I never particularly cared about the campus free speech debate as an undergrad, likely because I went to a big state school where this wasn't an issue. I don't recall ever feeling like I couldn't engage with an issue for fear of saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, even when conversations got contentious. And we had a genuinely diverse student body (racially and otherwise - lots of poor/working class students, a lot of immigrants & first generation students, returning students in their 30s from industry or the military, large ideological spread etc), which according to current orthodoxies you would think would result in more conflict - so many more lived experiences to offend against! But things - at least during my time there - never got out of hand. So I assumed that the overall campus free speech thing was overblown - that most campuses were probably more or less like mine, with small groups of overzealous folks making a lot of noise but overall no real, identifiable free speech issue. Obviously, this is one person's experience at one school, so I don't know how different things were elsewhere.
I am now in grad school at an elite institution, and have noticed a shockingly pronounced difference in the free-speech attitudes of people in my program who attended elite universities for undergrad vs people who attended lower-ranked/state schools. There's this whole separate language for discussing identity issues that they seem to have learned, which frankly sounded like gibberish to me at first and often still does. But they're very attuned to it and pretty merciless with it - the denunciation of fellow students (especially in any kind of student advocacy space) who fail to use the exact correct language is swift and fierce. And that's not even touching some of the things I have heard people say about professors who are known to have verboten beliefs. There's also been the disinviting of speakers, countless petitions to get the department and university more broadly to adopt unpopular and questionably effective practices like dropping the GRE...it's messy. I find the language thing to be the most fascinating part though - even though it's kind of frightening, it's also almost funny to hear these folks, most of whom have been very wealthy their whole lives, "advocate" for poor/working class people of color using language that most of the poor/working class people of any race I've met would laugh at.
So yeah, based on my experience, it seems like a mostly-class, mostly-elite-institution thing that's really difficult to navigate if you haven't been exposed to it continuously for a long time. And I agree that the idea that its relative limitation to elite universities doesn't make it something you can just brush aside - these are people who, by dint of their education, may end up with a lot of power and influence someday. I would love to live in a world where you're not more likely to end up with a lot of power just because you went to Harvard or Stanford, but alas I do not. So a bunch of these elite students in ideological lockstep repeating crazy shit and using bizarre language conventions to gatekeep who can publicly share their opinions is, indeed, bad.
Sorry for the rambling, this has just been on my mind a lot lately as I've been trying to participate in department initiatives without stepping on any toes while still avoiding repeating bullshit mantras I don't believe. It's a tough needle to thread.
Reading your comment about grad school reminded me of a Henry James or Edith Wharton novel and the intricate and inscrutable (to outsiders) speech codes and rituals of etiquette of the upper crust in the late 19th century.
It does seem like Woke (for lack of a better term) has become an upper-class signaling system, a way to show that you're one of the "Good People" who "get it". I guess part of it too is that now that Conspicuous Consumption no longer works (almost everyone can afford flashy clothes and shoes and bags etc) our betters have adopted Conspicuous Virtue as a way to signal their inherent superiority.
Also, I guess where 100 or so years ago the foundational illusion/delusion was that these codes and other forms of "good breeding" proved that this class deserved its place on the top of the pyramid and all its wealth, now the foundational illusion/delusion is that these collegiate strivers and aspiring overlords are really doing it all because of how deeply they care about "the marginalized", and that disagreeing with them will cause deep harm to the oppressed and underprivileged.
America's elites always seem to be basted in Protestantism, esp in the belief of "doing well by doing good" and of always trying their best to serve God while serving Mammon (and vice versa).
Conspicuous virtue as a replacement for conspicuous consumption as a signal of elite status is the BEST comment I’ve ever seen here. Thanks for floating that idea.
Great comment! Mind if I post it to Twitter? I can do just the body, without your handle, if you'd prefer. But no pressure and I won't post it without your permission.
You stated the bottom line on this subject nicely, succinctly: "So a bunch of these elite students in ideological lockstep repeating crazy shit and using bizarre language conventions to gatekeep who can publicly share their opinions is, indeed, bad."
The fact that it is largely privileged students is because they have been raised (for better or worse) to be more assertive, and to some degree to not respect hierarchies. (If a professor says no, you just go over their head to the department chair or Dean, probably addressing them as "hi firstname" in your email).
