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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33002 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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There seems to be a small movement by Republican lawmakers to put legal pressure on the excesses of woke universities.

The STEM Scott writes about several bills up for consideration in the Texas state senate:

This week, the Texas Senate will take up SB 18, a bill to ban the granting of tenure at all public universities in Texas, including UT Austin and Texas A&M. (Those of us who have tenure would retain it, for what little that’s worth.) [...]

The Texas Senate is considering two other bills this week: SB 17, which would ban all DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, offices, and practices at public universities, and SB 16, which would require the firing of any professor if they “compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.”

Florida is considering a similar bill, HB 999, that would place restrictions on DEI-related initiatives and majors at public universities. Already the effects are being felt at SLACs like the New College:

We have seven or eight tenure-track candidates coming up for tenure this year. Everyone has a positive recommendation for tenure. The next step is supposed to be the Board of Trustees, which in April will approve or deny tenure. Traditionally, the Board of Trustees just rubber-stamps the tenure based on the recommendations that are made. Now, recently, President Corcoran has met with the president of our union to recommend that the candidates withdraw their files before it’s too late. My interpretation is that Corcoran suspects there’s probably a non-negligible proportion of the trustees who want to make an example out of those people and deny them tenure. The trustees as a whole, Corcoran and DeSantis want to turn our institution into something different. And in order to do that, they need to hire new faculty. The best way for them to hire new faculty is to get rid of the faculty who they can fire without breaching contract. So that means firing the tenure-track faculty. [...]

The most likely thing to happen is that they’re going to impose some changes on the curriculum. It’s not clear exactly what form and with what faculty input, but they’re getting rid of gender studies and critical race theory—they have said that publicly many times. The law, HB 999, is hopelessly vague. There’s so many things that could fall under the umbrella of gender studies and critical race theory, and we don’t know what programs, classes or parts of a given syllabus are likely to be illegal if it passes. We don’t know if that will mean we will have to submit our syllabi to the provost or the president or the board, or what authority they will have.

I'm in a bit of an odd place with regards to these issues. I don't fit neatly onto the woke "how dare you attack our most hallowed and sacred institutions!" side, nor the anti-woke "stop teaching this pinko commie crap to our kids!" side.

I really do have an almost naive faith in free speech for all, even for my worst enemies. Despite being an avowed rightist, I not only want leftists to be able to speak, but I want them to be platformed! I want to help you get the word out! I think our public life really should play host to a diversity of viewpoints. I think the university should be a hothouse of strange and controversial ideas. By all means, keep teaching CRT and women's studies and black studies and whatever else you want. I know that leftists don't extend the same courtesy to me, but that doesn't invalidate the fundamental point that I should extend that courtesy to them. Even just beyond extending formal charity to my political outgroup, I actually enjoy a lot of this type of scholarship and I find value in it, I like Marxist literary criticism and the obscurantist mid-20th century French guys and German phenomenology and all the rest of it, and I think it should continue to be taught and studied on its own merits, even if I don't necessarily agree with the politics.

But! It really is hard sometimes. When things like this happen, when a book chapter that was, by all accounts, a completely anodyne explication of the official party ideology, whose only crime was that it didn't go far enough in advocating the abolition of all gendered pronouns, is met with public humiliation and a tarnishing of the reputation of the author... it does make my blood boil and it's hard to maintain my principles. It makes me want to go "ok, yeah screw it, ban all liberal arts programs at universities, I don't care, whatever, I just want these people to lose." I'm on their side on a lot of the key object-level issues and I still want them to lose! That's why I constantly feel like I'm of two minds on these questions.

In spite of all the problems with the modern university, I still think it's important that we have at least one institution that acts as a countervailing force to utilitarian profit-maximizing techbroism. The university as it stands now leaves a lot to be desired. But if the choice is between the university we have now, or nothing, I'll stick with the university.

The Texas Senate is considering two other bills this week: SB 17, which would ban all DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, offices, and practices at public universities, and SB 16, which would require the firing of any professor if they “compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.”

Looking forward to seeing this bit get tested and applied in bad faith - would this actually count as religious discrimination against any faith that divides the world into God's Chosen people and "the rest"?

Do you think there are public Jewish universities in Texas?

I have no idea - but I do think there are Jewish people in universities in Texas and potentially in teaching positions.

I'm confused. What religion do you believe is being discriminated against, and what religion do you believe this rule does not apply to?

Unless I'm interpreting this horribly wrongly, I'm pretty sure this bans any religions advocacy. It's just wide enough to also capture certain religious beliefs that purport to be secular.

I don't believe any religion is being discriminated against - I said I was looking forward to this being applied in bad faith, and I didn't have any particular religious group in mind. Jews, some Christian denominations and a few other faiths have beliefs of this kind as well.

I noticed that nobody has mentioned this yet so I'll throw it in for context: Margaret Thatcher abolished tenure in the UK back in the 1980s. The circumstances were pretty similar to today - the object-level issues were different but the basic layout of the situation was the same. It didn't create the sort of disaster that doomsayers are predicting but also do much to stop academics criticising the government, as far as I can tell things went on pretty much as they did before the change.

So tenure doesn't exist in the UK? Or it only exists in non-government universities? Or was it later re-established?

Just doesn't exist. Private universities weren't really a thing back then (government-funded universities didn't charge tuition fees until the late 90s) and although the Labour Party screamed about it at the time they made no attempt to reverse the policy when they came back into power.

What is the saying? The constitution is not a suicide pact?

Tenure can be very important, but that's because it protects researchers with unpopular but tenable findings or conclusions, or who present those same ideas to students to consider and discuss. It's important that we have the capability to test unpopular ideas rather than just throwing them out at first glance. If it's not actually accomplishing that goal--if universities are not actually bastions of free speech, and tenure isn't even a protection--then why do we have tenure at all?

Similarly, the government should not be telling universities who to hire, what they can teach, etc. But to not do so for a government-funded university is kind of ridiculous! I thought we pretended to care about democracy? Are blue-collar workers required to fund an institution which does not benefit them, and which largely despises them, and that institution has infinite protection from any recourse, regardless of what it is actually doing?

The general point is this: Free speech has to go both ways, otherwise it isn't free speech. Unfortunately, these bills seem practically designed to fail to accomplish much. Removing tenure will just drive all of the up and coming academics to other states or to private universities (including any who might have opposed cancel culture), while bureaucrats, students, and existing professors continue to prevent any actual freedom of speech. Overly broad vague laws are likely to fail a 1st amendment test. Instead, why not push on freedom of speech directly, using money? Tie university funding to adopting and enforcing policies that promote freedom of speech. Deduct funding for failing to protect speakers, treating student groups differently based on point of view, etc. Maybe even a cap on the money that can be spent on administrative staff, although that's probably vulnerable to Washington Monument Syndrome nonsense. The mentioned SB16, prohibiting professors from compelling a student to profess a belief, seems fine to me; a government funded professor teaching a class is acting as an arm of the state and should not be compelling speech.

I really do have an almost naive faith in free speech for all, even for my worst enemies. Despite being an avowed rightist, I not only want leftists to be able to speak, but I want them to be platformed!

