable to reality”. But as I’ve written frequently, science too, is being colonized by the “progressive” ideology that most Americans reject:

How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.

He calls these fields “intellectually corrupt”, and while that may seem extreme, the corruption is ubiquitous.  Yesterday one of my colleagues in an elite college went to a talk on “fat studies”, a talk sponsored by Gender Studies. The point the speaker made was that being obese was not a cause of morbidity and mortality, and the data supporting that was a claim that fat is “protective” in rats. But fat rats die more often than normal ones, just like humans. And in humans, if you simply Google “obesity and mortality”, you find a gazillion references about how being too fat can cause considerable health problems and death.  But the Fat Studies speaker simply denied this, saying that science is one of the impediments to fat acceptance. The speaker claimed instead that health problems with human obesity are the result of dieting, not being overweight!

This flat denial of reality—a reality everyone knows—in the cause of ideology is one reason for the intellectual corruption of “studies”. While such a thesis advanced before a biology department would meet with derision, I’m not so sure that the inhabitants would also soundly reject the claim that “there are only two sexes in humans.”

Here’s Deresieeticz’s argument about the disconnect between reality and “studies” programs, which he also lumps with “social sciences exclusive of economics” and “the schools of education and social work”:

The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.

These disciplines could be answerable to reality, as instantiated by the claims of the Fatness Studies speaker, but when data contradict their ideological underpinnings, they simply deny the data.

This piece is particularly well written, and I’ll add just two more bits to show that. Do read it if you have any interest in academia and the outcome of this month’s election:

[Academics] might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.

. . . Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.

Deresiewicz says that the solution is for academics to “entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things, and for a long time,” but considers that this is unlikely compared to academics “staying the course”, which of course means becoming woker and woker. If you’re fighting against this at a university, as many of us are, you know that while there are some hopeful signs, like the decline of DEI (a decline that will become steeper under Trump), there is little to stop the slide towards denial of the truth in the service of ideology. Since one of the purposes of academia is to discover and promulgate the truth, this will ultimately lead to academics becoming a mockery in the public eye. It’s already halfway there.

Sadly, academia got what it asked for

November 22, 2024 • 11:00 am

This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education by Michael Clune (a professor of English at Case Western Reserve University) reprises the familiar idea that the “wokeness” of academia—the explicit aim of turning higher education towards reforming society in a “progressive” way—has largely destroyed academia and reduced its standing in the eyes of the public.  It has done this, he says, by alienating the public via professors making pronouncements outside their area of expertise, something that simply turns off the average Joe or Jill.

The blame for this, says Clune, rests to some degree on academics themselves, but is largely the responsibility of administrators who feel compelled to comment on every issue of the day in the name of their university, creating an “these are our values” atmosphere that chills speech. In other words, they abjure institutional neutrality.

But you can read it yourself by clicking on the screenshots below. I’ll give a couple excerpts to whet your appetite.

The problem: (note the link to articles on the decline in public opinion of higher education, the big price we pay for politicizing academia):

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus. Public opinion of higher education is at an all-time low. The incoming Trump administration plans to use the accreditation process to end the politicization of higher education — and to tax and fine institutions up to “100 percent” of their endowment. I believe these threats are serious because of a simple political calculation of my own: If Trump announced that he was taxing wealthy endowments down to zero, the majority of Americans would stand up and cheer.

Here are the results of several Gallup polls on Americans’ confidence in higher education over only the last eight years. There’s been a big change:

Why faculty have no more credibility than anyone else when it comes to pronouncing on politics:

Let’s take a closer look at why the identification of academic politics with partisan politics is so wrongheaded. I am not interested here in questioning the validity of the political positions staked out by academics over the past decade — on race, immigration, biological sex, Covid, or Donald Trump. Even if one wholeheartedly agrees with every faculty-lounge political opinion, there are still very good reasons to be skeptical about making such opinions the basis of one’s academic work.

The first is that, while academics have real expertise in their disciplines, we have no special expertise when it comes to political judgment. I am an English professor. I know about the history of literature, the practice of close reading, and the dynamics of literary judgment. No one should treat my opinion on any political matter as more authoritative than that of any other person. The spectacle of English professors pontificating to their captive classroom audiences on the evils of capitalism, the correct way to deal with climate change, or the fascist tendencies of their political opponents is simply an abuse of power.

The second problem with thinking of a professor’s work in explicitly political terms is that professors are terrible at politics. This is especially true of professors at elite colleges. Professors who — like myself — work in institutions that pride themselves on rejecting 70 to 95 percent of their applicants, and whose students overwhelmingly come from the upper reaches of the income spectrum, are simply not in the best position to serve as spokespeople for left-wing egalitarian values.

