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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:
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:
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.
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?
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?
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.
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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?
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