In 1923, you might have a case, but this is 2023. Anyone with internet connection can have a platform, can make him/her/xirself heard all around the world.

If you are concerned with free speech, fight against big tech censorship, stone buildings encrusted in weeds are no longer necessary.

See all the ideas we are talking about in this place - HBDIQ science, NRX theory, AI hope/doom, holocaust revisionism, conspiracy theories, various reactionary plans to retvrn etc... - none of them are represented at universities, and it does not matter at all.

This feels like it has always been true, at least in the humanities.

The academia only exists to dissect the corpse of things that are already dead. Example: Jazz studies.

Is Jazz dead? Or is it "dead" in the same way that people said EBM and Vaporwave are dead?

If you'd said something like Tolkein or Shakespeare studies, then sure, there's a finite amount of information to glean without the aid of a time machine in topics like that. Not too sure about most musical genres and forms, though.

Yes. Jazz is long dead. If you wrote a 100 page book about jazz music, 75 pages would take place before 1950, and 99 pages before 1970.

I don't know what Vaporwave or EBM are so it's safe to say they are niche movements, unlike Jazz music which was the predominant musical style in the US for two or three decades.

Tenure is a bit of a strange institution, and honestly seems a bit useless in today's world. Why bother firing a professor when you can just allow students/activists to harass them in the classroom, at their houses, or in all online spaces? Some professors probably wish the university would fire them just so their would be a valid target for a lawsuit. Unless you have Robin Hanson levels of not giving a fuck (he has survived at least three attempted cancellations that I know of), tenure isn't much of a protection.

I actually think all the various leftist dominated fields are the source of the problem. I don't think banning them all will fix the problem. The activists already exist in large numbers in fields that wont get banned, like English departments. And the power of these departments comes through Gen-Ed requirements. That is the only way they can plausibly justify the size of their departments.

I would like to see state legislatures take a more interesting approach to handicapping university activists:

Destroy the traditional 4 year degree. Force universities to offer a-la-carte options for education. A "general education" degree for gen eds. None of which can be required to take classes in a specific college within the university. Allow testing out of entry level classes. Make it possible to speedrun an engineering degree in a year or two.

Many universities have switched from relying on endowments to relying on tuition and housing payments from existing students.

Politically make it about protecting students from predatory practices by universities. After all, its a business model that relies on getting gullible teenagers to buy a product via peer pressure, and then makes them spend a decade of their life (one of the best decades of their life) paying it off.

Of course tenure is useful. It is a carrot for academics to accept lower pay and general disrespect for that sweet promise of making it to the top. It is also one of the big incentives for research output. Without tenure, I expect academia would be much less popular.

Cancellation, especially in academic contexts, is overrated. The median tenure-track professor has no expectation of attracting a Twitter mob. He or she does expect to be dragged out of the lab every semester or two for an undergrad class. In this much more common situation, tenure is actually useful.

It is a very odd incentive structure. Show us you can produce lots of research, and we will reward you with a position where you ... don't have to produce anything. The lazy ones that need tenue shouldn't get it. The high producers that should get it, don't need it. The other case where you might want it controversy. But you just pointed out that this isn't a concern for most professors.

On the employer’s side, the work required to get tenure is supposed to prove motivation and skill. Less micromanagement is needed for the high performers.

On the employee’s side, reducing management and bureaucracy is an obvious reward. But it’s also a signal that you are trusted or at least valuable enough to earn such a concession.

Show us you can produce lots of research, and we will reward you with a position where you ... don't have to produce anything.

I don't think this is actually a problem or that odd at all. If you demonstrate that you're someone who can and does do a lot of high quality research, you get given more trust and a position that lets you really focus and work on something even if it doesn't lead to commercial viability within half a year. That, along with the ability to go against social trends without losing livelihood, is my working understanding of the reasons behind tenure - and I think they're pretty good, all things considered.

Without tenure, I expect academia would be much less popular.

Might this be a good thing? I've heard for ages that there is massive oversupply for academic positions.

I'm not sure if the PhD market is in equilibrium or not. I could believe that there's a weird lag, maybe due to the sunk cost of all that education, such that slashing supply would help. Or maybe not, and this is just a slight dulling of the American edge in higher education.

Either way, I'm really uncomfortable using that as a justification. Market intervention is one thing; an intervention that just so happens to backhand the political outgroup...It's inelegant at best.

As a worldly philosopher once said:

“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

The teachers who go hard leftist tend to wind up as the comical self-defeating types. Since, in my experience, it's the social mixing that causes kids to swing further left, I'd expect the culling of DEI initiatives to be the ones that cause the liberalness of the college to reduce. The leftist ideals don't tend to sink in just because of the curriculum of universities or classes, but if you can cull the social mixing and affirmative action aspects, returning the demographics to what they were pre-1990, then the universities will eventually shift right.

Going after tenure is a mis-play by the rightist subfactions, and sending signal that even degrading the quality of the institution's research is fair game. If these policies get enacted, I don't expect anything except the further riling up of the sjw and democrat factions. One might wonder how long it will be until even moderate democrats start seeing the signs and picking up guns.

I expect that Vaushian-style stochastic leftist terrorism should start seeing an increase if these policies get enacted. Will the middling neoliberals see this as a threat? Unsure, but many neoliberals are getting increasingly uncomfortable with the moves the rightist members of TX and FL legislatures are making. I wonder whether they'll start to shift into leftism or what.

… to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.

I wonder what this means in practice. A lot of social, political, or religious beliefs are, in fact, inherently superior to others.

compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt

What comes before is relevant. It is not about convincing, it is about being compelled to believe something.

Mandatory DEI trainings do that. Forcing students to write a diversity statement before applying does that.

@Primaprimaprima, I understand your idealism, but we will have suppression one way or the other. Anything else is a power vacuum that will promptly be filled. Given the death of privacy that has come with the smartphone, freedom and 'private life' is also, in practice, dead. We can either let the Blue Tribe in academia, media, and tech determine our morals, and crash our civilization and its vassals into the ground, or we can attempt to remove them. It's that simple. Universities as places of debate, at least with regards to social issues, is dead and has been for decades. It's only value in 2023 is as a job training program, to be honest.

I think the university should be a hothouse of strange and controversial ideas.

That would be nice, but that's not how it worked now for decades. Instead, how it works is that it is a hothouse of ideas that are strange and controversial to an ordinary man on the street, but all these ideas are completely mainstream and mandatory inside the hothouse. You're getting whole institutions where there's no single professor or administrator to the right of Bernie Sanders, and if one, by some strange accident, shows up and starts stirring controversy, they are silenced - and usually, expelled from the hothouse - very quickly. Some may tolerate one or two tokens, held around to show - here we have freedom, we keep this whole one moderately-right-wing professor out of 250! So what we actually have is a monocultural hothouse, which looks strange from the outside, but does not allow any substantial dissent on the inside. Academic freedom is a nice concept, except it hasn't functionally existed on most of the American campuses for a long time - you are free to only lean to the left, as far as you want, but never to the right.