Part of this is student-as-consumer culture (I'm paying to be here, I should get what I want), but part of it is a broader shift, coming from (again, in largely affluent and educated social milieus) helicopter parenting and the ways in which children are no longer taught anything like "respect your elders" or that there is ever a NO that can't be argued against.
I always come back to this askamanager piece, where the letter writer almost seems like patient zero of this kind of entitlement. It's from a college student (this was 2016), and her approach was entirely the mindset I'm talking about.
If you don't like something, you politely but assertively ask for it to be changed. And that the signatures of a bunch of interns should change company policy *because they want it to*. When I was 18 it would never have occurred to me to ask for a change in the dress code *at my job*. And this is the kind of ground shift I'm referring to: it's not just the fringe madnesses we hear about, but a complete worldview.
Students at elite colleges, many of whom went to $50-60k a year prep schools, have gotten very used to high levels of customer service. Going around authority figures to "speak to a manager" is quite common and even encouraged now at some places, which leads to a corresponding climb in deanlets and staff to cater to the students' sensitivities.
Some of this is in part due to the mental health crisis on many of these campuses and legitimate concerns about offering more close academic support (which is often how the massive expansion of this system is justified publicly), but much of it in practice functions as a massive customer service operation where typical complaints or deliberately misleading statements end up getting the attention of the school's full administrative might (and often magnified or distorted to absurd levels).
I consider it my job to share vaguely related white trash anecdotes. Here goes.
I had a difficult time culturally in college, as well although this was the late aughts. Biggest piece is definitely on me for not using resources but a lot of it was class resentment. I worked in a developmental biology lab and got to see a lot of the more practical side of things and I just had this overwhelming sense of people phoning it in. Like, these were the same type of people who threw up all this stuff about the spotted owl (which later turned out to be wrong) and had just destroyed my home community basically on a whim because it kinda sorta aligned with their politics if you didn’t go down to a deep level of detail. I was always put in charge of things because I could get shit done, so there’s that, but man I just stopped giving a shit. I’d raise a criticism about what we were doing and instead of addressing anything about the science of it I’d get a “you’re an undergrad, it’s complicated” then see something written for publishing that wasn’t complicated at all and still didn’t address what I knew was right. I don’t think it can be overstated how much the education as a service model has just destroyed research. You can’t trust the overwhelming majority of shit that you see. People treat peer review like it’s replication and don’t even take the time to ask themselves stuff to check their null hypothesis. Everyone wants to treat rigor abs discovery like it’s something you can put into a checkbox.
I used to resent my upbringing a lot and thought I was a failure for just not getting it but looking back on it I think the sort of mentality I got from being raised around men who had their fingers/limbs ripped off by machinery has served me well.
Ex:
When I was in fourth grade my teacher died in the middle of class.
My dad was late picking me up in part because he had to make sure someone else could take over the cut off saw at the sawmill.
When he found me crying he got down on one knee, put his hand on my shoulder, and gave the sincerely best advice he knew how to give me and said: “Don’t be a pussy.”
Meaning, life is hard, terrible things are normal, and you’ve got to find it within yourself to persevere and still find good because no one else can do it for you.
I used to think that was really bad, but now that I’ve seen blue check mark Twitter I think it was for the best. Like literally. I make a decent income, own a home, and have a family. I don’t think any of that would be the case if I had “succeeded” at college and ended up doing research of no value to anyone.
Definitely not anything I’d recommend saying to a kid for anyone who has the cultural background to be reading this (I’d go with the interpretation with kindness attached that I laid out about terrible things being normal and courage being necessary) but for a guy who barely graduated high school and has only ever had three books read to him his entire life it was the best way he knew to say it.
What I was also trying to say and didn’t, making this seem out of left field entirely, is that this sentiment is just totally absent from our institutions. Everyone wants the safe space. No one wants to make a space safe. At some point you have to be the person who separated personal from important and that ethos is just dead in academia.
I really, really hope you don't actually think that's a helpful thing to say to a young child who just had someone close to them die unexpectedly in close proximity to them.
