HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, UMN EDITION: A campus conservative’s year facing anger, doxing, and intimidation. “As the protests grew, so did violent threats against the College Republicans and Madison, in particular. The group’s members were scared for their safety on campus. Madison and the rest of the executive board didn’t go out at night and tried to never be alone on campus. Many used campus security to walk home. Rather than condemning vandalism and standing up for the First Amendment right of freedom of speech, many supposed adults in the administration instead lashed out at the College Republicans.”

And higher ed folks think the decline in public support is because the American public suffers from “anti-intellectualism.”

CONSIDERING THE SOURCE, THIS SOUNDS LIKE PROJECTION TO ME: “Americans reject the advice of experts to insulate their fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong.”

It was experts that gave us the financial crisis, it was experts that gave us the Middle East meltdown, it was experts who gave us the obesity epidemic and the opioid crisis. And yet the experts pay no price for their failures, and cling bitterly to their credentials and self-esteem, while claiming that the problem lies in the anti-intellectualism of ordinary citizens.

UPDATE: These lines of David Mamet’s from The Verdict say it well. “You guys, you’re all the same. The doctors at the hospital, you, it’s always what I’m gonna do for you. And then you screw up and it’s ‘Uh, we did the best that we could, I’m dreadfully sorry.’ And people like us live with your mistakes.”

NO LESSONS LEARNED: Campus Intolerance Intensifies in the Trump Era.

Panelists raised, implicitly, the question whether higher education has become out of touch with Donald Trump’s America. They fretted over their belief that the current social and political climate is a threat to the liberal arts and, in a time of “fake news,” to the pursuit of truth itself.

The Association’s president, Lynn Pasquerella, concluded that it is the average American—giving in to the alleged anti-intellectualism of the day—who is misguided.

Higher education leaders, she argued, must therefore work to “destabilize the attitudes at the basis of proposals that devalue education.”

While there were some speakers who called for tolerance and understanding—including Wesleyan University president Michael Roth, who advocated greater respect for “traditional conservative religion and thought”—they were a mere footnote during the four-day gathering.

Rather, workshops such as “Reclaiming the Racial Narrative,” case studies on implementing progressive agendas on campus, and strategies on how to engage students in support of “racial and social justice” dominated the conference’s agenda.

Unfortunately, in these early days of Trump’s presidency, similar politicization seems to persist throughout much of academia. Many leftist students, faculty, and administrators pay only lip service to the notion that higher education should be a marketplace of ideas. They now seem to view themselves as combatants in an ideological war.

Well, that’s just more of the Gramscian Damage. But if you want more Trump, by all means double down. Because that’s how you get more Trump.

THIS IS A SURE-FIRE STRATEGY: It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses. The Brexit has laid bare the political schism of our time. It’s not about the left vs. the right; it’s about the sane vs. the mindlessly angry.

Related: Anti-Intellectualism Remains In The Eye Of The Beholder. Want less anti-intellectualism? Get a better class of intellectuals. . .

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Academia Is Losing Its Mind.

It’s not just right-wing populists who are worried that some academic humanities and social science fields are veering into irrelevance. The latest issue of the left-of-center magazine American Prospect has a depressing report by the leftist Occidental professor Peter Dreier on his experience submitting a bogus paper to a humanities conference and getting it accepted. . . .

Here’s one representative sentence: “Self-delusion and self-discipline inhibits the reflective self, the postmodern membrane, the ecclesiastical impulse forbidden by truth-seeking and sun worship, problematizing the inchoate structures of both reason and darkness, allowing knowledge, half-knowledge, and knowledgelessness to undermine and yet simultaneously overcome the self-loathing that overwhelms the Gnostic challenge facing Biblical scribes, folksingers, and hip-hop rappers alike.” He also includes examples of the type of real humanities work that led him to undertake this experiment (he saw sentences elsewhere like: “Given the attitudes generated by our sense of a place, critical perspectives that only target overt structures within city systems are incomplete” and “Theoretical, conceptual and methodological choices must be framed in relation to concrete explanatory and interpretive dilemmas, not ontological foundations.”)

