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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   24829 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 29, 2025

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Continued Evolution on "The Plan" to Deal with Universities

WaPo cites two anonymous "White House officials", one of which is described as a "senior White House official". They claim that the purpose of anonymity is "because [the plan] is still being developed". So obviously, take that for what it is. Plausibly just a trial balloon to see how it plays; plausibly just a push by one faction within the WH to change direction.

“Now it’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” said a senior White House official

At least somebody at the WH is observing that doing things like indiscriminate chemotherapy wasn't working, and now little targeted things might be struggling, too.

The new system, described by two White House officials, would represent a shift away from the unprecedented wave of investigations and punishments being delivered to individual schools and toward an effort to bring large swaths of colleges into compliance with Trump priorities all at once.

Universities could be asked to affirm that admissions and hiring decisions are based on merit rather than racial or ethnic background or other factors, that specific factors are taken into account when considering foreign student applications, and that college costs are not out of line with the value students receive.

Huh. I wonder who suggested this sort of thing eight months ago. Of course, that person was also showered in downvotes for continuing to suggest something like this over "indiscriminate chemotherapy".

This was pretty straightforward all along. The playbook was already there. The hooks were already there. There are ways to affect change that are actually oriented toward the goals you want to accomplish. It seems like at least some people in the administration are continuing to find their way to it.

Of course, the wild response is wild:

Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, said the outlines of the proposal amounted to an “assault … on institutional autonomy, on ideological diversity, on freedom of expression and academic freedom.”

“Suddenly, to get a grant, you need to not demonstrate merit, but ideological fealty to a particular set of political viewpoints. That’s not merit,” he said. “I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this.”

Spoken as if universities weren't asked for ideological fealty to the left in the past. Some academics basically just tried to stay silent on the matter, while others jumped all over it.

A slightly less insane response:

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s law school, said “no one will object” if the White House simply requires universities to pledge compliance with existing law.

But Chemerinsky, one of the attorneys representing UC researchers in a lawsuit challenging terminated federal research funding, also said the administration’s view of what the law requires could be at odds with other interpretations: “It all depends on what the conditions are, and whether those conditions are constitutional.”

Chemerinsky said it would be a First Amendment violation to put schools at a disadvantage in competing for funding if they profess a belief in diversity, for example, because government is not allowed to discriminate based on viewpoint. He said it “would be very troubling” if the White House proposal deviates from the standards that have been used in awarding grants based on the quality and importance of the science, peer review and merit, and uses ideology as the judgment standard instead.

Still sort of lacking, as there was previously a (more-or-less, depending) soft disadvantage in competing for funding if one didn't profess a belief in diversity. If you want me to take this complaint seriously, then you should also say that the left having done that before was wrong. You should say so publicly and publicly commit to a position that the previous regime was, indeed, subject to the exact same concern that they were discriminating based on viewpoint.

But indeed, the Trump admin is in a legally privileged position here. They can, indeed, just demand that universities comply with existing law. I think Prof. Chemerinsky is being a bit coy about whether some universities will complain; my sense is that UCal has already been on a tighter leash for some of these things than many other unis... and yes, even just actually complying with the actual law is going to be a fight for some of them.

The only thing that has even a remote chance of working is forcing universities to hire thousands of young right-wing tenured faculty for ‘ideological balance’. The left will still try to allow them to all be fired when they come back to power, but you can at least try to hold that up in the courts. The grant stuff is meaningless, they will swear fealty to this regime to get money and in a few years will swear fealty to the next. The only thing that works is getting your people into the machine.

Why can't the right-wing create their own universities, or "Antiversities"? And grow them by redirecting the funds from existing universities (NIH, NHS, etc.) while only hiring outside academia.

There's two answers to this question.

@The_Nybbler gave one, network effects and prestige make the "Harvard product" non-fungible.

The other is that to make a superior product; that is, a university that produces higher quality education than Harvard does today, is essentially illegal.

You'll recognize here the classic structure of oligopolies: make the brand not the product a requirement of policy, and add requirements to production that can't be easily scaled to prevent the entry of competitors. This is usually constructed in terms of "safety" but any excuse is valid so long as you can make sure that becoming a competitor is more expensive than buying you outright.

