A long, wide-ranging conversation. At the end, Haidt predicts that there will be a split in the academic world. There will be a “University of Chicago model,” which underlines a commitment to truth and spurns indoctrination, and a “Brown University model” that does the opposite. He predicts that the market will reward Chicago and punish Brown.
I am not nearly so optimistic that the Chicago model will win out decisively.
1. I think that many high school students will prefer the Brown model.
2. I think that parents, who are the real consumers here, do not feel strongly about which model is used. What they care about is the school’s prestige and their ability to tell their friends that their child got into a top school. I do not think that Brown’s brand will decline much, if at all, in that regard.
I guess what I am saying is that I do not think that high school students or parents care all that much about the issue of truth-seeking vs. social-justice-seeking institutions of higher education. But suppose that they do care. Then some possible outcomes:
a. Brown attracts students oriented its way, and Chicago attracts students oriented its way. Over time, Chicago becomes predominantly conservative, and Brown becomes even more leftist.
b. Earlier in the dialogue, Peterson tosses out the data point that illiberal leftist students score relatively low on verbal intelligence. So perhaps the quality of the student body rises at Chicago and falls at Brown.
Leftist professors encourage plenty of non-academic activities such as demonstrating. No wonder these professors tend to be from the humanities and not from your engineering department.
For engineering and hard sciences, I don’t see a future where students can afford to do a 48 hour sit-in and still ace their midterms.
Therefore, overtime expect sciency and engineering schools to be the ones following the Chicago model by default and the humanities following the brown model. This already happens, it’s just going to get more pronounced.
Frankly I think you’re underselling the importance of how these students perform after college. It’s not enough to just attract students; to remain prestigious, you need successful and wealthy alumni. I think Haidt’s point is that the market will generally reward the truth-seekers better post-college, and over time this will translate to increasing prestige and wealth for Chicago while Brown’s own favor wanes.
If only the market feedback on truth-seekers were so good.
Further to Will’s point, your predictions implicitly assume what they learn is college is irrelevant to their later success. If Chicago produces more successful students, over time that will matter. It already is mattering for less prestigious liberal arts colleges.
As time goes on white men will shift to Chicago even more and brown will have the leftovers, until Chicago is forced to comply with brownian regulations to make sure non white-men will get some of the status of Chicago as well.
Then we have a significant minority of the students who just have a passion for something, like becoming a doctor or building bridges. In this information rich internet, the student passion could literally prep themselves for medical school using Wiki. These kids can be location independent, but are more significant to the economy.
Surely employers are the ultimate consumers of education. What they care about is employees who can add more value to the company than their wages plus associated costs and taxes. The education system has to produce these.
Elite universities produce a lot of politicians, bureaucrats, and other personnel in key non-profit institutions that can funnel a lot of resources to (and confer prestige on) their alma maters. Such people also view supporting their colleges as ‘part of the cause’, while successful private sector people are more likely to see their education as a merely good service rendered for a high price.
The ivy leagues bring access to important institutions like no one else; and in the end, even in terms of economic value, factors like regulatory compliance, rent seeking, and the revolving door guarantee that a well-connected Brown alumnus has a chance st being even more valuable than a bright Chicago quant.
The question is more whether Chicago can survive the reactionary right that insists either on conformity or on all positions being beliefs of equal validity. While it might be nice to believe they could lead them out of their morass of ideology, it would seem more likely to be turned against and treated as just another institution of the left.
How do you square your indifference model with the fact that enrollment has declined at many schools, like Mizzou and Evergreen, following large “social justice-oriented” demonstrations?
Perhaps top Universities are in a different position than smaller state schools?
“Perhaps top Universities are in a different position than smaller state schools?”
Indeed; understatement of the year. The statement is more broadly true even if you abstract away from higher education. Top dogs always have the slack to thrive even in hard times, since even in the worst cases when there are only scraps to fight over, they will still win those fights.
The ultimate combination is George Orwells doublethink. The ability to simultaneously take advantage of the advantages of being SJW while also being able to lay aside SJWism when it personally harms one.
Think of a puritan community with three people.
1) One believes is witches while hog.