To make matters worse, most of this “postmodern” analysis is taking place within the context of a hermetically sealed political bubble. As our friends at Heterodox Academy have pointed out, just four percent of American academics in the humanities identify as conservative. This total homogeneity may be one reason that so much work in the humanities has become utterly disconnected from what the general public might consider to be valuable scholarly exploration.

There is a good amount of anti-intellectualism and old-fashioned score-settling involved in attacks on the academy by right-wing pundits and populist politicians. But that reaction didn’t come out of nowhere. At a time when tuition and student debt are reaching crisis levels, the public is right to demand that the work it is funding (both directly, at public universities, and indirectly, at private universities, by subsidizing student loans) has some bearing on reality and some benefit to the rest of society.

Indeed.

TODAY’S COLLEGE STUDENTS HAVE AN “EXPECTATION OF CONFIRMATION”: Have college students gone from believing they have a “right not to be offended” to demanding they have a right to have their views confirmed? I explore this idea in my new essay in the newly published The State of the American Mind: 16 Leading Critics on the New Anti-Intellectualism, a collection of essays by a variety of cultural and educational experts edited by Mark Bauerlein and Adam Bellow. The essays are framed by Bauerlein and Bellow’s theories on the root causes of the decline of the American intellect and “the shift away from the self-reliant, well-informed American.” Some of my fellow authors include E. D. Hirsch, Nicholas Eberstadt, Dennis Prager, Daniel Dreisbach, Ilya Somin, Maggie Jackson, and Richard Arum. Read more about it over at Ricochet.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Red Higher Ed Reforms Put Pressure on Carolina Blue.

A right-leaning public policy foundation is making waves in North Carolina’s public university system. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on how the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy is getting traction among the state’s Republican political leadership. The Center, the Chronicle tells us, aims to “[make] public colleges more accountable to the public, by holding them to their ‘chief goals of scholarly inquiry and responsible teaching’” and many believe its stances have influenced legislative proposals as well as the Board of Governors of the state’s university system, largely appointed by the GOP. . . .

The Center’s work and influence can be seen as part of a trend: red states are beginning to lean forward on their skis in dealing with universities—institutions that have historically been bastions of Democratic and left-wing ideas. With higher ed costs rising inexorably, many conservative state representatives are likely wondering just why the state is offering tenured professorships in Transgressive Gender Studies with lots of time for ‘research’, and they are becoming more aggressive in trying to shake-up the higher ed system.

There is a lot of anti-intellectualism mixed up in all of this, in addition to some good old fashioned score settling. But there’s also a lot that’s right. Costs really are rising unsustainably, and many administrative bureaucracies have lost touch with common sense—to say nothing of being economically useless administrative make work bailiwicks. Moreover, a number of disciplines are so dominated by one political point of view that they look more like PACs and NGOs than like assemblies of disputatious scholars.

Which is why complaints that reforms are politically motivated are so transparently self-serving. And why all is proceeding as I have foreseen.

DEREK LOWE EMAILS:

I get the impression, from reader notes you’ve published and from other sources, that the Republican party is going to be doing some re-evaluating after the Romney loss. As it should. But I worry about a couple of ways that this might play out. Every time an organized group takes a defeat like this, there are two factions that spring up – one that says “We Clearly Have to Change Something Fundamental”, and the other saying “We’re On the Right Track; We Just Didn’t Do It Hard Enough”. I think we’re already seeing this split in action.

And it doesn’t have to break up the party; this sort of thing goes on all the time without creating permanent factions. But it could. I’ve been concerned for some time about the direction the Republicans have been trending. Is it controversial to say that this season’s crop of primary candidates was a deeply unimpressive bunch? The likes of Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are totally unappealing to me – I suppose my problem is that I’ve never been much of a social conservative. I believe in personal responsibility, fiscal prudence, a strong defense, and economic growth. I think America is a great country. But I’m not religious, and my political beliefs don’t rest on a religious foundation. Gay marriage (to pick one example) doesn’t bother me much. I did, though, find the various bizarre comments about rape from Republican candidates to be stupid and offensive, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they helped to cost enough potential Republican votes to sway the election.