. . . . Far from representing a powerful avant-garde leading the way to political change, the politicized class of professors is a serious political liability to any party that it supports. The hierarchical structure of academe, and the role it plays in class stratification, clings to every professor’s political pronouncement like a revolting odor. My guess is that the successful Democrats of the future will seek to distance themselves as far as possible from the bespoke jargon and pedantic tone that has constituted the professoriate’s signal contribution to Democratic politics. Nothing would so efficiently invalidate conservative views with working-class Americans than if every elite college professor was replaced by a double who conceived of their work in terms of activism for right-wing ideas. Professors are bad at politics, and politicized professors are bad for their own politics.

Who’s to blame? Faculty and, mostly, administrators who refuse to accept ideological neutrality of their universities.

It would be wrong to place the blame for the university’s current dire straits entirely on the shoulders of activist professors. While virtually all professors (I include myself) have surrendered, to at least some degree, to the pressure to justify our work in political terms — whether in grant applications, book proposals, or department statements about political topics — in many cases the core of our work has continued to be the pursuit of knowledge. The primary responsibility for the university’s abject vulnerability to looming political interference of the most heavy-handed kind falls on administrators. Their job is to support academic work and communicate its benefits. Yet they seem perversely committed to identifying academe as closely as possible with political projects.

The most obvious example is the routine proclamations from university presidents and deans on every conceivable political issue. In response to events such as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the murder of George Floyd in 2020, administrators broadcast identifiably partisan views as representative of the university as a whole. This trend has mercifully diminished in the wake of the disastrous House of Representatives hearings on antisemitism that led to the dismissal of Harvard president Claudine Gay and others. But the conception of the university as a vehicle for carrying out specific political ends continues in less visible ways.

What do we do?  The answer is clearly that professors should “stick to their last” and administrators should stop making pronouncements on social issues that have nothing to do with the mission of their university.  For it is our concentration on teaching and learning that really commands the respect of the public. When the public loses respect for universities, they stop wanting to attend them, which is a loss for both them and America, and it also turns them into people who, by disliking self-professed “elites,” become populists who vote for authoritarians like Trump (this last bit is my take, not Clune’s).  Here’s a last quote from his article:

If we have a political role by virtue of our jobs, that role derives from dedicated practice in the disciplines in which we are experts. Teaching students how to weigh evidence, giving them the capacity to follow a mathematical proof, disciplining their tendency to project their own values onto the object of study — these practices may not have the direct and immediate political payoff that has been the professoriate’s reigning delusion over the past decade. But they have two overwhelming advantages.

First, a chemist, or an art historian, really does possess authority in their subject of expertise. They can show us things we couldn’t learn on our own. This genuine authority is the basis for the university’s claim to public respect and support.

Second, the dissemination of academic values regarding evidence and reasoned debate can have powerful indirect effects. I have argued, for instance, that even so apparently apolitical a practice as teaching students to appreciate great literature can act as a bulwark against the reduction of all values to consumer preference. The scientific and humanistic education of an informed citizenry may not in itself solve climate change or end xenophobia, but it can contribute to these goals in ways both dramatic and subtle. In any case, such a political role is the only one that is both sustainable in a democracy and compatible with our professional status as researchers and educators.

I think the second point has been underemphasized. In fact, I haven’t seen it made in arguments about how to fix academics. But a good liberal education turns you on to thinking about what you believe, and above all constantly questioning your beliefs and seeking out further knowledge to buttress or refute them. It is the love of learning, combined with tutelage in how to assess what you learn, that will in the end restore the stature of academia—if it can be restored at all.

Daniel Diermeier, Vanderbilt’s chancellor, lays out his views on academia in our era

November 20, 2024 • 11:30 am

Yesterday I mentioned this interview in the new Sapir quarterly magazine edited by Bret Stephens, who in this article interviews Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. Diermeier was our provost from 2016 to 2020, but left to take the top job at Vanderbilt.  I, among many, miss him, for at Vandy he’s turned the school into a model of academic freedom and free speech, but hasn’t neglected the enforcement of “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech.

The discussion below shows how deeply Diermeier has pondered all the issues around freedom of expression and the purpose of a university. Combined with Stephens’s probing questions, it’s an excellent conversation.

Here are three excerpts from a longish discussion, which is worth reading in toto. First, the politicization of universities versus social inequality:

Bret Stephens: Until recently, surveys showed that Americans had high confidence in higher education. It was seen as an essential ticket to success in American life. In the past decade or so, that confidence has plummeted. The last survey I saw, from Gallup, showed a sharp decline, and that came out before October 7 and the protests that followed. What happened in the past 10 years to cause that decline?

