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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   19267 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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There's a big argument on Right-wing Twitter between so-called "classical liberals" and the advocates of Christopher Rufo's aggressive tactics toward wokeness in higher education. I find myself in the middle but leaning more towards Rufo, which was reinforced by a recent Quillette article criticizing him. One paragraph in particular gets to the meat of the disagreement:

An example of this new curriculum is a course on wokeness taught by Andrew Doyle, the British pundit behind the popular anti-woke parody character Titania McGrath. Doyle assigned Rufo's book America's Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything to his students. According to Rufo, the remaking of the college was an effort to "provide an alternative for conservative families in the state of Florida to say there is a public university that reflects your values." This makes it sound as if a university exists to reflect the ideological biases of its customers, rather than to help disseminate knowledge and foster understanding. As Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine, DeSantis's scheme to take control of the college demonstrated that he's "not seeking to protect or restore free speech, but to impose controls of his own liking."[1]

"Classical liberals" like to hit sentimental ideologues with cold hard facts. Advocates of the rosy theory of communism are confronted with the reality of communist states. Those with an overly sentimental view of the 1950s are hit with facts about how homes were smaller and most families had no more than a single car. Religious people are shown the evidence that their holy books were written by men, not Gods. But when people point out that their sentimental, idealized vision of "the free and open academy" is not working, they just circle back to the nobility of their vision and chastise people for deviating from it.

A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality. "Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one. Referring to DeSantis's takeover of the New College of Florida, Jonathan Haidt wrote that, "I am horrified that a governor has simply decided, on his own, to radically change a college. Even if this is legal, it is unethical, and it is a very bad precedent and omen for our country."[2] Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste. There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.

What is to be done? Critics of Rufo are right to note that in his zeal to, in his words, "recapture the regime and entrench our ideas in the public sphere," he's often vague about what, exactly, those ideas are. The whole conservative movement doesn't know what it stands for. Rufo, who speaks about the importance of "faith" and hired a literal former porn star, is no exception. In my view, the solution is not erecting a franken-ideology of "American values" but doubling down on truly classical liberal /libertarian ideas.

That means austerity and the ultimate goal of privatization. The Quillette author is horrified by the vision of competing universities that market themselves to students on ideological grounds. To my mind, that's exactly what we should want. Just as our free market in food results in much obesity, a free market in higher education will result in many echo chambers. But just as not everyone chooses to overeat, not everyone will choose to attend an echo chamber. The kind of university people like Pinker dream about will be more likely to arise under such a regime than under the current regime of unaccountable institutions flooded with public money and asked nicely to respect academic freedom.

The "classical liberal" recoils in horror at the idea of woke students going to school in an openly woke echo chamber. They should be exposed to other points of view! The result is more often that "classical liberals" are exposed to woke student cancel culture mobs. "Classical liberals" should recognize that they're a minority. They will not win back control of academia from within and are ideologically opposed to outside aid. "Partition" is the solution most likely to give them what they want.

  1. https://quillette.com/2025/05/05/christopher-rufos-pyrrhic-victory-gramsci-harvard-trump/
  2. https://www.thebulwark.com/p/ron-desantis-chris-rufo-and-the-college-anti-woke-makeover-florida

You don’t need academic freedom to advance science.

The Soviet Union was consistently at the scientific frontier while forcing its researchers to endorse such falsehoods as Marxism and Lysenkoism. Modern woke academia does generate plenty of useful science while jabberwokking about black oppression and trans being real. Further back, a lot of the scientific breakthroughs we learn about in history happened in actual literal confessional states.

Marxism was basically the state religion and relegated to a few hours of wasting student time weekly, or maybe just one hour. Lysenkoism was gone by mid 1950s.

Now I'd agree that there was no academic freedom as people who dissented or were politically active in the wrong way of course had very low odds of staying employed as academics. On the other hand I don't think orthodoxy was demanded much, at least going by on what went on in Czechoslovakia.

"Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities?

Nobel prices and fundamental research that changes the world a few decades later.

As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one.

