1. Bryan Caplan quotes a proposal.
What is required is administrative reform, where attacks on academic freedom, free speech, and intellectual diversity are treated with at least the same degree of seriousness as other offenses at universities. Specifically, every university should have an “Office of Free Speech” where faculty can lodge complaints when their academic freedom or free speech rights are violated, or when policies are put in place to limit the possibilities for intellectual diversity. This office must have adequate funding to complete independent investigations of such allegations, and it should report directly to the highest authority governing the university, either the board of trustees or regents for most private universities or the regents or state legislature for public universities. These investigations must have teeth; attacking academic freedom (not simply criticizing speech with speech) cannot be allowed to stand as acceptable behavior for administrators, faculty, or students. The same sorts of consequences available for other offenses should be applied to those who use their position at the university to deprive others of their institutional or constitutional rights.
Read the whole thing. Let me argue against the idea: More college administrators are the problem, not the solution. And the Office of Free Speech will evolve very quickly into an office of censorship. Conquest’s Second Law and all that.
2. Helen Pluckrose and others have started Counterweight Support, to fight back against cancel culture.
3. The folks at Legal Insurrection have started a project to track Critical Race Theory on college campuses. I think we should be tracking it at elementary schools.
4. Maybe all the resistance needs is more John McWhorter. If you already saw this post, go ahead and read it again.
More broadly the conversion of elementary school curricula into all indoctrination, all the time seems the more profound problem. It’s hard to care much about public employees worrying about their sinecures while political prisoners are locked away in DC jails on phony misdemeanor charges. The USA overfunds public education relative to the liberal Western democracies anyway. Defund the universities. Fund parents, not schools. Fund Romney’s family money proposal by cutting the Department of Education budget. https://www.insider.com/how-much-countries-around-the-world-spend-on-education-2019-8#2-the-united-states-spent-12800-per-student-in-2015-and-over-700-billion-total-yet-still-falls-short-when-it-comes-to-academic-achievement-14
That was my reflexive response as well: “ANOTHER vice-president-for-whatever?”
Instead of ADDING another one, GET RID OF ALL OF THEM.
At most, universities should have two VPs: One for academics, and possibly one for student life.
That’s it.
“get rid of all of them” is unrealistic. Even the harshest critics of universities generally agree that they provide important value in education and research where there is no existing alternative. It is necessary to build alternative institutions that function better as a first step.
Marc Andreesen wrote:
All US top-end universities have been running classes almost entirely remotely for the past 11 months. Students attend lectures via Zoom on their laptops, they read a textbook, they submit assignments via upload, and they take quizzes and exams. And it works! I’ve personally been taking advanced math classes for the past several years, and I learn as much if not more, with the remote learning. Having to commute to a campus and sit in a brick and mortar classroom lecture was never a useful part of the course experience.
Of course, part of the traditional college experience for ~18-22 year olds is social, it’s forming a peer group, living in the dorms, eating meals with your peers, dating, etc. Socialization is important, and that’s a complex issue itself, but providing broad access to academics to people in every city, even across the world to people with Internet access, seems an important step to take.
+1 a very good analysis, thanks. I met my wife in college so I’m definitely pro in-person. But, can’t we find a way to de-couple education (online) from social activities (in-person)?
Why not educate every 18 year old? Isn’t that the most important thing we can possibly do?
Why not burn water instead of fossil fuels? Isn’t combating climate change just about the most important thing we can do?
Alas, though it would be wonderful if it did, water can’t burn. Neither can a majority of the world’s 18 year olds successfully complete even a watered down college curriculum. “Make everyone a college graduate” is the cold fusion of policy advocacy.
This is the wrong attitude. If we correctly measure aptitude, the average person will get average scores, tautologically.
Education is complicated because most adults don’t really use it in their day to day jobs, but getting education credentials is critical. Then, as Kling says, “More college administrators are the problem, not the solution.”. Government higer education invovles a large layer of beauracratic government administration that brings its own set of problems.
One safe move to make that seems to have large upside and little potential for downside is liberalizing access to regular people can pursue whatever education they want at whatever age they want, presuming they can pay basic costs and put in the time and effort. If people sign up for a class and lose interest or do poorly, that’s fine, that’s like people signing up for a gym membership that they never use. My judgement is some small amount of waste is inevitable; people should be in charge of their own lives, and decide what skills to invest in.
I guess that depends on what you mean by average scores. Average scores in a college are the average for people who were good enough to get into that college, not the average over all people.
If that could be implemented well, it would be wonderful. But there will be problems.
What opinions can be taught? Does a course that teaches “the white devils are keeping the black man down” get reimbursed? What about a course that teaches “black people do poorly in the USA because they are on average considerably less smart than whites and Asians”?
What counts as education? A course that teaches you how to paint watercolors? That teaches you how to play poker? How to play various video games? A course in sexual technique?
