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Even Harvard was a start-up once (Vanessa Leroy/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
What is the point of university? It used to be, when Harvard was founded in 1636, “to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity”. But in recent years the university has taken on an altogether narrower character. Learning is no longer enough. Activism is demanded. Yale and Harvard have come to resemble the mythical Ouroboros, eating their own tails to satisfy an insatiable appetite for conformity.
In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. warned in God and Man at Yale of his alma mater’s inability to prepare its students for the real world. Its subtitle, The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”, hinted at the already existing tendency for administrators to hire academics who only teach ideas they deem acceptable. Scepticism was banished: to Buckley, political radicals were subverting American society by indoctrinating their students with atheism and collectivism. Yet he remained an “epistemological optimist”, hoping that sense would prevail both in the Ivy League and across the nation.
More than 70 years later, that sense has manifestly not prevailed. Take the case of Roland Fryer. A hugely gifted and until recently celebrated black professor of economics at Harvard, he was suspended for two years without pay following the most tenuous sexual harassment claims. Many suspect the real reason for his humiliating treatment was his research showing that African Americans are not disproportionately the targets of lethal violence by the police. There were, Fryer wrote, “no racial differences in either the raw data or when contextual factors are taken into account”.
Though published well before the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 decided that the police were state-funded agents of racial oppression, Fryer’s research nevertheless made him enemies in the academic world. Though he was only following the evidence, he had offended the progressives who now dominate the university’s governance and culture. On Fryer’s return to campus after two years of exclusion, the Harvard Crimson newspaper had only this to say: “Fryer should not return to Harvard classrooms.” Similar stories can be told about other illustrious institutions. Joshua Katz, a tenured Classics professor at Princeton, was not merely suspended but fired this year over a long-ago relationship with a student. Given the investigation into his behaviour was based on selective evidence, it seems likely his real crime was daring to criticise Black Lives Matter.
If universities once made promises to teach their undergraduates how to think, they now aim to teach them what to think. Students are now taught that disparities between groups are always the result of discrimination; the US is irredeemably racist; racism is everywhere; invisible power structures of structural oppression are equally ubiquitous and need to be dismantled; meritocracy is a myth; colour-blindness is a misleading concept; a focus on individual rights distracts from the real struggle. Gone are those such as Roland Fryer who sought to inquire freely into the most important questions facing society today through well-gathered evidence and rigorous logic. Hounded out by a vocal minority of thin-skinned students and zealous administrators, they are replaced by progressive conformists.
It was with these issues in mind that, last week, I taught five classes on freedom of speech at the new University of Austin. UATX is intended to be a free-thinking, free-speaking alternative to existing universities, and our summer school was aimed at attracting current undergraduates from precisely those places. But while one could have forgivingly expected at least some of these students to be scared of questioning progressive orthodoxies, the reality couldn’t have been more different.
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SubscribeThe University students I have met from less illustrious UK Universities are like the one’s described by the author, and I have met a few as I have two sons at University. However, like the University students I met as a young man in Husak’s communist Czechoslovakia they know not to openly question the orthodox views as it might harm their future. There is the same cautious covert contempt for the party line.
The eventual implosion of legacy universities, or at least their liberal arts faculties, is an appealing image but I suspect it will be very hard to achieve in practice. They are deeply entrenched institutions and will not fade away peacefully.
Much as I admire the new University of Austin, I wonder if it will still be around in a decade and whether such luminaries as Ayaan Hirsi Ali will still be associated with it.
I like the idea of placing more of the financial risk for student education on the universities themselves. If their graduates can’t repay their loans then the universities should carry much of that debt. Modern universities might be driven by the market but they don’t yet shoulder all the risks of the market.
Indeed, the endowments of the largest American universities, including Harvard, almost guarantee that they will be around after most other colleges and universities go bust.
Zero chance of Harvard and Yale closing down. The problem of academic wokeness is far more structural that spoilt students or zealot administrators (although they are there, sure enough). The cultural logic of wokeness, which was presaged by Burnham already in the 1940s and now come to fruition, is that the managerial class has found its “bliss point”. I pity those that think somehow wokeness is Marxism 2.0. Not at all. It’s a system that dissimulates its classist nature, provides a structural role for global corporations (“sticking up for minorities”), and allows the managerial bourgeoisie to remain unchallenged. There is no incentive for the management class, or its academic priesthood or loyal knaves like street artists and ‘antifa’, to keep reframing concepts of social structure and process. Identity politics is perfect for the managerial class — it makes their role in the power hierarchy invisible (as long as they say they’re for diversity and equity, i.e. they gaslight) , and as long as they can use “divide and rule” tactics over the lower classes, especially by use of racialism.