Research (and upstream activities of future research, like teaching and mentoring) are strong-link problems. Your end results only really depend on the very best that do it, the "not stellar" don't effect overall outcomes much. The problem is - as in most strong-link problems - that you don't know who the very best will be in advance. So having a lot of "not stellar" people have academic freedom (and have little to show for it 30 years later) is just the price of doing business.

So, what's the solution? Don't worry to much about it. Hire already successful mentees from the previous generation of strong links, punish outright fraud (Alzheimer research scandal, ect.) and leave them alone. And then don't trust any of them to much - if you're making policy decisions on their advice, you need a large meta study anyway. Usually, a strong link contrarian will appear.

What you shouldn't do is have a new crop of elected representative fight their way deep into the system every 4 years and topple everything. That actually affects outcomes.

I don't think spotting the weak links is actually as hard as this framing makes it sound. You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced. In stark contrast, many social "sciences" cannot and will not ever produce any true information about the world and I think these are pretty easy to spot from a mile away. No deference is owed to fat studies scholars on the basis that the university also employs materials scientists and agricultural microbiologists.

You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced

Agreed. I proposed a solution for that downthread: move all university STEM research to national labs, and have them train grad students. Undergrads stay with their "teaching professors" at the current universities.

I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts.

STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture. Electrons don't have gender identities, the set of integers is not "Aryan". At the most, the prevailing ideology might force affirmative action on the faculty (thus increasing dead weight) and force the academics to pay lip service to the ideology.

These are likely the fields that you mean when you say

Nobel prices and fundamental research that changes the world a few decades later.

The more you stray from STEM, the more the heart of a field is subject to ideological capture, until you get to fields which are pure ideology, like Grievance Studies.

Now, I think that is it useful to keep the Humanities around and give them a bit of tenure, but that has to be justified in its own terms, simply packing them with STEM and saying "universities produce great benefits for society" does not seem very honest.

--

I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.

Now, you can argue that the puzzle pieces for a grand unified theory are there, and it would simply take a theoretical physicist with an IQ two SDs above the smartest person alive today to figure it out, but that is not a very good sales pitch to the larger society -- fund physics so that you get a 1 in 20 chance that we will find an equation which will make physicists really happy but may or may not have much practical use.

I would argue that you are treating academia as a single thing when it is clearly made from a lot of different parts. STEM ideally has both feet planted in reality, and is not very subject to ideological capture.

Yes, absolutely. And the only reason I'm doing that is because the current culture warriors rampaging through universities and science funding are doing the same.

I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs. All undergrads stay at the current universities, where only "teaching professors" remain. Even in STEM, most undergrad classes don't benefit greatly from having an active researcher teaching them - but graduate level classes do.

I would also contest a bit that research (e.g. in fundamental physics) is genius constrained. The biggest discoveries in physics in the last two decades were the Higgs boson and gravitational waves. Both LIGO and LHC were massively collaborative efforts. The bulk of the work was done by PhD students who were smart, but not super-geniuses.

I kind of disagree. There's a lot of small stuff happening behind the scenes at universities and then silently creeping into products all over the world. There's two relatively recent prices for lasers, those came from "classic-size" groups. Advances here (independent from those prizes) also still frequently make it from universities into (e.g. telecom) products. In biochem, CRISPR/CAS9 was an incredibly small team. In material science, I expect small university groups making big contributions to high-entropy metal alloys and to further improvement of semiconductors.

I have a pretty radical solution for that: move all university STEM research (including all the grad students) to national labs.

I don't see how you can avoid ideological capture by making research explicitly part of the government. That's just begging for ideological (specifically, political) capture.

Are the current national labs "part of the government" in any meaningful way?

In that they are literally a part of the US Department of Energy (a.k.a US Department of Energy and Nukes), yes.

I mean, sure. And the Marines are part of the DoD. Does that facilitate ideological capture, especially one that differs between administrations?

My personal experience in both cases says no, not really. The government can't significantly change the ideological makeup of either the national labs or the Marines, and both are ideologically not significantly different than the median of the population.

The government has already changed the ideological makeup of the military. Trump and Hegseth are currently attempting to change it in another way.

