Michael Robillard chooses exit, but he urges others to use voice.
It is my hope that this essay will inspire others in academia, students and professors alike, to also begin speaking up loudly and vocally and to continue to speak up against this pernicious woke ideology until we bat it out the door of academia and society at large. Until then, I will continue to sound the alarm for any of those with minds and hearts open enough to hear. Listen to or dismiss these words at your own peril. However, when the woke mob comes to cancel you, when the HR department calls you into their office for mandatory remedial pronoun training, or when the agents of the pink police state come to knock at your door in the middle of the night, don’t say I didn’t warn you. So farewell academia,
I disavow you.
It seems to me like this guy self-canceled.
How does his exit from academia help make academia less woke? The only thing it really changes is (ever so slightly) the ratio of woke to non-woke, and not in the right direction.
Well, I can’t blame him for wanting to reduce the stress in his life.
Richard Hanania made the case that the leftists just care more about changing culture, and definitely at the expense of their mental health. Until the right is willing to sacrifice in the same, they’ll keep losing.
The right is generally busier with full time work and having families. There’s also the above emphasis on exit. Classical liberalism is the strange political philosophy that deprioritizes being political.
Fair points. I don’t know what the answer is, but if it requires everyone to become insane like the extreme leftists, then we lose either way.
I don’t blame him in not wanting to deal with it any longer, although I will point out that he calls for others to become outspoken without exiting, which will certainly be stressful for them.
My concern here is that were I among the woke, I’d be happy with this decision. One of the heretics voluntarily left!
Leftists didn’t succeed in taking over institutions by quitting when it became uncomfortable, when they were in the minority. If all of the non-leftists leave the institutions, then leftist control only solidifies. We need people willing to remain in these organizations under the radar.
At the same time, we need politicians on the right who are aggressive against wokeness, and even willing to torch a few mottes if need be. It’s obvious why the left wants free university education. The right should be against all subsidies to universities whatsoever. It should devolve education funding from local public schools to families, who will have vouchers to send their children to non-public schools if they deem it appropriate, or they can use the voucher to support home schooling. Let’s not have the civil rights act only be used against the right, it should seek to make political view a protected class. The right should be done with giveaways to woke corporations and the billionaire class, as corporate America has shown it priorities wokeism almost as much as profit.
Academia is lost, at least for the next 40 years. The professors will be there for 40 years or so, and each year create more disciples. Universities change very slowly and these current ‘academics’ know not to let anyone who thinks differently get tenure or dare to speak. (See the May 2013 Uncommon Knowledge discussion with Joseph Epstein and Andrew Ferguson on the state of the liberal arts.)
But all is not lost. Knowledge is no longer bottled up in university libraries. Knowledgeable people can now reach millions in an instant, far faster than the professor reached his hundreds over a lifetime of teaching. The student who insists on knowing can “listen in” on many well educated people, in the true meaning of discipline of intellect, regulation of emotions and establishment of principles, as they discuss topics. These students can see how those worth emulating approach the world. This is far more efficient than the luck of the draw exposure to professors in a class.
But take heart, in 17th century England, many intellectuals were kept out of the technophobic universities and forced to learn at alternative academies or via the trades. These intellectuals freed from the constraints of the establishment education transformed humanity with the Industrial Revolution and development of steam power. The Oxbridge crowd had to scramble to regain relevance. We may simply be back to that phase of the cycle.
And how different is the USA as a whole from academia? The Burkean right and irrelevant libertarians offer no meaningful alternative alternative or hope of substantive reform. Indeed, there is no real difference between the woke and their critics in that both are most concerned with maintaining power structures by which the majority can be lorded over. Consider that Tyler Cowen who this blog assiduously promotes is proudly out now as a mere Zuckerberg quisling. The North Korean-esque devotion of the Burkean right to a rotten government and failed constitution, brooking no discussion at all of even middling obviously practical reform is the perfect mirror of woke intolerance and authoritarianism.
“When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label,” wrote Jaques Barzun, and the USA today is nothing if not decadent. Fortunately, thank the Gods, exit is an option. Like Robillard I have found safety and sanity through exit. Although assigned USA nationality at birth, I am now a permanent resident of a federative democratic constitutional republic in which average citizens enjoy free and fair elections, substantive human rights through a judicial system in which justices are restrained by the rule of law and all citizens are subject to the enforcement of law more or less equally, pay similar tax rates, and enjoy self determination, in short, a nation the exact opposite of the USA. Transitioning to my new nationality is a joyous and uplifting experience and it will be my greatest honor to have my ashes spread here when I leave this world. USA, I disavow you.
