Preliminary List of Articles that Attempted to Warn Academics and Other Scientists that their Politicization of Scholarship, Teaching, Funding, Hiring and Promotions Was a Slow-Moving Train Wreck
Only an academic could possibly believe one would be friends with another solely bc that person is white. A regular Joe would never believe anything this foolish.
Just to be clear - they really do hate you all and they plan on destroying your institutions. Basically conservatives have watched their society crumbling around them largely due to horribly stupid ideas that have come from academia. Over immigration and toxic empathy. Encouraging drug use leading to tent cities crime and lawlessness. Banning the police. Men in women’s sports and washrooms. Cancelling AP courses, and anything merit based in schools in the name of DEI. Cancel culture -
but only against conservatives. Encouraging children to be mentally ill and hiding it from their parents. Covid was a series of mistakes and lies served up by the professorial elite that destroyed children’s school experiences, indebted our society, and forced many people out of their jobs. All of this served with a huge dollop of hostility, sanctimony and condescension. And cowardice - don’t forget that everyone knows you don’t even believe this stuff - you are just too chickenshit to speak up. The America First movement views you as a cancer that metatasticized out into society. They plan to burn it out of society and of course destroy it at its source.
Often missing from these kinds of discussions is the collegial voice of mainstream professionalism. See for example Hollinger, "The Wedge Driving Academe's Two Families
I dislike left-wing academia nearly as much as you, but just like every other liberal you want to avoid blaming people for their own decisions. Left-wing academia forced Americans to vote for Trump? The world doesn't revolve around academia, us outsiders barely notice you (no offense). Far-left ideas about racism, colonialism, etc. should be argued against because they are bad ideas, not because people don't like them. The goal of academia isn't to make people happy, it's to seek the truth. Liberals abandoned the search for truth because they didn't like when the truth made people feel bad. You want them to abandon it because it makes voters angry. What's the difference?
I want academics to courageously stand by evidence, regardless of outcomes. Whether it's to a woke mob or to Emperor Trump, Copernicus states his theory and accepts what comes next. Academia became a place for silencing dissent. Fight against that. Don't tell them that they can somehow control what choice voters make. They can't, and it would be just as bad for academia if they tried.
"Caused" and "forced" are not the same thing. Trump et al are absolutely 100% responsible for their own actions. However, understanding why and how we have gotten to this point seems to me to be a worthwhile endeavor, because it can give insights into how we dig ourselves out. I recommend this article along those lines:
"If academics want to preserve federal funding, they must first restore credibility. That means recommitting to intellectual diversity, resisting ideological conformity, and acknowledging our role in fostering the polarisation that led to this crisis of confidence. Until then, no amount of protesting will stop the political forces now reshaping higher education.:
You are trying to convince people to make a good moral decision because someone is standing behind them with a gun. Is that a good way to get people to behave morally? Why stop with "intellectual diversity"? Just tell them to put on MAGA hats and produce studies proving that welfare makes people lazy. Kiss Trump's ass and he will make sure the money flows again. Problem solved.
The problem with your theory here is that the MAGA movement doesn't want facts and they absolutely love ideological conformity, as long as it's the right kind. Simply moving to the middle won't get you back in their good graces, they will continue to hate every academic who gets results they don't like. So not only is your argument a bad reason to change behavior, it would ultimately be futile.
I know you want these assholes to be punished for their woke witch hunts, I agree with you there. But harboring resentment won't help you solve the problem. It's a poison you take hoping someone else gets sick. Academia should absolutely reform itself, because partisan ideological beliefs prevent us from reaching true conclusions. Sometimes the facts turn out to be unpleasant, sometimes they go against the way we thought the world worked. An academic can only endure such pain by being zealots for the truth. You can shame someone into being a conformist, you can't shame them into being a zealot.
Absolutely brilliant and maybe my biggest fear. I had feared that every paper that was factual yet didn’t line up with far left ideology would be suppressed to the point where academics would say “where is your evidence to support that claim?” And there won’t be any because it was all suppressed or removed.
