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Question for academics.
FIRE and Heterodox Academy call for campus "viewpoint diversity" as sort of the implementation of Mill's marketplace of ideas. The president of FIRE says:
I'm not in academia and haven't spent much time on campus since I graduated 20 years ago. So everything I hear is secondhand. The message is always that there is a problem, but it's mostly isolated to the "usual suspect" departments: anthropology, sociology, literature, and The Studies.
Much of the "viewpoint diversity" discourse has dealt with which guest speakers and student protests are and aren't allowed. Those seem to me like sideshows. It seems the main problem is students in these usual suspect programs graduating without ever having been exposed to perspectives opposed to progressive orthodoxy. These students go out into the world not having any idea that the Overton window is much wider than they've been told. They don't realize there are sophisticated rejoinders to the claims they're hearing, and those rejoinders aren't all from right-wingers—many of them are from tenured experts on their own campus, most of whom stand politically left-of-center.
On many (most?) campuses do we need more Milo on campus to inject "viewpoint diversity" into the system? Or do universities just need to exploit the expertise that already exists on campus from faculty in other buildings? Implement a "dueling lecturer" class. So have your gender studies class, but bring in an evolutionary psychologist (and perhaps a biologist or an MD?) to lecture on the biological retorts to social constructionist claims. Have an economist to your sociology class to explain scarcity, and market forces driving meritocracy. Bring an analytic philosopher to Theory of Literature to show that words actually can mean things. And make the content of these "opposition lecturers" a real part of the coursework. To pass, you have to steel-man both sides of the argument to the satisfaction of both lecturers.
The point is to ensure students know that there are opposing viewpoints, and that they are mainstream and not "alt-right propaganda". And to do that, the university should break through its own departmental balkanization.
Again, I know little about university politics and the feasibility of this approach. But I've never heard it suggested, and I thought maybe someone here in the know could tell me why this would or wouldn't work/help.
I'm an academic (well part time) and my current experience is this: the kids are already "woker" and leftier than most of my colleagues even before we get our hands on them. They are mostly kids of Blue Tribe progressives, so they have already inherited a great deal of their world view.
They don't want viewpoint diversity and neither do their parents (generalizing of course).
What incentive does a university currently have to go against that in any concrete way?
Principles? Intellectual virtues? Fulfilling the ideals of a university rather than a 4-year vacation?
Okay, once you've stopped laughing- not running the risk of Trump (and possibly Vance) continuing to gut their funding and harass them with lawsuits for as long as they can?
Indeed. But that will have to be sustained for a while. If the next President just reverts all of that, then a few years is easy enough to get through for most institutions. That's my point. It has to be a sea change from parents on up. Academia is a symptom not a cause.
Where do you think the parents got their views from?
You must be anticipating I'd say... their parents? To be a little less glib, parents and family.
Blue Tribe people make Blue Tribe institutions. Which is the chicken and which the egg?
Are you familiar with the phrase "trust the science"? Where does "the science" come from?
blue tribe people make blue tribe institutions, which in turn generate a consensus reality wherein Blueness is obviously true and correct, with contrary facts elided or buried. Academia is a knowledge-generating apparatus, together with media. By the time a Blue Tribe kid arrives on campus, their reality has been defined by this apparatus their entire life. Then they spend four years being taught and graded and managed by high-status members of this apparatus, often in a close pseudo-paternal relationship, with discrimination against anyone contradicting the apparatus being policed by the full force of the institution backed by the power of the federal government, to say nothing of the informal status economy, before moving into a career where office life is similarly policed.
None of this seems mysterious to me. It seems pretty obvious to me that it's an interlocking system of control, wherein each of the components is purposely designed to bolster and reinforce the others. It's almost certainly true that solving it by aiming at Academia alone won't be sufficient, but that doesn't mean that it isn't necessary.
This is a lot more in depth than I was planning, and I am not sure how much time I will have to reply in the next couple of days, but I didn't want to just give you a "You're wrong" answer. Changing academia itself is not only not necessary but probably counter-productive. Academia does not create the Blue Tribe, it is in its current form created by the Blue Tribe. It doesn't matter what you do to academia, it will return to doing Blue Tribe things. Academia also thinks it is more important than it is. Buying into that framing will not get you a solution. Blue academia prepares you for Blue office life. This is how it should be. No point in preparing Blue Tribers to be farmers with Red Tribe values(generalization of course). Academia is a Blue Tribe pursuit that prepares you for Blue Tribe roles. This is not because the Blue Tribe is smarter or whatever. It is because Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are different.
