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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:
"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.
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.
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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.
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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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