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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.
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.
Maybe the Smithsonian poster was the wrong example, but the tone and content of the comment I replied to struck me, at least, very much the mirror of a Kendi or DiAngelo. To moderately change the quote:
Googling for "interlocking system of control" shows at least one notable book from 1982 (The Highest Stage of White Supremacy by John W. Cell) that uses exactly that phrase to describe white supremacy:
I'm willing to take the original comment in good faith, but it really seems like it's perilously close to becoming the tribalism I take it as literally arguing against: "[outgroup] has rigged the system to keep [ingroup] down!" is, while in both cases probably true to some extent, is a meme I don't think is helpful in most circumstances.
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