People will want to know that the education they get will be paid for, so there will probably have to be some sort of pre-approval. But that means that the course-giver will have to clear things with the funding agency. The agency may have bureaucratic hoops to jump through and could have all sorts of substantive requirements. At the present day, schools and colleges go to accrediting agencies. Many of their requirements are ridiculous and serve mostly to drive up costs and keep out competition.
Even at public universities that are left-wing places. If you take a math class, the instructor usually wouldn’t dare bring up politics. The Dean of the Math Department and the Administrative Offices are outrageously political and engage in propaganda. But the classes themselves, usually take the non-political environment very seriously.
Also, if you take a computer class at Coursera, they wouldn’t dare bring up politics. That’s off topic and offensive. And Coursera has a reputation to build and maintain.
Like https://www.proko.com/? That’s great. I’ve done a few art classes. Nothing wrong with that. I don’t think the government should pay for any classes. But if people want to try art or guitar or cooking, have at it.
Why not educate every 18 year old?
Well, one hugely important reason is that many 18 year olds do NOT want to be “educated”, nor indoctrinated, any more.
For smart folk, getting an “education” by reading, listening, thinking, is not so hard. It can even be fun, and it’s certainly satisfying to write something you can be proud of, or get a quick dopamine hit when you solve a math problem, kinda quickly.
Lots of below avg. IQ folk struggle doing homework. Not fun, but wasted work. They feel, rightly, that it would be better to dig holes for 6 hours and then fill them up for 2 hours – at least they’d get muscular exercise.
There should be a voluntary, non-military/fighting National Service that all 18 years could join, if they want – especially those who think more schooling is a waste for themselves. Then the gov’t would have pool of willing, or semi-willing, but low-skilled workers to assign jobs to.
Maybe they’re ZMP or even negative at min. wage, but they can be told what to do and do it, at least like Forrest Gump. A film whose sweetness and charm are usually enough to approximate true depth and grace. (Rotten Tomatoes).
I wonder if any FITs will have such sweetness or charm.
There should be a voluntary, non-military/fighting National Service that all 18 years could join
Assuming the lesson of the Vietnam-era Project 100,000 (aka McNamara’s Morons) still holds, there are many people for whom this would not work. Of course things may have changed since then, but the biggest change is probably that the world has become more complex. That makes success even more doubtful.
Informal education and skill is often very important, but that’s kind of a separate issue.
For some specific skills, often a structured class makes sense. For many hobbies and personal fitness, that is done on the private market, and works great. For academics, the government has a monopoly on the credentials and by extension on the education process as well.
Sometimes “crowding out” is a feature, not a bug. When institutions go crazy, best they be asked to spend more time with their
familiescore competencies.Consider the college sex kangaroo courts fiasco crisis that KC Johnson (another good one for the FIT list) has been chronicling, and which is just about to get really bad again. If colleges could be trusted to handle these matters fairly, that might work.
But they can’t, not even close.
Even ones that actually have *law schools on site* and have all the help they could ask for, obviously aren’t interested in due process. I am sadly not joking at all when I say that most university campuses will give a student more due process and fair treatment when contesting their *parking tickets* than when facing life-ruining determinations.
So, the easiest answer is “no college rules, no college courts.” There is an existing and comprehensive body of state law concerning what kinds of sexual activity are legal and illegal, what the standards for proof are, whether an individual should be confined or restraining orders imposed prior to trial because of likely danger posed to others, which processes the defendant is due, and what the consequences are. If someone wishes to make a complaint, they can do so under risk of perjury and involve law enforcement. If that individual doesn’t want to involve law enforcement and the rules arrived at by our process of general social agreement, then “forum shopping for injustice” ought not to be available, and an institutionally-bankrupt college should be crowded out of the matter and have nothing more to say or do about it. “Sorry, our hands are tied: establishing and adjudicating serious crimes has coercive consequences which is an exclusively sovereign prerogative.”
Same goes for speech. The state can set the rules for what we can and can’t say. If the colleges were sane, or if the consequences weren’t so severe so as to be coercive, then they could supplement. But they have gone crazy and the consequences are potentially life-ruining, so hands off. If you want to lodge a complaint about someone breaking a social rule, then report it to the police and tell it to the judge.
+1
Gov’t rules are sufficient; and unfortunately necessary.
Free Speech is a Constitutional right.
The Fed. gov’t can, and should, require all recipients of US tax money or tax exempt status to use US courts for punishing any speech that violates the Free Speech rights.
Upon penalty of withdrawal of all Fed student loan moneys & Fed research & Fed tax exempt status.
This remains one of my fantasies, but only possible with a big Republican win.
The gov’t sets the rules of what can be rightfully censored, not the colleges that collect gov’t money. For those (is Hilllsdale the only one) which don’t get gov’t cash, they can set their own rules.
