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.
Beautiful. I read The Righteous mind with a lot of hope, then read 1 or 2 of Haidt's previous books, and spent a lot of time thinking about them, then finally decided Haidt is a genious when he's not being a complete idiot. "Markets are magic"!? Using the marked-driven affordability of lasik vision correction to argue the all medicine needs is a more free-market style? Incredible. "I'd to not have to bother with glasses" versus literal "money or your life" situations.
I read his founding document of HxA, a 50+ page journal article that fails to reflect on how the meanings of "liberal" and "conservative" have changed over several decades when comparing numbers of SELF LABELED (remember "definitions") liberals, radicals, conservatives..., concluding there used to be conservatives in academia and now they're all gone. It was one statistical blunder after another.
From a non-US perspective, an obvious question is "what's the basis for giving privileged consideration to the views of Republicans on higher education?". If higher education is supposed to be about critical reasoning, the pursuit of objective knowledge and so on, the fact that lots of Americans don't like these things ought to be irrelevant.
And if it is because there are lots of Republicans who are upset about things, the dispute about DEI is settled (at least in principle). Higher ed should represent the American population, and the dispute is only about who gets how much.
So the Blues utterly dominate higher education and ruthlessly suppress any dissent and you, a dedicated Blue, fail to see any problem. You are your own counter example.
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.
Beautiful. I read The Righteous mind with a lot of hope, then read 1 or 2 of Haidt's previous books, and spent a lot of time thinking about them, then finally decided Haidt is a genious when he's not being a complete idiot. "Markets are magic"!? Using the marked-driven affordability of lasik vision correction to argue the all medicine needs is a more free-market style? Incredible. "I'd to not have to bother with glasses" versus literal "money or your life" situations.
I read his founding document of HxA, a 50+ page journal article that fails to reflect on how the meanings of "liberal" and "conservative" have changed over several decades when comparing numbers of SELF LABELED (remember "definitions") liberals, radicals, conservatives..., concluding there used to be conservatives in academia and now they're all gone. It was one statistical blunder after another.
From a non-US perspective, an obvious question is "what's the basis for giving privileged consideration to the views of Republicans on higher education?". If higher education is supposed to be about critical reasoning, the pursuit of objective knowledge and so on, the fact that lots of Americans don't like these things ought to be irrelevant.
And if it is because there are lots of Republicans who are upset about things, the dispute about DEI is settled (at least in principle). Higher ed should represent the American population, and the dispute is only about who gets how much.
So the Blues utterly dominate higher education and ruthlessly suppress any dissent and you, a dedicated Blue, fail to see any problem. You are your own counter example.
*Reads this post to see the multiple times I said left-wing illiberalism is a problem*
*Reads your comment again*
*Blinks multiple times*
*Goes about the rest of the day worry-free.*
Note my comment above. It might help you understand why you're mistaken.