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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.
It's a public university, which means there's one thing which has a chance of working -- elect DeSantis-equivalents to the governorship and legislature and pass a law banning this stuff, then appoint a Rufo-equivalent to make sure it happens. However, that won't happen because Virginia has gone blue.
I mean, we did. We literally did exactly that. But the schools have decided to just flagrantly ignore the governor and the AG, tie things up in friendly courts for 4 years, and run out the clock while they hold our children hostage.
I thought there was all that drama with the school boards and then people re-elected the progs anyway? Or perhaps I’m thinking of another state.
Depends on the county. Fairfax County overwhelmingly elected a slate of school board members that were even more explicit about aggressively showing children even more pornographic material in schools, and secretly transitioning them. Loudoun County, where the school board went hard covering up for a serial rapist, saw reason last I checked.
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And thank god for that. University is voluntary, you can go to whichever one you want, and the 'students' are adults.
The idea that the government should step into that voluntary contract between adults to tell teachers what they can and can't teach or require, especially as relating to partisan political topics, is insane and disgusting.
(before anyone asks, yes, this applies to a university wanting to teach whatever awfulthing you think of as a counter-example, I would like the school to be destroyed socially and economically by private citizens/companies and social sanctions in that situation)
I think that academic freedom does have some value, so I'm not sure I'm ready to throw my support behind government stepping in and regulating the research of academics, even at public universities.
However, there are totally reasonable ways governments can regulate public universities that do not infringe on academic freedom:
These are broad principles, not blueprints for concrete laws. I'm well aware that "no ideological indoctrination in required courses and orientation sessions at public universities" sessions is unlikely to be an effective law; it needs to spell out the details, and multiple passes may be required to plug loopholes.
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This would be fine if so many employers did not req. degrees. Employers love degrees because it's an effective filtering mechanism.
And one of the few filtering mechanisms unlikely to bait a lawsuit.
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Public universities are, well, public. Once my tax dollars get roped into this I would like the government to be a wise steward of our finances. So I would like the government to police its own institutions.
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Hahaha right except there's also admissions processes that very much filter for the exact types of people they want to attend. Let us ignore affirmative action putting its thumb on the scale.
And many colleges have removed the one requirement that at least tried to be objective.
And you can get your admission rescinded if they find your behavior as a youth undesirable
So yes, its always possible to take your student loans elsewhere, but let us not pretend that there is equal bargaining power on any level, where the market is relatively frictionless.
And that leaves aside that whatever remaining value there is in the universities mostly comes from the prestige attached to the credential or, perhaps, the social connections it allows you to make, so WHICH university you go to absolutely matters.
So really, you're hiding behind the fact that the decision to attend university is 'voluntary,' while ignoring that getting into a university is influenced by factors beyond individual students' control, that their funding is usually coming out of public coffers, and they don't need your consent to revoke your admissions, scholarships, or suspend you for behavior that is neither violent nor illegal.
So perhaps the issue isn't quite what you're suggesting it is.
I’ve yet to be convinced that college admissions are a problem for people who belong in college. Community colleges are open admit and north podunk tech- bumfuck nowhere campus, will admit anyone with a high school diploma and a correctly filled out application.
I think this is instead an argument about selective schools, but for a normal job track does it matter? I mean law schools do, but individually making the choice to go to Iowa A&M to become an accountant or a teacher or an engineer doesn’t matter a lot unless the alternative is, like, Stanford. And you can totally take your student loans from woke.EDU to go to podunk state. Whether it’ll do any good I don’t know, but it’s entirely doable.
It matters . They are competitive for a reason. But of course, it is possible to be successful graduating from a lesser ranked school.
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Maybe I don't want to ideologically concede all future lawyers (who also tend to become future lawmakers and judges). I think society as a whole suffers from this DEI bottleneck, even if some people for now can get decent jobs as nurses or plumbers from going to a community college.
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Unless your job requires some kind of accreditation, there's probably no serious reason to get a 4 year degree from ANYWHERE when you could just start working in your preferred field, get paid, earn accreditation and experience right off the bat.
None of this really excuses that requiring social justice courses for those attending a public university is very much aimed at ensuring that students who graduate hold the 'correct' set of beliefs, even if those beliefs do absolutely NOTHING to enhance their job prospects, education, or value to larger society.