Thanks for writing this. About ten years ago, I started maintaining a bibliography called "Scholarship & Worldview" to help me keep track of what was being written related to these issues. After reading this, I went back to see what additional suggestions I might be able to contribute. I'm not sure all of these will meet your inclusion criteria, but here they are for your consideration:
Anthony, Robert M. 2012. “A Challenge to Critical Understandings of Race.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42: 260-282.
Damore, James. 2017. “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber: How Bias Clouds Our Thinking about Diversity and Inclusion.” Memorandum to fellow employees at Google LLC.
Effron, Daniel A., and Eric D. Knowles. 2015. “Entitativity and Intergroup Bias: How Belonging to a Cohesive Group Allows People to Express Their Prejudices.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108(2): 234-253.
Fram, Maryah Stella, and Julie Miller-Cribbs. 2008. “Liberal and Conservative in Social Work Education: Exploring Student Experiences.” Social Work Education 27(8): 883-897.
Goodhart, David. 2017. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London, UK: Hurst and Company.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Hawkins, Stephen, Daniel Yudkin, Míriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon. 2018. Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. New York, NY: More in Common.
Hodge, David R. 2009. “Secular Privilege: Deconstructing the Invisible Rose-Tinted Sunglasses.” Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought 28(1-2): 8-34.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1993. The Decomposition of Sociology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Horowitz, Mark, Anthony Haynor, and Kenneth Kickham. 2018. “Sociology’s Sacred Victims and the Politics of Knowledge: Moral Foundations Theory and Disciplinary Controversies.” American Sociologist 49(4): 459-495.
Kitchens, Michael, Mary Mitchell, Ashley Collins, Mariela Horna, Tanisha Rine, and Anh Tran. 2011. “Individual Differences in a Preference for Positively- and Negatively- Oriented Christian Information.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 30(1): 16-27.
Küenzlen, Gottfried. 1987. “Secular Religion and Its Futuristic-Eschatological Conceptions.” Studies in Soviet Thought 33(3): 209-228.
Lilienfeld, Scott O. 2017. “Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 12(1): 138-169.
Lilla, Mark. 2017. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936 (1929). Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Murray, Douglas. 2019. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. London, UK: Bloomsbury Continuum.
Phillips, James C. 2016. “Why Are There So Few Conservatives and Libertarians in Legal Academia? An Empirical Exploration of Three Hypotheses.” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 39(1): 153-207.
Pluckrose, Helen, and James Lindsay. 2020. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody. Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing.
Powers, Kirsten. 2015. The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.
Rauch, Jonathan. 2021. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Wilton, Leigh S., Evan P. Apfelbaum, and Jessica J. Good. 2019. “Valuing Differences and Reinforcing Them: Multiculturalism Increases Race Essentialism.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 10(5): 681-689.
Wright, John Paul, and Francis T. Cullen. 2012. “The Future of Biosocial Criminology: Beyond Scholars’ Professional Ideology.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 28(3): 237-253.
Yancey, George A. 2011. Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Yancey, George A. 2014. Dehumanizing Christians: Cultural Competition in a Multicultural World. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Yancey, George A. 2014. “Watching the Watchers: The Neglect of Academic Analysis of Progressive Groups.” Academic Questions 27: 65-78.
Yancey, George A. 2015. Hostile Environment: Understanding and Responding to Anti-Christian Bias. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Yancey, George A., and David A. Williamson. 2012. What Motivates Cultural Progressives? Understanding Opposition to the Political and Christian Right. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Yancey, George, Sam Reimer, and Jake O'Connell. 2015. “How Academics View Conservative Protestants.” Sociology of Religion 0(0): [1-22].