Daniel Diermeier: We’ve seen the same data, and I’ve been very concerned about the drop in approval and trust in higher education. The decline has been larger among people on the conservative side of the political spectrum, but it’s across the board, from the Left and the Right. My sense is that it comes from two concerns. From the progressive side, the concern is that highly selective universities are perpetuating inequality. And the concern from the Right is that we’re woke factories.

Stephens: Both of them can be true.

Diermeier: One hundred percent. My own sense is that the concerns about the propagation of inequality are, on closer inspection, much overblown. I think the concerns on the politicization of higher education and the ideological drift are much more valid.

The question of the politicization of higher education has come into stark relief after what we’ve seen last year: the conflict in the Middle East and the drama on campus. These developments have elevated into the public consciousness concerns that have been present for years. They now are front and center, much more serious, and they require a course correction by many universities.

The University of Chicago’s “foundational principles“:

Stephens: A historian might say, “Go back to the University of Chicago or Yale in the 1950s and you’ll find conservative critics railing against higher education as hotbeds of radicalism.” Now we look back on that and sort of chuckle. Is the criticism more valid today? If so, why?

Diermeier: Yes, I think the criticism is more valid today. If you look back, there were three pillars of how a university thought about its role in society. If you look at the University of Chicago, one pillar was this commitment to free speech that goes back to the founding and then through a whole variety of presidents, reaffirmed, most recently, by the 2015 report, often referred to as the Chicago Principles. Universities need to be places for open debate.

Pillar two is what we call institutional neutrality, which means that the university will not get involved, will not take positions, on controversial political and social issues that bear no direct relevance to the university’s mission. The University of Chicago’s formulation of this policy was the Kalven Report from 1967, which so eloquently articulates that when the university formulates a party line on any issue, it creates a chilling effect for faculty and students to engage in debate and discourse.

And the third pillar, less appreciated but important, is a commitment to reason, to respect, to using arguments and evidence. Discourse and debate at the university shouldn’t be about shouting. That’s a more cultural aspect. All three have eroded, and they have eroded over the past 10 years in significant fashion. Now we see the consequences of that.

I’m not sure how institutional neutrality has eroded, since it was really only embraced by the University of Chicago until very recently. Now, as FIRE reports, 25 colleges and universities have adopted the position. It seems to me that institutional neutrality has expanded, not “eroded.”

Finally, the ambit of institutional neutrality,  how it differs from propagandizing classrooms, and why the question of “affirmative action for conservative faculty” is not a major issue:

Stephens: Let me ask you about the role of university leaders. One thing you sometimes hear from presidents is I have no power. The faculty rule the institution. There’s a limit to what I can do in terms of what happens on my own campus. Tell us about governance structures. How can university leadership effectively use its position within those structures to set a tone, create a culture, have a set of rules and expectations for how the student and faculty behave? If you were speaking to first-time university presidents from across the country, what would you advise them?

Diermeier:

. . . . Institutional neutrality does not constrain faculty or students. It does constrain administrators. So the second concern that you pointed out, which I’m going to call the politicization of the classroom, is a separate one. That, to me, is a question of professionalism. If you’re using your classroom for indoctrination or propaganda, you’re fundamentally not doing your job. You’re not creating an effective learning environment for your students. So I think these are two separate issues that should not be commingled, because the point of institutional neutrality is to create freedom for faculty and students. If that freedom and responsibility are abused, that’s a different conversation.

. . . .If [faculty are] using their classroom for political propaganda, it’s a different conversation. The right way to think about hiring and promotions is that they should be based on expertise and merit. I’ve cited a couple of these University of Chicago reports before, but there’s one called the Shils Report that makes that very clear: We do not want to have political litmus tests for whom we hire and promote.

That said, there is an important role for the university, including its curriculum, in a society that investigates and reflects on itself, its values, its history. A lot of that is in humanities, the social sciences, divinity schools, law schools, and so forth. There are multiple perspectives, and to have them in the classroom is vitally important. If you have a class on ethics, you want the students to deal with virtue ethics, deontological ethics, and consequential ethics. You want these perspectives well represented, so that they are challenged, and then students can make up their own mind about what they think. If that does not happen because of the ideological capture of a department or program, we’ve got a problem.

I’m very doubtful that the solution is affirmative action for conservatives. I’m also not convinced that these movements to create new centers are the solution, either. I think the challenge goes a little deeper than where people are on political orientation — it has to do with how fields of study are structured and how certain fields have evolved. But we cannot have an ideological monoculture in these types of classes. It’s a disservice to our students.

