“TWITTER HAS A REMARKABLE POWER TO MAKE WELL-CREDENTIALED PEOPLE LOOK LIKE FOOLS:” Six Ways Harvard’s Joyce Chaplin Is Wrong About the Creation of the U.S.

Credentialed-but-not-educated, to coin an Insta-leitmotif. Fortunately, Ted Cruz helpfully explains early American history to the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University in 140 easy to follow characters.

HE’S WRONG. I DON’T OFTEN SAY THIS ABOUT A FRIEND, BUT HE’S COMPLETELY WRONG:  Education can’t be fixed until this is addressed.

Oh, not about the underperformance of males being a problem. He’s right about that. But he’s dead wrong about this system being deisgned by males, and about there being no conspiracy.  Schools are the main battle front of the war on males and maleness. There are practically no male teachers. And the female teachers are full of feminism and convinced women are oppressed. Flunking a little boy while giving a little girl high grades is part of their strike against the patriarchy. A society that believes every female is oppressed and every male an oppressor cannot be fair. And isn’t. And thereby fails both males and females. Males give up and drop out of the system. Females end up credentialed and maleducated.

This must be fixed. But first we have to admit what’s causing it.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Twilight of the Wonks.

Impostor syndrome isn’t always a voice of unwarranted self-doubt that you should stifle. Sometimes, it is the voice of God telling you to stand down. If, for example, you are an academic with a track record of citation lapses, you might not be the right person to lead a famous university through a critical time. If you are a moral jellyfish whose life is founded on the “go along to get along” principle and who recognizes only the power of the almighty donor, you might not be the right person to serve on the board of an embattled college when the future of civilization is on the line. And if you are someone who believes that “misgenderment” is a serious offense that demands heavy punishment while calls for the murder of Jews fall into a gray zone, you will likely lead a happier and more useful life if you avoid the public sphere.

The spectacle of the presidents of three important American universities reduced to helpless gibbering in a 2023 congressional hearing may have passed from the news cycle, but it will resonate in American politics and culture for a long time. Admittedly, examination by a grandstanding member of Congress seeking to score political points at your expense is not the most favorable forum for self-expression. Even so, discussing the core mission of their institutions before a national audience is an event that ought to have brought out whatever mental clarity, moral earnestness, and rhetorical skills that three leaders of major American institutions had. My fear is it did exactly that.

The mix of ideas and perceptions swirling through the contemporary American academy is not, intellectually, an impressive product. A peculiar blend of optimistic enlightened positivism (History is with us!) and anti-capitalist, anti-rationalist rage (History is the story of racist, genocidal injustice!) has somehow brought “Death to the Gays” Islamism, “Death to the TERFS” radical identitarianism, and “Jews are Nazis” antisemitism into a partnership on the addled American campus. This set of perceptions—too incoherent to qualify as an ideology—can neither withstand rational scrutiny, provide the basis for serious intellectual endeavor, nor prepare the next generation of American leaders for the tasks ahead. It has, however, produced a toxic stew in which we have chosen to marinate the minds of our nation’s future leaders during their formative years.

American universities remain places where magnificent things are happening. Medical breakthroughs, foundational scientific discoveries, and tech innovations that roar out of the laboratories to transform the world continue to pour from the groves of academe, yet simultaneously many campuses seem overrun not only with the usual petty hatreds and dreary fads, but also at least in some quarters with a horrifying collapse in respect for the necessary foundations of American democracy and civic peace.

Sitting atop these troubled institutions, we have too many “leaders” of extraordinary mediocrity and conventional thinking, like the three hapless presidents blinking and stammering in the glare of the television lights. Assaulted by the angry, noisy proponents of an absurdist worldview, and under pressure from misguided diktats emanating from a woke, activist-staffed Washington bureaucracy, administrators and trustees have generally preferred the path of appeasement. Those who best flourish in administrations of this kind are careerist mediocrities who specialize in uttering the approved platitudes of the moment and checking the appropriate identity boxes on job questionnaires. Leaders recruited from these ranks will rarely shine when crisis strikes.

The aftermath of the hearings was exactly what we would expect. UPenn, which needs donors’ money, folded like a cheap suit in the face of a donor strike. Harvard, resting on its vast endowment, arrogantly dismissed its president’s critics until the board came to the horrifying realization that it was out of step with the emerging consensus of the social circles in which its members move. There was nothing thoughtful, brave, or principled about any of this, and the boards of these institutions are demonstrably no wiser or better than those they thoughtlessly place in positions of great responsibility and trust.

Credentialed, not educated, to coin an Insta-phrase.

Flashback: The Suicide of Expertise.

NIALL FERGUSON: THE TREASON OF THE INTELLECTUALS.

It might be thought extraordinary that the most prestigious universities in the world should have been infected so rapidly with a politics imbued with antisemitism. Yet exactly the same thing has happened before.