There is a reason the Blue half of my family all became professors and teachers and the like and the Red half of my family all went into trades, and this is 50 years ago. Blue Tribe and Red Tribe are different, they have different values and different preferences. Definitionally the Blue Tribe cares more about academia for its own sake than the Red Tribe (but see below!). Ergo academia will always be governed by Blue ethos and rules. You can't change them to operate by Red Tribe preferences, because the actual Red Tribe doesn't want them (again we're operating in generalizations here) and if they did they would no longer be recognizable as the Red tribe. Do not confuse Blue Tribe conservatives with Red Tribers. They are not the same. Which is why when the Red Tribe relies on Blue Tribe conservatives (such as all the Catholics on the Supreme Court) it ends up not getting what it wants re gun control et al. There is some overlap in goals, but they are not the same. This is a crucial point.
The issue is that Red Tribe roles are always (but see below!) going to be harder and more physically demanding and therefore less prestigious than Blue Tribe roles. Miners want their kids to go to college so they can get an office job. They want their kids to sit in an air conditioned office and only have to worry about office politics and not a mine collapse, or fire, or black lung or losing fingers. This is where the American Dream collides with Tribal identities.
This is the fundamental issue the American Red Tribe has. The economic compounding effects of cities means high paid "easy" jobs are in cities and because cities make Blue Tribe people, that means Red kids need Blue Tribe education to fit in. Which means their kids have to go to university so they can qualify for Blue Tribe roles in Blue Tribe places.
So it's no good complaining Blue Tribe places teach Blue Tribe values. If they didn't they would be no good for getting Red and Blue Tribe kids into Blue Tribe jobs! Blue Tribe places do Blue Tribe things.
Or to put it another way, you can't make cities Red Tribe, because the Red Tribe largely does not want to live in big cities. That's part of what makes them definitionally Red Tribe in the first place. So it is with academia. In trying you would have to destroy what makes the Red Tribe the Red Tribe in the first place.
If there is a solution it is the economic re-distribution of value from cities to more rural areas, so that Red Tribe kids don't have to be taught how to be Blue Tribe to get a "good" job in the American Dream framing. This will rebalance the importance of academia fundamentally. It also hopefully stops the hemorrhaging of young people away from rural towns and therefore reduces "conversion" rates. Notably it can be accomplished with political power alone. Spending that political capital on changing academia is again a distraction (though you could fine/tax/defund them as part of a way to pay for it, this is going to be redistributing wealth from Blue to Red after all).
The other possible solution is time and AI. The Blue Tribe model is a better fit economically for current modernity. An AI revolution that substantially devalues white collar work may also tip the scales such that more manual tasks once again become economically dominant perhaps even over and above the compounding effects of cities. At least temporarily until we are all replaced by robots or nanites or something.
Fiddling inside academia is a smokescreen for the Red Tribe. It's not going to help. It can't. It's buying into a Blue Tribe framing of the Red Tribe problem.
And just to be really clear. The Red Tribe is not worse than the Blue Tribe, it's not overall any dumber or more backwards or ignorant or any of the other insults that are often flung by some Blue Tribers. Individual Red Tribers can and do excel in academia. Some of the very smartest people I know are Red Tribe through and through. Academia is not its forte not because of a lack of intelligence or curiosity but because of different values. Different desires. You can't change those without fundamentally destroying the Red Tribe as it exists. And it goes way beyond just academia.
The Red Tribe has to find its national political representation from Blue Tribe conservatives for the same reason. Hence the RINO tag et al. It's not about interlocking systems of control, it's about tribal identity, and what that means when those tribes actually have different values and preferences. Or perhaps to rephrase the problem with academia is not that it is Blue Tribe heavy, it is that it has become so dominating above the Red Tribe equivalents due to the way the modern economy works. You can't fix academia to be more Red any more than you could make a farming trade college more Blue without fundamentally destroying what it means to be Red or Blue. But you can put a finger on the scale if one is becoming too powerful.
Which is the irony of Trump of course, he is arguably a Blue Triber who shares the values of Red Tribers, even if he isn't actually all that conservative. Which means hopefully he will meaningfully work to shift economic value to rural Red areas. That will do far more to solve the academia problem than anything else I think.
And now I have written Red and Blue Tribe so much that I will probably be seeing it in my dreams tonight.
I'd say he's a Blue Triber who just has a soft spot for Red Tribers, which is even farther removed, and which makes the Red Tribe situation even more clearly sad. Although I admired the principles of Evan McMullin voters, I really feel for the religious conservatives who (perhaps correctly!) decided that their least awful electoral option in 2016 was Mr. "Grab them by the pussy". Many of them have since resolved the cognitive dissonance of all that by deciding that actually Trump is a good person, which is less sympathetic, but even more tragic, if only in the Greek sense.
