Eric Schliesser

Yesterday Columbia University gave in to blackmail by President Trump (see here the letter [HT: NYT]) in order to allow to begin negotiations over the recovery of $400 million in research funding. Its unsigned letter (here HT: Leiterreports) leaves ambiguous which potentially sensible elements they were planning to do anyway (“parts of our comprehensive strategy”) and which parts were added in light of the demands (“several additional actions.”)

The last sentence of the unsigned letter expresses commitment to the university’s mission, “while preserving our commitment to academic freedom and institutional integrity.” While I am no critic of judicious use of hypocrisy, this passage is also a nice example of what has come to be known as ‘performative contradiction.’ If government officials get to dictate to you that certain departments must be put into receivership, and you then go and promise to rejig the curriculum (for ‘balance’), perhaps you should not claim ‘institutional integrity’ or present yourself as a guardian of ‘academic freedom?’

I want to put this episode in a wider context. But before I get there, I make two of my background commitments explicit. First, there is no essential connection between the modern research university and the values of liberal democracy other than, as (recall) Michael Polanyi noted, that they can have the same enemies. The German research university with its cosmopolitan Humboldtian ideal rose and fell in the absence of liberal democracy. The very first modern research university Stateside, Hopkins, was a private institution that was, however, shaped by Jim Crow (and racially integrated rather late in its history).

[click to continue…]

Today’s post focuses on the contribution of elite higher education to the rise of Trump. This may seem in bad taste because it is also clearly targeted by MAGA, and so our impulse is to circle the wagons. But if you wish to develop a defensive posture you must understand the territory.

Here I presuppose three ideas: first, that wherever the Trump II presidency ends up, America’s constitutional and political regime will be quite different from (to simplify) the (cold war) post-Warren court era of the last half century and a bit.* Second the re-election of Trump exhibits a willingness to embrace the corruption in the Machiavellian sense that he represents. Importantly, corruption in this sense is not just about illegal and legal bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. The two are, of course, connected.

In particular, ever since I first started blogging on Trump’s ascendancy (back in 2015), I have been treating the electoral preference for Trump as a sign of mistrust between the electorate and the then political elites (which was first expressed in the Obama elections) and, more subtly, a preference for a crook who people believe will be our sonofabitch. America-First is a doctrine of zero-sum relations. And so, in particular, who gets what is related to who you know and how you navigate an opaque system (recall my post on the Madoff scandal).

By elite higher education, I mean roughly the highly selective universities and colleges (starting with the so-called “Overlap meetings”), and the schools that emulate them, that were the target of antitrust action and class-action lawsuit(s) for colluding on financial aid and price-fixing since the 1990s (see also 568 group). To be sure, some of the collusion had the noble aim to prevent scarce resources intended for poor and disadvantaged students flowing up to wealthy applicants.

[click to continue…]

Anyone that has read chunks of Marx’s Capital will know that he often explicitly and not trivially implicitly draws on data and evidence gathered and published in reports by select committees of the British Parliament. Most of these reports he draws on were written before the great expansions of the franchise, and so are effectively produced by the propertied representatives of the propertied classes in what can be fairly called an oligarchic government. Despite the (let’s stipulate) non-trivial class biases built into this reporting structure, the ‘blue books’ or ‘parliamentary papers’ (as they were known) were sufficiently objective and informative to be useful to the great enemy of oligarchy and property.

These nineteenth century oligarchs knew what they were doing. They needed objective information to help structure their internal debates about empire and national governance, and also to shape policy. (Elite bargaining is, of course, still an important function for the publication of public statistics and forecasting.) These reports also shaped the development of the administrative state. For example, the predecessor to the UK’s national statistics office, General Register Office for England and Wales, itself was born from such a select committee report in the first half of the nineteenth century.

[click to continue…]

One good side-effect of contemporary politics is that a more sober look at the merits and demerits of the US Founders’ legacy is possible again. (Of course, here at CrookedTimber we pride ourselves on our sobriety in such matters; it helps many of us reside in distant shores.) The current US President has contempt for reverence toward the past; and his opponents have no time for reflection.

One defect in the US Founders’ constitution is that while they are very concerned with developing mechanisms against what Machiavelli and his followers called ‘corruption’ — a word frequently used in the Federalist Papers —, but that it leaves too little room for what Machiavelli and his followers would have called ‘renewal’ (or ‘renovation’)—a word almost wholly absent from the Federalist Papers. In the Machiavellian sense, corruption is not just about illegal and legalized bribery, but also and even more about the bending of the rules such that when they function properly the public good is structurally undermined. There is a glimpse of awareness of this lacuna to be found in the historiographic debate(s) over the status of Lincoln as a so-called ‘refounder’ of the constitution, despite the fact that the US civil war conclusively indicates its failure.

