The Moral Panic About Higher Education
The Moral Panic About Higher Education
Let's check in on an important quarter of the ideas industry.
I was reading a Matthew Yglesias post on higher education, as one does, and two things jumped out at me. The first was this paragraph:
I would generally feel better about the quality of policy-relevant academic research if I felt confident that every paper had been talked over by a Republican or two over the course of its lifespan. One reason I think the relatively-less-progressive discipline of economics tends to generate more valuable work is precisely that it’s less of a monoculture. Of course, you’d need to ask a psychologist or a sociologist to explain exactly why the dynamic plays out that way. But it’s still true.
Hey, you could also ask a political scientist, since I addressed this very question in chapter four of The Ideas Industry. It is not that “economics tends to generate more valuable work” so much as “a lot of folks perceive economics is more useful.” The reason for that is partially due to something Yglesias references. Economics is a more politically heterodox discipline compared to the other social sciences, causing it to be trusted mote across the political spectrum. There are other factors at work, however, including the tendency for benefactors to like funding economist more than other disciplines.
More interesting to me was Matt’s description of a recent Heterodox Academy (HxA) meeting that sounds like it had less viewpoint diversity than the brochure suggests:
HxA is basically an organization for conservative, libertarian, moderate, or just center-left-but-ornery professors and graduate students, and I think the mission of fighting for ideological diversity and open-mindedness in academic spaces is worthwhile. The conference itself often had a kind of support group vibe, and people who clearly felt isolated in their respective institutions were excited to network with other people. And that’s an important function for professional organizations to fulfill. Non-leftist professors arguably need some safe spaces.
At the same time, a bit ironically for an organization in which Jonathan Haidt plays a major role, this sometimes seemed to me to tip over into a kind of counterproductive pity party, with people telling each other spooky campfire stories about the cancel cult and the DEI gestapo.
As someone who has been less than thrilled with diversity, equity, and inclusion [DEI] implementation, I share Yglesias’ assessment. All too often, the complaints about cancel culture on campus have been both inflated and conflated. DEI’s impact has been wildly inflated, and the criticism of various forms of speech on campus has also been conflated with cancel culture itself. Yglesias’ concludes that, “the negative framing sometimes, in effect, does the cancellation bullies’ work for them.” In other words, some folks within the ivory tower are morally panicking about what they see as other people engaging in moral panics.
Charles Lane echoes some of this sentiment in one of his recent columns discussing the exponential growth of “existential threat” talk:
To label something a threat or a risk or a danger, without using the bombastic e-word as a verbal crutch, would encourage those who issue warnings to be specific and those who receive them to be deliberate. And no matter how serious an impending problem might be, freaking out does not make it easier to solve….
Distinguishing among threats is one of the skills we’ll need to make it through. Democracies require a constant balance between mobilizing people for necessary change and sustaining a consensus behind what already works. Public opinion struggles endlessly for a happy medium between alarmism and complacency. The language that politicians and pundits use can help people make intelligent choices — or not.
This evokes an old debate I had with Cathy Young about prioritizing the cultural threat from left-wing illiberalism or the political threat from right-wing illiberalism. As a resident and observer of the ivory tower, my conclusion is that the threat from the left is concerning but the threat from the right remains way more concerning.
A quick glance at Florida demonstrates that moral panics are all fun and games until they degrade the ability of universities to function. Ron DeSantis’ stated aim of transforming New College into the Southern version of Hillsdale College
has highlighted the costs of using the state to install the conservative version of political correctness. Even voices sympathetic to the concept of DEI overreach acknowledge that DeSantis has overreached even more. The Florida governor has packed the Board of Trustees to the point where they cannot be bothered to read the rules and instead are making ill-advised tenure decisions based entirely on ideology rather than merit.To be clear, I do not think that all the ivory tower’s DEI initiatives have worked out well. It is a problem, and at some point some reasoned discourse about how best to proceed would be great. But that problem pales in comparison to those on the right screaming “WOKE!” and “EXISTENTIAL THREAT!” at the drop of a hat — and then weaponizing the power of the state to overreact to this problem.
Except for military service, I spent my whole life in higher ed, student, prof, administrator, & trustee, retiring nine years ago. Higher ed is organized around disciplines, not political groups or even ideas. In my experience, a few disciplines are explicitly political, especially in professional & graduate programs, but all the rest follow the imperatives of their disciplines. The politicized disciplines & subdisciplines do, too, but in ways which also reflect political/partisan developments. When I began studying Am Lit, we studied great works by great, mostly male, writers. As the canon expanded and as the study of how technology, politics, and business practices impact literature became more prominent, the discipline changed. By the time I retired, race, class, & gender were its major focuses, making the discipline look much more political & partisan than it really was. That said, there's no doubt that Am Lit has attracted people who are interested in race, gender, & class, rather than those who are interested in great lit. So it looks liberal, even though no one's more conservative than your typical Eng prof, no matter how they vote. I believe the same can be said about the humanities in general.
Another development I've seen is that partisans have begun to treat some disciplines as political: climate science & evolutionary biology are the prime examples, but, god help us, gynecology & endocrinology are now political, too. All this reflects, I believe, that waging of culture war (there was a real one in the 90s in Eng depts) in order to exploit the fears & resentment of people who feel alienated from our broad economic/political culture and what passes for our high culture.
The Ideas Industry's chapter on the disproportionate prestige attached to economists was interesting, (and irksome) and I see examples of it all the time. Thank you for drawing more attention to DeSantis' eviscerating New College -- an important example of how far this anti-woke fever can go.