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May 28, 2021 - 10:35am
Trust in universities has nosedived in America since 2015 among Republican voters, and the Right-wing media’s focus on the excesses of Left-modernist ideology on campus — from diversity statements to activist dismissal campaigns to no-platformings — is arguably a major reason. A growing number of red states are now legislating to reform or cut the budgets of their state universities.
Meawhile, the progressive Left is continuing to stick its fingers in its ears, doubling down on the narrative that this is a Right-wing moral panic designed to divide and conquer the electorate, while denying the overwhelming reality of Left-wing domination on campus. “The right is not underrepresented in higher education; in fact, the opposite is true,” is the astounding claim made by Asheesh Kapur Siddique in Teen Vogue this week. “The modern American university,’ he claims, “is a Right-wing institution”!
He baldly asserts that the political preferences of academics have “little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms.” While survey evidence suggests academics are generally fair in class, their politics most certainly does shape what research questions they ask, the range of answers they report, the orthodoxies they uphold, and the classes they offer to teach. How else can we explain the surge in academic output on race and gender since the late 1980s, and especially since 2015?
Siddique’s gambit involves redefining the university as its top layers, rather than its faculty or students. The campus, we are told, is actually shaped by trustees from the corporate world whose Right-wing outlook informs hiring decisions. ‘Right’ here is redefined in 1980s terms to mean capitalist while the anti-white male cultural radicalism that encompasses ‘woke’ corporate America escapes her materialist definition of ‘Left’. Eschewing systematic evidence, Siddique’s one data point is the denial of tenure to Nikole Hannah Jones, author of the New York Times’ much-criticised 1619 Project.
University managers shouldn’t have meddled with the Jones decision and do sometimes exercise influence. Figures from the business world do sit on boards of trustees. Yet managerialism is more of a problem in lower-ranked, less influential, universities. Moreover, academics often move into university administration, where they take key operational decisions. Departments usually determine who gets hired even if a management rep has a seat at the table. All a far cry from the corporate world.
Meanwhile, teaching and research in social science and humanities subjects leans heavily Left. The university sector’s failure to increase viewpoint diversity or control progressive authoritarianism is eroding trust in universities and fuelling populist resentment. The sooner universities and other elite cultural institutions get their head out of the sand the better their chance of instituting the reforms that are needed to dampen a growing and justifiable backlash.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Led to a Cultural Revolution (Forum Press, 4 July).
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SubscribeThe universities are educationally worthless. If anyone thinks they are right-wing bastions, that person must be so far to the left they’re not visible without an astronomy grade telescope.
Once you get as far to the left as the so-called “woke”, everything looks “right wing” – reason, freedom, conscience, facts and Dame Nature herself. And that is the state of mind which produces “Red Guards” and “Cultural Revolutions”.
Well we know that and the fact is that all western universities have been left-wing since the 1950s/60s, although they now combine this with an insatiable lust for money.
The Government backed Student Loans have been the worst thing ever done to education! That students could be extorted with no risk to the school as the loan was guaranteed – meant more price inflation than in any other industry. No worry about students defaulting, no need for credit reports, no need to worry that they were borrowing to take subjects they would not make money at, no need to keep costs down by market pressures…INSANE! Then only the top 20% are actually worth educating at university, but everyone told they must go, just borrow the money, here it is – and thus grade inflation, dumbing down classes, inventing fake degrees for lazy and poor students.
It is like if the Government guaranteed new car loans to all 18 year olds. No credit, no job, no job prospects? No problem, here are the keys, have fun, payments begin in 4 years.
And then everyone leaving these VASTLY inflated universities are life long DEBT SLAVES. Almost no one at 18 is worldly and Wise enough to make such finantial decisions! They never even had a job mostly. They do not know to study with debt only for subjects which pay well….. it all is insane. How can they set out to save enough to buy a house, to have a family, if they begin life in Debt! It is Criminal, what the Gov has done to the people with guaranteed Student Loans!