Of course woke is Marxism 2, for the simple reason that like Marxism it uses a notion of “revolution” to justify the hierarchy, bureaucracy and dictatorship of “the party”, as the “vanguard” of the “oppressed”. Your naïve notions that Marxism does not involve “class” – think party privilege; and that this new “class structure” is not largely staffed by renegade “bourgeois”, are themselves left wing delusions. And as for “racialism”, it is implicit in the Marxist project, at first in a Lamarckian sense, for the “bourgeoisie” is held to be a rigid, impermeable category of humanity which hands its characteristics on to its progeny. That this readily devolves into outright racialism of the traditional, pseudo-Darwinian sort, is vividly demonstrated in the various genocides carried out by Stalin, the last of which, germinating from the so-called “Doctors’ plot”, was mercifully nipped in the bud by the old monster’s death. So stop trying to rescue Marxism. It is the fons et origo of almost everything rotten and disgusting in European society from the mid-nineteenth century on.
The reason I find UnHerd so stimulating is not just the articles. It’s the quality of the readers’ responses.
I disagree with your critique of Mr. Alexander. You make some good points about the Marxist legacy but Mr Alexander’s reference to Barnham was cogent. The managerial class (what I would call the political and corporate power elites) are more than happy with the “Marxist” label. This label shields their real identity from the public.
Yes, you really have driven the point home well.
On the contrary, he’s just parroted it. And it remains rubbish, predicated on the false notion that Marxism has ever been about “equality”, when it has always been about authoritarian / millenarian rule in the name of “equality” – just like “woke” in fact.
I took it to mean “not just Marxism alone” but a larger “Administrative State” of bureaucratic “managerial” class that feeds off producers until it strangles even their own food supply out of existence, along the line of Aynn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” rather than a binary right vs left political structure. The Administrative State encompasses both while enjoying the luxury of being unelected and therefore seemingly “untouchable”.
Wokery is the unholy alliance of the elites in academia, corporations and the media, for its proponents have infiltrated and now held hostage their managements to their utopian vision.
Marxism is the lens of viewing society as the dichotomy and tension between oppressors and oppressed. That is precisely the central perspective wokeists demand of all society, and their presumed mission is to correct its inequity.
This is carried along by a religious belief in its inherent virtue, such that it cannot be contradicted without appearing evil, and worthy of removal from society by cancellation to protect the “virtuous.”
Like all dogmas, wokery is hijacked by those who seek power and recognise its utility – and this truth echoes Jones’s comment that parties form to monopolise application and enforcement of the dogma. Thus is where we are now.
True, which supports the argument that they are but “useful idiots” to the eventual Marxist ends and “cleansing” as yet another rendition of history repeating out of ignorance, which takes us back to the subject of this excellent article that is right on point.
@ Ian Alexander:
You have said it, exactly. Wokeness is a perfect fit for corporate capitalism, which is why large corporations are so willing to adopt it. It provides a lovely facade of warmth and kindness, behind which there is no alteration of the brutal extraction of resources (human and otherwise) that feeds the corporate coffers. It only requires a bit of reshuffling of personnel to meet diversity identity requirements, together with some added Diversity & Equity administrators in Human Resources (so aptly named).
Mostly I see the American right as adhering to the “neo-Marxist” label. They, and the hip lefty street-artist set, believe there’s something revolutionary about wokeism. The grain of truth there is that wokeism emerged from Marxist ( but also post structuralist) ideas. It has been quickly co-opted by the managerial class as we’ve both noted, and it’s certain they won’t be toppling their own positions with revolution. But since it’s such a great invisibility cloak for their own class position, they don’t want any ideas challenging it. The funky kids at college still fervently believe they’ve hit upon the revolutionary formula, and they’ll be Jacobin heroes on the right side of history. The two work together, not consciously or conspiratorially but by logic of their interests. Hence the conversion of universities into woke madrassas. I should mention that I’m riffing on and extending from an essay by Malcom Kyeyune in “City Journal” recently.