In your comment on MZ with Cowen, are you referring to the latter joining in the Featured partners list for the FB Bulletin?
Seeing as the Woke are far more prone (than any other crowds in the US) to *overt* belligerence, I wouldn’t call the Burkean right “the perfect mirror of woke intolerance”.
On “no discussion at all of even middling *obviously practical* reform”, can you suggest where we can bone up, on the sorts of reforms you see as obviously practical?
Brazil, right?
Did you really flee the US? Can you tell us where to?
Tyler Cowen was always on the left and always supported Facebook including the banning of right-wing figures.
I am very much on the right, share most of the views of the linked post, and, I believe, I share most of your views. However, I have a nice job, and a nice family life in US. And I enjoy US grad school (STEM) too.
If you are “Edgar F………”, you and I were friendly for over a decade, and last spoke for hours on a Sat. nite a few years ago, eventually joined at a restaurant by my girlfriend, with us talking about Lacan, tally sticks, etc.
You said that you were leaving the US, for an E. Asian country.
If this rings a bell, here’s a Best Wishes, from a fellow skeptic on “Russian hacking in 2016”!
“Academia is lost, at least for the next 40 years. The professors will be there for 40 years or so, and each year create more disciples.”
I can’t see this lasting another 10 years let alone another 40 because of what you wrote next: “Knowledge is no longer bottled up in university libraries. Knowledgeable people can now reach millions in an instant, far faster than the professor reached his hundreds over a lifetime of teaching.”
Internet technology is quickly improving along with virtual and augmented reality and eventually how people are given credit for knowledge and creativity will drastically change. In 1996, I thought higher education would “be flipped upside-down” by 2016 or 2020 for these reasons, so I think I will have been 10 to 15 years premature in my prediction.
Any alternative form of accreditation can be struck down by the courts or regulated away when performance inevitably fails to be completely uncorrelated with race, gender, etc. Established universities also are so heavily subsidized that alternative institutions are hopelessly at a disadvantage. Finally, regulation can compel private employers to privilege the academically accredited even if the degrees are totally useless, as long as politicians support academia, which at least half of them will as long as academia serves their political purposes. I don’t see academia going away any time soon. Don’t underestimate the ability of an institution to long outlive its usefulness.
Pretty sure they can’t make it illegal to hire a person without a college diploma, in most professions at least. And if they do, use it politically against them. Most Americans don’t have college degrees and won’t appreciate elites calling them too stupid to work most jobs.
Many can. Not necessarily outright illegal, but teachers, academics, many government jobs have degree requirements. Obviously doctors and lawyers. Accountants too. I wouldn’t be surprised if actuaries needed a degree to get accredited in order to work in their field. I believe in some cities requirements that police have bachelor’s degrees have been proposed. So yeah, a lot of the economy is even officially roped off to those without degrees.
Higher ed needs a tech revolution. Many within higher ed are supportive of that.
The knowledge has been captured in textbooks and online resources decades ago. Motivation is what you need a university for. Consider a math degree: a good math degree requires thousands of hours of serious study of working through proofs, concepts, and practice problems. Normal humans, even those that enjoy math, need human motivation factors like human coaches and human peers to do that.
Well, the modern residential college “experience” isn’t one of motivation and motivated peers. And the assertion that it is require flies in the face of all of humanity’s learning prior to the last 500 years. Universities had a purpose, the question is whether they still do, other than as a 4-yr coed vacation
What get me is the timing. He started his non-STEM graduate program fairly recently: in Obama’s first term, with smartphones and social media. By then, things had already long gone completely off the rails pretty much everywhere. A lot of the nonsense we complain about today was totally mainstream in such scenes back then.
People need to stop paying for this academia. Until they start doing that, nothing will change.
He describes the undergraduate experience 20 years ago at West Point in glowing terms.
Much of this essay is rantish and over-reaches. For example, I suspect very few people sincerely believe that, “the biomedical categories of male and female are just social constructs”. I do think the transgender rights stuff and custom pronouns is absurd, but I can’t say it ever interfered with my experience at university.
There is a big problem in that the universities and K-12 enforce political ideology. Bryan Caplan mentions this here:
https://www.econlib.org/loyalty-oaths-compared-an-orwellian-exercise/
I know people who confirm the same thing happens at UT Austin and at Austin K-12 (AISD): anyone applying for a position must submit Diversity + Inclusion essays. It’s safe to presume you need to convincingly express a political left preference to gain employment. Republicans are highly discouraged from working in education.