Sorry that upsets you. But it is truth. More Americans need to speak honestly to their kids about life and what it takes to be successful. We’ve got so much pathetic whining about “feelings” that we risk raising another generation of young people without the ability to struggle to succeed. Struggle is what it takes for most folks in this country. That is not true it seems for the “ [anyones] who has the cultural background to be reading this”. The hubris of that sentiment by Commenter “Some Guy” is pretty much at the core of the problems in America. We’ve lost the ability to deal with reality. Anyone who thinks this self selected readership knows how to address our problems is pretty much clueless. I sense you are also amongst the clueless adults here v
I'm a tenured professor in a school usually ranked around 30th-40th in the US; we have Nobel Laureates wandering the campus and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. As a "2nd tier" university I used to marvel at the madness at the top tier places and thought "thank god that's not us." But by 2020 it was us as well. The administrative staffing around "diversity" and associated progressive causes has exploded, and the tuition costs alongside it (note: there is some controversy around whether these two things have a causal relationship). I felt safe as a professor in a field far from politics, but I recently said something that caused an "investigation" to be initiated into whether my views are "properly aligned with those of the university." Fun times.
I was at a dinner with my brother and his then girlfriend a few years back. I had clumsily recited a Chappelle bit (can't remember which but I remember it was pretty tame). I could clearly tell I had upset her, after apologizing if I offended. Her response was that she thought that kind of humor shouldn't be allowed.
I nearly spilt my coffee out my mouth, I thought she had got me and I started laughing at what I thought was her joke. She was dead serious and explained to me that it was harm and shouldn't be allowed along with a litany of other thought crimes.
My brother would tell me later (his facial expression at that diner made it clear to let it then let it go) that she adopted this way of life in a elite New England college.
That was my first "something's wrong' moment in terms of dealing with this new mindset of free speech and it's acceptance. Normally you'd expect this sort of thinking from busy body conservatives.
"Normally you'd expect this sort of thinking from busy body conservatives."
Check your biases at the door, please. You read Singal, for god's sake. As Commenter RJF writes about Singal's work above, " ... attention to detail, deep dive approach is synonymous with intellectual honesty. His articles could be titled: 'hold your horses, let’s take a proper look at what is being said.'" A part of the objection to "cancel culture" is precisely the "busybody" behavior of the Liberals.
Forgive me I don't understand the point you are trying make?
You saying that conservatives weren't the main instigators of this type of discourse? Or that it was always in conjunction with an equal amount from the liberals?
In any event, I'm not trying to score points as much date myself. I remember a time at a family dinner party in my youth and a relative sneering "those dam liberals, will even defend Nazis!" Perhaps I was to young to know better but I remember Charlton Heston bitching about rap music and Jerry Falwell trying to pull the plug on Teletubbies.
I don't remember the Real World/Road World's demographic clamouring for people to be shut out. Maybe I remembered wrong.
Nice! But I don't think the Davidians were as fucked in the head as these elite, privileged Wokesters. They had a belief system that, no matter how bizarre, they kept to themselves without trying to control the behavior of strangers.
At the beginning of the pandemic my sister got scolded by someone for not wearing a mask. My sister was outside, alone on her side of the street and not within half a block of anyone. And yet, some busybody felt she had to do her civic duty and run over to yell at a perfect stranger.
Did you wear a cloth mask with a smiley face on it that you kept in your pocket otherwise and hadn't washed in a week and took it off anyhow in close quarters so you could have a Coke?
The argument is not simply "masks work". In strict controlled circumstances with consistent protocols they work. For mass society down to age 2? And now we're talking about sanctioning a world leader because of a $60 mask fine?
I was just answering why I don't think masks are a secular hijab! Which, why did I even bother? In retrospect it was ill advised to respond to someone who throws out an outrageous statement and then says "change my mind". Could you imagine someone saying something like that in real life?
Solid, great argumentation as always. I think Jesse‘s attention to detail, deep dive approach is synonymous with intellectual honesty. His articles could be titled: “hold your horses, let’s take a proper look at what is being said.”
Great article!! ( or piece? I don't know). Anyway, that story about the Smith college janitor was infuriating. I pity the future boss and co-workers of Kanoute.
