There’s been a lot of grumpy commentary about this recent NYT op-ed by Adam S. Hoffman, a Princeton senior claiming that conservatives are being driven off campus. Its basic claims:
In the not-so-distant past, the Typical College Republican idolized Ronald Reagan, fretted about the national debt and read Edmund Burke. Political sophistication, to that person, implied belief in the status quo. … Today’s campus conservatives embrace a less moderate, complacent and institutional approach to politics. … many tend toward scorched-earth politics. But these changes aren’t solely the consequence of a fractured national politics.They’re also the result of puritanically progressive campuses that alienate conservative students from their liberal peers and college as a whole.
The story of this transformation, according to the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, starts around 2014, when Gen Z arrived on campus. The new progressive students were less tolerant of heterodox ideas and individuals. …For those on the right, the experience is alienating. … And those who challenge liberal pieties can face real repercussions.
There is actual serious social science research that Amy Binder and her colleagues have done on this exact question. She and her colleagues come to very different conclusions than Hoffman.
I first came across Binder1 through her book with Kate Wood, Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives. That book came out back in 2013. It agrees with Hoffman on one important thing. There has been a shift in campus conservative activism, from “conservative campus organizations and actors [that] favor a more erudite style of political discussion” to ones “which are often very well funded” and “thrive on confrontation.” The Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which focused on “seminars on moral and political philosophy” has found itself being outmaneuvered by more confrontational groups such as Young America’s Foundation, the Leadership Institute (associated with the recently disgraced James O’Keefe) and Turning Point USA.
However, as the book’s publication date suggests, this shift began to take hold years before the Great Awokening. And Binder and Wood provided persuasive evidence that the shift had far less to do with what was happening on college campuses than changes in the broader conservative movement. There was money – and lots of it – for organizations that were willing to take the culture war to America’s universities, creating an entire political economy.
The later consequences are described in The Channels of Student Activism, a more recent academic book, published by Binder and Jeff Kidder last year. While Binder and Kidder are sympathetic to Haidt’s broad program of reform, they push back with evidence against his causal argument. People like George Lukianoff and Haidt “point fingers at the supposed shortcomings of Generation Z,” blaming the purported psychological frailty of an entire generation. Binder and Kidder find that the evidence points towards organizations as the key factors of change. Students “are channeled not coddled,” provided with incentives, identities and even entire career paths by political organizations.
Binder and Kidder identify very different organizational political economies for conservative and liberal/left students. Right leaning students are “encouraged by organizations external to their schools to adopt a discourse hostile to the academic enterprise,” “targeting a liberal campus culture, which plays into a larger Republican game plan.”
As they describe it (on the basis of interviews with students and figures within the relevant organizations):
Many outside organizations encourage students on the right to plan events specifically designed to incite outrage among their left-leaning peers. Once outrage is successfully sparked, and progressive students demand that administrators do something in response, the front line of conservative politics shifts to protecting the speech rights of reactionaries and provocateurs.
The reason why so many campus controversies seem to follow the same script is … that they are following the same script. A conservative group invites a figure onto campus who seems guaranteed to provoke outrage, leading to protests, and likely headlines about campus illiberalism. This is not a reaction against purported wokism so much as a means of weaponizing it for the other side’s political purposes. As Binder and Kidder describe it
The answer to why supporting vile speech has become such a ubiquitous part of college-level conservatism is that student-led groups are operating within a larger outside channel of activism. Many national organizations on the right see the First Amendment as a valuable tool for disrupting liberal hegemony in higher education. Ultimately, it is the influence of outside players—such as the Leadership Institute, Turning Point, Young America’s Foundation, PragerU, and Young Americans for Liberty, as well as local donors helping to fund their preferred campus clubs—that make speech uniquely effective in reactionary mobilization. Some of these organizations, like the Leadership Institute and Turning Point, maintain a stable of speakers ready to headline events put on by student-led groups. .
There is also ample help to subsidize the costs of hosting such figures…. Perhaps most importantly, national organizations and wealthy benefactors set the tone for what types of activism are appropriate for club members, and they provide a ready-made and consistent script that right-leaning students use to defend their provocations.
Also, for succcessful agitators, there’s a career in it. Binder and Kidder quote a “faculty advisor to several conservative clubs,” who “explained the multiple components of the strategy, from initially causing a stir to eventually presenting a burnished résumé that looks good in the realm of right-leaning politics.”
Press is always good. You always want that …[the clubs] want to get it on YouTube. … So, you pick speakers that [are] creating something that will be explosive…. There’s a conflict, and [students are] behaving in that field of conflict, and that helps to get press. … You go to your donors and it’s very easy to show them, “We’re on CNN. Give us more money.” …[Students are] also looking down the road … at internships…. These are the [students] that are going to end up in politics. [ . . . ] And they know that by doing these types of events, especially if there’s some visibility [it’s] all the better for them.
Things are very different for liberal/left students. They don’t have anything like the same ecosystem of supportive external groups. Instead, they have a hopelessly underfunded College Democrats program, a bunch of smaller organizations, and, well, PIRGs (Binder and Kidder touch on some of the controversies around PIRGs’ funding model, but they don’t get deeply embroiled). What they do have is the perception that many or most faculty and university officials are sort of on their side, and an infrastructure of intra-college institutions which provide a lot of inclusion policies and rhetoric, and some rather more modest forms of actual support.
Liberal and left students often feel at home on college campuses in ways that conservatives do not. They tend to overestimate the predominance of liberal views among their fellow students, and classroom discussion very often seems to privilege a loosely liberal set of values and concerns. Very often, they focus their political demands on their immediate surroundings. Binder and Kidder find that pressures for increased inclusion may come from a kind of tacit alliance between concerned students and employees in the relevant parts of the university.
The result is that while conservative groups leverage (and sometimes deliberately create) local incidents for national consumption, liberal and left students are more likely to focus internally. They are also likely to find themselves disappointed a lot of the time – especially those on the left. University officials are often happy to pay lip service, create diversity policies, and sometimes provide assistance and support. They are far less likely to be sympathetic to the more sweeping demands for changes to the underlying political economy of the university itself, which would likely upset constituencies they want to keep happy (elected politicians; boards of trustees).
That helps explain why liberal and left leaning students often end up being quite cynical. Nor are there the same kinds of career opportunities for liberal or left wing activists (whether moderate or radical) as there are for conservative bomb throwers. There just aren’t the same kinds of external institutions on the left, offering support, internships and future opportunities.
So if Binder and Kidder are more or less correct (and they have done a lot of interviews), there are three immediate implications about the NYT op-ed.
The first – most obviously – is that it is wrong. The big shift from the bespectacled bowtie model of campus conservatism to the frenzy of Turning Point USA and rampaging groypers wasn’t a reaction to Wokism-Out-of-Control, as Hoffman maintains. It was a product of a national level shift in the organizational political economy on the right, as national conservative groups perceived possible political advantage from stirring stuff up more on campus. This doesn’t mean that outraged reactions from left students aren’t part of the story. It means instead that they feed an independently existing organizational machine that wants them to be outraged, and will go to increasingly extreme lengths to make sure that they are outraged. Quoting Binder and Kidder:
provocations are often very much part of the design … Elliot Kaufman, a former conservative activist from Stanford University, for example, acknowledged in an op-ed for National Review that “The left-wing riots were not the price or the downside of inviting Yiannopoulos—they were the attraction.”
