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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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The NYT wants you to know that Harvard has "no way out." I'm sure Harvard University with its 53.2 billion dollar endowment is going to start having trouble attracting researchers:

Trump has stripped extensive federal funding from Harvard. Let’s say a judge gives back all of that money for this year. Half of the university’s research budget comes from the federal government. Where is Harvard going to get the money in the year after that, and the year after that? If you’re a researcher, do you want to be doing research at a school where your funding is in question?

I suspect they're scaring their readership to rack in the clicks. The article is being embraced by Rightist influencer people eager for confirmation of their "victory." They're COOKED! Back in reality, the Democrats will likely take back the Presidency in 2028, if not then then very likely by 2032. It will eventually dawn on these people that Harvard remains massively prestigious while nobody knows or cares about Fred's Car Wash in Des Moines Iowa.

Harvard Related piggyback: Steven Pinker published a mostly defense of Harvard in an NYT opinion piece titled "Harvard Derangement Syndrome". I call it a mostly defense, because I don't think the title is appropriate. While the purpose and conclusion of the article is to defend Harvard against Federal interference the meat is more rational examination.

Some pulled paragraphs:

Finally, our students are not blank slates which we can inscribe at will. Young people are shaped by peers more than most people realize. Students are shaped by the peer cultures in their high schools, at Harvard and (especially with social media) in the world. In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.

A poll of my colleagues on the academic freedom council turned up many examples in which they felt political narrowness had skewed research.... In climate policy, it led to a focus on demonizing fossil fuel companies rather than acknowledging the universal desire for abundant energy; in pediatrics, taking all adolescents’ reported gender dysphoria at face value; in public health, advocating maximalist government interventions rather than cost-benefit analyses; in history, emphasizing the harms of colonialism but not of communism or Islamism; in social science, attributing all group disparities to racism but never to culture; and in women’s studies, permitting the study of sexism and stereotypes but not sexual selection, sexology or hormones (not coincidentally, Hooven’s specialty)...

Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness...

If the federal government doesn’t force Harvard to reform, what will? ... Universities could give a stronger mandate to the external “visiting committees” that ostensibly audit departments and programs but in practice are subject to regulatory capture. University leaders constantly get an earful from disgruntled alumni, donors and journalists, and they should use it, judiciously, as a sanity check. The governing boards should be more tuned in to university affairs and take more responsibility for its health. The Harvard Corporation is so reclusive that when two of its members dined with members of the academic freedom council in 2023, The Times deemed it worthy of a news story.

Pinker concedes much. Too much for the NYT commenters who might lambast him more in other contexts. He likely doesn't concede enough for those that want to see Harvard suffer. His position negates neutrality, though he attempts to refute this conflict of interest with with his own demonstrated principles.

I find the antisemitism weapons repugnant. I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn the value of viewpoint diversity, limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university, what an education is meant for, and so on. That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.

This essay feels out of place in the NYT. Which is to say it's well argued, nuanced, a bit witty, requires more than twenty seconds of short-term memory and it advances claims that readers are not going to like. Also it's about 5x longer than usual. I am curious how many readers actually even get through it. The carrot and stick of the article (Harvard good but also bad but also good and Trump bad but also has a point but also bad) is potent but attention spans are so short and nobody is open to ideas.

Which is to say I think the article is excellent!

I don't think the essay is out of place in the NYT. At least I can understand why the paper wouldn't think so. The Atlantic also might have published it to reach the Quarterly Heterodox quota. If you judge how much the reader engages from the Reader Picks comment section, then the answer is no one read it.

One commenter opens with a claim they "often appreciated Prof Pinker's heterodox views" and "no ideas or philosophies either on the left or the right should be above challenge and criticism." They immediately follow that introduction with "the attacks are largely coming from conservative Christians (see Heritage Foundation) that simply don't believe in a plural democracy. There's a fundamental flaw when you take the Bible to be infallible as your primary tenet..."