So where does someone like me turn? I find a lot to dislike in Obama’s policies, on both the practical and philosophical level, and I can’t picture myself voting for him. But I can’t picture myself voting for someone like Rick Santorum, either, or a Sarah Palin, or a Mike Huckabee, just to pick some well-known types. I’m sure that there are people out there who think that if we could just get some more candidates like these, that enough people would flock to their banner. I don’t see it happening; too many voters find something “off” about them. The streak of anti-intellectualism in the Republican party is in danger of making it a caricature of itself, and such a party would leave a lot of potential voters shaking their heads in the polling booth. I’d be one of them.

Feel free to quote as much or as little of this as you wish; I don’t mind having my name attached, either.

Well, I think Sarah Palin gets a bum rap — she was pretty libertarian, and gay-friendly for that matter, as governor — but I agree both that the crop of candidates wasn’t that impressive, and that the social-conservative stuff turns a lot of people off, especially because they’ve been conditioned to think of social-cons as the preacher from Footloose. I think that’s a bit unfair; I used to have the same icky reaction to social-cons, but since then I’ve gotten to, you know, actually know some and now I don’t find them so scary even though I disagree with them on lots of stuff. But that sort of one-on-one interaction doesn’t scale well.

I think that a more libertarian message sells better — and nobody thinks libertarians are like the preacher from Footloose — but, then, I’m a libertarian.

UPDATE: Related: Operation Deep Blue. Plus, some thoughts from Bill Quick.

IN THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION: Rick Santorum is Right About Higher Ed. “I am not enchanted with Santorum’s tone in these matters, but his points warrant more serious attention than academics are likely to give them. His statements are not just howls of anti-intellectualism or attempts to play to Tea Party resentments. They are part of a cogent view that accurately registers aspects of the dominant campus culture that academics themselves are disinclined to acknowledge, let alone discuss.”

UPDATE: More thoughts from Steve Hayward.

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED THIS WEEKEND:

CBS Poll: 54% Say Obama Doesn’t Deserve Re-Election.

Matt Welch To Barack Obama: Hey, What About That “Net Spending Cut” You Promised Back in 2008? With video.

Frank J. on anti-intellectualism. He’s an expert!

Record oil production in North Dakota.

The shortage of blue-collar workers.

The future of higher education. Plus, Change.edu is free on Kindle for one more day.

Eurozone banking not looking so good.

What to do when the lights go out. More here.

Boston Occupiers Leave Site In The Kind Of Condition The Country Would Be In If They Were Listened To.

When politics meets science: LightSquared disrupts 75% of GPS receivers in gov’t testing.

Illegal no-knock raid costs Minneapolis $1 million. And they got off light.

Sexist claims from Sen. Patty Murray.

It’s not just Lightsquared: Regulators could sanction Falcone over trading.

Warehouse deals on Kitchen gear.

SHIKHA DALMIA: Why Smart Presidents Do Stupid Things.

The most depressing spectacle on the political landscape right now (besides a potential second term for Barack Obama) is the party of Lincoln entertaining the presidential ambitions of Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann—women with better hairdos than heads. One needn’t be a GOP-hater like Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd to be dismayed by the growing anti-intellectualism of the party. Even David Brooks, a conservative commentator, has observed that Republican disdain for liberal intellectuals has morphed into a disdain for all intellectuals.

But modern intellectuals, having abandoned honest inquiry for unabashed activism, must themselves bear some blame for the backlash.

Two thoughts. First: Even David Brooks? Really? Second: Intellectualism, in today’s society, isn’t about intellect. It’s just a pose, like hipsterism or faux-redneckism. Most of those people who self-identify as intellectuals aren’t especially bright, they’ve just adopted a lifestyle that’s littered with what they think are markers of intelligence. But read the whole thing. And I think that this is right: “So why do intelligent people consistently make such a hash of things? Because they are smart enough to talk themselves into anything. Ordinary mortals don’t engage in fancy mental gymnastics to reach conclusions that defy common sense. But intellectuals are particularly prone to this.”

UPDATE: But who will defend David Brooks?