Even worse, they are still trading on the image of "intellectual powerhouse" and pretend that this monoculture is the result of superiority of their ideas to any others, and unfortunately this still carries a large cultural and political merit. Something like "a study from Big University has shown that" can make or bury a law, a social program and sometimes even a career of a politician, despite it being known that Big University has not had a single non-Marxist professor in relevant field since 1960s and multiple examples of studies from the same University being shoddily made, non-reproducible and ultimately completely debunked on every replication attempt.

So, do you have to wonder why the Right politicians finally make their first timid steps to take control of this political and cultural weapons platform that has been used by the Left for decades now to completely devastate the opposition?

I still think it's important that we have at least one institution that acts as a countervailing force to utilitarian profit-maximizing techbroism

There are many institutions that can act as such. But, you may consider that most of the utilitarian profit-maximizing techbros are actually products of the very system you present as an alternative to them. How comes?

But if the choice is between the university we have now, or nothing, I'll stick with the university.

It's never nothing. If we won't have the current Marxist indoctrination camps plus spectator sports empires plus adult daycare for chatterati class younglings, we'll have something else. And maybe even better, who knows.

I don’t know that you will see this question, since you’ve blocked me, but I would like to know what Big University you have in mind that’s staffed by Marxists.

It is not controversial to say that most universities are skewed heavily to the left. Claims of Marxism are much more specific, as well as much less compatible with the kind of boring neoliberalism which shows up elsewhere in white-collar America.

I think you are crafting a strawman, here, in which the specter of Communism justifies suppressing your political enemies. I don’t believe that you have an example university with such a staff, much less one that has buried a law, social program, or politician in service of Marxism.

Well, in order to properly answer your question, it would be useful to know whether or not you consider the Critical Theory tradition to be Marxist. I obviously do, and I’m confident that @JarJarJedi does as well, but this seems to be a common point of divergence between left and right as it regards how to assess Critical fields. If you believe that Crits are not Marxist because they have moved past materialist economic critiques, then we could present all the evidence in the world that countless universities are absolutely swimming with Marxists, and you would find it unconvincing because you don’t share our assessment of what makes somebody a Marxist.

I think this is also not very important who exactly is defined as "Marxist". It's just a word, if we use another word to define the same set of folks, sharing roughly the same ideology and occupying now most of the academic space, the outcome would be the same. "Marxist" is a convenient word because it gives a good estimate what this ideology is about and where its roots come from, and I think it is not a bad estimate. But if the word is the problem one can use any other word, that's not the point and there's no use to get bogged down in trying to refine the precise definition if we already know what we're talking about.

That might be a fair point.

Okay, let's grant that critical theory is, literally, Cultural Marxism. What's the most prominent university that you would say is overwhelmingly critical theorists?

Instead, how it works is that it is a hothouse of ideas that are strange and controversial to an ordinary man on the street, but all these ideas are completely mainstream and mandatory inside the hothouse.

Recently, I was in a third-rate city with nothing to do, and it was pouring rain, so I ended up in a contemporary art museum.

Much of what was inside was "subversive political art" of a very boring variety, pushing a specific political narrative. And it just so happens to be the same narrative that is pushed by nearly all our elite cultural leaders.

Which means, of course, that this subversive contemporary art is not in any way subversive. It's just top-down propaganda, masquerading as subversion. Counterculture, whether art or academia, has been entirely coopted at this point. It might as well not even exist.

Exactly. We now have a couple of generations of "subversive conformism" - where the culture behaves as if it still were 1960s and there were some "establishment" they are fighting, but they are not fighting any establishment actually, because they have been the establishment for decades now and has (mostly successfully) suppressed everybody who dissented from them. That's why they need constructs like "systemic racism" and "patriarchy" to maintain the image of rebelling against an overwhelming force, while actually being one.

I am plugged into Texas politics.

SB 16 and 17 will both pass the senate, but the senate passes everything Dan Patrick wants passed on party line. SB 18 is a little bit less certain.

In terms of the house, it’s a lot more up in the air. I’d expect either 16 or 17 to pass, maybe not both and probably not 18. The Texas house is governed by a coalition and its entirely possible that Dade phelan will sink at least one of the three to shore up his support among democrats against an at-this-point-guaranteed primary challenge.

I’d be interested in anything you have to say about the state of our state politics. I don’t keep track of the dynamics as much as I probably should.

The TDLR is that the senate runs off party line votes under the control of the lieutenant governor, who isn’t the most conservative statewide elected official, but probably was fairly recently. The house has multiple major coalitions within it and none of them have a majority, so despite 60% of seats having an r next to their name it doesn’t really mean much in terms of partisanship- the speaker(Dade Phelan) was elected with proportionately more D votes than R, despite him being a Republican, and needs to pay that support back with some level of committee chairmanships(as in most houses of rep, committee chairs hold a lot of the real power in agenda setting). This is a predictable source of irritation to more partisan republicans, and means that the house can be expected to sink some conservative Republican bills because, well, it did give democrats enough power to stop at least some things(although not anything they want; realistically the governor and lieutenant governor can pick a few items to ram through even with the D committee chair trying to prevent it, although not everything. You can probably expect some drama about the governor/lieutenant governor doing this for school choice/vouchers/whatever the term is today.). Of course the flip side is that there are much more conservative republicans in the house(one of whom is currently distracted by a sex scandal) than the senate, as well, they just happen not to be part of the ruling coalition.

The house is reliable in delivering pro business legislation, but often strikes a much more liberal tack than the other branches of state government on education and criminal justice. Like I said, Abbott and Patrick intend to spend their ability to ram through legislation on school choice and macho border posturing this session, so if the house rejects one of these three bills, it’s unlikely to get revived and shoved through anyways.

What annoys me about people who get queasy about proposals like the Texas one is the seeming belief that right now there isn’t massive state influence in education. Because of things like Title IX, one side has legally stacked the deck. These moves are an attempt to balance the scales (allow for mixing metaphors).

Now balancing has all sorts of problem. Ideally you remove the initial thumb but these politicians can’t do that. So either they concede or try to balance.

What annoys me about people who get queasy about proposals like the Texas one is the seeming belief that right now there isn’t massive state influence in education. Because of things like Title IX, one side has legally stacked the deck. These moves are an attempt to balance the scales (allow for mixing metaphors).

It is basically the Left's "Keep your government hands off my Medicare"

I really do have an almost naive faith in free speech for all, even for my worst enemies. Despite being an avowed rightist, I not only want leftists to be able to speak, but I want them to be platformed! I want to help you get the word out! I think our public life really should play host to a diversity of viewpoints.

I used to be like this, but over time I've come to settle on the idea that I'm only willing to support people who wouldn't turn around and censor me, given the chance. I'm paradox of tolerance-ing this shit. Free speech for everyone except would-be censors.

I used to be like this, but over time I've come to settle on the idea that I'm only willing to support people who wouldn't turn around and censor me, given the chance. I'm paradox of tolerance-ing this shit. Free speech for everyone except would-be censors.

And given that these particular censors have abused the paradox of tolerance to justify the censorship of their opponents for ages, it's only fair to have them hoisted by their own petard. Something something your principles applied evenly.

