A herculean task to clean out the stables of Academia -- rerouting the Potomac will hardly be sufficient. Very few top admistratative and policy-creation levels there seem willing or able to read the writing on the walls.
For starters, they should gut the "women and gender studies programs" and put most of the ideologues and zealots there out on the bread lines. Substacker, lawyer and author Helen Dale and mathematician and erstwhile journalist Helen Joyce once argued that gender ideology is a "civilization threatening/ending movement":
Not sure if that's hyperbole or understatement, though I and no few others tend to the latter. More than a few civilizations teetered on the brink, or went over it as happened when the "Arabic World Turned Away from Science" and engaged in the "rejection of reason" in favor of religious dogma:
I have seen numerous academic associations/institutions make statements regarding the Trump administration's attacks on academia. Nowhere, however, have I seen any of these institutions suggest that depoliticization of the institutions would be a good idea and that politicization may have been a problem. More often, there has been a doubling-down. Has anyone else witnessed any actual self-reflection?
Any? Sure. You see it here in this post, and my own We Tried to Warn You Post. You see it in many of the sources linked in that post. But among professional associations or, say, Faculty Senates and the like?
Yes, the academic societies I am a part of just don't seem to get it, and have typically put out vaguely-worded statements on their support for diversity and scientists. It seems to me they cannot comprehend or acknowledge the fact that some of the behaviors and political ideas of academia are broadly unpopular and part of the reason for the backlash.
This is a sound and well-worded analysis, but even if all your recommendations were implemented it wouldn't help. The right would still want to defund academia.
The core problem is scientific credibility. The Republicans aren't currently focused on this. Things like Queers For Palestine and DEI studies are more visible and easier to communicate to the base, but the fact is that much research that appears non-partisan on the surface is also hopelessly corrupted by far-left ideology when you scratch the surface.
The thing is, academics usually can't see this. If they can't see a problem they can't fix it. For example, they would continue to hire people with far left beliefs into fields like biology, public health, climatology etc because they just won't ask about politics at all and thus convince themselves that they are neutral, without realizing that the entire basis of their field takes left wing beliefs as a premise. For instance the very existence of the field of public health takes as axiomatic that health is something to be managed by the state via collectivist policies. If you aren't a left wing collectivist, this entire proposition is suspect from the start.
COVID was a good example of this problem. I read a large number of public health papers during 2020 and 2021. Near 100% of them were bullshit. If academia had simply not existed at all the world and people's health would both have been much better off. Quite apart from academic funding being behind the virus in the first place, fields like computational epidemiology start by asking "what is something the government should do?" and then work backwards to whatever answer is most dramatic. They never stop to ask "should the government do something?", and when sane and rational people point out that this is an important question to ask, they just assert that the question of costs and benefits is outside of their expertise. Doesn't stop them demanding policy, of course.
Here's another example: social studies. Overflowing with far left extremism pretending to be science. They routinely define conservative beliefs as misinformation or conspiracy theories and then seek "cures" whilst ignoring misinformation and conspiracy theories on the left. You can't save a field like that by asking them to hire conservatives - they've literally invested their career in the notion such people are subhuman imbeciles.
Academia can't be saved. And why should it? It's just a planned economy parasitizing the real one. Burn it to the ground and let research be done where it should be done: inside the companies that'll use it.