A hundred years ago, in the 1920s, by far the best universities in the world were in Germany. By comparison with Heidelberg and Tübingen, Harvard and Yale were gentlemen’s clubs, where students paid more attention to football than to physics. More than a quarter of all the Nobel prizes awarded in the sciences between 1901 and 1940 were awarded to Germans; only 11 percent went to Americans. Albert Einstein reached the pinnacle of his profession not in 1933, when he moved to Princeton, but from 1914 to 1917, when he was appointed professor at the University of Berlin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics, and as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Even the finest scientists produced by Cambridge felt obliged to do a tour of duty in Germany.

Yet the German professoriat had a fatal weakness. For reasons that may be traced back to the foundation of the Bismarckian Reich or perhaps even further into Prussian history, academically educated Germans were unusually ready to prostrate themselves before a charismatic leader, in the belief that only such a leader could preserve the purity of the German nationalist project.

Today’s progressives engage in racism in the name of diversity. The nationalist academics of interwar Germany were at least overt about their desire for homogeneity and exclusion.

Marianne Weber recalled how, in the wake of the 1918 Revolution, her husband Max had explained his theory of democracy to the former supreme military commander, General Erich Ludendorff:

Weber: Do you think that I regard the Schweinerei that we now have as democracy?

Ludendorff: What is your idea of a democracy, then?

Weber: In a democracy, the people choose a leader whom they trust. Then the chosen man says, “Now shut your mouths and obey me.” The people and the parties are no longer free to interfere in the leader’s business.

Ludendorff: I should like such a “democracy.”

Weber: Later, the people can sit in judgment. If the leader has made mistakes—to the gallows with him!

Rudy Koshar’s study of the university town of Marburg in Hesse illustrates the way this culture led German academia toward the Nazis. The mainly Protestant student fraternities already excluded Jews from membership before World War I. In March 1920, in the turbulent aftermath of the revolution that had overthrown the imperial regime and established the Weimar Republic, a student paramilitary group was involved in a murderous attack on Communist workers. In the national elections held four years later, the Völkisch-Sozialer Bloc—of which the early Nazi Party (the NSDAP) was a key part—won 17.7 percent of the Marburg vote.

Lawyers and doctors, all credentialed with university degrees, were substantially overrepresented within the NSDAP, as were university students (then a far narrower section of society than today). To middle-aged lawyers, Hitler was the heir to Bismarck. For their sons, he was the Wagnerian hero Rienzi, the demagogue who unites the people of Rome.

Even a man who considered himself a liberal, as Max Weber surely did, was susceptible to the allure of charismatic leadership when the fledgling democracy seemed so weak. Three years after Weber’s death in 1920, Germany was plunged into disastrous hyperinflation. For many German academics, Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in January 1933 was a moment of national salvation.

Related: An ‘Eichmann Trial’ for Hamas’s Crimes. “The Oct. 7 version of Holocaust deniers have come out of the woodwork already, existing as they do in a postmodern world of ‘living your truth.’ The library of evidence that Israel is currently building is the proper antidote to the lobotomizing poison of such a world.”

BECAUSE THEY ARE? Freddie DeBoer: Why Do So Many Elites Feel Like Losers?

The concept of “elite overproduction” has attracted a lot of attention in the past several years, and it’s not hard to see why. Most associated with Peter Turchin, a researcher who has attempted to develop models that describe and predict the flow of history, elite overproduction refers to periods during which societies generate more members of elite classes than the society can grant elite privileges. Turchin argues that these periods often produce social unrest, as the resentful elites jostle for the advantages to which they believe they’re entitled.

Consider societies in which aristocrats enjoy feudal privileges over land and are afforded influence in government. These sorts of dynastic privileges have been common in world history. Now imagine that over time, the number of people in this class has grown; more and more children of aristocrats means there are more and more people who hold aristocratic status. This creates a math problem: there’s only so much land to divide up and only so many people that can meaningfully guide government. The elites who have been denied their advantaged position in society, sometimes a literal birthright, will often respond to this denial with political and social unrest, and sometimes with violence.

Elite overproduction has been on my mind because of a condition that, I find, grows more acute over time: the sense that many people, particularly the college-educated and the financially secure, are deeply unsatisfied with their status in society. It’s impossible to quantify these feelings, but I think many would agree with me about a pervasive sense of discontent among people who have elite aspirations and who feel that their years toiling in our meritocratic systems entitles them to fulfill those aspirations. Recent political upheaval has given voice to this unhappiness. I personally am a supporter of a new economic system and the socialist movements that began with Occupy Wall Street. But I also recognize the influence of elite overproduction in those movements; an essential part of their genesis was when graduates of top colleges found themselves unable to get the jobs they thought they deserved after the financial crisis. That anger has only spread and intensified since.

Is it “impostor syndrome” if you really are an impostor? Because many of our elites are, to judge by performance.