Sounds more like you are describing Charles Murray’s depiction of the political spectrum as a circle, not a horizontal line from left to right. Pictured as a clock, with the “left” at 9 o’clock, the “right” at 3 o’clock, at 12:00 o’clock the extreme left and the extreme right meet where fascism & dictatorship rule. At 6 o’clock, exactly opposite and 180 degrees away is libertarianism: the idea of individual freedom & responsibilty, your rights end where mine begin and vice versa. Don’t tread on me.
Most anyone who has not grown up white-collar middle class or above sees that this is an elitist movement that is not for their benefit. This is why people of multiple races are leaving the Democrats in the U.S. Sad thing, since that party used to do at least the minimum for this group.
Of my woke former friends the wokest were the ones who grew up with the most “privilege” and thought DiAngelo was a saint. Tone deaf to any ideas to the contrary.
Always looked like phony baloney to me and those friends I grew up with. Lifelong Democrats, only a few voted for Trump, though they were in that demographic (blue-collar/financially struggling). Who knows the future voting patterns of this group, which is probably larger than the Dems think? Accusations of voting against their own interests will abound. And not only white males in that group.
Some of this has to do with doing physical and demanding jobs. Keeps you in touch with the real world.
Spot on.
A good addition to the discussion. Woke youth are Lenin’s”useful idiots” to the elite, such as Trudeau in Canada, who wield woke power, and harnessed the woke rank and file to villify the anti-authoritarian protests of the truckers – the true working and producing class.
Or witness the co-opting of Bernie socialism by the Democrat party elite as a means to gain control of the executive branch in the US. Multi-millionaires to a man or woman, they spout the right cocktail of social and economic narratives to give the impression they are the protectors of the marginalised, and the only leaders able to understand and interpret their concerns.
Challenging wokery is, as you say, a challenge to their power, and they do not countenance losing it through revolution. The method is all similar to Mao’s harnessing of youth in the Cultural Revolution to turn them against their parents, their traditions and their history – not to overthrow the Communist Party rule (of course not), but to reinforce his dominant role in the party, and eliminate rivals.
What is to be done? Here is my own modest proposal: No university in the UK should be permitted to enrol a student on any course(s) unless and until the student has signed a declaration in the following form:
I understand that I may find the content of the course(s) on which I have enrolled distressing, sometimes severely so, but I have enrolled on that understanding and expressly agree that the content cannot be adjusted to accommodate my sensibilities.
I further understand that in the course of my studies, both in the faculty, and from visiting speakers, I must expect to read and hear opinions and points of view with which I disagree, sometimes violently. I understand that the only permissible way to counter such opinions and points of view is by reasoned and courteous argument. I expressly agree that I will not urge or participate in the censorship, cancellation, exclusion or other actual or attempted suppression of any such opinions or points of view or the person(s) expressing them.
I further understand that any attempt to censor, cancel, exclude or suppress opinions or points of view with which I happen to disagree is inconsistent with my participation in the course(s) and may be regarded as gross misconduct leading to my immediate exclusion; and that in any such event my tuition fees will not be refunded.
I further understand that this declaration applies equally to all students and members of the faculty, regardless of their gender, ethnicity or other background and regardless of any actual or pretended harm supposed to have been caused by adherence to the principles set out above.
Would they stick to it? The staff would be on their side. What really needs to happen is to close all “universities” save the ones with rigorous academic credentials, and get the ensuing half a million “students” a year to work, thus saving the need for endless immigrants.
Politicians, judges, military all take a sacred oath: it has not stopped them. Why? As John Adams once said “Our government was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to any other.” It is akin to passing gun control laws, you disarm law abiding citizens and are left only with armed criminals providing a worse problem rather than a solution to violent crime.
That’s why my declaration is intended to be self-policing. You can’t complain, for example, if you find your course distressing because you signed up for it on that understanding and the sanction for attempting to shut down debate is that you yourself are shut down.
When someone disagrees violently, that ordinarily means while employing physical force — like the Antifa thugs or BLM — so your formula comes across as self-defeating. But perhaps you meant to use a word like “vehemently”, or better yet, “profoundly”, “deeply”.
