From the Martin Center, there is a new piece from two authors who work at right-wing think tanks, Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute, and Andy Smarick of the Manhattan Institute, on what ails Public Policy schools in American universities.
The "caricatured understanding of the right" stuff reminds me of Jonathan Haidt. Before he reinvented himself as an expert on teenagers, his main shtick was as a concern troll. explaining to liberals that their perception of conservatives as racist, misogynist and fascists was totally wrong. Actually, Haidt claimed, they valued purity and obedience to legitimate authority. We saw how that turned out when they wll turned to Trump
Shtick is 100% the right word for what this guy does. It's so embarrassing, he's *that* guy, someone has to be him, there's a thing it's like to be Jonathan Haidt.
I'd disagree pretty strongly with this framing, Mr. Quiggin. Haidt wrote "The Righteous Mind" prior to the MAGA era and at the time GOP actors and voters were far more closely oriented towards actual conservative ideas and policies.
Haidt was concerned with moral response patterns most common among those self-identifying as liberals and conservatives. He found that for conservatives as a group, feelings of disgust (negative) and loyalty to authority (positive) generally had much greater salience than for liberals, but while that could explain why conservatives might be more susceptible to extreme positions it did not mean they would adopt them, since they were also strongly motivated by standards such as fairness and caring, as were liberals.
MAGA has been exceptionally good at holding a large number of GOP voters through appeals to feelings of disgust (major elements of xenophobia and anti-gay anti-trans responses) and in attracting former working class Democratic voters and some minority members (chiefly male) whose commitments to caring and fairness responses were weak. (MAGA also turns fairness on its head by treating DEI as displacing segregation-era unfairness.) This has more than made up (in voting terms) for an exodus of intellectual conservatives from the MAGAfied GOP (people like George Will, Bill Kristol, JM Luttig, etc.). It is the latter group that relates to what public policy schools mean by "conservative."
But Haidt's central point was that liberals misunderstood 'conservatives". As it turns out, liberals understood conservatives (or Republicans) better than conservatives undersood themselves. And that's true of the majority of conservative intellectuals who have embraced Trump. Only handful have broken with the Republican party
I take your point, but I think the ranks of Never Trumpers is much larger than you suggest. I also think Haidt in 2013 would have readily agreed that people who felt emotionally aligned with conservatism were far more likely to be led towards authoritarianism and fascism. But I believe his message was that if liberals understood conservatives in a more holistic way they would find means to build common ground. His basic goal always seemed to me to be anti-extremism rather than "conservatives are misunderstood good people." This is why he was a founder of the Better Angels movement.
Things have not worked out as he hoped. But I think a large part of the reason is that the Left has played into the hands of Trumpists who are expert at manipulating the disgust and loyalty responses that are widespread dispersed among conservatives. I live in a conservative area (just outside the liberal city where Professor Rushton taught). Many of my neighbors -- good people to my mind -- have been so animated into disgust by MAGA presentations of selected elements of the Left that when confronted with President Trump's egregious dishonesty and incompetence, they justify continued loyalty by pointing to the extremes of those elements as the sole alternative to MAGA.
"Faculty are not going to support an explicitly anti-intellectual movement." In fact they will, in the main, if it's coded progressive. The 1619 Project, just about everything written by Ibram Kendi, and thousands of other smaller-scale papers and claims that didn't withstand the slightest historical scrutiny or argumentative analysis were passed off as MacArthur-prize-level genius and their critics were dismissed as bigots. Trump and his cabinet were not in the habit of characterizing academia as the enemy until his second term, after not only the above, but also the exposure of wide swaths of academia as having succumbed to rank Jew-hatred and explicit anti-Westernism. The idea that academics had long been minding their business and reacted understandably when Trump attacked them first is the opposite of what happened. They had been demonizing conservatives for years, if not decades.
You don't dispute the authors' claim that "policy programs tilt far to the left. In many programs, the number of conservative faculty is negligible, with left-leaning faculty outnumbering their right-leaning counterparts at leading policy schools by 7-to-1." Instead you claim that their proposed solutions are unsatisfactory and the status quo is justifiable. If so, then there's no policy-based path to parity by your own premises. The conservatives, in that case, may as well try to destroy the universities. Hess and Smarick seem to want to avoid that outcome. A lot of voters don't. I happen to be one of them.
I think Professor Rushton's main point on this issue was that the curriculum was largely technocratic, and the political orientations of faculty members was not particularly relevant to the education provided.
I'm a liberal but I agree with you that in some fields, particularly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, the very strong tilt of faculty members towards liberalism has led programs to lose critical focus and endorse political-advocacy teaching and research. But the solution, I think, lies in rejecting, in general, political advocacy as an appropriate guide for teaching and research, not in either mandating that political advocacy be balanced or destroying universities. (I don't, however, mean to imply that advocacy itself is inappropriate, since there are many areas, such as the sciences, where advocacy may be an essential element of moving fields forward. I'm referring to partisan political advocacy -- and, yes, the line can be fuzzy, like most of social life.)