And, if you don’t want to read, here’s a 45-minute conversation between Diermeir and Dan Senor (Senor’s “Call Me Back” show) that covers much of the same ground as the Sapir article. Senor notes how happy Vandy’s students are compared to students at other places, and Diermeier tries to explain it (note: it has something to do with football, too). Diermeier does credit a lot of Vanderbilt’s academic policies to what he absorbed at the University of Chicago.

Note at about 30 minutes in, Diermeier describes the sit-in in the administration building which led to disciplining the pro-Palestinian protestors. The University of Chicago doesn’t go nearly this far in disciplining protestors that do exactly the same thing. At Vandy, there was suspensions, probation, and even arrests for assault. Diermeier also explains why he would not accede to the demonstrators’ demands for divestment of the university’s endowment from Israel, and explains why he considers encampments a violation of the school’s policy. At the end, he muses about what to do free speech crosses the borderline into illegal harassment or threats.

In my view, Diermeier is the best university President in America, for his policies are the best and are based on considerable thought (and of course, his experience at The University of Chicago).

Bret Stephens indicts American universities for placing relevance above excellence

November 19, 2024 • 11:45 am

A reader called my attention to a new quarterly online magazine called Sapir. It’s edited by the NYT writer Bret Stephens, it’s free, and it has a number of intriguing articles (check out this interview with Daniel Diermeier, our former provost and now chancellor of Vanderbilt University). It also offers a free one-year hard-copy subscription here.

The magazine appears to deal largely but not exclusively with matters Jewish (Stephens’s background). Among the secular pieces is a fine new article by Stephens himself that you can access by clicking on the title below. It’s about the demise of liberalism in American universities, including a defense of what Stephens considers true liberalism and a list of obstacles to university reform. It’s short and well worth reading.

Stephens defines true liberalism this way:

By liberalism I do not mean the word in the usual ideological or political sense. I mean it as the habit of open-mindedness, a passion for truth, a disdain for dogma, an aloofness from politics, a fondness for skeptics and gadflies and iconoclasts, a belief in the importance of evidence, logic, and reason, a love of argument rooted in intelligent difference. Above all, a curious, probing, independent spirit. These were the virtues that great universities were supposed to prize, cultivate, and pass along to the students who went through them. It was the experience I had as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago 30-plus years ago, and that older readers probably recall of their own college experience in earlier decades.

And how it’s disappeared from universities:

Except in a few surviving corners, that kind of university is fading, if not altogether gone. In its place is the model of the university as an agent of social change and ostensible betterment. It is the university that encourages students to dwell heavily on their experience of victimization, or their legacy as victimizers, rather than as accountable individuals responsible for their own fate. It is the university that carefully arranges the racial and ethnic composition of its student body in the hopes of shaping a different kind of future elite. It is the university that tries to stamp out ideas or inquiries it considers socially dangerous or morally pernicious, irrespective of considerations of truth. It is the university that ceaselessly valorizes identity, not least when it comes to who does, or doesn’t, get to make certain arguments. It is the university that substitutes the classics of philosophy and literature with mandatory reading lists that skew heavily to the contemporary ideological left. It is the university that makes official statements on some current events (but not on others), or tips its hand by prominently affiliating itself with political activism in scholarly garb. It is the university that attempts to rewrite the English language in search of more “inclusive” vocabulary. It is the university that silently selects an ideologically homogeneous faculty, administration, and graduate-student body. It is the university that finds opportunistic ways to penalize or get rid of professors whose views it dislikes. It is the university that has allowed entire fields of inquiry — gender studies, ethnic studies, critical studies, Middle Eastern studies — to become thoroughly dogmatic and politicized.

A charitable term for this kind of institution might be the relevant university — relevant in the sense of playing a direct role in shaping public and political life.

He calls the new kind of universities the “relevant university” in that their raison d’être is to improve society. But in so doing, they put Social Justice above merit and excellence, a point that we made in our joint paper “In defense of merit iu science” published in The Journal of Controversial Ideas.  The demotion of merit in favor of ideology—something that Scientific American excelled at (see the previous paper)—has a very palpable downside: the lost of public confidence in institutions:

In fact, there are many less political and more productive ways in which universities can credibly establish their relevance to the world around them: by serving as centers for impartial expertise, making pathbreaking discoveries, and educating students with vital skills, not just academically but also with the skills of good citizenship and leadership.

But the latter kind of relevance does not emerge from a deliberate quest for relevance — that is, for being in tune with contemporary fads or beliefs. It emerges from a quest for excellence. And excellence is cultivated, in large part, by a conscious turning away from trying to be relevant, focusing instead on pursuing knowledge for its own sake; upholding high and consistent standards; protecting the integrity of a process irrespective of the result; maintaining a powerful indifference both to the weight of tradition and the pressure exerted by contemporary beliefs. In short, excellence is achieved by dedicating oneself to the ideals and practices of the kind of liberalism that gives free rein to what the educator Abraham Flexner, in the 1930s, called “the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.”