Thanks. Any one of your three suggestions would be an improvement.
An excellent point!
This is excellent, and I am already considering adopting a variation of it for my courses. I do wonder, though, if there is ever a line to be drawn. For example, I do not think that I, the great-nephew of seven people gassed at Auschwitz, could adhere to this in the face of neo-Nazis coming to campus. I have no answers here, just questions.
Our universities teach White students that they are immoral and contemptible if they don’t support the White Genocide that’s being carried out by massive third-world immigration and FORCED assimilation i.e diversity for EVERY White country and ONLY White countries.
Their professors never tell them, “White self-hatred is SICK!!!“
Those professors claim to be anti-racist. What they are is anti-White.
Anti-racist is a code word for anti-White.
More than that it is anti-God. Ask any black, brown, red, yellow parent who’s child is being subjected to the LBGT+ indoctrination in secrecy behind their backs. Their definition of “racism” extends beyond skin color to anyone who disagrees with the narrative of the “collective”: you must assimilate or you will be destroyed, that is the message. And fear is the tool (opposite of faith).
I read your comment and could not but help be reminded of the Borg. “We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile!“
Someone’s going to have a heavy lift convincing me the idiots holding the sign deserve an elite education. Everyone I see wearing masks outdoors automatically gets placed in the numbskull column.
There certainly is an interestingly strong correlation between wokeness and continuity masking.
I don’t question what is written in this article. However it doesn’t even mention Harvard’s (and other colleges’) racial bias in their admissions policy.
A chance for Supremes to end Harvard’s Asian discrimination (nypost.com)
Harvard’s previous defence for its racism was that Asians have less ‘personality’ than other races!
Indeed. Absolutely disgusting. A more racist statement is hard to imagine. Yet they get away with it.
“However, far from protesting that the US was a “structurally racist” society oppressive to supposedly marginalised communities, the students I met were eager to be of service to their country, culture, and society at large.”
Well, that’s unfortunate. Not that is your fault or the university’s fault. But it isn’t something to be pleased about. We shouldn’t want a world where there are leftwing universities and rightwing universities, woke universities and anti-woke universities.
At the ideal university, some of the students would believe the US was a racist society. And others would not. And they would freely debate it.
It should not be a question of cancelling those who think the US is racist or enforcing patriotism. Rather it is a question of facilitating free speech and allowing both left and right to have their say without either side trying to cancel the other.
Eager to learn the truth, rather than silencing debate, is what I took from the context of what she was saying. Gotta be careful about “cherry picking” pieces and parts from the entirety of the content, right?
Alas, your class was a 11-person group. Good beginning but a lot of work ahead !
Yes, but nice to hear a story of hope!
As Solzhenitsyn said, “The line between good and evil goes through every human heart.” One man with faith makes a majority, if you believe. That is what the fear mongers know, the danger for them is that the Truth and the Light will extinguish the darkness. But courage & leadership by those with faith (like the author of this article) are required!
New and better Veritas comes from debate… which originally meant beating thoroughly. So one cannot throw a light, lux, let alone establish veritas without a modicum of mental violence. New and better truth is always an aggression against the established mental… let alone financial or economic… order. This is why, historically speaking, most of humanity’s top thinkers blossomed in only a few places and times… And yet found themselves to be the object of violence, often fatal, at a rate much greater than the average population.
New truth, better veritas, always contradict the established order, this is what deep and genuine novelty does to minds.
Instead, plutocratic universities, aka legacies universities, teach the established order, and how to get inserted within. Enough money and effort is deployed by students and, or their families to attend elite universities, so as to ensure that students have the appropriate mentality of, and for, plutocratic insertion. Thus rebellion within is unlikely. Wokism has become a purity test of dedication to the fake truth of the established order. Exhibiting enough wokism demonstrates that one is eager, and one can display enough hypocrisy and polish, to rule the gullible masses… and thus join the master class.
Theories adverse to the established order are adverse to the plutocratic universities’ sponsors, thus will be discouraged by administrators and teaching staff. Whereas theories which make no sense or are deeply regressive are friends of the established order, and will be encouraged.
