between a fifth and a half of academics would discriminate against the Right in grants, papers, or promotion bids. On a four-person panel, this means that the likelihood of a conservative encountering at least one biased assessor is pushing toward certainty.
The essay is a useful attempt to document the problem. Kaufmann’s solution consisting of more government intervention, strikes me as a bad idea in the current environment. The Democrats will not want to intervene, and the Republicans will only provoke backlash from the institutions if they intervene.
I look at it this way. The intimidators are anti-intellectual, and they deserve low status. Conservative intellectuals deserve higher status. Our best hope is that the we achieve cultural change that gives people the status they deserve.
And just how would that cultural change come about? Not through mild-mannered conservative gentility, but through active ridicule and shaming of those in the academy who are a disgrace to what should be the values of the university.
“Not through mild-mannered conservative gentility, but through active ridicule and shaming of those in the academy who are a disgrace to what should be the values of the university.”
Sounds like a cancel culture arms race to me. It also sounds like a conservative suicide pact because angry conservatives will inevitably lose that arms race and turn more and more progressives into exactly who they fear.
Perhaps a competence based approach might be tried at some point by one of the sides.
You said progressives would moderate when Trump was gone but they’ve just gotten more crazy and are using their new power to shove it down our throat. It’s time to stop making excuses for progressives actions as the fault of anyone other than progressives.
+1 It was crazy to believe that Biden would hold them back. The progressive takeover of the Dem party is nearly complete.
And what are they progressing to? What does their ideal country look like?
This is a fascinating question, but the implied premise is misleading. There is no coherent consensus of an end-state vision, and anyway, ideals are utopian, ignore unavoidable trade-offs, and so don’t map to reality. There is only the logic of absolutist egalitarianism and the incentive to act marginally in the short term and advocate for eliminating the weakest unprincipled exceptions to that levelling principle. If carried through to it’s logical conclusion, the end result is an anti-majoritarian version of Harrison Bergeron. But so long as their are rival militaries, it will never get that far, and order will eventually be imposed on the runaway political process, one way or another, just like it was in every other crazy revolution.
I suspect Portland is showing us the progressive future. This is where we are progressing to.
You probably remember there was massive rioting in the Pearl District the day after Donald Trump was elected. Millions of dollars of damage were inflicted,” says journalist Michael Totten. “How many people in the Pearl District voted for Donald Trump? It’s probably not even 1 percent. Who on earth are these people who declare war on a place where nobody voted for Donald Trump? That’s not how people in a democratic society are supposed to behave. You don’t go trash neighborhoods with the opposing political party in a healthy democracy, but they didn’t even do that. They declared war on the city as a whole.”
https://reason.com/2021/03/22/the-dream-of-the-90s-died-in-portland/
Fair enough. Progressives have ratched it up a notch, and it isn’t good. Post election could not have been any more provocative, and it has been only 2 months, but I will admit the tolerance isn’t improving much on either side.
At least there are conversations being had about this on the progressive side, and there is a recognition among some that things need to change.
I don’t “believe” in progressives. I believe in working things out in a pluralistic society, and tolerating a certain level of turbulence. History teaches us this could go in a whole lot of different directions. I just don’t see any value in conservatives figuring out how to outpunch progressives, or burning down every value they ever had just to win.
Tom, honest answer. If you look at the cities and states dominated by progressives, are these models of good governance that are the envy of the world?
Or is the world laughing at us due to the utter lack of seriousness of the progressives?
“Our best hope is that the we achieve cultural change that gives people the status they deserve.”
Gonna be a hail mary pass to get there, but I agree that this is kinda the best we’ve got at the university level. As one possible alternative, I suggest building robust centrist or right-of-center platforms. Fortunately, this is starting to happen. Thank you substack.
On the need for alternative platforms: If they effectively cancel a Supreme Court Justice, then they’ve effectively canceled all mainstream thought.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-did-amazon-cancel-justice-thomas-11614727562?st=1n94rt8s1bzu4v1&reflink=article_copyURL_share
You assert your impression of why you think it’s a bad idea, but you don’t argue it. I’d ask that you argue it, or at least steel-man the argument in favor of intervention.