Research (and upstream activities of future research, like teaching and mentoring) are strong-link problems. Your end results only really depend on the very best that do it, the "not stellar" don't effect overall outcomes much. The problem is - as in most strong-link problems - that you don't know who the very best will be in advance. So having a lot of "not stellar" people have academic freedom (and have little to show for it 30 years later) is just the price of doing business.

Except that there is no reliable system in place to inform people of which the strong links are outside the hard scientists. So the weak links go on TV or write blogs as "Professor of History" and spread whatever idiocy they feel like. And they outnumber the strong links so the strong links knuckle under.

So then the question is if we really want to mess with the system that globally is the best at driving fundamental research in the hard sciences - because of a pretty small number of people spreading garbage on TV or through their private blog. Which, arguably, those people would be doing anyways (there's plenty of idiots with normal jobs successfully spreading garbage through the same channels). So really, we would only be changing their title from "Professor" to "Doctor".

I don't understand why you kept putting classical liberal in quotation marks.

I'm pretty adjacent to classical liberals. It might be the second or third term I describe myself with (an-cap and libertarian being the other words). I feel it necessary to respond to your descriptions of classical liberals.

"Classical liberals" like to hit sentimental ideologues with cold hard facts.

This is a fun thing to do. I think I liked doing it before I was ever an-cap/classical liberal/libertarian. Back then it was arguing evolution vs creationism with people in myspace groups. But other people like Ben Shapiro are not classical liberals, and that is like his whole shtick. The classical liberals are also sentimental about quite a few things, Adam Smith, the founding fathers, the enlightenment, etc. So I'd call this a weird and mostly uncorrelated description of classical liberals.

A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality.

I'd say that is more of the rationalist's shtick. Its again another weird description where it sorta fits, but fits other groups better, and also doesn't fit in some glaring cases. Most classical liberals will point to American and Britain in the late 1700s and 1800s as sort of shining beacon examples. They do in fact happily and openly privilege ideas coming out of those time periods.

"Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one.

The results have not been stellar, but they've also been fighting back against it longer than conservatives have even been aware that it is a problem. FIRE is one such organization. They have also carried out and implemented their solution. Classical liberals generally outnumber conservatives in the university. Ya they are both super outnumbered by liberals and the left. But the libertarianish/classical liberal guys have go on a targetted campaign to develop stellar academics and an academic support network that can allow their own to survive in an otherwise hostile environment. Do they have society wide solution for the problem? No, of course not, they don't have society wide power to even think about implementing such a thing. That is for the conservatives to carry out. But there is no point in trading one enemy for another.

Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste.

Quick aside: I hope you don't think Haidt is a classical liberal, here is a quote from the man:

"But it’s also that once I switched my research over from culture to politics, and once I began criticizing the ideas on the Left and the Democratic Party — for many years I was doing it to try to help them win."

He calls himself a political centrist these days, but I still think he is mostly a democrat that thinks the democrats went a little too far. Either way he is not a classical liberal.

There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.

You are right in the first sentence. It is certainly not classical liberal. Which is why most classical liberals don't like it. Most classical liberals do not think universities should be subsidized at all. You'll find some that are sort of adjacent to classical liberals that think basic research should be funded (Tyler Cowen). But anyone with an ounce of understanding of economics can realize that education is a private good, and that private goods are handled just fine by markets. It misses the mark so badly that I can't help but think maybe you are again talking about some other group. Until I read your last few paragraphs, and you seem to have understood their actual ideology all along.

I don't know who you are reading that is calling themself a classical liberal. I'd read these guys if you want an actual example of classical liberals examining higher education: https://www.amazon.com/Cracks-Ivory-Tower-Higher-Education/dp/0190846283

If you go to clasical liberalism and FIRE you'll be right back where we are. The prime failing of conservatives was not gatekeeping the universities harder. Also any of the "Critical studies in X" stuff should have never been allowed to take root. Basically, cultural marxism shouldn't have been allowed to take root. (yes I am aware a literal communist deleted the article about it on Wikipedia and redirected the link to a subheading of "alt-right conspiracies")

Yes, the problem with classical liberals is playing cooperate-bot. The answer to academics wanting to enforce orthodoxy is not to invoke academic freedom to protect them from those with power who oppose the orthodoxy; they have to be driven out somehow.