The very smart people at Harvard don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have promised to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
Also, isn’t one reason universities/colleges have become so left wing to do with student bodies who now wield much more power of their own over academia from expecting A’s ( with support from an ever growing administrative body) no matter what the quality of their work, to ostracizing professors whose views don’t comport with their own? Part of taking back universities from the stranglehold of progressivism run amok is shifting the balance of power a little that has shifted too far to students. It’s not like the good universities will lose customers. There are always people who want to go to Harvard, etc
It’s kinda sad that specializing in something like Western Religions is now considered right wing. The History of Christian Thought was one of my favorite classes in college. And I am an athiest and liberal. I have no idea what that professor’s politics were. There was a time when people engaged in scholarship in areas that matched their interests/passions and when intellectual interests weren’t associated with a political leaning. Professors had a variety of political leanings that didn’t necessarily have an obvious correlation with their area of scholarship. For example, I had a professor of Chinese history whose specialty was the communist era who was very conservative and a professor of medieval European history who was liberal. I felt that both taught their subject matter objectively and with seriousness. I did not get the sense that either professor’s scholarship was corrupted by their politics, even if their politics informed their scholarship. I was liberal myself, yet it did not offend me that my Chinese history professor was conservative and I appreciated the different perspective he brought to his subject than say a professor with Marxist leanings would have. And my fellow students felt the same way. Different perspectives produce rigor and debate. And better scholarship. Would we now assume the medievalist was conservative and the communism expert liberal? Somewhere in the past 35 years scholarship has become corrupted by politics. Definitely an overhaul is needed. Maybe Harvard et al should pay for their research with their huge endowments and tuition, or least not expect government funding for politically driven projects.
I shouldn't have implied that a specialization in western religious thought is inherently right-wing. But by a similar token, specializing in the history of race relations isn't inherently left-wing. And yet we all know what that looks like in practice. My point was that, if you look at academic job ads today, in many cases they are dripping with buzzwords that indicate a very strong preference for leftist politics. Imagine what academic hiring would look like if ads were instead full of buzzwords that indicate a strong preference for right wing politics.
The problem is that you think these “attacks” are a bad thing, and that a resounding majority agree with you. Unfortunately for you, people want this, and want it to continue. Universities have been producing nothing other than mindless middlemen for the regime, and people are sick of it.
Rather than waiting around for the Dems to come back into power, why not work WITH Trump? I don't know why the Left is so loathe to do that. Whatever his faults, he is clearly a guy who likes to make deals, so why not work with that rather than engaging in a pointless, self-defeating resistance? And for what? DEI? Trans issues? Hamas?
Its Matt's post, but I agree with this. Working now on getting Jay Bhattacharya, Trump's appointee who heads NIH, to speak at Rutgers.
I do think Trump et al are treating academia as "the enemy." And, if so, for many good reasons. The route to defusing that is long, hard, and any good outcome is far far far from certain. But some efforts are ... worth the effort.
Given the massive educational polarization over the last forty or so years… would the numbers work? There simply aren’t enough conservative scholars anymore. It would look, not like a much-needed reset, but a symbolic bending the knee that would serve no actual purpose but virtue signaling to an administration and subculture that already hates them and would not be inclined to change.
I’m perfectly OK with your diagnosis; I think your remedy is naive and ignores the serious structural concerns that brought us to this point.
But it’s unrealistic in an uninteresting way, you know? If I could wave my wand and have half the universe do what I want, I could come up with all kinds of solutions to whatever problems befall us.
I am a tenured humanities faculty member at a California university and I agree with the overall point of this essay. The extreme ideological bias of academics in the humanities has become toxic.
I’m a lifelong Democrat, but over the last 5-10 years I have been red-pilled by what I’ve witnessed. We are no longer teaching critical thinking, if we ever really were in my generation. We are teaching specific political perspectives with the Orwellian goal of creating “change agents” for “social justice” in a “globalized world.” I am fond of my colleagues as people, but they are incapable of thinking outside this box. It’s how we were all trained. They are literally illiterate when it comes to conservative thought or any data that conflicts with their world view. They reflexively label anything outside this box regressive, racist or antidemocratic.
As a small comic example, at a faculty lunch I was given a well meaning, friendly schooling not to voice the Republican lie that COVID may have leaked from a lab because it’s racist. This type of interaction is typical and pervasive. Seriously questioning prominent left narratives, such as raising Roland Fryer’s work or gender critical perspectives, would not be tolerated.