Yet, as Machiavelli notes, “those [republics and religions] are best organized and have longest life that through their institutions can often renew themselves or that by some accident outside their organization come to such renewal.” Discourses on Livy (hereafter Discourses; 3.1), translated by Allan Gilbert (Chief Works, Vol. 1) p. 419. So, if you take what one may call, ‘Machiavellian social theory,’ seriously it is not an irrelevant topic.

[click to continue…]

Politics has returned to Europe’s wealthy protectorates, which, after the phone-call on Jan. 20, 2025, between the then-President-elect and the Danish prime minister, suddenly find themselves faced with an open-ended era of shakedowns by its guardians and an unreliable big neighbor to the East. Neither its political class nor its aging, nostalgic population is prepared for this.

Qua democratic politician, it’s one thing to have skill at facilitating distributional bargaining among competing and shifting interest groups; it’s quite another to do so while simultaneously having to think through geopolitical alliances while relying on undermanned and underfunded militaries. Interestingly enough, with a shift toward new populist leaders Europe’s political class is also quite inexperienced in politics. It seems all but certain that during next month’s federal election, the most important European country and the only one that can provide political leadership, Germany, is itself facing a massive shift toward a political class inexperienced playing intra-European and global political chess at the same time.*

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Europeans have been behaving in defiance of Machiavellian classical social theory, which teaches that “The chief foundations of all states, new as well as old or composite, are good laws and good arms; and as there cannot be good laws where the state is not well armed, it follows that where they are well armed they have good laws.” (The Prince, Ch. 12) More bluntly (and more unpopular): a regime oriented toward protecting human rights presuppose good arms, too. The Europeans assumed that in an age of soft-power, a giant internal market, and win-win international/trade rules, they didn’t need good arms and could perfect their laws—even extend those through intra-European/EU expansion.

[click to continue…]

Recently I learned that at Yale University a “Report of the Committee on Institutional Voice” was published a few months ago. The committee was chaired by professors “Della Rocca & Rodríguez” and so hereafter, I refer to the report as “Della Rocca & Rodríguez.” According to an accompanying editorial by these two lead authors in the Yale News, The report is a response to “disagreement within the Yale community about whether, when and how leaders should speak — on behalf of the University or units within the University, on issues of public significance — particularly when strong differences of opinion on an issue exist.” As they note Yale is not alone in that respect.

As a non-trivial aside, the character of institutional voice matters to all universities. But is worth noting that the turmoil on various campuses of the past year has not resulted in a focus on institutional voice at all universities. For example, in my home country, the Netherlands, university committees are exploring now the existing policies on international, institutional collaborations. (This is a thinly veiled strategy to avoid focus exclusively on a boycott of Israeli institutions.) That North American universities are primarily focusing on institutional voice has much to do with the disastrous Congressional Testimony of the former Presidents of Harvard, Penn, and Columbia a year ago. Even in empire, the same politics is oddly local.

Since “Della Rocca & Rodríguez” is rather brief, I will not summarize the report (here). (Some of the key issues will be clear from what follows.) The formal focus of Della Rocca & Rodriquez is rather narrow: it’s concerned with institutional voice. In the report this is characterized as “whether and when university leaders should issue statements concerning matters of public, social, or political significance.” Included in university leaders are not just “university leadership (the President, Provost, other central administrators, and deans),” but also “leaders speaking on behalf of other units of the university, including academic departments and programs.” As the report recognizes, institutional voice matters on campus (which is the committee’s main focus) and to wider, outside communities.

[click to continue…]

Before Rawls’ shadow in left-liberal political philosophy there was Arnold S. Kaufman (1927-1971), who died when his airplane collided with a military jet while traveling (recall this post). While there is no Wikipedia page devoted to him, Kaufman was rather famous during the 1960s because of his involvement with the student movement at the University of Michigan and especially by promoting ‘participatory democracy’ in the context of the Port Huron Statement (as the New York Times noted fifty years later, and The Nation a decade earlier). In fact, he had been regular contributor to Dissent during the last decade of his life. So, for example, an early version of his book (1968), The Radical Liberal: New Man in American Politics, appeared as a long essay (1966) “A call to Radicalism: Where Shall Liberals Go?” in Dissent. [HT Kevin Mattson.]

Despite his fame in his own era, Kaufman has left almost no trace in the Stanford encyclopedia of Philosophy, except that once he was a participant in the debate over Black Reparations. His actual views — in favor of what he calls ‘compensatory justice’’ — are not mentioned. (One can find the argument in the July – August 1969 issue of Dissent.)

Then after he moved to UCLA, he became a key defender of his then junior colleague, Angela Davis, against, inter alia, Ronald Reagan’s (gubernatorial) administration’s repeated attempts to get her fired because of her membership in the Communist Party.* The shape and rhetoric of today’s culture wars are already visible in the debates over her appointment. The essay in her defense that Kaufman published on January 3, 1970 in The New Republic is rather significant to understand his thinking about academic freedom, especially in light of his polemic with Sydney Hook’s more restrictive understanding of it. (Some other time more on that.)