Or maybe it’s that people succeed in the early phases of life but can’t stay on top as they advance. We kind of see this in law school, where our students come in having been at the top ten percent of their college class — but only ten percent of them can be in the top ten percent of their law class.

Regarding Occupy Wall Street, Kenneth Anderson had some thoughts on this quite a while ago:

In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites. The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. . . . The OWS protestors are a revolt — a shrill, cri-de-coeur wail at the betrayal of class solidarity — of the lower tier New Class against the upper tier New Class. It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites. The downward mobility is real, however, in both income and status. The Cal graduate started out wanting to do ‘sustainable conservation.’ She is now engaged in something closer to subsistence farming.

It’s easy to have a comfortable life now, but people have been raised to crave distinction.

People didn’t used to do that. My mother tells about how she and a friend were primping for a college beauty contest and telling each other they were ready for Miss America. Her mother stuck her head in the door and said, essentially, don’t get your hopes up. You’re pretty, but you’re not that pretty. Bringing kids back to earth was considered good parenting back then, but now it’s considered dream-crushing. No surprise that many people have unfulfilled expectations.

It’s probably made worse now that our elite class is so uniform, meaning that people are comparing themselves with a larger set of competitors. You can’t be a big fish in a small pond if it’s the same big pond for all of your peers.

CHANGE: Employers Rethink Need for College Degrees in Tight Labor Market: Google, Delta Air Lines and IBM have reduced requirements for some positions.

Companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Delta Air Lines Inc. and International Business Machines Corp. have reduced educational requirements for certain positions and shifted hiring to focus more on skills and experience. Maryland this year cut college-degree requirements for many state jobs—leading to a surge in hiring—and incoming Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro campaigned on a similar initiative.

U.S. job postings requiring at least a bachelor’s degree were 41% in November, down from 46% at the start of 2019 ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to an analysis by the Burning Glass Institute, a think tank that studies the future of work. Degree requirements dropped even more early in the pandemic. They have grown since then but remain below prepandemic levels. . . .

The majority of its U.S. roles at IBM no longer require a four-year degree after the company conducted a review of hiring practices, IBM spokeswoman Ashley Bright said.

Delta eased its educational requirements for pilots at the start of this year, saying a four-year college degree was preferred but no longer required of job applicants.

Walmart Inc., the country’s largest private employer, said it values skills and knowledge gained through work experience and that 75% of its U.S. salaried store management started their careers in hourly jobs.

“We don’t require degrees for most of our jobs in the field and increasingly in the home office as well,” Kathleen McLaughlin, Walmart executive vice president, said at an online event this fall. The company’s goal is to shift the “focus from the way someone got their skills, which is the degree, to what skills do they have.”

A four-year college degree holder has more lifetime earnings than one without. The lifetime earnings of a worker with a high-school diploma is $1.6 million while that of a bachelor’s degree holder is $2.8 million, according to a 2021 report by the Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University.

But many people don’t finish college and are left with mountains of debt—more than 43 million people in the U.S. hold a total of $1.6 trillion in student-loan debt. While a college degree can provide specific workplace skills, workers can gain the skills needed for many jobs without a four-year degree.

Black and Hispanic people are less likely to have a college degree compared with white and Asian people, according to the Commerce Department. Men are less likely than women. . . .

Mr. Deitchman said since the policy change he is seeing more applicants and higher quality job applicants.

“I would rather have someone with experience,” he said. “It’s just something that should have been done years ago.”

Employers are learning the difference between credentialed and educated. All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

MICHAEL WALSH: What Is to be Done? Preparing the Information Battlespace.

The truth is, the Democrats were caught with their pants down in 2016, immediately vowed to never let it happen again, and then set about their four-year task of battlespace preparation. You can read all about how they did it in this by now-notorious piece in Time Magazine, which includes the following victory lap:

“There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes… They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears.”

All the supererogatory Trump rallies in the world couldn’t compete with that. Because while the president was jibing at the media and Joe Biden’s pathetic and infrequent public appearances, the real action was taking place at the state level, right under the Republican Party’s noses, and the principal battlefield was the media environment.

The corporate media has been drifting left for decades, self-selecting in its hires for progressive radicalism: overly credentialed, poorly educated, and rabidly partisan young reporters who weren’t smart enough to get into law school, but wanted to change the world anyway. Traditional notions of objectivity and even-handedness had been vanishing for years but in 2016, the New York Times abandoned all pretense to fairness and issued a call to arms:

“If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that,” wrote Jim Rutenberg in August 2016. “You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional… Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?”

Once absolved by the Mother Church of Progressivism (and now Wokism), “journalists” everywhere went to work on Trump with a pair of pliers and a blowtorch. Although they failed to swing the election that year, their opposition only intensified during the “resistance” as they unabashedly allied themselves with the Democrat Party and gleefully functioned as anti-Trump propaganda outlets 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And that’s where the battle was lost. Enough suburban white wine moms were trained to recoil at Trump’s “mean tweets” and to gravitate toward a clearly senescent Biden in the name of civility.