I actually enjoy a lot of this type of scholarship and I find value in it, I like Marxist literary criticism and the obscurantist mid-20th century French guys "

Literal...fucking...pedophiles. And not in some nebulous Qanon/Epstein way either. But honest to god tenured philosophers like Foucault signing their name to petitions to abolish the age of consent so they can rape kids freely. Something I think you know already. The fact you call yourself an "avowed rightist" is not the least bit surprising. With friends like these...

Anyways, I'm done. I already suspected the Dead Internet Theory to be partially true, and now with AI, it 100% will be. I'm doing my level best to decrease my time and usage of the internet, and I strongly suggest everyone here do so as well. I would love to be able to sit down and read an actual book again for more than an hour. Take care guys.

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Literal...fucking...pedophiles. And not in some nebulous Qanon/Epstein way either. But honest to god tenured philosophers like Foucault signing their name to petitions to abolish the age of consent so they can rape kids freely. Something I think you know already. The fact you call yourself an "avowed rightist" is not the least bit surprising. With friends like these...

Ranting about postmodernist pedophiles is allowable, but turning it into a personal dig at the poster is not.

If, like 99% of people who declare they are flouncing off the Internet, you return, stick to your problems with Foucault and not the OP.

Socrates was a pederast, at least as suggested by Plato. And Plato himself seems to have been ambivalent toward pederasty, at least in his earlier works. Shall we toss them out too? What about Turing, whose castration followed an inappropriate relationship with a teenager?

an inappropriate relationship with a teenager

Or as I like to call 19 year olds: adults allowed to fuck each other in private if they want to. Just in case any drive by readers misinterpret "teenager" to mean close to 13 rather than almost 20.

adults allowed to fuck each other in private if they want to

But they weren't allowed to fuck each other in private; indeed, that was the entire problem.

As such, I'd argue the "jailbait" reflex still applies in light of its cultural context.

What about Turing, whose castration followed an inappropriate relationship with a teenager?

wait, what?

Chemical castration. See https://spartacus-educational.com/Alan_Turing.htm#section12

In December 1951 Alan Turing met Arnold Murray, a 19-year-old unemployed man while walking the streets of Manchester... Turing and Murray were found guilty. Murray was given a conditional discharge. Turing was placed on probation, which would be conditional on his agreement to undergo hormonal treatment designed to reduce his sex drive. He accepted the option of treatment via injections of stilboestrol, a synthetic oestrogen; this treatment was continued for the course of one year. Turing wrote to his friend, Philip Hall: "I am both bound over for a year and obliged to take this organo-therapy for the same period. It is supposed to reduce sexual urge whilst it goes on. The psychiatrists seemed to think it useless to try and do any psychotherapy." The treatment rendered Turing impotent.

Note that I think Turing's actions are eminently understandable here and he gets my full sympathy. One of the best things about the advance of gay rights is that people are now more able to find appropriate partners.

I'm pretty sure everyone here is familiar with the story of Alan Turing's chemical castration and subsequent suicide. The (evidently false!) assertion that Turing was a pedophile as the novel part of your statement.

Did I call him a pedophile? Just pointed out that he had an age-inappropriate relationship with a teenager, which is true.

The broader point is that sexual peccadilloes don't matter one way or another in terms of the value of someone's work, and (secondarily) cultural context matters. In the case of Foucault etc, they lived in a milieu where society hadn't yet decided that having sex with a teenager who was not yet of age was the Worst Thing Ever.

Did I call him a pedophile?

You responded to someone complaining about defenses of actual, non-rhetorical pedophiles, by arguing that Socrates was a pederast, and that Turing had an "inappropriate relationship with a teenager". If you weren't attempting to imply he was a pedophile, I'm at a loss for why you brought him up. It doesn't seem that the age of the relationship was actually what made it inappropriate, which was certainly the implication I took.

I am not friendly to the LGBT community, but ‘had an inappropriate relationship with a teenager’ is a strange way to describe dating a 19 year old, apparently consensually, who he held no actual position of power over.

We must hold Blue Tribe to their own standard, and their standard is that any age gap more than ~2-5 years is a horrible offense.

According to whom?

and their standard is that any age gap more than ~2-5 years is a horrible offense

This is only the Blue Tribe standard if the youngest partner is a woman.

(The Red Tribe standard if the younger partner is a man, but the older partner is a woman, is "nice".)

Murray is not a woman.

definately misleading. thanks much for the follow-up.

Why would we do such a nutty thing? Because we like a certain lifestyle. We’re willing to move several economic strata downward in return for jobs where (in principle) no one can fire us without cause, or tell us what we’re allowed to say or publish.

What? Is Scott making the argument that people go into academia for freedom of speech? That the tantalizing carrot of maybe-someday being allowed to speak your mind without losing your job is what drives down faculty wages? That uber-talented researchers who are willing to accept below-market salaries need to worry about job security?

No, people become professors because they like indoctrinating teaching the youth. It makes them feel important and powerful.

I'm sure there are fields that are not like that, but in STEM (my own area) and even History (where I have relatives, and which is otherwise a complete politicised shitshow), I can assure you that most everyone absolutely loathes teaching and would be happy if they never had to interact with anyone below PhD programme level again. (Exceptions are concentrated at liberal arts colleges. A handful exist elsewhere, mostly people who burnt out in research.)

The dream of tenure (for someone in a pen-and-paper area) is that I will no longer have to work on the vapid BS that makes grant-giving agencies and "top" conference reviewers happy. Many tenured professors I know have not published in a decade to anything apart from workshops of the type where if you go in their stead as a student half the kindly grandpas in attendance ask you about how X's kids are doing in college (and X made sure to ramble to you about it before you left, so you can respond), and invite-only special journal issues run and read by the same 15 people.

For most of the professors I know teaching the youth, or at least Freshman and Sophomores, is their least favorite part. I'm sure they'd be happy to lead senior seminars forever.

Of the three things banned by the Texas bill, there’s no issue at all with two. DEI departments, and compelling (profession of) belief under implicit threat of failing a class, are not forms of free speech. They’re means of enforcing ideological conformity through institutional power. They have as much right to exist under the principles of free expression as Orwell's Ministry of Truth. If woke professors or laid off DEI employees want to promote their views by, say, handing out fliers in the hallways, that's fine.

Banning tenure is a little more questionable, but even here it’s not so clear where advocates of free expression should land. This isn’t a straightforward case of tenure being banned so that the establishment can censor antiestablishment views. It's being banned, rather, by one group with institutional power (political leaders) to try to stop another group with institutional power (professors) from indoctrinating students into the dominant elite ideology. This is historically unusual because, of course, in most times and places political leaders support the dominant elite ideology.

Agreed that professors often overreach by compelling certain types of belief. But on my reading, the legislation is overly broad:

compel or attempt to compel a student … to adopt a belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief.

Suppose an economics professor has an exam that compels students (on penalty of getting a worse grade) to express that, in a hypothetical all-else-equal scenario, minimum wage increases unemployment. This is certainly a political belief (minimum wage is a controversial political issue), but I'd say it's fair game for an economics exam.