What does excellence achieve, beyond being a good in itself? Public trust. Ordinary people do not need to have a good understanding of, say, virology to trust that universities are doing a good job of it, especially if advances in the field lead to medicines in the cabinet. Nor does the public need to know the exact formulas by which universities choose their freshman class, so long as they have reason to believe that Yale, Harvard, Princeton and their peers admit only the most brilliant and promising.

But trust is squandered when the public learns that at least some virologists have used their academic authority to make deceitful claims about the likely origins of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trust evaporates when the public learns how the admissions process was being gamed for the sake of achieving race-conscious outcomes that disregard considerations of academic merit, to the striking disadvantage of certain groups. And trust is destroyed when the country sees students from elite universities behaving like Maoist cadres — seizing university property, disrupting campus life, and chanting thought-terminating slogans such as “From the river to the sea.” What those protests have mainly achieved, other than to demoralize or terrify Jewish students, is to advertise the moral bankruptcy and intellectual collapse of our “relevant” universities. Illiberalism always ends up finding its way to antisemitism.

I agree with nearly everything Stephens says, even though he calls himself a political conservative. But he can espouse conservatism in politics all he wants (and he does so judiciously, having voted for Harris) so long as he holds out for classical liberalism as the framework for universities.

At the end of his piece, Stephens lists the obstacles impeding a return to liberal universities, obstacles that include illiberal faculty, a “deeply entrenched DEI bureaucracuy”, a “selective adherence to free expression” (this is what brought down Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill after the House hearings), students taught to identify themselves as victims, and so on.

You may not hear anything new from this piece, but once in a while it helps to have your inchoate ideas clarified by a clear thinker and writer like Stephens, and then buttressed if, like me, your clearer ideas seem correct.

Harvard bans “study-in” protests in libraries

November 17, 2024 • 11:15 am

This article from Harvard Magazine documents the occurrence of “silent study-ins” in the University’s main library: Widener. While protests on the wide Widener steps have always been countenanced, these demonstrations are new because they take place inside—in the reading rooms.

They of course involve pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel protestors, who can’t seem to refrain from disrupting anything, whether it be traffic, classes, putting up graffiti, or, in this case, studying in the library. These sit-ins have been conducted by both students and faculty (faculty are often more anti-Israel than students). Click to read.

Some excerpts:

Throughout this fall, groups of students and faculty members have again taken to libraries with taped signs and coordinated reading lists. These demonstrations—direct challenges to Harvard’s protest restrictions—have ignited campus discussions on what defines a protest, when free expression obstructs learning, and how to introduce new regulations meant to sustain both academic operations and speech.

On January 19, 2024, just after Alan M. Garber assumed the interim presidency, he and the deans released a statement clarifying University policy regarding “the guarantees and limitations” of campus protest and dissent. That January policy states that “demonstrations and protests are ordinarily not permitted in classrooms…libraries or other spaces designated for study, quiet reflection, and small group discussion.” But it did not define what constitutes a protest.

That ambiguity was put to the test on September 21, when approximately 30 pro-Palestine students sat in Loker wearing keffiyehs and displaying signs protesting Israeli strikes in Lebanon. A day before the event, a Harvard administrator warned students that such an action would violate Harvard policies, The Crimson reported. During the protest, library staff informed the students that they could not protest in the library and recorded their Harvard ID numbers. (Students are allowed to protest outside of the library—the Widener steps are a popular location. This semester, both students and faculty held pro-Palestine protests there and were not punished by the University.)

The students were punished, but lightly. Then the faculty got in on it (they were given the same punishment), and the idea spread:

In response to the study-in, Widener Library banned participating students from the building for two weeks. “Demonstrations and protests are not permitted in libraries,” Widener Library administration wrote in an email to punished students that was obtained by The Crimson. The email specified that the recipient had “a laptop bearing one of the demonstration’s flyers.” During the students’ two-week Widener suspensions, they could pick up library materials from other locations, but not enter Widener itself.

The University response angered some faculty members. What made this study-in a protest? Why did a silent action merit punishment? Three weeks after the initial student action, approximately 30 faculty members followed suit. The participants read texts about dissent (ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau to materials published by Harvard itself) and displayed placards quoting the Harvard Library Statement of Values (“embrace diverse perspectives”) as well as the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (“reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [our] existence”).

. . . . Following those initial confrontations, library actions become more numerous on campus. In the month following the October 16 faculty study-in, there have been two such events at the Law Library, one at the Graduate School of Design, another at the Divinity School (a “pray-in”), and two more in Widener (one faculty-led and another student-led). A November 8 Widener faculty study-in pushed the University’s punishment calculus to its logical extreme, with professors displaying blank papers.