Comments ignore most of the things in the article and focus on the things they already wanted to shitpost about. They might not have read it or understood it. They might not be American at all. Comment sections are universally bad. The reader base the NYT imagines justify its status and dominance aren't shitposting under articles and op-eds. If these people are real (they are) and they still read the NYT (they do), then the piece is understood as some uncomfortable nuance from an insider with a comfortable conclusion. That's not out of place in the NYT.

isn't that just the meme about questions at academic lectures. its not usually about asking a question, its usually just the person pushing their hobby horse.

If these people are real (they are) and they still read the NYT (they do), then the piece is understood as some uncomfortable nuance from an insider with a comfortable conclusion. That's not out of place in the NYT.

Yes that part fits like a glove. I still think it required (e.g.) more IQ points than the median NYT essay to follow though. But perhaps that's part of today's performance.

In many cases, students’ politics are no more attributable to indoctrination by professors than are their green hair and pierced septums.

This is such a funny sentence. It feels like it belongs in the 1960s, when I can imagine a stuffy old-fashioned college professor being shocked by dyed hair and piercings.

Nowdays... well, first it's not very shocking. Second, the students who have that kind of fashion are almost all liberal, sharing the same politics as the faculty. Many of the faculty probably had those fashions when they were younger (or still have them). And the school's admissions policies actively select for those kinds of kids via their vague "personality" rating, which rewards people for personal demonstration of radical leftist politics. Which is to say, it rewards them for having the right fashion, and for a college, that means counterculture punk shit.

Sure, the college professors aren't shocked by hair died in unnatural colours and piercings where they don't belong. But they are also not the originators- this stuff comes from peers.

I've made this point before, that colleges are essentially compounds full of unsupervised teenagers and that, elite colleges being still sort of meritocratic, they adopt the politics which justify the preferences of unsupervised teenagers writ large, because that makes them popular among their peer group- not their professors.

Ah yes, the personality assessment. In which the assessor looks at an applicant's race and marks them down as an unlikable unrespected coward if they are Asian.

The holistic interviews being originally invented to limit the number of Jews at Harvard, now easily repurposed for more modern racism.

I considered the point of that statement as connecting political beliefs of students with their fashion choices and not something that professors influence compared to other cultural forces (including and especially social media).

If none of the political opinions are brought in with the students, why are students beliefs so uniform? Why are all the kids with or without green hair so uniformly aligned to the values, attitudes, beliefs and ideals of the left liberal wing of the Democratic Party? If no indoctrination is taking place such uniformity should not happen. Yet on every issue, the students agree with the far left. There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming. There are protests against Trump, but are there any MAGA hats or signs? The dude got 50+ percent of the vote.

A very clear sign of indoctrination is agreement by the populace on major issues. And going down issue by issue, it’s impossible to not notice just how closely modern college students align with the far left, especially when compared both to the surrounding communities and the communities these kids came from.

One of the first things I saw in a modern university was a lengthy 'do consent, don't be rapey, don't use words like bitch, also there's a wage gap between men and women plus a race wage gap (which inconveniently shows Asians are on top but we'll skip over that)' session. There was one guy who raised his hand and made an argument of it, saying men were more likely to do engineering and highly paid subjects which is why they earn more money.

But there was visceral, audible groaning from the audience at this display, about the only interesting thing that happened. The presenters basically just ummed and ahhed in response, they weren't really angry or anything. It was leftism on autopilot, leftism by default, apolitical leftism.

Somehow they'd already gotten to most the students. High school or maybe society generally is the key thing. Maybe the kids who pay attention to high school because they're going to uni actually soak up the message in high school and that's what's really happening? But they also do change people there, I saw a fairly normal albeit somewhat edgy guy turn into an Extinction Rebellion climate believer seemingly overnight. I saw none of this actually happening and don't understand the mechanism, only the effects. Dark leftism.

There were pro-Israel protests on college campuses. There's fratboys wearing maga hats.

Campus conservatism exists, it's just a minority tendency for a variety of reasons and the kind of mass-popular soft-social conservatism that Trump embodies isn't super appealing to the highly intellectual crowd.

