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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
You have won a few battles, but all you have done is halt the advance. The woke have simply retreated to more easily defended positions. As long as they control academia and the arts (science AND culture) they will keep coming back and continue to be relevant.
"Woke 1 was crazy" does not mean that wokeness is dead. It simply means that mistakes were made and Woke 2, when it happens, will account for the learnings of the past.
I don't think academia is a great position to be in long term. Sure, it's easily defended, but like any walled fortress, it can be starved out. And it's already showing signs of hunger. COVID and the replication crisis are ravaging its moral authority, while it is being put under increasing financial strain by both right-wing government funding rugpulls, the decreasing perceived value of the degree, and the demographic decline of the customer base. Plus, being an academic has become increasingly unglamorous over the past two decades as would-be academics have realized that there are more would-be academics than there are slots, so you spend 5 years taking classes and working as a barely-paid TA for the privilege of fighting with six or seven other people just as qualified as you over the privilege of an underpaid non-tenure-track adjunct position. Right-wing colleges and universities probably won't suffer much from the demographic decline, and neither will the Ivy Leagues, but there's a good chance it wipes out small left-by-default liberal arts colleges. There was clearly an effort to compensate for this by importing students, but Trump's actions may have put a damper on that, at least for a bit.
Culture is also going to take a hit from this effect, since the colleges are the pipeline to it. It might be less vulnerable in some ways, particularly to direct government action, but there are signs that culture is going to increasingly fragment in the future and that will substantially weaken predominately left-wing institutions like Hollywood.
I don't think these developments are set in stone but if I saw lefties telling each other "at least we still have academia" I would finger it as cope.
It seems like I've been hearing something like this for 10+ years, yet academia stills seems to be around and the main gatekeeper of white collar/tech jobs. The system can stay irrational longer than you can stay alive, or whatever variant of that saying you prefer. What percentage of applicants are getting a white-collar/tech job with mid-corp, big corp, NGO, fed/state/local government, etc. without the piece of paper that says they can be a good boy/girl/them and follow the dictates of HR? As long as those areas demand the paper, academia will be strong enough to cause all kinds of problems.
If you're not preparing to fight over a longer time-span than your own life, you're not preparing to win the culture war.
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Are we going to ignore the elephant in the room that is AI? It is bound to do something to the university system, even if it is just further decoupling the college experience from hard skills. If humans do not intellectually contribute to the object-level problems in the workplace anymore, then there can not be any pretense that any job requirements for them are about anything other than manners, that is, how they relate to other people; and so college will have to go all in on its role as finishing school.
I definitely think that AI might have an impact, but the Internet didn't have quite as big an impact as one might have predicted. If AI does make a big difference, I wonder how much of it will be because of the tech and how much because of the state of the university.
I am largely all right with colleges understanding that they are something like a finishing school.
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Right wing small liberal arts colleges are not in great financial shape right now either.
Hmm, I haven't gotten the impression that things have gotten worse for them recently. I broadly expect right-wing demographics to somewhat offset the general demographic decline that will hit schools, but I could be mistaken.
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Let them die. We don't need a right-wing replacement for college, we need to destroy college as an institution. The idea that everyone should spend one fourth of their life in school is fucking mental.
From "Against Tulip Subsidies" by Scott Alexaner:
From "You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that you are now Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president." by the same:
And from "A Modest Proposal For Republicans: Use The Word "Class"", idem:
College exists for a reason. We need higher educated people in order to run the society we choose to live in.
College nowadays is just a mechanism to take advantage of tribal nepotism and entry into higher strata of social circles and connections.
Sadly, I learned that one far too late.
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No, you need this system of education because it's a jobs program (and because Boomers are obsessed with graduation rate as a proxy for how well society is doing). The purpose of college is not to teach; professors are not evaluated on knowledge retention rates and are notorious for being poor at teaching.
Ironically the problem with this system is that, because its primary objective is not education (both lower and higher), it's proof that high-IQ people will be fine no matter how garbage and wasteful the education system becomes. Which means that if you reduced a degree to the IQ test(s) for which it serves as a hyper-inefficient proxy, you could save billions upon billions of dollars and refund nearly 8 years of prime lifetime to nearly every young citizen, something worth several hundred thousand dollars at current rates.
This isn't to say that we must abolish job training, of course- that would still be required- but it's also required right now on top of education anyway. Cutting out the middleman would probably be OK, though of course, employment in academia is one of the primary contributors to the existence of the middle class as a concept.
