....one student “talked kind of extensively about how bad the department was, how much racism there was, how there were abusive professors, how the administration was letting all that slide..."
The idea that in 2023 UCLA is some kind of hotbed of bigotry a la University of Mississippi in the 1950s, is beyond absurd to the point of delusional.
The academic humanities have been conquered by this weird alliance between the DEI bureaucracy, Social Justice Inc (which includes everyone from those who go along to get along to the zealous true believers), and then to the students themselves, who seem to be fundamentalist Foucauldians who see "power dynamics or invisible barriers" in their cereal bowls and under their beds.
I don't know if this is Munchausen by Proxy, with the permanently fragile "minoritized" children sickened with racial paranoia so the activist class can tend to their wounds while denouncing their enemies and expanding their fiefdoms, or if this is all just a bad case of internet poisoning, and these people mainline oppression porn like a junkie mainlines dope.
American academia now most resembles a cross between a Maoist Struggle Session and an Esalen encounter session, where nothing matters except the feelings of the "minoritized" and the goal is to see who can best punish a proxy victim (scapegoat) for the historical crimes we all embody and which define our universe and moral worth as humans, and where "Justice" is defined as any member of an Oppressed class getting to wound any member of an Oppressor class, regardless of context.
Your comment makes me laugh. Seriously, academe is so fubar it is a living joke.
What is our first clue that the letter was written by idiots? Here, "the reproductive rights of people who can become pregnant ". Second clue that this grad population is a cult: The Pronouns of the signatories. Sheeple.
Some mere handful - 2-5 grad students "skilled" in the use of ideology buzzwords and phrases - wrote that letter and, one by one, the sheeple signed on, too cowed and cowardly to say "no". If perfect justice existed each of the signers would be bounced from UCLA and a scarlet letter placed on their foreheads as warning to any who might admit them to a program of study, employ them in an institution, engage them as a counselor. Imperfect Justice will preserve their names for eternity on the internet and they can be mocked as fellow travelers for the rest of their careers.
"This. . . doesn’t sound like a healthy ecosystem for independent thought and intellectual life"
It also isn't helpful that these future psychologists will be so dogmatic and muddled in their thinking when they try to deal with patients.
My niece, off to receive her graduate degree in psychology in Boston, is the same way and she is the "wokest" person I know. I have no doubt that she will be castigating clients to "do better" rather than helping them overcome their issues, which is quite sad for them and for her too in the long run. .
I have seen a similar phenomenon and my question is what will licensing boards do when patients complain? Or what will insurance companies do if the patients complain about it? (Sometimes complainng about a doctor to the insurance company is most effective because they can refuse to pay.). I’ll could get quite nasty.
Perhaps therapy will simply become a “lefty” thing, only utilized by one side of the political spectrum. The censoriousness and judgment of progressive therapists will make the entire field useless, which is truly unfortunate.
It pretty much already is. If you see those stats of which demographics get antidepressants, it maps exactly with which groups seek mental health care to begin with.
OMG! This is like a sick parody of what therapy should be.
Can I see my niece following in this therapist's footsteps? Absolutely, which is why it will be utterly useless except for people who enjoy self-flagellation.
I am a tenure-track faculty member, and I find this kind of stuff chilling. I agree with Inbar: I'm a liberal, and of course I value diversity and inclusion, in the sense that nobody should ever be excluded from science/academia based on irrelevant characteristics like skin color, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. However, I also agree that DEI statements tend to be useless boilerplate that at best don't accomplish anything useful and at worst are counterproductive.
And I don't feel able to say any of the above at my workplace, for fear of bad repercussions. How does this fit in with free exchange of ideas that is supposed to be a cornerstone of academia? It doesn't. I only hope that the fever will break soon, but if anything, the SCOTUS ruling against affirmative action may increase the sense among academic progressives that "OMG we're being persecuted by the evil conservative SCOTUS, we must crack down all the harder on any dissent in our ranks."
"This. . . doesn’t sound like a healthy ecosystem for independent thought and intellectual life."
A fair summary of academic life at UCLA, unfortunately. I'm in a STEM field, which is somewhat more insulated from things like this, but even so this type of thinking/engaging still manages to permeate. It was especially bad during the grad student strike--we had pro-union proponents coming in to labs to try and find/shame "scabs," for example, who were still working in labs. The goals/experiences of STEM grad students and humanities students are very different, and in some cases incompatible, but expressing that viewpoint even slightly would lead to getting labeled a "bootlicker," or any other of the other twitter favorites. Predictably, the union effort ate itself alive towards the end, and I'm not surprised that psych and other humanities grad students (psychology is not a science, I'll die on that hill) are still angry about it. The person I work for is very enmeshed in DEI work and I've gotten to see a lot of what that looks like over the years, and to be honest it's caused a big shift in how I view the utility of those measures. I used to be a huge proponent of it all, but I don't see it that way anymore.
It’s very hard to explain to millennials and zoomers that the humanities were once held in real respect and recognized as the breeding ground of many of the most clever, erudite and witty people in the US and UK.
They look at you like you’re trying to convince them that Alaska was long considered a mecca for standup comedy or that Iowa’s opera houses were once the envy of the world.
The humanities (in the US, at least) have been in free-fall for over four decades and things don’t look bright for the social sciences. But it should be noted: they weren’t always clown shows.
"The person I work for is very enmeshed in DEI work and I've gotten to see a lot of what that looks like over the years, and to be honest it's caused a big shift in how I view the utility of those measures. I used to be a huge proponent of it all, but I don't see it that way anymore."