A government intervention to enforce ideological equality? You feel the need to think that one through?
Do you believe in anything other than raw power?
Just as good a job with the steel-manning as I expected from you.
Did I claim to be making a steel-manning argument?
Read the argument proposed by “Not Joseph Conrad”. You couldn’t legitimately get halfway through the first sentence without your integrity exploding.
Steel-manning only goes so far. There is no universe where you can reconcile the views you have expressed here for years with asking the government to protect you from the bias of others.
.
How about you give it a shot? Show us what you can do!
In the meantime, since Arnold is trying to raise the status of steel-manning, I’ll wait until I see his version.
A Steel Man could be something like this.
Argument for policing political discrimination:
• We admit that discrimination on the basis of sex, race, or sexual preference is wrong, and fund an extensive bureaucracy to combat it. Discriminating against someone on the basis of sex, race, or sexual preference should be a firing offense.
• We should also admit that discrimination on the basis of political belief is wrong, and fund an extensive bureaucracy to combat it. Discriminating against someone on the basis of political belief should be a firing offense.
Argument for specific funding of political academic groups
• Women and various minority groups were excluded from academia. So it made sense to create specific departments: women’s studies, Afro-Am. Not just because the *topics*merited attention, but because institutional power is important. Control of funding and tenure lines created a space for these marginalized/excluded communities to grow and exercise influence.
• The political right is currently excluded from academia, so it makes sense to create specific departments, etc., etc.
None of this requires authoritarian intervention. It would just mean that if your faculty “happened” to be 97% progressive that would be seen as just as suspicious as if your faculty “happened” to be 97% white. A bunch of right-of-center academics would get some money to play around with for scholarship and teaching. Maybe that would be of lower than median academic quality — but it would also provide an institutional counter-weight to explicitly left-of-center disciplines.
+1 I thought that the Equal Employment Opportunity and Civil Rights act would do that.
https://www.usda.gov/oascr/civil-right-laws-authorities
The site lists:
This law makes it illegal to discriminate against someone on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex.
I thought there was something about “creed” previously, to disallow discrimination against socialists, but don’t see it now.
It should be illegal to discriminate based on political party.
And Republicans should be suing the colleges, and winning, for their discrimination. They’ve been discriminating for decades.
The higher education strangles not only free thought and expression, not also progress, economic growth, opportunity, and the hopes and dreams of young people.
The root cause of all this misery is the tax code. As is their wont, lunkhead economists came up with a simple minded notion that an added dollar in education spending would yield more than a a dollar in benefits. As laughable as that might seem today, many economists were able to argue that with a straight face and thus was born an overwhelming deluge of direct spending programs and tax breaks to divert the maximum feasible amount of resources out of the productive economy and into our Laputan higher education industry.
Given the immense political power wielded by these purveyors of waste, wholesale reform would undoubtedly be a quixotic undertaking. Nevertheless, as opportunities present themselves, incremental roll-backs might be possible. Some ideas worth considering:
https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax-analysis/Documents/WP-113.pdf
I don’t see the connection between “The root cause of all this misery is the tax code” and the “overwhelming deluge of direct spending programs and tax breaks to” grow the education business. Since before the founding of the country eleemosynary (“do good”) institutions have not paid property taxes, which were about the only taxes back then. And, of course, governments–which own and run most schools–never paid property taxes.
Since WWII the share of the economy consumed by tax exempts has grown rapidly. During most of this period the USA has had the highest corporate income taxes in the world. The first corporate income tax to survive supreme court scrutiny was enacted in 1909 following adoption of the 16th amendment (when things really began to go to pot.). Punitive taxes on productive industries and tax exemption for the politically connected industries massively distorted resource flows resulting in the USA wasting more on the education industry than any other country save Luxembourg. These distortions created by the tax code are at the root of nearly every one of the USA’s problems.
That does raise the interesting question of what would the graph look like that charted the overall portion of spending routed through tax-exempt institutions over time.