It partially comes down to what, exactly, you think the role of the public universities actually is. And whether they're suited for that role. I think they very much function as 'gatekeepers' for elite society, to ensure the 'right sort of people' ascend to the soft aristocracy that runs things, and thus they want to filter very heavily who is even admitted.
Again, 'voluntary,' except you don't have any way to register actual dissent, and you're paying for it anyway.
Sort of. The number of jobs that de facto require degrees is pretty high. Basically anything not a “trade” is going to require college. Which is exactly why schools have gotten away with indoctrination for decades. If you want a PMC job, you need a 4 year degree. They can do anything they want because the alternatives are poverty wage jobs in the service industry or the trades.
Yeah, college is not that great, but the alternatives are even worse. 4 years and some debt is a small price to pay for a lifetime of extra earnings and low unemployment rate (plus additional $ from compounded returns by investing said earnings in stocks and real estate, lower insurance premiums, etc. )
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Largely because they're not allowed to filter by basic IQ and because degrees have become so ubiquitous that they CAN demand them.
See:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidies/
And for bonus points:
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-10-19/thiel-s-unicorn-success-is-awkward-for-colleges
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It's a public university. The government is literally one of the parties. This is as incoherent as "Keep the Government out of my Medicare!"
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I agree with this, but also wish Republicans would just go ahead and wash their hands of the university system. These are Publicly Funded universities. Cut all state funding. Problem solved. Let them go and be as crazy as they want with student/donor money. But I certainly shouldn't be paying taxes to support the craziness.
I does not understand why cutting of public funding should fix the radical left problem in universities. In my country the wokest universities are the private funded ones where rich people go, the same with private media etc.
It depends on what exactly you think the "problem" is. I believe radical leftists are allowed to exist. I do not want to purge or kill them or force them into re-education camps. I simply do not want to pay for them. I ask that they tolerate me in the same way. The "problem" as I see it right now is that I am paying for them, so once I am not paying for them the problem is solved, even if they don't go away at all.
The problem is not just that you’re paying for them; it’s also that it’s impossible to get many jobs without a college diploma, and in a world where almost all of the universities are staffed nearly exclusively with radical leftists, it becomes impossible for conservatives to even think of entering many well-paid, influential, and/or important professions. It would take more than defunding the colleges to solve that problem. At a minimum, you’d also need to remove college degrees from state licensing requirements. If the conservatives cede all the law schools but the state governments maintain the requirement that you must graduate from a law school in order to take the bar exam, the conservatives will have suddenly ceded the entire legal profession, even more than they have already. Ideally, in a world where conservatives give up on the universities, they should also make it illegal to inquire about job candidates’ educational background, just as it is currently illegal to inquire about marital status or religious affiliation.
Yes, get rid of degree requirements. Some states like Virginia don't require them for passing the Bar. It's kind of insane to me that any state gates the Bar in such a way.
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You are paying taxes, though. And some of those taxes goes directly to support the craziness.
And they are using all these funds to churn out students who will ensure that the funding continues, either because those students go on to run the bureaucracies which distribute the funding, or at least they will vote for candidates who will continue the funding over your vehement objections.
It is a pretty well-entrenched system, in that regard. You don't want to pay, but they don't care, you will be paying.
So now what?
So now I am definitely going to go complain about this on TheMotte and argue with one of the resident liberals about it, and feel a bit better afterwards even if nothing has changed. And I'm gonna dedicate some of my free time and money to making sure TheMotte stays around as a place for me to complain and feel a little better about the things I have no control over.
Probably the best sort of outlook to have, to be honest.
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you already have, for decades. Build some other public institution, and they'll use their current position to make a play for that as well. The problem isn't the idea of public institutions; those are both inevitable and necessary. The problem is that it's not possible to share a society with people who don't share some minimum level of values with you.
I believe most people share a value for wealth and money. Or at least it is a fungible thing that can be converted into other values. That is why the stock market works and publicly traded companies exist. Until DEI crap came along most of them have been legally obligated to pursue money and profit as a singular value, because that is one thing everyone can agree on.
Certain values matter way more than others. I think there are only some minimum values of non-interference that I need to live around others, and everything beyond that is just icing on the cake.
...And yet, DEI crap came along. Is your assumption that market forces will make it go away again? Why didn't they prevent it in the first place?