Which civility never appeared.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Our Bankrupt Nomenklatura. “Take all the signature brand names that the Baby Boomers inherited from prior generations—Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, NPR, CNN, the Oscars, the NFL, the NBA, the FBI, the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford foundations, and a host of others. And then ask whether they enhanced or diminished such inheritances.”

Plus:

What explains the bankruptcy of the elite?

We have confused credentials with merit—as we learned when Hollywood stars and rich people tried to bribe and buy their mostly lackadaisical children into named schools, eager for the cattle brand BAs and without a care whether their offspring would be well educated.

Graduating from today’s Yale or Harvard law school is not necessarily a sign of achievement, much less legal expertise. Mostly, entrance into heralded schools is a reminder of past good prep school grades and test scores winning admittance—or using some sort of old-boy, networking, athletic, or affirmative action pull.

Being a “senior” official at some alphabet government agency also means little any more outside of the nomenklatura. Academia, the media, and entertainment industries are likewise supposedly meritocratic without being based on demonstrable worth. Otherwise, why would college graduates know so little, the media so often report fantasies as truth, and Hollywood focus on poor remakes? . . . To paraphrase an assessment found in Tacitus’s Agricola, the current American nomenklatura has all but ruined our institutions and branded all that success.

As I say, credentialed, not educated. Related: The Suicide Of Expertise.

Also, flashback:

Here’s a question, and it’s a fair one. What has the ruling class done right in the last 20 years?

Come on, betters, “wow” us with your mad society-running skillz.

We know what America achieved under the old ruling class. It beat the Nazis – the real Nazis, not the fake bugaboo “Nazis” that the left labels everyone to the right of Felonia Milhous von Pantsuit. It fought through the Depression. It trashed the Democrat’s Jim Crow regime. It designed the ’65 Mustang, created the Big Mac and put a man on the moon. It crushed the dirty commies in the Cold War. The old elite was not perfect, but at least you can point to some ticks in the “WIN” column.

Not so with the coterie of half-wits running our institutions today. It’s all check marks under “LOSS.” Iraq. The Wall Street Meltdown. Obamacare. Obama himself.

Oh, and then there’s Jeffrey Epstein.

Do you see a lot of successes? Do you see any? Have I overlooked some tremendous victory this generation of our betters pulled off? I can’t think of any offhand – gee, how about social media? Yeah, there’s progress.

Like I said.

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Andrew Yang’s New York Knicks Institutions Metaphor — The Darkest Metaphor Imaginable.

You have a leadership that can’t get out of its own way and then, when a legend like Charles Oakley comes back, or when a fan criticizes Dolan, he literally kicks them out of (Madison Square Garden) or bans them for life or does something that to me is the opposite of what you’d want a manager or leader to do. And so if you look at this and you’re a fan of the team, you’re like, ‘Wait a minute, I’m giving this team my energy and emotional investment and the owner clearly doesn’t care about me or my opinion.’

This, to me, is an emblem of what Americans feel about various institutions in different walks of life. If you look at our trust in the press, or Congress, or unfortunately even schools and hospitals, they’re all at multi-decade lows.

As Glenn has noted, “We have too many people who are credentialed rather than educated, and too many people who think their education creates an automatic entitlement. The problem isn’t with ‘merit’ rising to the top, the problem is that we have a false and destructive idea of what constitutes merit.”

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The dangers of anti-populism: It isn’t populists who threaten life, liberty and democracy in Europe – it’s anti-populists.

It isn’t populists who have been beating, shooting and maiming protesters in France for the past six months, causing scores of them to lose eyes and limbs. It’s anti-populists who are doing that.

It is the anti-populists’ hero, in fact – Emmanuel Macron – who is overseeing this extreme state violence and brutal clampdown on French liberty.

It isn’t populists who are seeking to overthrow the largest democratic vote in UK history – the vote for Brexit – and in the process threatening to undermine the very idea of the right to vote. It is anti-populists who are doing that.

It is anti-populists who, exactly as we have been celebrating the 100th anniversary of women and working-class men getting the vote, have tried to block the enactment of something that eight million women and millions of working-class men voted for: Brexit.

It isn’t populists who are marching through the streets in their thousands waving placards mocking the stupidity of ordinary people and demanding that the state unilaterally override these people’s democratic wishes. It’s anti-populists.

Throughout the West our university-credentialed-but-not-educated ruling class has been guilty of an entitled arrogance that is matched almost perfectly by its incompetence and ignorance.

THE PLASTIC TURKEY BAND ARE OFF ON ANOTHER WORLD TOUR: April Ryan, Leftists Beclown Themselves Over Sarah Sanders’ Thanksgiving Pecan Pie.

