Yves here. To be clear, I added to Rajiv Sethi’s headline to make the core issue explicit. JD Vance at least once described long form how universities needed to be taken over and remade to promote conservative values (does that include discouraging the education of women?) From Politico this week in Republicans have hated universities for years. Anti-war protests gave them a reason to punish them:
In 2021, JD Vance proclaimed “the universities are the enemy.” This week, the White House declared war against them.
President Donald Trump and his administration are escalating their attacks on higher education, intensifying a yearslong effort to hobble the campuses they say breed progressive ideology by casting them not as spaces of innovation, but as hotbeds of hate.
Republicans have long blamed college campuses for being ground-zero for a number of “woke” culture war issues to which they’re now taking an ax, including diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and academic frameworks like critical race theory. The protests that roiled college campuses last spring in the midst of the Israel-Hamas war gave Republicans fuel to go after the schools over concerns about antisemitism, and since taking office, Trump has swiftly taken actions designed to punish higher education.
The Trump administration’s effort pulls levers of power across the federal government. The Department of Education on Monday warned 60 universities under investigation for antisemitism that they could face penalties, reminding them that taxpayer support “is a privilege.”
Sethi describes what is happening at Columbia, at the forefront of the Administration’s ideological purge.
By Rajiv Sethi, professor of economics at Barnard College. Originally published at his website
When the federal government announced the cancellation of 400 million dollars in grants and contracts to Columbia earlier this month, the rationale given was “the school’s continued inaction in the face of persistent harassment of Jewish students.” Further cancellations were promised, with five billion dollars in existing commitments at risk.
President Armstrong’s response appeared to take this rationale at face value.1 In a message to the community, she stated that combating antisemitism was her “number one priority” and that under her leadership, the university had transformed its “approach to managing demonstrations, built and put into action disciplinary processes that previously existed only on paper, created collaboratives across our campuses to provide relevant education and training, implemented new anti-discrimination policies and trained our entire community on those policies, changed our protocols for campus access, and redesigned our leadership structures to more swiftly respond to incidents of antisemitism and discrimination on campus.”
If the eradication of antisemitism really were the goal of the federal authorities in squeezing Columbia financially, one might have expected the pressure to ease. Instead, as a precondition for any conversation on the restoration of funds, a further set of demands was announced. These include the abolition of the university judicial board, the adoption of a definition of antisemitism that has raised serious concerns among individuals and groups across the ideological spectrum, the granting of law enforcement powers to public safety officers, the placement of an academic department under receivership, and comprehensive admissions reform.
Over the past year and a half, many Barnard and Columbia faculty have strenuouslyobjected to the erosion of shared governance on their respective campuses.2 The letter from the federal authorities reveals that there is now little governance to share.
The Columbia administration faces a very difficult choice between complete capitulation and costly conflict with a much stronger adversary.3 If the university were to accept all demands made in the letter, there would be more demands made, and more again once those are met. My guess is that these would grow to include changes in hiring practices and the shuttering of departments perceived to be ideologically captured. Only when the entire organization itself is in receivership, with an administration loyalist installed at the helm, would any restoration of funding be contemplated.
The only other option on the table is to seek intervention by the courts. This carries a different set of costs and risks. Open conflict with the federal government is likely to lead to a further tightening of the screws, quickly reaching the full five billion dollars of grant commitments. Litigation will be protracted, devastating in the interim, and may end in failure. That said, this is the only path that allows for the preservation of institutional autonomy.
Back in 2021, JD Vance described American universities as the enemy, and arguedquite explicitly that they had to be either taken over or destroyed. This was long before the October 7 attacks and the war in Gaza, and thus long before the encampments, building occupations, classroom disruptions, and sit-ins to which the federal government claims to be responding.
Does this mean that charges of antisemitism are an opportunistic excuse to force long-desired changes in American higher education? What if there had been no unauthorized protests at all, and no trace of antisemitic rhetotic or imagery? Would similar demands have still been made and similar financial pressures applied?
I think that the answer to this question is yes, but Columbia would not have been first in line to face the fire. It would probably have been Harvard, with an endowment four times the size and a global reputation even more formidable. The protest activity placed a target on our backs, and the trigger has now been pulled.
Nils Gilman observed several months ago that Germany’s “hegemonic position atop the global academic research hierarchy before 1933 was arguably as dominant as that of the U.S. since 1945.” The Nazi regime destroyed it in short order, by persecuting Jewish and left-wing academics. Thousands of scholars—including Albert Einstein, Max Born, Erwin Schrödinger, Hannah Arendt, John von Neumann, Hans Krebs, and Albert Hirschman—fled to more welcoming shores.4
This exodus has been described as Hitler’s gift to the allies, and the US took full advantage. Large scale federal funding of academic research “led to groundbreaking advancements: radar, jet engines, early computers, mass-produced penicillin, and, in the basement of Pupin Hall, a little something known as the Manhattan Project.” American higher education became a magnet for global talent, and waves of aspiring scholars came knocking at our doors. It also became a major export engine, providing a service for which there was seemingly insatiable global demand, and generating revenues that brought a bit more balance to our international transactions.