PERHAPS THE PROBLEM IS WITH THE INTELLECTUALS, NOT THE GEEKS: Larry Sanger: Is There A New Geek Anti-Intellectualism?

LAW AND THE PEOPLE: Reader Dennis Dezendorf writes:

I read your blog every day, as do thousands of other people. Thanks for your thought snd the effort you put into it.

I was reading your post about Law School 4.0 and was intrigued by the idea that there is discussion in some circles about the way that attorneys are trained. I think the discussion is long overdue.

I’ve been a cop for thirty years and have spent a tremendous amount of time in court. I’ve known great lawyers and lousy ones and I toyed at one time with the idea of going to law school. It was impossible for a number of reasons, but the main barriers to entry are:

Accessibility. I live in Louisiana and going to law school means moving to Baton Rouge or New Orleans. There aren’t any law schools in central or north Louisiana.

Cost. Law school is expensive, though not exorbitantly more expensive than graduate school. However, when I was researcing law schools (and th is may have changed in the past decade), law school required the student to be unemployed for at least the first year. Families require sustenance and going to law school full-time demands sacrifies from the family that might not be overcome for a long time.

I went to graduate school at nights. My family was young and I was able to juggle a fairly rigorous academic load while taking care of my obligations. My family was aware that Daddy was studying, but they didn’t suffer. Any reasonably intelligent person can enroll in graduate programs in business, the clergy, education, or any number of other disciplines and attain their education on a night-school basis.

Of course, if the mission of a law school is to maintain the income and status of the faculty, you need do nothing.

Thanks again for all your writings.

Well, as the pressure mounts to end night law programs, it sounds like the public-service ideal is fading. In fact, there’s a good argument that changes in the educational system in general tend to favor the children of those who are already high up on the occupational ladder. This somehow made me think of Ross Douthat’s column on Race, Class, Gender, and Sarah Palin:

If Palin were exactly what her critics believe she is — the distillation of every right-wing pathology, from anti-intellectualism to apocalyptic Christianity — then she wouldn’t be a terribly interesting figure. But this caricature has always missed the point of the Alaska governor’s appeal — one that extends well outside the Republican Party’s shrinking base.

In a recent Pew poll, 44 percent of Americans regarded Palin unfavorably. But slightly more had a favorable impression of her. That number included 46 percent of independents, and 48 percent of Americans without a college education.

That last statistic is a crucial one. Palin’s popularity has as much to do with class as it does with ideology. In this sense, she really is the perfect foil for Barack Obama. Our president represents the meritocratic ideal — that anyone, from any background, can grow up to attend Columbia and Harvard Law School and become a great American success story. But Sarah Palin represents the democratic ideal — that anyone can grow up to be a great success story without graduating from Columbia and Harvard. . . .

Here are lessons of the Sarah Palin experience, for any aspiring politician who shares her background and her sex. Your children will go through the tabloid wringer. Your religion will be mocked and misrepresented. Your political record will be distorted, to better parody your family and your faith. (And no, gentle reader, Palin did not insist on abstinence-only sex education, slash funds for special-needs children or inject creationism into public schools.)

Male commentators will attack you for parading your children. Female commentators will attack you for not staying home with them. You’ll be sneered at for how you talk and how many colleges you attended. You’ll endure gibes about your “slutty” looks and your “white trash concupiscence,” while a prominent female academic declares that your “greatest hypocrisy” is the “pretense” that you’re a woman. And eight months after the election, the professionals who pressed you into the service of a gimmicky, dreary, idea-free campaign will still be blaming you for their defeat.

All of this had something to do with ordinary partisan politics. But it had everything to do with Palin’s gender and her social class.

Sarah Palin is beloved by millions because her rise suggested, however temporarily, that the old American aphorism about how anyone can grow up to be president might actually be true.

But her unhappy sojourn on the national stage has had a different moral: Don’t even think about it.

What Joel Kotkin calls “the Gentry Faction” has taken over the Democrats completely. Wherever they dominate, you see a lot of talk about equality — and a lot of effort at maintaining inequality and keeping the proles in their place. There are plenty of Gentry in the Republican party, too. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see a populist backlash arise, on either the left, or the right, or both, or somewhere in between.