My favorite is the Van Der Werff letter to Vox, in which she stresses that she does not want Yglesias fired or disciplined--perish the thought!--but that his presence at Vox made her feel "less safe." When I first read that, years ago, I immediately thought, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"
Also--and this is 100% griping--I am awfully tired of Van Der Werff wrapping herself in the rainbow flag when, at the publishing of the Harper's letter, she'd been out for about ten goddamn minutes. I realize that whenever people come out they tend to get absorbed in their outness--I certainly went through that--but I have had my fill of newbies acting like they invented the concept of queerness. It's like, "Emily, focus on real equality issues and stop being scared of the bad man who likes free expression."
I got banned from a subreddit for suggesting that people who have been out as trans for like 5 minutes _might_ not be the people who we should be listening to about trans issues. I was told that was "bad faith" and I was "just making up a person to get mad at" and was like "you _definitely_ know these people. we all do". (I'd link the comment but it was deleted. The whole post was, even though it had hundreds of upvotes. It's extremely innocuous, you're just not allowed to push back at from trans maximalism on most subreddits, apparently including r/neoliberal).
I get that in general every single person who is a mod on reddit is young and in college, but that sort of ties in to Jesse's point: if these same illiberal people who are making a mess of liberal organizations are _also_ in charge of what is acceptable to say on social media, that might not be a great thing for society.
Agree. But, Kanoute is on social media and the stories in the NYT and NYPost are easily found. If an employer fails to do even a cursory Google search on a potential candidate as a part of a background check before interviewing, then they might just deserve this whiny racialized narcissist.
That an applicant for a position lists Smith on her resume is itself a red flag. Same for the rest of the Seven Sisters schools and a few others who are hot beds of privileged idiocy.
What is weird, considering she is an African immigrant, is how damn entitled she is. She is acting like a rich white mean girl.
She uses a cafeteria that is only supposed to be for high school kids attending summer camp. Then she goes into a partitioned off part and settles in.
All people working with minors have to have clearances for God's sake. And she just waltzes in, going where she wants, rules be damned. Accuses people of racism will nilly. Ugh!
It goes with the DEI mentality. Mandating "Inclusion" of folks because of their identities to achieve "Diversity" (as though that had value in and of itself - it does not) and then forcing equal outcomes, that is to get "Equity", is just Affirmative Action on high test steroids. AA was, while a noble thought, wrong, wrong, wrong from the start. And we've devolved to the point that some of society believe that "merit" is racist. It could be that Kanoute is a "victim," a victim of a society that has pushed her along because of her identity. She hasn't't learned to think analytically, but only, in her case, racially.
On the other hand, she no doubt has exposure to a gaggle of privileged white mean girls and perhaps has simply adopted the same behavior.
"The issue is much more what college administrators do when a small minority of students try to inflict illiberalism and misery on the broader campus community..."
I'm a college professor at a non-elite public university in flyover country. The overwhelming majority of my students are just trying to get through their coursework while juggling work, bills, and anxiety. Some are also intellectually motivated, engaged, and open-minded, but exceedingly few are so dogmatic in their views that they won't entertain contrarian ideas, which I frequently introduce in my courses. Most students at the majority of universities no one cares about simply don't have the time or massive sense of entitlement required to take their professors' or classmates' words out of context and attempt to cancel them by whipping up outrage on social media.
That being said, all it takes is one student who wants to become twitter famous by outing their professor as a racist, sexist, or transphobic to destroy someone's career. I am not so arrogant as to believe I'm immune from this and I tread carefully while teaching political science courses. For instance, I teach about Title IX and while I cover how it governs the way universities adjudicate cases of alleged sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct, I don't touch transgender issues with a ten foot pole.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out..."
They're now coming for the professors and ironically, we're the ones who birthed these students...The snake eats its own tail.
Late capitalism’s class war waged by comfortably off types against the losers from decades of financialism and globalisation is a breathtaking moment.
But where are the representatives of those people? Where are the Jesse Singals, Matt Yglasii, F deBoers with actual political gravitas rather than good wordsmithery? They are endlessly exploited and let down by this lack of quality representation. In turn this creates a feedback loop where they cling to someone like Trump (or Le Pen where I live) and are then mocked and vilified, kind of understandably but unfairly.