And then to make it worse they impose draconian fines for late payment etc so the poor(er) student ends up paying far more for that “education” than they should ever have had to- AND the corrupt unis dumbed down their courses to get max bums on seats. Tragic.
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PS Frasier, like the guy speaking of the school he took his daughter out of in Freddie’s interview, how they are all afraid to speak as they will be banned…. I am on Unherd’s watch list, my Social-Media-Credit-Score has gone negative and I am always sent to ‘Awaiting For Approval’ now…I have been given my warning I suppose.
And you are an oldish guy I think – do you remember ‘The Furry Freak Brothers’ and the cat which spun off from them, ‘Fat Freddie’s Cat’ 1970s Comics of drugs, stoners, hippies, and drugged out Red-Necks?
Ah the Freak Brothers – they did a simply fantastic parody of Carlos Castaneda.
And there’s a line in another one of them, where the very liberal one has a load of babies (his girlfriend refuses to have the babies so he does it himself) mini copies of himself, that begin noisily demanding their ‘rights’, to which his response is to take a spade to them, blade first, yelling
‘Taste the stainless blade of liberalism, you arrogant bunch of stalinists’
Oh that liberals these days had that kind of steel 🙂
You have to wonder when people are going to stop paying vast sums every year for tutiion, plus whatever rent and food comes to, to listen to utter crap for several years in return for a piece of paper that often as not merely gets you a job at Starbucks.
The various governments of the west would be better off guaranteeing everyone at age 18 a loan of what the first year of university would have cost, telling them they will need to pay it back regardless of what they earn in the future, but meantime, go out into the world and learn something.
It’d cost the taxpayer less, and the youngsters would learn more.
Universities are the new “racket” £27k+ for a piece of paper worth nothing incremental to your expected earnings. £600k pa to the Vice Chancellor. One day it will become apparent.
It’s all to clear to those of us who work in University STEM research labs, we take the top 1% of the top 1% of graduates world wide to interview for selection to undertake a PhD, very very few are from the UK.
And even fewer from the USA.
Can’t argue with this one! “Universities are actually Right-Wing” is so dishonest it feels like gaslighting. And often the corporate ‘capitalist’ bureaucracy is the biggest enforcer of Wokeism, more than the radical students & staff.
Teen Vogue, the same publication that fired its incoming editor over ten year old tweets. The same publication that told young girls about the joys of a n a l $ex. I generally put the message before the messenger, but that’s hard to do here, given this messenger’s rather sorry track record of being disconnected from reality.
What planet do you have to be on, or what drugs do you have to take, to think universities are right-wing?
Wakanda.
New York has thought up a great way to raise money-sell drugs. They are attracting young ( mom & dad don’t let us do this at home) types ,so maybe they write for Teen Vogue?
Asheesh Kapur Siddique would say that wouldn’t he, a graduate of Princeton who is writing a book “about the relationship between archival and linguistic knowledge in the early modern British empire”
Tiresome in the extreme.
Other than Liberty Univ and maybe Hillsdale College (libertarian), and a few other religious universities (although most of these, e.g. Notre Dame are seriously left wing on social issues), the US university system is thoroughly ‘progressive’ (not to be confused with those actually producing progress).
There are a few other notorious anti-liberal examples, though they generally feature individual departments like “the Chicago School” and George Mason University’s Economics department, along with the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. Other “Public Choice” pockets include departments at Florida State University, Washington University (St. Louis), Montana State University, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Rochester.
It’s probably fair to say that the institutions themselves are inherently conservative in most ways, though the ideas held by faculty members on balance are decidedly NOT conservative in most ways. A weirdly contested space, really.
George Mason Econ department is conservative. Mercatus Center produces some good research.
Defund the universities! The useless idiots are already outnumbering the useful idiots.
People can stop giving them donations-a few letters from the super rich saying they have changed their minds about leaving them anything in their wills because of -whatever stupidity-might be a good idea.