So drawing on a population that elected MAGA with half the vote, a tiny minority is pro Trump? A population that has lots of Jews yet again only a tiny group of them protesting for their brothers in Israel? It still doesn’t track. Sure you don’t have 100% uniformity, but drawing from a highly polarized population that runs 45-55% between D and R and ending up with the vast majority of students would align with the far left which in the general population of the USA is maybe 20% of the population. If there’s no indoctrination, why doesn’t a typical college campus mirror the USA ideologically?

I don’t observe the same thing in business. If you hire 100 people, they’ll generally be pretty close to the demographics of the region. If I hire 10 people from Alabama, I get probably 9 southern Baptists, most of them very conservative, and so on to attitudes about abortion, gays, and proper grits. If I hired 10 people from Alabama and four years later they were mostly pro LGBT episcopal Christians and socialist to boot, you’d probably be right to suspect that there’s something fishy going on.

You can find well educated conservatives they’re usually just not maga. The religious right and the pro-business right are coalition partners, not loyalists.

Selection plus social pressure

I think most of the students are left-leaning even before they enter the university, they just don't express it so strongly. But yes, some indoctrination is clearly taking place. But it's more from student clubs and off-campus organizations than from the classes. Also probably pressure from dudes trying to impress women to get laid, and women are usually more left-leaning than men.

Women are more left leaning than men because they're more conformist and left-wing politics is the norm in those circles. It used to be the reverse.

Left wing politics is the norm in those circles because they're compounds full of unsupervised teenagers which award status for intellectual achievements, and unsupervised teenagers broadly want to get taken care of without having rules on themselves(and also often to get laid, dabble in substances, stay up late, etc). This is something that's pretty easy to justify from a far-left framework but can't be justified from a right wing framework at all. And there is a subset of high-status college kids at elite universities who are more than smart enough to understand that- how much of the football team is showing up at palestine protests(they don't care about intellectual consistency, by and large)? There are obvious reasons why future thought leaders are aggressively left wing when they're in college and our culture is just not good enough at making them be adults to exert a moderating influence.

Women are more left leaning than men because they're more likely to benefit from government services (healthcare during pregnancy, support for children, longer lives meaning social security and medicare, etc.) There's no need to point to indoctrination when self-interest is already more than explanatory. In the same vein, most people go to college to become professionals in dense urban centers, which also happen to be where government administration and benefits tend to be the most concentrated. There's culture war stuff going on too, but that's basically a proxy for self-interest. It's a mirror of how conservative denial of climate change and performative love of big trucks is downstream of the fact they're more likely to be involved in primary industries, and that people who drive big vehicles long distances are more affected by the price of gas. Throw in people making costly signals of ingroup affiliation and we have the modern situation.

There are protests for Palestinians, yet you can’t find any students— not even the Jewish ones — openly saying that Hamas had it coming.

Well, yeah, that's probably a great way to get punched in the face.

I would consider it a good thing for student-activists and campus administrations alike to learn...limitations of protest, boundaries of conduct at university... That's not going to happen regardless. Pick your poison.

As an empirical question, they are learning the limits and boundaries through personal experience. I just don't like what the limits are.

The limits of protest conduct are:

  1. Protest for causes the establishment likes (unlimited violence allowed)

  2. Don’t protest for causes the establishment dislikes (seriously, don’t even bother leaving the house)

From the article:

The nation desperately needs this sense of proportionality in dealing with its educational and cultural institutions. Harvard, as I am among the first to point out, has serious ailments. The sense that something is not well with the university is widespread, and it’s led to sympathy, even schadenfreude, with Mr. Trump’s all-out assault. But Harvard is an intricate system that developed over centuries and constantly has to grapple with competing and unexpected challenges. The appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.

Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.

Also, universities are committed to free speech, which includes speech we don’t like. A corporation can fire an outspoken employee; a university can’t, or shouldn’t.