The joke in 2025 is that the academic left is totally freaked out by Trump’s “censorship” without any awareness of their own stranglehold on freedom of thought and speech — or their astounding incapacity to consider in good faith any perspectives they find “triggering,” which includes anything at all right of center, and increasingly anything at the center. In other words, much of what the majority of US voters — including Democrats — think. Of course, bashing Trump voters is a recreational pastime among faculty on campus.
For the last 10 years we’ve hired a whole new cohort of professors based on their fervent DEI statements and dissertations in far left “studies” — the ship is not going to turn around. Trump is confirmation that they are “right” and the right is “on the wrong side of history.” They will dig into their Manichaean world view, resist and hold their breath until the next Democratic administration. In the meantime, the whole industry of higher education is becoming financially unsustainable, if it isn’t already.
If anything, the lab leak hypothesis is less racist than the wet market hypothesis. To err is universally human - the wet markets are not, in the 21st century.
There are huge numbers of adjunct and other contingent faculty and scholars who never received tenure track offers or were pushed out of academia for political reasons. Start with them...and begin by looking at their voter registrations. Democrats need not apply in this reset as part of restoring the balance in academia and can be more than justified given 60 years of affirmative action.
Yes, it will continue and intensify and that has been clear for a while. I jumped ship from the hard sciences in academia in 2017 after seeing that the academic response to Trump was to double down on partisan self-delegitimation. Even if the hard sciences would only get hit indirectly, the indirect hits seemed like they would still be devastating. I wasn't wrong.
And so the beatings should continue, for exactly the reasons stated. The alternative is to consider a scorched earth policy approach. Let the universities pick; but, choose well.
It's all in your last paragraph. It's impossible to overstate how clueless academia and academia-adjacent programming are about this reality.
A herculean task to clean out the stables of Academia -- rerouting the Potomac will hardly be sufficient. Very few top admistratative and policy-creation levels there seem willing or able to read the writing on the walls.
For starters, they should gut the "women and gender studies programs" and put most of the ideologues and zealots there out on the bread lines. Substacker, lawyer and author Helen Dale and mathematician and erstwhile journalist Helen Joyce once argued that gender ideology is a "civilization threatening/ending movement":
https://lawliberty.org/podcast/when-does-sex-matter/
Not sure if that's hyperbole or understatement, though I and no few others tend to the latter. More than a few civilizations teetered on the brink, or went over it as happened when the "Arabic World Turned Away from Science" and engaged in the "rejection of reason" in favor of religious dogma:
https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/why-the-arabic-world-turned-away-from-science
Is it possible to look at what has happened recently to public universities in Republican-dominated states to get a feel for what the future may hold?
I have seen numerous academic associations/institutions make statements regarding the Trump administration's attacks on academia. Nowhere, however, have I seen any of these institutions suggest that depoliticization of the institutions would be a good idea and that politicization may have been a problem. More often, there has been a doubling-down. Has anyone else witnessed any actual self-reflection?
Any? Sure. You see it here in this post, and my own We Tried to Warn You Post. You see it in many of the sources linked in that post. But among professional associations or, say, Faculty Senates and the like?
Total radio silence.
Yes, the academic societies I am a part of just don't seem to get it, and have typically put out vaguely-worded statements on their support for diversity and scientists. It seems to me they cannot comprehend or acknowledge the fact that some of the behaviors and political ideas of academia are broadly unpopular and part of the reason for the backlash.
This is a sound and well-worded analysis, but even if all your recommendations were implemented it wouldn't help. The right would still want to defund academia.
The core problem is scientific credibility. The Republicans aren't currently focused on this. Things like Queers For Palestine and DEI studies are more visible and easier to communicate to the base, but the fact is that much research that appears non-partisan on the surface is also hopelessly corrupted by far-left ideology when you scratch the surface.
The thing is, academics usually can't see this. If they can't see a problem they can't fix it. For example, they would continue to hire people with far left beliefs into fields like biology, public health, climatology etc because they just won't ask about politics at all and thus convince themselves that they are neutral, without realizing that the entire basis of their field takes left wing beliefs as a premise. For instance the very existence of the field of public health takes as axiomatic that health is something to be managed by the state via collectivist policies. If you aren't a left wing collectivist, this entire proposition is suspect from the start.