Frankly I’m bored until an articulate representative of the least privileged people of ALL colours and cultural backgrounds bothers to show up.
He’s a classic of the genre, I’m afraid. A grifter (now making money from publishing a dubious financial tip sheet). Just another narcissistic sociopath with the smarts to know what upsets ‘ordinary decent people’ but who doesn’t really *represent* them.
All politicians are narcissists and grifters. That's the baseline. But he actually got something big done that voters wanted, unlike most who promise the world and then don't do it.
All true, although Farage doesn't represent the crushed classes. UKIP's base was angry nationalistic older folk who were further right than the Tories. He certainly started the Brexit ball rolling but never advocated for any other reform to level the odds for the formerly unionised and relatively affluent working class who became the underclass in Britain.
Farage represents himself, it just turned out he was able to engage half the country with those interests, which is no small thing.
But the interesting thing (and we are hijacking Jesse's page here) is that leaving the EU was a socialist left position from c.1975-2010. Jeremy Corbyn was anti-EU until 5 minutes before the referendum, precisely because the EU was hurting the working class, by undercutting wages with Eastern European workers.
The left did a backflip (driven by the metro-elite/Davos side of the party, not concerned with keeping their own jobs but with affording Polish nannies and having second homes in France), and labeled anti-EU sentiment as "racist".
The irony is, if Corbyn had stuck to his guns about the EU, he'd probably be prime minister now.
I think a lot about this, having once been enthusiastically Remain then gradually becoming disillusioned and finally cast out for not wanting to cancel Brexit haha! The referendum was my introduction to identity politics and how unhelpfully it essentialises everything. Thanks to you lot over there haha! From my (one and only) home in France I now cede the page back over to Jesse :)
"I’m interested in the norms that prevail in elite institutions on issues of identity, speech, and disagreement, because these norms go a long way toward determining what academic research is funded and disseminated, how young thinkers are socialized, what news stories get written versus ignored or suppressed, and so on."
I also wonder how elite institutions influence the wider landscape of higher ed. I'd have to think, say, Harvard's practices have a trickle-down effect, right?
It trickles down in a number of ways. First, articles in various journals (especially education journals) that are not just published, but then put on syllabi at top schools, discussed on Twitter, made a big deal about at conferences, etc. often provide all the proof necessary to "decide" on these issues (regardless of follow-up studies, concerns about methodology, etc.). If it's published and gets popular, it's gospel. This gets specific ideas on the radar of academics, while professional associations meetings can take care of the rest of the staff. Social networks are key parts of the speed of the spread, but it's these "I saw X idea on a professional panel at Y conference" and the fact you can say it comes from a "Harvard" or "Stanford" study that give it the stamp of approval (so education schools in particular at these places play a not-surprisingly very large role in dissemination of some of these ideas).
How do these spread at your average campus though? Usually it's some kind of person who's interested in getting ahead--a dean who wants to move up to provost, a staffer who wants to become an assistant dean--or someone else worried about their position on campus becoming redundant. These people become, as the sociologists would say, norm entrepreneurs--they bring these ideas up at meetings on campus, organize events, and wield their newfound authority on these matters as a weapon. They point to the "prestigious" institutions doing this as proof that they need to as well, but it's somewhat subtle because people on these campuses know very well that they aren't Harvard. So there's kind of a vague appeal to "experts" on these issues instead, often backed by the prestige credentials of said expert.
These entrepreneurs often have a fertile recruiting ground of moderate-to-far-left liberals among the faculty and staff who genuinely want to "do something" to address societal issues that they've seen on the news and think that participating in a workshop on "microaggressions" or "decolonizing the curriculum" is a way to do that. This also opens up more opportunities to signal that you "care" and that you are "doing something," which can then lead over time to a race to signal that you care *more* and are more concerned DEI than your less-enlightened competition on campus. Over time, those who resist or question this get ostracized, or occasionally even shouted down.
An additional path here too is accreditation, in which retired academics and admins--many who are fully onboard with recent woke stances--make demands that a campus "do something" about DEI issues. Since these kinds of threats directly impinge on the viability of a campus, they give a great deal of grist to those interested in wielding wokeness as a weapon in meetings.