The problem is that there is evidently little appetite for such rejection on the part of the faculty. The recent spate of institutions declaring neutrality on any given topic was downstream of the collision between anti-racist activism and anti-Israel activism. The hour is late to be telling conservatives that the universities, for the most part, can be trusted, even if that's the case. The exceptions have been too numerous and glaring, and the recent admissions of need for reform (such as came out of Yale and Vanderbilt) are too weak.
Actually, I think there is considerable appetite for such a rejection on the part of the faculty, because many faculty members who felt too intimidated to voice reservations about advocacy academics are more willing to point to what the cost to academics has been (with no discernable gain in return) and to speak up. Perhaps you're correct that conservative (or MAGA) forces to blow up the university system can no longer be slowed, but in my view it is insanity not to make the attempt. I have no wish to defend the excesses of extreme progressivism on campus, but the US research university has been one of the greatest drivers of America's global profile since the post-War period. To hand that off to other countries out of anger at what is, in fact, an activist minority of faculty members seems like as counter-strategic a response as can be imagined (although I suppose the way the current administration has been dismantling other elements of national strength it at least shows consistency, foolish as it may be).
What MAGA has done and may yet do to the universities will be a footnote to what the demographic collapse and AI will do to them between now and the early 2040s. But those faculty had better speak up soon, and loudly. Belief in the value of a university education finally ticked up after years of precipitous decline, and maintaining it will depend on displays of intellectual fairness and introspection that a few universities are now just starting to cough up under duress.
I think the impact of AI over any span of more than three or four years is something we really can't predict now, but it certainly is worrisome. As a tool it's got terrific potential, but . . . well, you know as well as I. I think the demographic collapse is likely to affect hundreds of smaller, private colleges before its full impact reaches the most important research universities. If its scale is large, perhaps it will wake the US up to the importance of large-scale immigration to maintain the economy, social services, and basic institutions.
As someone who teaches political philosophy in a philosophy department (and has taught Nozick, Hayek, Friedman, as well as Adam Smith) this line is spot on: "State Republicans are now the party of Gradgrind." The imperative among students to take things that will get them a job, means the teaching of political philosophy/theory of any sort, not to mention history and literature etc is in massive decline. Generally people who teach theory of any sort in social science departments are in decline. If Friedman isn't taught it is because econ departments don't teach history of economic theory anymore - not because they don't want to, but the field is not seen as a hiring priority amidst declining budgets.
The "caricatured understanding of the right" stuff reminds me of Jonathan Haidt. Before he reinvented himself as an expert on teenagers, his main shtick was as a concern troll. explaining to liberals that their perception of conservatives as racist, misogynist and fascists was totally wrong. Actually, Haidt claimed, they valued purity and obedience to legitimate authority. We saw how that turned out when they wll turned to Trump
Shtick is 100% the right word for what this guy does. It's so embarrassing, he's *that* guy, someone has to be him, there's a thing it's like to be Jonathan Haidt.
Yes, I thought twice before using "shtick" but it fits him so well
I'd disagree pretty strongly with this framing, Mr. Quiggin. Haidt wrote "The Righteous Mind" prior to the MAGA era and at the time GOP actors and voters were far more closely oriented towards actual conservative ideas and policies.
Haidt was concerned with moral response patterns most common among those self-identifying as liberals and conservatives. He found that for conservatives as a group, feelings of disgust (negative) and loyalty to authority (positive) generally had much greater salience than for liberals, but while that could explain why conservatives might be more susceptible to extreme positions it did not mean they would adopt them, since they were also strongly motivated by standards such as fairness and caring, as were liberals.
MAGA has been exceptionally good at holding a large number of GOP voters through appeals to feelings of disgust (major elements of xenophobia and anti-gay anti-trans responses) and in attracting former working class Democratic voters and some minority members (chiefly male) whose commitments to caring and fairness responses were weak. (MAGA also turns fairness on its head by treating DEI as displacing segregation-era unfairness.) This has more than made up (in voting terms) for an exodus of intellectual conservatives from the MAGAfied GOP (people like George Will, Bill Kristol, JM Luttig, etc.). It is the latter group that relates to what public policy schools mean by "conservative."
But Haidt's central point was that liberals misunderstood 'conservatives". As it turns out, liberals understood conservatives (or Republicans) better than conservatives undersood themselves. And that's true of the majority of conservative intellectuals who have embraced Trump. Only handful have broken with the Republican party
I take your point, but I think the ranks of Never Trumpers is much larger than you suggest. I also think Haidt in 2013 would have readily agreed that people who felt emotionally aligned with conservatism were far more likely to be led towards authoritarianism and fascism. But I believe his message was that if liberals understood conservatives in a more holistic way they would find means to build common ground. His basic goal always seemed to me to be anti-extremism rather than "conservatives are misunderstood good people." This is why he was a founder of the Better Angels movement.
