Comment by cleandreams
14 hours ago
I think the universities made a mistake in becoming too culturally left wing. The faculty (and students) in the humanities in particular are far to the left of the political mainstream. (I am on the left though more focused on labor rights and good jobs than identity politics.)
The attack on the universities is fueled by this divergence, now that the right is firmly in power. This will just hurt the country in the long run. There was so much group think and silencing happening on the left over the last decade. It seems now to have been self-destructive.
Some university humanities departments undermined themselves by being divisive and exclusionary. Several years ago the University of Chicago made this public statement.
"For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black Studies."
There's nothing wrong with encouraging scholarship in a particular field but when they intentionally exclude other fields it tends to limit public support. Taxpayers will naturally question why they're being asked to subsidize student loans, and wonder whether universities are being used to promote ideologies rather than educate.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/16/university-ch...
The mechanism that lead to this is imho that humanities generally do not have any more grounding in facts, logic or reality. Science, technology and (to some extent) medicine and mathematics are bound to describe existing phenomena that occur in nature. They do this by observation and experiments (except mathematics), proposing axioms and theory, and then bringing those into strict logical agreement. Humanities nowadays reject observation and experiments as biologism. Or they never had those, and always just proposed ideas to be discussed, like in philosophy. They also nowadays reject objective logic and proof in favour of subjective evaluations and a wholly individual-centered world view.
This decline of rigor in the humanities means that they no longer really teach logic, critical thinking, or any kind of reality-related ideas. What they do is arbitrary and therefore objectively pointless, except maybe to further some political or social goal. That those goals are mostly left-wing is imho just an accident, they could as well be promoting right-wing politics.
(In a similar manner, arts now reject their original goals of beauty, aesthetics, depictions of reality, mastery and entertainment. But that's less of a problem, because arts have always been even less important than humanities.)
This is a popular criticism that is partially true, but it rings a bit hollow because conservatives (rather, Republicans) don't seem to want intellectual career paths. They're nowhere to be found in academia.
And, to pre-empt the usual objection, they aren't being crowded out by ideology. They aren't there in the first place. They're not in the STEM majors outside of engineering, and they're not in the humanities except for law. Otherwise you'll find them in sales, marketing, business, and management.
These people complain about academia but have little invested in it in the first place.
They are chased out of academia. I knew professors who were proudly, vocally socialist but the professors who had any conservative leanings were very subtle about it.
You don't get tenure if your fellow professors don't like you, and they've created their own echo chamber long ago.
In contradiction to your point, the conservative professors and teachers that I knew were not in arts humanities at all (with one exception in law) but in crunchier fields like economics. The STEM and maths professors didn't talk social topics at all, so it is impossible to know what their feelings were.
If the students aren't there, there won't be professors.