April Ryan, an inexplicably esteemed member of the White House press corps, having tried and failed to promote a “fake news” controversy over White House’s Press Secretary Sarah Sanders’ Thanksgiving pecan pie, has not apologized or acknowledged her error, has rejected Sanders’ face-saving attempt to smooth things over, and is apparently worried that Sanders will publicly poison her and her fellow journalists. You can’t make this stuff up.

Ryan’s history, as documented at NewsBusters, is full of embarrassing statements, unhinged rants, and stunning ignorance of very basic facts.

Not least of which, the CNN “political analyst” tweeting in July that a Trump official first coined the word “stagflation.”

Credentialed-but-not-educated – and the worst political class in American history, as Glenn likes to say, who have no idea how easily they’re being trolled by the administration over their past fake news and anti-GOP hyperbole.

(Classical reference in headline.)

WHEN PEOPLE ARGUE ABOUT MERITOCRACY, IT’S IMPORTANT TO REMEMBER THAT “EDUCATION” ISN’T THE SAME AS “MERIT.”

There’s a weird assumption throughout all these articles, that meritocracy is founded on the belief that smart people deserve good jobs as a reward for being smart. . . .

I think this is both entirely true and entirely missing the point. The intuition behind meritocracy is this: if your life depends on a difficult surgery, would you prefer the hospital hire a surgeon who aced medical school, or a surgeon who had to complete remedial training to barely scrape by with a C-? If you prefer the former, you’re a meritocrat with respect to surgeons. Generalize a little, and you have the argument for being a meritocrat everywhere else.

The Federal Reserve making good versus bad decisions can be the difference between an economic boom or a recession, and ten million workers getting raises or getting laid off. When you’ve got that much riding on a decision, you want the best decision-maker possible – that is, you want to choose the head of the Federal Reserve based on merit.

This has nothing to do with fairness, deserts, or anything else. If some rich parents pay for their unborn kid to have experimental gene therapy that makes him a superhumanly-brilliant economist, and it works, and through no credit of his own he becomes a superhumanly-brilliant economist – then I want that kid in charge of the Federal Reserve. And if you care about saving ten million people’s jobs, you do too.

Does this mean we just have to suck it up and let the truffle-eating Harvard-graduating elites at Chase-Bear-Goldman-Sallie-Manhattan-Stearns-Sachs-Mae-FEDGOV lord it over the rest of us?

No. The real solution to this problem is the one none of the anti-meritocracy articles dare suggest: accept that education and merit are two different things!

I work with a lot of lower- and working-class patients, and one complaint I hear again and again is that their organization won’t promote them without a college degree. Some of them have been specifically told “You do great work, and we think you’d be a great candidate for a management position, but it’s our policy that we can’t promote someone to a manager unless they’ve gone to college”. Some of these people are too poor to afford to go to college. Others aren’t sure they could pass; maybe they have great people skills and great mechanical skills but subpar writing-term-paper skills. Though I’ve met the occasional one who goes to college and rises to great heights, usually they sit at the highest non-degree-requiring tier of their organization, doomed to perpetually clean up after the mistakes of their incompetent-but-degree-having managers. These people have loads of merit. In a meritocracy, they’d be up at the top, competing for CEO positions. In our society, they’re stuck.

We have too many people who are credentialed rather than educated, and too many people who think their education creates an automatic entitlement. The problem isn’t with “merit” rising to the top, the problem is that we have a false and destructive idea of what constitutes merit.

CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT, PART 45. THE BANALITY OF CHELSEA:

Chelsea tweeted a link to a story about an arson fire at an LGBT center in Arizona with her coda about how it is an example of “the banality of evil”—the phrase made famous in Hannah Arendt’s controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem. [Prof. Corey Robin of Brooklyn College] thought this a gross misuse or misunderstanding of Arendt’s phrase, and naturally defaulted to the usual mode of progressives everywhere, hectoring Chelsea for her superficiality. And Chelsea responded!

There follows a lot of explication about Arendt’s phrase, but twice Robin describes Chelsea thus: “author of a best-selling book; vice chair of a powerful global foundation; former special correspondent to NBC; possible congressional candidate, with a net worth of $15 million; daughter of the former president of the United States; daughter of the former Secretary of State and almost-president of the United States,” adding that “We have in this country a really weird ruling class.”

Credentialed-but-not-educated – and the worst political class in American history, as Glenn likes to say.

Steve Hayward’s write-up of the exchange at Power Line is fun, but you really should read the full back and forth between Robin and Chelsea, plus Robin’s correct assessment of how Arendt coined her immortal phrase and what she intended it to mean.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Ann Althouse on a piece by NYU vice provost Ulrich Baer: “I don’t think I have ever read 4 consecutive sentences containing as much bad writing and bad thinking. I’m a bit awestruck at the badness. I’m certainly glad that it was published. I was going to criticize it, but I think it speaks for itself. I’ll just say thanks for hanging your ideas out where we can see them.”