The most sad and hilarious thing about this whole situation is that, even after Trump's second win, there are still significant portions of academia that are in denial of the politicization of higher education. They think attacks on academia are just a conservative backlash or they think to the extent that there is any politicization it's not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
When you present evidence to them like the sources Lee presents in this post, they shift the goal posts. That's why I try to start these conversations out with the question, "What do you count as evidence?" Because the trick is revealed when you point out that they believe other stuff (like the horrors of systemic racism) with much weaker evidence. These are the mechanics of the confirmation bias: when we face evidence that conflicts with what we believe we ask, "Must I believe it?" The bar is way higher. But when we face evidence that supports what we believe we ask, "Can I believe it?" The bar is much lower.
Clearly, the question many left-leaning academics are asking themselves about the politicization of higher education is, "Must I believe it?" No, they musn't, evidence be damned.
Maybe it's just me, but this does not look like a good faith effort to correct excesses of DEI or get more bang for the research buck. Looks more like not liking "those people."
They are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, I think what we are seeing is a blend of both. I also think its less that Trump et al hate academia per se, though they might.
1. But its is more disdain and resentment than outright hatred.
2. I think there is an earnest attempt to both correct many of the dysfunctions of academia and rein in both bureaucracy and the budget.
3. Because of point 1 AND ALSO because many in academia have quite intentionally positioned themselves as Trump's mortal enemy, I have little doubt that Trump, Musk, or most of his administration cares at all if they wreak all sorts of damage.
4. It is possible that many of them are enjoying wreaking that damage and think both that we deserve it and that the country will be better for it.
None of the things in this mix are mutually exclusive.
> Or why they should want to richly fund playhouses for radical activists and their enablers?
Venturing an answer to why academe should be funded, since you ask:
We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.
No, I didn't write that paragraph. That was Carl Sagan, in 1997, in A Demon-Haunted World, worried about attacks on academe. I quote it because it describes our situation even better than the one in the 90s — and Sagan was a better writer than I am.
I am honestly not sure how much academia contributes to science and tech. Not expert enough in biomed to have any sense of how much comes from academia. I suspect:
1. A lot in some absolute sense
2. Not a lot, relative to the amount spent by the feds funding biomed grants.
But I do not know that.
Most of the major innovations of the last 20 years or so have come from the private sector, not academia. Smart phones. Electric cars. Solar. Space X. The Covid vax. AI originated in academia, but it was private companies that turned it into a juggernaut.
Outside the physical & life sciences, though, have probably been more a net negative than positive. First, what great contributions to society have emerged from all the grant money spent on social science? "Great" is probably around 0. Maybe a few somewhat useful ones. Second, subtract out all the ways social scientists have sent out into the culture nasty, dysfunctional stuff. Intersectionality. Critical social justice theories. Implicit bias, microaggressions and their associated useless at best trainings. DEI. Outright antipathy towards and corrosion of the great strengths of the liberal democratic west.
I am not saying none of us do anything worthwhile. I am a social scientist. I think what I do is worthwhile (as have more than a few Congressmen -- our paper on foreign funding of American U's helped trigger the House hearings that highlighted the rising antisemitism on campus and, ultimately, the resignations of Gay and Magill). But I do not have federal funding. (Maybe I should submit a proposal...). And of course its not just me. There are others outside the physical/biomed sciences doing good work. But enough to justify the amount spent on us? I genuinely do not know.
If Trump/Musk came to me and asked what to do about the NIH/NSF budgets, I'd say something like:
1. Cut the indirects to 20%, not 15.
2. Apply them to the entire grant, rather than the insane torturous-for-everyone-involved piecemeal way done now, where the indirect rate is applied to some things in the budget but not others. (DOGE, where are you when we need you!).
3. Cut the budget by half the amount that was going to DEI work and anything that smacked of critical theory.
4. But don't forget that research on discrimination and bias long predated DEI; that work, per se, is not necessarily DEI. This requires someone to actually think, rather than just wield an ax.
5. Direct the other half that was going to DEI that was not cut to research that eschews as much as possible taking a political activist lens.
Do that for a year or two, then evaluate how that's going.