A similar pattern follows with students, starting with the student leadership on campus. They quickly realize that DEI is not only a way to increase a number of resume-friendly positions that they can hold (as well as often a path to getting internships or scholarships, as they read the applications for those), but also a cudgel to use against their enemies and, as some start to realize, authority figures on campus.
I think many of these mid-tier schools are just a few years behind the elite schools on these issues. Yes, there's less $$ to throw at some of these issues, but there's definitely some and the pressure will continue to mount for all schools to "do more". For every one story of overreach at Yale, there are probably dozens at other lowered-ranked colleges that just don't get reported.
I teach in NYC public high schools and in recent years students have started adopting this lingo too. I'm talking working class Hispanic students in the Bronx talking about white people as colonizers and referring to things as problematic. Elite institutions matter because what happens there trickles down.
Some of the lingo and coursework has made it to a community college in the pine barrens in south jersey, so when people say “it’s just the elite schooools, nothing to worry about” it gets my hackles up.
Yes, I'm not sure at all sure that elite schools are more intolerant. Some of the more egregious examples -- say the Bret Weinstein case at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA -- were hardly at elite institutions.
When I toured Ohio State with my oldest daughter five years ago, we were told about a position available that students could take that would give them free room and board. They had to declare themselves trans or a trans ally.
I also think he misses the point. I taught many first-generation & working class students at a Catholic college—many held conservative, traditional views on religion, authority, and social hierarchies. So, many students seemed to perceive that debate with other students or with the professors was disrespectful. Many of them assumed there was a “correct” answer and they probably thought my effort to generate conflicting views in class discussions was some kind of trick or trap. I finally decided I wasn’t going to be able to single-handedly grant them the sense of entitlement to engage in open debate with an authority figure, especially one who was grading them.
Is there any chance you could unlock this article so that I could share it with my students? We just had our class wrap-up, and to a fault students in my first year seminar (required humanities course with students from all disciplines) talked about how important it was to them to be able to have respectful, open discusses with their peers. They get to stay together in a rather small class for the entire year, so the opportunity to build trust and community is there. If possible, would like to put this on the syllabus in the fall to open up discussions right at the beginning of the year. Your hard work and willingness to take unwarranted abuse are tremendous marks of courage. p.s. I bet you will have particular insight into the Florida textbook case about CRT using the IAT (a great part of your book).
I never particularly cared about the campus free speech debate as an undergrad, likely because I went to a big state school where this wasn't an issue. I don't recall ever feeling like I couldn't engage with an issue for fear of saying the wrong thing in front of the wrong person, even when conversations got contentious. And we had a genuinely diverse student body (racially and otherwise - lots of poor/working class students, a lot of immigrants & first generation students, returning students in their 30s from industry or the military, large ideological spread etc), which according to current orthodoxies you would think would result in more conflict - so many more lived experiences to offend against! But things - at least during my time there - never got out of hand. So I assumed that the overall campus free speech thing was overblown - that most campuses were probably more or less like mine, with small groups of overzealous folks making a lot of noise but overall no real, identifiable free speech issue. Obviously, this is one person's experience at one school, so I don't know how different things were elsewhere.
I am now in grad school at an elite institution, and have noticed a shockingly pronounced difference in the free-speech attitudes of people in my program who attended elite universities for undergrad vs people who attended lower-ranked/state schools. There's this whole separate language for discussing identity issues that they seem to have learned, which frankly sounded like gibberish to me at first and often still does. But they're very attuned to it and pretty merciless with it - the denunciation of fellow students (especially in any kind of student advocacy space) who fail to use the exact correct language is swift and fierce. And that's not even touching some of the things I have heard people say about professors who are known to have verboten beliefs. There's also been the disinviting of speakers, countless petitions to get the department and university more broadly to adopt unpopular and questionably effective practices like dropping the GRE...it's messy. I find the language thing to be the most fascinating part though - even though it's kind of frightening, it's also almost funny to hear these folks, most of whom have been very wealthy their whole lives, "advocate" for poor/working class people of color using language that most of the poor/working class people of any race I've met would laugh at.