I don’t think that this system is at risk of imminent collapse, although such things happen with such ferocious suddenness that they are hard to predict. I do think it’s our responsibility as participants in the system to fortify it, and this must begin with an understanding of why we have lost the public trust.
Gilman has argued that we have strayed from our three core competencies, the things that we are uniquely good at producing. These are “educating a broad population to a high level of technical competency… creating the conditions for the discovery of new facts about and conceptions of the world… [and] maintaining the knowledge already created.” He argues that “a ruthless focus on eliminating anything and everything that stands in the way of these three things” is our only hope for survival. I think this diagnosis is correct, and there is little time to lose.
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1 I say “appeared to take” because it might have been a strategic decision made from a weak position, based on the belief that it was the only path to a prompt restoration of funding.
2 I had serious reservations about these initiatives for reasons explained here.
3 I use the term adversary here in recognition of the fact that this is how American higher education is viewed by the Vice President and many others in the administration.
4 Before he fled, Hirschman fought with the French resistance (under an assumed name) and helped many others escape. He then joined the US Army and returned to Europe as part of the war effort. He was among the most original economists of his era, and I was honored to speak at his memorial service.
I am not sure he is resisting so much as rationalizing not doing so.
Yes, I have much to say to elaborate on this, and I have very mixed feelings about what is going on, so I apologize in advance if this ends up being a long comment (and my keyboard is acting up, so apologies also for any errors).
It has long been clear that US conservatives blame what miniscule opposition they actually encounter on liberal brainwashing or indoctrination on college campuses. As someone who attended undergraduate classes both right out of high school in the early 90’s and then again less than a decade ago, experience was that the universities I attended most definitely skewed conservative (Although granted my priors- I am a lifelong avowed Marxist/anarchist) and this was at state schools in both PA (90s/2010s) and NE (2010s). Literally the only ideological discussions I heard were from avowed conservative faculty insisting that they were in a minority on the campus- I did find one Marxist professor, and they never discussed their ideology in the open in class (absolutely amazing man and I only discovered him when he made an offhand comment that nobody that was already not very knowledgeable of Marxist theory ever would have caught on to-He spoke 5 languages that I was aware of and he was a published mathematician who wrote two calculus textbooks in both Spanish and Portuguese-which he then open-sourced. He taught college classes for free to poor kids in Bolivia during the summer break). There were radical left-wing KIDS on these campuses I was on, but there were no radical left-wing professors that were out in the open- I mean zero. There was a Sociology professor that was the closest thing- but even he was more just a pragmatist that tried to explain how things work without any ideological bent. Even the Women’s studies chair was just a woman who enjoyed spending time with young people- she did give me a smile when I brought up some radical labor actions in a history class, and all of the kids looked at me absolutely shocked that workers would ever attempt such actions “but that stuff is illegal!” was what came from them. I don’t know whether my look was withering or a look of pity- maybe a bit of both. The point is that conservatives have already cowed universities from the standpoint of the administration/faculty. The radicalization comes from the kids, if at all (or I guess from parents like me- My own children will go to college likely knowing more left political theory than any faculty or admin on the campus, sadly). So at this point the only thing to suppress is student activity, and colleges are already doing that.
Conservatives simply cannot grasp that they have already won. This seems to be an American elite trait- given that we basically won the war in Afghanistan, for instance, but that we just had to keep terrorizing people because US leadership failed to understand the facts on the ground, so eventually the Afghan people were forced to once again take up arms. I often make rueful comments on Twitter that the people running this (family blogging) society “never read their own manual”- by which I refer to the US Military Counter Insurgency Manual. The US always becomes so punitive toward perceived enemies that it ALWAYS tightens the screws to such a degree that they force groups/societies that have capitulated to renew their fight- and the second time around the group/society is much more successful in their resistance because US elites knocked out the least fit resisters, and the strong remain to remake the resistance in a more effective manner. This is what will happen- the kids will resist and form networks that are more resistant, and their tactics will shift from (more or less) peaceful protests and occupations, to other forms of protest such as sabotage in the dark of night (which is actually safer for them). The kids will be alright I suspect.