Social media has this problem too, and here maybe we can find a pattern for how institutional capture could work. Universities are vulnerable because their funding is sourced from the government and government backed loans. Rather than try to redirect the funds to new institutions, you could just turn the spigot off to collapse their value and buy the brand cheap in an austerity drive that allows you to fire 80% of the staff, in particular the political activists.

Short term I agree, it won’t work, but keep in mind that ATM, Theres a monopoly on university level job training. The old university system was all there was, and so they never faced much competition for post graduation job placement. If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates. Depending on the school and major the new academy doesn’t need to be that good to outpace the current university system. Most people coming out of the university today are probably less educated than high school graduates of the 1960s. They are not well-read, they don’t understand the scientific method (unless they happen to graduate in STEM) and don’t know how to do serious academic research or write logically coherent papers. Heck, even the professors seem to be less able to do serious academic work.

Does anyone actually want to hire a humanities degree holder? I can’t imagine anyone looking at the current crop and wanting them in any part of the business. They’ve mostly majored in being liberal, campus protesting, and becoming a litigation nightmare. If there were alternatives, they’d be completely unemployable simply because even minimal job-related competence (doing dispassionate research, doing the work assigned, staying on topic, and knowing better than to be a walking, talking bag of grievances all of which are based on something the company could be sued for) those people would be snapped up. Why hire a blue hair when Hillsdale grads can do better work and act like professional workers?

If the new academic system can produce higher quality education and therefore better graduates, eventually it will be noticed that graduates of these institutions do better in the workforce than traditional college graduates.

Therein lies the problem. Universities are not about education, they are about selection. Until you can reliably demonstrate you are getting better admittees than Stanford, Stanford will be better than you. And no one will agree to go to your school instead of Stanford until you show you can place them...

So the burn it down plan is the only plan that has a chance of working. Once people are dubious about going to the current universities because they cant take out loans to go there and no one else can either, so why bother? Then something else can spring up.

The other is that to make a superior product; that is, a university that produces higher quality education than Harvard does today, is essentially illegal.

Can you elaborate? I see the structural analogy, but how is it implemented in this case?

It's mostly down to CRA related Calvinball.

If you try and start your own university with, say, rigorously merit based admissions and no grievance studies departments, you'll instantly become a mostly east-asian lawsuit magnet.

Now, the way that the CRA is written, by the letter of the law you'd actually be more compliant than Harvard, but what matters isn't what the law says, it's what judges believe it says and how many lawsuits your organization can defend itself against until it shuts down.

In more operational terms, for your degrees to be worth anything you need accreditation, and accreditation bodies are controlled by your enemies. Granted, the Trump administration understands this which is why Trump signed April's EO that directs Secretary of Education Linda MacMahon to frustrate any accreditor that requires DEI initiatives and the like.

This is why I add "essentially", as usual in such cases, the hurdles aren't technically impossible to meet, just practically impossible.

Don't places like BYU and Liberty university kind of disprove this? I actually don't think this would be a failure mode. I think the right wing vs neutral would be a bigger problem. Anyway BYU is accredited reasonably well regarded and kicks out students for drinking, premarital sex and homosexuality I doubt a Motte approved right wing university would be more conservative then that.

I think the point is that if your institution is over a century old, like BYU, (cue Fiddler: "Tradition!") you can get away with a lot more than if you're starting something today. Liberty seems to do okay, but Bob Jones University has gotten a lot of litigation for its beliefs (which I personally don't subscribe to, not defending it here).

The problem is that you can't start century-old institutions overnight. Maybe the second-best time is now, but that's not a huge solace. I guess "find a vestigial existing one and wear it as a skin suit" could be done --- haven't there been a number of liberal arts colleges going up for auction in the last decade?

Liberty seems to do okay, but Bob Jones University has gotten a lot of litigation for its beliefs (which I personally don't subscribe to, not defending it here).

Didn't they both get into fundamentally the same trouble over bans on interracial dating? I thought the difference was that Bob Jones fought all the way to the Supreme Court but Liberty folded.