>—“Free Speech is a Constitutional right.”
You are confused about Constitutional rights Tom. The Constitution says the government can’t abridge the freedom of speech. It doesn’t prevent employers and colleges and parents and others from doing it in non-governmental situations.
There are lots of good reasons why there should be more freedom of speech on campus. They aren’t Constitutional reasons. Not everything bad is unconstitutional.
It’s not so cut and dried. Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it was Constitutional Law that the Equal Protection Clause only applied to governments. But federal judges, and especially the Supremes, wanted to get rid of segregation, and felt immense pride in Brown v. Board of Education. So the judges developed the idea of “state action”. A private party violated Equal Protection if there was some “state action”. So, a Wilmington, Delaware parking garage whose land had been sold to the developer as part of an urban renewal project was held to have sufficient “state action” to be prohibited from discriminating. If judges wanted to revive the doctrine in the context of free speech, they certainly could. The feds are quite involved in just about every college in the USA.
Of course, a cynic would say that federal judges back then wanted to lead the country out of Jim Crow while they feel no such crusading spirit about reining in colleges today.
>—“If judges wanted to revive the doctrine in the context of free speech, they certainly could. ”
Yes, judges can rule the way they “want to.” But they don’t normally “revive” dormant “doctrines” for purposes in a “context” different than even the dormant doctrine was ever used in the first place. A cynic would say that also.
Even more to the point, look how quickly this went from working the “cultural soil” to working the legal technicalities. And doing so in favor of more expansive Federal interventions.
Yes, they normally don’t revive dormant doctrines in a different context. That is a very valid sociological point. I was pointing out that the logic is the same in both cases.
You point to find Pluckrose, LI, and John McWhorter and imply, by rhetorical question, that they are getting organized.
I don’t think quick yet, these activities are more of individual NON-organized actions of single or few-person groups. Legal Insurrection perhaps being the most organized, and the most likely to make a real difference.
Those supporting Free Speech and opposed to the Democrats against free speech do need to get organized, but it will be slow going. As mentioned before, all procedures against election fraud can be called “voter suppression”.
Which Reps need to embrace – we want Mickey Mouse votes to be NOT counted. Dead people votes? NOT counted. Illegal alien votes? NOT counted. Ineligible voters? NOT counted.
Better comedy would be welcome here – but Reps are not so good at comedy. Not yet. I suspect with Biden, and then Harris, there will be lots more good jokes in the next 4 years. Tho I don’t know who to follow – these FIT threads have some ideas.
>—” As mentioned before, all procedures against election fraud can be called “voter suppression”.”
Yes, and all attempts to really suppress legitimate votes CAN BE CALLED “procedures agains election fraud.”
It is precisely because it is so easy to call things whatever you want that real courts require real evidence. “Mentioning” a delusion isn’t presenting evidence.
Having over five dozen legal challenges to the election fail, and none prove any fraudulent votes at all, counts for a whole hell of a lot more than your completely unsupported conspiracy theories.
McWhorter: “at Swarthmore, the President simply folded arms and said ‘no’ to the protesters, upon which they basically folded in their tails and went away.”
I understand the Swarthmore President is a black woman, which provides her some protection against accusations of racism. But, tenured faculty of all races have at least their professorships secured (assuming they don’t apologize or voluntarily resign). So, I have trouble understanding why we don’t have more McWhorters and Swarthmore Presidents among tenured faculty, willing to stand up to the woke mobs. Shouldn’t fully grown, mature senior faculty know how to handle inexperienced college kids? Isn’t the whole point of tenure to enable faculty to ignore each other and the wishes of university administrators, even the university president? It seems that tenured faculty bear at least some of the blame for allowing themselves to get bullied and intimidated by the woke, no? Yes, I realize that I am partially blaming the victim here, but never blaming the victim at all is a woke thing. In the pre-woke world, we told and expected people to stand up to bullies.
If the only way to protect yourself from the woke is to be black, we aren’t going to be able to put black people in charge of every single institution in America. And besides, many black people are sympathetic to the woke, so we are talking about a minority of a minority. Lastly, it doesn’t seem like being black provides all encompassing immunity, and there is always someone higher up the totem poll (black man meet black women, straight black meet trans black, etc).
To the extent people do resist, they are often overruled by outside powers. Think kangaroo sex courts are dumb? Well, Title IX is coming for you if you don’t comply. Let’s remember that the courts, bureaucracy, and now the legislative and executive branches are a reinforcing army that do smack down people who stand up to the woke. If you win the battle, they go get reinforcements.
Of course additional courage is both morally and pragmatically needed. But the real problem is that it’s insufficient. The title of this is “is the resistance getting organized?” As in, disorganized resistance while individually brave is practically useless. The soldiers in an army need to be individually brave for the army to win, but it’s the fact that they are an army that enables victory. Those brave individual barbarian warriors got mowed down by the Roman army all the time.
