By the turn of this century at the latest, definitely after the Sokal Hoax, it was obvious that a form of academic Marxism based around "marginalized identities"—the famous holy trinity of Race Gender Sexuality—had firmly rooted itself in American academia, most esp its Humanities Depts.
But let's take a moment to get nostalgic about America of even 20ish yrs ago: it was a mostly stable, mostly peaceful and prosperous, middle-class country, the richest and most powerful the world had ever seen. Who cared what a few random cranks were pumping out on campus? Why bother fighting and refuting them, when we all had better things to do? Even the reddest of red-state legislators and trustees turned a blind eye, because getting an English or Arts degree was for losers anyway and as long as the market was rising, all was well. The fact that a few well-funded mad scientists were in a lab somewhere cooking up new forms of anti-intellectual anti-Enlightenment anti-American resentment was just a pimple on the body politic, easily covered w some ointment.
Well, now that pimple has grown into a metastasizing tumor and the patient is more tumor than body, and unfortunately the time for treatment is long since passed.
America may be the first country in history to actively fund, encourage and organize the demonization and dismantling of its own culture, history and society.
I guess Marx was right about the capitalists being willing to sell the rope that the socialists would use to hang them with?
"Praetorian bloat, gender ideology, race essentialism, propagandic, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought—these are the products of the new academic state religion that combines Foucauldian postmodern relativism, Soviet sclerosis, and Maoist liberticide. As faddish progressive principles are baked into the very policies of public and private education alike, universities are becoming little more than overpriced indoctrination echo chambers where equality-of-result takes precedence over merit. The situation is getting worse because most academics are now activists seeking to impose their interests and vision on the world."
One quibble. The CT woke project isn't just a college campus thing. It is a K-12 thing. The kids are being brainwashed before many of them end up in higher learning. The K-12 system is controlled by radical 3d wave postmodernist feminists that run the teachers unions.
Stanford is a private university and thus can destroy its own business model. The problem with looking at higher learning in general as the root of the problem, and I live in a college town with a large state university so I have some understanding here, is that while many of the campuses have enough academics and administrators to run against this woke DEI hogwash...the students are demanding it.
What we need is a national Ron DeSantis program for K-12... and we really, really need to rip out the national teachers union. The kids are getting messed up young.
Totally agree about the importance of K-12 and that the unions are partly to blame. NEA sent members BLM poster centerfolds for display in classrooms in their monthly magazine (Jan '22) along with links to a whole BLM curriculum guide, and they're sponsoring DEI trainings focused on gender pronouns and other such propaganda. Check out Chicago's teacher's union since 2001 if you want to see what Marxist institutionsal takeover looks like. The other two drivers are Schools of Ed in universities and Departments of Ed in state bureaucracies. Rufo in FL has it right on these sources of the problem, but I agree with J Peterson that bans and other authoritarian moves are a slippery slope.
The focus on feminists as the culprits is a crowd pleaser on both right and left these days, but isn't entirely accurate and risks alienating women voters. A lot of teachers and nurses (etc) are fed up with the divisive woke crap and are open to new ideas. I'm curious what take on women's rights my anti-woke brethren would advocate. If it's back to the '50s when women had to be dependent on men, that's a fantasy. You can't have individual rights for men without rights for women, as women have been saying since the Enlightenment. Unless you create a Saudi or Atwood-esque dystopia, women's rights are here to stay. The movement that can articulate a uniting vision for men and women, to cooperate and thrive together as we're obviously meant to, will win this moment.
I had a much more virulent, lengthy rant about the outright racism of the Democrats and liberals on this topic, but I thought better and deleted it.
I will add that the underlying racism I’m seeing from the mostly white, educated, wealthy liberals via these DEI programs really disgusts me.
the underlying message seems to treat all Black people as these fragile, hothouse flowers that will never get ahead unless complete dependence and assistance from Whitey makes me sick.
Black history is American history and they seem dead set on watering down Black achievement into bland mediocrity. nothing seems more insulting to the Black genuis that gave us Gospel, Blues, Jazz, and Hip Hop.