A SHOCKER: Anti-war Soros funded Iraq study. Say it ain’t so!

UPDATE: More thoughts here: “This is an academic scandal, insofar as these institutions have lent their brand equity to what is essentially a fraud on the public. Fortunately, they are all so well-established that they can afford for George Soros to dissipate a tiny bit of their reputation. But — and this is important — let us not hear complaints from any of these institutions about ‘anti-intellectualism in American life.’ Americans do not trust our pointy-headed institutions of higher learning in matters of public policy for very good reason.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Art Fougner, M.D., emails:

The reputation of an outstanding medical journal ( The Lancet is more highly regarded than the New
England Journal of Medicine.) has been permanently sullied. The editors should be sacked. And they complain when a drug detail man buys lunch for a doctor’s office. My God!

This goes beyond lunch.

REVEALING COMMENTS AT THE NEW YORK TIMES:

For a certain segment of the population, Nascar’s raid on American culture — its logo festoons everything from cellphones to honey jars to post office walls to panties; race coverage, it can seem, has bumped everything else off television; and, most piercingly, Nascar dads now get to pick our presidents — triggers the kind of fearful trembling the citizens of Gaul felt as the Huns came thundering over the hills. To these people, stock-car racing represents all that’s unsavory about red-state America: fossil-fuel bingeing; lust for violence; racial segregation; run-away Republicanism; anti-intellectualism (how much brain matter is required to go fast and turn left, ad infinitum?); the corn-pone memes of God and guns and guts; crass corporatization; Toby Keith anthems; and, of course, exquisitely bad fashion sense. What’s more, they simply don’t get it. What’s the appeal of watching . . . traffic? It’s as if ”Hee Haw” reruns were dominating prime time, and the Republic was slapping its collective knee at Grandpa Jones’s ”What’s for supper?” routine. With Nascar’s recent purchase of a swath of real estate on Staten Island, where it intends to plop down an 80,000-seat racetrack and retail center for the untapped New York City market, the onslaught seems poised on the brink of full-out conquest. Cover your ears, blue America. The Huns are revving their engines.

As a reader suggests, “Replace ‘NASCAR’ with ‘Hip-hop,’ and then ask yourself whether this would have run in the Times.” Certainly the editors would have objected to the condescension and stereotyping that run throughout.

On the other hand, perhaps this NASCAR stuff has gone a bit too far. . .

UPDATE: My race-car-driving brother notes that if you want real diversity, you should forget NASCAR and check out drag racing. Note the very cool photos. Meanwhile, reader Tom Carter emails:

Wow – what an article. Jonathan Miles has it all wrong. I’m having a hard time accepting the fact that a contributing writer for what is typically held as a good paper would fall into such blantant prejudices. Once again this smacks of the “blues” having a free pass at throwing stones. I wonder if Miles has ever been to a NASCAR function or even driven a stock car.

“The cars the drivers pilot — modified Chevy Monte Carlos, Ford Tauruses, Pontiac Grand Prix — are not so different from the cars Nascar fans use daily to pick up their groceries, shuttle their kids and get themselves to work.”

Statements like that are just an indicator that this man has absolutey no idea of what he’s writing about, and this just fuels the granishing disatisfaction with traditional media and their inability to effectively research their material.

Yeah. There’s not much overlap between a NASCAR “stock” car and the actual stock vehicle of the same name, and hasn’t been in ages.

I don’t mind these articles in which the Times tries to explain red states to its readership (and unlike my brother, I don’t care much for racing as a spectator sport) but I’d like them to do a better, and less-condescending, job of it.

ANOTHER UPDATE: SSgt J.P. Dawson emails:

Hey InstaDude,

In the Air Force (I’m active duty) I encounter a small group of hip-hop fans and a couple of Nascar fans every night at work on the midnight shift. There are conversations about Jay-Z and Nelly, as well as Dale, Jr. and Jeff Gordon. I tease both crowds, as we all tease each other about something. My New Yawk accent and thinning hair are the targets for them.

I’d never be so condescending of either group. Perhaps those of us in the military are just much more tolerant than the staff at the NY Times.

I think so, actually.