Second – that media events like the NYT op-ed feed the phenomenon that they purport to describe. If your political economy is all about stirring up media attention and reaction to the problem of illiberalism on campus, then getting op-eds into major national newspapers is a win. Commentators have pointed out that Hoffman was involved in the conservative movement long before he wrote the op-ed. He is also more likely to be able to enjoy a career in professional conservatism, if that is what he wants, after having published it. That doesn’t imply that he is insincere in his claims or his politics. As Binder and Kidder make clear, people’s beliefs and their organizational attachments influence each other on the left as well as the right (they find that one one of the problems faced by campus liberalism and left organization is that there aren’t enough careerist opportunities for their rabblerousers). But the op-ed isn’t an explanation of the causal relationship underlying the shift. It is an example of it.
Finally – that there is another political economy that we need to know more about. One of the most intriguing arguments that Binder and Kidder make is that conservatives are pretty well united around a strong pro free-speech position (even if some of them don’t like the provocateurs that get invited on campus), while liberals tend to be conflicted. Binder and Kidder see this as an opportunity for national left-liberal groups to articulate a better understanding that can be propagated to students.
But there is another way of thinking about it. One reason that the model of conservative campus outrage politics works, is that it is easier to use speech issues to split people on the left half of the political spectrum than it is to split people on the right. And much of the art of politics consists in highlighting the issues that will divide your adversaries (it’s an important element of what William Riker dubbed “heresthetics”). The disagreements over free speech rack national political debate as much as politics within colleges – hence the conservative strategy of crossing the streams, to rally their own troops and create disarray in the ranks of their opponents.
That helps explain why national newspapers keep on publishing pieces on this. It gets fights going, and attracts attention. It also helps explain the careers of people like Jonathan Chait (if you are in the attention economy, and the pieces you get most attention for are the pieces that are most likely to divide your readers, then it is not difficult to do the math about how to maintain readership, and it would take an unusually high degree of moral probity to resist the implicit pressure). But the broader implication is that the political economy of conservative student organizations that Binder and Kidder describe aren’t just linked to right wing media, but to the incentive structures of liberal media too. The strategy would be much less successful, if it didn’t play into liberal-versus-left tensions and attention dynamics too.
1 Binder will become a colleague of mine at Johns Hopkins’ SNF Agora Institute next year. My interest in her and her colleagues’ findings long pre-dates this, and I haven’t consulted her in writing this (any mistakes, exaggerations or misinterpretations are completely mine).
{ 67 comments }
Brett 03.06.23 at 4:39 pm
That’s why I’ve always maintained that the best response to these provocations is to plan separate events physically removed from where the conservative provocateur is. A group of students on camera heckling them is profitable for them – a mostly empty audience room full of empty chairs is not.
superdestroyer 03.06.23 at 5:01 pm
As a test case, maybe those on the left should name a conservative speaker not being funded by an outside group specifically to cause controversy that could be brought to campus that not cause a controversy. Is there anyone at the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Cato, etc who would not cause a controversy? If there an elected politician who could be brought to campus that would not be met with protest? If there a conservative author that could not result in protests, street theater, and bomb threats?
When Condoleezza Rice is too controversial for liberal students, then the campus protests are more than just against paid agitators brought to campus.
LFC 03.06.23 at 5:45 pm
The very first link in the OP needs to be changed. It goes to the NYT op-ed, not to the “grumpy commentary.”
J, not that one 03.06.23 at 5:57 pm
I worry that analyses like Binder and Wood’s are at the wrong level. They start out assuming the only people who matter are the conservative activists and the leftwing activists – that there are two well-defined groups of students, whose beliefs are stable and collectively coherent from age 17 to age 25, who engage in conflict, and that nothing else is going on. If they exclude everyone who doesn’t fit those criteria, obviously they’re going to see what they expect.
Whatever the other flaws of Hoffman’s op-ed, I don’t find it that implausible that a high school senior could expect to find a kind of moderate Republicanism in college and then be bewildered by what they actually find – and they react unpredictably to that confusion. Focusing on the political entrepreneurs who take advantage of that confusion is useful for some purposes and misleading for others. If all we care about is how they vote going forward, maybe we are interested in different things than if we also care about how they treat women, people of color, wage workers, trans people, and immigrants.
MPAVictoria 03.06.23 at 6:33 pm
“When Condoleezza Rice is too controversial for liberal students, then the campus protests are more than just against paid agitators brought to campus.”
Oh yeah. I mean if one of the architects and chief cheerleaders of a war that killed a million innocent people can’t attend a university campus without attracting some protestors who exactly will the Libs let speak unopposed am I right??
Ray Vinmad 03.06.23 at 6:40 pm
This is all true and important to know.
At this point it’s perplexing what the response should be. Everything like this is so effectively designed to generate outrage and conflict. The goal is to harm, of course but it is also to derail , distract and feed the outrage machine.
You would think debunking it would work—to reveal the tactics and analyze them. Does it? While it’s a good strategy, sometimes it fails because the people committed to this method of creating outrage are very committed to it, and many people are sympathetic to them because they see their umbrage as protecting a hierarchy they have an important place in. They fear disruption of this hierarchy because there’s no guarantee they have an important place if institutional reform were to take place to make space for others or even to accept those others (since excluding people on certain grounds frees up more space).
Ignoring certain kinds of cruel or dehumanizing speech can’t work because the point is to create fear and possibly to create actual conditions of physical and social insecurity for some people—e.g., to verbally attack immigrants students or Muslim students or Black students or LGBT students, etc. Ignoring it enables more attacks, normalizes them, and understandably makes people who have a reason to be afraid become more afraid.
When speech is used to respond to the speech this is claimed to be suppression of speech. When people avoid or ignore or criticize individuals either professors or students who are sometimes perhaps expressing their sincere option in a desire for intellectual engagement but sometime do things that could actually be called trolling or harassing others with their speech, the people who object or complain are portrayed as bullies.
In this context of conflict, unfortunately people demonize each other and become unable to listen to each other because they perceive other people as threats. This can create more groupthink, which is bad for free inquiry. Some people aren’t presenting their reasons in good faith but it’s hard to say who is and who isn’t.
I tend to suppose all students are presenting their reasons in good faith because almost all the time this has been my experience. Certain right wing students seem to be very resistant to reflection or free and open inquiry if they’ve been primed into feelings of extreme distrust and a sense of victimization. In my experience, even these students can respond to a climate where problems are being considered in good faith, and people are trying to learn from each other. So I think maybe our old tools which are encouraging curiosity and respect and meeting people where they are and remembering they’re people and really seeing them and caring about them still work a lot of the time. Although it’s hard work, there are some professors who are able to get most students to care about freedom of thought and inquiry, and see other people around them in a non-demonized way.
What I worry is there’s a lot of effort to destroy these interpersonal efforts at learning together, i.e., a major feature of university of education, because being somebody who listens to ideas and thinks about them fairly and with openness and curiosity can be disruptive to certain status quos. And the way to make sure they can’t do this is to demonize and create interpersonal hostility among the students who would be learning together. That you could send a whole bunch of students to get the acquired power of the Ivy League universities but they’d never acquire the appropriate caring and regard for other people and instead wallow in careerist egoism worries me more than whether some planned campaign can fool the New York Times. And I worry for them and not just the people they affect, as well. They are going to miss out on a lot in life.
superdestroyer 03.06.23 at 8:10 pm
MPAVictoria
Thank you for making my point that there is no conservative speaker that a college could have that would not result in an outlandish response from the left. What any conservative/Republican student quickly learns is that everything that they support will called racist/sexist/xenophobic/etc by the liberal students on campus and will not be tolerated.