The only thing that is ailing higher education that I don't think you covered in this piece is the astounding poor quality of education being offered. The only time I tried to go the traditional route at a small liberal arts college the education was a joke. The papers being written by my peers in that class wouldn't have passed muster at my high-school (and I went to regular public high-school in the Deep South).
I think the future of education is going to be all online. Right now, I'm working towards a BS in computer science, but I'm only going to school because 1. it looks better to have a degree on your resume and 2. the GI Bill is paying me to go to school (hard to beat that). That being said, my real source of education is YouTube.
This phenomenon Tahs noted in early 1991 by George Will, who I believe said, "There are more Marxists on the faculty of Harvard than in all of Eastern Europe."
As I may have mentioned here, I write grants on behalf of the small art nonprofit for which I volunteer. I am about to convene a meeting to discuss the ways in which we can make our work more accessible to the “differently abled” as that is an answer I must provide in every application. To my great delight, I discovered that a new member led that process at Georgia State University, so she will be a key asset. I admit rolling my eyes when she mentioned making our art exhibits more accessible to persons who cannot see (formerly known as the blind) but quickly apologized.
I graduated in '88. I'm not sure if "the left" has changed or if I just wasn't very aware back then. I've never been a very political person, still am not. I was a gay kid in rural northern California and wanted to go somewhere where I would meet other gay people. Of course now I know that there are gay people everywhere. I could of gone to UC Davis and met plenty, but I didn't know that back then. As a college-bound junior I was impressed that Oberlin included sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policy -- and off I went.
Of course that was before the days of "pregnant people" and announcing pronouns and cancel culture. Back then I thought it was leftist to lean away from interventionist military actions and lean towards free speech. Did things change while I wasn't looking?
I found the Stanford personnel numbers in the final footnote almost beyond belief, and I am well aware of the burgeoning of the bureaucracy of university administrative staffs, having been a trustee of a well know eastern liberal arts university from 2009-2015. That statistic alone is both illustrative of much of what is wrong with higher education today and indicative of how little of what transpires on most campuses is actually concerned with “education” as most individuals understand the meaning of the word and so contrary to the situation on campus when I graduated in 1963.
Our biggest problem we face is the corruption of our systems.
Why isn't anyone talking about solutions?
Let's build a decentralized and transparent "4th branch of government" that is 100% built and controlled by the people as a parallel system that holds all of the other branches accountable.
They are using technology to organize against us. We must use it back against those who are corrupting our systems.
There are still a few individuals who are patriotic enough to want to attempt to institute reforms which might either help government to function better and/or reduce its size. But they have been in short supply for a least a century. But in my in my opinion Reagan fell into this category. Probably Eisenhower before him.
I'm wondering who the victims here are, the kids that get to go to college or the kids that don't. It seems like a giant scam to me having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay the bloated salaries of administrators to get an "education" that you could get a lot cheaper online. The only thing that sets it apart is the degree that is predicated on the reputation of the institution, which is squandered when most of what they actually teach has no real-world application, perhaps outside of becoming another administrator and perpetuating the scam.
One thing i do look askance though is the sob story of "my perfect child" did not get into their "safety schools." College admissions can be a scam but we all have played the game. Funny, all of my friends who attended Ivy League schools in the 80's, played on their football teams. Only one of them, would have made it in on academic merit alone and may well have because I was a better player than him though he did make the Harvard team. So when I see the horror stories in your tweet example I think, yes, people ae gaming the system but thyy always have but I really do not think that is why the "perfect" kid did get in. My 18 year old has a solid GPA and test scores from a top HS and is a varsity athlete. He has gotten into some very good, but not elite, schools, rejected by similar schools, and is still waiting on a few elite schools some of whom he is on the deferred list. Its about what I expected. What I am beginning to suspect, based on other "horror" stories he has related to me, is that the admissions offices are getting good at identifying people who are trying to game the system by artificially padding their scores and resumes. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. It does not excuse the other abuses you describe, but I refuse to clutch my pearls when I see something lik that.