[click to continue…]

I really liked and admired Agnes Callard’s essay, “Beyond Neutrality: The university’s responsibility to lead” in The Point (September 29, 2024) [HT Dailynous]. My post is, despite some quibbles, primarily about amplifying a point Callard (Chicago) makes. I do so not just because there is considerable overlap between our positions (recall here and here), but also because she advances the discussion on the nature of campus speech.

Before I get to our agreement, I accentuate one difference first. Callard presupposes as a normative or practical ideal that universities are sites of leisure: “A university is a place devoted to the problem of how to make serious use of free time.” On Callard’s view this is only possible once “a world of justice, peace and plenty” has been achieved. And because we are not there yet universities engage in a bunch of non-intrinsic activities: “Forced to find a place for itself in a world unfriendly to sheltered gardens, the university employs police, hedge-fund managers, construction companies, a fundraising office and PR teams.”

Now, I have remarked before (in responding to Jennifer Frey here) that the serious cultivation of leisure is very far removed from the public ethos I inhabit (in a relatively underfunded public university). Students and faculty (as well as the PR teams) are like hamsters kept on a treadmill of busy-ness often without obvious relation to any intrinsic nature of the university. I am increasingly convinced that this contributes to the existential and medicalized psychological crises among our students. So, Callard’s comments resonate.

[click to continue…]

Back in 1991 my co-blogger here at Crooked Timber, Elizabeth S. Anderson, reminded every one of the significance of John Stuart Mill and Experiments in Living (Ethics, 102(1): 4-26). She situated Mill’s views on the matter in the context of a debate with Bentham (and Parfit) over the nature of the good in which Mill wanted to defend a hierarchy of goods in an empirical fashion. In the paper, it’s Mill’s actual life that is the paradigmatic experiment in living “or a valid test of a conception of the good,” (p. 15; see also the use of ‘disconfirmation’ on p. 16.)

What’s striking about this conception of an ‘experiment in living’ is how first-person-ish it is. In Mill’s case the experiment was done on him by his father, and he himself could refute it in virtue of the crisis he experienced and the lack of remedy Bentham’s theories afforded. As Anderson notes this is ultimately a quest for self-understanding. (p. 24) As she explains, “The crucial test for a conception of the good is that it provide a perspective of self-understanding which is both personally compelling (has normative force for the agent) and capable of explaining and resolving her predicament-the reasons for crisis and for recovery from it.” (p. 24) An experiment in living is both epistemic and therapeutic in character.

In what follows, I am not mostly interested in these features of experiments in living. But they do lurk in the background of what I am after.

About a decade ago, my friend Ryan Muldoon (Buffalo) also drew on Mill in his “Expanding the justificatory framework of Mill’s experiments in living.” Utilitas 27.2 (2015): 179-194. Here “experiments in living are meant to provide the engine of social progress: not only do we have the opportunity for improving our cultural and moral condition, but we can also better discover why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful.” (179) Notice the first-person plural; the perspective is clearly social and collective in character. The experiment still has an epistemic quality, but now it is primary a means toward discovery and social progress.” Interestingly enough, Muldoon builds a vindicatory aspect — “why some of our existing social arrangements are so successful” — into his approach.

[click to continue…]

I am very pleased that our very own Chris Bertram has responded to Joseph Heath’s very entertaining and polemical “John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism,” a widely shared Substack post [HT: Dailynous]. Chris has made some important corrections to the public record, and the comments on his post are extending that.

As it happens, I just did a three-part series on Heath’s excellent book, The Machinery of Government: Public Administration and the Liberal State (OUP, 2020). [The first one is here; the second here; here.] And I may do a fourth in which I compare his take on cost-benefit analysis with Dave Schmidtz’s. Do read the first few paragraphs of my first post in the series, so you get a sense of my view of the significance of Heath (Toronto), whom I have never met in real life.

Before I get to my criticism of Heath — and I don’t need to remind regular readers I am no Marxist – Heath’s essay is a rare case of auto-biographical history of philosophy in which Heath gets something important right despite the polemical and boundary-policing efforts — note his repeated use of ‘bullshit.’ Usually, such retrospective first-person narratives are only instructive as polemics and boundary-policing (and a window into the anguished grievances of the author).

[click to continue…]

According to The New York Times (23 August), The Justice Department “filed an antitrust lawsuit on Friday against the real estate software company RealPage, alleging its software enabled landlords to collude to raise rents across the United States.” I am not an expert in law or anti-trust, but there is another (systemic risk management) angle to this story that the NYT missed, and worth spelling out.