So as to the destruction of the higher education system itself. I am afraid we are too late. I think that Covid, the war in Ukraine, and the war in Gaza have showed us that higher education has already been destroyed- by liberals, ironically, although not in the way that conservatives believe. I will grant that University faculty and admins most definitely skew liberal- but I see no evidence that this has any real ideological bent. These people are liberal because that is what it takes to maintain a position in the in-group, both for the faction of US intelligentsia that views itself as sophisticated, and the PMC itself. These people are every bit as right-wing as conservatives. What they abhor about conservatives is the thuggish behavior conservatives adopt in order to display dominance/masculinity. The PMC prefer to advance right-wing policy via more subtle, sophisticated ways. They prefer to “educate” people via manipulation of the media, and “science”, and this is how higher education in the US was destroyed. Those lamenting the degradation of the science, whether social or hard sciences, are too late. The job is done. Complete. Finished. Liberals did the deed. This deed was done via corruption through either financial corruption or patronage. The best example of this was seen during Covid. The big research/grant money flowed to deliberately flawed scientific studies that bolstered the correct view, and anyone that wanted to maintain or extend their position within the academic patronage system towed the line. The people doing good science could not access funds, a platform to publish, and they lost their positions (or never gained them). So due to all of this, I just cannot find it in my to heart mourn what is occurring- the important thing to see here is that THE ONLY THING LEFT TO BE FOUGHT OVER IS THE PATRONAGE SYSTEM ITSELF that the PMC class uses to enrich itself. The conservatives want that for themselves and their people. This is what the uproar about the destruction of science and the academic system is all about, IMO. For those of us every day people living week to week worrying about our kids, there is no real change from a structural standpoint. The kids getting the credentials they need to access professional positions are simply going to be shoveled bullshit from a different pile. I cannot mourn this- because if the conservatives were to stop their assault right now, it changes nothing from a practical standpoint. The education the kids were getting was already hopelessly corrupted. I think most of us here on this blog skew middle age- to older, and I think few understand how truly bad higher education already was. Like much of the rest of this society- there is no reform possible. The only fix is total collapse or destruction and then rebuilding anew- and that requires total collapse and/or destruction of the current order in the western world. It is going to have to get a lot worse before it can get better, I am afraid.
Sorry for the long ramble, but I just wanted to add in lots of context to explain why I feel the way I do.
Hear, hear.
Thanks, Arkady Bogdanov. What you are pointing to is that in a neoliberal society, that is, the U.S. of A. since about 1970, the gamut of thought has to be limited, deliberately. I was the lead editor on an Advanced Placement U.S. government textbook in which the author, a disciple of John DiIulio, claimed that U.S. politics arranged into three groups: liberals, conservatives, and libertarians. Oh. So the scale of the gamut now runs from A to B (without nuances like flats or sharps, eh).
Further, your descriptions indicate to me much, much gatekeeping. People physically and metaphorically blocking the advance of other people.
About this, I may quibble: “The US always becomes so punitive toward perceived enemies that it ALWAYS tightens the screws to such a degree that they force groups/societies that have capitulated to renew their fight- and the second time around the group/society is much more successful in their resistance because US elites knocked out the least fit resisters, and the strong remain to remake the resistance in a more effective manner.”
Thinking of the U.S. left, I’d venture that from the 1920s to the 1960s the FBI, the Congress (ever McCarthyite), the red scares, the lavender scare, and the endless monitoring of the Civil Rights Movement all reduced the left to a sizeable part of the electorate, maybe 20 percent, that is not allowed to express itself. As you indicate above, one can talk about being into BDSM, but one’s public persona better not let on that you’re a marxist. The result is that we were left (pun intended) with the excellent Angels in America, and its portrait of a left and of left activism among gayfolk. But even Angels in America now seems distant and nostalgic. And what remains? The flailing Bernie Sanders? I’m not sure that I see your “more successful” resistance.
Important for readers to differentiate among college programs: Generic “humanities” programs often skew liberal, but professional and hard scientific programs generally skew conservative owing to reliance on more empirical requirements for instructional information. Granted there is considerable lack of ethics and malfesance in some areas of research, for most areas the research is solid and contributes to the public weal. Despite some of the more outre examples alluded to by Musk with considerable bias distortion.
Tearing the whole edifice is like bringing a sledge hammer to a laser surgery. Will kill the patient, rather than restoring health.
If you think economics is empirical, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
And physicists and pure mathematicians, the most elite on the hard science side, have long skewed left wing.
I arrived at the University of Waterloo in the early ‘80s, by which time its reputation as “the Red University” had begun to fade, its original student newspaper, The Chevron having been notoriously taken over by the Anti-Imperialist Alliance in 1976 and subsequently driven underground by the Student Union to be replaced by the anodyne Imprint. More than anything else it was known for its co-op program (along with being the only Canadian — maybe even North American? — university with an independent Mathematics department granting its own degree) and Computer Science which seemed to me to orient the student body in a more “business friendly” way than may have been typical of the times. So I don’t have any direct experience of what US conservatives complain about where “liberal capture” of the universities is concerned.
“Over the past year and a half, many Barnard and Columbia faculty have strenuouslyobjected to the erosion of shared governance on their respective campuses.2 The letter from the federal authorities reveals that there is now little governance to share.