This will go on until, and if, the established order is wiped out by a tsunami of veritas… or then total civilizational collapse… something easily engineered with nukes… Harvard did play an important role in establishing Yeltsin’s Russia… which then installed Vlad, modulo a genocidal war in Chechnya… It all fits together nicely.
Wokism is greatly fake, but so has been the fight against the pollution crisis (in particular the CO2 crisis, aka global heating), or, for that matter the taxation schemes which have only ensured ever greater power and wealth inequality… A fake and silly universe, such as wokism, will often hide another, much more dangerous, such as increasing feudalism.
These institutions have been built by, and for, the aristocrat class. When they were founded, education itself was an exercise only for the wealthiest. Even as education became more democratic, these institutions retained their aristocratic character, placing themselves above other institutions in the same manner aristocrats have always placed themselves above commoners. They retained their rich clientele over decades and centuries, fostering generation after generation of world leaders, business tycoons, and supposed luminary intellectuals. To say they are entrenched in the power structure of the modern world would be a vast understatement. I doubt anyone can fell them without first felling the aristocrats that sustain them, but if those aristocrats change their tune, maybe because they fear popular revolution and complete destruction, their institutions will follow them like the obedient dogs they are.
Harvard and Yale were founded to educate clergy. The religion has definitely changed, and the desire for literate clergy has disappeared, but the function continues in a degraded fashion. Woke apostles are the new goal.
You make a good point. I had forgotten the technical circumstances of their early origins. Of course, the Puritans who founded these institutions were the closest thing to an aristocratic class America had at the time. Then and now, the aristocrats were a bunch of religious nuts who were determined to convert the world to their one true faith and make America into a ‘shining city upon a hill’.
I doubt the average middle aged reader of UnHerd will have much impact on the way this plays out. We may tend to agree with each other that the traditional ideal of a university should be x, y and z but it is the opinions of Gen Z students which matter.
What I think would be a mistake, however, is to assume that that the attitudes of the students of next five years will remain fixed, “woke”, “critical” and progressive as at present. They may have radically new ways of seeing society. In the 1960s – the last period with as dramatic a shift in values – the initial wave of unrest, which drew on preexisting ideas, was soon overtaken by assorted new ideals: the New Left, Hippy Communes and Consciousness enhanced by LSD, etc. Instead of just adopting the ideas of some of their radical professors they started coming up with their own. I have no idea what comes next but I suspect it will be as different from current “critical” patterns as it is from our own way of thinking.
But we are just bystanders. I suspect UnHerd needs more insightful reports from correspondents for teenage and student attitudes and less repetitions of our generation’s liberal consensus. I totally agree with the points everyone is making but I fear we are largely irrelevant in a philosophical debate about the ideal future university. Perhaps we should focus our efforts instead on reforming the internet to encourage constructive debate but be fatalistic about the conclusions Gen Z and their successors draw from those debates.
By your thinking the change in values is driven by normal teenage non-conformity. I suspect however it is the result of a concerted neo marxist movement, perhaps originating in silicon valley.
I take your point but, to be a little clearer, I would stress equally four factors
1) a normal periodic outbreak of “teenage non conformity”
2) the psychological impact of social media on teenagers leading to spontaneous demands by “snowflake” students for safe spaces, trigger warnings, etc from c. 2014
3) the subsequent adoption by Gen Z student activists of the theories that had been circulating in cultural, gender, etc studies since the1990s i.e. a mashup of critical theory and social constructivism leading to Critical Race Theory, Queer theory, etc. I am not sure if, strictly speaking, these are “neo marxist” but they certainly share many features.
4) the self contained ideological bubbles that amplify and reinforce the viewpoints of e.g. woke / critical “SJWs” into adulthood (and are caused by social media algorithms designed to increase “engagement”).
“I am not sure if, strictly speaking, these are “neo marxist” but they certainly share many features.” — I thought this until I started studying where Marx/Lenin, Mao, etc., were coming from, and the shared approaches to their revolutions. Not that it matters really, since the details of that history are not taught in primary school, nor mainstream university history; showing that woke grew from those roots may be of limited utility.
I’ve been teaching for about four decades in both Psychology and Biology departments. I think that one of the central problems is that a large proportion of academics are not, themselves, broadly educated, sincerely curious, or critical thinkers. This may just be the nature of human beings. As a Biological Psychologist and historian of science, I think that we often overestimate the cognitive capacities of people. I do not think most are capable of the in-depth, creative, open-mindedness that should be the foundation of academia. I’m not pessimistic. I think I’m just realistic.