Our credentialed-but-not-educated elites at work.

ELITISTS GOTTA ELITE:

From this week's @NewYorker pic.twitter.com/4EPsd4Eb1M

— Ben Taub (@bentaub91) January 2, 2017

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): “Do you want more Trump? Because this is how you get more Trump.”

Let me just add that our credentialed-but-not-educated elites have crashed the plane plenty of times. They always walk away unscathed afterward. The folks back in Economy Class, not so much.

JEFF JACOBY: The Experts Got 2016 Wrong. They’ll Get 2017 Wrong, Too.

2016! Was there ever such a year for making donkeys out of seers? A whole column could be filled with nothing but the names of sages and savants, supposedly adept in the ways of politics, who confidently assured everyone that Donald J. Trump couldn’t possibly win the Republican presidential nomination, let alone be elected president of the United States.

“If Trump is nominated, then everything we think we know about presidential nominations is wrong,” wrote Larry Sabato, whose highly regarded website at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics is called Sabato’s Crystal Ball. Peering into his crystal ball on Nov. 7, he saw Hillary Clinton poised to harvest 322 votes in the Electoral College, handily defeating Trump in the next day’s election.

Countless experts made similar predictions. “GOP insiders: Trump can’t win,” read a Politico headline last summer. Atop the story was the cocksure analysis of one of those insiders that nothing could keep Trump from losing short of “video evidence of a smiling Hillary drowning a litter of puppies while terrorists surrounded her with chants of ‘Death to America.’ ” Pollsters, politicians, and even the incumbent POTUS announced with perfect certitude that a Trump victory was off the table. Indeed, prophesied Damon Linker, senior correspondent at The Week, not only would Trump lose, he would “lose in the biggest landslide in modern American history.”

By no means was it only in the realm of US presidential politics that experts blew it.

At Fox Sports, Sam Gardner insisted on Opening Day that the Chicago Cubs “weren’t ready to make the leap” to the World Series. He was still insisting six months later that the Cubs’ World Series drought would persist.

Climate experts predicted that in the summer of 2016, for the first time in 100,000 years, the Arctic Ocean would be essentially ice-free. Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University, said the decline in sea ice was unstoppable. But when satellite images for September were released, they showed ice levels greater than they were in 2012.

Fortune magazine played up the doomsaying of Wall Street strategist Albert Edwards, who warned that 2016 would bring the biggest stock market crash in a generation. “The illusion of prosperity is shattered as boom now turns to bust,” Edwards wrote in January, amid a market swoon. Bust? By year’s end, the Dow was flirting with an all-time record high.

British experts of every description made the case for keeping the United Kingdom inside the European Union, and pollsters were sure Brexit would go down to defeat. But on the day of the election, voters tore up the script, handing the “Leave” campaign a victory margin of more than a million votes. Michael Gove, the UK’s justice minister and a leading Brexiteer, had been laughed at when he contended: “People in this country have had enough of experts.” Maybe the experts should have listened.

Maybe all of us should be more skeptical when experts are telling us what to think.

Experts and expertise have their place, but it is smaller than they imagine. And many “experts” fall into the credentialed but not educated category.

THE ECONOMIST: America’s New Aristocracy: As the importance of intellectual capital grows, privilege has become increasingly heritable.

Thomas Jefferson drew a distinction between a natural aristocracy of the virtuous and talented, which was a blessing to a nation, and an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, which would slowly strangle it. Jefferson himself was a hybrid of these two types—a brilliant lawyer who inherited 11,000 acres and 135 slaves from his father-in-law—but the distinction proved durable. When the robber barons accumulated fortunes that made European princes envious, the combination of their own philanthropy, their children’s extravagance and federal trust-busting meant that Americans never discovered what it would be like to live in a country where the elite could reliably reproduce themselves. . . .

Intellectual capital drives the knowledge economy, so those who have lots of it get a fat slice of the pie. And it is increasingly heritable. Far more than in previous generations, clever, successful men marry clever, successful women. Such “assortative mating” increases inequality by 25%, by one estimate, since two-degree households typically enjoy two large incomes. Power couples conceive bright children and bring them up in stable homes—only 9% of college-educated mothers who give birth each year are unmarried, compared with 61% of high-school dropouts. They stimulate them relentlessly: children of professionals hear 32m more words by the age of four than those of parents on welfare. They move to pricey neighbourhoods with good schools, spend a packet on flute lessons and pull strings to get junior into a top-notch college.

The universities that mould the American elite seek out talented recruits from all backgrounds, and clever poor children who make it to the Ivy League may have their fees waived entirely. But middle-class students have to rack up huge debts to attend college, especially if they want a post-graduate degree, which many desirable jobs now require. The link between parental income and a child’s academic success has grown stronger, as clever people become richer and splash out on their daughter’s Mandarin tutor, and education matters more than it used to, because the demand for brainpower has soared.

