Leftist Agenda in Academia explained

Post Reply New Topic

I'm going to add:

For those who probably aren't going to look into Haidt and Lukianoff, I'm guessing most, I'll try to give a quick distillation:

They're suggesting that a whole confluence of factors is bringing the current situation into focus:

- Academia has been on something like an exponential curve in the last thirty or forty years, going from 2:1 liberal to conservative toward 5:1 somewhere in the 1990's and it's looking like it's heading out toward ranges between 20:1 to 40:1 in different departments partly based on the sort of cultures that come about when a super-majority forms. The problem Jonathan points to often with this is that higher education vets ideas through institutional disconfirmation - ie. the vigorous review and destruction of bad ideas, a process which tends to largely break down if a particular school becomes an echo chamber.

- 'I-Gen', ie. the generation who got social media in their early teens has had a very different adjustment to the world than previous generations. Jonathan Haidt's has suggested that the problems with free speech aren't happening so much at commuter schools, sometimes at state schools but less often, but rather mostly in the top 100 Ivy League settings. Social media and student to student communication has brought about a situation where students can and will go after faculty for bringing up or teaching topics in the class room that cause discomfort or offense, the teachers are increasingly afraid of the handful of students (really a very loud/vocal minority), and the other students largely stay quiet as well because they know that these people can and will pile on them and have the capacity to put them through hell.

- Part of the wilder leftist content that's going around is really students sharing half-baked ideas, not necessarily what they're being taught as often as sharing their own interpretations of it.


A few of the root cultural problems in this case:

- As a culture we're still trying to figure out how to handle social media and the kinds of social and political dynamics it leads to and as of yet we're behind the curve and reacting to these problems.

- It's been demonstrated that young adults are actually being taught the opposite of coping mechanisms, rather everything they're being encouraged to do in terms of identifying their discomforts and seeking help for them (particularly when the causes aren't egregious) are increasingly making them psychologically fragile.

- After the 1990's adult supervision of children drastically increased, in some cases by law, and this has had negative impacts on child development.


It's hard to say what the right answers will be. My guess, with the academic political imbalance already out there in the public discourse we likely will have increasing numbers of center-right individuals finding a calling to academia. Academia already has a lot of problems with the student loan bubble and its likely that in the next several years we could see the financial aspect as well as the political issues accelerate the move to online universities. As for the social media problems - that's even tougher to call. It could be that new and catchy platforms where everyone won't see everyone or where people have a much firmer grip on how far and wide personal information can go will develop that makes the sort of internet gang pile-ons a lot more difficult to develop.

I also have to wonder, much like people have been saying that the cheapness and click-baitiness of the mainstream media lately has been due to them being on their last gasp as something of a dying power structure, if these could be precursors to the death of the formal academy. If it is the later that could be deeply troubling for our country's future and we'd have to really think quickly about how to safeguard the quality of education.

Also something kind of funny about Jonathan Haidt's 'The Righteous Mind' which he wrote back in 2012 about religion, Richard Dawkins Tweeted a few months ago that he was reading it and declared it to be a seminal work on evolution and sociology - Jonathan had to somewhat politely warn him that he might not like what's in chapter 11, ie. he took a few jabs at the new atheists including Dawkins around that point of the book.

I suppose the point being - we have academics increasingly chiming in on the 'free speech on campuses' issue, that it is a problem, that it is now spilling over into the corporate world, and colleges are increasingly turning out a generation who don't value free speech nearly as much as earlier generations. Part of this likely isn't entirely the colleges fault, these problems may indeed have been well on their way in development with these kids all through elementary and high school, that's quite likely the case. Some schools do teach and promote critical thinking and some, like the University of Chicago, have stated that any students trying to shout down a speaker or prevent them from airing their ideas will be expelled. Others are closer to the extreme of fully caving in, assigning safe-spaces, providing services for those whose feelings have been hurt by ideas they disagree with, and when these kids go for job interviews they won't have a prayer - it's like society failed them and continued to fail them right up through the time where they now owe $50-100K in student loans, which not even bankrupcy can clear, and they're too out of touch to make ends meet in the real world.

I've taken a slightly different reaction to the woes and alienation of autism/asperger's.

I deeply enjoy reading anything I can get my hands on about philosophic history, the human condition, psychology, and I also really enjoy watching the world *not* burn regardless of how many NT's I know are the sort of dutiful lemmings who'd march the project of civilization right off a cliff if social conformity edified their doing so.

This is an interesting conversation - Claire Fox hosting Yaron Brook and Douglas Murray. I tend to agree a lot more with Douglas's perspectives and it seems like Yaron puts a bit too much blind faith in reason (I see it as a tool that needs to be guided by something higher, like integrity, not an unabated good in and of itself) but at little after 40:00 in he's bringing up his concerns about how the west is demolishing itself at it's universities by attacking its own culture, calling western civilization terrible, etc. and Id agree to the extent that it happens we're really putting ourselves in danger.

I'd add, to the extent that it does happen I also don't think of it in terms of a 'commie takeover' plan or anything like that, i think of it more like a psychological types problem, combined with insulation and echo chambering, and even if there were an espionage element to it it would only be exploiting the psychological types problem already present.

edit:
41:45 - I'll go on to say that Yaron says something really bone-headed here that I don't support at all.