Tellingly, here’s something no one in academia has ever said to me in my 30+ years of teaching: “That’s really an interesting idea. Tell me more about what you think.” The standard academic response to a new idea or different point of view is simply to contradict or dismiss it. Differing opinions make insecure people defensive and uncomfortable. Best to surround yourself with people who agree with you. It’s much more cozy.
FR Prete
Two brilliant young family members, one in college and the other graduated were both let down by college. They’d hoped to find stimulating discussions with some students who had interests like their own. This never happened, though the second one has had a few good conversations with his profs, somewhat randomly. This is a social time of life, but how to make it work? These folks are out there, but we need new places where they can happen, not online but in person.
I have been trying to name the wokeist movement for some time. I have come to a few conclusions: it is inspired by Marxism, in that it looks at hierarchies of power, but not as generated under classic capitalism but rather under contemporary imperialism, where the 1st world elite (mainly white, western and (manly) men) rules the rest (so-called BOPOC, feminine and queer). It seems to have taken hold in academia in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet bloc, where they abandoned hope in socialist, working class led revolution and instead looked to a kind of coaliton of oppressed minorities to take over and bring some kind of socio-economic equity (under a more ‘just’ corporate capitalism presumably). The Social Justice Warriors who have assumed leadership of this movement seem to be liberal arts graduates by and large, i.e. middle class intellectuals. They don’t seek to overthrow capitalism but rather join it or at least get lucrative grants or managerial positions, thereby ending socio-economic inequality, at least for themselves, in the name of righting historical injustices. So, really a form of perverted civil rights movement where designated identities are elevated above the rest and the most attention seeking individual rules over the collective.
Universities have degenerated into liberal left exclusion zones. In the UK 80% of faculty are left of centre, with those who are centre and right of centre forced to self censor to survive. In a state funded system, where the vast majority of voters are solidly more conservative on social issues, surely this must not persist? Government must restore the balance.
Two examples and a personal anecdote do not a summer make.
Hi, I was at UATX although not in your session. I just want to offer one insight that several students including myself raised about future prospects while we were there: scaling. As the number of people enrolled increase, the culture depends less on planning, statements, or even faculty, but instead evolves into something heavily driven by incentives (think tiktok, or lebanon for that matter). It’s hard to see the witches’ brew of detachment, careerism, and fanaticism in most student bodies separate from this.
I’m not sure if it’s typical for authors to respond to these comments, but getting a general discussion started on how this scaling effect will be guided would be great in any case.
Incentives? Do you have thoughts as to how incentives might be introduced? I did not get the tiktok or lebanon references at all. (I’m old.)
The more I see what has happened to universities, the more I applaud my son’s decision not to go to university.
“If universities once made promises to teach their undergraduates how to think, they now aim to teach them what to think.”
This is a common (and completely false) refrain.
Universities were originally created as seminaries. They were sponsored by monasteries or sometimes cathedrals. They absolutely taught “what to think”. The entire idea that you even CAN teach someone how to think without providing them any morally significant content to think about is absurd.
The problem isn’t that universities stopped teaching kids how to think. The problem is that they started teaching personally useless and socially destructive things to think about.
Calling self-aggrandizement and blind elite hypocrisy born of denial of the vicissitudes of life on earth is a crime against nature. Truth be known the best and brightest are not who they claim to be but the pampered and pernicious are.
Amen! So good, so refreshing, to know intelligent life still exists in a seemingly upside down world where as Orwell said we were headed: the opposite of what people say is what they mean. Thank you! And yes, when foundations rot from the inside out, they must be replaced. The time & energy attempting to repair it is not only wasted, it is sinful because it is an extension of “the rot within”.
“But the only way to get back to ‘advancing learning and perpetuating it to posterity’ is to found new universities.”
FUGPA
There is another way…
To the contrary, Harvard was founded as a college of Protestant relooks indoctrination. Learning and intellectual freedom has very little to do with it. Maybe the old Ivies have come full circle.