(The "inherently superior" wording is a bit weird, if you say political belief X is true and not-X is false, is that equivalent to saying X is inherently superior to not-X?)

Yesh who thought elite overproduction would mean politicians fighting with professors?

I think more seriously, that inquiry should be separated from instruction. The current model doesn’t allow free inquiry into taboos because the professors cannot be poor examples to students even if they happen to be disco and telling the truth.

The dominant elite ideology in most cities, but not in Texas, or at least the Texas political scene. This is an attempt to stop the pollination of this ideology into Texas elite ideology in the future.

I don't have an opinion on tenure, and I lean on the side of thinking that legislation ought not to interfere with the operations of even public universities to the extent of banning it. Likewise, I'm not sure that legislation ought to specifically compel firings of professors spreading odious views, including "belief that any race, sex, or ethnicity or social, political, or religious belief is inherently superior to any other race, sex, ethnicity, or belief." As described by Aaronson, the professor would have to at least attempt to "compel" this belief, but that could mean something as innocuous as stating it in class and winking, for all I know. I don't know if setting the precedent for such legislative micromanaging causes more harm than good.

But for SB17, as described by Aaronson:

The Texas Senate is considering two other bills this week: SB 17, which would ban all DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) programs, offices, and practices at public universities

seems like a very straightforward implementation of the first amendment religion clause. DEI is clearly a religion, a specifically and openly faith-based worldview with certain morals that follow downstream of that faith, and much like how public universities ought not push Christianity or Islam on its faculty or students, it ought not push DEI on them either. The devil's in the details, I suppose, since public universities certainly can make accommodations for religions including having services, and maybe this law might go too far. I would think that such a specific law wouldn't even be required, though, since the Constitution already covers this.

I see where you’re coming from, but disagree that DEI is a religion. Or, at least, not “specifically and openly” one.

It obviously has moral claims, and distinguishes between right and wrong. But this is not unique to religions. Take something from my line of work. People get really into Agile. Your scrum master will tell you there is a right way and a wrong way to plan a sprint. He will ask that you participate in self-effacing rituals. Comply, he will warn, lest your team falter under a backlog of your sins. In doing so, he will have the blessing of the company—presumably because someone had good marketing and a couple of case studies.

And you know what? Agile is a bit cultish. It has hierarchies and rituals and, God, it has evangelists. But this is not sufficient religious character to bar it on First Amendment grounds. From Cornell Law:

[R]eligion can be defined as a comprehensive belief system that ad- dresses the fundamental questions of human existence, such as the meaning of life and death, man's role in the universe, and the nature of good and evil, and that gives rise to duties of conscience.

Agile clearly fits neither. It offers answers about workflow and planning, not cosmology or morality. Its duties are purely materialistic. Likewise, DEI does not attempt to answer any of these comprehensive questions. It anchors the assignment of duties to material benefits like “diverse viewpoints” or “not alienating talent.” Failing both prongs of the religious definition, DEI is secular in nature.

It seems like it would cover Buddhist, Hindu, and maybe Confucian thought.

The Unitarians definitely push the limits, to the point where the government occasionally questions their tax exemption. Even internally, they struggle with how much Christianity to include. UUs do have covenants and principles. I suspect that those would be dispositive in any case where UUs’ religious character was in question. For a practitioner to try and claim religious exemption, there would have to be some conflict with “fundamental questions.”

Do you have an alternate, better definition in mind?

My understanding of Confucianism was that it’s got a lot to do with the “mandate of heaven” answer to is/ought problems. Looking it up, I guess that predated Confucius by several centuries, and I might have confused it with other threads in Chinese philosophy. There are still some spiritual features which DEI lacks:

they are the expression of humanity's moral nature (xìng 性), which has a transcendent anchorage in Heaven (Tiān 天).[9] While Tiān has some characteristics that overlap the category of godhead, it is primarily an impersonal absolute principle, like the Dào (道) or the Brahman.

But it’s clear that I’m not familiar enough, so I guess I’ll punt.

I would agree with your formulation of the problem, and I’m trying to avoid splitting little hairs. Appealing to legal definitions was my attempt to describe the “similar-enough place in thought and practitioners’ lives.”

It’s not enough to say that DEI feels cultish, because so do a lot of other decidedly-secular business practices. Neither is having a code of behavior—that’s not unique to religion. “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are secular values, so policy made in their service is secular. Insofar as DEI cites similar principles, I think it rates as secular, too.

Extreme cases are surely capable of leaving that umbrella. By citing Christian metaphysics, Ms. Higgenbotham has no pretense of secularity. You can’t accept her argument without accepting some of the axioms of Christianity. That doesn’t prevent coming at similar proscriptions from a secular background.

My understanding of Confucianism was that it’s got a lot to do with the “mandate of heaven” answer to is/ought problems. Looking it up, I guess that predated Confucius by several centuries, and I might have confused it with other threads in Chinese philosophy.

 

[5:12] 子貢曰：夫子之文章、可得而聞也。 夫子之言性與天道、不可得而聞也。

Tsze-kung said, 'The Master's personal displays of his principles and ordinary descriptions of them may be heard. His discourses about man's nature, and the way of Heaven, cannot be heard.'

[6:20] 樊遲問知。子曰：務民之義、敬鬼神而遠之、可謂知矣。

Fan Ch'ih asked what constituted wisdom. The Master said, 'To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom.'

[7:20] 子不語、怪、力、亂、神。

The subjects on which the Master did not talk, were - extraordinary things, feats of strength, disorder, and spiritual beings.

ーTranslations taken from the Legge translation of the Analects

While there is a religious Confucianism that expands on his approval of religious ritual and rites (he having lived in a period of widespread animist belief), Confucius himself was (and the Confucian classics more generally are) quite humanistic. Essentially all instruction and rhetoric is based on the physical; references to the supernatural are vague and nonspecific; and the few references to 天命 (usually translated in most contexts to Mandate of Heaven) in the Analects are moreso appeals to some sort of spiritual/natural/moral law (as you noted).

I suppose you could say it’s spiritual in that sense, but given the teachings are entirely preoccupied with human and not divine action, and the classics themselves are uninterested in discussing the supernatural beyond acknowledging the native animism and ancestor worship of the time, …I guess it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, but clucks like a chicken?

I see where you’re coming from, but disagree that DEI is a religion. Or, at least, not “specifically and openly” one.

I did not write that DEI is "specifically and openly" a religion. I wrote that it's "a specifically and openly faith-based worldview with certain morals that follow downstream of that faith." The ingenuousness of it is that it's a religion that wins over people who have largely been inoculated against religions thanks to our modern secular culture. But perhaps it's more correct to say that DEI is a specific practice of a religion, in the same way that Baptism or praying to Mecca 5x a day aren't religions in themselves, but specific practices of Christianity and Islam, respectively.

Alright, but does it fit that definition? Either DEI or whatever parent religion you would say it represents.

I don’t think so. The comprehensiveness and the “fundamental questions” are missing. It gets closer to “duties of conscience,” but anchors them in materialism.