interested to learn more about the representation of "Independents." To my, outmoded, way of thinking, the main body of professors would likely identify as such as they would see themselves as pursuing The Truth, wherever it leads them. Identifying with a political party means subordinating some of your beliefs in pursuit of a "greater good." Not a bad thing but antithetical to someone pursuing The Truth. They may vote a particular way and I would expect academe to be more heavily represented by Democrat voting collectivists than Capitalist for various reasons, but I would expect the majority would want to retain their Independent status. Ina sane world
The reason educators are 10 to 1 Dems over GOP is because GOP ideology is intellectually corrupt. It is literally just corporate and special interest propaganda. Right?
Dems don’t even claim to have any coherent ideology , it is all about retaining and growing their power at any cost. I still go with the differentiation that I learned decades ago. R’s are the stupid party, D’s are the evil party, although there is more than enough stupidity and evil in both parties currently.
I tend to agree with your characterization between the two but I think "evil' is excessive in terms of D's. Stupid for R's is spot on which might be harsh but makes sense. If, like me, you were more likely to believe that government for the most part was a wasteful sinkhole of mediocrity, why would you want to go into government/politics as a career?
By the turn of this century at the latest, definitely after the Sokal Hoax, it was obvious that a form of academic Marxism based around "marginalized identities"—the famous holy trinity of Race Gender Sexuality—had firmly rooted itself in American academia, most esp its Humanities Depts.
But let's take a moment to get nostalgic about America of even 20ish yrs ago: it was a mostly stable, mostly peaceful and prosperous, middle-class country, the richest and most powerful the world had ever seen. Who cared what a few random cranks were pumping out on campus? Why bother fighting and refuting them, when we all had better things to do? Even the reddest of red-state legislators and trustees turned a blind eye, because getting an English or Arts degree was for losers anyway and as long as the market was rising, all was well. The fact that a few well-funded mad scientists were in a lab somewhere cooking up new forms of anti-intellectual anti-Enlightenment anti-American resentment was just a pimple on the body politic, easily covered w some ointment.
Well, now that pimple has grown into a metastasizing tumor and the patient is more tumor than body, and unfortunately the time for treatment is long since passed.
America may be the first country in history to actively fund, encourage and organize the demonization and dismantling of its own culture, history and society.
I guess Marx was right about the capitalists being willing to sell the rope that the socialists would use to hang them with?
Amazing comment as always, thank you!
thank you!
Great piece Brad. Saving in my library.
Love this:
"Praetorian bloat, gender ideology, race essentialism, propagandic, jargon-filled research, and campus-wide intolerance of diverse thought—these are the products of the new academic state religion that combines Foucauldian postmodern relativism, Soviet sclerosis, and Maoist liberticide. As faddish progressive principles are baked into the very policies of public and private education alike, universities are becoming little more than overpriced indoctrination echo chambers where equality-of-result takes precedence over merit. The situation is getting worse because most academics are now activists seeking to impose their interests and vision on the world."
One quibble. The CT woke project isn't just a college campus thing. It is a K-12 thing. The kids are being brainwashed before many of them end up in higher learning. The K-12 system is controlled by radical 3d wave postmodernist feminists that run the teachers unions.
Stanford is a private university and thus can destroy its own business model. The problem with looking at higher learning in general as the root of the problem, and I live in a college town with a large state university so I have some understanding here, is that while many of the campuses have enough academics and administrators to run against this woke DEI hogwash...the students are demanding it.
What we need is a national Ron DeSantis program for K-12... and we really, really need to rip out the national teachers union. The kids are getting messed up young.
Excellent comment, thank you.