Could you elaborate a bit more on what you saw that led you to this shift? I come at this with the broad skepticism of someone whose default inclination is to "stick to your lane" and address any legitimate DEI-ish concerns by just trying to be welcoming and encouraging of newcomers generally. Which tends to put me at something like cross purposes with industrialized DEI, at least as far as my own thinking goes. I'm curious how someone who starts out more friendly to the approaches, comes over time from experience to disdain them. It's not a mindset I really inhabit myself!
Yeah that’s good to remember! And honestly, plenty about the STEM fields are rapidly becoming “clown shows” too. One is certainly not better than the other in producing clever people, it just seems like in stem you can still get away with keeping your head down about these issues, whereas in humanities it really is all-consumed by activism
My apologies. I couldn’t get “edit” to come up so I copied my comment, deleted it, edited in missing words & reposted it. But it was the equivalent of my pulling the chair from under your comment, sorry.
Both your points are excellent. Indeed.
On the positive side, I think STEM benefits from a host of things, including:
1) rigid entry-level standards
2) much better metrics for judging success (do the numbers add up?) and abject failure (did the lab blow up due to grotesque incompetence?)
3) the oversight, both internal and external, that comes with outside entities investing money
4) a culture in which people from other countries are very active. They don’t have the latest progressive American values & goals. They’re less interested in things outside their ostensible reason for being there.
5) a culture in which the mores of men who may be on the autism spectrum are much more dominant than those of women who may be neurotic. (I apologize if this sounds rude, but it addresses very real, extreme & relevant differences)
On a more pessimistic note, one lesson I derive from the death of the humanities is that ludicrous things can survive ridicule. People have been commenting on and mocking the forces that ultimately won since the 1980s. Having the best argument can be overrated and a false solace.
EDIT: edit now works. Sometimes it comes up as option, sometime it doesn’t. Have no idea what I’m doing differently.
Whenever I read of something like this, I always think the same couple of things. First, I'm somewhat terrified of these people leaving campuses in larger and larger numbers. And second, where are all the God damn adults here? Sure, these kids should know better, but fine, college is for being idealistic and all the jazz. But does no one who isn't a student have a spine and can just say, "No."?
our liberal class, most esp in academia, has utterly failed to defend free thought & free expression, the integrity of art or science, and this absolute abdication of adult authority is why the infantile campus Red Guard calls the shots. If any one of the absurd campus kerfuffles of the past decade, like the Yale Halloween meltdown or the attacks on conservative speakers, had ended with immediate expulsions, all this would have ended already.
But the priority is to always go along to get along, meaning that there is no higher value than status and career, and people with no higher values than status and career (meaning people with no real beliefs) are always steamrolled by people with strong beliefs, no matter how stupid or demented.
Eloquently put, but I think there are two things that you are underestimating as gravely significant psychological factors at play beyond self-preservation, preserving status and the desire to get along. Namely, empathy (however misguided) and embarrassment (often excruciating.)
People genuinely feel bad. People are embarrassed.
No one wants to tell the young person (or colleague and ostensible peer) from a marginalized group who they may suspect isn’t particularly gifted that it’s all nonsense. Certainly not the kind of people who are in the social sciences right now.
In 2023 they may stay silent out of justifiable fear, but, in my experience, they often dreaded saying anything in the past when the professional risks were negligible or nonexistent.
ive lived just about my entire adult life in "left spaces" as they say, and i fully feel and am not exempt from the "walking on eggshells" vibe that can arise at any moment in interactions bw white liberals and black/brown people. there is just this heavy cloud of guilt that sort of follows us like we're Oedipus and i think we've all been conditioned to a certain extent to feel/believe that any injury to a black person recapitulates all the crimes of our ancestors, and we can become Simon Legree at any moment.
ive never worked in academia, and i can only imagine the intense professional and social pressure, it really reminds me of that old Twilight Zone episode about the town controlled by evil children who read their thoughts and kill anyone who annoys them.
i guess like all fundamentalist uprisings this will somehow burn itself out at some point, and whoever survives in the rubble will just have to rebuild the best they can.
Follow the money. The students now provide a greater percentage of the university's budget than they did 50 years ago. Back then, the state actually financed state universities. Now the students do. So the administrators don't want to alienate the students, and when the students become deranged the administrators tell the faculty to just put up with it, give them a passing grade, don't make trouble. The student is the customer and the customer is always right.
Students do provide a higher percentage of the budget than 50 years ago. However, state funding has not exactly disappeared. What has happened is that university spending has grown explosively over that last 50 years. Most (almost all) of the spending in on administration. Type 'administrative bloat universities' into Google to get some idea of how bad the situation is.
Oh, I know how bad the bloat is. But if you research what percentage of the university budget used to be provided by the state and what percentage is provided now, it's much less.
For some summary statistics, see "The Un-funding of Higher Education???". Quote "From 1970 to the present, state support for higher education has generally kept pace with both enrollment growth and inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. State and local support was $7 billion in 1971, $21 billion in 1981, $42 billion in 1991, $67 billion in 2001, and $72 billion in 2005"
Interesting. At the University of California (the system I'm most familiar with), in 1974 the state funded approximately 32 percent of the total UC budget. In 2023, it seems to be 10% -ish.
20 years ago, Stanley Fish argued in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that state legislatures should butt out of the curriculum of public universities because they no longer pay enough of the bills to justify their interference. Link below.
As a percentage you might be correct (not sure). However, that is because spending has soared. Spending has soared because of (apparently) administrative bloat. Actual Federal, State, and Local contributions have grown a lot (adjusted for inflation). See https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_333.10.asp,
Nope. And it's not just the elite institutions. My wife has had a somewhat jumbled education path that took her from a community college in the NJ pine barrens, to Southern Utah University, to her current University. At every stop, these institutions were littered with some level of, as the olds say, "wokeness."