2) one doesn’t believe in witches.
3) One can alternate between belief and non belief based on an unconscious social calculus of personal advantage.
The first gets killed in he reaction against the “witch ideological spiral”. The second doesn’t get to accuse their enemies of being witches and may be called a with themselves for lack of enthusiasm. The third can use witchcraft hysterical as a weapon to gain personal advantage while avoiding the worst personal disadvantages of an insane worldview.
#3 would probably be correlated with high verbal iq. Mediocrities would have a hard time with it.
And of course a world run by double thinkers need not be a good world. It could in fact be an Orwellian equilibrium you wouldn’t want to live in.
#3 is likely to be associated with a moderate, but not high, IQ. High IQs make self-deception difficult; the calculation becomes conscious. Conscious hypocrisy is harder to pull of than unconscious hypocrisy.
Einstein thought communism was a good idea.
High iq makes self deception hard within the narrow confines of a definable discipline subject to empirical testing of scientific method. Outside the area where the person is an expert, or in any field where definitive answers aren’t possible (this includes merely statistical proof) high iq is used mainly for sophisticated self deception.
Communism took Russia from barely medieval to a leading industrial power that put the first man in space. When Einstein was relevant, Communism was working.
Communism in Russia worked well at solving its initial problems, but eventually created problems that it couldn’t solve. Human ideologies usually follow that trajectory, and capitalism doesn’t seem to be an exception.
Jay — if by “worked”, you mean “killed tens of millions of people”.
Mike – Yes, communism killed lots of people. But any proper understanding of communism should be able to explain its considerable successes as well as its many failures.
Jay — This sounds like the old debate about whether the end justifies the means. When thinking about this, at a minimum it’s necessary to include the tens of millions of dead people in the “end”.
Mike- I don’t tend to think that anything justifies anything, nor does anything require justification. Rather, I favor the view that today’s problems were yesterday’s solutions, and today’s solutions will inevitably be tomorrow’s problems.
Here’s a decent intro: https://badrepublic.wordpress.com/2016/12/08/moral-warptitude/
Except Jay is quite wrong. Russia before the first world war was a rapidly industrializing economy, growing at a much faster pace than was the United States at that time. Living standards were quickly rising. Although the first world war was devastating, it is not impossible that in the absence of the communist revolution, Russia might have overtaken the US economically by the late 1930s. Lenin and Stalin derailed this progress, turning the Soviet Union into a good producer of tanks and artillery but not much else of use; and of course destroying the agricultural sector. Putting a man in space was a great trick but essentially a symbolic gesture by a fourth rate economy.
And yet since 2000 NASA has been booking flights on Russian rockets, and since 2011 the U.S. has had no independent access to space.
There may be some hope in that there exists a contingency of GMU trained economists at Brown right now.
Geez, conservative Jonathan Haidt finds conservative universities as truth seekers while liberals are indoctrination of leftist order. To be honest, I don’t think either wins because:
1) 90% of college students are interested in a careers not truth seeking on either side.
2) The conservative side wont lose because money making, Koch Brothers, (remember 70% of the economy) generally wins.
3) Liberals won’t lose entirely as most companies support multiculturalism and there is always areas the private markets can’t solve.
Dr. Haidt has never been a conservative, and until relatively recently (by his own admission) actively despised them. Calling universities that make a commitment to free speech and the pursuit of truth conservative is likewise risible (though I’m sure conservatives don’t mind the flattery).
U of Chicago isn’t a conservative university by any stretch of the imagination, unless recognition of the value of free speech automatically makes one conservative.
“What [parents] care about is the school’s prestige and their ability to tell their friends that their child got into a top school.”
This is probably true for the elite, which I think gets too much attention. For an average parent like me with average to above average kids, my focus is going to be on them getting an education that helps them make a living — college, tech school, or whatever. My friends’ opinions don’t factor.
Ultimately, this may be what brings down the higher education house of cards. As the demand grows for skilled workers, simple signaling with a bachelor’s degree won’t work for the average or above average student and his parents.
The elite will still have their exclusive handshakes and rites of passage, but the rest of us don’t have the time or money to waste on watered down versions of that nonsense.