Unless one can give an example of a conservative that will tolerated on campus who is not a never-Trumper who is not longer involved in conservative politics, then one is proving the conservative students point.
Alex SL 03.06.23 at 8:44 pm
In a sense, duh. The idea that people become reactionary because others have become liberal is just a variant of the abuser’s “look at that, now you have made me hit you again”. They could just, and hear me out on this, remain decent people if they wanted to, but yes, there are more clicks and views to be had from rabble-rousing, and entire careers full of book deals, TV interviews, and newspaper opinion pieces have been founded on the claim of having been silenced. (Silenced meaning here that other people used their freedom of speech to disagree with that person.)
One of the most intriguing arguments that Binder and Kidder make is that conservatives are pretty well united around a strong pro free-speech position
This statement is missing several sets of nested scare quotes around “free-speech”. No, these reactionaries do not care about free speech at all, not in the slightest, and it would be good not to propagate their pretence that they do. As demonstrated right here by the fact that “superdestroyer” is opposed to campus protests, which are a form of free speech. Not to mention reactionary opposition to information being available on homosexuality, to public protests against global heating, to factual history being taught, etc.
LFC 03.06.23 at 8:53 pm
Re my earlier comment:
I suppose the “grumpy commentary” could have referred to the comments attached to the column itself, and if that’s the case I’ll withdraw it.
Commenter 03.06.23 at 8:58 pm
superdestroyer:
“Thank you for making my point that there is no conservative speaker that a college could have that would not result in an outlandish response from the left. What any conservative/Republican student quickly learns is that everything that they support will called racist/sexist/xenophobic/etc by the liberal students on campus and will not be tolerated.”
This is hilarious and wonderful.
superdestroyer 03.06.23 at 9:08 pm
Alex SL There is a world of difference between peaceful protest and pulling the fire alarms, blocking doors, bomb threats, or just the simple passive-aggressive protest of setting the financial costs of the extra-security so high as to prevent any conservative from coming to campus.
I am still waiting for someone who list a conservative speaker that could be invited to campus, not cause a mass protests, not create bomb threats or fire alarm pulls, and would be of any interest. I have asked three time now and no one seems able to come up with an example. Thus, the issue about paid conservative speakers on campus just comes down to the stand “Go Team Blue, we are good people and conservative are bad people.”
JimV 03.06.23 at 9:23 pm
The last two graduation ceremonies I went to, at Duke, about 20 years ago, then at Hobart and William Smith, about eight years ago, had conservative commencement speakers, whom nobody protested against. One was George Will, and the other was a conservative I used to see on the PBS News Hour a lot, but whose name is lost to my failing memory.
I suspect neither of those would endorse Trump. I further expect that degeneration in the right-wing since those comparatively halcyon days is largely responsible for the increased level of protest against conservative campus speakers.
William U. 03.06.23 at 9:35 pm
superdestroyer:
Sure, I’ll bite. It took me all of five seconds on Google to find that David Brooks has spoken on university campuses many times without incident. (The students ought to have protested — against wasting their tuition dollars on a fatuous person!)
Pity the poor conservative pundits, who must have some of the easiest jobs on planet earth.
a different guy named kent 03.06.23 at 9:47 pm
On superdestroyer’s question (which seems intelligent and well-founded to me, for what it’s worth) ….
I do wonder about the “would be of any interest” clause of the question. Maybe someone who doesn’t cause protests by liberals isn’t “of any interest” to conservatives, by definition: perhaps conservatives are only “interested” in speakers because and to the extent that they piss off liberals!
But let’s hope that the question isn’t a self-annihilating gotcha like that, and take it seriously.
I live in Madison, WI and am not connected to the University in any regard (though my parents both taught there for years). I would be surprised if any of the following speakers would provoke mass protests, bomb threats, etc.
Liz Cheney (never Trumper and therefore doesn’t count?)
David Frum (ditto?)
Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin Republicans, but no longer in office so … not interesting I assume?)
Mitch McConnell
Chris Sununu, Phil Scott, Joe Lombardo (state Governors and therefore by definition not interesting? or maybe they don’t count as conservative?)
I am having problems finding really good examples. Why should that be? My best guess is that, right now, “conservative & interesting to conservatives” = “Trump-aligned” and/or “famous for owning the libs via performative cruelty and/or hateful rhetoric.”
Personally I would love to see Richard Hanania come to campus. Would be very interesting.
superdestroyer 03.06.23 at 9:52 pm
George Will spoke at Duke 32 years ago. Will is also a never Trumper and does not consider himself a Republican any longer. Will jokes that voting in DC is pointless for a conservative.
https://commencement.duke.edu/commencement-information/memorabilia-traditions/previous-speakers-degree-recipients/
In 2015 David Gergen spoke at Hobart and Williams Smith but then again, Gergen worked in the Clinton Administration at one time. Not exactly the type of speaker that is going to excite the Young Republicans.
https://www.hercampus.com/school/hws/2015-commencement-speakers/
J-D 03.06.23 at 11:04 pm
Somebody who thinks that Condoleezza Rice should not be a controversial speaker could reasonably be expected to conclude that it is inappropriate for people to treat Condoleezza Rice as a controversial speaker; somebody who thinks that Condoleezza Rice should be a controversial speaker could reasonably be expected to conclude that it is appropriate for people to treat Condoleezza Rice as a controversial speaker.
There is no way of answering the question ‘Is it appropriate for people to treat Condoleezza Rice as a controversial speaker?’ separable from answering the question ‘Should Condoleezza Rice be a controversial speaker?’
With a broader scope, compare the following two sequences of reasoning, which arrive at opposing conclusions:
Sequence one
First premise: College students treat all conservatives as controversial speakers.
Second premise: Not all conservatives should appropriately be treated as controversial speakers.
Conclusion: College students are not treating all conservative speakers appropriately.
Sequence two
First premise: College students treat all conservatives as controversial speakers.
Second premise: All conservatives should appropriately be treated as controversial speakers.
Conclusion: College students are treating all conservative speakers appropriately.
In each sequence, the premises lead to the conclusion; the conclusions are opposite because of the difference in the second premise.
My position is this: if somebody tells me that it is wrong for Condoleezza Rice to be treated as a controversial speaker, I want to know ‘What makes you think so?’ and more generally if somebody tells me that there are some conservatives who should not be treated as controversial speakers, I want to know ‘What makes you think so?’
I don’t know the names of anybody at the American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, or Cato. Can somebody tell me the name of somebody from one of those places who should not cause a controversy,and why that person should not cause a controversy?
Doug C. Alder 03.06.23 at 11:22 pm
modern Conservatives always play the victim card – it’s always someone else’s fault, when it is usually theirs.
J-D 03.06.23 at 11:22 pm
It doesn’t affect everybody equally (or even at all), but there is a weak average tendency for knowing more about how things work to encourage people to think more about how things might work differently; and it doesn’t affect everybody equally (or even at all), but there is a weak average tendency for thinking more about how things might work to encourage people to shift (in a political sense) leftwards. So, to the extent that universities and colleges exist to help people find out more about how things work, they encourage a leftward political shift, and so, if people who are politically on the right perceive universities and colleges as being politically opposed to them, there is a loose general sense in which there is an element of truth in that perception. However, this effect can only make universities and colleges into opponents of the political right to the extent that the truth is opposed to the right.