The Columbia administration faces a very difficult choice between complete capitulation and costly conflict with a much stronger adversary.3 If the university were to accept all demands made in the letter, there would be more demands made, and more again once those are met. My guess is that these would grow to include changes in hiring practices and the shuttering of departments perceived to be ideologically captured. Only when the entire organization itself is in receivership, with an administration loyalist installed at the helm, would any restoration of funding be contemplated.”
_____________________________
I thought this was a great summary of the current situation at Columbia (the likely first example and test case).
The rest of the article did not really face the question raised: how to respond to the administration?
Figure out how to make up 5 billion?
Figure out how to work with all of academia to resist the termination of freedom in education?
Agree on the value of the diagnosis, and on the failure of the remainder of the piece.
Gilman’s work, which Sethis draws on, steers too close to “racialized trajectories of the past” in determining what counts and what doesn’t as intellectual history. That turns out to matter in his hierarchical understanding of what it is that are the “uniquely good” products of the university.
The research university is a deeply flawed thing in even its best rendering. It is built on deep class inequalities (as was pointed out in an article on this site about a week ago) and favors and disfavors researchers on the basis of tiny differences in their resumes.
For these reasons and others, the answer of how to face up to the Trump administration cannot be to continue to more deeply inscribe the class-based imbalances that leave a small class of elite researchers relatively intact at the expense of more precariously-employed instructors. The answer is to create a non-exploitative university environment that is capable of producing the same sorts of excellence universities are properly revered for. Somewhat ironically, Gilman, and perhaps Sethi, don’t seem to understand it’s research produced by the humanities and social sciences that makes clear that an exploitative form of hard-scientific excellence isn’t most conducive to the creation of long-term social stability.
Who pays the piper calls the tune. A few years ago I calculated that the Feds supplied about 1/7th of all the money taken in by higher education, but got to control basically ALL the higher education spend because if an institution took one dollar of Federal money, it had to obey Federal dictates.
the Professional-Managerial class NEVER imagined it would lose control of the Federal government so this was not a problem for them. Until now.
One other thing about my estimate: the cost of administration in higher Ed was about equal to the total Federal dollars spent in higher Ed. Curiously, the PMC never advocated firing all the administrators so that no Federal dollars needed be taken.
They made their beds. Now they must lie in them. And boy, do they lie.
This comment is fair, and I probably should have been clearer. I don’t support capitulation to these demands, both because they are outrageous and because that would be the first step towards a complete loss of autonomy.
This means that the losses will have to be shouldered and allies found if any are willing to come forward. I have nothing useful to say (at the moment) about how such a strategy should be pursued, so ended up saying very little.
The Gilman recommendations are relevant insofar as they address the loss of public trust, which I consider to be suicidal. I don’t think this loss of trust is entirely (or even largely) due to partisan propaganda.
But I thank you for your comment, which is fair and worth making.
To inject a somewhat counter intuitive thought here, I wonder just what percentage of the funds at play are really necessary to the core functioning of the modern University. Much of what passes today for “education” is really technical training. To a great extent, this function would be better provided by Community Colleges and outright Technical Colleges.
Taking to heart the idea of the “core functions” of a University, separating out the technical training part of the endeavour would leave us with what any scholar from earlier times would recognize as a University. To that extent, Universities can and probably should be “downsized,” with an accompanying increase in freedom and autonomy.
Secondly, once upon a time, businesses trained their new hires under one form or another of deferred compensation. My Dad learned drafting and later engineering that way just after the end of World War 2. His apprenticeship papers from Europe were accepted as the equivalent of a college degree by most American companies that he applied for employment with. This can be done again.
One major initiator of the stealth anti-intellectualism on display in the present Administration is actually an inter in-group power struggle. Lots of “rice bowls” are in danger of being broken and the “rice” redistributed.
We have entered the Silicon Valley phase of the Reaction. The motto now is “Move fast and break things.”
F Scot Fitzgerald was absolutely right in his opening to the novel “The Great Gatsby.”
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness…”.
Stay safe.
Bingo! Excellent post. You present an option not mentioned in the article. It would be wonderful to see universities return to the universities of old where the faculty held far more authority. And how about requiring corporations to pay for the training of their own employees. Find the courage Columbia to stand up against ignorance.
As the author wrote:
“three core competencies … are “educating a broad population to a high level of technical competency… creating the conditions for the discovery of new facts about and conceptions of the world… [and] maintaining the knowledge already created.”
What has happened is that the middle competency (which is important) has come to crowd out the first and the third. It’s near impossible to get hired as an assistant professor without already-funded grants on the CV.
I think most people going to college see the first and third competencies as more important. Much of the reaction and cutting of funds only affects the second competency. The university of “publish or perish” with thousands of journals full of unread articles is in trouble. My guess is that the universities of the first and third competencies are less at risk.