People spend a lot of their incomes on the “Neo-Ricardian” sectors of Housing, Government, Health Care, and Education.
Health Care and Education are usually publicly provided or tax exempt. State and local governments don’t pay taxes on their revenues to higher jurisdictions, and actually it’s a negative tax to the extent it’s subsidized by being deductible. Also they can tax to reclaim a portion of their expenditures that ends up in the incomes they pay out to government employees or contractors. State and local borrowing is sometimes tax exempt too.
Housing is different, but still tax-subsidized in some ways. Landlords and lenders are taxed on their profits, and property itself is taxed, but mortgage interest is deductible and the capital gains for most people low enough to be exempt from taxation. If one owns a home outright, the imputed income (rent to oneself) is not taxed.
At one time it was a fairly widely accepted premise that minimizing tax policy distortions is desirable to maximize economic returns and that the least distortionary tax policies are undifferentiated across-the-board consumption taxes.
To some degree, this is happening on its own. Without diversity of thought or opinion, different academic fields have become quite heavily corrupted, and thus the disconnect between reality and bad scholarship becomes hard to ignore, with people operating in corrupted fields starting to be tainted by mere association with it. E.G., If I hear someone describe their occupation as “sociologist,” I wouldn’t be inclined to take their opinion seriously on what brand of paper towel to use, absent some additional information. Of course, this is my personal status/legitimacy ranking, but other people, I’m sure, can make the same observations.
There are a couple of steps we can take to help fix this problem.
1) Get rid of the Gen-Ed requirements. These give humanities departments too much power on campus.
2) Stop taxpayer support of humanities and “studies” programs. If people want to major in “Gender Studies,” let them do it on their own dime.
They say predictions are tough, especially about the future, but I don’t see how this ends well. We are quickly coming to a point where a conservative, (and soon moderate) will be unable to be employed in Silicon Valley, or for many Fortune 500 companies, or any mainstream media, or any university. Heck, when it comes to scholarships, they won’t be getting help even getting in as students in most universities (my grandkids had to write essays on woke topics proving their woke credentials and victimhood status when they applied to colleges).
This will either lead to non-progressives reforming all their own institutions and organizations, or to open violence, probably a bit of both. It reminds me of the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. This doesn’t end well.
Historically the only reliable way to lower the status of the revolutionary ideologues was for people to get mugged by the reality of the terrible consequences of implementing crazy ideologies. First of all, that requires going through most of the ruin as in “there is a lot of ruin in a nation.” But also, by that point, having fully seized the reins of power, they are no longer willing to let them go just because the population now holds them in lower esteem.
Plenty of secure basket-cases out there. The Kims still run North Korea. The Castros, Cuba. Mugabe ran Zimbabwe (into the ground) until he died at age 95. Maduro is still in charge of Venezuela. Modern surveillance and related state capacities means one need no longer be much concerned about one’s status with the mere population. Thus, you had better do something before it gets to that point, or you’ve missed your chance.
Erik’s excellent data on repression:
One-in-three conservative academics and PhD students in the US say they have been charged or threatened with disciplinary action on at least one dimension.
This should be unacceptable to all tolerant, reasonable people. Eric argues that only government intervention can break the spiral of conformity gripping the contemporary university. If you’re not arguing in favor of gov’t intervention, you’re pretty clearly “tolerating” it, for now. This is exactly the leftist logic about toleration of “systemic racism” – the difference being that racist discrimination is illegal, and punished, but anti-Rep discrimination is not illegal, and is often even advocated by elites and actively practiced by colleges today, and for the next few years, at least.
In a short or mid-term time frame of 1-5 years, Eric is more correct than Arnold. Over the long term, Arnold might be correct that our
best hope is that the we achieve cultural change that gives people the status they deserve.
The high status people should be the ones speaking the truth, even the truth we don’t like. I can imagine, and hope, that FIT and other truth oriented actions help in that process.
Yet gov’t action can achieve change, good and bad, faster than would occur with a peaceful market process.