J-D 03.07.23 at 12:04 am
It’s not possible to have an assessment of this observation independent of the answer to the question ‘Is it in fact the case that the positions supported by Republicans are racist, sexist, xenophobic, and so on?’ If the answer to that question is ‘Yes’, then liberal students on campus telling Republicans this truth would not be the same problem it might be if the answer to the question is ‘No’.
J-D 03.07.23 at 12:34 am
Consider the difference between ‘united around a strong pro-free-speech position’ and ‘united around a strong pro-free-speech position’. There is certainly a sense in which the position around which they are united is a strong pro-free-speech position’.
I’ve seldom observed people who say they’re in favour of free speech being asked to explain why they’re in favour of free speech, and I sometimes wonder whether they’ve given much thought to the question. Maybe they need to think about that more than they do.
Adam Hammond 03.07.23 at 12:57 am
I am pretty sure that we (those on campuses) do truly want controversial speakers now. Such speakers are central to the goal of free and reasoned debate. But, Universities don’t have a great record in this area. We tend to want to hear new ideas expressed only in the academic manner familiar to us, and ideally only presented by people who have been vetted by our academic colleagues (meaning they have fancy degrees — meaning they are white men). We have gate keeping tendencies that we are unwilling to acknowledge. But, We happily listened to white men speak on the concept of race and white superiority. We happily listened to white men talk about the need for eugenics. We happily listened to white christian men explain why we needed to have quotas for Jews, or be overrun. There was debate of the reasoned variety, but not, I would argue, nearly heated enough! Now we have a much more diverse set of speakers, and things are slowly getting better. We are actually hearing more of the views from more of the people. Many of those views are challenging and controversial. Hooray! We should keep moving in that direction. And we should shout down people who come on campus to tell us that we are wrong to be so open to these newer voices. Speakers who tell us that we should not welcome women, and Black people, and gay people, should be met with angry opposition! They are not asking for equal time, they are asking for exclusive access – like it used to be. They want in so that they can peddle exactly the kind of gatekeeping that we are struggling to clear out. They want to disassemble the University, not introduce compelling arguments. Students explode in all kind of directions because they are young. They undoubtedly have excesses. I am glad to see it. College is a good time for it. It is troubling to hear about the moneyed interests that are apparently using (abusing) young conservatives. We should invite the people in these organizations to campus to debate plainly about their manipulation of our students and how it fits in their political economy. I would enjoy watching their filth picked apart by the sharper minds we are attracting now!
a different guy named kent 03.07.23 at 1:06 am
American Enterprise Institute scholars on their website:
Samuel J. Abrams
Beth Akers
J. Joel Alicea
Joseph Antos
Leon Aron
Kirsten Axelsen
John P. bailey
Claude Barfield
Michael Barone
Robert J. barro
Michael Beckley
Eric J. Belasco
and I’m barely into the first 1/2 of the “B”s
and I can’t think of why anyone would launch a protest against any of them
mostly because who’s heard of them? and who cares?
but that makes me think they “wouldn’t count” due to the “would [not] be of any interest” clause
Sashas 03.07.23 at 3:09 am
My comment got eaten by an internet outage, so I just want to give a shoutout to Alex SL (8) who covered everything I was trying to say way more eloquently!
Timothy Scriven 03.07.23 at 3:44 am
Condoleezza Rice is one of the individuals most responsible for starting one of the bloodiest wars of the last few decades. She is a literal war criminal. Her moral status is that of a serial killer. There is possibly a stronger case for not letting her speak on campus than Trump.
John Q 03.07.23 at 4:48 am
The NYT has been successfully trolled, by a combination of victim trolls (Christina Hoff Sommers is my standard example in this category, but there are loads of them) and concern trolls (Haidt then Chait, then daylight)
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/11/18/trolls/
Quiop 03.07.23 at 4:49 am
Here are the lists of people affiliated with the institutions mentioned by superdestroyer:
AEI: https://www.aei.org/our-scholars/
Cato: https://www.cato.org/people/policy-scholars
Heritage: https://www.heritage.org/about-heritage/staff/leadership
Glancing over the lists, I find myself confused by their question. Restricting myself to the first page of names at the AEI (and excluding Nonresident Fellows), are they really claiming that none of the following people could be invited to talk on campus without incurring unacceptable costs due to the need for increased security: Beth Akers, Joseph Antos, Leon Aron, Claude Barfield, Andrew Biggs, Karlyn Bowman, Arthur C. Brooks, James C. Capretta? That doesn’t seem plausible to me, but I am open to changing my mind if superdestroyer thinks they have persuasive evidence that it would in fact be the case. (I am taking superdestroyer at their word when they say that peaceful protests would not be an issue.)
On the other hand, if the claim is that none of these speakers would be “of any interest” to young conservatives, then:
(1) I am sure they would be disappointed to hear that, and
(2) superdestroyer’s challenge needs to be specified more precisely if it is to be a genuin challenge to the claims of the OP rather than merely a “self-annihilating gotcha” of the type alluded to by a different guy named kent at [14].
John Q 03.07.23 at 5:05 am
One problem not mentioned so far is that there is nothing special about college campuses. College students were notably under-represented in the Jan 6 insurrection, and don’t seem to be common at Trump rallies as far as I can tell. Republicans of all ages and classes have embraced scorched-earth politics with enthusiasm.
And, at every stage in this process, Haidt has been there to explain that it’s all because liberals said mean things about them.
Alex SL 03.07.23 at 6:01 am
superdestroyer,
I am not American and not a protesting American student and not in America, so I can only observe this from a distance, and what I write should be taken with a grain of salt. That being said, if the immediate reaction is to No True Scotsman or Republican In Name Only every sane conservative as “speakers that don’t excite the Young Republicans”, if, in other words, the only speakers that excite Young Republicans are the kind who would have been considered proto-fascist lunatics thirty years ago, then maybe the problem isn’t with the students pulling fire alarms.
The famous internet meme created by Andrew Lawrence comes to mind…
Conservative: I have been censored for my conservative views
Me: You were censored for wanting lower taxes?
Con: LOL no…no not those views
Me: So….deregulation?
Con: Haha no not those views either
Me: Which views, exactly?
Con: Oh, you know the ones
Tm 03.07.23 at 11:40 am
Three remarks:
1 Why are the mainstream media so ready to feed a right wing narrative they most likely know to be false? To the point that the NYT broke its own journalistic rules big time by publishing the op-ed without disclosing that the author is a Republican political activist?
The standard answer to this question is „for the clicks“ but I doubt it. Publishing the same tired old nonsense for the hundred thousandth time can’t be the big newspaper seller. Plus, the editors must know how much this damages their reputation among their prime audience, and I doubt it does much to tap into new audiences. So what is it? Sadism? Masochism? Does anybody have a theory?
2 I second Alex regarding the „commitment“ of the right wing brigade for „freedom of speech“. The claim is laughable.m in our time of book bans and attacks on academic freedom. I cannot fathom how somebody like our esteemed host could be so wrong.
3 „ They (liberal students) are also likely to find themselves disappointed a lot of the time – especially those on the left“. When I went to university in Germany, it was obvious that the Unis were conservative institutions, for the obvious reason that most professors were quite right wing. Not despite but because of this, students were very politically active and the activism was overwhelmingly leftist.