Thank you for challenging the nonsense regularly spewed by the radical left authors on Teen Vogue. The hypocrisy of their articles next to the products they hawk is revealing.
The rag is owned by the Newhouse family who controls media empire Advance Publications. It is amazing to consider if their authors ever get their way of converting the US to a Communist Utopia. The history of Communist authoritarians is remarkably consistent: the first people rounded up will be the Newhouse family as not only rich, but controlling media outlets and being Jewish.
Why in the world would they be promoting their own demise?
Sir,
Why is everything that is wrong or disappointing in the world my fault?
Surely as everyone is complaining, as a white guy in my late 60’s Can I claim racist/Sexist/ageist persecution and demand reparations?
You are trying to be logical-this is evidence of white privelege-so of course everything is your fault. They take all credit cards if you want to start paying off your reparations bill-I think someone said they thought $ 300 trillion sounded about right.
Because if it isn’t your fault it is their fault, and the greatest cognitive bias known to man is the inability to see fault in oneself.
Most people would rather fight to the death than see they are in the wrong.
People who read the charter of Hamas and don’t wonder why so few Jews support it still seem surprised that whites who read some of the course descriptions published by our prestige universities are increasingly leery of funding them anymore.
It is probably time for a new “Dissolution of the Monasteries” to be applied to academia, assuming we can find a government that actually cares about the nation.
If one defines the essence of Leftism as anti-Capitalistic, with shared ownership and governance by “labor,” then I suppose American universities are not Leftist. Siddique is basically calling for communism.
American universities are very much to the Left because their educational product is 99% to the Left. What the hell difference does it make if they don’t pay their faculty fairly? That just shows that those in charge are hypocrites.
US universities do have a very liberal-bent, but if you have taught your children to think for themselves, and to question authority, they won’t be hapless patsies when they show up for college. Mine were only too happy to share with me the propaganda put out by their universities, which they found amusing, even at the age of 18. You want your kids to get what’s good about their university without being indoctrinated in woke ideas that won’t help them build successful lives.
Teen Vogue! The clue’s in the name.
Siddique is right about the boards’ members and wrong about them being right wing. Right wing, left wing, these are meaningless in such rarified circles. The boards are made of the very wealthy. They have a rational interest in appearing progressive and in hampering the rise of the merely wealthy (as opposed to very wealthy). It is entirely rational as it makes them look good and also lowers competition to their own dominance.
In fact, Left/Right is totally meaningless. Right-Wing is Marx’s imaginary enemy. It doesn’t exist. He wanted the workers to revolt in England, and when they didn’t he looked for a reason. It couldn’t be his theory because that was perfect. So if right-wing means anything then it’s all the non Marxists of this world – Us, the vast majority. We are not organised, don’t have an ideology, and are reasonable. We are the opposite of Marxists in every respect.
The word capitalism always makes me wince, especially when used by free-market believers. This was a word that was popularized by Marxists looking to prop up an opposing ideology so they could throw their ire at it. There is no need for a theory or ideology for free markets. It is what happens naturally when thieves and usurpers are kept at bay.
I don’t have to live through much more of this. I do, however, believe in reincarnation, and should I, by the grace of God, reincarnate at some point in the future, then I expect to be taught, in history lessons, about the disintegration and collapse of the world we see around us.
We seem to be entering a new age of unreason, and unreason cannot cohere, it must lead to disintegration across all spheres of human activity.
I scraped the Federal Election Commission website for all donations made to Presidential candidates from September 2015 to April 2016 (the primary season), by employees of American universities with more than 5,000 undergrads and median entrance SATs of more than 1200. That is, all the major top schools.
92% of the donations were to Democrats: 65% to Clinton, 25% to Sanders, 2% to minor candidates. All sixteen Republicans, including eight governors and five senators, divided the remaining 8%. (Donald Trump received 0.5%.)
Interesting data, thanks!