There are multiple functions to universities, but the main cuts thus far are specifically to research and development funding. That includes things such as providers by lighting and ventilation to laboratories, and paying the staff that works and trains in them.
Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Larry Fink are not going to pay for increased job training. They want to pay less for job training — that’s why they’re cutting funding to universities, which will eventually be used to cut their taxes. They probably figure (incorrectly) that job training can be provided for by artificial intelligence and H1Bs.
One might think from the title that this article is about the attempted deportation of Mahmoud Khalil for his Columbia protests since Bondi’s threat to University speech really does evoke the Hitler comparison. Instead it seems to be a defense of universities and their all important endowments as institutions. There the comparison is more to the UK where “Oxbridge” is a pillar of the class system just as the Ivies are here. Would it be out of line to suggest that the Columbia/Barnard suppression of their own students–including bringing in the NYPD to knock heads–is more shocking than Trump’s assault on University money?
And when it comes to teaching “excellence” the Clintons, Obama, even George W. Bush–all Ivy products–do not impress.
In my lifetime perhaps the most famous university protests were those against the Vietnam war and often these were against the students’ universities rather than in defense of them. If institutions like Columbia and Barnard want to prove their sincerity about “fascism” perhaps they should start by defending their own students speech and not merely some students “safe spaces.”
Aside from the Mahmoud Khalil abduction, I’ve been shocked at Columbia’s unwillingness to stand up for all of its own students and faculty during the Gaza protest movement. From the groveling of ex-President Shafik in front of the idiotic Congressional inquest to allowing ex-IDF students to use ‘skunk’ on protesters without apparent repercussions. Maybe prospective students and staff need to make it clear that they will not be interested in attending or working at such a compromised institution?
Haven’t you heard about Columbia’s new offering? The PhD in Sycophancy is in high demand!
Agreed. Many of the people I work with got a degree that focused on technical training with little in the way of liberal arts. Our former CFO, who happened to go to the same college I did, once remarked to me that people like him and myself went to college to learn in a broad sense, not just taking courses that translated directly into a job. I think the idea at one point was that if a person could complete four years of studies, that was a good indicator to a potential employer that they could also learn was was needed on the job and become a reliable employee. Times have changed. People now spend way too much money to get degrees in subjects like marketing, which to me is just a colossal waste of the time and money of everyone involved. There’s no reason something like that can’t be learned on the job.
At the fairly small state university in my city, a few years back the head administrator received a huge raise, because it was necessary to retain top talent, don’t you know. At about the same time there were budget shortfalls and something had to go. And it wasn’t the marketing department. Instead they stopped offering physics majors. Jesus wept.
I’m putting down the root cause of all this as the continued assault on the First Amendment on behalf of Zionists who want to silence any dissent about what Israel does. At the end of the day, it is all about making any criticisms of Israel a chargeable offense of antisemitism. And it is bipartisan. Somebody in comments reminded us how you walk the halls of Congressional offices, that they all have Israeli flags and junk on proud display in front of them.
I linked this last night and it’s worth a look.
https://scheerpost.com/2025/03/14/china-is-better-at-capitalism-than-the-us-and-trump-knows-it/
Vijay Prashad–associate of Chomsky–cites a poll where more Chinese think they live in a democracy than Americans think we live in a democracy. He says what we really have now is oligarchy and it’s our system build around money=power that is at the root. Whereas the Chinese “people’s republic” makes populism the root and never allows their many billionaires to interfere with politics.
Of course China is a much more ethnically homogeneous country whereas money has always been USA’s organizing principle (with a side order of “liberty”). But his point is that for societies to work the animal spirits of individualism have to be controlled, preferably via reason rather than through suppression. High inequality ultimately threatens both the rich and the poor.
All of which is to say that, IMO, making all of today’s topic about Trump is to ignore the long standing misbehavior of power = money. And if the Trumpies think they are going to use money to control the universities perhaps the universities should tell the Trumpies to get stuffed. Not holding my breath.
US will become less and less competitive if they stump like this on the academic body. So what not to like..? The muscles and brain will atrophy so maybe the world will be a better place? Cause I really cannot remember the overall good that was bestowed to the world by the USofA.
Indeed: Yankee go home — and stay there …
the home is stolen too
This was a really interesting conversation between Scheer and Prashad, gave me lots to think about. Thank you very much for the link!
Notes on the current crisis in the U S of A of education (in its broadest sense of the upbringing of a decent adult):
1. “capitulation”? Very soon, Americans will start chanting, We Are the Good Germans. In fact, such bloviating already is happening, especially with regard to the genocides and Palestine and Ukraine (and, let’s face it, Ukraine is proxy genocide). I won’t mention Syria, Libya, or Iran.