Kudos for using "Blue Tribe" and "Red Tribe" accurately, though, not just as synonyms for "Democrat-leaning" and "Republican-leaning". TheMotte seems to be filled with Republican-leaning Blue Tribe folks so you'd think we'd slip up on that less often...
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This is a great post.
I think a good way of summing up the social dynamics @SSCReader is talking about is that the Red and Blue tribes have different theories of American greatness. The Red Tribe believes that the secular source of American greatness is the natural resource wealth (including, possibly even especially, the agricultural land) of the American continent. (Reds often say, and the ones who say it appear to genuinely believe, that the true source of greatness is America's special relationship with Divine Providence, but the way providence works itself in practice is that God gave Americans a continent with huge natural resource wealth). The Blue Tribe believes that the source of American greatness is Yankee ingenuity and (for centrist and right-wing Blues) the capitalist institutions which maximise the economic value of it.
In many ways the cleanest ways this shows up is in the Europoor discourse. Most of the people mocking the Europoors are Red, and the mockery therefore focusses on the destructive stupidity of European (mostly German) energy policy, and includes a lot of factually dubious insinuations that Europeans are not going to be able to keep the lights on. But when a Blue like Noah Smith mocks the Europoors, he focusses on the failure of Europe to build a trillion dollar tech company.
This model is, for me, the best way of explaining Trumpian economic policy. Part of the reason why the Red Tribe loses in American politics is that the Blue theory of American greatness is mostly correct - it really is the case that as of 2025 the main source of American wealth and one of the main sources of American geopolitical leverage is software-driven innovation, and that the place where it happens is the Bluest place in America (coastal California and greater Seattle). Trump wants to change this by changing the economic rules, such that the Red theory becomes correct. At the level of vibes, the memes coming out of the White House in support of a new masculine, blue-collar vision of American prosperity don't show men working on assembly lines (understandable - there is a whiff of pink-collarness to assembly line work and non-union assembly line work really is pink-collar in most times and places) or even men doing traditional heavy industry (like WPA/Nazi/Soviet propaganda posters of manly men with hammers) - they show miners and farmers. At the level of policy, if the UK/EU/Japan trade deals actually happen roughly as announced, then the US will have higher tariffs on steel than on car parts and higher tariffs on car parts than on finished cars - the exact opposite of what you would do if you were encouraging US manufacturing. But the other side of the coin is that all three deals very explicitly promote US natural resource exports - as did the trade deals Trump did in his first term.
The corollary is that MAGA doesn't need to fix academic Blueness. If you believe that the source of American greatness is national resource wealth, then burning down the universities won't break America. And MAGA in the country want Trump to just burn Harvard down yesterday, not carry on faffing about trying to reform it.
This also explains why remote workers moving out to rural areas doesn't help - the people who rise to the top in that world are still doing so based on Yankee ingenuity, and so Blue will be higher status than Red. The sales of North Face jackets and demographics of National Park guests make clear that the Blues aren't actually anti-rural or anti-outdoor. A NYC banker doesn't stop being Blue because his wife keeps a horse at their upstate vacation home, and remote work is no different.
The obvious exception to this model is MAGA embrace of cryptocurrency. I think this is an exception which proves the rule - I am comfortable arguing that MAGA embrace of cryptocurrency is top-down in the way that MAGA embrace of coal mining is bottom-up. It also appeals to the Kulak_Revolt type of Red Triber who has given up and thinks watching the world burn is more practical than a return to a masculine blue-collar model of economic prosperity.
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Do you think the shift to remote work will allow value to accrue more in rural areas, and outside of cities? I know some Christian writers like Rod Dreher and Stephen Morello have mentioned this as a possibility, remote work opening up more rural collectivist efforts amongst red tribers.
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Peripherally, I think your point has a kernel of truth, but I worry that you're constructing a worldview in a direction that is prone to revanchism and decoupling from reality. Your complaints sound uncomfortably close to the logic behind that infamous Smithsonian poster, but complaining about blue, rather than white power structures.
At least, it makes me uncomfortable even though I think there are certainly elements of truth to it.
You're going to have to spell it out. The Smithsonian poster correctly noted some things about white culture (or rather, certain white cultures), but implied that their value were arbitrary. They got jeered at because the people jeering thought some ofthe things on the posters were good things for non-arbitrary reasons, and ascribing their value to "whiteness" was ridiculous.
FCfromSSCs complaint is simply about indoctrination. There doesn't seem to be much relationship.
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