More generally, I think the idea that money is a reliable least-common-denominator fallback value is simply not accurate given what we observe of human nature. I think there was a similar argument in the last belle epoque, that the contentions and resentments couldn't get too far out of hand because it would interfere too much with making money. It didn't work out well in the last century; I don't expect it to go much better in this one.
I think DEI stuff was a bit like peacock feathers in an era of easy money. It was a way to stand out in the market.
Once the easy money ended a lot of places quietly axed their more meaningful DEI initiatives. Or not so quietly did massive layoffs that just disproportionately affected those departments.
I have a cousin and some former co-workers that worked with DEI stuff. They all have expressed frustration that the companies they work for basically only give lip-service to the ideas, and that they actively avoid measuring themselves in any way that might suggest they've failed or could do better.
If DEI stuff was more meaningful and continued to exist in tighter markets, ya I think market forces would destroy it. There has been ongoing interest from investor groups on ant-dei funds. Which make a ton of sense as an investment strategy. If you were going to choose to either invest in a group of companies that pursue profit as a primary objects or pursue anything else as a primary objective, you'd probably expect the profit group to make more money. DEI is a handy categorization in that regard.
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Point 1, only 20% of their budget is state funding. That is still any state funding, true, but I feel like sometimes people act like they're entirely state funded and that's really seriously not the case.
Point 2, I think it's reasonable for the government to subsidize education without dictating what the education entails. You can trust the market to efficiently decide what type of education takes place between students and teachers, while also pumping money into the education sector because you think the economy benefits from more education happening overall.
Point 3, I don't want to pay for many aspects of our military, police, and prison systems, to name just a few. 'I shouldn't have to pay for things I dislike' has never been a cogent argument against government spending; it's a democracy, you can vote for what you want but everyone has to pay for everything that ends up in the budget. You don't get a line-item veto unless I do too, and if everyone gets one then we end up with no government at all, society collapses, and we get invaded by China or w/e.
To echo FC below, it does indeed feel like lots of people wanted this during the Obama years, when the War on Terror was in its twilight years and "our military budget is obscenely, unnecessarily huge and prevents us from having good healthcare" was a talking point on Tumblr. Lots of people would probably still want this now, even!
And in fairness, why shouldn't they? I figure the easy counterargument is that that's what our politicians are for; that we elect representatives and such precisely so that the demos can evolve its power to people who will handle the responsibility and hard work of haggling and negotiating. In practice, this doesn't satisfy the demos enough, for reasons.
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20% is easily the difference between "this is a successful and growing venture" and "we need to do mass layoffs or risk being shut down". I also pointed out in my comment that they can do what they want with student/donor money, so obviously I know there are other funding sources. And if I am wrong and the budget from the state is so small and not worth mentioning, then certainly they won't make a big fuss if they lose that funding. But I think we both know that a very large fuss would be made.
Do you want a functioning market, or do you want state funding? The more state funding the worse the market.
And I can want my tax dollars to not be spent for bad reasons. Two different professors at GMU have written books about the subject of rotten academia.
I specifically said "Cut all state funding" and "Republicans [should] wash their hands of the university system". I suppose my last line could be interpreted as wanting a line item veto, and I'm not opposed to that. But its not really the point I was making in this comment. As long as we don't get a line item veto I think its reasonable to say "I hate this thing" as a reason why that thing should receive 0 funding. In fact, if there was line item vetoing by individuals my comment would be dumb and pointless and you could just respond "if you don't like it then just line item veto it, and the rest of us can continue to fund it as we like".
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Counting federal student loans? Where's the other 80% of their budget coming from, specifically?
...And then if the teachers defect and focus on indoctrinating instead of actually teaching workable skills, then the argument will be that we need to increase funding to get the economic benefits that aren't actually materializing. I would argue that this has already happened.
"I shouldn't have to pay for partisan political activity" is distinct from "I shouldn't have to pay for things I don't like." I do welcome your commitment to police reform, though.
...You phrase this as though it isn't a clear preference for a growing portion of society, and one of the more likely destinations given our current trajectory.
The culture war is not going away. The grievances continue to accumulate. By this time next year, America will enjoy significantly less social cohesion than it has now, and sooner or soonest, the spark shower onto the mound of oily rags that is our society is going to catch.
On this note, if you didn't see, they just got handed a full $1.2B that was laundered through the label of a "loan".
EDIT: Forgot link.
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