Today things may have changed slightly but there clearly isn’t anything approaching a left wing hegemony. The big change has been that the hard right has turned against science and the humanities, not that academics have turned away from the right. In the USA, in my opinion (I have spent several years observing US academia directly), it’s not much different. Professors are overwhelmingly not leftist and the right is very present. In terms of party politics, they favor the centrist part of the Democratic Party mostly because Republicans have become so crudely anti-science that only the most cynical of academics can support them. But don’t underestimate the right wing networks at US universities, they are very present and very powerful. In short, the liberal leaning US University is mostly a myth that we really need to retire.
As to the disappointed leftist students: they need to organize and engage in activism on and off campus, as we did in my time. They need to expect less and demand more from academia.
Tm 03.07.23 at 12:56 pm
Freedom of speech 101
Everybody has a right to express their views without state interference. But there is no right to speak wherever, on whatever platform one chooses, nor is there a right to be read or listened to.
The university leadership has the right to invite Condoleezza Rice to speak, although it may be extremely bad style to invite her as commencement speaker against the will of the student body.
The university leadership has the right to disinvite her.
Students have the right to criticize Rice as a war criminal.
Students have the right to demand that she be disinvited.
Students have the right to organize protests against her speaking on campus.
Students have the right not to listen to her, to turn their backs on her, to hold protest signs during her speech, or to walk out on her.
Right wingers and their fellow travelers have the right to criticize the students who engage in 4-7 for violating Rice’s freedom of speech, but that is a bold-faced lie.
There is to some extent a right to tell lies but serious media don’t have to repeat the lies or give them a platform. Unfortunately many media outlets have adopted the habit of simply repeating right wing lies.
The right wing commitment to freedom of speech consists in the claim that right wingers – and only they – have a right to speak on any platform they choose, and everybody else must listen to them and take them seriously.
Jake Gibson 03.07.23 at 1:19 pm
I have to jump on the Conservatives =free speech WTF? battalion. Can anyone say with a straight face that Ben Shapiro or Matt Walsh are for free speech? Except for themselves.
Also I might concede that possibly 10 percent of things being called racist/xenophobic may be inaccurate or exaggerated. There is a tendency to use racist as a generic term for prejudice.
superdestroyer 03.07.23 at 1:26 pm
Even calling for changes in the tax law are called racist.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/us-tax-code-race-marriage-penalty/618339/
Deregulation is called racist.
https://www.bostonfed.org/publications/risk-and-policy-analysis/2012/bank-deregulation-and-racial-inequality-in-america.aspx
There is no conservative issue that will not eventually be called racist. It is one of the iron rules of politics. It is what drives liberal politics in the U.S., the fear of being called a racist is more important that actual policy success.
Nigel 03.07.23 at 2:27 pm
‘Thank you for making my point that there is no conservative speaker that a college could have that would not result in an outlandish response from the left’
Are you ABSOLUTELY sure that this mightn’t say more about the right than the left?
Tim Worstall 03.07.23 at 4:16 pm
” one of the problems faced by campus liberalism and left organization is that there aren’t enough careerist opportunities for their rabble-rousers”
Hmm
When the AP Balcj History thing blew up I went and had a read around, as you do (well, if you’re part of that right wing infrastructure, as I am) and found that AP has a bit associated with each course. “If you do this and then do it more in college this will be useful preparation for a career in….” The Black History class was a preparation for being a “community activist” and that was the only suggestion.
Leave aside everything else we might think about this and observe just that someone really does think that there’s a career structure in community activism. Even, possibly, for rabble-rousers of particular political views.
patiniowa 03.07.23 at 6:40 pm
“I am still waiting for someone who list a conservative speaker that could be invited to campus, not cause a mass protests, not create bomb threats or fire alarm pulls, and would be of any interest.”
John Yoo spoke at Iowa a couple of years back, without any of those things happening, as far as I know. So, empirically, you’re wrong, as a multitude of others have shown.
BTW, the latest salary figure I can find says that the University of California Berkeley Law School paid Yoo $340k in 2020, down from $400k in some earlier years.
Condi Rice makes $304k from Stanford and is worth $12 million.
Poor, poor conservatives, so oppressed on campus.
Alex SL 03.07.23 at 8:42 pm
superdestroyer,
Last comment here because you are not coming across as arguing in good faith. You ignore most of the thread and engage 0nly on talking point level. Right now you doing the thing where somebody picks anecdotes and then implies that the entire “other side” is completely like that. I could just as well with a little effort find a handful of crazy and/or embarrassing nurses and argue from those anecdotes that nurses are all bad people. You at best don’t realise that that is what you are doing because you are tied up in political tribalism, my lot against that other lot, and my lot are the good ones, and the others have to be the bad ones.
If one were genuinely interested in answering if there is left-wing censorship at American universities, one would not argue entirely from individual anecdotes of some individual students behaving badly or individual academics saying or writing something that can be used as fodder for outrage (see nurses above), but take into serious consideration the various examples people have provided to you here and now of conservatives giving speeches and holding extremely well-paid jobs at those universities. That you are just ignoring all that shows that you are not serious.
Also, what Tm said.
Tm 03.07.23 at 9:39 pm
@superdestroyer and likeminded, I‘m curious about one thing: how outraged are you about these (and I could list many more):
„GOP Tennessee lawmaker suggests burning inappropriate books“
https://www.axios.com/2022/04/28/gop-tennessee-burn-banned-books
„Virginia school board members call for books to be burned amid GOP’s campaign against schools teaching about race and sexuality“
https://www.businessinsider.com/virginia-school-board-members-call-for-books-to-be-burned-2021-11
„Mentioning the existence of racism to children is now illegal in Florida“
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/02/mentioning-the-existence-of-racism-to-children-is-now-illegal-in-florida
„Florida teachers forced to remove or cover up books to avoid felony charges“
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/24/florida-manatee-county-books-certified-media-specialist
“Florida Is Trying to Take Away the American Right to Speak Freely”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/04/opinion/desantis-florida-free-speech-bill.html
(With apology to the host, I would prefer that the speech question shouldn’t dominate the discussion so much, but this is where we are…)
notGoodenough 03.07.23 at 10:14 pm
Hmm, rather than discussing the many proffered suggestions of right wing speakers who’s invitation might not result in bomb threats, etc., it appears we now have a new topic on offer. I freely admit that, not being a USian, I don’t follow your “American football”, but perchance does the game involve rapidly moving one’s goalposts?
“Deregulation is called racist.”
If so, the cited paper doesn’t seem to support that statement. Indeed, unless I’ve missed something (and ignoring for now whether or not one agrees with it), it seems to be arguing the exact opposite. Quoting from it:
“Our research shows that these improvements materialized through indirect channels: bank deregulation enhanced the functioning of labor markets throughout the economy, reducing racial inequality and boosting the economic opportunities of African Americans.”
And while I wouldn’t presume to tell someone how they should be making their case, citing a paper that says “banking deregulation improves racial equality” to support the argument “deregulation is called racist” is, to me at least, a somewhat…unusual approach.
“It is one of the iron rules of politics.”
Looking a little rusty, I fear…
Ebenezer Scrooge 03.07.23 at 10:59 pm
Tim Worstall @34 is correct: there are career paths in liberal activism, just like conservative activism. But liberal activism requires a vow of poverty, if not celibacy. Conservative activism only requires a vow of obedience.
notGoodenough 03.07.23 at 11:12 pm
Tim Worstall @ 34
I couldn’t find “AP Black History”, but I did find “AP African American Studies”. I assume we are talking about the same thing, but please do feel free to clarify if you had something different in mind.