Universities and associated research institutions are the only mass producers of engineers and scientists and of state-of-the-art science and engineering at the bleeding edge of what’s possible (generically speaking; i.e. one can always find examples of otherwise, but they typically rely on the existence of the entire knowledge infrastructure of which universities are the foundation) we have. (Quoting my post.)
Universities do basic research, not product development, so it's not surprising that new products don't come from universities; the technologies on which those products are built tend to be collaboratively developed between universities and corporate R&D, and the universities/research institutions do the deep things (like CRISPR and mRNA biology and Li-ion electrochemistry and CdTe physics, Shor's algorithm) that become products (superhuman children of the 2040s, covid vaccines, EV batteries, high-efficiency solar panels for satellites, quantum cryptography "any day now").
My view on universities is that they have their problems, but they're the only institution that does tertiary education; among the few places where people who care more about being right than being successful can actually be successful; and where cognitive artifacts (tools that allow less-intellectually-powerful people to solve problems that would otherwise require genius) are developed.
As for the main topic of the post, my view (I've been out for a while) is that most faculty had a "I'm here to work on metal-organic frameworks, not bother with politics" attitude, and that was a reasonable individual choice that begat a commons problem.
Well, your first paragraph here is on training/education, not original research so much. The second is, but, again, it is for the physical sciences and biomed. IDK about superhuman children, but so be it.
I am definitely not arguing to trash universities. But a little intense reform is a different story.
> and of state-of-the-art science and engineering at the bleeding edge of what’s possible
Meaning that basic research at the boundaries of what we know is primarily done at universities and associated research institutions.
Also, the "education part" produces the scientists and engineers (undergrads, masters, PhDs, and post-docs) who do the research, and it's partially funded by research money, indirectly, and in the case of PhD students, and some masters, directly as RAs.
So cutting funding to research also impacts the ability to educate the people who work in the rest of the R&D chain, even outside of academia (less so the closer you get to manufacturing, but still a lot of MSc.s involved even in manufacturing).
Since my experience is with STEM and professional schools, that's all I can talk about. But that was there from the beginning (the Sagan quote) and when people (not here, but at large) say that SpaceX landing the Falcon 9* proves research can be moved out of academe, they're not attacking the Humanities or Social Sciences.
FWIW, there are people at large who _are_ trashing universities and hope the limits on indirect costs will lead to closures and firings.
--
*Landing the Falcon 9 is an engineering problem that is solved using material taught to undergraduates at least as far back as the 1980s; it's an achievement of engineering, but many people at large think it was some sort of major scientific breakthrough, which it wasn't.
Politicization of institutions works great, until the other side gets ahold of the levers of power. After that happens, it is over. And what’s worse, it is over in ways that the people who came up through the current system cannot really comprehend. This is a phase shift. The institutions are discredited, along with everyone who has worked in them, and incremental reforms aren’t going to cut it. The widespread collapse of higher education is a real possibility, particularly when looming financial strains from shrinking student cohorts are factored in.
Only an academic could possibly believe one would be friends with another solely bc that person is white. A regular Joe would never believe anything this foolish.
Just to be clear - they really do hate you all and they plan on destroying your institutions. Basically conservatives have watched their society crumbling around them largely due to horribly stupid ideas that have come from academia. Over immigration and toxic empathy. Encouraging drug use leading to tent cities crime and lawlessness. Banning the police. Men in women’s sports and washrooms. Cancelling AP courses, and anything merit based in schools in the name of DEI. Cancel culture -
but only against conservatives. Encouraging children to be mentally ill and hiding it from their parents. Covid was a series of mistakes and lies served up by the professorial elite that destroyed children’s school experiences, indebted our society, and forced many people out of their jobs. All of this served with a huge dollop of hostility, sanctimony and condescension. And cowardice - don’t forget that everyone knows you don’t even believe this stuff - you are just too chickenshit to speak up. The America First movement views you as a cancer that metatasticized out into society. They plan to burn it out of society and of course destroy it at its source.
What a terrible tragedy, and everyone here should receive due credit for their Cassandra-esque warnings.
