This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Bryan Caplan complaining on X that Mason U is introducing mandatory Just Society courses; https://twitter.com/bryan_caplan/status/1760048714847064146
It looks Conquest's Second Law is still strong as ever. And I guess Caplan's libertarianism will ask for some intervention against it that will never work.
Given that I generally react "Anything that annoys Bryan Caplan must be a good thing", I decided in the interests of fairness to look this up.
Hmm. I agree that making it mandatory isn't a good look, but there are two things:
(1) Bryan says "creating an official state-sanctioned orthodoxy and requiring all students to spend multiple classes feigning agreement with it", but the course prospectus says:
Now granted, that may all go by the wayside when the modules actually start and the blue-haired SJW profs (does George Mason U have blue-hairs?) start teaching, but they're not coming out of the gate with "this IS the TRUTH, all must AGREE AND BOW THE KNEE"
(2) More cynically,
What Mason U is doing is preparing its students for life in the workplace. 'Kids, when you graduate and head out to make the big bucks in corporate jobs, you'll be expected to sing off this hymn sheet. We're gonna teach you the jargon so even if you think it's all baloney, you can sling the bullshit with the best of them'. Bryan should appreciate that the university is giving its graduates another tool in the box for success in the corporate world!
Mind you, I'd like to see his reaction to a mandatory course on Catholic social justice teaching 😁
Have you ever taken a diversity seminar? I'm surprised by your lack of cynicism.
70% will eye-rolling harassment boilerplate libspeak ("LaShondra and Xavier Alejandro Jose were talking about the latest Marvel Movie, but then Pete said that Black Widow's tits were too small. Is this sexual harassment?").25% will be progs smuggling in obnoxious consensus-building ("Science says that only white people can be racist.").
~5% will be the teacher saying something truly heinous and deranged ("My three year-old cried when Trump called E. Jean Carroll a liar.").
You're not predicting that academia will suddenly find conservatives to teach the "Justice" course, right? The text about allowing disagreements is just boilerplate.
In a college setting, most people will go along with whatever is presented. But most people won't have their minds changed either. Probably the average college student will agree with the majority of what's being taught, in a loose sense. A few students will speak out. In my experience, those students will tend to be men, especially non-whites who have one foot in another culture but are functionally American. Some of them will go a bit too far and say something that gets them in trouble. The rest will be passed through, because the university doesn't really want to deal with angry students complaining that Professor Socjus is failing them for saying tax cuts aren't racist.
There is no self-aware life-preparing edge. The people who will implement this course believe that academia and activism are compatible, not that they'll cynically teach students how to navigate lying in the workplace.
Any such course is almost certainly a waste of everybody's time. But for a certain kind of bureaucrat and moderate lib, diversity seminar kumbayah sing-alongs are catnip. They really just believe that DEI is good, and if we implement more DEI, we'll get more good.
I predict that there will be extremely low standards of rigour at these courses, and most students won’t bother actually attending to express disagreement.
It really depends on the druthers of the professors involved. In my college experience, engineering and more "serious" classes were lax about attendance, blow-off courses were mid-lax about attendance, humanities and college make-believe busy-work courses were much more strict. The less objective material that could be learned from a textbook at home, the more a professor might tend to enforce attendance.
Secretly, those who disagree with the material will be some of the likeliest to show up, because even if they individually keep their heads down, they will want to see someone else argue against the material. (My own bad habit of arguing against the material taught me that there was always a sizeable number of students who would approach me quietly later and thank me for saying something.)
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
By the grace of the Lord God Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen, I have not. I am too old (and never went to college) so this stuff was not around in my youth. It may well come up in work, but I might just about be retirement age and not have to sit through this by then.
It being Caplan's place of employment, I wondered if there was a tiny chance that it wasn't all Persons Of Hair Colour. Can anyone tell me what George Mason U is like from that angle?
Ah, the cynicism is there from my side. As I said, the poor divils are going to go out into the workplace where this stuff is all around (at least for another few years) so they'll be exposed to it anyway, better that the more hard-headed of them get early exposure so they know how to bluff around the corporate requirements.
I had to take a BS cultural diversity class in college. The professor was a black female adjunct who started off day one by trying unsuccessfully to create racial and sex-based divisions between the students. In day three or four, she snapped at me in class for “questioning” her and thereby “undermining her authority.” I was frankly stunned. I pretty regularly asked questions in other classes if something sounded off to my ears and even directly argued with professors. In all those previous classes, the professors loved it (at least I was engaged, which couldn’t be said for many of my classmates). After I challenged her for including inaccurate information in her presentations, she stopped uploading them to the class site. These were insane errors too, like claiming that Max Weber, close friend and colleague of Martin Luther, invented the Protestant Work Ethic as a way to discriminate against Jews and Catholics, which in turn served as a model for later Jim Crow laws (I swear I’m not making any of that up). Her final straw was when she said something blatantly wrong in class, and one of the other students turned around to me and asked, “Is that right?” The fire in the prof’s eyes was quite a sight to behold. She naturally failed me, but fortunately, I’d been meeting with my advisor after every class to document the issues, so I was able to get the grade overturned on appeal.