It's not just IQ. Conscientiousness is a huge part of the story in terms of both inputs and outputs - a smart but lazy person won't necessarily be a better worker than a hard worker with lower IQ, and university outcomes will more-or-less mimic that dynamic.
College may be mostly signaling, but there's a real signal there beyond what can be measured in a quick IQ test.
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Nearly eight years? College only lasts four to five. Most people don't go to grad school.
I am pretty strongly in agreement that the expansion of higher education was mostly bad, that things like sending nursing students back to community college would be very good. But every first world society has near-universal high school education. I'm not sure about that chesterton's fence being avoidable.
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What proportion of the "highly educated" population is "highly educated" in the ways actually needed to run our society? Why is this system specifically necessary to educate them?
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Realistically we only need college for engineering, medicine, and a small amount of trained scholars to write books.
Other countries do not do credentialism and you end up randomly meeting people who end up having an international surgeon as an uncle (so likely some inherited IQ) and talk perfectly fine upper middle class socialization but never went to college.
From what I know most forms of testing for jobs that is basically an IQ test are illegal because of civil rights and disparate impact. We could get rid of college if every job application had a 10 min IQ test. Instead we do an expensive proxy system for IQ.
Orthodox Jews also often have normal upper middle class people without a college education. There network perhaps helps them navigate American society without an expensive credential.
Oh please. I've been IQ tested for jobs before in a field that everyone wants to get more blacks into and in which hiring managers will straight up tell people 'yeah, we'll give a black guy a chance, but they're lazy and don't learn, so we wind up having to fire them'.
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Undergraduate is a proxy for IQ and conscientiousness, so replacing it with pure IQ loses something.
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In theory hiring based on IQ tests is not necessarily illegal, since if you can prove the IQ test is a "reasonable measure of job performance" then you're in the clear, and a priori the expected correlation is something like "between 0.2 and 0.5 but it's complicated" so that might be doable. But in practice, are you going to run the study to make sure that that correlation really applies to the job you're hiring for, in a way that's not too complicated to explain to a judge? No.
It's worse than a proxy for IQ, because it's a proxy for IQ and SES. Employers don't care if you were the sort of person who could take 4 years out of the workforce while your family and/or your creditors paid tuition and room and board for you, but if you want a good college degree that's who you need to be, and the disparate impact of that might be more significant than a test of IQ alone.
Ironically the disciplines that are important enough that we really need college for them are also the ones that are important enough that we don't trust college for them; even if you're a straight-A student in one of those fields, you're still going to be taking your PE or USMLE tests.
It would be nice if someday grade inflation just gets so ridiculous that we realize this is a general principle: proper mechanism design concludes that the institutions getting paid to teach you should not be the same institutions in charge of evaluating how well you've been taught. Creating effective and robust general tests is a big problem, but perhaps not as much of a problem as not creating them has been.
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We don’t need college as it exists today, but it fills certain niches that need replacement:
Undergrad: specialized education beyond what school teaches. Although we could probably have online learning with online/LLM lessons, small in-person groups, and tutors for milestones and edge cases; a more decentralized college-like system without the bureaucratic overhead and tuition costs of today’s colleges. Honestly, I think this is the future: it has only been possible recently (last 20 years without the assistance of reliable LLMs, last 4 months with them), so although traditional college has existed for so long, maybe now it’s obsolete and only persists by inertia.
Postgrad, lowercase-a academia: projects too experimental and unprofitable for industry, too expensive long and collaborative for hobbyists. We have a system to fund those projects (grants), understand (papers) and verify (peer review) their results, have experienced people (PIs / advisors) plan them and manage inexperienced ones (labs) and pass tacit knowledge to their successors (PhD students); feel free to propose a better alternative, or figure out how to create a parallel academic system.
Kill it with fire. This system is entirely broken. The grants are politically or ideologically written, peer review is largely logrolling, papers are nonsense (Replication Crisis). The PIs are there to take in money and build fiefdoms, the PhD students are highly-educated grunts to actually write the papers.
How many engineering/math grant proposals or papers have you read? Peer review is broken, though.
Enough to see the ideology. When supposedly pure math grant proposals contain various DEI goals, it's pretty clear the system is broken.
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You’re not wrong about uppercase-A Academia, but it will be sought and kept alive unless there’s another institution to replace the type of projects it handles. It’s the worst system except for industry, independent research, and everything else.
It's occupying the niche while not satisfying it. It has to be burned down for another institution to arise.