Given the course appears to have only been established in 2022/2023, I do wonder if it might be possible that one reason there is not a plethora of associated careers is because the people taking the course have not yet entered the workplace?
Regardless, I first note that the career is “Community Organizers and Activists”, not just “Community Activists”. A quick search suggests that “a community organizer is an individual who networks with and mobilizes the community to support a cause, develops programs or initiates any other positive social impact. You can find employment as a community organizer in the government, churches, nonprofit organizations, health organizations, social services agencies and more. A community organizer can work in various sectors like public housing, community development, social work and the nonprofit sector.”
Perhaps the idea that such roles can exist is not quite the ridiculous notion implied…?
J-D 03.07.23 at 11:51 pm
If a change (or proposed change) in taxation law is not racist, then it’s wrong to call it racist; but if it is racist, that’s different. The author of the article linked states that twenty-five years of academic research shows that the impact of changes to taxation law on white taxpayers is more beneficial than its impact on black taxpayers–is this in dispute? If it’s true, it seems fair to describe those changes as having had a racist impact (although as far as I can tell the word ‘racist’ does not actually appear in the article).
notGoodenough has already pointed out (thanks for that!) that this seems to be the opposite of what the linked article says, but again the question of whether it’s fair to describe deregulation as racist is inseparable from the question of whether deregulation is, in fact, racist. If it’s being proposed here that it’s always wrong to describe deregulation (or changes to taxation law) as racist, it hasn’t been explained why.
Yet again, the question ‘Is it wrong to describe all conservative political positions as racist?’ cannot be separated from the question ‘Is it in fact the case that all conservative political positions are racist?’
If it is in fact the case that people are afraid of being called racists, why are they afraid of being called racists? Lots of people have been called racists without suffering as a result.
As far as I can tell, it’s rare for ‘racist’ to be used as a description by people who favour racism: when one person calls another racist, the person who is using the description usually despises racism. If somebody called me a racist, I would think it most likely that they intended to suggest that I was despicable, and I probably wouldn’t consider that an enjoyable or a delightful or a pleasurable experience. But I’m not afraid of it. I would think the most likely explanation was that I had said (or written) something which conveyed a meaning I did not want to convey, and so I’d want to know more about why I was being called a racist. If I convey a meaning I don’t want to convey, anybody who lets me know about it is benefitting me.
notGoodenough 03.08.23 at 12:25 am
I think that were I concerned with free speech within US universities, one of the first things I would want is data – not only regarding numerator of “number of people who’s free speech was curtailed”, but also the denominator of “potential total number”. If, purely as a hypothetical example, “there were 19 campus speaker disinvitations between 2019 and 2022”, I think I would evaluate that rather differently depending on whether the total number of campus speakers were 20 or 20,000. And then, of course, we could start looking at how that broke down still further (e.g. by topic, political beliefs, etc.). Personally, I would find it odd to start talking about a free speech crisis without first trying to understand if there is one and its degree of magnitude.
I hope that people who do have such concerns would consider this, and push those carrying out investigations or publishing articles in the news (and so on) to follow this sort of approach. After all, if you are genuinely convinced this is a problem, wouldn’t the first thing you’d want is as much evidence as possible so people have to face up to the facts? Just a thought.
LFC 03.08.23 at 1:49 am
from the OP
So a pertinent question is: since right-wing students and many other right-wingers want left and left-liberal students to protest, and actively try to goad or provoke them into doing so, wouldn’t it make some sense for the leftist students not to protest? The next time a speaker they find objectionable is speaking on campus, they should do nothing by way of protest. They shd focus instead on inviting their own speakers, etc. That way they deny the right-wingers the reaction the latter want, they put a spoke in the so-called antiwoke campaign, and they take a step toward bringing this whole ridiculous spectacle to an end — by which I mean the spectacle of right-wingers provoking and leftists, almost like Pavlov’s dog salivating at the sound of a bell, giving them the reaction they want.
neil 03.08.23 at 3:41 am
Thank you, Alex SL. I’d like add that I don’t see the value in this conversation. I come here to read smart people talk about the issues of the day. To me this does not seem that…
TM 03.08.23 at 10:38 am
Going back to some questions I raised above (29)
– Concerning the media ecosystem, here’s an interesting piece by Dan Moynihan (always worth reading) on “How the higher education outrage sausage is made”:
https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/how-the-higher-education-outrage
– And regarding the experience of the students, I think this statement from the OP needs some context:
“Liberal and left students often feel at home on college campuses in ways that conservatives do not.” As is well-known, there is a general tendency in all of US education discourse to focus on a small subset of higher education and tacitly assume that it’s representative of the experience of the vast majority of students, which it patently is not. Here’s a rare example of the NYTimes writing about right wing authoritarianism at a Red State community college:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/03/the-destruction-of-public-higher-education-in-red-states
Just think about the torrent of media coverage that would have happaned if even a fraction of these events had happened at a so-called liberal college. Imagine for a moment left wing activists taking over a college and firing the college president (or even several college presidents) for not being left wing enough. This kind of thing happens, it happens in Florida, in Idaho, and probably in other places as well, but we can be lucky if the NYTimes devotes even one tenth as much column space to these events than it does devote to made-up right wing grievances about liberal colleges.
TM 03.08.23 at 11:03 am
A telling detail from the Moinyhan piece: Attitudes about higher education among Republican respondents declined sharply since 2015. Certainly not because higher education changed dramatically in that time…
superdestroyer 03.08.23 at 12:29 pm
SUPERDESTROYER – YOU’VE GONE PAST THE POINT AT WHICH YOU’RE USEFULLY CONTRIBUTING TO DISCUSSION. ALL FURTHER COMMENTS FROM YOU ON THIS POST WILL BE DELETED.
politicalfootball 03.08.23 at 3:56 pm
Ah, shucks. I did want to make one observation about superdestroyer, but maybe that’s inappropriate now. I trust this will be deleted if it doesn’t meet blog standards.
If you look at all of superdestroyer’s posts here, they are all about things that it is impermissible to say.
Condoleeza Rice is characterized by MPAVistoria as “one of the architects and chief cheerleaders of a war that killed a million innocent people.” Superdestroyer doesn’t deny this, but wants to establish a norm where it is unacceptable to say this. Likewise in 32, it’s not that the content of the linked articles is incorrect; it’s that discussions of systemic racism must be suppressed.
Meanwhile, rightwingers can do and say whatever they want without censure, because (superdestroyer tells us) if conservatives decided to behave decently, they wouldn’t get credit for it from liberals and (to tie this back to the original post) it is therefore the fault of liberals that campus conservatives have become so nutty.
In taking this line, superdestroyer is just trolling, of course. But rigthtwingers understand that trolls often set the agenda, as we have seen in this thread. If you take the trollery out of modern conservatism, what remains?
TM 03.08.23 at 4:18 pm
May be worth pointing out that the post at 32 tries to discredit any scholarly study of racial disparities caused by certain policies as inadmissible because it might come to the conclusion that racial inequality exists in the US, which must never be mentioned because white people might feel criticized, even if they weren’t blamed as individuals and even if the word “racist” was never used; and this attempt at suppressing legitimate academic research is embedded in a complaint about the other side suppressing speech .