Here’s how the Times summarizes the case:

RealPage’s software, YieldStar, gathers confidential real estate information and is at the heart of the government’s concerns. Landlords, who pay to use the software, share information about rents and occupancy rates that is otherwise confidential. Based on that data, an algorithm generates suggestions for what landlords should charge renters, and those figures are often higher than they would be in a competitive market, according to allegations in the legal complaint. By Danielle Kaye, Lauren Hirsch and David McCabe

There’s more detail in a piece (here) the Times did earlier in the year (July 19, 2024) written by Danielle Kaye. And for a lot more background see this piece in Propublica (here, October 15, 2022). One wonders why the Times waited so long until there was government prosecution to report on this topic.

Before I get to my interest in this story, the coverage highlights two important political angles: (i) this may be a contributing cause to rent inflation because the software allows landlords, which are fairly large companies that use the software, to collude; (ii) there is an interesting issue how this case fits under existing anti-trust law because the collision is kind of indirect mediated, in part, tacitly through a third party. The company itself brags they have “purposely built” their platform “to be legally compliant.” I leave the first issue to economists and the second to lawyers.

[click to continue…]

In an earlier post (here), prompted by some writings by Jacob T. Levy, I defended the idea that student protests can fall under academic freedom. My argument for this starts from the fact that while many universities can have mission specific interpretations of the latitude and constraints on how they interpret academic freedom (non-trivially constrained also by local legal context), all universities share a mission in being committed to knowledge discovery, knowledge transmission, and preservation of knowledge.

That being so, student protests can play a two-fold role in furthering this mission in light of scarce resources (not the least time): first, they are a means of articulating what is worthy of academic attention and what ought to be the focus on discovery. Most student protests fit easily under this role. This fits quite naturally with Max Weber’s account of how to think about the philosophy of social science and the vocation of a scientist. Second, student protests can themselves be seen as experiments in living and as such they can have epistemic benefits to the academic community, and wider society. I won’t repeat the argument for these points here, but will modestly develop them below.

If this much is correct, then universities have a defeasible obligation to be respectful of students protests and, perhaps, even to facilitate student protests in light of their academic mission. It’s defeasible because the epistemic benefits of student protests may come in conflict with other projects on campus with non-trivial and potentially much higher epistemic benefits—say research labs or regular instruction. It’s also defeasible because some protests may be prima facie at odds with the particular mission of the university as such—in this way academic freedom is very unlike freedom of speech! So, ideally, a code that governs student conduct on campus recognizes the need to accommodate the possibility of student protests (without trying to regulate it in fine detail).

[click to continue…]

Culture wars have two main functions. First, to split an existing, dominant social or political coalition apart by the clever use of wedge-issues. (Not all wedge-issues are a part of a culture war.) So, a culture war reveals a latent or induces real divergence in a pre-existing coalition. So, for example, how to think about trans-issues has split contemporary feminism apart (especially in the U.K, which is itself an interesting phenomenon). Second, and this mirrors the first function, to induce or solidify unity within a potentially heterogeneous coalition (think of the role of women’s ‘right to choose’ in America’s Democratic party). So, the issue must have salience to what we may call ‘tribe formation.’ (If you don’t like my examples offer your own!)

Now, the term ‘culture war’ is a literalist translation of the German ‘Kulturkampf.’ This nineteenth century conflict involved a major political conflict between Bismarck and the Catholic Church over control of educational institutions (and the content taught) as well as ecclesiastical appointments. In it national/ethnic stereotypes (about the Polish) were used to shift balance of allegiance. One reason I mention this origin of the term because in it we already see many of the later features of culture wars: the significance of education, especially the education of social elites, the role of non-materialist values, including ethnicity/race, religion, and nationalism.

[click to continue…]

In the wake of the sentencing of SBF last week there were two mighty takedowns of effective altruism: one (here) “The Deaths of Effective Altruism Sam Bankman-Fried is finally facing punishment. Let’s also put his ruinous philosophy on trial” by Leif Wenar (Stanford) at Wired; the other and better written, “Neo-Utilitarians Are Utter Philistines” by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Paris) at his (here) Substack (Hinternet). In response Richard Pettigrew (Bristol) wrote a rather sensible criticism, “Leif Wenar’s criticisms of effective altruism” at his blog (Richard’s Substack). On of our very own,  Chris Bertram, shared it it on social media with a note that Wenar’s piece was shared widely without “a sober assessment of the merits of his arguments.”

Now, I am an avid reader of Pettigrew’s blog because more than anyone today, he makes on-going debates in formal epistemology and decision-theory available to wide audiences in a relatively fair and relatively accessible fashion. And like the very best blogs, he also shows the salience of different debates within some specialist area to other areas of philosophy (and the sciences/life). I also find Pettigrew rather judicious generally.

[click to continue…]