The only way to do that, seemingly, is with a different imposed orthodoxy.

I'm absolutely fine with a different orthodoxy that's not explicitly racist and sexist against me. Hell, I'd even be fine with Christian themed orthodoxies at this point, even though I've not been a believer for a long time.

I don't understand why you kept putting classical liberal in quotation marks.

I think he's right to do. This isn't applicable to you, but the overwhelming majority of people using the term act like liberalism was invented in the 90's or, at most, with the election of FDR. "Classical liberalism" is a complete misnomer for them.

There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.

I 100% agree with this. There is no constitutional right for progressives to have their ideology subsidized by taxpayers, which is what has been happening to the tune of trillions of dollars over the last 3+ decades. This is one of those "sniff tests" so called centrists need to pass. If you can't comprehend that there is no free speech at modern universities, there hasn't been, and we need to force them 10 steps right before there will be a chance for free speech at universities, you just have missed the mark.

Another (right now) is if someone uses "woke right" unironically. If you are talking about the "woke right" you have fundamentally misunderstood the world. The actual woke was Google and Harvard discriminating against white men openly. They still are doing it, just a little less openly. The "woke right" is frogs on twitter, they have no hope of doing anything. If the right won for 20 years in the institutions then, perhaps, there would be reasonable reasons to worry about overreach by right wing extremists. As of now it is frankly laughable.

we need to force them 10 steps right before there will be a chance for free speech at universities

This does not seem to me like the sort of thing which is likely to lead to less constrained speech at universities.

I’m not bound by your partisan tactical considerations when describing the world. The woke right has been saying stuff like ‘the woke are more correct than the mainstream’ so naturally the label fits. They are postmodernist in outlook, they straight up adopt the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy with the valence switched.

There is no non trivial Western political movement today that isn't postmodern.

If post-NRX reactionaries are "woke right" then IDW Liberals are "woke center". To say nothing about how post-liberal libertarians are today. Nobody actually believes in metanarratives anymore, not even Joe Rogan tier normies. And insofar as they do their views are instantly dismantled. All that's left is a handful of classical fascists and orthodox marxists acting like the clock stopped in 1937.

Modernism has died God's death. It's over. It's been over. And those that refuse to see this like Lindsey are driven mad by it. But there is no journey back to our illusions, because material conditions have dispelled people of the idea that institutions can be neutral.

Foucault won. Popper lost. A very long time ago.

Now can we move on to actually addressing the issues we are facing, or must more ink be shed bringing Liberals kicking and screaming into the present they created? You have to grow out of the debate club and into actual politics someday. Or you can keep getting diligently thrown around by cultural communists and scheming reactionaries.

A, it’s not true, and B, even if, I’m not in the habit of surrendering my beliefs to the zeitgeist.

I think Trump II being so very unbounded in its trumpism has the potential to flush out a lot of postmodernist rot on both sides out of the west’s system. Step 1 : conscious sledgehammer to woke institutions. Step 2 : unintentionally fuck the rest up with post-truth populism. Step 3 : everyone’s back in the happy happy modernist center.

How about surrendering your beliefs to reality?

We ran the 90s liberalism experiment. It ended here. You blaming subversive elements is exactly the same as those old Marxists doing so in their time. It's as unconvincing and silly. If your order can't survive wreckers it loses the mandate of heaven.

You can stay a 90s liberal if you want, I even have some sympathy for that from my cold liberal point of view, but that's embracing the same sentiment as being a communist post 1991. Your ideology is a dead doctrine. Young people are not registering to go debate the virtues of free speech and constitutions, they have more pressing and severe concerns. Such as the constant violations of their natural rights.

I submit to you that what you really ought to care about is liberty, not liberalism. And that rolling with the punches of history is a lot more productive than stubbornly demanding that things never change. In fact a return to Hobbes and Bentham would suit your political family better than rehashing Mill.

Defend your postmodern beliefs directly, instead of appealing to their popularity.

How do you retvrn to hobbes and bentham if foucault’s right, exactly ?

Through the realities of violence my friend.

