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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26279 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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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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