Your comment evokes the Iranian hostage crisis. Officials crippled by activist students. Purist idealism catalyzing nonsense protests to absurdity and beyond. Incredible geopolitical ramifications flowering well outside the quad.
We are not there quite yet, but not for lack of effort.
I’m so grateful to be done with this stuff. Twenty years ago. (And I’m in Sweden where there’s certainly some of this bullshit, but not quite this dire.) I just want to scream at these kids, “Get the fuck over yourselves you ridiculous twats!” But that wouldn’t be very ladylike of me, now would it?
What always gets me is how extremely excluded I would feel by these attempts at “inclusion,” where everyone needs to be suffering from the same reality-distorting mind virus in order to fit in. There’s no part of me that could ever relate to this lack of compassion, curiosity, or (to use a term they might pretend to understand) epistemic humility.
As a normie lesbian, I’m at the point where I’d rather hang out with evangelicals than with the alphabet soup alliance at any liberal arts college. The 2020’s suck…
But amused by and can sympathize with your "hang out with evangelicals". Reminds me of a passage from a post by biologist/philosopher Massimo Pigliucci who wasn't much impressed with the "skeptic & atheist movement" at that time [circa 2015]:
Pigliucci: "I’d rather have a productive conversation with an intelligent Christian than a frustrating one with an obtuse atheist, and believe me, there is plenty of both out there."
Many of those "skeptics and atheists" were apparently the precursors to many of the woke -- just as narrow-minded, and dogmatic as those they sought to rein in. Kind of the nature of the beast; we have seen the enemy, and he is us:
Surely skeptics and atheists go too far and many probably populate the woke spearhead. Yet, I see a religious impulse running within the woke extremism. Gender ideology in particular requires the type of doctrinaire thinking that characterizes religious dogmatics. I am convinced that many of the woke extremists were once deeply religious and have traded one ideology for another. All religions are at war with reality for one reason or another. The desire can jump around.
Quite agree with you on that "religious impulse running within the woke extremism."
Something that Andrew Doyle pointed to some time ago (the tweet may not be visible at the moment -- he may be restricting access & Twitter seems to be experiencing some "technical difficulties"):
Doyle: "The JK Rowling controversy has exposed one of the most chilling aspects of the woke ideology: the sheer certainty of its adherents.
It never occurs to these people that they might be wrong. That’s why they refuse to debate.
Though there's some reason to argue that the underlying cause -- a general and pervasive scientific illiteracy -- makes us all culpable, to a greater or lesser extent, for the whole transgender clusterfuck and the related problems following in its wake.
Moot of course the reasons for that state of affairs, but, offhand, it seems a major contributing factor is that most people -- including various so-called biologists and philosophers who should know better -- haven't a flaming clue about the principles which undergird those fields in particular. The upshot of which is that many of those biologists and philosophers are just as narrow-minded and dogmatic as the worst of the woke and of religious fundamentalism. A proverbial case of the blind leading the blind.
Something of a complex issue that I've probably only touched the surface of, though I think I've run across a few "beacons on the hills" that provide some illumination and constitute useful guideposts. One of which is Norbert Wiener's "Human Use of Human Beings" -- in large part, the source and motivation for my own Substack. Not sure if you've yet had time to look at my Welcome post -- thanks for subscribing 🙂 -- which goes into some detail thereon, but I've found this passage of particular relevance and cogency:
Wiener: "I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law." [pg. 193]
Some "nuance" there that's a bit tricky to summarize in a few words -- he took a whole book to do so -- but his "thesis" -- and that of no few others -- seems to be that the whole edifice of science is built on a number of premises, on a great many axioms of one sort or another that are essentially contingent, are "mere" hypotheses", subject to revision at any time.
Been some time since I've read it, but I think he argues or I think that it is reasonable to argue in consequence that many so-called biologists and philosophers -- for all of their "loud proclamations about following reason and evidence wherever they may lead" (as Pigliucci put it) -- have turned those premises and axioms into articles of faith that are defended with the same dogmatic "groupthink and unwillingness to change one’s mind that is trumped only by religious fundamentalists" (Pigliucci).
Moot also which might be the most salient and problematic case-in-point there, but, as I've argued, a leading contender might be the "debate" -- which is turning much of biology into a clown show -- over whether sex is best defined as a binary, a spectrum, or is, gawd help us all, just "socially constructed":
Sadly not just the woke and the religious fundamentalists who are engaging in that "zealotry". Seems also to characterize far too many on "our side", among those supposedly on "the right side of history".
Good insights. Scientific reasoning isn’t a platonic form immune from human emotions and non rational desires. Didn’t Nietzsche tell us this? Perhaps Hume too.
I am always amused by the signs on people’s lawn’s saying: “Believe in Science “. Not sure these people see the complexity of that statement. Many of these people don’t realize they are saying science is a religion since they want it to be believed. Yet if you asked them about that, they would probably say science is absolute knowledge. They would be better off saying: “ Understand Science”.
Thanks. And quite agree with you about science not being "immune from human emotions & non-rational desires".
Apropos of which, you might want to check out the "Reality's Last Stand" Substack by evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, and this recent guest post there in particular:
This from Tyler Harper (professor at Bates College) in the NYT yesterday.
"First, they [colleges] should exit the D.E.I.-industrial complex, which prioritizes the kind of cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit. "
Where are his grad students clambering to have him fired for making this terrible statement?
"You should take advantage of a friendly adversary like that and use his arguments to sharpen your own.
But in so many liberal spaces, the mere thought that you even need to defend your opinions with logic and reason are seen as outré."
The excerpts from the grads' complaints actually had me liking the guy more! The letter, which I have not read in full, gives the impression that the grievance theey had with Inbar was that he sometimes disagrees with them.