This optimistic report by Ayaan, based on a tiny sample size, does succeed in reminding us of what’s really epistemologically (and sociologically) at issue. If what people know is simply a re-externalization of everything they internalize from their environment, unmediated by any critical evaluation, then there is no defense against propaganda, and all that matters is the utilitarian value of whatever propaganda they end up consuming. If, on the other hand, people have an arm’s length relationship with the truth claims they encounter in life sufficient to be able to accept or reject those claims, then environmental influence, while doubtless still important, doesn’t qualify as an escape-proof information silo.
In the first instance, the sole point of reforming Harvard or any other institution of higher learning would be to substitute alternative, hopefully more benign propaganda for the propaganda currently being offered students. It’s only the second case, the one which presumes students come equipped with critical faculties of their own, whatever their formative environments happen to be, that offers some hope of weaning students from propaganda.
P.S. The question of the extent to which our beliefs are conditioned by environmental influence, or independent of it, is addressed by sociologist Margaret Archer in her book Being Human: the Problem of Agency (Cambridge, 2000). As a retired reference librarian I can recommend this book without reservation to anyone who missed it.
Could someone help a badly-educated Yank with the reference to Barnham, a first name and perhaps a title that he or she authored. Thank you.
Appears what progressives fear most is that racism become negligible.
The comments were every bit as good as the article. Thank you all. Would anyone like to comment on how hollywoods obsession with distopian futures is creating an assumed or inevitable future to help support the global climate narrative and inability for anything but a single authoritarian structure to save the world?
I find it interesting that one of the leading lights of the UK’s Communist Party Historian Group, Donna Torr, stated in 1938 that her intention was to (paraphrasing) ‘breed new historians, awaken then train them’.
Eminent Historians E P Thompson, Raphael Samuel, Christopher Hill and many others all joined the Group, most of whom went on to occupy chairs at major Universities, the latter being appointed as Master of Balliol College, Oxford.
Most, but not all, left the Communist Party after the Soviet invasion of Hungary but remained unashamedly Marxists. All had the ability to shape the academic agenda being taught to students.
I have no doubt that they truly believed in their Marxist cause at the time, believing it best for humankind, so took the opportunity to introduce ‘a new way of thinking’ to many young students that passed over their thresholds.
As we are now experiencing their 3rd/4th generation, I wonder if they would they be proud or horrified at what’s happening on campus?
Regarding the issue of upvotes and downvotes, perhaps UnHerd could eliminate the downvote option altogether. My mother used to say, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Wouldn’t it be enough to know a comment didn’t receive any upvotes or only received a few upvotes as an indicator the argument or comment did not persuade fellow readers. Readers who strongly disagree with a comment will still have the option to post a response.
Downvoted Just to be funny.
But you make a reasonable suggestion and upvote-only systems do seem to work elsewhere. OTOH and to keep the discussion on point, it also seems a little bit of a snowflake move, similar to handing out participation trophies because “self-esteem”. In the age of wokeness, I find I have become “reactionarily” suspect of anything even vaguely sniffing of the potential catering to a “triggerable” class.
Someone a few comments above wondered if holocaust grandchildren could deal with Neo-Nazis coming to speak on campus. The answer of course is that they would have to. That’s how it works in a free society.
As much as I have an appetite to discuss the failure of our present universities to encourage or instruct students in the skills of critical thinking and logical argument, I find this brief essay to be very thin gruel. The author presents no more than anecdotal historical and recent evidence toward the politically-liberal bias in higher education, followed by her own anectdotal experience from interacting with 11 students for one week.
I have no objection against the general idea that critical thinking and logical argument are no longer taught in most universities, but I don’t believe the author’s experience will convince anyone else who is not already of the same mind.
“.. but I don’t believe the author’s experience will convince anyone else who is not already of the same mind”
Perhaps you are not so curious after all.
“The author presents no more than anecdotal historical and recent evidence toward the politically-liberal bias in higher education, followed by her own anectdotal experience from interacting with 11 students for one week.”
I think your second use of the word anecdote is right, but not the first, because the author gave examples, not anecdotes, and she knows that her readers know of many other similar examples.
Anyway, this is a very short piece of writing that contrasts what the older universities are doing compared to this new one, and how encouraging she found the students’ attitudes. It’s not a PhD thesis.
The idea of education is to teach you to research with an open mind and think.