That’s the kind of bullshit that these diversity classes make people put up with. If you have even the slightest inkling that the professors teaching those classes will treat students fairly or allow multiple points of view, you need to spend more time with The Nybbler. Maybe some his cynicism will rub off.
Someone should have asked him for his longevity secrets.
More options
Context Copy link
Damn. I saw some questionable things done by ideological professors, but never anything like that. Certainly nothing that impacted my grade so forcefully, though there were a few times I say, got a B on a paper when a paper of similar quality in another class would have gotten an A, and the topic of my paper directly disagreed with the professor's ideological position. But never anywhere close to failing.
There were definitely some eyebrow-raising religious things too, I remember the most ideological professor I took a class from suggested once that the Trinity was an exclusively Catholic belief, while most Christian denominations venerated saints (this really depends on how one defines "most").
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
George Mason U is more conservative than the modal university, but let's not overstate it.
GMU's law school is a well-regarded pipeline to legal jobs in DC. This has given the school a solid network of grateful, connected alumni, and made it a mild bastion for conservative ideas. The law school was renamed for Scalia in 2016, and Koch brothers money followed. For a certain kind of shallow person, that association was all the proof necessary of the school's conservstive bent, which reputation has actually probably done more to lean the school toward the conservative side than would have otherwise happened. (For example, Brett Kavanaugh was given a faculty position there after his confirmation to the Supreme Court.)
The Economics department supposedly has a libertarian bent. There was a minor scandal where it came out that the Kochs were allowed to pick candidates for the department in exchange for their donations.
GMU is the largest public school in Virginia. Despite Virginia's recent reputation as a blue state, it still elects Republicans to lead the state government, and this has kept its political hands at least somewhat tied. But political comprimises are never really respected in American universities -- Youngkin's restrictions have all been challenged in court, and will probably not be respected even if he wins. (It's the same as college administrators across the country admitting that they will work around the recent ban on affirmative action as best they can.)
The school automatically admits top-performing students from across Virginia regardless of anything else, which restricts a certain level of affirmative action admissions gamesmanship in the student body. But I really don't think that makes much of a difference. Selective schools like the Ivies are not especially more woke than broad-body state schools.
GMU is still a university in the modern day, still comprised of a professor class that networks and affiliates across universities, still broadly left, still operating a modern DEI and Title IX regime. That it has carved out some role for conservatives makes GMU one of the more intellectually free schools in the country, but I suspect this is a low bar.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Imagine requiring multiple courses on Muslim theology, all taught by fundamentalist imams, and with most of the students devout Muslims, but then assuring the students that "it's okay to disagree".
I honestly don't see any difference except that, as you point out, Wokism is more popular than Islam among our current elites.
More options
Context Copy link
This common language will surely include terms like toxic masculinity, white privilege, and heteronormativity, but certainly not black violence, female privilege or Jewish in-group bias. So it will be strictly of the form “<negative adjective> <disfavored group>”, where the disfavored groups are exactly those hated by the radical left (only Jews are iffy here, depending on how radical they intent to go). And then students are free to express their personal values but required to use only terms that imply that cisgender straight white males suck.
More options
Context Copy link
The syllabus doesn't have to. That's what the Title IX bureaucracy is for when you get accused of "creating an unsafe environment" for questioning the orthodoxy in class.
More options
Context Copy link
I agree with this perspective. Imo, the core problem is that there is no positive vision people can agree on that isn't the SJW/woke worldview, and part of the reason for this is that there is no good public forum where we can hash out our differences, only "secret" places like this. The GMU should offer courses like this, but with a much more explicitly open-minded focus than the average university course. Just ceding the entire concept of talking about how to make a just society to SJWs is merely a different flavour of rolling over and dying. Though admittedly a big problem is that you simply can't trust the current faculty (and the administration even less) at most universities to not just turn these classes into loyalty tests no matter how much explicit directions to the opposite you give them, or good ol' malicious compliance. Similar to the problems many states have with their teachers.
More options
Context Copy link
Not just the teachers, the students too. Teachers you can ignore, you don't have to engage with them, but a 'debate' that turns out to be a struggle session is a different thing entirely. Even if you're not naive enough to get blitzed, you know engagement is possible so you have to choose between cowardice and suicide.
Yeah, my go to reaction is that this is just normal run of the mill entryism. The lecturer is likely to stand by while the purple haired brigade 'builds consensus' and the independent thinkers are silenced.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link