Personally, I don’t think the woke will be beaten until we admit that racism isn’t a problem in society. Disparities are just genetics. Some in group bias is normal and healthy. Etc. The problem is that, like the One Ring, even moderates want to use the taboo of “racist” for whatever they want. Maybe its Affirmative Action. Maybe its addition funding for government programs or corporate donations they want. Maybe it’s just ordinary the power and accommodation that comes with being of an anointed group. Maybe it’s just not wanting to face the ugly truth. Whatever it is, they won’t give up the One Ring. They want to use it for good after all, so why should they gives it up?!
Re: McWhorter
His forthcoming book is called “The Elect: Neoracists Posing as Antiracists and their Threat to a Progressive America”
Excerpt from the first chapter has been posted.
https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists
And, a new book is forthcoming from Charles Murray in June: “Facing Reality: Two Truths about Race in America”
***
The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability.
https://www.amazon.com/Facing-Reality-Truths-about-America-ebook/dp/B08PL6C4RQ
Just as Christianity attempted to answer questions that are beyond earthly powers (what happens when you die, etc), Wokeism attempts to answer “why do blacks perform so badly?”
It’s a question that demands an answer. The basic ways people answer it are:
1) Racism
2) Some sort of liberal government/NGO project like “education” will fix it
3) Black culture is degenerate, must change culture
4) Genetics
You’ll note that this is basically the ranking of how much status these beliefs have and also a ranking of how difficult the problem is to fix, especially from the viewpoint of some guy on the street (saying you aren’t racist or paying taxes to someone that says they will fix it is easier then fixing black culture which is easier then genetics meaning it can’t be fixed).
In the 1990s-2000s you could posit #2 and #3.
#3 was kind of a low status GOP opinion, but you could be mainstream and posit it. I more or less took this view as the truth when I was younger, as I wasn’t introduced to #4 until my late 20s.
#2 was where all the energy went though. An INCREDIBLE level of resources and sheer power went into this for two+ decades. We didn’t just spend a lot more money on education and various programs. We also gave officials unprecedented power to reform educational practice and curriculum if they promised to close the various gaps. This wasn’t *just* racial in nature. It was promised to close class gaps so that all those unemployed factory workers kids would learn to code. Ed reform made a lot of promises besides race, just as The Bell Curve talked about a lot of things besides race.
When this effort failed, people began searching for other explanations. #3 seemed cruel, and anyway Dems needed black turnout to win elections. Also, the cities they lived in had successfully pushed out their white working class by this time, and so any politics of the big cities would have to give substantial deference to blacks and browns.
So with #2 and #3 gone, it was a choice between #1 and #4. We all knew what the left would choose between those two options. It’s not even the case that people like John McWhorter and Glenn Lowry are willing to choose #4. What they want is to go back to a world where #2 and #3 are acceptable, so as to balance out #1 become an all encompassing crusade of the righteous. This is probably a lost cause. But that would mean giving up on all the benefits that have accrued to certain stakeholders, black and white, from being able to use the taboo about racism for gain and status. Instead, the white guilt used to get those things was always the One Ring, and eventually it demands true faith. The Ring will not be used.
#3 is alive and doing just fine as an explanation. When 70%+ of Black births are to unwed mothers vs. like 5% for Asians, then we have something interesting to look at.
Note: I much prefer to cut the data based on class vs. race, since that approach appears to have much better explanatory power and avoids a lot of unnecessary baggage, but that just won’t fly in today’s environment. I mean, the black illegitimacy rate looks just fine among college graduates.
Let’s say we took a group of 85 IQ Asians, Whites, and Blacks. I posit that:
1) Compared to UMC of all races, their illegitimacy, crime rates, etc would all be worse and more like each other than the UMC.
2) Between each other, the blacks would be worse than the whites who would be worse then the Asians.
For instance, Fishtowns illegitimacy rate, while high by our standards, would be less than the black ghetto. In the case of violent behavior, there is a very large difference between Fishtown and the black ghetto.
Some of this might be residual genetic difference between even underclass groups. However, I think some of it is just “the average IQ of your racial group affects the cultural norms of your racial group, and that cultural norm has impacts up and down the IQ spectrum.”
The bottom line is this though. Even if every single black father stuck around, blacks would still have a lot of problems and would statistically underperform whites. They will still have grievances over this, and people will still seek some explanation for why these well behaving black people just can’t seem to close the gap on things like income and accomplishment.
All the numbers still work logically. I think asdf was saying that #2 and #3 are no longer acceptable socially.
The way asdf states it makes #3 even more unacceptable socially. But as you point out, dysfunctional behavior leads to bad results whether you are black or white. That was the message of Charles Murray’s Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 with it’s successful Belmont and unsuccessful Fishtown.