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I am directionally pro-removing college from its entitled position as a signifier of talent, but I think (specifically for the right wing) that it still retains a lot of merit for elite formation purposes. Part of elite formation is enculturation, and part of it is networking.
What I think isn't needed is for college to be the bottleneck through which job privileges are awarded. Most professions would likely be better off with something like a guild system that does on the job training. Colleges in some professions can slot easily into this, of course.
If you don't like unions, credentialism, and regulatory capture now I have some bad news for you about guilds...
Perhaps that's a bad word given the historical use. What I really mean is "job preparatory training," which can look like certification, a college degree, or just on-the-job training.
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We have right wing government rugpulls because of Trump. Trump is unique, and even if he wasn't, administrations tend to change parties and it's likely a Democrat will be elected as the next US President. Actually having wokeness receding would mean something that doesn't just depend on one individual (maybe two individuals if you count Musk).
And I have no idea how COVID has caused any problem for woke academia. Any wokeness-related COVID problems have been forgotten by now, at least to the point where you can't criticize the woke for them and get taken seriously.
I agree with this very strongly (and have pointed this out several times) but state-level right-wing governments (notably Florida and Texas, if memory serves) have decided to get in on the action and they aren't going to go anywhere when Trump goes away.
I can't use X The Everything App without it telling me that Fauci knew ahead of time that COVID vaccines could cause miscarriages. That sort of hit to institutional trust hits the upstream academic institutions by association.
They tried but the bigger effort was enjoined as violating free speech. I guess New College is still trying but... ehh?
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DeSantis is term limited out in Florida in January; that'll end his attacks on Florida college woke. Abbott's haven't been nearly as effective.
Abbott's have much more staying power, because he's doing this mostly by stacking admins at flagship universities with Abbott-aligned technocrats. Yes it works slower but it probably works better.
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I think "attacking woke colleges" is the sort of thing red states are more likely to do under a blue federal administration.
I'm inclined to agree with you about the lack of impact on such efforts so far, I just don't think it's right to assume that after Trump, nobody will pay attention to colleges ever again.
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He's not unique in this particular aspect, but unfortunately his match is DeSantis who right now seems very unlikely as a Presidential contender.
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It was a reputational hit to the expert class, which is the main product sold by academia.
I don't think it's rare to have noticed that the reaction to COVID from the expert class was, charitably, akin to flailing around. Now some people will still cut them some slack that they were acting with best intentions, or did the best with that they had, but it doesn't address that they did not seem to know what they were doing ultimately, which people will remember. Prior to that, the prevailing thought regarding the expert class was that any visible failure was a result of not following enough the suggestions of the expert class.
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You need an actual alternative to academia though. Even if a lot of stuff coming out of academia is no longer scientific, it is also still the main source of actual good public knowledge. Corporations also do research, but they keep their results to themselves and don't want to spend money on educating the next generation.
Right wing colleges are surely quite rare, and Ivy league universities still lean left to my knowledge. Left-by-default is the norm as far as I can tell.
Do we? What critical function do you believe that academia is filling?
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The get rid of college crowd isn’t saying get rid of Cal-Tech or remove college for most of the top 10% intellects. It’s about returning to 1950’s college attendance levels and finding a sorting method (Basically an IQ test) for the 10-50% instead of making them get a Spanish degree at a mid-tier university.
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"The right" as a political movement needs right-wing or "neutral" colleges and universities to engage in elite formation. It probably already has enough institutions to fulfill this function.
Otherwise it wants research labs to help with things like growing crops and building better bombs. These functions of academia are likely to survive (even if the rest of academia is hit pretty hard) because they have a steady demand that exists outside of the student body size.
I don't think this is the case, if by "main source" we mean the source that is getting used. The press and advocacy/special interest groups have the ear of the public much more so than academia, which communicates with the broader public via the press. And the press covers issues that doesn't really get processed via academia, whereas a lot of even the best academic stuff nobody in the public really cares about (except maybe to look at pictures from Hubble or w/e). It's true that there may be university-affiliated think-tanks that do good work, but if I want to know something like "how many munitions did the US fire off in Iran" academia is not going to help me out (CSIS hasn't been affiliated with Georgetown for 30+ years, apparently because Georgetown booted them out precisely because they were so focused on the press and not "scholarship.").
The press and special interest groups do not produce the data themself though. They rely on others to do so, and are very much biased. You need primary sources for that ecosystem to work.
The people who fund them do. They produce studies which just happen to support what they are advocating through the press and the special interest groups.
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