Totally agree about the importance of K-12 and that the unions are partly to blame. NEA sent members BLM poster centerfolds for display in classrooms in their monthly magazine (Jan '22) along with links to a whole BLM curriculum guide, and they're sponsoring DEI trainings focused on gender pronouns and other such propaganda. Check out Chicago's teacher's union since 2001 if you want to see what Marxist institutionsal takeover looks like. The other two drivers are Schools of Ed in universities and Departments of Ed in state bureaucracies. Rufo in FL has it right on these sources of the problem, but I agree with J Peterson that bans and other authoritarian moves are a slippery slope.
The focus on feminists as the culprits is a crowd pleaser on both right and left these days, but isn't entirely accurate and risks alienating women voters. A lot of teachers and nurses (etc) are fed up with the divisive woke crap and are open to new ideas. I'm curious what take on women's rights my anti-woke brethren would advocate. If it's back to the '50s when women had to be dependent on men, that's a fantasy. You can't have individual rights for men without rights for women, as women have been saying since the Enlightenment. Unless you create a Saudi or Atwood-esque dystopia, women's rights are here to stay. The movement that can articulate a uniting vision for men and women, to cooperate and thrive together as we're obviously meant to, will win this moment.
another great essay Brad.
I had a much more virulent, lengthy rant about the outright racism of the Democrats and liberals on this topic, but I thought better and deleted it.
I will add that the underlying racism I’m seeing from the mostly white, educated, wealthy liberals via these DEI programs really disgusts me.
the underlying message seems to treat all Black people as these fragile, hothouse flowers that will never get ahead unless complete dependence and assistance from Whitey makes me sick.
Black history is American history and they seem dead set on watering down Black achievement into bland mediocrity. nothing seems more insulting to the Black genuis that gave us Gospel, Blues, Jazz, and Hip Hop.
what a tragedy...
I think you're 100% spot-on, man.
The only thing that is ailing higher education that I don't think you covered in this piece is the astounding poor quality of education being offered. The only time I tried to go the traditional route at a small liberal arts college the education was a joke. The papers being written by my peers in that class wouldn't have passed muster at my high-school (and I went to regular public high-school in the Deep South).
I think the future of education is going to be all online. Right now, I'm working towards a BS in computer science, but I'm only going to school because 1. it looks better to have a degree on your resume and 2. the GI Bill is paying me to go to school (hard to beat that). That being said, my real source of education is YouTube.
GI Bill paid me to go to grad school. Enjoy it, brother.
Online is the way to go. Plus, I've def noticed a huge difference from majoring in a social science (history) vs a hard science (CS).
Btw, I finished "Because of Jenny". That's a good book, man.
Thanks for reading!
This phenomenon Tahs noted in early 1991 by George Will, who I believe said, "There are more Marxists on the faculty of Harvard than in all of Eastern Europe."
As I may have mentioned here, I write grants on behalf of the small art nonprofit for which I volunteer. I am about to convene a meeting to discuss the ways in which we can make our work more accessible to the “differently abled” as that is an answer I must provide in every application. To my great delight, I discovered that a new member led that process at Georgia State University, so she will be a key asset. I admit rolling my eyes when she mentioned making our art exhibits more accessible to persons who cannot see (formerly known as the blind) but quickly apologized.
Incredibly, my alma mater, Oberlin College, didn't merit a mention. We must be slipping.
😆
Did they hit up the alumni up for $$ to cover the Gibson judgment?
Not sure as they don't have my current contact info. I was really surprised to hear about that craziness.
"Not sure as they don't have my current contact info"
Well played.
"I was really surprised to hear about that craziness"
You must have attended a long time ago.
I graduated in '88. I'm not sure if "the left" has changed or if I just wasn't very aware back then. I've never been a very political person, still am not. I was a gay kid in rural northern California and wanted to go somewhere where I would meet other gay people. Of course now I know that there are gay people everywhere. I could of gone to UC Davis and met plenty, but I didn't know that back then. As a college-bound junior I was impressed that Oberlin included sexual orientation in their nondiscrimination policy -- and off I went.
Of course that was before the days of "pregnant people" and announcing pronouns and cancel culture. Back then I thought it was leftist to lean away from interventionist military actions and lean towards free speech. Did things change while I wasn't looking?