COVID was a good example of this problem. I read a large number of public health papers during 2020 and 2021. Near 100% of them were bullshit. If academia had simply not existed at all the world and people's health would both have been much better off. Quite apart from academic funding being behind the virus in the first place, fields like computational epidemiology start by asking "what is something the government should do?" and then work backwards to whatever answer is most dramatic. They never stop to ask "should the government do something?", and when sane and rational people point out that this is an important question to ask, they just assert that the question of costs and benefits is outside of their expertise. Doesn't stop them demanding policy, of course.
Here's another example: social studies. Overflowing with far left extremism pretending to be science. They routinely define conservative beliefs as misinformation or conspiracy theories and then seek "cures" whilst ignoring misinformation and conspiracy theories on the left. You can't save a field like that by asking them to hire conservatives - they've literally invested their career in the notion such people are subhuman imbeciles.
Academia can't be saved. And why should it? It's just a planned economy parasitizing the real one. Burn it to the ground and let research be done where it should be done: inside the companies that'll use it.
The very smart people at Harvard don’t seem to remember that the Supreme Court has already told them that discriminating on the basis of race is unconstitutional and yet they have promised to continue to do so. I hope the Feds drop the hammer on them.
Also, isn’t one reason universities/colleges have become so left wing to do with student bodies who now wield much more power of their own over academia from expecting A’s ( with support from an ever growing administrative body) no matter what the quality of their work, to ostracizing professors whose views don’t comport with their own? Part of taking back universities from the stranglehold of progressivism run amok is shifting the balance of power a little that has shifted too far to students. It’s not like the good universities will lose customers. There are always people who want to go to Harvard, etc
It’s kinda sad that specializing in something like Western Religions is now considered right wing. The History of Christian Thought was one of my favorite classes in college. And I am an athiest and liberal. I have no idea what that professor’s politics were. There was a time when people engaged in scholarship in areas that matched their interests/passions and when intellectual interests weren’t associated with a political leaning. Professors had a variety of political leanings that didn’t necessarily have an obvious correlation with their area of scholarship. For example, I had a professor of Chinese history whose specialty was the communist era who was very conservative and a professor of medieval European history who was liberal. I felt that both taught their subject matter objectively and with seriousness. I did not get the sense that either professor’s scholarship was corrupted by their politics, even if their politics informed their scholarship. I was liberal myself, yet it did not offend me that my Chinese history professor was conservative and I appreciated the different perspective he brought to his subject than say a professor with Marxist leanings would have. And my fellow students felt the same way. Different perspectives produce rigor and debate. And better scholarship. Would we now assume the medievalist was conservative and the communism expert liberal? Somewhere in the past 35 years scholarship has become corrupted by politics. Definitely an overhaul is needed. Maybe Harvard et al should pay for their research with their huge endowments and tuition, or least not expect government funding for politically driven projects.
Totally agree with you.
I was agreeing with you in my own way in that response. I understood what you were trying to say.
I shouldn't have implied that a specialization in western religious thought is inherently right-wing. But by a similar token, specializing in the history of race relations isn't inherently left-wing. And yet we all know what that looks like in practice. My point was that, if you look at academic job ads today, in many cases they are dripping with buzzwords that indicate a very strong preference for leftist politics. Imagine what academic hiring would look like if ads were instead full of buzzwords that indicate a strong preference for right wing politics.
The problem is that you think these “attacks” are a bad thing, and that a resounding majority agree with you. Unfortunately for you, people want this, and want it to continue. Universities have been producing nothing other than mindless middlemen for the regime, and people are sick of it.
Rather than waiting around for the Dems to come back into power, why not work WITH Trump? I don't know why the Left is so loathe to do that. Whatever his faults, he is clearly a guy who likes to make deals, so why not work with that rather than engaging in a pointless, self-defeating resistance? And for what? DEI? Trans issues? Hamas?