2. Producing Good Germans. “Gilman has argued that we have strayed from our three core competencies, the things that we are uniquely good at producing. These are “educating a broad population to a high level of technical competency… creating the conditions for the discovery of new facts about and conceptions of the world… [and] maintaining the knowledge already created.” Sheesh. Critical thinking? Skepticism? Shaping students to have an ethics? I guess no one has to do that anymore: See point 6.
3. “capitulation”? Recall the hearings dominated by obvious-fascist Elise Stefanik. The university presidents could have fought her then. Did they? No. As a lawyer, Stefanik knows damn well that speech of all kinds is protected (even her well-planned stupidities) and they could have countered her by pointing out her bad faith.
4. “antisemitism”? Supporting genocide should lead to a religious crisis. It certainly did so among German Catholics and Lutherans after WWII, as well as in much of Catholic Europe. I eagerly await the religious crisis in oh-so-religious America to atone for slaughtering children in Gaza, tearing up olive trees, imprisoning and raping Palestinians, and sending exploding pagers. I’m waiting!
5. Those of us from Chicago may recall the travails of the daring and witty writer Laura Kipnis, who was put through hell after various baseless allegations and then dragged through the internal kangaroo-court system at Northwestern U. So don’t count on much justice internally at any of the Ivies or near Ivies.
6. Speaking of near Ivies, I am a product of the University of Chicago. When I was there, mid-1970s, the U was being taken over by the vaunted / deluded economics department as well as by the general rise of business schools as a place to park bourgeois youth and train them to be socially useless. By now, the takeover at U of Chicago is complete. So let’s not go: Où sont les virtus pures d’antan? The unis, collectively, have been money grubbers for years, as well as gatekeepers. The search for truth, justice, and a fine writing style comes in twelfth or thirteenth place. Right after the snagging of that groovy internship. The rot is not new, nor is it unexpected.
Thanks guy. Re U of C sounds like you and OIFVet have something else in common.
While I do have a more local degree I prefer to be a proud autodidact. After all, to quote myself, “to think outside the box you have to be outside the box.” This may not be, strictly speaking, true but everyone needs a slogan.
OIFVet and I both have links to U of Chicago, but he is a generation younger than I am, which means that his experience of the U of Chicago was full “grovel before the economics department and MBA program.”
My experience turns out to have been the end of the old “small” College, since tripled in size, of undergrads. Many of us were the first in our families to go to college. Now, the U of Chicago advertises “international students” as that appropriate dash of color — when most of them are children of the new Chinese bourgeoisie and high-caste Indian families. I doubt that U of Chicago recruiters are wandering Kerala State looking of smart kids of the Orthodox Christian groups there. I also know that the U of Chicago has been consistently unable to recruit black Americans in proportion to the U.S. population — always a shortfall, and ’tis a mystery.
As to autodidacts, the irony is that when I was in the College, we were told that we were being educated so that we could continue to educate ourselves. Autodidacts all. And the days of autodidacts are over — unless we consider endless selfies to be autodidactism.
I was brought up with that same impression – we are being educated to hopefully instill a love of learning that continues throughout our lifetimes.
Sometimes I get into an ecclesiastical funk and start thinking that there is nothing new under the sun. I pick up books which discuss things I’ve already learned and my brain feels full. But if you keep at it, there’s always a ‘eureka’ moment. Just last week I watched the execrable movie Troy, but one of the actors in that led me to the movie version of Coriolanus, a historical figure I’d never heard of before. That movie was brilliant, and it led me to read part of the Shakespeare it was based on, as well as the Plutarch that Shakespeare based his play on. Coriolanus was a better person than both those above and below him, and his heroic flaw was that he knew it, and refused to pretend otherwise.
There’s a lesson for our times in that story, maybe a few of them, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I still haven’t decided what to think of it all yet, but to bring things back around to the subject of this post and the current zeitgeist, I’m sure there are many people today who have been on the wrong end of a cancellation coming at them from the right or the left who can relate to Coriolanus’ (played by Ralph Fiennes) response to being banished by his fellow Romans whom he had selflessly defended. With accusatory finger pointed and spittle flying, he thunders –
I banish you!
Coriolanus is good and Ralph Fiennes is very good in Conclave. He’s a fine actor.
Coriolanus must be cherished in Europe. It is maybe the only more pre-eminent figure in European history that fought for clean slates and extinguishing of the debts, if I remember correctly (ok, Solon had to deal a bit with those issues, but he is so much back in time). Not a very popular figure in certain circles, I am sure of it. And very likely this part of his uprising always pushed to the backstage. Same as with Jesus…
As a refugee from the university system, the administration keeps sucking a larger amount of the funds while shifting teaching costs to underpaid, no-benefits adjuncts.