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Thé motte wants a different kind of conservatism than BYU has.

What the hell is ”CRA”? Googling mostly turned up Cyber Resiliency Act and something from Canada.

Civil Rights Act.

Incumbent advantage in the university field is extreme. Last prestigious universities to be founded were shortly before the turn of the 20th century (Stanford and the University of Chicago)

But isn't seizing the universities and gifting them to the right wing just like some sort of reverse socialism and affirmative action?

Yes. So?

With UCLA (1919) comfortably the most prestigious 20th century foundation in the US. If you consider the other UCs satellite campuses of Berkeley, then the most prestigious 20th century foundation in the US is Rice (1912), which puts you a long way down the rankings. Outside the US, it would be Imperial College London (1907) or possibly Tsinghua (1911).

Post-1920 the rankings are dominated by specialist research institutes and standalone medical schools which count as "universities" by bureaucratic fiat.

You know what would work even better? Destroying academia and burning the university system to the ground.

Declare war on college. Remove all government funding of higher education. Stop issuing student visas. Make hiring on the basis of degrees illegal.

College delenda est. This will not end until the last university building is reduced to ashes, the last college campus has been sowed with salt, and the last tenured professor's head sits on a pike.

That would only work if Russell Vought-tier MAGA conservatives had an unbroken hold on the Executive branch for the next 20 years. They won’t. Their policies will be reversed within five seconds of the next Democrat president taking power, or within about six months of a George Bush-tier Republican taking power. Removing funding would require Congressional approval and they won’t get that.

Next best thing is, as 2rafa says, fill the machine with your people. Next best thing is to bloat higher education with new constituencies favorable to your side. That means more funding to ROTC programs, collegiate athletics, and red-tribe-adjacent disciplines like business and engineering.

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

In this case, I’d also expect it to be a flagrant 1A violation in a way which the status quo is not. But I’m not up to date on my “viewpoint neutrality” jurisprudence, and I’d be quite willing to believe that there’s some awful precedent here. It would still be an extraordinarily petty, expensive, short-sighted way to imitate the Cultural Revolution.

Reversed stupidity is still not intelligence.

Sure it is. The stupidity of the tribes doesn't overlal much, so if you can get them to counter each other, everyone ends up better off.

That just means you’re paying more for less!

And if they don’t overlap, how exactly are they countering? Is there someone out there who would drop grievance studies if only they had more creationist papers to read?

That just means you’re paying more for less!

Customer: "$25 for a T-bone? That's outrageous! The butcher down the street sells his for $15!"

Butcher: "Then why didn't you buy it from him?"

Customer: "Because he's all sold out."

Butcher: "Well, when I'm all sold out, I sell mine for $7!

And if they don’t overlap, how exactly are they countering?

Both sides call each other our when they're acting stupid, constraining their behavior to the non-stupid set. "Centrists"/"moderates"/etc. have shown they can't do that, as they lack motivation and even a spine.

Is there someone out there who would drop grievance studies if only they had more creationist papers to read?

As others pointed out: how about HBD papers?

Ok, but getting right wing faculty is… difficult, and in practice would look like making universities hire creation scientists and give them tenure.

A modest proposal: Replace all social science professors with economists.

They have the methodological training and interests to fully replace sociology, political science, and much of anthropology, psychology, etc.

They're only moderately left leaning instead of being dogmatically so.

And there's currently a surge of economists desperate for work thanks to the government hiring freezes. Now is the perfect time to strike!

Notre Dame supplies a template for purging marxists from the academy. They formed a new "econometrics" department, gave them the courses that students actually need to take. Then after enrollment in the old "heterodox" econ department withered, they binned the entire thing. (Tenure only protects individual faculty; entire departments can still be shut down if they aren't financially viable.)

Thanks, this is a good idea

Is that really so much worse than hiring tenured STEM faculty who actually just write zero-value low-impact papers for sci-ed journals about the history of race in science? Mr Creationist can sit in his nice office at Harvard and write papers for the Kansas Journal of Creation Science and teach a class on creationism that 5 students a year (4 of whom are just curious about this strange ideological subculture) will take and that's fine. In time though, even his presence will, in a small way, counter the equally poor equivalents on the left.