But how can you not cite Robert Conquest / Kingsley Amis??
["I am quoted as having suggested, for a title for a new edition of The Great Terror, “How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?”...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/04/12/kingsley-amis-and-the-great-terror/ ]
“Dreger, A. (2016). Galileo's middle finger: Heretics, activists, and one scholar's search for justice. Penguin books.”
If I ever have trouble thinking of a good title for something, I’ll try to hire Prof. Dreger.
I'm so happy that Trump won. That is all
Often missing from these kinds of discussions is the collegial voice of mainstream professionalism. See for example Hollinger, "The Wedge Driving Academe's Two Families
Apart" https://history.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2013_wedge_hollinger.pdf
I dislike left-wing academia nearly as much as you, but just like every other liberal you want to avoid blaming people for their own decisions. Left-wing academia forced Americans to vote for Trump? The world doesn't revolve around academia, us outsiders barely notice you (no offense). Far-left ideas about racism, colonialism, etc. should be argued against because they are bad ideas, not because people don't like them. The goal of academia isn't to make people happy, it's to seek the truth. Liberals abandoned the search for truth because they didn't like when the truth made people feel bad. You want them to abandon it because it makes voters angry. What's the difference?
I want academics to courageously stand by evidence, regardless of outcomes. Whether it's to a woke mob or to Emperor Trump, Copernicus states his theory and accepts what comes next. Academia became a place for silencing dissent. Fight against that. Don't tell them that they can somehow control what choice voters make. They can't, and it would be just as bad for academia if they tried.
"Caused" and "forced" are not the same thing. Trump et al are absolutely 100% responsible for their own actions. However, understanding why and how we have gotten to this point seems to me to be a worthwhile endeavor, because it can give insights into how we dig ourselves out. I recommend this article along those lines:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/trumps-science-research-cuts-were-a-long-time-coming/
Concluding paragraph:
"If academics want to preserve federal funding, they must first restore credibility. That means recommitting to intellectual diversity, resisting ideological conformity, and acknowledging our role in fostering the polarisation that led to this crisis of confidence. Until then, no amount of protesting will stop the political forces now reshaping higher education.:
You are trying to convince people to make a good moral decision because someone is standing behind them with a gun. Is that a good way to get people to behave morally? Why stop with "intellectual diversity"? Just tell them to put on MAGA hats and produce studies proving that welfare makes people lazy. Kiss Trump's ass and he will make sure the money flows again. Problem solved.
The problem with your theory here is that the MAGA movement doesn't want facts and they absolutely love ideological conformity, as long as it's the right kind. Simply moving to the middle won't get you back in their good graces, they will continue to hate every academic who gets results they don't like. So not only is your argument a bad reason to change behavior, it would ultimately be futile.
I know you want these assholes to be punished for their woke witch hunts, I agree with you there. But harboring resentment won't help you solve the problem. It's a poison you take hoping someone else gets sick. Academia should absolutely reform itself, because partisan ideological beliefs prevent us from reaching true conclusions. Sometimes the facts turn out to be unpleasant, sometimes they go against the way we thought the world worked. An academic can only endure such pain by being zealots for the truth. You can shame someone into being a conformist, you can't shame them into being a zealot.
Absolutely brilliant and maybe my biggest fear. I had feared that every paper that was factual yet didn’t line up with far left ideology would be suppressed to the point where academics would say “where is your evidence to support that claim?” And there won’t be any because it was all suppressed or removed.
You are so right, Lee. Here's a piece that I wrote when stepping down after 17 years as Stanford's provost: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/02/the-threat-from-within. It was later reprinted in expanded form in the Chronicle of Higher Education: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-threat-from-within/
Thanks, John. I will add it. You certainly called the dangers. A bit more optimistic than things turned out, but, hey, so was I at that time...