A typical 500k 3-year NSF grant, 275k goes directly to overhead, but then you have to cover the horridly inflated costs of a grad student, say another 150k for two years, of which half is again overhead, leaving what 90k for 3 years to do the research since the grad student has classes and does almost nothing for the first two years. And of course anything must be purchased from overpriced, officially sanctioned vendors. 20k to attend three conferences, and guess what? The actual research done by the PI is done for free on weekends.
The rotten system (though not for the reasons Trump et al claim) was heading for collapse.
Until these realities are addressed by those who want to save the University for the extremely well-paid administration, it won’t be saved.
There was a critical moment in Jordan Peterson’s trajectory where he was progressive and kindasorta left, and you can still see undercurrents of this in his thinking, but then one day he attended a protest where he was critical of Bill C16 which he argued, incorrectly, would legally compel him to use student’s personal pronouns and thus, he thought, was an attack on freedom of speech and thought.
Any law student could have kindly and gently explained to him how the proposed legislation wasn’t what he thought it was, and that would likely have been sufficient. Instead, in his moment of vulnerability and public display of ignorance (and captured on video, especially for someone very attached to his own intellectualism), people were quite vicious in their attacks, a media backlash against him was manufactured, and I witnessed a full backfire effect in him. He went from reactance, confirmation bias, to full Motte and Bailey effect, and now being ostracized by his friends, community, colleagues. It clearly hurt him on a very deep and personal level, as his entire career from this point can be seen as him exacting vengeance on academia which had been until this moment his whole world.
(This is one of the ways the “left”, sprinkled as it is with Trots, Leninists and Stalinists who would sooner kill you for your thought-transgressions, plus zealous rabidness of crowds, tends to alienate and crucify those who otherwise woudl have made brilliant allies, in turn leading to the general downfall and degradation of left politics. This is, I think, an insight the right sector capitalizes on in many ways.)
Recall, one of Peterson’s earlier initiatives was to set up a database of university course descriptions so as to identify and target courses as “cultural Marxist” (aka lefty) based on keywords. He abandoned this, perhaps he realized it rather looks like language/thought policing?
Anyway, the reason I raise this, Jordan Peterson in his vengeance has created an online digital version of of his lectures, pay-for-access content, which resides on Youtube, Patreon, and self-hosted platforms. The modern university is modeled on Aristotle’s Lyceum, open to all and supposed to be free, which arose in response to Plato’s Academy being only available to wealthy patreons. I would argue Peterson is recreating the university, both as digital and onlne, and based on the Academy, and I wonder if perhaps this is what Vance is aiming for as well. And recall the right sector wants to burn books, is also opposed to libraries.
Nah, I would stay away from it. The guy holds dear to his heart the Paretto distribution, which he profoundly believes must apply to human societies as well, as a law of nature. And he wants to end up in the 20% or thereabouts…
I remember when Peterson was still relatively normal (and a frequent guest on TV Ontario’s The Agenda where he would discuss his work as a therapist and what it led him to believe about human behaviour and social norms) and stuck closer to his subject discipline (I also read his first book Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief based upon his PhD thesis and an actual work of scholarship, unlike his normative missals of late). Something happened to him — a physical ailment, but also I suspect some sort of psychotic break; he appears to me to have become an entirely different person.
MKUltra strikes again! Some of the CIA mind control experiments were carried out at McGill University back in the day.
See: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/class-action-lawsuit-families-montreal-brainwashing-mk-ultra-1.6371416
The problem is that universities depend on federal funding in the first place. In order to protect academic freedom, universities should be able to sustain themselves without government funding.
Back in April of 2024, Adam Tooze analyzed the political economy of Columbia University.
He begins by noting that Columbia has huge resources and could have had even more if it were better managed and less top heavy in its administration. He also points out that it is extremely opaque in its financial reporting.
Below are a few examples of his findings, based on the research of union activists on the campus.
Columbia is a $5.8 billion-revenue generating organization consisting of at least seven main entities:
* A medical industrial complex
* And recently funded research complex
* Very large professional schools,–business, law etc.
* Columbia College for undergraduates
* A real-estate empire – the original core of Columbia’s endowment (at $15 billion)
* The fund-management organization that manages the financial assets of the endowment
* A development arm that raises money from alumni.
Tooze then provides the revenue stream from each of these seven components. He states that the largest revenue provider is not the educational part of Columbia but the medical-industrial complex– and revenue from Columbia college undergrads makes up at most 3.25% of Columbia University annual revenue, likely less than that considering the higher fees charged in some of the professional schools.
It just may be that an important first step in building back public trust in academia is more accurate descriptions of what the nature and priorities of these institutions actually are.
We are a little confused. We’ve known for years that these Big Universities have been operated by Big Money interests: hedge funds and other looking to make Big Profits off of students who end up with enormous debts they carry once they enter their professions.
The article insinuates that a 2nd degradation is occurring via conservative think tank ideologies.
Both of those entities seem to be in a race to destroy once pristine higher education.