Lord, imagine being any bit conservative and trying to land one of these positions.
"It’s nothing but derailing. Inbar’s argument is that “when we align ourselves with a political side or faction it’s bad for our science.” Maybe he’s right and maybe he’s wrong. But it is not an argument to respond by accusing him of “trivializing” abortion by painting it as a Democratic versus Republican issue (I’m not sure I even understand this line of reasoning; surely it can be both an important issue and one that breaks down fairly neatly along partisan lines), and it’s certainly not an argument to respond by pointing out that UCLA has itself issued statements on these issues. Neither claim comes close to actually offering evidence Inbar is wrong — and you don’t even need to agree with Inbar to see this!"
Unfortunately, this statement by Singal fails to signify his support for the LGBTQIAUDSIAFOPDSAUPFOIDSA, Queer, and BIPOC communities who are most significantly harmed by restricting abortion access. This leverages the identity politics of birthing people and BIPOC all the while failing to mention the aforementioned reality. The claim that liberals support abortion more than conservatives fails to recognize the unique ways that bodies operate in modernity--especially birthing, BIPOC, and queer bodies. Saying that Republicans tend not to like abortion fails to recognize unique experiences and negates the personal identity of birthing people (premise). As such, I will not hire Singal!
You laugh, but I was part of a student group at the above institution that basically imploded because someone failed to recognize how "LGBTQSDFKJSDF queer and BIPOC communities" are most significantly harmed by restricting abortion access...it was absurd
At an early Presidential debate in 2020, Julian Castro promised to protect abortion rights for transgender people, too. I guess it was an attempt to distinguish himself from the multitude of candidates. I wondered if he knew what transgender was. Little did i realize he foresaw the need for such protection far better than me.
My first thought is what a ghastly story. My second thought was, dog bites man. Yet more intolerance, more virtue-signalling, more bad reasoning. Many liberals do not want to sharpen their arguments, they want to sharpen their knives.
In universities and colleges, there is a paucity of good-faith debates, there is a surplus of pile ons, of moral preening, of yelling about unsafe spaces. I sort of understand how we got where we are but I confess that I do not see a way out.
I've been following this very closely, and agree completely with Jesse's analysis here. There may also be something else going on that nobody (in that space) wants to touch with a ten foot pole. Students really want their universities to hire faculty of color, which I understand, but many don't seem that concerned about the how of it. I imagine at least a few of the "passionate" students were not excited that this hiring would mean not just one, but two, more white faculty members (Dr. Inbar and his partner, from what I can tell), taking opportunities away from faculty that would contribute to these diversity goals. This could explain their motivation to trawl through old podcast episodes for anything that could be considered problematic. Obviously, this is just my theory and only one aspect of the larger situation, but all of it is extremely demoralizing.
I'm curious too about his partner/girlfriend: did she take the job that was offered to her first? Or did this whole episode turn her off from the job offer?
It said in the Chronicle article that she has one year extension on the offer in case he can get another position in the area. But, kind of an awkward way to start a new job.
So I was in Academia for a while and I thought me being a native Alaskan would give me some defense to push back on some dei stuff. Nope. I was called the other white and was told point blank by my philosophy teacher that I shouldn't peruse a job in Academia because my skin was too white. Anti-racism is such a joke.
The sense I have from reading the excerpts from the students' letter is that it is an exercise in what Orwell in "1984" called "bellyfeel". The author/s of the original draft was/were in a state of bellyfeel when they drafted it, the wording of the letter is full of phrases that engender bellyfeel, and the signatories endorsed it in a state of bellyfeel. To critique such a document for failures of logic and lack of grounding in facts is to indict oneself as an oldthinker who unbellyfeels Ingsoc.
This reminds me why I don't ever want to go see a psychologist. If I want to spill my guts to someone, I don't want it to be someone so ideologically committed to an outcome that they don't listen to what my problems are.
Quite some time ago now I had an experience like that at the Australian University where I was studying. I saw a university counsellor to seek assistance with a problem I was experiencing. The counsellor was a conservative Catholic and also a devotee of a certain school of psychoanalytical doctrine, and due to the synergy of these beliefs he spent the hour trying to convince me that the problem I had was one that would be solved by his preconceived solution, and providing no assistance whatsoever with the problem I came to ask his assistance with. I can readily imagine other kinds of ideological commitment driving such a professionally derelict approach.
....one student “talked kind of extensively about how bad the department was, how much racism there was, how there were abusive professors, how the administration was letting all that slide..."
The idea that in 2023 UCLA is some kind of hotbed of bigotry a la University of Mississippi in the 1950s, is beyond absurd to the point of delusional.
The academic humanities have been conquered by this weird alliance between the DEI bureaucracy, Social Justice Inc (which includes everyone from those who go along to get along to the zealous true believers), and then to the students themselves, who seem to be fundamentalist Foucauldians who see "power dynamics or invisible barriers" in their cereal bowls and under their beds.
I don't know if this is Munchausen by Proxy, with the permanently fragile "minoritized" children sickened with racial paranoia so the activist class can tend to their wounds while denouncing their enemies and expanding their fiefdoms, or if this is all just a bad case of internet poisoning, and these people mainline oppression porn like a junkie mainlines dope.
American academia now most resembles a cross between a Maoist Struggle Session and an Esalen encounter session, where nothing matters except the feelings of the "minoritized" and the goal is to see who can best punish a proxy victim (scapegoat) for the historical crimes we all embody and which define our universe and moral worth as humans, and where "Justice" is defined as any member of an Oppressed class getting to wound any member of an Oppressor class, regardless of context.
Your comment makes me laugh. Seriously, academe is so fubar it is a living joke.