Dan Sarewitz was on this early as well
See:
https://slate.com/technology/2010/12/most-scientists-in-this-country-are-democrats-that-s-a-problem.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/493007a
https://issues.org/sarewitz-2/
https://issues.org/br_sarewitz/
https://www.nature.com/articles/516009a
I've mostly stopped adding blogs, essays and op-eds, mainly because there are just too many, but I will add the two Nature articles. Thanks!
lol
Thanks for writing this. About ten years ago, I started maintaining a bibliography called "Scholarship & Worldview" to help me keep track of what was being written related to these issues. After reading this, I went back to see what additional suggestions I might be able to contribute. I'm not sure all of these will meet your inclusion criteria, but here they are for your consideration:
Anthony, Robert M. 2012. “A Challenge to Critical Understandings of Race.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 42: 260-282.
Damore, James. 2017. “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber: How Bias Clouds Our Thinking about Diversity and Inclusion.” Memorandum to fellow employees at Google LLC.
Effron, Daniel A., and Eric D. Knowles. 2015. “Entitativity and Intergroup Bias: How Belonging to a Cohesive Group Allows People to Express Their Prejudices.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108(2): 234-253.
Fram, Maryah Stella, and Julie Miller-Cribbs. 2008. “Liberal and Conservative in Social Work Education: Exploring Student Experiences.” Social Work Education 27(8): 883-897.
Goodhart, David. 2017. The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics. London, UK: Hurst and Company.
Gündemir, Seval, Ashley E. Martin, and Astrid C. Homan. 2019. “Understanding Diversity Ideologies From the Target’s Perspective: A Review and Future Directions.” Frontiers in Psychology 10: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00282/full.
Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York, NY: Vintage Books.
Hawkins, Stephen, Daniel Yudkin, Míriam Juan-Torres, and Tim Dixon. 2018. Hidden Tribes: A Study of America’s Polarized Landscape. New York, NY: More in Common.
Hodge, David R. 2009. “Secular Privilege: Deconstructing the Invisible Rose-Tinted Sunglasses.” Journal of Religion and Spirituality in Social Work: Social Thought 28(1-2): 8-34.
Horowitz, Irving Louis. 1993. The Decomposition of Sociology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Horowitz, Mark, Anthony Haynor, and Kenneth Kickham. 2018. “Sociology’s Sacred Victims and the Politics of Knowledge: Moral Foundations Theory and Disciplinary Controversies.” American Sociologist 49(4): 459-495.
Kitchens, Michael, Mary Mitchell, Ashley Collins, Mariela Horna, Tanisha Rine, and Anh Tran. 2011. “Individual Differences in a Preference for Positively- and Negatively- Oriented Christian Information.” Journal of Psychology and Christianity 30(1): 16-27.
Küenzlen, Gottfried. 1987. “Secular Religion and Its Futuristic-Eschatological Conceptions.” Studies in Soviet Thought 33(3): 209-228.
Lilienfeld, Scott O. 2017. “Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 12(1): 138-169.
Lilla, Mark. 2017. The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics. New York, NY: Harper Collins Publishers.
Mannheim, Karl. 1936 (1929). Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Murray, Douglas. 2019. The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity. London, UK: Bloomsbury Continuum.
Phillips, James C. 2016. “Why Are There So Few Conservatives and Libertarians in Legal Academia? An Empirical Exploration of Three Hypotheses.” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 39(1): 153-207.
Pluckrose, Helen, and James Lindsay. 2020. Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody. Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing.
Powers, Kirsten. 2015. The Silencing: How the Left Is Killing Free Speech. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing.
Rauch, Jonathan. 2021. The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.
Wilton, Leigh S., Evan P. Apfelbaum, and Jessica J. Good. 2019. “Valuing Differences and Reinforcing Them: Multiculturalism Increases Race Essentialism.” Social Psychological and Personality Science 10(5): 681-689.
Wright, John Paul, and Francis T. Cullen. 2012. “The Future of Biosocial Criminology: Beyond Scholars’ Professional Ideology.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 28(3): 237-253.