I think in practice it's comprehensive enough and addresses fundamental questions, particularly about how we humans relate to one another, and one of its great innovations is in doing so in practice while having the actual written-down tenets not actually look like they're as comprehensive and totalizing as they are. Likewise, I think, at best, one can say that its duties of conscience are anchored in something that has a veneer of materialism, but underneath that veneer is a fundamentally faith-based belief in immaterial forces that guide human relationships. And even if we could quibble about just how comprehensive it is, I think the fact that it is fundamentally anchored to a faith such that its tenets exist necessarily downstream from that faith makes it fit the category of "religion" for the purposes of limiting the US government's promotion of it. I objected to public schools teaching intelligent design on this basis.

But IANAL, so perhaps I'm mistaken on exactly how US 1st Amendment gets applied. If so, this seems like a massive hole in the law; if faith-based cults can get government sponsorship just by not being sufficiently comprehensive in their tenets, this would provide a mechanism by which the US government would be allowed to promote virtually any religious view. Perhaps what we're observing right now in real-time is a religion that has managed to exploit this security hole and US society and legislators scrambling to patch it before the exploit causes too much harm.

I have a hard time seeing it as a veneer of materialism. The “immaterial forces” are something like justice or fairness. I think those have a pretty solid foundation in materialism.

Compare to American civic religion, which is grounded in various enlightenment values. But the government is allowed to cite life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, because they’re fundamentally material.

(Though…the whole “endowed by their Creator” thing raises some questions.)

So when DEI asserts that something is good because it is “fair,” it’s grounded in a material value rather than a spiritual one. You don’t have to subscribe to any particular metaphysics or doctrine to recognize fairness as a value. It’s too useful for bargaining and cooperation, so it shows up again and again in secular contexts.

Maybe this is just plausible deniability. @desolation had an example extremist who was explicitly grounding DEI rhetoric in religious principles. I don’t have a problem with banning that from government speech. For the average advocate, though, I don’t see what immaterial grounds are being used.

I have a hard time seeing it as a veneer of materialism. The “immaterial forces” are something like justice or fairness. I think those have a pretty solid foundation in materialism.

I was actually referring to "oppression" (or "systemic -ism" or "patriarchy" or "white supremacy" or other similar terms). It's certainly the same word as one that's used to refer to a real concept with a solid foundation in materialism, but as used by the religion in question, it refers to an essentially magical concept due to how it is claimed to have impacts on interactions between individuals, while lacking the sort of scientific backing to support such claims. Again, I think this is ingenious for its ability to convince otherwise secular/materialist people of this supernatural force, but it is a veneer, and scratching the surface reveals that it's magical thinking that fundamentally rests on faith, not dissimilar to a belief in an omnipotent God that works in mysterious ways.

DEI does not attempt to answer any of these comprehensive questions.

I think proponents of this law would disagree, and point at the fairly clear examples of "good and evil" and "duties of conscience" appearing in the relevant canon. Although you have a point that DEI lacks a unified view of meanings for life and death.

lean on the side of thinking that legislation ought not to interfere with the operations of even public universities to the extent of banning it.

Public universities are creatures of the state. Why should the legislature not supervise them?

Part of what makes a University a University and not something else is a degree of self-government. An institution that teaches a 13-16th grade curriculum determined by the politicians and/or bureaucrats in the sponsoring Education Ministry may be doing something valuable, but it isn't continuing the tradition that began with those communities of scholars in Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge in the High Middle Ages.

FWIW, I don't think that the legislature abolishing tenure (something that happened long ago in the UK without causing serious problems) or regulating non-classroom DEI initiatives gets close to the point where it turns a public University into a Even Higher School. But (for example) a law prohibiting the teaching of books by paedophiles would be pushing the boundary.

SB16 seems different, in that if it is enforced as written, it prevents the University teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones. An organisation where the curriculum is subject to government sanitisation to remove controversial topics is not a University.

SB16 seems different, in that if it is enforced as written, it prevents the University teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones.

Surely "teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones" is antithetical to a modern university? Is a university a church now?

What's "correct social, political or religious beliefs"?

Anyway, let's imagine a fantastical situation. A group of Nazi scientists (and I mean hardcore Nazis with all accompanying beliefs) from parallel universe gets into today's America and by some means (e.g. by temporarily hiding their beliefs) manages to take over a small Higher Education institution (still bearing the title of University because it's good for PR) in some state. They proceed with a program to find smart youth of proper Aryan background and indoctrinate them and educate them in sciences (let's assume they are really good scientists) and thus make sure only devoted Aryan scientists fully on board with Nazi ideology can be professors in this establishment. They teach all the usual scientific stuff, but with a Nazi bent, and also have a variety of more specific courses, like how Jews are evil, how homosexuality is ruinous for civilization, how to scientifically figure out people's worth depending on their genetics, which genetical defects can be cured and which should be exterminated, maybe the history of Aryan races and Aryan culture, maybe even a course on Nitzche and Wagner (with some appropriate bent of course), etc.

Now, let's say they are not particularly hiding it, and the citizens of the state discover they have a full blown Nazi University in the middle of the state, supported by their tax dollars, participating in career fairs, inviting their schoolchildren to campus tours, publishing their own newspaper (with appropriate graphics of course), holding their big celebration on April 20 each year, and so on, you get the picture. Do you think the good people of this state would say "well, it's a University, and they are technically not doing anything against the law - sure, the stuff they are teaching sounds vile to us, but we can't subject them to governmental sanitization, that wouldn't be University anymore!" Or, do you think they'd grab torches and pitchforks and would demand to raze it all to the ground, and would destroy any politician that would object to that? Or would they do something in between - like find any legal means, however tortured and far-reaching, to destroy this outlet without technically violating the law and committing outright violence, maybe?

And if you think people would not tolerate a Nazi University - what set of principles would you propose that would be consistent with that, but also with your ideal of a University as something completely and utterly independent and subject to no outside control whatsoever?

Part of what makes a University a University and not something else is a degree of self-government. An institution that teaches a 13-16th grade curriculum determined by the politicians and/or bureaucrats in the sponsoring Education Ministry may be doing something valuable, but it isn't continuing the tradition that began with those communities of scholars in Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge in the High Middle Ages.

Isn't that essentially what it is at this point? It's not like there's much room for dissent, or that 90% of the people going aren't just there to get a degree to get A Good Job. The tradition is already pretty much dead.

SB16 seems different, in that if it is enforced as written, it prevents the University teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones. An organisation where the curriculum is subject to government sanitisation to remove controversial topics is not a University.

Then we definitely shouldn't have state-funded universities in the US, because it is not the job of any organ of the state to teach its citizens correct religious or political beliefs.

SB16 seems different, in that if it is enforced as written, it prevents the University teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones.

And what are the "correct social, political or religious beliefs" that the University should be teaching are superior?

An organization where the curriculum is subject to government sanitization to remove controversial topics is not a University.

By this definition Universities have not existed for some time, since they are already subject to a variety of restrictions and mandates from the government explicitly intended to shape their attitude and expression of "controversial topics". It is already well-established that "controversial" expressions cause harm to the vulnerable, and so must be carefully cordoned off if not suppressed entirely. It is already well-established that specific words make people unsafe; now we are simply picking which words those are. How is this remotely objectionable to anyone who supports the Universities as they currently exist?