Just what those students need; isn’t it?
But who gets to benefit from the spoils of ‘Big Profits’? And who gets the biggest say on the shape (to whatever influence an academic environment can have) of the next generation? To make it short, who will benefit from the proposed changes, and who is it safe to assume will benefit in the future?
I’d say this is a competition of elites, us plebs be damned.
I have major problems with the current state of higher education. The ones of us that live in the real world of have to make stuff that works. Right now the the current higher education system, basically produces for the most part unusable people in STEM. One comments make the companies pay for the training. The already do!!. You get some new grad with an engineering degree, it take around two of on the job training. So an average company is expending around $300 (salary and benefits). Hoping that in two years they’ll get someone useful. Higher education does give a F—k whether their graduates are useful. I use to fight out sourcing and hire american. Now you can get some from the third world that will work and has fair engineering skill. Almost all tech companies have dropped degree requirements. About thirty years ago, I had investors to set up a tech consulting in Moscow, ID. We wanted to hire STEM students part-time (at decent wage) and have the Universities (U of I and WSU) give the students some class credit for the work. We would also help with their tuition and through some consulting money to the Universities. What were wanting was to produce people with real job skills. They didn’t care. Boise State around 1990, I tried to help them out. I went their. I’m back in town visiting. So I go in the Math/Computer Science department to visit some of my form professors. And go in to see the newer head of the department. I’ve a piece of paper in my pocket. I’m working the project called Window NT. I’ve do all the legwork. I had Boise State selected to be one of the first 100 colleges and Universities to teach what would become the most successful product in the history of the planet. Boise would have got: free software for the whole University, free hardware for the labs and all expenses paid to teach the professors how to teach it. This would be around 10 mil worth of stuff. The head of the department turned it down. He didn’t like Microsoft. The Indian universities didn’t have a problem. They were cranking out Windows programmers six months later. Same guy told me cell phones would not be successful. I’m been at a lot of companies and I’m always on the committee to select were to recruit STEM grads. I’ve never sent them to Boise State. Higher education has a reality problem. A lot of the grads are deeply debt and their parents. Sixty thousand dollars for a STEM degree and you can’t get a job. A lot of working class have had it. Companies have had it. Shouldn’t the education system produce something useful. To bad you can’t sue them for malpractice. So why are the ones of us outside of academia, that could help shunned? There’s a lot of pent up anger out there. I basically tell young people and parents. Don’t waste the money on a college education.
Hear, hear!
I almost spit my coffee when I read a comment telling that universities should not teach for the job but these skills should be taught in the workplace. What then should universities teach instead? Progressive dogma? It is a very expensive indoctrination. Then the students graduate without skills but being very good activists. So their teachers think they use them to make the revolution they were not willing/able to make by themselves. Instead of this, they are troops that enforce the neoliberal/woke establishment.Neoliberal =woke while leftism is another thing
I think one solution is to make graduates able to file for bankruptcy for education credits. So universities do not offer useless degrees and more graduates of useful degrees than the job market can employ. In addition, graduates are not converted in slaves to pay their credits for most of their life. In addition, universities would be more efficient
Full disclaimer: I am a college professor in a country that it is not the US. I apologize for my English
re: “Conservative Revenge on Universities”
I’m sorry. B sounded like he wanted to do the same things. So “conservative revenge” or “the Lobby’s revenge”? Those two aren’t necessarily the same. / ;)
Is it wrong to think the writer from Barnard College might have priors? / ;)
Isn’t Columbia in New York City? Where’s AOC when you need her?
She’s all on board with persecuting the anti-Semites and therefore Columbia:
https://www.blackagendareport.com/aoc-votes-back-israel-lobbys-bogus-anti-semitism-definition
Gilman argues (too stridently for my taste) for a “research university”, an hybrid institution that should not exist, IMO. It really didn’t either, in the early post WWII years, only after the Federal government broke up the big telcos of the day (Bell Labs come to mind).
Anyway, I agree that the first thing the poor academicians who belatedly realize that it is their rice bowl that Musk is looking at, should do is sit down and clearly enunciate the top goals of a university. Mine are 1. teach the student how to think, 2. teach the student how to think, 3. teach the student how to think in specialized areas of knowledge (no, F! no, not in areas of business). Anything outside of those 3 goals, such as “the student experience” (present day goal), or getting a spouse (the ’50s goal), or not getting drafted and shot in ‘Nam (the ’60s goal), are to be resisted and degraded.
And on the subject of what to do now, Charlie Brown; do not suggest to tear it all down and start again. Two flaws with that idea. One, if you tear it down, then you have nothing, no scaffolding, no framework, no references, for building something new. And two, it shows that you haven’t a clue as to a) what is wrong with the present system so you don’t know what to correct or discard, and b) what to build to and what not to build to. That said, good luck going forward.