What is our first clue that the letter was written by idiots? Here, "the reproductive rights of people who can become pregnant ". Second clue that this grad population is a cult: The Pronouns of the signatories. Sheeple.
Some mere handful - 2-5 grad students "skilled" in the use of ideology buzzwords and phrases - wrote that letter and, one by one, the sheeple signed on, too cowed and cowardly to say "no". If perfect justice existed each of the signers would be bounced from UCLA and a scarlet letter placed on their foreheads as warning to any who might admit them to a program of study, employ them in an institution, engage them as a counselor. Imperfect Justice will preserve their names for eternity on the internet and they can be mocked as fellow travelers for the rest of their careers.
"This. . . doesn’t sound like a healthy ecosystem for independent thought and intellectual life"
It also isn't helpful that these future psychologists will be so dogmatic and muddled in their thinking when they try to deal with patients.
My niece, off to receive her graduate degree in psychology in Boston, is the same way and she is the "wokest" person I know. I have no doubt that she will be castigating clients to "do better" rather than helping them overcome their issues, which is quite sad for them and for her too in the long run. .
I have seen a similar phenomenon and my question is what will licensing boards do when patients complain? Or what will insurance companies do if the patients complain about it? (Sometimes complainng about a doctor to the insurance company is most effective because they can refuse to pay.). I’ll could get quite nasty.
Perhaps therapy will simply become a “lefty” thing, only utilized by one side of the political spectrum. The censoriousness and judgment of progressive therapists will make the entire field useless, which is truly unfortunate.
Oh God, that would be awful. And it's so plausible.
It's too bad because CBT is so useful and if my CBT therapist started with the ideology, I'd just stop going.
It pretty much already is. If you see those stats of which demographics get antidepressants, it maps exactly with which groups seek mental health care to begin with.
I didn't know that. What a shame.
Freddie deBoer received a letter from a reader describing her experiences attending sessions with a woke therapist. It's not pretty. https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/letter-from-a-subscriber-my-new-therapist
OMG! This is like a sick parody of what therapy should be.
Can I see my niece following in this therapist's footsteps? Absolutely, which is why it will be utterly useless except for people who enjoy self-flagellation.
Thank you for writing about this, Jesse.
I am a tenure-track faculty member, and I find this kind of stuff chilling. I agree with Inbar: I'm a liberal, and of course I value diversity and inclusion, in the sense that nobody should ever be excluded from science/academia based on irrelevant characteristics like skin color, ethnicity, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, etc. However, I also agree that DEI statements tend to be useless boilerplate that at best don't accomplish anything useful and at worst are counterproductive.
And I don't feel able to say any of the above at my workplace, for fear of bad repercussions. How does this fit in with free exchange of ideas that is supposed to be a cornerstone of academia? It doesn't. I only hope that the fever will break soon, but if anything, the SCOTUS ruling against affirmative action may increase the sense among academic progressives that "OMG we're being persecuted by the evil conservative SCOTUS, we must crack down all the harder on any dissent in our ranks."
Until people like you start speaking up, it won't change.
"This. . . doesn’t sound like a healthy ecosystem for independent thought and intellectual life."
A fair summary of academic life at UCLA, unfortunately. I'm in a STEM field, which is somewhat more insulated from things like this, but even so this type of thinking/engaging still manages to permeate. It was especially bad during the grad student strike--we had pro-union proponents coming in to labs to try and find/shame "scabs," for example, who were still working in labs. The goals/experiences of STEM grad students and humanities students are very different, and in some cases incompatible, but expressing that viewpoint even slightly would lead to getting labeled a "bootlicker," or any other of the other twitter favorites. Predictably, the union effort ate itself alive towards the end, and I'm not surprised that psych and other humanities grad students (psychology is not a science, I'll die on that hill) are still angry about it. The person I work for is very enmeshed in DEI work and I've gotten to see a lot of what that looks like over the years, and to be honest it's caused a big shift in how I view the utility of those measures. I used to be a huge proponent of it all, but I don't see it that way anymore.
It’s very hard to explain to millennials and zoomers that the humanities were once held in real respect and recognized as the breeding ground of many of the most clever, erudite and witty people in the US and UK.
They look at you like you’re trying to convince them that Alaska was long considered a mecca for standup comedy or that Iowa’s opera houses were once the envy of the world.
The humanities (in the US, at least) have been in free-fall for over four decades and things don’t look bright for the social sciences. But it should be noted: they weren’t always clown shows.
"The person I work for is very enmeshed in DEI work and I've gotten to see a lot of what that looks like over the years, and to be honest it's caused a big shift in how I view the utility of those measures. I used to be a huge proponent of it all, but I don't see it that way anymore."
Could you elaborate a bit more on what you saw that led you to this shift? I come at this with the broad skepticism of someone whose default inclination is to "stick to your lane" and address any legitimate DEI-ish concerns by just trying to be welcoming and encouraging of newcomers generally. Which tends to put me at something like cross purposes with industrialized DEI, at least as far as my own thinking goes. I'm curious how someone who starts out more friendly to the approaches, comes over time from experience to disdain them. It's not a mindset I really inhabit myself!
Yeah that’s good to remember! And honestly, plenty about the STEM fields are rapidly becoming “clown shows” too. One is certainly not better than the other in producing clever people, it just seems like in stem you can still get away with keeping your head down about these issues, whereas in humanities it really is all-consumed by activism
My apologies. I couldn’t get “edit” to come up so I copied my comment, deleted it, edited in missing words & reposted it. But it was the equivalent of my pulling the chair from under your comment, sorry.
Both your points are excellent. Indeed.