In this case a bit of research would confirm the brief essay – what’s the mix of university educators in terms of their political support, what’s the typical profile of people who are “excluded”, what are the “acceptable” principles imposed on universities these days.
The picture that emerges is consistently gloomy.
I really do NOT understand the downvotes. This commenter has made a valid point. One may agree with it or not, but wanting to shut it down? It does seem to me one follows the Harvard way here. After all this article is indeed only a few hundred words long and rather heavy in the anecdotes. I too was expecting something more interesting from Ayaan having read many of her other pieces, here and elsewhere.
Where do you get the idea from that anyone wishes to “shut down” the comment by Curious Person? I believe you’re falling into the very woke trap of assuming criticism to be something that it’s not! It’s the very essence of critical thinking to disagree, and that’s all the responses to CP have done, quite validly.
As for the short essay (and that’s all it is, not a dissertation) the intention is surely to provide a point, or points, for further discussion. Ali has succeeded, and all voices are being heard!
I found the downvotes uncalled for. He didn’t say anything offensive or even controversial. S/He simply pointed out this article is very light in content. What is the downvote for?
Becaused it is just post-WOKE and propagandist and vacuous.
I tend to agree but I suppose a downvote can just be seen as a signal that someone disagrees with what one is saying. I get lots of downvotes generally but I don’t let it worry me and, in and of itself, I don’t regard a downvote as an attempt to shut me down. I am less enamoured of ad hominem comments by people which do seem to be attempts to bully someone into silence. polidori redux is the only person here who appears perhaps to have strayed into this territory with the comment “perhaps you are not so curious after all” and even that is fairly mild stuff (and apologies from me to polidori redux if it was intended more as a witticism than a criticism).
Perhaps the reader is short of time to make a written response? For instance, they could be on a lunch break, or reading on a train journey nearing their destination?
The downvote (or indeed, upvote – why not complain about that?) is a perfectly valid way of expressing disagreement/agreement, and it’s not ‘confrontational’ as your response seems to suggest. I should know, i’m often downvoted, and accept it as part and parcel of lively debate.
Suggesting the article is “light in content” is also to assume that UnHerd articles are intended to have the kind of rigour that one would expect in a fully-extrapolated academic paper. It seems a perfectly fine means of expression for those us who’re bored with the MSM and which enables commentary which is often as enlightening as the original piece.
I agree – too many Unherders attempt to enforce their own orthodoxy through group-think downvotes.
Personally I upvote answers when I think they are well argued, regardless of whether I agree with the point or not.
I will very ocassionally give a downvote to someone rude or engaging in ad hominem attacks.
But many unherders seem to think that downvoting something is equivalent to refuting it. And they tend to downvote things that grate with their assumptions about the world, rather than consider whether the point is well argued.
You may be right – I don’t read enough comments to make a guess one way or the other. Perhaps the issue is that we cannot know what they are thinking since the voting is binary – up or down. I would have assumed a down vote simply means ‘I disagree’. Speaking for myself, I disagreed with the comment criticising the article since it was clear that the article was not attempting to be a dissertation. I didn’t down-vote it either though.
Surely a down-vote simply signals disagreement. The contributor’s post isn’t removed or ‘cancelled’ is it?
Downvotes indicate disagreement and disapproval, just as upvotes indicate agreement and approval. Both are feedback. Downvotes are not a call for censoring the comment. They are a shortcut for people who don’t want to write a rebuttal.
‘Anecdote’ – when you wish to denigrate.
‘First hand experience’ – what I read.
Thank you. This point needed to be made.
Ayaan fanboys
Why do downvotes mean ‘shutting down’? As someone regularly downvoted – a lot – I thought they just meant that people really disagreed. A simple expression of opinion. Now I may find it regrettable that people on this forum do not agree with my opinion on Donald Trump or vaccine mandates – and downvote even my well-argued posts – but I can hardly be upset about it.
The writer’s “lived experience” in Somalia, the Netherlands and the US provides ample anectdotal and historical evidence to support her observation that free thought and speech can be repressed under the guise of either progressivism or religious autocracy. Even a cursory look at her writings supports this.
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A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. Her efforts may be small, and certainly not enough to counteract the indoctrination agenda of the education establishment that has been going on for decades, but at least the author is doing something rather than just complaining on the internet.