Its Matt's post, but I agree with this. Working now on getting Jay Bhattacharya, Trump's appointee who heads NIH, to speak at Rutgers.
I do think Trump et al are treating academia as "the enemy." And, if so, for many good reasons. The route to defusing that is long, hard, and any good outcome is far far far from certain. But some efforts are ... worth the effort.
Given the massive educational polarization over the last forty or so years… would the numbers work? There simply aren’t enough conservative scholars anymore. It would look, not like a much-needed reset, but a symbolic bending the knee that would serve no actual purpose but virtue signaling to an administration and subculture that already hates them and would not be inclined to change.
I’m perfectly OK with your diagnosis; I think your remedy is naive and ignores the serious structural concerns that brought us to this point.
I do not think Matt would disagree with you. As he wrote, "Is any of this realistic? Of course not."
But it’s unrealistic in an uninteresting way, you know? If I could wave my wand and have half the universe do what I want, I could come up with all kinds of solutions to whatever problems befall us.
This is exactly why the essay has the recurring theme, "The beatings will continue."
Academia has become pure indoctrination and I’m thrilled to see a big correction. Even if it causes a lot of pain, and sets us back in some ways.
I am a tenured humanities faculty member at a California university and I agree with the overall point of this essay. The extreme ideological bias of academics in the humanities has become toxic.
I’m a lifelong Democrat, but over the last 5-10 years I have been red-pilled by what I’ve witnessed. We are no longer teaching critical thinking, if we ever really were in my generation. We are teaching specific political perspectives with the Orwellian goal of creating “change agents” for “social justice” in a “globalized world.” I am fond of my colleagues as people, but they are incapable of thinking outside this box. It’s how we were all trained. They are literally illiterate when it comes to conservative thought or any data that conflicts with their world view. They reflexively label anything outside this box regressive, racist or antidemocratic.
As a small comic example, at a faculty lunch I was given a well meaning, friendly schooling not to voice the Republican lie that COVID may have leaked from a lab because it’s racist. This type of interaction is typical and pervasive. Seriously questioning prominent left narratives, such as raising Roland Fryer’s work or gender critical perspectives, would not be tolerated.
The joke in 2025 is that the academic left is totally freaked out by Trump’s “censorship” without any awareness of their own stranglehold on freedom of thought and speech — or their astounding incapacity to consider in good faith any perspectives they find “triggering,” which includes anything at all right of center, and increasingly anything at the center. In other words, much of what the majority of US voters — including Democrats — think. Of course, bashing Trump voters is a recreational pastime among faculty on campus.
For the last 10 years we’ve hired a whole new cohort of professors based on their fervent DEI statements and dissertations in far left “studies” — the ship is not going to turn around. Trump is confirmation that they are “right” and the right is “on the wrong side of history.” They will dig into their Manichaean world view, resist and hold their breath until the next Democratic administration. In the meantime, the whole industry of higher education is becoming financially unsustainable, if it isn’t already.
If anything, the lab leak hypothesis is less racist than the wet market hypothesis. To err is universally human - the wet markets are not, in the 21st century.
Trump will squeeze 2 months of this stupidity into the next 46 months. He’s great at this 😆
There are huge numbers of adjunct and other contingent faculty and scholars who never received tenure track offers or were pushed out of academia for political reasons. Start with them...and begin by looking at their voter registrations. Democrats need not apply in this reset as part of restoring the balance in academia and can be more than justified given 60 years of affirmative action.
Yes, it will continue and intensify and that has been clear for a while. I jumped ship from the hard sciences in academia in 2017 after seeing that the academic response to Trump was to double down on partisan self-delegitimation. Even if the hard sciences would only get hit indirectly, the indirect hits seemed like they would still be devastating. I wasn't wrong.
And so the beatings should continue, for exactly the reasons stated. The alternative is to consider a scorched earth policy approach. Let the universities pick; but, choose well.