Things have not worked out as he hoped. But I think a large part of the reason is that the Left has played into the hands of Trumpists who are expert at manipulating the disgust and loyalty responses that are widespread dispersed among conservatives. I live in a conservative area (just outside the liberal city where Professor Rushton taught). Many of my neighbors -- good people to my mind -- have been so animated into disgust by MAGA presentations of selected elements of the Left that when confronted with President Trump's egregious dishonesty and incompetence, they justify continued loyalty by pointing to the extremes of those elements as the sole alternative to MAGA.
There is no frontier knowledge in civics that I can see.
Many fields go sleepy for a few decades, and frontier knowledge comes along when people least expect it :)
"Faculty are not going to support an explicitly anti-intellectual movement." In fact they will, in the main, if it's coded progressive. The 1619 Project, just about everything written by Ibram Kendi, and thousands of other smaller-scale papers and claims that didn't withstand the slightest historical scrutiny or argumentative analysis were passed off as MacArthur-prize-level genius and their critics were dismissed as bigots. Trump and his cabinet were not in the habit of characterizing academia as the enemy until his second term, after not only the above, but also the exposure of wide swaths of academia as having succumbed to rank Jew-hatred and explicit anti-Westernism. The idea that academics had long been minding their business and reacted understandably when Trump attacked them first is the opposite of what happened. They had been demonizing conservatives for years, if not decades.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/25/605668869/professor-who-called-barbara-bush-an-amazing-racist-will-keep-her-job
You don't dispute the authors' claim that "policy programs tilt far to the left. In many programs, the number of conservative faculty is negligible, with left-leaning faculty outnumbering their right-leaning counterparts at leading policy schools by 7-to-1." Instead you claim that their proposed solutions are unsatisfactory and the status quo is justifiable. If so, then there's no policy-based path to parity by your own premises. The conservatives, in that case, may as well try to destroy the universities. Hess and Smarick seem to want to avoid that outcome. A lot of voters don't. I happen to be one of them.
I think Professor Rushton's main point on this issue was that the curriculum was largely technocratic, and the political orientations of faculty members was not particularly relevant to the education provided.
I'm a liberal but I agree with you that in some fields, particularly in the humanities and some of the social sciences, the very strong tilt of faculty members towards liberalism has led programs to lose critical focus and endorse political-advocacy teaching and research. But the solution, I think, lies in rejecting, in general, political advocacy as an appropriate guide for teaching and research, not in either mandating that political advocacy be balanced or destroying universities. (I don't, however, mean to imply that advocacy itself is inappropriate, since there are many areas, such as the sciences, where advocacy may be an essential element of moving fields forward. I'm referring to partisan political advocacy -- and, yes, the line can be fuzzy, like most of social life.)
The problem is that there is evidently little appetite for such rejection on the part of the faculty. The recent spate of institutions declaring neutrality on any given topic was downstream of the collision between anti-racist activism and anti-Israel activism. The hour is late to be telling conservatives that the universities, for the most part, can be trusted, even if that's the case. The exceptions have been too numerous and glaring, and the recent admissions of need for reform (such as came out of Yale and Vanderbilt) are too weak.
Actually, I think there is considerable appetite for such a rejection on the part of the faculty, because many faculty members who felt too intimidated to voice reservations about advocacy academics are more willing to point to what the cost to academics has been (with no discernable gain in return) and to speak up. Perhaps you're correct that conservative (or MAGA) forces to blow up the university system can no longer be slowed, but in my view it is insanity not to make the attempt. I have no wish to defend the excesses of extreme progressivism on campus, but the US research university has been one of the greatest drivers of America's global profile since the post-War period. To hand that off to other countries out of anger at what is, in fact, an activist minority of faculty members seems like as counter-strategic a response as can be imagined (although I suppose the way the current administration has been dismantling other elements of national strength it at least shows consistency, foolish as it may be).
What MAGA has done and may yet do to the universities will be a footnote to what the demographic collapse and AI will do to them between now and the early 2040s. But those faculty had better speak up soon, and loudly. Belief in the value of a university education finally ticked up after years of precipitous decline, and maintaining it will depend on displays of intellectual fairness and introspection that a few universities are now just starting to cough up under duress.
I think the impact of AI over any span of more than three or four years is something we really can't predict now, but it certainly is worrisome. As a tool it's got terrific potential, but . . . well, you know as well as I. I think the demographic collapse is likely to affect hundreds of smaller, private colleges before its full impact reaches the most important research universities. If its scale is large, perhaps it will wake the US up to the importance of large-scale immigration to maintain the economy, social services, and basic institutions.
As someone who teaches political philosophy in a philosophy department (and has taught Nozick, Hayek, Friedman, as well as Adam Smith) this line is spot on: "State Republicans are now the party of Gradgrind." The imperative among students to take things that will get them a job, means the teaching of political philosophy/theory of any sort, not to mention history and literature etc is in massive decline. Generally people who teach theory of any sort in social science departments are in decline. If Friedman isn't taught it is because econ departments don't teach history of economic theory anymore - not because they don't want to, but the field is not seen as a hiring priority amidst declining budgets.