Some pushback from a librarian:

 The administrative response to the library protests has, if anything, prompted more faculty members to express concerns. Since the fall wave of demonstrations began, the library has twice articulated why the study-ins merit punishment. On October 24, University librarian Martha Whitehead published an essay titled “Libraries are places for inquiry and learning” in which she argued that the study-ins—which she firmly classified as protests—disrupt academic life:

While a reading room is intended for study, it is not intended to be used as a venue for a group action, quiet or otherwise, to capture people’s attention. In the study-ins in our spaces, we heard from students who saw them publicized and chose not to come to the library. During the events, large numbers of people filed in at once, and several moved around the room taking photos or filming. Seeking attention is in itself disruptive.

What we have here is a conflict between free speech and disruption of University regulations, which prohibit demonstrations in libraries. Granted, these are silent demonstrations, so I had to think it over. In the end, having studied at Widener Libary, which has a huge and beautiful reading room, I decided I agree with Ms. Whitehead.  I thought, “What if I were trying to study in Widener and a bunch of people came in with posters affixed to their computers, sometimes walking about, and all of them expressing an opinion on ideology or politics. I concluded that such demonstrations, no matter what ideology they favored, are disruptive of study, which of course is one of the functions of the University. I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on my work if I were surrounded by protestors.

By all means these demonstrators are free to gather and hold up signs on the Widener steps (shown below), but to have silent demonstrations like this in libraries, symposia, or classrooms, is disruptive to the mission of a university, and should be banned. Harvard has already banned them, but perhaps you disagree. Give your opinion in the comments, please:

A photo of the Widener showing its famous steps. This is from about 1920. They look pretty much the same today, but there are no cars or buggies in front.

Abdalian, Leon H., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Here’s a short video of the spaces inside Widener, including the reader rooms. Isn’t it lovely? They show the steps in an outside view at the end.

Anti-Israel and pro-BDS students harass Brown University trustees

October 22, 2024 • 9:45 am

You didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to predict that last spring’s pro-Hamas (or “anti-Israel”) protests would continue into this academic year.  Despite Hamas being pretty well crushed, the entitled and enraged fans of Palestinian terrorism continue to cause trouble on campus.  The latest target is the elite Brown University. (Elite universities are the ones where protests are most vocal.)

Earlier in October, the University rejected a BDS proposal to divest from Israeli corporations, and also affirmed that such political moves were not in the University’s interest.

As The Algemeiner previously reported, Brown University earlier this month voted down a proposal — muscled onto the agenda of its annual meeting by an anti-Zionist group which attempted to hold the university hostage with threats of illegal demonstrations and other misconduct — to divest from 10 companies linked to Israel.

“The Corporation also discussed the broader issue of whether taking a stance on a geopolitical issue through divestment is consistent with Brown’s mission of education and scholarship. The Corporation reaffirmed that Brown’s mission is to discover, communicate, and preserve knowledge. It is not to adjudicate or resolve global conflicts,” university president Christina Paxson and Brown Corporation chancellor Brian Moynihan said in a letter commenting on the vote. “Whether you support, oppose, or have no opinion on the decision of the Corporation, we hope you will do so with a commitment to sustaining, nurturing, and strengthening the principles that have long been at the core of our teaching and learning community.”

In effect, Brown here is espousing institutional neutrality, refusing to make political statements through investing or divesting. (Brown does not appear on FIRE’s list of 22 colleges besides the University of Chicago that have adopted a Kalven-like institutional neutrality.)

Click below to read more from The Algemeiner:

The students didn’t get their way, so, like toddlers denied a cookie, they acted out, going after the trustees, impeding their movements, and calling them names. Some of that may be free speech, but it’s not clear whether any University rules were violated:

Brown University has launched investigations of anti-Israel groups and individual students following their riotous conduct during a protest of the Brown Corporation that was held on Friday.

Staged outside the Warren Alpert Medical School to inveigh against the Corporation’s recent rejection of a proposal to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement — which aims to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination — the demonstration saw the Ivy League students engage in harassment and intimidation, according to a community notice first shared by the Brown Daily Herald and later obtained by The Algemeiner. The protesters repeatedly struck a bus transporting the Corporation’s trustees from the area, shouted expletives at them, and even lodged a “a racial epithet … toward a person of color.”

Other trustees were stalked to their destinations while some were obstructed from entering their bus, according to the missive by Russell Carey, Brown’s interim vice president for campus life and executive vice president of planning and policy. The official added that the students — many of whom are members of Students for Justice in Palestine, which has links to terrorist organizations, and its spin-off, Brown Divest Coalition (BDC) — harmed not only the trustees but also the university as an institution of higher learning.