No. The Journal of Creation already exists, you can read it right now if you’d like to.

As an alternative, how about we simply stop funding universities that have been spending public money on things as ridiculous as creation science? They can even keep the tenure, so long as they fund it themselves.

Trying to defund woke by instead funding creationism honestly seems like a pretty likely outcome!

It isn't as if "woke" is particularly distinct from creationism. Both ideologies essentially agree on the impact that evolution had on group differences and cognition after all.

You have, correctly, arrived at a single similarity between the two ideologies- the idea that genetic differences between races(and for creationists sometimes species) are too minimal to explain differences in behavior.

I have yet to see demonstration of others. I mean, yeah, there's not-creationist woo with lots of similarities(ancient aliens theory is quite often literally just creation science with a search and replace function). But woke isn't among them.

Wait I’m confused. Wasn’t creationism just being suggested here because it’s a right-wing theory with roughly equivalent public support to the core wokism (like the actual serious all whites are racist etc type) and with roughly the same level of grounding (which is to say, a lot of circularly cited papers and few ground facts that don’t have better alternative explanations) and so would be a ‘fair’ replacement?

I don’t think the point was ever that there’s actually a 1-1 prevalence of every single problem between the two of them.

Creationism is about twice as popular as woke ideas in opinion polls.

This could conceivably work, but the more-likely result is the same thing that always happens with affirmative-action, where there is a clique of “real” researchers doing “real” science, and then a bunch of affirmative-action hires producing slop that no one actually cares about.

I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.

I am all for hiring without regard to the applicants political positions, just as I am for hiring color-blind, but I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.

Basically, certain occupations select for certain political leanings. For example, I would expect pacifists to be severely underrepresented in the military.

The road to tenure is long, hard, and not particularly rewarding, financially. While there are some walking it purely for the love of science (or humanities or whatever), most will at least partly have some ideological reason for preferring academics to industry. For the left, there are plenty of reasons to prefer academics:

  • A dislike for capitalism and thus industry. A company working to make a profit might be seen as at least evil-adjacent. By contrast, being funded by taxes of people who work for such companies might seem cleaner.
  • Academics being somewhat of a lefty echo chamber, which they can feel at home in (and play their stupid status games).
  • A genuine desire to make the world better through basic research.
  • A belief that education is a bottleneck to human welfare, and a willingness to spread their knowledge to as many people as they can (especially the disadvantaged ones).

By contrast, a conservative researcher will likely believe that earning a lot of money is generally good and will detest the lefty academic environment. If he is doing research, he will be more likely be motivated by the competitive advantage of his country, which makes working in industry or restricted government facilities more attractive.

So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.

MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.

What are you talking about?? Do you honestly expect “the left” to not hit the defect button the instant MAGA-style conservatives are out of power? “Wow, looks like Trump restrained his base from using affirmative action and remaking educational institutions to benefit their side! What a noble precedent—now we will also abandon DEI and uphold Trump’s lofty ideals of meritocratic achievement.”

I am doubtful if the right has the academic manpower to restore political balance to the academic system with merit-based hiring.

Somehow I doubt that too. Also, what does merit mean in academia? A cultural institution so totally dominated by neoliberal progressives that merit can only mean being published in one of their journals, or speaking at one of their conferences, or getting tenure at one of their blue blooded Ivy League schools.

Hey I have an idea: let’s make journalism merit based! We’ll measure merit by how many articles you’ve written for the Epoch Times, or your number of appearances on One America News network!

So if the fallacy of the left is to expect that any inequality of the racial distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness, the fallacy of the right is to believe that any inequality of the political distribution of tenured faculty is proof of unfairness.