This is the whole CRT moral panic in a nutshell, and shame on any legitimate media enterprise (looking at you Atlantic and NYTimes) that has helped lend credence to this brazen righ-wing authoritarian manipulation game.
mary s 03.08.23 at 5:44 pm
Apologies if this has already been mentioned, but I really don’t think things have changed all that much on most college campuses since I was a student in the early 1980s. The vast majority of college students are still pretty much apolitical. The small percentage of politically active students on campus sometimes take positions that are silly. When I was in college, I participated in efforts to get the trustees to divest from South Africa. There were also some mild protests over, say, a visiting professor who may or may not have said sexist things. (Those protests did not get anywhere, btw.) Even though I went to a liberal arts college with a liberal bent, most of my fellow students did not participate in or care about either effort.
Granted, some things have changed since I was in school. First, there’s the internet, which can magnify every little thing — a few years back, a student’s remark about the school cafeteria inaccurately calling one of their sandwiches banh mi became an example of cancel culture run amok. Second, attitudes toward stuff like gay rights have (IMHO) shifted in a very positive direction, especially over the past decade or two. So if you are a person who does not support, say, same-sex marriage rights or abortion rights, you are feeling marginalized because your opinion is outside the mainstream, NOT because a relatively small group of leftie/leftish students is making you feel that way.
Tim Worstall 03.08.23 at 10:11 pm
@39 “But liberal activism requires a vow of poverty, if not celibacy. ”
It may be that things have changed but that really ain’t how I recall LSE politics those 40 years back. Or, for a better tale about it, the PJ O’Rourke story about walking between the two bars, the frat pin one and the liberal arts student one.
Not being able to afford a family – say – well, OK. But celibacy? I don’t recall left wing women as being that terrifying. Nor uptight, to be honest (alter women to gender of choice as, well, choice)
@40 “I couldn’t find “AP Black History”, but I did find “AP African American Studies”. I assume we are talking about the same thing,” Yes, forgive me. Being English the precise wording of the current American outrage du jour sometimes escapes me.
“Perhaps the idea that such roles can exist is not quite the ridiculous notion implied…?”
Now, me, as an admitted, out and proud, neoliberal do think such roles are absurd, but that isn’t what I said here. Rather, the OpEd said there was a paucity of jobs for lefty rabble rousers once they finished college. And yet here we both have it – you as well as me – suggesting that there’s a career path.
J, not that one 03.08.23 at 11:59 pm
I think it’s fairly obvious, if you look at who gets published, that there’s a career path in publishing for seriously rabble-rousing right-wingers who want to rabble-rouse as a career, and for people willing and able to pose as “I’m a liberal but I can see where conservatives have a point.” (Notice that it is just about possible to pose as “I’m black but I can see where conservatives have a point, and they’ve never seemed racist to me” – but it is not possible to inhabit “I’m a woman lawyer and career is important to me, as is equality with my male colleagues, but the people who think women shouldn’t have careers or leadership positions have a point, and they’ve never seemed sexist to me”. It’s not just a matter of hypocrisy, either. The racists will embrace a Black man who’s a conservative. The sexists will never embrace a feminist career woman who doesn’t think she has to defer to men.)
That doesn’t really mean there are no careers for activists on the left. There are careers as activists, and there are almost certainly some slots in the bureaucracy that favor left-wingers. There are even some slots in publishing for people who come from left activism. But that there’s asymmetry is undeniable.
burritoboy 03.09.23 at 3:56 am
“That doesn’t really mean there are no careers for activists on the left. There are careers as activists, and there are almost certainly some slots in the bureaucracy that favor left-wingers. There are even some slots in publishing for people who come from left activism. But that there’s asymmetry is undeniable.”
Not…..entirely true in the same sense as on the Right. In general, there are almost no positions explicitly per se for a leftist qua leftist. There are activist positions in interest groups – environmental, labor, healthcare and so on. Yes, many of the activists in these are vaguely leftists or left of center, but almost none of these positions address all of the political space as a political partisan space. I was an activist in mental health. While the majority of my colleagues were admittedly probably vaguely liberal in the broadest possible sense, the fact was that most of us were in it because someone in our families suffered from mental illness. I had both conservative colleagues, and numerous colleagues who I had no idea about their politics outside mental illness (many of whom didn’t seem able to have any visible politics outside mental illness). Any larger sense of politics was largely considered, and perhaps rightly so, not massively relevant to what we were doing. (It was fine if we had those opinions – or any opinions – but we weren’t seen – and mostly didn’t see ourselves – as part of a combined political effort outside of mental health.) This is pretty standard for most of the interest group activist positions – the organizations are quite narrowly focused, not really focused per se on broad political goals, and often quite intentionally designed to have a non-partisan appeal (“I’m conservative but I want to save the blue-footed owl”, “I’m conservative but I want my fellow union members to get paid what they should”, etc.)
The right activists have many more opportunities with many more organizations that explicitly address all of political life as part of an explicitly conservative political movement. They are absolutely not non-partisan activists in the ways that a very large number of my colleagues were, and almost all of my colleagues would claim to be. There is near no (or very few) equivalent left of center things. Things that are closest are both few in number and usually directly attached to one politician’s personal staff. (The conservatives do have these as well.) In mental health, even other health care causes were viewed as completely optional – no one cared much what your opinion was on them.
TM 03.09.23 at 9:47 am
Worstall 34: Leaving aside the somewhat questionable business model of the College Board’s AP courses. You are askng whether the study of African American history is lucrative, and the answer is probably not, but that is true for the study of history in general, as well as the study of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, art history, and so on. To my knowledge, nobody ever got rich from studying the humanities and social sciences.
This raises a more interesting question: why are right wing authoritarians reacting with so much fear and outright panic to the relatively few mostly modestly paid scholars engaged in these kinds of research and teaching? Tell us business man, why are the rich and powerful so afraid of anything “critical” and “theory” they have to go to such lengths to suppress and ban it?
Sashas 03.09.23 at 3:32 pm
@TM (54)
It seems obvious to me (always a red flag, I know) that RWAs are not scared of the scholars. They’re scared of the “average person” who takes just the one AP African American History class in high school and learns something from it. And I think rightly so. If everyone in the US actually knew and understood that, say, the Confederacy seceded because they liked slavery and wanted to keep doing it, then the immediate result would be the end of the Republican party in the US. That party relies on a lot of people who know and don’t care, sure, but it also relies on a lot of people who truly do not know (or near-equivalently who are truly unsure and don’t care enough to find out).
This also highlights something that has been bothering me for a while. AP African American History does not exist to prepare one for a career in doing African American History. I think in fact most AP courses aren’t designed to prepare you for a career in that thing. They are generally in topics that could be part of a General Education requirement in college. Sure, you can take AP Calculus and go on to be a mathematician, but the purpose of AP Calculus is so you can test out of the Gen-Ed calculus requirement. That the College Board could only come up with “community activist” is a condemnation of the College Board. Spending about 5 seconds of thought, I also came up with “Museum Curator”, so it’s not like this is hard to do even given the ocean of things that one can do with an African American History background but don’t specifically require it. But at the same time, the important part is that everyone taking it helps us be better people. The career element is secondary, at most.
notGoodenough 03.09.23 at 9:46 pm
Tim Worstall @ 51
” Being English the precise wording of the current American outrage du jour sometimes escapes me.”
I too (as I have mentioned before) am a UKian, yet apparently my “reading around” was a little more successful than yours – perhaps google is slightly more reliable than your “right wing infrastructure”?
“ And yet here we both have it – you as well as me – suggesting that there’s a career path.”