Yancey, George A. 2011. Compromising Scholarship: Religious and Political Bias in American Higher Education. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Yancey, George A. 2014. Dehumanizing Christians: Cultural Competition in a Multicultural World. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Yancey, George A. 2014. “Watching the Watchers: The Neglect of Academic Analysis of Progressive Groups.” Academic Questions 27: 65-78.
Yancey, George A. 2015. Hostile Environment: Understanding and Responding to Anti-Christian Bias. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press.
Yancey, George A., and David A. Williamson. 2012. What Motivates Cultural Progressives? Understanding Opposition to the Political and Christian Right. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press.
Yancey, George, Sam Reimer, and Jake O'Connell. 2015. “How Academics View Conservative Protestants.” Sociology of Religion 0(0): [1-22].
The most sad and hilarious thing about this whole situation is that, even after Trump's second win, there are still significant portions of academia that are in denial of the politicization of higher education. They think attacks on academia are just a conservative backlash or they think to the extent that there is any politicization it's not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things.
When you present evidence to them like the sources Lee presents in this post, they shift the goal posts. That's why I try to start these conversations out with the question, "What do you count as evidence?" Because the trick is revealed when you point out that they believe other stuff (like the horrors of systemic racism) with much weaker evidence. These are the mechanics of the confirmation bias: when we face evidence that conflicts with what we believe we ask, "Must I believe it?" The bar is way higher. But when we face evidence that supports what we believe we ask, "Can I believe it?" The bar is much lower.
Clearly, the question many left-leaning academics are asking themselves about the politicization of higher education is, "Must I believe it?" No, they musn't, evidence be damned.
Maybe it's just me, but this does not look like a good faith effort to correct excesses of DEI or get more bang for the research buck. Looks more like not liking "those people."
They are not mutually exclusive and, in fact, I think what we are seeing is a blend of both. I also think its less that Trump et al hate academia per se, though they might.
1. But its is more disdain and resentment than outright hatred.
2. I think there is an earnest attempt to both correct many of the dysfunctions of academia and rein in both bureaucracy and the budget.
3. Because of point 1 AND ALSO because many in academia have quite intentionally positioned themselves as Trump's mortal enemy, I have little doubt that Trump, Musk, or most of his administration cares at all if they wreak all sorts of damage.
4. It is possible that many of them are enjoying wreaking that damage and think both that we deserve it and that the country will be better for it.
None of the things in this mix are mutually exclusive.
> Or why they should want to richly fund playhouses for radical activists and their enablers?
Venturing an answer to why academe should be funded, since you ask:
We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements - transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting - profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.
No, I didn't write that paragraph. That was Carl Sagan, in 1997, in A Demon-Haunted World, worried about attacks on academe. I quote it because it describes our situation even better than the one in the 90s — and Sagan was a better writer than I am.
I am honestly not sure how much academia contributes to science and tech. Not expert enough in biomed to have any sense of how much comes from academia. I suspect:
1. A lot in some absolute sense
2. Not a lot, relative to the amount spent by the feds funding biomed grants.
But I do not know that.
Most of the major innovations of the last 20 years or so have come from the private sector, not academia. Smart phones. Electric cars. Solar. Space X. The Covid vax. AI originated in academia, but it was private companies that turned it into a juggernaut.
Outside the physical & life sciences, though, have probably been more a net negative than positive. First, what great contributions to society have emerged from all the grant money spent on social science? "Great" is probably around 0. Maybe a few somewhat useful ones. Second, subtract out all the ways social scientists have sent out into the culture nasty, dysfunctional stuff. Intersectionality. Critical social justice theories. Implicit bias, microaggressions and their associated useless at best trainings. DEI. Outright antipathy towards and corrosion of the great strengths of the liberal democratic west.
I am not saying none of us do anything worthwhile. I am a social scientist. I think what I do is worthwhile (as have more than a few Congressmen -- our paper on foreign funding of American U's helped trigger the House hearings that highlighted the rising antisemitism on campus and, ultimately, the resignations of Gay and Magill). But I do not have federal funding. (Maybe I should submit a proposal...). And of course its not just me. There are others outside the physical/biomed sciences doing good work. But enough to justify the amount spent on us? I genuinely do not know.