On the positive side, I think STEM benefits from a host of things, including:
1) rigid entry-level standards
2) much better metrics for judging success (do the numbers add up?) and abject failure (did the lab blow up due to grotesque incompetence?)
3) the oversight, both internal and external, that comes with outside entities investing money
4) a culture in which people from other countries are very active. They don’t have the latest progressive American values & goals. They’re less interested in things outside their ostensible reason for being there.
5) a culture in which the mores of men who may be on the autism spectrum are much more dominant than those of women who may be neurotic. (I apologize if this sounds rude, but it addresses very real, extreme & relevant differences)
On a more pessimistic note, one lesson I derive from the death of the humanities is that ludicrous things can survive ridicule. People have been commenting on and mocking the forces that ultimately won since the 1980s. Having the best argument can be overrated and a false solace.
EDIT: edit now works. Sometimes it comes up as option, sometime it doesn’t. Have no idea what I’m doing differently.
You may be wrong about this. Galileo had a better argument than the church. Look at who prevailed over time.
Whenever I read of something like this, I always think the same couple of things. First, I'm somewhat terrified of these people leaving campuses in larger and larger numbers. And second, where are all the God damn adults here? Sure, these kids should know better, but fine, college is for being idealistic and all the jazz. But does no one who isn't a student have a spine and can just say, "No."?
"where are all the God damn adults here"??
our liberal class, most esp in academia, has utterly failed to defend free thought & free expression, the integrity of art or science, and this absolute abdication of adult authority is why the infantile campus Red Guard calls the shots. If any one of the absurd campus kerfuffles of the past decade, like the Yale Halloween meltdown or the attacks on conservative speakers, had ended with immediate expulsions, all this would have ended already.
But the priority is to always go along to get along, meaning that there is no higher value than status and career, and people with no higher values than status and career (meaning people with no real beliefs) are always steamrolled by people with strong beliefs, no matter how stupid or demented.
Eloquently put, but I think there are two things that you are underestimating as gravely significant psychological factors at play beyond self-preservation, preserving status and the desire to get along. Namely, empathy (however misguided) and embarrassment (often excruciating.)
People genuinely feel bad. People are embarrassed.
No one wants to tell the young person (or colleague and ostensible peer) from a marginalized group who they may suspect isn’t particularly gifted that it’s all nonsense. Certainly not the kind of people who are in the social sciences right now.
In 2023 they may stay silent out of justifiable fear, but, in my experience, they often dreaded saying anything in the past when the professional risks were negligible or nonexistent.
It was just too embarrassing. They felt bad.
oh i get it, and i appreciate the added nuance.
ive lived just about my entire adult life in "left spaces" as they say, and i fully feel and am not exempt from the "walking on eggshells" vibe that can arise at any moment in interactions bw white liberals and black/brown people. there is just this heavy cloud of guilt that sort of follows us like we're Oedipus and i think we've all been conditioned to a certain extent to feel/believe that any injury to a black person recapitulates all the crimes of our ancestors, and we can become Simon Legree at any moment.
ive never worked in academia, and i can only imagine the intense professional and social pressure, it really reminds me of that old Twilight Zone episode about the town controlled by evil children who read their thoughts and kill anyone who annoys them.
i guess like all fundamentalist uprisings this will somehow burn itself out at some point, and whoever survives in the rubble will just have to rebuild the best they can.
Follow the money. The students now provide a greater percentage of the university's budget than they did 50 years ago. Back then, the state actually financed state universities. Now the students do. So the administrators don't want to alienate the students, and when the students become deranged the administrators tell the faculty to just put up with it, give them a passing grade, don't make trouble. The student is the customer and the customer is always right.
Students do provide a higher percentage of the budget than 50 years ago. However, state funding has not exactly disappeared. What has happened is that university spending has grown explosively over that last 50 years. Most (almost all) of the spending in on administration. Type 'administrative bloat universities' into Google to get some idea of how bad the situation is.
Oh, I know how bad the bloat is. But if you research what percentage of the university budget used to be provided by the state and what percentage is provided now, it's much less.
For some summary statistics, see "The Un-funding of Higher Education???". Quote "From 1970 to the present, state support for higher education has generally kept pace with both enrollment growth and inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. State and local support was $7 billion in 1971, $21 billion in 1981, $42 billion in 1991, $67 billion in 2001, and $72 billion in 2005"
Interesting. At the University of California (the system I'm most familiar with), in 1974 the state funded approximately 32 percent of the total UC budget. In 2023, it seems to be 10% -ish.
20 years ago, Stanley Fish argued in the Chronicle of Higher Ed that state legislatures should butt out of the curriculum of public universities because they no longer pay enough of the bills to justify their interference. Link below.
https://dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since-1868
https://www.lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4684#:~:text=UC%20Budget%20Is%20%2446.9%20Billion,CSU%20and%20CCC%20budgets%20combined.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/give-us-liberty-or-give-us-revenue/
As a percentage you might be correct (not sure). However, that is because spending has soared. Spending has soared because of (apparently) administrative bloat. Actual Federal, State, and Local contributions have grown a lot (adjusted for inflation). See https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d22/tables/dt22_333.10.asp,
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_365.asp,
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d00/dt327.asp,
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d95/dtab318.asp.
Nope. And it's not just the elite institutions. My wife has had a somewhat jumbled education path that took her from a community college in the NJ pine barrens, to Southern Utah University, to her current University. At every stop, these institutions were littered with some level of, as the olds say, "wokeness."
Your comment evokes the Iranian hostage crisis. Officials crippled by activist students. Purist idealism catalyzing nonsense protests to absurdity and beyond. Incredible geopolitical ramifications flowering well outside the quad.
We are not there quite yet, but not for lack of effort.