FIRE (not a right wing organization) listed Harvard as the worst US university for free speech two years running. And it got the worst score EVER for any US university in 2023. Harvard cannot credibly use a commitment to free speech as a defense for anything, because it lacks one. Yes, I know Pinker objects to this ranking, but not really credibly.

Fact is, the right has tried that, most recently with SFFA v Harvard, which Harvard essentially thumbed its nose at. And Pinker himself, by his own testimony in this article, has tried that. It did diddlysquat; Harvard doubled down on the bad behavior. So either those opposed to what Harvard is doing must back down, or they must escalate.

If you want to govern, you're going to deal with problems that transcend politics. There are potholes in the road, Democrats and Republicans both want them fixed. You might need to work with the guy who fixes them even if he's an a**hole.

The "friend-enemy distinction" people lack a theory of politics for that. Harvard is the enemy, Carl Schmitt, blah blah blah. Never occurs to them that their job fight involve literal or figurative pothole-filling rather than zero-sum political warfare. As Pinker said:

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

The "friend-enemy distinction" people lack a theory of politics for that. Harvard is the enemy, Carl Schmitt, blah blah blah. Never occurs to them that their job fight involve literal or figurative pothole-filling rather than zero-sum political warfare. As Pinker said:

What is the pothole in this scenario? Harvard is the avatar of a parasitic system which is higher ed. People have been tinkering at the edges for a long while now. Some people like Mitch Daniels have had some local success at keeping costs down while not allowing overt politicization of the campus. Others like Rufo have had to take a scorched earth view to get anything accomplished at all.

What is the pothole in this scenario?

Scientific research.

Having worked in a lab with Ph.D candidates, I am pretty skeptical that we benefit from that system over just letting them free into the world to be employed.

They won’t be outside of hard sciences and engineering. There simply aren’t a lot of skills a PhD student has that a normal employer wants. Basically the phd programs outside of really hard science and engineering are jobs programs for the graduates of those programs. It helps hide that such programs are useless because those students do get jobs after graduating. If we didn’t have that, maybe the top 1% of those students get real jobs while the rest learn to take orders at coffee shops.

I worked in a hard science engineering lab for most of my time in undergrad. The people work incredibly hard as Ph.D candidates and post docs, but so much of it is dedicated to grant writing, only a small bit of the work is working on the projects those grants are for. It seemed a lot like (frankly) college admissions. You have to apply to a dozen schools to get into one, and its not really clear why you got into that one instead of the others.

If you want to govern, you're going to deal with problems that transcend politics. There are potholes in the road, Democrats and Republicans both want them fixed. You might need to work with the guy who fixes them even if he's an a**hole.

LOL. Harvard, and in general the entire left, have refused to do that when presented with said "a**hole". (Two of them, actually, Trump and Musk). Because this is false. Democrats (except a few marginalized dissidents) are happy with the situation as it is, and Republicans are extremely unhappy with it. If Democrats in general wanted to fix the racial discrimination problem at Harvard, they could have done so by now. If Democrats in general wanted to fix the issue of violent Palestinian protests at universities, they could have done a more credible job at it by now. If Democrats wanted to fix the problem of ideological uniformity at universities, they could have not contributed to it on purpose.

Just as clear is what won’t work: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

This is a theory, anyway. But dangling funding to force grantees to do whatever it wants is the standard situation -- he who pays the piper calls the tune; Trump, as you may recall, eliminated some of that which was pointing the other way (requiring various DEI things), to a lot of crying from the same people crying about Trump's actions against Harvard. In fact the government funds a lot of useless stuff that is basically alms for the universities, and that stuff which isn't... well, there are other universities which aren't so intransigent.

It becomes inevitable, at the start of the new dynasty: to throw all the old scholars and burn them with their books. There is approximately a snowball's chance in hell that anyone in Harvard will cooperate, Politics is the question of the posssible. It is impossible to do politics with the left. Best to cut the gordiian knot.

If someone calls you Hitler, believe them as an honest expression of non-cooperation.

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