So the public must fund these institutions but have no say so that they can continue in the tradition of historic universities? That’s an incomplete argument especially given that we have numerous private universities.

They should, and they 100% have the legal power to, AFAIK. But not all supervision is reasonable, and at some point it can go into micromanagement territory that does more harm than good. E.g. legislators could theoretically explicitly mandate by law that the trash collector must wear shoes that have 8 shoelace holes on odd-numbered days and 10 shoelace holes on even-numbered days, since trash collectors are employees of the state, but that would be a ridiculous level of micromanagement, and most people would agree that legislators drafting laws to that effect and specificity would do more harm than good. I lean towards believing that the legislature having specific mandates about tenure in public universities is micromanagement rather than reasonable supervision, though I'm not strong in this belief.

For coursework specifically, I don't think there's much meat. Yes, in some theoretical perfect environment researchers and teachers would go after their own esoteric Truths; in the real world, Actual Nobel-winning PhDs in Hard Science have slapfights over superconductor magnetic flux charts.

It's already been the case -- and long been the case -- where progressive!Racist speech or classwork by even tenured professors (even off-campus and off-the-clock!) not only could but must result in firing, lest the entire school be held responsible. While I'd quibble with the borders of what's included in that definition, I don't think it does (or should) require people to abandon prohibitions on actual!racism.

Maybe the soccons will overstep those bounds. I wouldn't be surprised! When they start going after private organizations on campuses, I'll try to link directly to this post when I start raising the black flag. But I don't get what's happening here that is any more than a formalization, if that, of the last fifty-plus years.

It's already been the case -- and long been the case -- where progressive!Racist speech or classwork by even tenured professors (even off-campus and off-the-clock!) not only could but must result in firing

Can you link some examples of what you're talking about here?

Mark McPhail is another racist-from-the-left one, and there's been a handful of sexuality or gender-related ones involving small private (and usually religious) orgs. They're usually not done within the legal framework I was mentioning, but they are objectionable on their own merits.

I don't think the entire chain has happened in one particular spot, but John McAdams at UPenn was 'suspended indefinitely without pay' over blog posts (overturned years later for contract reasons), while Amy Wax is going through the process so they can get rid of her and not have to pay out afterward. On the process side, they're mostly incentivized by Title VI and Title IX matters, with a scattering of other broad and vague laws that have been regularly used as justification to block speech.

To me it's pretty clear that "utilitarian profit-maximizing techbroism" is as much a product of universities

Is it? Honest question, I'm just wondering what you have in mind here.

so could you explain why you think universities act as a countervailing force to the former?

At a basic level, it's because the university is fundamentally a non-utilitarian, non-capitalist enterprise. Granted that's less and less true of actual universities with each passing year, but as long as public dollars are still going to people who are doing entirely useless research into the Langlands program or the mating habits of an obscure species of moth or whatever, it remains at least partially true. The university is, ideally, a place where people can pursue intellectual queries for their own sake without concern for profit or real-world applicability. If nothing else, it shows people how a different model of life might look, that a different model of life is possible.

I guess in order to get deeper than that I'd want to know what kind of answer you were expecting. Is it a question about what sorts of thought the university produces, or is it a question of how the university is supposed to have any impact on the actual real world?

If nothing else, it shows people how a different model of life might look, that a different model of life is possible.

My church offers people an example of how a different model of life is possible, and shows what it looks like. Notably, my church isn't subsidized by the federal government via compulsory taxation, to the tune of many billions of dollars a year. If this is what Universities are for, I have zero objection to them pursuing that goal on the same terms my Church does. People like yourself who value such efforts are free to donate money to support them of your own free will, and everyone goes home happy.

We finance Universities because they are supposed to be an unambiguous public good, like electricity and clean water. That is to say, we finance them for explicitly utilitarian ends. If that's not what they actually do, then to hell with tenure and DEI; we need to publicize their true nature as loudly and publicly as possible, the better to quicken the complete abolition of their access to the public purse.

We finance Universities because they are supposed to be an unambiguous public good

Well, it depends on what you think a "public good" is, and your own personal tolerance for ambiguity, I suppose.

Do you think a paper on Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories is an unambiguous public good? Hell, do you think Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories are even real? Because this is a representative exemplar of the sort of thing that the university does. And this is from a STEM department, the "useful" half of the university.

I do think it's a public good - it's just a public good of a non-utilitarian kind. This kind of research isn't going to help you cure cancer or feed more people or build the next killer app; but I view it as a public good nonetheless, because it's an integral part of what makes life worth living in the first place.

Perhaps diverting your tax dollars to causes you find nonsensical is itself a public good, if it serves as an impetus for you to reflect on your own preconceived notions of value.

Perhaps diverting your tax dollars to causes you find nonsensical is itself a public good, if it serves as an impetus for you to reflect on your own preconceived notions of value.

Oh yes, my preconceptions of value and what is worth dispensing violence over are regularly challenged by bluehair tier academia.

Perhaps diverting your tax dollars to causes you find nonsensical is itself a public good, if it serves as an impetus for you to reflect on your own preconceived notions of value.

I have good news! I am willing to perform a good deed for you - in exchange for a large sum of money, I'll provide you with an impetus for you to reflect on your own preconceived notions of value. Hell, I'll even be generous and throw in one or two bonus impetuses at no extra cost. If you think this is a good worth spending other people's tax dollars on, why not spend some of your own money on it?

...I do not think this is going to be a persuasive argument for most people, but I must admit that it certainly seems likely to be a public benefit, at least from my perspective, for you to continue to make it.

[EDIT] - ...More charitably, I think it behooves supporters of the Universities to recognize the degree to which the vast public costs of these institutions have been justified by long-standing claims of public benefit far more concrete, immediate and utilitarian than "an impetus for you to reflect on one's own preconceived notions of value". The level of appalling smuggery in that last phrase, in particular, is... quite something.

I do not recognize why "Frobenius exact symmetric tensor categories" are an unambiguous public good, and I emphatically reject the argument that they are any part, integral or otherwise, of what makes life worth living in the first place. Maybe this is because I'm too stupid to understand the vital role such categories play. I'd certainly be interested in seeing an actual argument as to why their pursuit is worth trading away sizable and utterly irreplaceable chunks of my life, though, should you deign to provide one.

I'd certainly be interested in seeing an actual argument as to why their pursuit is worth trading away sizable and utterly irreplaceable chunks of my life, though, should you deign to provide one.

I can elaborate on my views a bit, at any rate.

It will be helpful if we continue to confine ourselves to mathematics, rather than university studies as a whole, since mathematics is less politically fraught than the humanities, and certain peculiar properties of mathematics help bring questions of usefulness vs uselessness into sharp relief.