I’m so grateful to be done with this stuff. Twenty years ago. (And I’m in Sweden where there’s certainly some of this bullshit, but not quite this dire.) I just want to scream at these kids, “Get the fuck over yourselves you ridiculous twats!” But that wouldn’t be very ladylike of me, now would it?
What always gets me is how extremely excluded I would feel by these attempts at “inclusion,” where everyone needs to be suffering from the same reality-distorting mind virus in order to fit in. There’s no part of me that could ever relate to this lack of compassion, curiosity, or (to use a term they might pretend to understand) epistemic humility.
As a normie lesbian, I’m at the point where I’d rather hang out with evangelicals than with the alphabet soup alliance at any liberal arts college. The 2020’s suck…
The 2010s weren't all that great either ... 😉🙂
But amused by and can sympathize with your "hang out with evangelicals". Reminds me of a passage from a post by biologist/philosopher Massimo Pigliucci who wasn't much impressed with the "skeptic & atheist movement" at that time [circa 2015]:
Pigliucci: "I’d rather have a productive conversation with an intelligent Christian than a frustrating one with an obtuse atheist, and believe me, there is plenty of both out there."
https://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2015/05/11/reflections-on-the-skeptic-and-atheist-movements/
Many of those "skeptics and atheists" were apparently the precursors to many of the woke -- just as narrow-minded, and dogmatic as those they sought to rein in. Kind of the nature of the beast; we have seen the enemy, and he is us:
https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/blaise_pascal_133606
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo_(comic_strip)
Surely skeptics and atheists go too far and many probably populate the woke spearhead. Yet, I see a religious impulse running within the woke extremism. Gender ideology in particular requires the type of doctrinaire thinking that characterizes religious dogmatics. I am convinced that many of the woke extremists were once deeply religious and have traded one ideology for another. All religions are at war with reality for one reason or another. The desire can jump around.
Quite agree with you on that "religious impulse running within the woke extremism."
Something that Andrew Doyle pointed to some time ago (the tweet may not be visible at the moment -- he may be restricting access & Twitter seems to be experiencing some "technical difficulties"):
Doyle: "The JK Rowling controversy has exposed one of the most chilling aspects of the woke ideology: the sheer certainty of its adherents.
It never occurs to these people that they might be wrong. That’s why they refuse to debate.
This is zealotry; it needs to be resisted."
https://twitter.com/andrewdoyle_com/status/1208423606977515520
Though there's some reason to argue that the underlying cause -- a general and pervasive scientific illiteracy -- makes us all culpable, to a greater or lesser extent, for the whole transgender clusterfuck and the related problems following in its wake.
Moot of course the reasons for that state of affairs, but, offhand, it seems a major contributing factor is that most people -- including various so-called biologists and philosophers who should know better -- haven't a flaming clue about the principles which undergird those fields in particular. The upshot of which is that many of those biologists and philosophers are just as narrow-minded and dogmatic as the worst of the woke and of religious fundamentalism. A proverbial case of the blind leading the blind.
Something of a complex issue that I've probably only touched the surface of, though I think I've run across a few "beacons on the hills" that provide some illumination and constitute useful guideposts. One of which is Norbert Wiener's "Human Use of Human Beings" -- in large part, the source and motivation for my own Substack. Not sure if you've yet had time to look at my Welcome post -- thanks for subscribing 🙂 -- which goes into some detail thereon, but I've found this passage of particular relevance and cogency:
Wiener: "I have said that science is impossible without faith. By this I do not mean that the faith on which science depends is religious in nature or involves the acceptance of any of the dogmas of the ordinary religious creeds, yet without faith that nature is subject to law there can be no science. No amount of demonstration can ever prove that nature is subject to law." [pg. 193]
http://asounder.org/resources/weiner_humanuse.pdf
Some "nuance" there that's a bit tricky to summarize in a few words -- he took a whole book to do so -- but his "thesis" -- and that of no few others -- seems to be that the whole edifice of science is built on a number of premises, on a great many axioms of one sort or another that are essentially contingent, are "mere" hypotheses", subject to revision at any time.
Been some time since I've read it, but I think he argues or I think that it is reasonable to argue in consequence that many so-called biologists and philosophers -- for all of their "loud proclamations about following reason and evidence wherever they may lead" (as Pigliucci put it) -- have turned those premises and axioms into articles of faith that are defended with the same dogmatic "groupthink and unwillingness to change one’s mind that is trumped only by religious fundamentalists" (Pigliucci).
Moot also which might be the most salient and problematic case-in-point there, but, as I've argued, a leading contender might be the "debate" -- which is turning much of biology into a clown show -- over whether sex is best defined as a binary, a spectrum, or is, gawd help us all, just "socially constructed":
https://humanuseofhumanbeings.substack.com/p/binarists-vs-spectrumists
Sadly not just the woke and the religious fundamentalists who are engaging in that "zealotry". Seems also to characterize far too many on "our side", among those supposedly on "the right side of history".
Good insights. Scientific reasoning isn’t a platonic form immune from human emotions and non rational desires. Didn’t Nietzsche tell us this? Perhaps Hume too.
I am always amused by the signs on people’s lawn’s saying: “Believe in Science “. Not sure these people see the complexity of that statement. Many of these people don’t realize they are saying science is a religion since they want it to be believed. Yet if you asked them about that, they would probably say science is absolute knowledge. They would be better off saying: “ Understand Science”.
I
Thanks. And quite agree with you about science not being "immune from human emotions & non-rational desires".
Apropos of which, you might want to check out the "Reality's Last Stand" Substack by evolutionary biologist Colin Wright, and this recent guest post there in particular:
https://www.realityslaststand.com/p/meditations-on-the-betrayal-of-science
This from Tyler Harper (professor at Bates College) in the NYT yesterday.