“No member of the Brown community would want or expect to be treated in the manner some of our members experienced on Friday, and it was troubling to read in media reports the express intent of some organizers to provoke discomfort that ultimately targeted individuals,” Carey wrote. “Disciplinary sanctions will be imposed where violations of conduct codes are found.”

He added, “As we continue to navigate challenging times on campus and in the nation, our resolve and our principles as a compassionate learning community will continue to be tested. I am hopeful that members of the Brown community will engage in discussion with each other about these challenges and commit to treat each other with respect and dignity.”

Anyone who thinks that civil discussion will ensue between anti-Israel and pro-Israel (or neutral) groups, much less come to any agreement, is an arrant optimist.  Obstructing trustees from getting on their bus, as well as harassing individuals and striking their bus, is likely to be committing violations. And shouting a racial epithet, which of course is odious behavior, may well be “fighting words” prohibited by the First Amendment. (Brown, however, is a private university.)

This is just more evidence that the toddlers will continue their tantrums for an indefinite time.  But schools are getting tired of it, and, I hope, more of them will start punishing the protesters when they violate university regulations (my own school has been clearly reluctant to levy such punishments).  Without such sanctions, there is simply no deterrent to breaking the rules, leading to more and more (and more violent) demonstrations. Pomona College struck back last week:

Last week, Pomona College in Claremont, California levied severe disciplinary sanctions, ranging from expulsion to banishment, against 12 students who participated in illegally occupying and vandalizing the Carnegie Hall administrative building on the anniversary of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel.

The news was first reported by an Instagram accounted operated by Pomona Divest from Apartheid (PDfA), the group which led the assault on the building. PDfA acknowledged that “property crimes” were perpetrated but maintained that the college lacked evidence to identify the offenders. Noting that PDfA members concealed their identities with masks, it charged that Pomona president G. Gabrielle Starr has resorted to “indiscriminately” punishing minority students, as well as depriving them of housing and food, for the sake of upholding fascism.

Starr, who is an African American woman, told a different story, however, accusing the group of “violation of our collective life on campus” in a statement which noted that the pro-Hamas student group was aided by non-student adults who managed to gain access to the campus.

“The destruction in Carnegie Hall was extensive, and the harm done to individuals and our mission was so great,” Starr wrote. “Starting this week, disciplinary letters are going out to students from Pomona and other Claremont Colleges who have been identified as taking part in the takeover of Carnegie Hall. Student groups affiliated with this incident are also under investigation.”

This, of course, is why the cowardly protesters wear masks, taking their actions out of the real of civil disobedience, which they also erode when demanding that, even when caught violating the rules, that they not be punished.

But on the other side we have P. Z. Myers, who has emerged as a full-blown demonizer of Israel.  Myers proclaims this about protests at a branch of his school (The University of Minnesota)  that just led to the arrest of students:

“Free Palestine. End the genocide. Divest now. Those are simple, clear ideas that won’t be answered by arresting people.”

The genocide to which Myers refers is committed by Hamas and Hezbollah, not Israel. And yes, free Palestine—but from Hamas. (Lebanon also needs to be freed from Hezbollah, but the UN apparently lacks the will.)

And of course the point of arresting people is to ensure that campus rules are followed, which are intended to produce a climate that doesn’t chill speech. And somehow Myers neglects to give details about what the protesters actually DID to warrant their arrest. But ABC News did:

A demonstration at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities Monday led to 11 arrests after pro-Palestinian protesters barricaded an administrative hall on campus, locking staff members inside the building.

The protesters blocked the entrance and exit of Morrill Hall, which houses the offices of the university president, Rebecca Cunningham.

According to a statement from the university issued Monday night, the protest began with a peaceful assembly on a lawn in front of the campus’ Coffman Memorial Union at about 3 p.m. local time.

However, “A group of these individuals quickly moved north, up the Northrop Mall, and entered Morrill Hall,” according to the university.

“Once inside the building, protesters began spray painting, including covering lenses of all internal security cameras, breaking interior windows, and barricading the building’s entrance and exit points,” the statement said.

, , , , The university has said that “a number” of staff were present, and many were unable to exit the building “for an extended period of time.”

Police officers arrived on the scene and began to detain protestors around one hour after the first alert was issued, according to the university’s statement.

“With necessary support from the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office, UMPD entered the building at approximately 5:40 p.m. and arrested 11 people,” it said.

Barricading yourself inside buildings, vandalizing it and breaking windows, and preventing staff from leaving: those are not things that are going to win supporters to their “cause”.

