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Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences:
Frankly, they're going in the wrong direction. A great deal of technology developed over the last 30 years (social media, generative AI, frankly the internet itself) is either neutral/mixed at best or actively harmful at worst. If anything we need to be putting the brakes on "high-tech, high-productivity" jobs. Diverting funds to university social science departments would be a good way of slowing things down, at least. Despite my substantial disagreements with the wokeists, I'm willing to fund them if they can act as a counterbalance to a complete takeover by utilitarian techbroism.
I don't trust big tech to honestly evaluate the impacts and effects of their own products. We need a neutral, or even outright adversarial, independent body to investigate issues like say, the effects of social media on teenage mental health, and the university seems as good a place to do it as any (it might be objected that such research falls under the heading of "psychology" or maybe even "economics" rather than "social sciences" - but I doubt that the people in favor of these cuts would be particularly friendly to psychology or economics departments).
There are certain legitimate and even pressing research topics (e.g. psychological differences between racial groups, impact of racial diversity on workplaces, etc) that fall under the heading of "social sciences", but which are unfortunately impossible to investigate honestly in today's climate of ideological capture. The ideal solution to this would be to simply reform social sciences departments and make them open to honest inquiry again, rather than destroying them altogether.
I guess this is a question for anyone on The Motte familiar with such things. What is the current state of university reform? Are any universities in the western world simultaneously non-woke and somewhat respected? BYU maybe? I know there are various micro "based" colleges like New Saint Andrews but my impression is these are tremendously expensive for a completely disrespected degree. Are there even any of these types that aren't explicitly religious?
I don't know about "based" in the sense users here use the term, but there are some notoriously conservative/un-woke schools out there. UNC, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Stanford, St Johns, Claremont McKenna, all come to mind.
Uh, how exactly is Stanford un-woke? They have the full slate of grievance studies departments, plus a DEI commissariate installed in all the real departments (read: the School of Engineering, basically) providing mandatory political reeducation and enforcing the party line. Perhaps they’re un-woke in comparison to their rivals across the Bay, but the same could be said of virtually every university in the Western world.
You're not going to find a school in the state of California that doesn't have the "the full slate of grievance studies" and a "DEI commissariate"
Stanford is on the list for the same reason Claremont is. They're notoriously conservative relative to thier bretheren, get ranked highly on free speech by FIRE and other such groups, and project an all around ruthless disposition towards disruptive protests.
According to the FIRE 2025 ranking (page number 44), Stanford University is 218., while Claremont McKenna College is 6. best out of 251 universities evaluated. These two institutions could hardly be more different, with regard to how FIRE regards them.
That's news to me. I remember them being ranked much higher than that and catching a lot of hate from the media for cracking down on disruptive activists back in 2020 but i also haven't paying close attention the last couple years.
Shit happens i guess.
If you check out Stanford's rankings, it's an odd mix. High "openness" ranking combined with bottom of the barrel "disruptive conduct" after a bunch of attacks on meetings.
Looking at the incident reports, Stanford was prosecuting students through an anonymous "protected identity harm reporting system" for being photographed reading Mein Kampf. Of course, this seems pretty typical for colleges these days
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