"First, they [colleges] should exit the D.E.I.-industrial complex, which prioritizes the kind of cheap fixes, awareness raising and one-off speaker events that have been shown to bear little fruit. "
Where are his grad students clambering to have him fired for making this terrible statement?
They wouldn't read far-right propaganda like the NYT.
He doesn't have graduate students. The only grad programs at Bates are for professional master's degrees.
More like Very Bad GRAND Wizards, am I right?
This line really hits home:
"You should take advantage of a friendly adversary like that and use his arguments to sharpen your own.
But in so many liberal spaces, the mere thought that you even need to defend your opinions with logic and reason are seen as outré."
The excerpts from the grads' complaints actually had me liking the guy more! The letter, which I have not read in full, gives the impression that the grievance theey had with Inbar was that he sometimes disagrees with them.
Lord, imagine being any bit conservative and trying to land one of these positions.
"It’s nothing but derailing. Inbar’s argument is that “when we align ourselves with a political side or faction it’s bad for our science.” Maybe he’s right and maybe he’s wrong. But it is not an argument to respond by accusing him of “trivializing” abortion by painting it as a Democratic versus Republican issue (I’m not sure I even understand this line of reasoning; surely it can be both an important issue and one that breaks down fairly neatly along partisan lines), and it’s certainly not an argument to respond by pointing out that UCLA has itself issued statements on these issues. Neither claim comes close to actually offering evidence Inbar is wrong — and you don’t even need to agree with Inbar to see this!"
Unfortunately, this statement by Singal fails to signify his support for the LGBTQIAUDSIAFOPDSAUPFOIDSA, Queer, and BIPOC communities who are most significantly harmed by restricting abortion access. This leverages the identity politics of birthing people and BIPOC all the while failing to mention the aforementioned reality. The claim that liberals support abortion more than conservatives fails to recognize the unique ways that bodies operate in modernity--especially birthing, BIPOC, and queer bodies. Saying that Republicans tend not to like abortion fails to recognize unique experiences and negates the personal identity of birthing people (premise). As such, I will not hire Singal!
You laugh, but I was part of a student group at the above institution that basically imploded because someone failed to recognize how "LGBTQSDFKJSDF queer and BIPOC communities" are most significantly harmed by restricting abortion access...it was absurd
At an early Presidential debate in 2020, Julian Castro promised to protect abortion rights for transgender people, too. I guess it was an attempt to distinguish himself from the multitude of candidates. I wondered if he knew what transgender was. Little did i realize he foresaw the need for such protection far better than me.
>I guess it was an attempt to distinguish himself from the multitude of candidates.
I suppose you could say he succeeded in that regard at least.
If someone's goal was to utterly destroy the institution of the university, would they act any differently than these diversity zealots?
My first thought is what a ghastly story. My second thought was, dog bites man. Yet more intolerance, more virtue-signalling, more bad reasoning. Many liberals do not want to sharpen their arguments, they want to sharpen their knives.
In universities and colleges, there is a paucity of good-faith debates, there is a surplus of pile ons, of moral preening, of yelling about unsafe spaces. I sort of understand how we got where we are but I confess that I do not see a way out.
Have a great weekend and 4th of July, everyone!
I wholeheartedly agree but mainly want to say, on a positive note:
"Thanks! Have a great 4th, too!"
I've been following this very closely, and agree completely with Jesse's analysis here. There may also be something else going on that nobody (in that space) wants to touch with a ten foot pole. Students really want their universities to hire faculty of color, which I understand, but many don't seem that concerned about the how of it. I imagine at least a few of the "passionate" students were not excited that this hiring would mean not just one, but two, more white faculty members (Dr. Inbar and his partner, from what I can tell), taking opportunities away from faculty that would contribute to these diversity goals. This could explain their motivation to trawl through old podcast episodes for anything that could be considered problematic. Obviously, this is just my theory and only one aspect of the larger situation, but all of it is extremely demoralizing.
I'm curious too about his partner/girlfriend: did she take the job that was offered to her first? Or did this whole episode turn her off from the job offer?
It said in the Chronicle article that she has one year extension on the offer in case he can get another position in the area. But, kind of an awkward way to start a new job.
So I was in Academia for a while and I thought me being a native Alaskan would give me some defense to push back on some dei stuff. Nope. I was called the other white and was told point blank by my philosophy teacher that I shouldn't peruse a job in Academia because my skin was too white. Anti-racism is such a joke.
More and more the demands of the wokeistas bring Orwell to mind.
<<"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.” Notes on Nationalism (1945)>>
The sense I have from reading the excerpts from the students' letter is that it is an exercise in what Orwell in "1984" called "bellyfeel". The author/s of the original draft was/were in a state of bellyfeel when they drafted it, the wording of the letter is full of phrases that engender bellyfeel, and the signatories endorsed it in a state of bellyfeel. To critique such a document for failures of logic and lack of grounding in facts is to indict oneself as an oldthinker who unbellyfeels Ingsoc.
This reminds me why I don't ever want to go see a psychologist. If I want to spill my guts to someone, I don't want it to be someone so ideologically committed to an outcome that they don't listen to what my problems are.
Quite some time ago now I had an experience like that at the Australian University where I was studying. I saw a university counsellor to seek assistance with a problem I was experiencing. The counsellor was a conservative Catholic and also a devotee of a certain school of psychoanalytical doctrine, and due to the synergy of these beliefs he spent the hour trying to convince me that the problem I had was one that would be solved by his preconceived solution, and providing no assistance whatsoever with the problem I came to ask his assistance with. I can readily imagine other kinds of ideological commitment driving such a professionally derelict approach.