"Did things change while I wasn't looking?"
Yes.
I found the Stanford personnel numbers in the final footnote almost beyond belief, and I am well aware of the burgeoning of the bureaucracy of university administrative staffs, having been a trustee of a well know eastern liberal arts university from 2009-2015. That statistic alone is both illustrative of much of what is wrong with higher education today and indicative of how little of what transpires on most campuses is actually concerned with “education” as most individuals understand the meaning of the word and so contrary to the situation on campus when I graduated in 1963.
Our biggest problem we face is the corruption of our systems.
Why isn't anyone talking about solutions?
Let's build a decentralized and transparent "4th branch of government" that is 100% built and controlled by the people as a parallel system that holds all of the other branches accountable.
They are using technology to organize against us. We must use it back against those who are corrupting our systems.
Like this:
https://joshketry.substack.com/p/lets-build-a-4th-branch-of-government
Subscribed!
There are still a few individuals who are patriotic enough to want to attempt to institute reforms which might either help government to function better and/or reduce its size. But they have been in short supply for a least a century. But in my in my opinion Reagan fell into this category. Probably Eisenhower before him.
I'm wondering who the victims here are, the kids that get to go to college or the kids that don't. It seems like a giant scam to me having to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay the bloated salaries of administrators to get an "education" that you could get a lot cheaper online. The only thing that sets it apart is the degree that is predicated on the reputation of the institution, which is squandered when most of what they actually teach has no real-world application, perhaps outside of becoming another administrator and perpetuating the scam.
One thing i do look askance though is the sob story of "my perfect child" did not get into their "safety schools." College admissions can be a scam but we all have played the game. Funny, all of my friends who attended Ivy League schools in the 80's, played on their football teams. Only one of them, would have made it in on academic merit alone and may well have because I was a better player than him though he did make the Harvard team. So when I see the horror stories in your tweet example I think, yes, people ae gaming the system but thyy always have but I really do not think that is why the "perfect" kid did get in. My 18 year old has a solid GPA and test scores from a top HS and is a varsity athlete. He has gotten into some very good, but not elite, schools, rejected by similar schools, and is still waiting on a few elite schools some of whom he is on the deferred list. Its about what I expected. What I am beginning to suspect, based on other "horror" stories he has related to me, is that the admissions offices are getting good at identifying people who are trying to game the system by artificially padding their scores and resumes. If it looks too good to be true, it probably is. It does not excuse the other abuses you describe, but I refuse to clutch my pearls when I see something lik that.
interested to learn more about the representation of "Independents." To my, outmoded, way of thinking, the main body of professors would likely identify as such as they would see themselves as pursuing The Truth, wherever it leads them. Identifying with a political party means subordinating some of your beliefs in pursuit of a "greater good." Not a bad thing but antithetical to someone pursuing The Truth. They may vote a particular way and I would expect academe to be more heavily represented by Democrat voting collectivists than Capitalist for various reasons, but I would expect the majority would want to retain their Independent status. Ina sane world
The reason educators are 10 to 1 Dems over GOP is because GOP ideology is intellectually corrupt. It is literally just corporate and special interest propaganda. Right?
Dems don’t even claim to have any coherent ideology , it is all about retaining and growing their power at any cost. I still go with the differentiation that I learned decades ago. R’s are the stupid party, D’s are the evil party, although there is more than enough stupidity and evil in both parties currently.
I tend to agree with your characterization between the two but I think "evil' is excessive in terms of D's. Stupid for R's is spot on which might be harsh but makes sense. If, like me, you were more likely to believe that government for the most part was a wasteful sinkhole of mediocrity, why would you want to go into government/politics as a career?
psst!! - The Dems ideology is ideologically corrupt and defined by corporate and special interests too!!
You heard it here first!!!
I accidentally deleted the post and didn't want to resend it again and clutter inboxes 🙄.
But thank you so much for taking the time to take notes. My email is brad.neaton@yahoo.com!