On Affirmative Action for Republicans, which I didn’t used to support but now I do, the IQ and academic qualities of truth, logic, and consistency, is likely to be just as good, or better, than the Democrat (Rep-hating) professors & administrators who are hired by colleges today.
It seems possible, but by no means certain, than gov’t inaction plus active Republican/ conservative steps to create a better truth and freedom oriented culture can, over decades (not years and certainly not months), slowly change the culture. It also might happen in China – but it seems that since Tiananmen in ’89, most changes have been going the other way. Both I and my kids have limited lives, so now I prefer faster gov’t action to support Free Speech in practice.
What changes cultures fast is changes in the elites – which are easily motivated by status and money. But it’s also the elites who “give” status, so in order to “change status” you almost need to change the elites who give it, before any elites will change it. [My brief steelman (tinman?) against Arnold’s market/ culture change only, no gov’t change idea.] I’m all on board the FIT – but that’s a long term (5+ years) project for significant changes. Such changes may be huge, but they’re far out in the future and very uncertain.
Stop the gov’t money. The Federal gov’t should stop giving Fed loans & research money, & “tax-exempt” status, to colleges that discriminate against hiring Republicans.
On a short term practical note, Arnold is surely correct that a:
solution consisting of more government intervention, strikes me as a bad idea in the current environment. The Democrats will not want to intervene,
If the Dems in control of national gov’t don’t want it, it won’t happen. Nationally.
However, in states with Rep governors & gov’t, “Equal access” to becoming a professor for Reps could be politically possible, and also be a red-state political winner. Plus getting it both on the table, and part of the current conversation, and the implementation showing some effects, in practice.
What does Eric recommend for the UK Higher Education Providers?
We propose to:
• legislate for a Free Speech and Academic Freedom Champion with a
remit to champion free speech, investigate infringements of free
speech in higher education and recommend redress
• legislate to require the Office for Students (OfS), the higher education
regulator in England, to introduce a new, registration condition on free
speech and academic freedom, with the power to impose sanctions for
breaches
• strengthen the free speech duty under section 43 of the Education
(No. 2) Act 1986 (the section 43 duty) to include a duty on HEPs to
‘actively promote’ freedom of speech
• extend the duty to apply directly to SUs
• introduce a statutory tort for breach of the duty, enabling individuals to
seek legal redress for the loss they have suffered as a result of breach
of the duty
• widen and enhance academic freedom protections, including
extending protections so that recruitment and promotion are also
covered
• work with HEPs to set minimum standards for free speech codes of
practice (required under the legislation), making sure high standards
become the norm across the sector.
Most seem applicable and good for the USA; Republicans / conservatives / Libertarians can and should work both private and gov’t paths, wherever opportunity shows up.
Arnold is failing to argue convincingly why this is a “bad idea”, rather than one unlikely to work on the Fed level for now, but reasonable to be supported and discussed.
Is college anti-Rep discrimination more likely to be changed before or after Roe? Colleges would accept anti-discrimination laws & policies to support Reps before they’d accept reductions in legal abortion.
The yearly March for Life, soon to be in its 50th year, indicates both the ability of gov’t to make changes quickly, and the slow process of peaceful human change.
College/ success oriented and political Republicans generally don’t have the moral certainty that pro-life people have to support the Truth, as they see it, despite support causing some problems and even reduced status. We need to support better gov’t laws to support Free Speech, and Truth, against current elite opposition. Despite it being difficult and unlikely to succeed quickly.
The underlying question here seems to be how to address discrimination and personal attacks by the majority against minority groups. That is, how would an economist, political scientist, legal theorist, sociologist, politician or activist suggest framing and addressing the problem. For example, a game-theoretic approach may suggest some variant of a tit-for-tat strategy to achieve a more favorable outcome. A legal scholar would possibly suggest appealing to existing laws to ensure equal protection. A politician may put forward a new law that strictly prohibits the activity. Every solution offered will result in cost of execution. We ultimately must choose whether we want to address the injustice, how we will oversee the process, who will oversee the process, and how much we are willing to pay to address.