I don’t know, an awful lot of those Ivy League graduates are credentialed, but not educated. For them, I suppose, there’s always a career in journalism or politics.

ASHE SCHOW: ‘Yes means yes’ opposition: It’s about due process, not misogyny.

It’s easy enough for women writers to attack men who write against “yes means yes” laws as crude misogynists. But it’s a simple and lazy response that ignores all the women who oppose them as well based on concerns about due process rights.

Many big-name journalists have been writing about the “yes means yes” laws recently — Ezra Klein, Jonah Goldberg, Jonathan Chait — you may notice a pattern there. Salon’s Katie McDonough insinuated that Chait — who has written in opposition to the law — dismisses women’s opinions on the law in order to respond to a man – Klein.

I, too, received criticism when I interviewed four due process advocates with intimate knowledge of what a lack of such rights can cause. I was chastised for only interviewing men (naturally, I get no credit for being a woman).

But in fact, due process is important, and due-process advocacy is by no means exclusive to men.

Elizabeth Bartholet, one of 28 current and former Harvard Law professors who recently wrote in opposition to the university’s new sexual assault policy, told the Washington Examiner that while she had no “silver bullet” to creating a perfect policy, she did believe such a policy should take into account the rights of the accuser and the accused. . . .

“The government’s push is to suppress sexual activity to the max,” Bartholet wrote. “Many women, including many women’s rights advocates and many feminists, think this is a very wrong approach to the complex issues involved.”

Kimberly Lau, an attorney who is currently representing several young men suing their university for denying them due process, expanded on the idea that the new policy from the Obama administration, as well as California’s law, are degrading to women.

“For the last hundred years or so, I believe that a large part of the feminist movement was built on women striving for the equality of treatment between the genders,” Lau told the Examiner. “That said, with equality comes accountability and because of that, I find it offensive that there are presumptions being made about who should be in control of the sexual encounter even where both male and female students have been drinking.”

Credentialed-but-not-educated nitwits like Young Ezra won’t appreciate due process until they’re charged with something.

ANOTHER EDUCATION BUBBLE: Schooling has exploded in the Third World, but literacy and numeracy remain wretched. “The average Haitian and Bangladeshi today have more schooling than the average Frenchman or Italian in 1960.” But, like many of our own elites, they’re more credentialed than educated. And there’s evidence that the same factors are involved.

KIRSTEN POWERS: It’s appalling to hear the Washington bureaucrats and their media allies trash Edward Snowden as a traitor, when it’s our leaders and the NSA who have betrayed us. Strong words from a Democrat.

Plus this: “It says something about the lack of a positive case for keeping the NSA spying programs secret that the main line of defense is to attack Snowden for lacking the proper credentials to speak out against the government.” Well, our credentialed-but-not-educated elites place a lot of importance on credentials. What else have they got?

IS MERITOCRACY failing America? I’m not sure that what we’ve got is a meritocracy. Our people seem to be credentialed, more than educated. But I don’t think that affirmative action and higher taxes are likely to make things better.

I’d say shrink the playground of the “elites” — government — so that they can do less harm. Notice that that’s never the answer to any of their failings, though?

UPDATE: From the comments: “It strikes me that, in no small part, modern American meritocracy has been so watered down and stylized that ‘smart’ now amounts to little more than mastery of a few subcultural norms and presuppositions. The norms and presuppositions themselves have little, if any, predictive power of native intelligence and generally serve to designate its participants as one of ‘us’ versus one of ‘them’. It has much less to do with the identification and nurturing of native intelligence than it does with the perpetuation of status.”

SETH GODIN On the Higher Education Bubble. “Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources? If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag.” Credentialed, not educated.

Meanwhile, Bill Quick observes:

Here’s the problem: Currently, you can acquire very expensive credentials without much of an education, or you can acquire a relatively inexpensive education without credentials.

At some point in the not-too-distant future, that dichotomy is going to be resolved. And I know which side of that bet I’m putting my money on.

Sooner or later, the gods of the copybook headings win out.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: “Teachers in many states automatically get raises if they complete a master’s degree. The trouble is that those credentials do nothing to improve teaching competence, a new report shows.” Credentialed, not educated.

A DEFENSE OF “ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM:”

Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of “education” to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren’t true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they’ve been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. “Scientists” collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone’s political beliefs… and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it’s nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.

I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of “anti-intellectualism” that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on “Americans” is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It’s not a one-sided problem.

If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes.

(Thanks to reader Jonathan Stafford for the link.) This is much like what Neal Stephenson said in In The Beginning Was The Command Line:

The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.

Indeed.