If Trump/Musk came to me and asked what to do about the NIH/NSF budgets, I'd say something like:
1. Cut the indirects to 20%, not 15.
2. Apply them to the entire grant, rather than the insane torturous-for-everyone-involved piecemeal way done now, where the indirect rate is applied to some things in the budget but not others. (DOGE, where are you when we need you!).
3. Cut the budget by half the amount that was going to DEI work and anything that smacked of critical theory.
4. But don't forget that research on discrimination and bias long predated DEI; that work, per se, is not necessarily DEI. This requires someone to actually think, rather than just wield an ax.
5. Direct the other half that was going to DEI that was not cut to research that eschews as much as possible taking a political activist lens.
Do that for a year or two, then evaluate how that's going.
But they are not going to ask me.
Universities and associated research institutions are the only mass producers of engineers and scientists and of state-of-the-art science and engineering at the bleeding edge of what’s possible (generically speaking; i.e. one can always find examples of otherwise, but they typically rely on the existence of the entire knowledge infrastructure of which universities are the foundation) we have. (Quoting my post.)
Universities do basic research, not product development, so it's not surprising that new products don't come from universities; the technologies on which those products are built tend to be collaboratively developed between universities and corporate R&D, and the universities/research institutions do the deep things (like CRISPR and mRNA biology and Li-ion electrochemistry and CdTe physics, Shor's algorithm) that become products (superhuman children of the 2040s, covid vaccines, EV batteries, high-efficiency solar panels for satellites, quantum cryptography "any day now").
My view on universities is that they have their problems, but they're the only institution that does tertiary education; among the few places where people who care more about being right than being successful can actually be successful; and where cognitive artifacts (tools that allow less-intellectually-powerful people to solve problems that would otherwise require genius) are developed.
As for the main topic of the post, my view (I've been out for a while) is that most faculty had a "I'm here to work on metal-organic frameworks, not bother with politics" attitude, and that was a reasonable individual choice that begat a commons problem.
Well, your first paragraph here is on training/education, not original research so much. The second is, but, again, it is for the physical sciences and biomed. IDK about superhuman children, but so be it.
I am definitely not arguing to trash universities. But a little intense reform is a different story.
From the first paragraph:
> and of state-of-the-art science and engineering at the bleeding edge of what’s possible
Meaning that basic research at the boundaries of what we know is primarily done at universities and associated research institutions.
Also, the "education part" produces the scientists and engineers (undergrads, masters, PhDs, and post-docs) who do the research, and it's partially funded by research money, indirectly, and in the case of PhD students, and some masters, directly as RAs.
So cutting funding to research also impacts the ability to educate the people who work in the rest of the R&D chain, even outside of academia (less so the closer you get to manufacturing, but still a lot of MSc.s involved even in manufacturing).
Since my experience is with STEM and professional schools, that's all I can talk about. But that was there from the beginning (the Sagan quote) and when people (not here, but at large) say that SpaceX landing the Falcon 9* proves research can be moved out of academe, they're not attacking the Humanities or Social Sciences.
FWIW, there are people at large who _are_ trashing universities and hope the limits on indirect costs will lead to closures and firings.
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*Landing the Falcon 9 is an engineering problem that is solved using material taught to undergraduates at least as far back as the 1980s; it's an achievement of engineering, but many people at large think it was some sort of major scientific breakthrough, which it wasn't.
Politicization of institutions works great, until the other side gets ahold of the levers of power. After that happens, it is over. And what’s worse, it is over in ways that the people who came up through the current system cannot really comprehend. This is a phase shift. The institutions are discredited, along with everyone who has worked in them, and incremental reforms aren’t going to cut it. The widespread collapse of higher education is a real possibility, particularly when looming financial strains from shrinking student cohorts are factored in.