The world is a scary and angry place, a war of all against all, a disorder of wills, a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And yet in this chaos, we can have stability, as long as our small tight knit group is ready to sign an alliance. A simple pragmatic alliance that would have us regard each other as friends, and anyone else as enemies. And afford each other ancient rights.

This is no holy or moral arrangement, it is no sacred covenant or enlightened scientific government. It is simply an accord of convenience, which we may rescind if the night watchman becomes drunk on power. We can choose to have liberty because we like it, and for no other reason. And return to the ancient unthought prejudices and traditions of Englishmen, not because they are the universal destination of history or a logical necessity but because we simply desire them.

But what of this being undone of that same whim? That was always the case. Therefore, sharpen your sword, load your cannon and encrypt your hard drive.

It is simply an accord of convenience, which we may rescind if the night watchman becomes drunk on power.

Again, I must point out that this is not Hobbes. The delegation of sovereignty, for Hobbes, was irrevocable, not just for a lifetime but forever including the descendants of those who so delegated and of the sovereign.

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That does not explain our different positions, iggy, old branch. When I denounce someone like putin, which you sort of support, as a corrupt murderer, my criticism does not rely on him breaking a ‘sacred covenant’. And when I call trump a liar, the truth he tramples on is not an illusion.

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A true "classical liberal" would treat his ideas the same way he treats everyone else's, as hypotheses to be tested against reality. "Academic freedom" sounds good and all, but what happens when it's implemented in real-world universities? As the "classical liberals" freely admit, the results are often not stellar. So what's their solution? Doesn't seem they have one. Referring to DeSantis's takeover of the New College of Florida, Jonathan Haidt wrote that, "I am horrified that a governor has simply decided, on his own, to radically change a college. Even if this is legal, it is unethical, and it is a very bad precedent and omen for our country."[2] Haidt seems to object not to the specifics of what DeSantis did, but to the notion that any radical changes could be made to even a single college unless they're driven from within the academic caste. There's nothing "classically liberal" about the notion that an institution is entitled to receive money from the taxpayer while not being accountable to said taxpayers' elected representatives. But that's the "classical liberal" brain-worm.

I’m not convinced that “academic freedom” failed. We had university-like institutions across the globe for millennia. The philosophy schools of Greece, the Confucian schools, medieval universities. Even in modern times, it’s possible to have universities without them becoming captured. How many woke professors are there in Korean universities? Or Mexican universities? It doesn’t appear that this is universally true of universities with academic freedom. In fact, for most of history, colleges were not especially woke.

On the other hand, in America, universities have two direct lines to power. First, their research directly affects public policy as government cites research and the professors who do it. This means that any ideology injected into universities will eventually be reflected in government policy. Second is that the press will cite these things often without criticism, thus injecting the ideas directly into the veins of culture. Both of these things make American universities ideal for ideological purposes. It’s an easy way to get your ideas to be accepted as received wisdom by the masses whether or not they happen to be true.

What would be the ideal solution is to not use colleges as the source of knowledge and government policy. If you no longer have direct access to the ear of the king, the position no longer is useful for pushing ideology. If journalists investigated beyond just quoting the first professor they come across, again, it’s not useful to push ideology. At that point, the academy goes back to being a place where you do dispassionate research and teach students how to think for themselves.

Uh, Latin American universities are woke. The populace often isn’t, but the elites and their institutions are very much pro-progressive ideology.

What would be the ideal solution is to not use colleges as the source of knowledge and government policy. If you no longer have direct access to the ear of the king, the position no longer is useful for pushing ideology. If journalists investigated beyond just quoting the first professor they come across, again, it’s not useful to push ideology. At that point, the academy goes back to being a place where you do dispassionate research and teach students how to think for themselves.

So they just sit there doing what exactly? Universities have always produces knowledge and influenced government policy. They do in Korea and Mexico as well. They aren't captured by woke there because woke isn't a salient interest, but AFAIK they are captured institutions that are out of touch with the mainstream citizens of those countries.

Relatedly, there was a poster here who once explained that the main rationale for the separation of church and state was not to improve governance of the state, but to protect the church from the corrupting influence of power. Blew my mind at the time but makes total sense now.

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