UPDATE: It seems I have the above Stephenson quote wrong. A reader emails:

You’ve several times quoted Stephenson as writing:

“The twentieth century was one in which limits on state power were removed in order to let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abattoir. . . . We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and value systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals.”

But every copy of “In the Beginning was the Command Line” I’ve been able to find does not contain this quote anywhere. I fact, the phrase “state power” does not appear anywhere in the text, not even once.

Following the link you provide (to Amazon.com), and using their ‘look inside the book feature’ turns up the following, and it’s the same in every version I’ve examined:

“But more importantly, it comes out of the fact that, during this century, intellectualism failed, and everyone knows it. In places like Russia and Germany, the common people agreed to loosen their grip on traditional folkways, mores, and religion, and let the intellectuals run with the ball, and they screwed everything up and turned the century into an abbatoir. Those wordy intellectuals used to be merely tedious; now they seem kind of dangerous as well.

We Americans are the only ones who didn’t get creamed at some point during all of this. We are free and prosperous because we have inherited political and values systems fabricated by a particular set of eighteenth-century intellectuals who happened to get it right. But we have lost touch with those intellectuals, and with anything like intellectualism, even to the point of not reading books any more, though we are literate. We seem much more comfortable with propagating those values to future generations nonverbally, through a process of being steeped in media.”

I’m confident you’ll want to correct this error, as it seems somewhere along the line someone’s twisted Stephenson’s words somewhat, and accuracy in quotations and references are important.

My copy of Command Line is at the office, but looking inside the book on Amazon this seems to be right. Further research reveals that the opening bit about state power is an introductory phrase from a law review article that somehow got put inside the quote, which is probably my error, though since I originally posted this in 2002, I’m not positive where I got it from then. But I’ll go back and correct the earlier posts as well. I don’t think the sense of the quote is wrong, but nonetheless I apologize for the error, and thank the reader (whose name isn’t in his/her email address) for the correction. To err is human, but to be corrected by anonymous readers is blogging!

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Santiago Valenzuela writes:

Thoughtful article, but I am always disturbed by conservative anti-intellectualism.

Particularly, what disturbs me, is that it equivocates intellectualism per se with a specific species of intellectualism (statism of various stripes.) Why have conservatives ceded the title of intellectual to their opponents, instead confidently putting their faith in their gut instincts, “common sense,” and other decidedly “non-intellectual” ways of deciding? While it may be superior to statism in this case, it doesn’t make it good.

So why not instead say “These intellectuals have failed. Our intellectuals have a better grasp of reality and how men must live in it”? Why a rejection of intellectualism per se? It troubles me, because I have a profound respect for rational thought and a systematic approach to the troubles humanity faces, and seeing people mock that because one crop of intellectuals chose their theoretical models over reality can’t bode well.

Well, anti-intellectualism can mean two things. One is opposition to intellectualism, but the other is opposition to self-described “intellectuals” — who, often as not, are more credentialed than educated, and frequently not particularly intellectual at all except in mannerisms and self-description. We should, I think, be more explicit about distinguishing between intellectuals, and activists who mimic the mannerisms of intellectuals.

MORE: Hanah Volokh emails:

I found your recent blog post on anti-intellectualism interesting, particularly the last comments from Santiago Valenzuela and your response to them. I also find conservative anti-intellectualism troubling, and I think it’s important to separate it into three separate points:

1. Left-wing intellectuals are wrong substantively.

2. Many people who claim to be intellectuals are actually not intellectuals at all, but activists.

3. Central planning is not the best way to run a government or economy, so intellectuals do not need to be running things.

Still, to understand why central planning is a bad idea, and what we should have instead, and to get at the answers to numerous substantive policy issues, intellectuals are crucially important.

You may also be interested in this recent Stanley Fish column that attempts to describe academic intellectualism to laymen. It is particularly helpful at identifying the difference between an intellectual and an activist (full disclosure: I was an attendee at the conference he describes).

Thanks!

FINAL UPDATE: The Stephenson quote comes from the original online version of the book, which is here.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Campus Carry Likely To Pass in Texas, Elsewhere; University Officials Unhappy. Relax guys. Those people may not seem like your kind, but they’re not as threatening to your way of life as you think. Your worries that this will “change the culture” will soon seem bigoted and out of place as the integration process proceeds.

Is it just me, or is the notion that guns are especially dangerous on university campuses because they’re lawless and full of alcohol and drugs one of those arguments that “proves too much?” If campuses are really that bad, isn’t the problem, you know, bigger than just whether someone with a permit has a gun there?

UPDATE: Two further points. First the reporting at Inside Higher Ed is usually good, but this story is extremely one-sided, reading like a press release for the anti-campus-carry folks. Second, the university administrators here don’t do anything to further a reputation for critical thinking, since they keep stressing the danger of 18-year-olds carrying guns when, as is pointed out repeatedly in the comments, the permits are only available to those 21 and over. Credentialed, not educated . . . .