Sadly, I fear I might have to shatter your illusion of harmonious accord on this issue. I made no mention of “career path” – only noted that there do indeed seem to be roles in which people are expected to liaise with their local communities. However, since what I’d hope was self-evident from the description I gave has apparently not made the intended point, I should probably elaborate a little (my apologies for having been a little too obscure!). So, in the interests of clarity, let me offer a little more context regarding my previous post by responding to this point:
“Rather, the OpEd said there was a paucity of jobs for lefty rabble rousers once they finished college.
Not exactly. The point from the OP, as I understand it, was not that there was a “paucity of jobs for lefty rabble rousers once they finished college”, but rather that there is not a left-wing equivalent of a national framework of well-funded organisations (including think tanks, media, politics, etc.) mobilising and supporting activism within higher education, within which increasing extremism is not only not disapproved of but often actively supported and rewarded.
In the interests of trying to find a point of agreement, I would certainly accept that there is a point to be made by comparing “joining turning point USA, writing a “professor watchlist” and articles about how homosexuality should be illegal, and then going on to become a mover-and-shaker in republican politics well regarded by your peers” and “taking a class in AP African American Studies and possibly getting a job as ‘community outreach officer’ for ‘Environment America’ working to ‘save the bees’”.
It is just that I’m just not convinced it is the point you appear to believe you are making, or that it represents refutation (rather than substantiation) of the OP…
Tim Worstall 03.09.23 at 10:16 pm
“Not…..entirely true in the same sense as on the Right. In general, there are almost no positions explicitly per se for a leftist qua leftist. ”
I actually am one of those “activists” on the right. And really, no, there are no safe havens. No, really. I am a Senior Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. About as far free market and classical liberal/libertarian as it is possible to get. It’s an unpaid position and always has been. Sure, I got a job at Forbes. Got paid just like everyone else – and got fired for being too free market.
@54 “This raises a more interesting question: why are right wing authoritarians reacting with so much fear and outright panic to the relatively few mostly modestly paid scholars engaged in these kinds of research and teaching? ”
They’re not. The reaction is to teaching this as truth to children – and to the extent that 18 year olds are still children, to college students. Exploring ideas? Great, go for it. Teaching what might be called not as yet entirely proven ideas as truth might not be so sensible.
“Tell us business man, why are the rich and powerful so afraid of anything “critical” and “theory” they have to go to such lengths to suppress and ban it?”
Well, it could be that “critical theory” is a load of bullshit. But then y’all around here have much more experience of academia than I do (yes, you’re right, I was too dumb to get in).
J-D 03.09.23 at 11:20 pm
I don’t believe there is a single answer to this question, so I make this suggestion only as one part of a more complex explanation: I suspect a fear of being despised by their children (and perhaps their friends’ children) on the basis of what they (the children) learn from their college education.
Mark McNeilly 03.10.23 at 2:02 am
2013 is a lifetime ago. Also, focusing on a small subset of conservative activists misses the mass of conservatives on campus. What has been postulated here is a strawman. I say this as a professor who has co-authored two undergrad research studies on free expression and constructive dialogue at UNC and 7 other NC System universities and written extensively on the topic.
Tm 03.10.23 at 2:57 pm
TW 57: If you really have never been inside an institution of higher education, maybe just refrain from judgment? Otherwise, you must be well aware that what you wrote there is complete bullshit.
Ebenezer Scrooge 03.10.23 at 4:34 pm
Tim@51: I should have realized that the American language differs from the language written in England. In America, “poverty, if not celibacy” is a close relative of “poverty, but not necessarily celibacy.” In England, it seems to mean “poverty and celibacy.” Sorry for creating the misunderstanding.
J, not that one 03.10.23 at 5:17 pm
burritoboy @ 53
I imagine the people in healthcare who are there for nonpolitical reasons, and who set aside politics for most of the day, even if politics inform their approach to the work, exist at almost all points on the political spectrum.
What I’d guess you won’t find at your workplace are (for example) people who reject the mental health professions for the reasons Christopher Lasch gave. There are people on both sides who feel that way about healthcare bureaucracies. At the moment those on the right are very loud, while those on the left feel unseen and unheard. But I doubt the number or quality of jobs for those last two groups differs. The jobs for those on the left seem to me to be better, on nearly every metric other than fame/celebrity.
Maybe at the moment those on the right have more influence. But I thought the OP was about whether they were more likely to get jobs.
burritoboy 03.11.23 at 10:22 pm
“I imagine the people in healthcare who are there for nonpolitical reasons, and who set aside politics for most of the day, even if politics inform their approach to the work, exist at almost all points on the political spectrum.”
Your imagination is wrong. Or rather, more precisely, there is an additional, large career path for right-wing activists to use college campuses as a theater for well-paid careers as (fairly extreme) political agitators. It is true that there are even more conservative-leaning interest groups that fit my experience in mental health activism than liberal or left ones, but just more conservative-leaning. Those were always career possibilities for right-leaning college students, and those still remain. The right-leaning students who want to be economics scholars or foreign policy scholars and get into related activism that way both have existed and continue to exist (and at higher levels /with more funding than liberal or left-leaning organizations). And those right-leaning students will generally not spend a lot of effort to be performative trolls.
But there’s simply no equivalent, none, to the career path – and yes, it’s well funded and massive – that would pay liberal or left students to be performative trolls on campus and make that into a career path. It’s quite irrelevant that possibly the vast majority of conservative students don’t take advantage of this career path for all kinds of perfectly valid reasons that make sense for them as individuals. It only matters that a (comparatively) small number actually do.
Joe 03.12.23 at 5:04 am
I don’t think things are as Farrell describes them. Case in point: https://davidlat.substack.com/p/yale-law-is-no-longer-1for-free-speech
J-D 03.12.23 at 10:06 pm
No.
In my lifetime, I have had the occasional experience of encounters with simpletons. I can imagine that a simpleton might read Henry Farrell’s piece and suppose that the whole point of it is that the baddies are people on the right, and might then read the article Joe has linked and think that it shows that the baddies are people on the left and that therefore it shows that Henry Farrell’s description is wrong.
Maybe even somebody who was not a simpleton might adopt such a simpleton’s analysis. But there’s no good reason to do so.
The account in the article Joe has linked does not contradict Henry Farrell’s description.
TM 03.13.23 at 12:38 pm
Joe 64: Relevant details here:
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/03/intentionally-like-a-martyr-the-ballad-of-kyle-duncan
E. g.: “Here’s another highlight (lowlight) from Stanford, when US Court of Appeals Judge Kyle Duncan told a student, “You are an appalling idiot, you’re an appalling idiot.””
Yeah, the right of fascist judges who break settled law almost every time they write an opinion, the right to lie and insult critics and destroy the rule of law, is the only kind of freedom of speech that right-wingers are comfortable with.
“Duncan was the lawyer who argued that the New Orleans DA was not responsible for training prosecutors not to withhold material evidence, even though they routinely withheld material evidence. Personally I find using egregious due process violations to put people on death row for crimes they didn’t commit even worse than rude college students, but YMMV.” (Scott Lemieux)
Tim Worstall 03.14.23 at 12:42 pm
“TW 57: If you really have never been inside an institution of higher education, ”
My turn to apologise for being unclear. I’ve been to a university, taken part in uni politics (the LSE’s was particularly vicious in fact). I did not achieve that higher state of bringing an academic, employed by a university. Probably on the basis of being too stupid to bother doing any work while I was at university.
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