There's a distinct asymmetry here, though. In that there are loads of documented recent evidence of people in power explicitly and openly encouraging unfairness of the latter kind, while you have to go back quite a few decades before you encounter anywhere near the same density of such official documentation (well, at least in the direction that is being discussed, anyway; certainly there's no shortage of recent official documentation that explicitly calls for discriminating against members of white/Asian races in academia). Perhaps, more importantly, diversity of political orientation is material to an organization's ability to perform academic research (and more generally to discover truth) in a way that one's race isn't. As such, there's an argument in favor of AA in cases of political orientation that doesn't exist for race or other immutable-characteristic-based ones.

I still think this would cast MAGA as hypocrites and unprincipled, but mainly because (a) they're unprincipled hypocrites anyway for independent reasons and (b) the people who would judge MAGA as unprincipled based on this are motivated to be sloppy in their thinking in order to judge as such no matter what, anyway.

I think that you are spot-on that @2rafa's proposal is exactly affirmative action, and it will work out just as badly, while also destroying any credibility of MAGA as a principled opponent to affirmative action and setting the precedent for the left to do the same when they come back into power.

Nobody gives MAGA any credit for principles anyway, and the precedent is long since set.

If the best anyone can do is balance left-wing wokeys with right-wing Q people, it's STILL better than the status quo ante.

It won’t be Q people. There’s a reservoir of right wingers trying to do science already- creationism(and climate change skeptics). You would have to make universities hire people like Ken ham and give them tenure.

if giving Ken Ham is the solution to left wing bias in universities' I think I'll just stick with annoying liberal groupthink.

It is at the very least less harmful to broader society than grievance studies.

As someone who doesn't regret his "obnoxious atheist" phase of his online life from about 15 years ago, it saddens me to say that I'd take that tradeoff in a heartbeat, because I can't honestly judge Ham's "scholarship" as any worse than the mountains of "scholarship" that is produced by modern academia. And, unlike the latter, the Hams of the world don't actively try to subvert the ability of other fields to do good scholarship by denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy that must be discarded for us to get at the truth. So if we can reduce the latter at the cost of increasing the former, I'd see it as an absolute win.

But I don't think increasing the former would reduce the latter anyway, so I think the plan would be bad if implemented with Creationism. As someone else alluded to, if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.

[modern academia] denigrating basic concepts like "logic" and "empirical evidence" as tools of White Supremacy

If you believe the truth of HBD, this claim is objectively correct.

if we could get good HBD research along with the nonsense critical theory "research," it would be a strict improvement, since it'd be helping to reduce the dilution of academia's truth discovery by the critical theory nonsense.

It is not in the short-term (or even medium-term) group interest of non-white groups to abandon the critical theory frame, even putting the matter of group dignity aside. If nonsense is the only thing keeping Liberia at bay, then nonsense shall be spread.

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There's actually an even bigger and much more interesting cohort of right wingers trying to do science - HBD, evo psych, etc. I'd put money on them getting in as representatives of the right rather than the creationists. Personally I'd be looking forward to mandatory "diversity" classes that are actually HBD rather than the regular tripe.

But no one likes them. Trump has no reason to favor dissident right science. Their supporters are a negligible group of people who aren’t enthusiastic about him. They are incredibly unpopular with the general public.

Hey, I like them! I think he does in fact have a reason to favor dissident right science, because the political environment for the right becomes substantially better when HBD is the universally accepted wisdom with regards to differences in group achievement. The supporters of "woke" were incredibly unpopular with the general public too - that didn't stop them from using academia to change the world.

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Personally I'd be looking forward to mandatory "diversity" classes that are actually HBD rather than the regular tripe.

"OK class, we're going to start with a little exercise. How many of you -- raise your hands -- have parents who are dumb?" (Half the hands go up, with a little laughter). "Now, I don't mean they don't understand you, or can't figure out the new apps on the iPhone 20. I mean really dumb. Like they can't read, or understand compound interest... at least enough to pay for this school" (all the hands go down but one). "Ms. Johnson? Really? By any chance were you adopted?"

"<gasp> How did you know?"

The most unrealistic part of this is that illiterate morons could ever navigate the insane paperwork to adopt a kid.

Ken ham

Well, certainly not him, he's Australian. I'm sure we can find some American creationists. Maybe Anthony Watts would like a sinecure in the Climate Studies department.

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