A tweet-video of the protesting students at U. Minn.

 

The state of Harvard according to Bill Ackman

October 3, 2024 • 8:50 am

Bill Ackman is the billionaire hedge-fund manager who not only publicized the drop of donations to Harvard because of its purported antisemitism, but also helped bring down President Claudine Gay. But he’s also a double Harvard alum; as Wikipedia notes:

In 1988, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in social studies from Harvard College. His thesis was titled “Scaling the Ivy Wall: The Jewish and Asian American Experience in Harvard Admissions”.  In 1992, he received a Master of Business Administration degree from Harvard Business School.

But Ackman’s not a rapacious piker. Wikipedia adds this:

Ackman is a signatory of The Giving Pledge, committing himself to give away at least 50% of his wealth by the end of his life to charitable causes.  He has given to charitable causes such as the Center for Jewish History, where he spearheaded a successful effort to retire $30 million in debt, personally contributing $6.8 million.  The donation, along with those of Bruce Berkowitz, founder of Fairholme Capital Management, and Joseph Steinberg, president of Leucadia National, were the three largest individual gifts the center has ever received.  Ackman’s foundation donated $1.1 million to the Innocence Project in New York City and Centurion Ministries in Princeton, New Jersey.

Apparently Ackman gave an invited talk about the Harvard Corporation, couched in financial jargon. Here’s the tweet with the slides. I’ll highlight some of them, which are pretty damning for Harvard.

There are 49 slides, and they pretty much encompass his thesis, which is that Harvard has become a business aimed not at providing a quality education to students, but to enriching the Corporation, and its mission has changed from promoting learning to pushing a “progressive” ideology.  In the process, it’s become woke and bloated with administrators.  But Ackman does seem some glimmers of hope on the horizon.

Here are some slides that support that thesis. First, a financial summary and the avowed mission of the College.

Here are some figures taken over the last 20 years:

Yet look at this administrative bloat! Why do they neeed so many administrators (in 20 years the administration has grown by 42% while student enrollment has grown by 0.3% and faculty by 0.5%:

And the cost of going to Schmarvard has doubled, “far outpacing inflation”. The cost of living over this period has increased only 61%. The tuition and fees this year are about $83,000 per annum, so a four-year education costs over a third of a million bucks.

Yet Harvard’s endowment has also more than doubled over this period, and is now 51 BILLION dollars. Ackman’s conclusion:

Here are three of Ackman’s plaints (he’s a registered Democrat but appears to support Trump). I can’t verify the first one (Ackman’s figures are likely accurate), but we all know about the second.  As for the slide just below, Harvard is probably LESS liberal than other schools, but we know that the dearth of conservative viewpoints (just 3% of faculty) is a general issue. Whether you consider that a problem, and if so, how to remedy it—these are matters for debate.

Last year Harvard was last in FIRE’s free-speech ranking, now it’s sixth from last:

Grade inflation is something I abhor, but it seems unstoppable; it’s part of the Alice in Wonderland view that “all must have prizes,” and a sign of the devaluing of merit. It cannot be that students have gotten so much smarter in 20 years! No, grading has gotten easier.

He then shows a series of slides explaining what has happened to Harvard.  This is the summary: it’s become woke and its mission has become woker, conforming to the ideology of the day rather than seeking truth and knowledge.  You can find the new mission statement below:

The latest mission statement, showing the emphasis on diversity, and it doesn’t mean intellectual diversity. The emphasis is on social diversity, coming from “different walks of life,” and having “different identities.” These differences, asserts Schmarvard, will perforce YIELD “intellectual transformation.”

There follows a series of slides showing that while the “demand” of students for education in economics and computer science has grown modestly (as well as the number of faculty in these areas and the number of degrees conferred), the faculty in “studies” departments has grown much faster.  But the number of degrees conferred in “studies” has decreased sharply.. Ackman concludes that Harvard is allocating its resources according to an ideological, diversity-centered platform.

He supports this by giving an analysis of the words used in Harvard’s course catalogue, presumably reflecting its curriculum:

Truth is mentioned much less often than Gender or “oppression”.

Ackman does note that the interim President (Garber will be there for three more years) has done some good things:

From all of this, and assessing Harvard as an “investment” (possibly aimed at potential donors), Ackman regards the College as a “hold”:

I largely agree with Ackman about Harvard, though the problems he singles out, like grade inflation and an ideological bent, also plague other schools. But Ackman, like me, went to Harvard, and we share a sentimentality about the place that lingers (I had a terrific time and got a terrific education in its grad school).  So here’s his reply when someone questions him about why, given all these problems, Harvard is a “hold” rather than a “sell”: