Academia has long since become an echo chamber. From undergraduate education through graduate training through postdoctoral research through faculty, one is rewarded for agreeing with the consensus in a superficially novel way, and punished for contradiction. Truth doesn't really come into it.
The result is that the institution has lost the ability to introspect, and therefore to course correct. To be called racist is to be cancelled; to critique is to be called racist; therefore no critique is acceptable. There isn't really much that can be done at this point, other than to let things play out. Intellectuals with talent and ability will drift away. What's left behind will collapse under the weight of cultish incompetence and public disinterest.
As an aside, surprised James Watson wasn't mentioned. His was probably the first and most prestigious scalp to be claimed by the woke mob. Every scientist in the world saw it. If someone of Watson's eminence could have his career and life destroyed for an offhand statement about the genetic origins of racial IQ differences, no one was safe. Thus the cowardice of scientists in the face of the mob, and the emboldened aggression of those political operators who have at this point largely consolidated their control over the culture of academic science.
James Watson was not intentionally left off, but I did need to cap the list of examples somewhere. Otherwise, I suspect I might have written a book on that instead of an essay.
Watson is a sort of special case. He, like William Schokley, was extremely good at generating enemies. If a person develops a reputation for being cut-throat and dishonest, then they are effectively painting a target on themselves, whatever their contributions are or are alleged to be. I suspect that is part of what happened to Watson (and Schockley). Both of these characters always had pretty bad reputations, as sort of "enfant terribles".
Just like former Harvard President Lawrence Sumner was perhaps not really "nuked" or fired for making some more or less innocuous statement about female scholars. Insiders claim that this was just a convenient excuse; a way to get rid of another Jew. Arab money was flowing in at the time to Harvard from Arab coffers. And the donors demanded that if they were going to pay, that they got to call the shots to a certain extent.
Perhaps Gay lost her position because she is a secret white supremacist. Perhaps Gay lost her position because she was caught donning a white hood on weekends as a member of the KKK. Perhaps Gay lost her position because she was not in favor of transgender surgery. Perhaps Gay lost her position because she did not plagiarize enough, or copied her work from the wrong people. Perhaps Gay lost her position for not firing all the white faculty, or not firing all the black faculty, or not firing all Muslim faculty, or not firing all the female faculty or not firing all the male faculty. Perhaps Gay lost her position for voting for Trump, or voting against Trump, or making a snide comment about Hillary or Barack or whoever.
But you do not really know. And neither do I.
We know what was announced in public. We know what announcements donors made and we know about the pushback from the Jewish community. We know what this situation looks like. But we do not really know what went on internally. And I think if you are positive you know, you are fooling yourself.
Of course, you are free to speculate however you like. But do not claim that you know for sure what went on. Because you do not. And neither do I.
However, if you believe that allowing student groups to widely call for the mass slaughter of every Jew on planet earth, and being a plagiarist are the only two problems with Ms. Gay, then you have not been paying attention. I think that finally, this was the straw that broke the camel's back, and too much was too much. I would not cry too much for Ms. Gay, who is still a Dean and has not had her 900K a year salary cut at all. So compared to the punishments Ms. Gay meted out to tenured scholars who she disagreed with, she did not suffer at all, really.
One never knows, does one. A major justification for Heterodox!!
Of course, the same applies to your example of Lawrence Summers. I was simply pointing out the similarity. I am not crying for either of them. Both remain more privileged than probably they deserve.
If you believe that student groups have been calling "for the mass slaughter of every Jew on planet earth", then you are the one who hasn't been paying attention, my friend.
Of course, I said the rumor about Summers was according to "insiders". It might be correct, but it might not be. And neither of us know for sure. Perhaps Summers himself really does not know. I would not be surprised at that.
You think there are no groups, student or otherwise, calling for mass slaughter of Jews? Interesting impression. Somehow I have the opposite impression. But perhaps I am incorrect. And the Jewish pushback is just over-reaction.
Look, I think everyone should live together in peace. But there is more than one group that has in its charter the extermination of Jews everywhere. And I seem to remember chants about Death to Israel or Death to the Little Satan. And calls to Gas the Jews, and so on. I am reasonably sure about that. And these groups seem to be supported by quite a few others. And there are frequent marches and protests to support them, in various parts of the world. And petitions. This has been going on for decades of course, but lately the activity seems to have escalated again.
I also remember the celebrations after various attacks, like 10.7 and 9.11. And interviews with the students and faculty at a local Madrassa after 9.11 and what they said about Americans and the US. And even interviews with Muslims from Bosnia and Kuwait that the Americans had saved, who did not seem particularly appreciative, to put it mildly. And lots of similar stuff, and some worse.
I have also listened to plenty claim there was no attack on October 7th, 2023. And plenty who claim that all the videos posted were created by AI and were faked by actors. And plenty who claim that Israel has been involved in a "genocide" against the Palestinians for many decades now, while their population grew extremely rapidly. And some who claim that Netanyahu purposely funded Hamas and even arranged for the October 7th attack. And all kinds of other crazy rumors.
To sort through this mess is more than most people are willing to bother with. I personally have had conversations with Palestinian friends who advocated mass slaughter of the "other side". The whole thing pretty much bores me and disgusts me. And I have watched it far longer than you have, I would bet. Although, I am not sure about that, to be honest, judging from what I found online.
But I am sure you think you are on the side of justice and goodness, so, carry on.
Good compilation of many examples. I was nodding my head often in agreement until I got to the last paragraph. The last two sentences are "Such an introspection will be difficult, but it must take place before any course correction if there is any desire to restore public trust. Otherwise, it is time for the rise of new institutions that can earn the trust of the public and continue the mission of truth-seeking." As to the first of the two, the author's essay is just such introspection: the author is a researcher scientist at an academic institution and the essay is good introspection. I would agree that more is needed and that trust is vitally important to functioning of institutions in society. The last sentence's proposal is either A) throwing the baby out with the bath water, or maybe more accurately, B) cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. What sort of institution is the author imagining to rise in order to earn the public trust and seek truth? Think tanks? Corporations? Nonprofits? Go-Fund-me campaigns? Webinars? Or is the author imagining new universities?
Why not fix what's perceived as wrong in the current ones?
Or is this a reductio-ad-absurdum argument? That is, is the last sentence so absurd that we are to re-assess its premise and find it wanting: that indeed universities MUST do the hard introspection, because the "otherwise..." is absurdly impractical.
I would encourage the author and the readers not to dismiss the effects listed that are other than introspection: they are important contributors also.
As a fellow HxA member, I encourage the author to exercise some introspection also about the concept of a telos for the university, which her essay cites, the one written by the founder of HxA. It sounds grand, the telos, but by analogy think of a university or a single human, and ask yourself if each has to have a single telos, as J. Haight has argued. Maybe the telos of a human is to reproduce? Oh really?! A human can walk and chew gum at the same time: eating is as important as breathing for the long term health and functioning of a human. Likewise, universities can seek truth and do other important things like teaching and service. I won't write here a full rebuttal essay on the concept of the telos of the university, but having given it much thought over the years, I am more and more convinced that the concept of a single telos of the university is a concept that is unhelpful and incorrect.
Last year I was interviewed by a high school student over Zoom, and I waxed philosophical about how Trust is Foundational to Truth. The interview is 30 min long, but here I queue it up so that the couple minutes following, I address the fallout of the general breakdown in trust of institutions: https://youtu.be/me0Et3MwIZ4?si=WxK9Xz9diSZ51VuA&t=1341
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. I suspect from your comment and the YouTube clip you shared that we would agree that trust in universities has fallen, that the trust fall itself is not to the benefit of society as a whole, and that there are certain things that the various universities have done to cause the fall in public trust.
Thank you also for the compliment about the collection of material. Part of my purpose for writing this essay was to compile such material for readers and examine the problem at hand. That said, I did the introspection that makes up the bulk of this essay, but have the universities themselves done this same introspection? One could argue that the universities have not done that introspection based on the observed behavior following the December 5 hearings in particularly or in recent years as public trust has fallen. It seems difficult on the part of universities as a whole to do such an introspection (and they seem not to have done one, nor are inclined to do so), though the reasons for that remain unclear to me.
I would actually very much like to see the problems at the universities be fixed rather than new institutions be created, but can that be done without willingly examining what the university has done to engender distrust (alongside other existing issues)? That seems doubtful to me, and it also seems quite likely that if there remains an unwillingness to examine the actions of the university as a whole that trust in American universities at least will continue to fall. If it were to continue falling, then new institutions that can be trusted might be necessary. Do I really want to see that, no, I would prefer that universities as they are be fixed. That said, some have already argued that it's too late and that new universities (such as the recently found University of Austin) are necessary. If it came to it that new institutions were needed, what would I prefer? I didn't get into it in this essay because defining what those new institutions could be is beyond the intended scope. I am partial to new universities not to simply replace the old, but in hopes that the competition would push other universities to self-correct. This is a topic for another essay, so I won't go into much depth here. That said, the University of Austin was itself founded at least in part owing to the problems with existing universities. I hope it's successful and drives a healthy change in university systems.
Thank you also for your comments on the telos arguments, I'm happy to dive into this more. Though for individual people, Aristotle presented a different argument for what telos is then for organizations and objects. Aristotle ultimately concludes in his work that the telos for humans is eudaimonia - happiness through leading a meaningful and virtuous life (or other similar translations). What exactly is a meaningful and virtuous life is not so easily defined, and I note many discussions about that elsewhere. That's a topic for another time too, but I would be curious to hear your thoughts with respect to the university.
Thanks again for reading and commenting, it is much appreciated.
Your welcome and thank you for the thoughtful reply. I experience the doubt you express also, but I remain hopeful that the tide is turning. Fads, fashions, whatever one wants to call it, these things come and go. I think a university can and many do serve multiple purposes - mainly seeking new knowledge AND disseminating it (both the new and the old knowledge) but also functioning in the community, e.g. providing a place/space for like minded people to meet. And for each person, the university can be different, with a different priority as experienced by each person. The university in the classic sense is not a collection of buildings on a particular piece of land, but a group of people with labels "faculty" and "students"; I once read a short essay by Rabi about that. It's recounted in many places; here's one. https://hcurocks.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/que-sera/
I think Haight set up a false dichotomy and although I have tried, I am not convinced by his arguments. They are delivered convincingly, because he is a talented writer and speaker and has a good concept, but it fails, at least as I see it.
Likewise, I do not find your arguments convincing. If you want to pursue social justice ends, you have no business being in STEM, at least if you are going to adhere to standards of excellence.
I think the ONLY way things are going to "turn around" is through massive amounts of disruption and pain.
Universities charge way too much for what they deliver. And there is no ideological diversity permitted on campuses.
I would point to the recent affair at the Stanford Law School where Federal judge Kyle Duncan was invited to speak. Duncan was met with an incredible amount of opprobrium, both from woke students and also woke administrators. And later, the law school dean was attacked over the same issues.
Or the reception Riley Gaines had at SFSU when she went to speak, and the shameful response of the SFSU administration after. They are now the target of a lawsuit.
Sorry, but the system is very sick at the moment. And only radical action will have an effect.
Students protesting the existence of Jews on planet Earth at various prestigious schools should be expelled. Some should be imprisoned. Some should be deported.
A message has to be sent. It might be unpleasant, but the situation is out of control. And it will get worse if people do not push back.
The behavior following Duncan's visit to the SLS on March 9, 2023 is an example of a segment of Stanford university introspecting promptly after a bad experience. I hope readers will recall how the top law school dean Jenny Martinez wrote a 10-page open letter (ref 1 below) analyzing her introspection and demanding more of the same from the faculty and students, even mandating formal sessions in the law school addressing the issues. The DEI Dean Steinbach who mismanaged the protest of Duncan's speech is no longer employed at Stanford university. These sort of introspections are happening, and hopefully there will be more, and then too, over time hopefully there will be less need for more introspection because the tide will have turned and the academic pendulum will settle closer to a reasonable position after it had swung too far.
Given your comparisons elsewhere in these comments of US academia to the regimes of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Al-Ghazali, I have no misconceptions of convincing you (Octave) that the tide is turning, the pendulum has turned around, things are headed in a better direction, or whatever metaphor one prefers, but perhaps some other readers will experience their own introspection and see that there is hope.
I grant you there are some tentative positive signs. But they are pretty feeble so far.
Every student at SLS who threatened to rape and murder Duncan's family as well as Dean Martinez needed to be expelled. In addition, their names should have been placed on blacklists like those protesting at Harvard, so that they could never obtain employment that was not menial in nature. The same should be done to Dean Steinbach. What is Steinbach qualified to do, exactly, since she seems to demand the destruction of Western Civilization? A strong message needs to be sent; this behavior will not be tolerated.
After all, we put the names of teachers of the NYC Public School system who declined the COVID-19 vaccination on FBI blacklists, according to whistleblowers. This behavior at SLS seems far worse to me than declining an experimental vaccine that was improperly tested.
It is even worse for potential future lawyers to advocate rape and murder. From my viewing of the protests, it is clear to me that the only way that Duncan got on and off campus safely was that he was accompanied by two heavily armed Federal Marshals. This is ridiculous. What are we training these future lawyers to do, by permitting and even ENCOURAGING such activities? Is this what we want in our legal system in the future? Our legal system has already been weaponized and politicized. This would just be another step down a very dangerous path.
Over what issue were the SLS students protesting? That a biological male and apparent pedophile Norman Varner/ Katherine Nicole Jett should be allowed to manipulate the system. Varner/Jett wanted the court to order the change of his arrest records and all court documents retroactively to show his/her new preferred gender. Varner/Jett also wanted the judge to order the inmates at the prison to treat Varner/Jett as a female. This appears to be an attempt to gain entry to a woman's prison. And judge Duncan said he did not have the power to do this and that he would not do it.
This perfectly reasonable ruling infuriated more than 50% of the SLS freshman class, so they protested and were on the verge of physical violence, by all appearances. They were also furious that the Dean of the SLS apologized, albeit belatedly, for this outrageous demonstration staged by the students, aided by her own administrative staff. Stanford had promised security for the event and had also promised that there would be no unrest when Judge Duncan was reluctant to accept the invitation. Stanford basically misrepresented their preparations and the situation, in the extreme. They lied.
In fact, all DEI personnel at Stanford should be terminated. Have you ever witnessed DEI training sessions? They are atrocious "struggle sessions" where illiterate buffoons throw tantrums and berate the audience; they are a disgrace. You can find videos online of people like Ashleigh Shackleford plying her trade:
The statistics show that DEI programs make things worse. They just encourage people to hate each other. They do not even fulfill their own stated goals, according to Harvard Business School studies.
One of my mentors advocates the termination of 99% of all administrative staff at these schools. That might be a bit extreme, but in Stanford's case, where they outnumber the students, it might be starting to get realistic.
I also think that the President of SFSU and SFSU should be forced to pay substantial sums for their treatment of Riley Gaines. All the students who can be identified in the videos protesting should be expelled.
The same should be done to the students at MIT who were calling for the slaughter of all Jews. They should be expelled, and if they are foreign students, deported.
Look, you will not agree with any of this because it is clear to me you are apparently not really particularly "Heterodox" at all. You obviously like the current situation and would prefer to convert every single university into a woke nightmare where mathematics is banned and the scientific method is forbidden. Why you would want this is beyond me, but that appears to be the situation.
Pardon my impertinence, but I wonder that if this appeals to you so much, why have you not acted accordingly? As someone who appears to be of European extraction and male, two characteristics which are not at all welcome and do not belong anywhere in academia or STEM according to woke ideology, why have you not resigned your position accordingly? Why did you even get an education in STEM? All of these things are verboten, you know. Are you not "down with the struggle"? Why not put your money where your mouth is? According to anti-racist principles and DEI, you are a representative of the oppressor class who must be banished from STEM and academia at all costs. You do realize this, don't you?
You know the famous apothegm, "To make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs". And if we are not willing to take extreme action, or at least advocate that extreme actions be considered, STEM will die. There is very little doubt of this in my mind.
You (Octave) wrote, "All the students who can be identified in the videos protesting should be expelled."
I wonder how many others here support such a position. How many don't? How many here are willing to admonish you that your bellicose truculence and hyperbole is not helping - it's hurting.
You also wrote, "Look, you will not agree with any of this because it is clear to me you are apparently not really particularly "Heterodox" at all. You obviously like the current situation and would prefer to convert every single university into a woke nightmare where mathematics is banned and the scientific method is forbidden."
I wonder how many others here would support such straw manning. Again, I wonder if anyone here is willing to call you on this, other than me?
Since this is a STEM post, it might not be remiss to point out that loss of trust in science has multiple causes, critical social theory aka woke being only one. And the natural, human tendency under such circumstances is to defensively overstate scientific authority. Some introspection may be called for around that as well.
Thanks to both of you for this discussion. Yes, I agree that Haidt set up a false dichotomy, doing so tends to engender an us vs them discourse which probably isn't useful. Love Haidt, but no one is perfect
This is a thoughtful response. However, I think you are not as familiar with the ideology academia has been captured by as you perhaps should be.
In woke ideology, the very concept of "truth" is anathema. One is deemed a bigot and worse for even suggesting that "truth" exists. "Evidence" is an example of a hateful concept, so is "proof", so is "rationality", so is "reason", and logic, and so on.
This is why Haidt suggests that there be a schism of sorts in higher education. We would have religious schools, we would have "truth" schools and we would have social justice schools. The social justice category has become toxic, or even dangerous, to anyone who is not similarly brainwashed into this cult of wokeness, or as some have deemed it, "weaponized compassion" or a "mind virus" (a term used by Musk).
I would draw your attention to the attitudes of both Peter Boghossian and Jordan Peterson, for example. Both are academics and both believe that higher education (at most of the current extant institutions), at least in the US and Canada, is so corrupt that it cannot be reformed. Christopher Rufo is attempting a reform effort in Florida, but it is meeting a lot of resistance. Will Rufo be successful? Time will tell.
MIT has reportedly taken one step back towards sanity, by reinstituting the SAT. For years, MIT has been roiled in infighting over the rewriting of its "mission statement". A substantial and clearly powerful group wants to do away with any mention of excellence, or even merit or competence, in hiring and admissions. In other words, there are forces that are desperate to destroy MIT as an institution of any note. Will they succeed? We are going to find out.
The accreditation entities are also massive problems for anyone attempting to create a new college or university, like the University of Austin or Ralston College or the Peterson Academy. We probably need to completely discard the concept of accreditation or reform it drastically.
For example, I would propose that we need metrics like "tooth to tail" ratios of academic institutions. The more deadweight like administrators that exist at an institution, the lower this ratio would be. Everyone, including funding agencies and donors and parents and students should have some way of gauging the efficiency of the institution they are considering devoting resources to. Another set of useful metrics could be the ideological diversity of the student body and the faculty and the support staff and the administration. Metrics like careers of the alumni, and graduation statistics would also be valuable. These could all be publicly available, and considered in accreditation as well.
I have subscribed for years to the Chronicle of Higher Education. They are completely oblivious to the problem. And they are totally in control and they will never willingly give up control and power. They do not really care what faculty or the students think.
Look at the inquiry and trial of Professor Jordan Peterson in Ontario. It is a perfect example of the problem. According to this situation, if someone is overweight, no one is "allowed" to notice the person is excessively heavy or at risk of health issues. If an academic or professional notices this and mentions it in public, their professional and academic career is forfeit. According to this ruling, an academic or professional is not allowed to express an opinion deemed to be contrary to some arbitrary political narrative, whether or not it is within their expertise or purview. And the list of violations and potential violations that Peterson has supposedly committed is long indeed, and close to nonsensical. Take a look. It is like following Alice down the rabbit hole.
We are not that far away from the situation that existed in Nazi Germany, where Jewish academics were terminated. Wokeness is profoundly antisemitic in its nature, as Elon Musk has noted. If we apply "equity", or even worse, "anti-racism", there would be almost no Jews left in the academy, as faculty or students. We might even get rid of almost all whites and "white-adjacents", like South and East Asians.
This was the goal of a committee that disgraced plagiarist Claudine Gay created at Harvard. The committee was supposed to erase any possible trace and history of whites and in particular, white males, at Harvard. She resigned before this could really get rolling, but that was the stated goal.
We are also not that far away from what happened in Mao's cultural revolution where academics and intellectuals were sent out of the institutions to do brutal manual labor, or sent to prison labor camps, and were subject to abuse and torture and execution. Or even worse, under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia anyone deemed to be too educated or intellectual (such as knowing how to read and write or even wearing glasses) was viewed as some enemy of the people and killed. Before Vietnam intervened militarily, 1/3 of Cambodia's population had been murdered.
Also, remember what happened to the Islamic Civilization when they turned on their intellectual class after the second most influential man in Islam, Al-Ghazali, wrote his treatise, "The Incoherence of the Philosophers". Most of the institutions of higher learning were destroyed, as were libraries and observatories and laboratories. Most of the scholars were slaughtered. And Islamic culture entered a dark age for a millennia, from which it still has not really emerged.
These undercurrents and forces exist in the population. And it would not take very much to set them off in North America. Our colleges and universities are steeped in similar attitudes and viewpoints.
Severe and drastic action is called for. Or else, all will be lost.
Obviously, yes. McDonald's mission is to sell food, mainly burgers, to the public. It does not sell hardware, that is Home Depot's mission.
And the walking and chewing gum analogy is a non sequitur. McDonald's can have Ronald McDonald and chicken nuggets, but that doesn't change its mission.
Although I hate to say it, this appears to be more and more accurate.
Unless something substantial happens, nothing will happen and things will just continue to get worse. For example, unless there is some serious competition to the current institutions, they will refuse to change. Unless their funding is cut, they will refuse to change. Unless they lose applicants, they won't change. And so on and so forth.
The people in power, those who have created or allowed the current situation, are far too complacent and arrogant and comfortable with the status quo. Why should they modify anything? There is nothing to compel them to do so, and they personally feel pretty good with how things are and the direction things are headed. They have either acquiesced to the current developments, or they have had a hand in plotting the current course of action.
I would agree with this comment. What is needed is all of the above, and more.
And aside from 4 new academic institutions that are currently in the process of standing up in the US, I suspect there are many more being planned. And new varieties of institutions. I am involved with one myself that will be intended to supplement or compete with the existing failing institutions.
STEM institutions come and go, all the time. There was the Research Corporation of America that was a more or less failed attempted decades ago. There was the Rowland Institute for Science that got folded into Harvard. There was Alfred Lee Loomis' private R and D organization that eventually withered. The Edison Laboratories basically disappeared; the organizations that Edison's work created are not particularly interested in R and D or STEM. There was Bell Labs that basically collapsed through mismanagement, although the name sort of lives on. Kelly College at Bell Labs was far more rigorous and productive than any current academic institution, by leaps and bounds. There also were STEM R&D entities Bellcore and Bell Northern that more or less disappeared. IBM Research is a mere shadow of its former self. There are a range of nonprofit FFRDCs that are constantly evolving, mostly created after World War II. IST in Austria was stood up based on the same model as the reformed Weizmann Institute in Israel, and both are currently outrageously successful STEM institutions. There are a large and growing number of R and D organizations that James Simons is supporting with his private funds.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I would argue that our STEM institutions in North America have gone off track. So, every possible effort from every possible direction should be attempted to clean up the mess we have allowed to develop.
We need to be clear-eyed about the current issues, and then act accordingly.
I might also remind the reader that if one goes back 150 years ago or possibly a bit more, US and Canadian academic institutions and R and D entities were mostly sort of an embarrassment. If a serious student wanted to pursue advanced studies, they went to Europe. Period.
This was still the situation when Oppenheimer wanted to continue his studies. The Ivy League schools were mostly slightly retooled religious training schools. There were "normal schools" for training grade school teachers. There were very few real American graduate schools. There were a few technical training institutes for creating skilled craftsmen scattered around. What became both Caltech and MIT were originally organizations of this type. University of Chicago and a few other institutions were novel experiments in the sort of "backwards" United States. This was not that long ago, relatively speaking.
When Benjamin Franklin wanted to study printing, he had to go to London, which he did. The founders of the US might have been educated at some institutions that are currently prestigious in the US, but they were mostly auto-didacts.
Franklin was a perfect example of an auto-didact of prodigious capabilities. I have read some of the biographies of Franklin, and the authors are so clueless and uneducated (even the "celebrated" famous biographers) that they are not able to approach a reasonable judgement of Franklin.
So, there is no specially ordained rule that says that the current academic situation in the US is static and was always the way it is now and always will be the way it is now. Things change, and evolve. And they always have.
Hi - just curious about the Research Corp. Is this one and the same as the one you mentioned? https://rescorp.org/ I was a Cottrell Scholar decades ago, and R.C. is still doing its thing. I wouldn't describe it as a failure. If it is the same as the one you mentioned, then why do you describe it as more or less a failed attempt? (at what?) I recall that its original plan was to get some altruistic scientists to donate their patents to it, to foster more scientific innovation. I haven't checked much or lately, but I was generally under the impression that that "business model" did not succeed a lot. I did know well one famous scientist who signed over a patent to it, a very generous act, because it was the maser/laser patent. The return was good, but nothing like it would have been if the lifetime of a patent wasn't limited to 17 years (at that time, in the USA).
I also have a close friend who worked inside your own institution for decades. And she came away with extremely ugly stories. And burned plenty of bridges on the way out as she confronted them with the reality of what she had observed; the dishonesty, the theft, the fraud, the nonsense. You think your own institution is immune to problems? And you think the solution is "more social justice" and substituting adjunct faculty for real faculty? While continuing to charge more and more tuition for basically worthless degrees? Really?
Yes, there are a few Cottrell Scholars. But as you say, the "business model" did not succeed. A handful of "Cottrell Scholars" is nothing compared to the original plans for the organization.
Sure, it is better than nothing. However...it is still pretty paltry. There have been 18,000 Cottrell Scholars. So, how many Cottrell Scholars have really contributed substantially after their support? There are a few dozen Nobel Laureates among the former Cottrell Scholars, which is not that shabby, but it is still way less than 1%. However, before I started researching these sorts of organizations, I had never even heard of them. I have never even met a single Cottrell Scholar, and I have spent extensive amounts of time at elite institutions for decades. That is how obscure they are.
In that sense, I maintain that it still effectively failed. The plans did not work, and the present organization is a mere shadow of what was originally envisioned. It is just an endowment that hands out fellowships. That is it. Just a pool of cash, period.
I might also mention that patents are a model that has failed pretty much as well. They were supposed to be a tool for innovators to garner some benefit for a short period of time, having a monopoly, and after the monopoly period expired, the discovery or invention would be open to everyone. This no longer works very well. I am not sure it ever really worked as it was intended.
The patent laws, at least in the US and probably a few other places, just are weaponry for large corporate interests to attack small innovators now. You will notice that most organizations require all innovators to give all their rights up to everything they think of, even on their time off, even if it is something outside the scope of their employment. Some even attempt to enforce these rules on people who have left the organization.
Some universities offer a 50/50 cut to innovators. But for the most part, US and Canadian universities are not interested in capitalizing on innovation. Their "departments" for doing this are not skilled at evaluating discoveries and inventions. And they mostly do nothing at all, as near as I can tell. They are just window-dressing. And the intellectual property they have access to is mostly just scattered to the wind, except in a tiny fraction of cases.
"Without looking inward at what problems exist, academia may make no course correction at all, or any course correction will make things worse."
"Academia" is an umbrella term at best, or really a generalization encompassing all sorts of schools and teachers (which I'm sure we all know)—but my point is no one wakes up wondering how their actions will affect "academia" just as no business person wonders how they'll affect the overall "economy" and I don't step outside wondering what my life or deeds says about the "human race".
People respond to immediate personal incentives in their lives and environments, and to get to my point: in most of academia and culture now throughout the West, all incentives point toward always publicly obeying and propagating the Social Justice faith (while a million sharp-edged punishments await those who dissent), and this goes for both True Believers and for those who need to pretend to be True Believers for either career or personal reasons. (I don't work in academia but in culture, and I can tell you the same exact dynamics and the same total ideological capture exist in TV, movies, art galleries and museums, documentaries, theater, etc.)
The best books that I think illustrate our moment are Festinger's "When Prophecy Fails", which introduced the concept of cognitive dissonance and showed that once someone has committed themselves body and soul to a faith or belief, they will say and do anything not to have to admit that their sacred belief was mistaken or foolish—even up to death or injury or penury.
And also, Barbara Tuchman's "March of Folly" which shows how a certain group or a leader and their backers will refuse to change their minds, will make the gravest errors, if all incentives in the moment make it impossible to dissent and make obedience the coin of the realm.
In ideological-captured America, we have reached a similar situation and these things usually play out the same way: there will simply be no overthrowing or replacing the Social Justice faith among our cultural and academia class (that ship sailed many years ago), the capture is way too complete, these people will just have to create enough wreckage until some higher force steps in to end it.
In our case it probably won't be a dictator (though that's possible), but most likely a major war or depression that finally reveals Social Justice to be both a massive lie and a massive failure, similar to what ultimately undid the Soviet Union.
Yes I think you are correct. This is why it is almost impossible to work within the current system, and reform it from within.
One needs massive leverage to change things because the current system is completely rotten. But no one dares to point that out because it is just too dangerous for them personally.
My only expertise here is that I was a Lit major at a private liberal-arts college way back in the 80s and so was there at the birth of this rough beast that's swallowed the Western brain, which I think back then was called "postmodern Critical Studies".
Even then it was obvious that this ideology was a dagger aimed at Western liberalism and that it replicated many patterns of Marxism, its ideological forebear: dogmatic, intolerant of dissent, Manichaean, and aiming to move the "class struggle" into other realms (most esp race and sexual relations), with the goal of deconstructing all established arrangements, values, definitions etc.
There were warning signs since then—the Sokal hoax, the horrific treatment of people like Ed Wilson or Alice Dreger or Napoleon Chagnon, along with all the speech codes and things like "Western Civ has got to go" @ Stanford...
But by now any opposition is too little way too late: the Crit Theorists masterstroke was piggybacking on the triumphs and morality of the Civil Rights Movement and presenting themselves as Official Defenders of the Oppressed. Once they locked that in, the liberal class was disarmed and lost any ability or vocabulary to oppose them, as any opposition would be met by a massive attack of bigotry accusations. Thus the Crit Theorists marched unimpeded from victory to victory and here we are...
American academia in 2024 is like Dante's Inferno and should come with the same warning: Abandon all hope ye who enter.
We are dealing with an ideological wildfire akin to things like Marxism, Jacobinism, Mao's Red Guards, except most of all that took place in more violent and unstable societies, where eventually the ruling clique either spilled too much blood or their ideological incompetence led to things like famine and state collapse (Soviets, Cubans, Pol Pot come to mind).
But in our case, America is still by far the richest country in the world, has a mostly well-functioning govt and society and American academia sleeps soundly every night on a mattress stuffed w billions in subsidies. So in this case it's hard to say what lies up ahead: we could be one social or environmental cataclysm away from a serious social reckoning where teaching bespoke pronouns seems a decadent luxury that can no longer be afforded, or I could see the opposite and the American Empire waxing strong and fat for the rest of the century, after its rulers having converted en masse to the Social Justice faith like the Romans did w Christianity.
There's a lot of ruin in a nation—I guess at some point we'll learn exactly how much is in ours.
We have too much debt, and too much inefficiency and our unfunded mandates are far too large. This cannot continue.
We are spending money we do not have. We are not near as innovative as we used to be, and one can hear the complaints about this all over the place. The US is well on its way to losing reserve currency status, which will hike interest rates drastically. The housing market and the commercial real estate markets are very shaky at the moment. We have not elevated our own under-class, and we are frantically importing millions more uneducated, unvetted, third world unproductive elements. Many are criminals or worse. They get a free pass on any illegal activity and a free ride since the uniparty says so.
We are imposing ESG and CEI and CRT and DEI (or as I call it, IED) and anti-racism and wokism and lowering standards left right and center for various professions and careers. We pat ourselves on the back about how wonderful and "fair" it all is. Is this improving things or making things worse? Corporations that have bought into this nonsense are suffering badly. What is their response? To double and triple down on the same failed strategies.
White males are no longer enlisting in the military (the levels have dropped more than 50% in the last 5 years). About 65% of those in the current US military would never recommend that a family member enlist. The service academies like Annapolis and West Point, which offered sought-after prestigious positions, are having trouble filling their quotas. These are signs of trouble.
The Secretary of Defense even advanced a plan (which he backed off of once it was made public) about persecuting and arresting and court martialing and worse any service member who was discovered to have voted the "wrong way". There was a similar proposal to "sanitize" the FBI of people guilty of "wrong think". One former presidential candidate has advocated setting up concentration camps and re-education camps for people who voted for the wrong party (the "deplorables"). Many in the mainstream media applauded this and repeated this threat.
White males are rejecting college educations, increasingly. Twenty years ago, about 80% of US MDs were Republicans; now the statistics have almost completely reversed and the vast majority are Democrats.
"White adjacents" like those from South and East Asia are increasingly being targeted because it is supposedly "unfair" that they excel. We are far more comfortable with failure and incompetence, I guess.
There is a massive attack on Jews throughout US Academia. In some parts of STEM, Jews form the vast majority of the workforce. In the name of "fairness", just like the Nazis, will we drive them out of STEM?
So, considering everything, I think it is highly unlikely that everything will just sail along as it currently is, with no problems and everyone just getting richer and richer and more comfortable.
In the words of the famous aphorism, "What can't continue, won't."
The signs of strain are everywhere. About 30 years ago, about half of US faculty were adjunct faculty (a huge increase from 10 or 20 years previous to that point). About 15 years ago, the fraction of US faculty that were adjuncts had just crossed the 75% level. These people are paid peanuts and have no benefits. Increasingly, the qualifications of people willing to accept these positions is dropping. Meanwhile, the costs of college continue to skyrocket.
The ranks of highly paid administrators who do not teach and do not do research and do not raise funds and cannot be fired grows uncontrollably. At Stanford and Yale (and possibly other schools as well), there are now more administrators than there are students.
Obviously, this situation cannot continue. No trees grow to the sky.
A couple minor quibbles. 1) The question about genocide was in the form of "why do you beat your wife?" since the claim that particular groups were calling for genocide was unverified. And I believe, false. 2) I am curious if FIRE's decision to rank Harvard last was based on anything. It certainly deserved to be ranked near the bottom, but I didn't see any evidence in the FIRE report that would clearly place it below Penn et al.
Your essay has sparked some good comments. A few of which mention some new universities. It is amazing and daunting to me to imagine starting a new university. Not just a new campus of an existing university, but a whole new one. Like most new businesses, these new universities are likely to fail - just in the sense that many previous attempts have been rare and generally not long lived. An example of that is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_University . I recall a past President of the American Astronomical Society was associated with Quest - as President of it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Helfand who was a heterodox thinker and doer. The story of Quest might be worth reading for anyone thinking of getting involved in a new university. Why did it close its doors in 2023 after 16 years? Ran out of money.
If the situations you are describing were “politically reversed,” wouldn’t they be described as bigotry?
Academia has long since become an echo chamber. From undergraduate education through graduate training through postdoctoral research through faculty, one is rewarded for agreeing with the consensus in a superficially novel way, and punished for contradiction. Truth doesn't really come into it.
The result is that the institution has lost the ability to introspect, and therefore to course correct. To be called racist is to be cancelled; to critique is to be called racist; therefore no critique is acceptable. There isn't really much that can be done at this point, other than to let things play out. Intellectuals with talent and ability will drift away. What's left behind will collapse under the weight of cultish incompetence and public disinterest.
As an aside, surprised James Watson wasn't mentioned. His was probably the first and most prestigious scalp to be claimed by the woke mob. Every scientist in the world saw it. If someone of Watson's eminence could have his career and life destroyed for an offhand statement about the genetic origins of racial IQ differences, no one was safe. Thus the cowardice of scientists in the face of the mob, and the emboldened aggression of those political operators who have at this point largely consolidated their control over the culture of academic science.
James Watson was not intentionally left off, but I did need to cap the list of examples somewhere. Otherwise, I suspect I might have written a book on that instead of an essay.
Watson is a sort of special case. He, like William Schokley, was extremely good at generating enemies. If a person develops a reputation for being cut-throat and dishonest, then they are effectively painting a target on themselves, whatever their contributions are or are alleged to be. I suspect that is part of what happened to Watson (and Schockley). Both of these characters always had pretty bad reputations, as sort of "enfant terribles".
Just like former Harvard President Lawrence Sumner was perhaps not really "nuked" or fired for making some more or less innocuous statement about female scholars. Insiders claim that this was just a convenient excuse; a way to get rid of another Jew. Arab money was flowing in at the time to Harvard from Arab coffers. And the donors demanded that if they were going to pay, that they got to call the shots to a certain extent.
Interesting, since Gay was canceled for plagiarism as a convenient excuse to limit the expression of pro-Palestinian opinion
Who knows what the reality is?
Perhaps Gay lost her position because she is a secret white supremacist. Perhaps Gay lost her position because she was caught donning a white hood on weekends as a member of the KKK. Perhaps Gay lost her position because she was not in favor of transgender surgery. Perhaps Gay lost her position because she did not plagiarize enough, or copied her work from the wrong people. Perhaps Gay lost her position for not firing all the white faculty, or not firing all the black faculty, or not firing all Muslim faculty, or not firing all the female faculty or not firing all the male faculty. Perhaps Gay lost her position for voting for Trump, or voting against Trump, or making a snide comment about Hillary or Barack or whoever.
But you do not really know. And neither do I.
We know what was announced in public. We know what announcements donors made and we know about the pushback from the Jewish community. We know what this situation looks like. But we do not really know what went on internally. And I think if you are positive you know, you are fooling yourself.
Of course, you are free to speculate however you like. But do not claim that you know for sure what went on. Because you do not. And neither do I.
However, if you believe that allowing student groups to widely call for the mass slaughter of every Jew on planet earth, and being a plagiarist are the only two problems with Ms. Gay, then you have not been paying attention. I think that finally, this was the straw that broke the camel's back, and too much was too much. I would not cry too much for Ms. Gay, who is still a Dean and has not had her 900K a year salary cut at all. So compared to the punishments Ms. Gay meted out to tenured scholars who she disagreed with, she did not suffer at all, really.
One never knows, does one. A major justification for Heterodox!!
Of course, the same applies to your example of Lawrence Summers. I was simply pointing out the similarity. I am not crying for either of them. Both remain more privileged than probably they deserve.
If you believe that student groups have been calling "for the mass slaughter of every Jew on planet earth", then you are the one who hasn't been paying attention, my friend.
Of course, I said the rumor about Summers was according to "insiders". It might be correct, but it might not be. And neither of us know for sure. Perhaps Summers himself really does not know. I would not be surprised at that.
You think there are no groups, student or otherwise, calling for mass slaughter of Jews? Interesting impression. Somehow I have the opposite impression. But perhaps I am incorrect. And the Jewish pushback is just over-reaction.
Look, I think everyone should live together in peace. But there is more than one group that has in its charter the extermination of Jews everywhere. And I seem to remember chants about Death to Israel or Death to the Little Satan. And calls to Gas the Jews, and so on. I am reasonably sure about that. And these groups seem to be supported by quite a few others. And there are frequent marches and protests to support them, in various parts of the world. And petitions. This has been going on for decades of course, but lately the activity seems to have escalated again.
I also remember the celebrations after various attacks, like 10.7 and 9.11. And interviews with the students and faculty at a local Madrassa after 9.11 and what they said about Americans and the US. And even interviews with Muslims from Bosnia and Kuwait that the Americans had saved, who did not seem particularly appreciative, to put it mildly. And lots of similar stuff, and some worse.
I have also listened to plenty claim there was no attack on October 7th, 2023. And plenty who claim that all the videos posted were created by AI and were faked by actors. And plenty who claim that Israel has been involved in a "genocide" against the Palestinians for many decades now, while their population grew extremely rapidly. And some who claim that Netanyahu purposely funded Hamas and even arranged for the October 7th attack. And all kinds of other crazy rumors.
To sort through this mess is more than most people are willing to bother with. I personally have had conversations with Palestinian friends who advocated mass slaughter of the "other side". The whole thing pretty much bores me and disgusts me. And I have watched it far longer than you have, I would bet. Although, I am not sure about that, to be honest, judging from what I found online.
But I am sure you think you are on the side of justice and goodness, so, carry on.
Excellent! A terrific compendium of the chaos that the woke left has created in academia. And a warning to mend your ways or ...
PS - an alternative title, from the world of medicine: no therapy before diagnosis.
Excellent! Thanks!
Good compilation of many examples. I was nodding my head often in agreement until I got to the last paragraph. The last two sentences are "Such an introspection will be difficult, but it must take place before any course correction if there is any desire to restore public trust. Otherwise, it is time for the rise of new institutions that can earn the trust of the public and continue the mission of truth-seeking." As to the first of the two, the author's essay is just such introspection: the author is a researcher scientist at an academic institution and the essay is good introspection. I would agree that more is needed and that trust is vitally important to functioning of institutions in society. The last sentence's proposal is either A) throwing the baby out with the bath water, or maybe more accurately, B) cutting off one's nose to spite one's face. What sort of institution is the author imagining to rise in order to earn the public trust and seek truth? Think tanks? Corporations? Nonprofits? Go-Fund-me campaigns? Webinars? Or is the author imagining new universities?
Why not fix what's perceived as wrong in the current ones?
Or is this a reductio-ad-absurdum argument? That is, is the last sentence so absurd that we are to re-assess its premise and find it wanting: that indeed universities MUST do the hard introspection, because the "otherwise..." is absurdly impractical.
I would encourage the author and the readers not to dismiss the effects listed that are other than introspection: they are important contributors also.
As a fellow HxA member, I encourage the author to exercise some introspection also about the concept of a telos for the university, which her essay cites, the one written by the founder of HxA. It sounds grand, the telos, but by analogy think of a university or a single human, and ask yourself if each has to have a single telos, as J. Haight has argued. Maybe the telos of a human is to reproduce? Oh really?! A human can walk and chew gum at the same time: eating is as important as breathing for the long term health and functioning of a human. Likewise, universities can seek truth and do other important things like teaching and service. I won't write here a full rebuttal essay on the concept of the telos of the university, but having given it much thought over the years, I am more and more convinced that the concept of a single telos of the university is a concept that is unhelpful and incorrect.
Last year I was interviewed by a high school student over Zoom, and I waxed philosophical about how Trust is Foundational to Truth. The interview is 30 min long, but here I queue it up so that the couple minutes following, I address the fallout of the general breakdown in trust of institutions: https://youtu.be/me0Et3MwIZ4?si=WxK9Xz9diSZ51VuA&t=1341
Thanks for taking the time to read and comment. I suspect from your comment and the YouTube clip you shared that we would agree that trust in universities has fallen, that the trust fall itself is not to the benefit of society as a whole, and that there are certain things that the various universities have done to cause the fall in public trust.
Thank you also for the compliment about the collection of material. Part of my purpose for writing this essay was to compile such material for readers and examine the problem at hand. That said, I did the introspection that makes up the bulk of this essay, but have the universities themselves done this same introspection? One could argue that the universities have not done that introspection based on the observed behavior following the December 5 hearings in particularly or in recent years as public trust has fallen. It seems difficult on the part of universities as a whole to do such an introspection (and they seem not to have done one, nor are inclined to do so), though the reasons for that remain unclear to me.
I would actually very much like to see the problems at the universities be fixed rather than new institutions be created, but can that be done without willingly examining what the university has done to engender distrust (alongside other existing issues)? That seems doubtful to me, and it also seems quite likely that if there remains an unwillingness to examine the actions of the university as a whole that trust in American universities at least will continue to fall. If it were to continue falling, then new institutions that can be trusted might be necessary. Do I really want to see that, no, I would prefer that universities as they are be fixed. That said, some have already argued that it's too late and that new universities (such as the recently found University of Austin) are necessary. If it came to it that new institutions were needed, what would I prefer? I didn't get into it in this essay because defining what those new institutions could be is beyond the intended scope. I am partial to new universities not to simply replace the old, but in hopes that the competition would push other universities to self-correct. This is a topic for another essay, so I won't go into much depth here. That said, the University of Austin was itself founded at least in part owing to the problems with existing universities. I hope it's successful and drives a healthy change in university systems.
Thank you also for your comments on the telos arguments, I'm happy to dive into this more. Though for individual people, Aristotle presented a different argument for what telos is then for organizations and objects. Aristotle ultimately concludes in his work that the telos for humans is eudaimonia - happiness through leading a meaningful and virtuous life (or other similar translations). What exactly is a meaningful and virtuous life is not so easily defined, and I note many discussions about that elsewhere. That's a topic for another time too, but I would be curious to hear your thoughts with respect to the university.
Thanks again for reading and commenting, it is much appreciated.
Your welcome and thank you for the thoughtful reply. I experience the doubt you express also, but I remain hopeful that the tide is turning. Fads, fashions, whatever one wants to call it, these things come and go. I think a university can and many do serve multiple purposes - mainly seeking new knowledge AND disseminating it (both the new and the old knowledge) but also functioning in the community, e.g. providing a place/space for like minded people to meet. And for each person, the university can be different, with a different priority as experienced by each person. The university in the classic sense is not a collection of buildings on a particular piece of land, but a group of people with labels "faculty" and "students"; I once read a short essay by Rabi about that. It's recounted in many places; here's one. https://hcurocks.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/que-sera/
I think Haight set up a false dichotomy and although I have tried, I am not convinced by his arguments. They are delivered convincingly, because he is a talented writer and speaker and has a good concept, but it fails, at least as I see it.
Likewise, I do not find your arguments convincing. If you want to pursue social justice ends, you have no business being in STEM, at least if you are going to adhere to standards of excellence.
I think the ONLY way things are going to "turn around" is through massive amounts of disruption and pain.
Universities charge way too much for what they deliver. And there is no ideological diversity permitted on campuses.
I would point to the recent affair at the Stanford Law School where Federal judge Kyle Duncan was invited to speak. Duncan was met with an incredible amount of opprobrium, both from woke students and also woke administrators. And later, the law school dean was attacked over the same issues.
Or the reception Riley Gaines had at SFSU when she went to speak, and the shameful response of the SFSU administration after. They are now the target of a lawsuit.
Sorry, but the system is very sick at the moment. And only radical action will have an effect.
Students protesting the existence of Jews on planet Earth at various prestigious schools should be expelled. Some should be imprisoned. Some should be deported.
A message has to be sent. It might be unpleasant, but the situation is out of control. And it will get worse if people do not push back.
The behavior following Duncan's visit to the SLS on March 9, 2023 is an example of a segment of Stanford university introspecting promptly after a bad experience. I hope readers will recall how the top law school dean Jenny Martinez wrote a 10-page open letter (ref 1 below) analyzing her introspection and demanding more of the same from the faculty and students, even mandating formal sessions in the law school addressing the issues. The DEI Dean Steinbach who mismanaged the protest of Duncan's speech is no longer employed at Stanford university. These sort of introspections are happening, and hopefully there will be more, and then too, over time hopefully there will be less need for more introspection because the tide will have turned and the academic pendulum will settle closer to a reasonable position after it had swung too far.
Given your comparisons elsewhere in these comments of US academia to the regimes of Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, and Al-Ghazali, I have no misconceptions of convincing you (Octave) that the tide is turning, the pendulum has turned around, things are headed in a better direction, or whatever metaphor one prefers, but perhaps some other readers will experience their own introspection and see that there is hope.
ref 1 = https://law.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Next-Steps-on-Protests-and-Free-Speech.pdf
I grant you there are some tentative positive signs. But they are pretty feeble so far.
Every student at SLS who threatened to rape and murder Duncan's family as well as Dean Martinez needed to be expelled. In addition, their names should have been placed on blacklists like those protesting at Harvard, so that they could never obtain employment that was not menial in nature. The same should be done to Dean Steinbach. What is Steinbach qualified to do, exactly, since she seems to demand the destruction of Western Civilization? A strong message needs to be sent; this behavior will not be tolerated.
After all, we put the names of teachers of the NYC Public School system who declined the COVID-19 vaccination on FBI blacklists, according to whistleblowers. This behavior at SLS seems far worse to me than declining an experimental vaccine that was improperly tested.
It is even worse for potential future lawyers to advocate rape and murder. From my viewing of the protests, it is clear to me that the only way that Duncan got on and off campus safely was that he was accompanied by two heavily armed Federal Marshals. This is ridiculous. What are we training these future lawyers to do, by permitting and even ENCOURAGING such activities? Is this what we want in our legal system in the future? Our legal system has already been weaponized and politicized. This would just be another step down a very dangerous path.
Over what issue were the SLS students protesting? That a biological male and apparent pedophile Norman Varner/ Katherine Nicole Jett should be allowed to manipulate the system. Varner/Jett wanted the court to order the change of his arrest records and all court documents retroactively to show his/her new preferred gender. Varner/Jett also wanted the judge to order the inmates at the prison to treat Varner/Jett as a female. This appears to be an attempt to gain entry to a woman's prison. And judge Duncan said he did not have the power to do this and that he would not do it.
This perfectly reasonable ruling infuriated more than 50% of the SLS freshman class, so they protested and were on the verge of physical violence, by all appearances. They were also furious that the Dean of the SLS apologized, albeit belatedly, for this outrageous demonstration staged by the students, aided by her own administrative staff. Stanford had promised security for the event and had also promised that there would be no unrest when Judge Duncan was reluctant to accept the invitation. Stanford basically misrepresented their preparations and the situation, in the extreme. They lied.
In fact, all DEI personnel at Stanford should be terminated. Have you ever witnessed DEI training sessions? They are atrocious "struggle sessions" where illiterate buffoons throw tantrums and berate the audience; they are a disgrace. You can find videos online of people like Ashleigh Shackleford plying her trade:
https://www.tpusa.com/live/woman-says-all-white-people-are-racist-demons
The statistics show that DEI programs make things worse. They just encourage people to hate each other. They do not even fulfill their own stated goals, according to Harvard Business School studies.
One of my mentors advocates the termination of 99% of all administrative staff at these schools. That might be a bit extreme, but in Stanford's case, where they outnumber the students, it might be starting to get realistic.
I also think that the President of SFSU and SFSU should be forced to pay substantial sums for their treatment of Riley Gaines. All the students who can be identified in the videos protesting should be expelled.
The same should be done to the students at MIT who were calling for the slaughter of all Jews. They should be expelled, and if they are foreign students, deported.
Look, you will not agree with any of this because it is clear to me you are apparently not really particularly "Heterodox" at all. You obviously like the current situation and would prefer to convert every single university into a woke nightmare where mathematics is banned and the scientific method is forbidden. Why you would want this is beyond me, but that appears to be the situation.
Pardon my impertinence, but I wonder that if this appeals to you so much, why have you not acted accordingly? As someone who appears to be of European extraction and male, two characteristics which are not at all welcome and do not belong anywhere in academia or STEM according to woke ideology, why have you not resigned your position accordingly? Why did you even get an education in STEM? All of these things are verboten, you know. Are you not "down with the struggle"? Why not put your money where your mouth is? According to anti-racist principles and DEI, you are a representative of the oppressor class who must be banished from STEM and academia at all costs. You do realize this, don't you?
You know the famous apothegm, "To make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs". And if we are not willing to take extreme action, or at least advocate that extreme actions be considered, STEM will die. There is very little doubt of this in my mind.
You (Octave) wrote, "All the students who can be identified in the videos protesting should be expelled."
I wonder how many others here support such a position. How many don't? How many here are willing to admonish you that your bellicose truculence and hyperbole is not helping - it's hurting.
You also wrote, "Look, you will not agree with any of this because it is clear to me you are apparently not really particularly "Heterodox" at all. You obviously like the current situation and would prefer to convert every single university into a woke nightmare where mathematics is banned and the scientific method is forbidden."
I wonder how many others here would support such straw manning. Again, I wonder if anyone here is willing to call you on this, other than me?
Since this is a STEM post, it might not be remiss to point out that loss of trust in science has multiple causes, critical social theory aka woke being only one. And the natural, human tendency under such circumstances is to defensively overstate scientific authority. Some introspection may be called for around that as well.
Thanks to both of you for this discussion. Yes, I agree that Haidt set up a false dichotomy, doing so tends to engender an us vs them discourse which probably isn't useful. Love Haidt, but no one is perfect
This is a thoughtful response. However, I think you are not as familiar with the ideology academia has been captured by as you perhaps should be.
In woke ideology, the very concept of "truth" is anathema. One is deemed a bigot and worse for even suggesting that "truth" exists. "Evidence" is an example of a hateful concept, so is "proof", so is "rationality", so is "reason", and logic, and so on.
This is why Haidt suggests that there be a schism of sorts in higher education. We would have religious schools, we would have "truth" schools and we would have social justice schools. The social justice category has become toxic, or even dangerous, to anyone who is not similarly brainwashed into this cult of wokeness, or as some have deemed it, "weaponized compassion" or a "mind virus" (a term used by Musk).
I would draw your attention to the attitudes of both Peter Boghossian and Jordan Peterson, for example. Both are academics and both believe that higher education (at most of the current extant institutions), at least in the US and Canada, is so corrupt that it cannot be reformed. Christopher Rufo is attempting a reform effort in Florida, but it is meeting a lot of resistance. Will Rufo be successful? Time will tell.
MIT has reportedly taken one step back towards sanity, by reinstituting the SAT. For years, MIT has been roiled in infighting over the rewriting of its "mission statement". A substantial and clearly powerful group wants to do away with any mention of excellence, or even merit or competence, in hiring and admissions. In other words, there are forces that are desperate to destroy MIT as an institution of any note. Will they succeed? We are going to find out.
The accreditation entities are also massive problems for anyone attempting to create a new college or university, like the University of Austin or Ralston College or the Peterson Academy. We probably need to completely discard the concept of accreditation or reform it drastically.
For example, I would propose that we need metrics like "tooth to tail" ratios of academic institutions. The more deadweight like administrators that exist at an institution, the lower this ratio would be. Everyone, including funding agencies and donors and parents and students should have some way of gauging the efficiency of the institution they are considering devoting resources to. Another set of useful metrics could be the ideological diversity of the student body and the faculty and the support staff and the administration. Metrics like careers of the alumni, and graduation statistics would also be valuable. These could all be publicly available, and considered in accreditation as well.
I have subscribed for years to the Chronicle of Higher Education. They are completely oblivious to the problem. And they are totally in control and they will never willingly give up control and power. They do not really care what faculty or the students think.
Look at the inquiry and trial of Professor Jordan Peterson in Ontario. It is a perfect example of the problem. According to this situation, if someone is overweight, no one is "allowed" to notice the person is excessively heavy or at risk of health issues. If an academic or professional notices this and mentions it in public, their professional and academic career is forfeit. According to this ruling, an academic or professional is not allowed to express an opinion deemed to be contrary to some arbitrary political narrative, whether or not it is within their expertise or purview. And the list of violations and potential violations that Peterson has supposedly committed is long indeed, and close to nonsensical. Take a look. It is like following Alice down the rabbit hole.
We are not that far away from the situation that existed in Nazi Germany, where Jewish academics were terminated. Wokeness is profoundly antisemitic in its nature, as Elon Musk has noted. If we apply "equity", or even worse, "anti-racism", there would be almost no Jews left in the academy, as faculty or students. We might even get rid of almost all whites and "white-adjacents", like South and East Asians.
This was the goal of a committee that disgraced plagiarist Claudine Gay created at Harvard. The committee was supposed to erase any possible trace and history of whites and in particular, white males, at Harvard. She resigned before this could really get rolling, but that was the stated goal.
We are also not that far away from what happened in Mao's cultural revolution where academics and intellectuals were sent out of the institutions to do brutal manual labor, or sent to prison labor camps, and were subject to abuse and torture and execution. Or even worse, under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia anyone deemed to be too educated or intellectual (such as knowing how to read and write or even wearing glasses) was viewed as some enemy of the people and killed. Before Vietnam intervened militarily, 1/3 of Cambodia's population had been murdered.
Also, remember what happened to the Islamic Civilization when they turned on their intellectual class after the second most influential man in Islam, Al-Ghazali, wrote his treatise, "The Incoherence of the Philosophers". Most of the institutions of higher learning were destroyed, as were libraries and observatories and laboratories. Most of the scholars were slaughtered. And Islamic culture entered a dark age for a millennia, from which it still has not really emerged.
These undercurrents and forces exist in the population. And it would not take very much to set them off in North America. Our colleges and universities are steeped in similar attitudes and viewpoints.
Severe and drastic action is called for. Or else, all will be lost.
"ask yourself if each has to have a single telos"
Obviously, yes. McDonald's mission is to sell food, mainly burgers, to the public. It does not sell hardware, that is Home Depot's mission.
And the walking and chewing gum analogy is a non sequitur. McDonald's can have Ronald McDonald and chicken nuggets, but that doesn't change its mission.
Google an five seconds later...McDonald's Mission Statement. "Our mission is to make delicious feel-good moments easy for everyone....we define McDonald’s as a brand our people, and the people we serve, can trust." https://corporate.mcdonalds.com/corpmcd/our-company/who-we-are/our-values.html
"The Company operates and franchises McDonald’s restaurants,
which serve a locally-relevant menu of quality food and drinks sold
at various price points in more than 100 countries."
Still wrong, PM.
:-)
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/63908/000006390816000103/mcd1231201510k.pdf
You're a special sort Alex. Bless your heart.
And the same to you!
Having done some checking, I would agree with this assessment.
Right now, the baby is dead. There is nothing but putrid bathwater. We should throw everything away.
Although I hate to say it, this appears to be more and more accurate.
Unless something substantial happens, nothing will happen and things will just continue to get worse. For example, unless there is some serious competition to the current institutions, they will refuse to change. Unless their funding is cut, they will refuse to change. Unless they lose applicants, they won't change. And so on and so forth.
The people in power, those who have created or allowed the current situation, are far too complacent and arrogant and comfortable with the status quo. Why should they modify anything? There is nothing to compel them to do so, and they personally feel pretty good with how things are and the direction things are headed. They have either acquiesced to the current developments, or they have had a hand in plotting the current course of action.
I would agree with this comment. What is needed is all of the above, and more.
And aside from 4 new academic institutions that are currently in the process of standing up in the US, I suspect there are many more being planned. And new varieties of institutions. I am involved with one myself that will be intended to supplement or compete with the existing failing institutions.
STEM institutions come and go, all the time. There was the Research Corporation of America that was a more or less failed attempted decades ago. There was the Rowland Institute for Science that got folded into Harvard. There was Alfred Lee Loomis' private R and D organization that eventually withered. The Edison Laboratories basically disappeared; the organizations that Edison's work created are not particularly interested in R and D or STEM. There was Bell Labs that basically collapsed through mismanagement, although the name sort of lives on. Kelly College at Bell Labs was far more rigorous and productive than any current academic institution, by leaps and bounds. There also were STEM R&D entities Bellcore and Bell Northern that more or less disappeared. IBM Research is a mere shadow of its former self. There are a range of nonprofit FFRDCs that are constantly evolving, mostly created after World War II. IST in Austria was stood up based on the same model as the reformed Weizmann Institute in Israel, and both are currently outrageously successful STEM institutions. There are a large and growing number of R and D organizations that James Simons is supporting with his private funds.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg.
I would argue that our STEM institutions in North America have gone off track. So, every possible effort from every possible direction should be attempted to clean up the mess we have allowed to develop.
We need to be clear-eyed about the current issues, and then act accordingly.
I might also remind the reader that if one goes back 150 years ago or possibly a bit more, US and Canadian academic institutions and R and D entities were mostly sort of an embarrassment. If a serious student wanted to pursue advanced studies, they went to Europe. Period.
This was still the situation when Oppenheimer wanted to continue his studies. The Ivy League schools were mostly slightly retooled religious training schools. There were "normal schools" for training grade school teachers. There were very few real American graduate schools. There were a few technical training institutes for creating skilled craftsmen scattered around. What became both Caltech and MIT were originally organizations of this type. University of Chicago and a few other institutions were novel experiments in the sort of "backwards" United States. This was not that long ago, relatively speaking.
When Benjamin Franklin wanted to study printing, he had to go to London, which he did. The founders of the US might have been educated at some institutions that are currently prestigious in the US, but they were mostly auto-didacts.
Franklin was a perfect example of an auto-didact of prodigious capabilities. I have read some of the biographies of Franklin, and the authors are so clueless and uneducated (even the "celebrated" famous biographers) that they are not able to approach a reasonable judgement of Franklin.
So, there is no specially ordained rule that says that the current academic situation in the US is static and was always the way it is now and always will be the way it is now. Things change, and evolve. And they always have.
And we better get ready to evolve, or else.
Hi - just curious about the Research Corp. Is this one and the same as the one you mentioned? https://rescorp.org/ I was a Cottrell Scholar decades ago, and R.C. is still doing its thing. I wouldn't describe it as a failure. If it is the same as the one you mentioned, then why do you describe it as more or less a failed attempt? (at what?) I recall that its original plan was to get some altruistic scientists to donate their patents to it, to foster more scientific innovation. I haven't checked much or lately, but I was generally under the impression that that "business model" did not succeed a lot. I did know well one famous scientist who signed over a patent to it, a very generous act, because it was the maser/laser patent. The return was good, but nothing like it would have been if the lifetime of a patent wasn't limited to 17 years (at that time, in the USA).
I also have a close friend who worked inside your own institution for decades. And she came away with extremely ugly stories. And burned plenty of bridges on the way out as she confronted them with the reality of what she had observed; the dishonesty, the theft, the fraud, the nonsense. You think your own institution is immune to problems? And you think the solution is "more social justice" and substituting adjunct faculty for real faculty? While continuing to charge more and more tuition for basically worthless degrees? Really?
Yes, there are a few Cottrell Scholars. But as you say, the "business model" did not succeed. A handful of "Cottrell Scholars" is nothing compared to the original plans for the organization.
Sure, it is better than nothing. However...it is still pretty paltry. There have been 18,000 Cottrell Scholars. So, how many Cottrell Scholars have really contributed substantially after their support? There are a few dozen Nobel Laureates among the former Cottrell Scholars, which is not that shabby, but it is still way less than 1%. However, before I started researching these sorts of organizations, I had never even heard of them. I have never even met a single Cottrell Scholar, and I have spent extensive amounts of time at elite institutions for decades. That is how obscure they are.
In that sense, I maintain that it still effectively failed. The plans did not work, and the present organization is a mere shadow of what was originally envisioned. It is just an endowment that hands out fellowships. That is it. Just a pool of cash, period.
I might also mention that patents are a model that has failed pretty much as well. They were supposed to be a tool for innovators to garner some benefit for a short period of time, having a monopoly, and after the monopoly period expired, the discovery or invention would be open to everyone. This no longer works very well. I am not sure it ever really worked as it was intended.
The patent laws, at least in the US and probably a few other places, just are weaponry for large corporate interests to attack small innovators now. You will notice that most organizations require all innovators to give all their rights up to everything they think of, even on their time off, even if it is something outside the scope of their employment. Some even attempt to enforce these rules on people who have left the organization.
Some universities offer a 50/50 cut to innovators. But for the most part, US and Canadian universities are not interested in capitalizing on innovation. Their "departments" for doing this are not skilled at evaluating discoveries and inventions. And they mostly do nothing at all, as near as I can tell. They are just window-dressing. And the intellectual property they have access to is mostly just scattered to the wind, except in a tiny fraction of cases.
"Without looking inward at what problems exist, academia may make no course correction at all, or any course correction will make things worse."
"Academia" is an umbrella term at best, or really a generalization encompassing all sorts of schools and teachers (which I'm sure we all know)—but my point is no one wakes up wondering how their actions will affect "academia" just as no business person wonders how they'll affect the overall "economy" and I don't step outside wondering what my life or deeds says about the "human race".
People respond to immediate personal incentives in their lives and environments, and to get to my point: in most of academia and culture now throughout the West, all incentives point toward always publicly obeying and propagating the Social Justice faith (while a million sharp-edged punishments await those who dissent), and this goes for both True Believers and for those who need to pretend to be True Believers for either career or personal reasons. (I don't work in academia but in culture, and I can tell you the same exact dynamics and the same total ideological capture exist in TV, movies, art galleries and museums, documentaries, theater, etc.)
The best books that I think illustrate our moment are Festinger's "When Prophecy Fails", which introduced the concept of cognitive dissonance and showed that once someone has committed themselves body and soul to a faith or belief, they will say and do anything not to have to admit that their sacred belief was mistaken or foolish—even up to death or injury or penury.
And also, Barbara Tuchman's "March of Folly" which shows how a certain group or a leader and their backers will refuse to change their minds, will make the gravest errors, if all incentives in the moment make it impossible to dissent and make obedience the coin of the realm.
In ideological-captured America, we have reached a similar situation and these things usually play out the same way: there will simply be no overthrowing or replacing the Social Justice faith among our cultural and academia class (that ship sailed many years ago), the capture is way too complete, these people will just have to create enough wreckage until some higher force steps in to end it.
In our case it probably won't be a dictator (though that's possible), but most likely a major war or depression that finally reveals Social Justice to be both a massive lie and a massive failure, similar to what ultimately undid the Soviet Union.
Yes I think you are correct. This is why it is almost impossible to work within the current system, and reform it from within.
One needs massive leverage to change things because the current system is completely rotten. But no one dares to point that out because it is just too dangerous for them personally.
My only expertise here is that I was a Lit major at a private liberal-arts college way back in the 80s and so was there at the birth of this rough beast that's swallowed the Western brain, which I think back then was called "postmodern Critical Studies".
Even then it was obvious that this ideology was a dagger aimed at Western liberalism and that it replicated many patterns of Marxism, its ideological forebear: dogmatic, intolerant of dissent, Manichaean, and aiming to move the "class struggle" into other realms (most esp race and sexual relations), with the goal of deconstructing all established arrangements, values, definitions etc.
There were warning signs since then—the Sokal hoax, the horrific treatment of people like Ed Wilson or Alice Dreger or Napoleon Chagnon, along with all the speech codes and things like "Western Civ has got to go" @ Stanford...
But by now any opposition is too little way too late: the Crit Theorists masterstroke was piggybacking on the triumphs and morality of the Civil Rights Movement and presenting themselves as Official Defenders of the Oppressed. Once they locked that in, the liberal class was disarmed and lost any ability or vocabulary to oppose them, as any opposition would be met by a massive attack of bigotry accusations. Thus the Crit Theorists marched unimpeded from victory to victory and here we are...
American academia in 2024 is like Dante's Inferno and should come with the same warning: Abandon all hope ye who enter.
Yes. This is a dangerous rampaging ideology. And it will be very difficult if not impossible to bring it to heel.
We are dealing with an ideological wildfire akin to things like Marxism, Jacobinism, Mao's Red Guards, except most of all that took place in more violent and unstable societies, where eventually the ruling clique either spilled too much blood or their ideological incompetence led to things like famine and state collapse (Soviets, Cubans, Pol Pot come to mind).
But in our case, America is still by far the richest country in the world, has a mostly well-functioning govt and society and American academia sleeps soundly every night on a mattress stuffed w billions in subsidies. So in this case it's hard to say what lies up ahead: we could be one social or environmental cataclysm away from a serious social reckoning where teaching bespoke pronouns seems a decadent luxury that can no longer be afforded, or I could see the opposite and the American Empire waxing strong and fat for the rest of the century, after its rulers having converted en masse to the Social Justice faith like the Romans did w Christianity.
There's a lot of ruin in a nation—I guess at some point we'll learn exactly how much is in ours.
We have too much debt, and too much inefficiency and our unfunded mandates are far too large. This cannot continue.
We are spending money we do not have. We are not near as innovative as we used to be, and one can hear the complaints about this all over the place. The US is well on its way to losing reserve currency status, which will hike interest rates drastically. The housing market and the commercial real estate markets are very shaky at the moment. We have not elevated our own under-class, and we are frantically importing millions more uneducated, unvetted, third world unproductive elements. Many are criminals or worse. They get a free pass on any illegal activity and a free ride since the uniparty says so.
We are imposing ESG and CEI and CRT and DEI (or as I call it, IED) and anti-racism and wokism and lowering standards left right and center for various professions and careers. We pat ourselves on the back about how wonderful and "fair" it all is. Is this improving things or making things worse? Corporations that have bought into this nonsense are suffering badly. What is their response? To double and triple down on the same failed strategies.
White males are no longer enlisting in the military (the levels have dropped more than 50% in the last 5 years). About 65% of those in the current US military would never recommend that a family member enlist. The service academies like Annapolis and West Point, which offered sought-after prestigious positions, are having trouble filling their quotas. These are signs of trouble.
The Secretary of Defense even advanced a plan (which he backed off of once it was made public) about persecuting and arresting and court martialing and worse any service member who was discovered to have voted the "wrong way". There was a similar proposal to "sanitize" the FBI of people guilty of "wrong think". One former presidential candidate has advocated setting up concentration camps and re-education camps for people who voted for the wrong party (the "deplorables"). Many in the mainstream media applauded this and repeated this threat.
White males are rejecting college educations, increasingly. Twenty years ago, about 80% of US MDs were Republicans; now the statistics have almost completely reversed and the vast majority are Democrats.
"White adjacents" like those from South and East Asia are increasingly being targeted because it is supposedly "unfair" that they excel. We are far more comfortable with failure and incompetence, I guess.
There is a massive attack on Jews throughout US Academia. In some parts of STEM, Jews form the vast majority of the workforce. In the name of "fairness", just like the Nazis, will we drive them out of STEM?
So, considering everything, I think it is highly unlikely that everything will just sail along as it currently is, with no problems and everyone just getting richer and richer and more comfortable.
In the words of the famous aphorism, "What can't continue, won't."
The signs of strain are everywhere. About 30 years ago, about half of US faculty were adjunct faculty (a huge increase from 10 or 20 years previous to that point). About 15 years ago, the fraction of US faculty that were adjuncts had just crossed the 75% level. These people are paid peanuts and have no benefits. Increasingly, the qualifications of people willing to accept these positions is dropping. Meanwhile, the costs of college continue to skyrocket.
The ranks of highly paid administrators who do not teach and do not do research and do not raise funds and cannot be fired grows uncontrollably. At Stanford and Yale (and possibly other schools as well), there are now more administrators than there are students.
Obviously, this situation cannot continue. No trees grow to the sky.
Thanks for this!! Excellent!!
A couple minor quibbles. 1) The question about genocide was in the form of "why do you beat your wife?" since the claim that particular groups were calling for genocide was unverified. And I believe, false. 2) I am curious if FIRE's decision to rank Harvard last was based on anything. It certainly deserved to be ranked near the bottom, but I didn't see any evidence in the FIRE report that would clearly place it below Penn et al.
Your essay has sparked some good comments. A few of which mention some new universities. It is amazing and daunting to me to imagine starting a new university. Not just a new campus of an existing university, but a whole new one. Like most new businesses, these new universities are likely to fail - just in the sense that many previous attempts have been rare and generally not long lived. An example of that is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_University . I recall a past President of the American Astronomical Society was associated with Quest - as President of it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Helfand who was a heterodox thinker and doer. The story of Quest might be worth reading for anyone thinking of getting involved in a new university. Why did it close its doors in 2023 after 16 years? Ran out of money.
Of course, resources are everything. Without resources, nothing will work.