I don't know how much you know about research-level mathematics, so I'll give a brief summary. Mathematicians primarily concern themselves with writing proofs of theorems - deductive arguments in support of statements about mathematical objects. These mathematical objects can be ordinary and familiar, like numbers, or they can be extremely exotic, like hypervector spaces over fields of characteristic p. It is an open philosophical question as to the precise relationship between mathematical objects and what one might call "reality". Mathematicians simply speak them into existence with flat declarations like "Define a hypervector space as any set of points that meets such and such requirements...", the way one speaks the rules of Chess into existence with statements like "Define the Queen to be a piece that moves in such and such a way...", which naturally raises questions about the ontological status of these objects. After a proof has been written and certified by peer review, it will be published in a journal where it will be largely unread, largely incomprehensible to all but ~15 mathematicians who specialize in the author's sub-sub-field, and it will pass largely unnoticed into the dustbin of history. Such is the peculiar enterprise we concern ourselves with.

Fields medalist Timothy Gowers gave a nice lecture on the value of mathematics, and why it's deserving of public funding. The most substantive part of the argument is when he points out the obvious fact that mathematics does indeed have practical real-world applications that everyone can agree are important; otherwise we couldn't have science and engineering and computers and all the rest of it. The twist though is that you can't know a priori which field of mathematics, let alone which individual results, will turn out to be "useful" in a utilitarian sense. The classic example is how number theory turned out to have applications in cryptography, but this application of number theory only became apparent over a century after Gauss and Galois inaugurated the modern study of the subject. Unlike fields of mathematics that developed in close relationship to concrete problems in physics, like differential equations, no one could have guessed that trivia about things like quadratic reciprocity would ever be useful to anyone - and yet it did turn out to be useful, in the context of the technology of the distant future.

This argument should be enough to convince even the most hard-nosed utilitarian that funding some level of speculative mathematics research is worthwhile. In the short term it may look like a lot of waste and false starts, but the potential payoff is so great, and the proven track record of past results is so strong, that I think the expected ROI is positive.

My own views go beyond this though. I think even if we had God's guarantee that some branch of mathematics would never have any practical use whatsoever, it would still be deserving of public funding, as long as it met the specifically mathematical criteria for mathematical relevance, of course (desirable traits that mathematicians will point to in a theorem like aesthetic beauty, "naturalness", impact on other results, etc). This I believe simply because the purpose of civilization itself is to enable higher types of minds to do higher types of things. Society should not be a playground arranged so that atomized individuals have maximum freedom to "do as they please" - rather it should be arranged with no other goal in mind than to support the flourishing of humanity's most meaningful achievements. Lower types of activities should subsidize higher types of activities. A paltry <1% of the federal coffers is a small price to pay in pursuit of this goal.

I once witnessed a conversation that went as follows:

A: "What's the point of writing proofs? Does it help us build better roads?"

B: "What's the point of building roads? Does it help me write better proofs?"

I think B was getting at something quite important. The standard criteria that people use to determine whether something is "useful" is precisely backwards. Infrastructure, commerce, defense, all types of "efficiency"... these things have no value in and of themselves. Their only justification is to serve as the foundational support structure for authentically human activities, the things that separate man as such from the mere animals.

As for why I give mathematics specifically such an exalted place, I could elaborate on my reasons further, but they would quickly become poetic and unpersuasive to you. I will simply say that direct contact with the subject is the best argument. I don't see how a genuinely sensitive and inquisitive mind could understand the statement and history of problems like the search for an exact quintic equation, or Fermat's Last Theorem, or the Riemann Hypothesis and remain unconvinced that there is something of immense value there. Such apparently simple problems, such deceptively childish questions, and yet they resisted the continuous assault of humanity's greatest minds for centuries, their solutions had such surprising and far-reaching implications, or they remain unsolved even today despite us bringing the full weight of our resources to bear on them, such as the RH and an infinite sea of even further and loftier problems...

Not all mathematical problems are interesting of course. Many are boring and trite and have no real relevance to anything or anyone. But similar to the argument given above about practical utility, you can't know a priori where great ideas will come from. A random paper about combinatorics published by a professor at a third-rate state school probably won't lead to a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, but at the same time, it might. The history of mathematics is full of such surprising connections. Which is why it's better to simply let mathematicians do what they do and not try to prune the search space too early.

To be clear, nothing in this argument is self-serving. I am not employed by or affiliated with a university, and never will be.

Similar considerations will apply to most university STEM fields. They may change somewhat if we were to consider the humanities, but the basic thrust is the same.

I know that leftists don't extend the same courtesy to me, but that doesn't invalidate the fundamental point that I should extend that courtesy to them.

Sure it does. The principles of academic freedom is there to allow us to play around with ideas, develop our analytical skills, and improve our thinking, not to give a particular side an outlet for indoctrination. Defecting and using the education system for indoctrination, and censoring opposing ideas does mean the courtesy should be taken away from them.

In spite of all the problems with the modern university, I still think it's important that we have at least one institution that acts as a countervailing force to utilitarian profit-maximizing techbroism. The university as it stands now leaves a lot to be desired. But if the choice is between the university we have now, or nothing, I'll stick with the university.

Aside from the question of whether the benefits of the university outweigh the harms, on which I disagree with you, I don't even see how the two are currently in conflict. The pod living - bug eating - ESG conforning Woke Capital is a perfect synthesis of the two views, and our elites endorse it fully. It all has to be taken apart simultaneously.

The pod living - bug eating - ESG conforning Woke Capital is a perfect synthesis of the two views, and our elites endorse it fully. It all has to be taken apart simultaneously.

As stifling as the modern university environment has become, it still does support multiple viewpoints. Woke Capital is a big problem, but there are voices of dissent. Zizek is a good guy for example. He's kind of a doofus, but his heart is in the right place.

Banning DEI stuff would seem easily positive to me, but banning tenure altogether is just insane, it would just make Texas incredibly less competitive as a place for promising young researchers.

What about banning tenure but also banning firing people for spurious reasons like mean tweets or not being a hyper-leftist?

In academic circles there's a real prestige that comes with the word "tenured". I think getting that distinction lets professors "relax" in a very important sense. Most really smart researchers in math and physics just want to be left alone to do their research, they want to be insulated from the practicalities of real life to just have space to think, and tenure provides that in a way that your suggestion doesn't really. You don't have to worry that you won't be able to eat if you don't publish a set number of papers or appear well on whatever citation metric, so you can do a bit more pie-in-the-sky thinking than you could without tenure. Though this is probably less true in fields that require lots and lots of grant proposals and lots of actual equipment, but for the theory-heavy fields tenure is really important.

Based on the post-PhD applied math careers I've watched, it's easy to get tenure-quality researchers without offering tenure; you just have to do what the private sector does and offer double the salary. (Less than double can also work but then they start scrutinizing the rest of your work environment very closely)

That said, I do not expect Texas to double any salaries.

Texas is, however, very likely to be able to offer public/private partnerships that offer substantial career opportunities.

Actually, considering the top Texas STEM university is university of Texas at Dallas, they can probably offer direct standard of living improvements as a benefit, but I don’t expect the state to be able to manage that.

university of Texas at Dallas

Woosh

Don't post low-effort retorts like this.

(Yes, UT Austin ranks well above UT Dallas.)

UTD's mascot is a comet, Woosh is their equivalent of "hook'em". Half my family has graduated from one or the other institution, it was not meant to be derogatory.

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