[T]heir politics most certainly does shape what research questions they ask, the range of answers they report, the orthodoxies they uphold, and the classes they offer to teach.
Gone unmentioned is the fact that the core curriculum itself is designed and mandated by the entire faculty. Here in the States, a STEM department is usually in charge of its requirements for majors/minors as is a STEM college.
But most universities have “university core” requirements that mandate students be exposed to a variety of disciplines, usually including “diversity requirements”. Such “core” courses are usually taught by adjunct lecturers whose continued employment depends on their toeing the political line in their departments. As the Humanities and Social Sciences have degenerated, the degeneration is most evident in these required “core”courses.
The “core” requirements are an example of a good idea gone all bad. The blame for this rests solely on the mature, tenured faculty who have shown little interest in reining in the “wokeness” in their departments, colleges, and universities nor in teaching the “core” courses to the masses.
The only saving virtue of all this “progressiveness” in universities is the fact that most students recognize “core” requirements as something that simply has to be done, opt for the easiest courses, and ignore what is taught. A waste of money, but, in the end, no harm done.
You might be on to something. In my experience wokeism is usually taught by teachers who don’t know their subject-matter well and like riling up students.
Mr. Dorsley–
…taught by teachers who don’t know their subject-matter well and like riling up students.
In my experience here in the states, this is especially true with high school and middle school teachers. Because their training in particular subjects is limited and because of the demands on their professional time, those teachers usually do not have a deep, broad interest or knowledge in their subjects. (This is probably also true of university professors whose knowledge in very narrow and restricted to a small part of their disciplines.)
To me, this is the problem with the brouhaha about teaching critical race theory in schools and universities. Those who would teach it do not KNOW it. They can only teach what they are told ,and they are told only one side.
Of course, CRT should be taught and discussed in universities because it is an interesting and, perhaps, important idea. But it is not “gospel” and the intellectual opposition to it is equally important. To do this, the teacher must know the pros and cons and must provide the time for discussion. This is incredibly difficult to do in high school and middle school. CRT is one of MANY ideas that should never be discussed by those who really are ignorant of the entire argument.
It’s probably fair to say that the institutions themselves are inherently conservative in most ways, though the ideas held by faculty members on balance are decidedly NOT conservative in most ways. A weirdly contested space, really.
There are a few notorious anti-liberal examples among faculty, though they generally feature individual departments like “the Chicago School” and George Mason University’s Economics department, along with the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University. Other “Public Choice” pockets include departments at Florida State University, Washington University (St. Louis), Montana State University, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of Rochester.
The anti capitalist liberal left seek work in the public sector and now their intolerant ideology dominate and control it to promote their increasingly extreme political agenda, particularly the publics education system,as reported and oppossed in every free democracy on west they operate in
The public has every right and reason to return public education and institurions to secular democratic public control and to be operated in the interests of the public,not the narrow singular
ideological agenda of the marxist progressive cult who exploited and turned into a left liberal woke political tool.
Non left govts are taking measures to protect basic human rights on campuses systemically violated by the intolerant tyrannical liberal left self apponited overlords, and the general uprising and opposition to the progressive tyrannical control is rising.
I do not underedtimate the time and effort it will take to remove the left control and tyranny from our public education systems, but it should be priority , even just to spare children the forced indocrination of CRT to hate themselves…because of the color of their skin.
It’s a funny world when Coca Cola and Lockheed Martin are left-wing companies.
Blind and deaf, They are NOT left-wing; they just decided to zealously act as if they were left-wing.
Why?
$$$
This $60,000-a-year Liberal Arts College is firmly to the left of center. Which is not the worst of it. But the College has actually declared open season an anyone, teacher, staff or even housekeeping, who fails to adhere to the party line completely.
One result: four trustees, who have given millions to this institution, have recently resigned. A loss. But loudly proclaimed as a”victory” by the mob.
What’s ironic is that people living in most authoritarian dictatorial countries happened to be the most patriotic and satisfied ones compared to their western counterparts.