So yeah, based on my experience, it seems like a mostly-class, mostly-elite-institution thing that's really difficult to navigate if you haven't been exposed to it continuously for a long time. And I agree that the idea that its relative limitation to elite universities doesn't make it something you can just brush aside - these are people who, by dint of their education, may end up with a lot of power and influence someday. I would love to live in a world where you're not more likely to end up with a lot of power just because you went to Harvard or Stanford, but alas I do not. So a bunch of these elite students in ideological lockstep repeating crazy shit and using bizarre language conventions to gatekeep who can publicly share their opinions is, indeed, bad.
Sorry for the rambling, this has just been on my mind a lot lately as I've been trying to participate in department initiatives without stepping on any toes while still avoiding repeating bullshit mantras I don't believe. It's a tough needle to thread.
Reading your comment about grad school reminded me of a Henry James or Edith Wharton novel and the intricate and inscrutable (to outsiders) speech codes and rituals of etiquette of the upper crust in the late 19th century.
It does seem like Woke (for lack of a better term) has become an upper-class signaling system, a way to show that you're one of the "Good People" who "get it". I guess part of it too is that now that Conspicuous Consumption no longer works (almost everyone can afford flashy clothes and shoes and bags etc) our betters have adopted Conspicuous Virtue as a way to signal their inherent superiority.
Also, I guess where 100 or so years ago the foundational illusion/delusion was that these codes and other forms of "good breeding" proved that this class deserved its place on the top of the pyramid and all its wealth, now the foundational illusion/delusion is that these collegiate strivers and aspiring overlords are really doing it all because of how deeply they care about "the marginalized", and that disagreeing with them will cause deep harm to the oppressed and underprivileged.
America's elites always seem to be basted in Protestantism, esp in the belief of "doing well by doing good" and of always trying their best to serve God while serving Mammon (and vice versa).
Conspicuous virtue as a replacement for conspicuous consumption as a signal of elite status is the BEST comment I’ve ever seen here. Thanks for floating that idea.
hey, thanks!
i only wish i could claim it as my idea:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10551-018-3999-7
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB117462054041346510
Great comment! Mind if I post it to Twitter? I can do just the body, without your handle, if you'd prefer. But no pressure and I won't post it without your permission.
Thanks - posting it would be fine, but I would appreciate not having my handle in there :)
You stated the bottom line on this subject nicely, succinctly: "So a bunch of these elite students in ideological lockstep repeating crazy shit and using bizarre language conventions to gatekeep who can publicly share their opinions is, indeed, bad."
Nicely done.
Ugh, I caught the tiniest tiniest bit of that. It’s so fucking culty. Was still okay to say so fifteen years ago. Hang in there.
The fact that it is largely privileged students is because they have been raised (for better or worse) to be more assertive, and to some degree to not respect hierarchies. (If a professor says no, you just go over their head to the department chair or Dean, probably addressing them as "hi firstname" in your email).
Part of this is student-as-consumer culture (I'm paying to be here, I should get what I want), but part of it is a broader shift, coming from (again, in largely affluent and educated social milieus) helicopter parenting and the ways in which children are no longer taught anything like "respect your elders" or that there is ever a NO that can't be argued against.
I always come back to this askamanager piece, where the letter writer almost seems like patient zero of this kind of entitlement. It's from a college student (this was 2016), and her approach was entirely the mindset I'm talking about.
https://www.askamanager.org/2016/06/i-was-fired-from-my-internship-for-writing-a-proposal-for-a-more-flexible-dress-code.html
If you don't like something, you politely but assertively ask for it to be changed. And that the signatures of a bunch of interns should change company policy *because they want it to*. When I was 18 it would never have occurred to me to ask for a change in the dress code *at my job*. And this is the kind of ground shift I'm referring to: it's not just the fringe madnesses we hear about, but a complete worldview.
Students at elite colleges, many of whom went to $50-60k a year prep schools, have gotten very used to high levels of customer service. Going around authority figures to "speak to a manager" is quite common and even encouraged now at some places, which leads to a corresponding climb in deanlets and staff to cater to the students' sensitivities.
Some of this is in part due to the mental health crisis on many of these campuses and legitimate concerns about offering more close academic support (which is often how the massive expansion of this system is justified publicly), but much of it in practice functions as a massive customer service operation where typical complaints or deliberately misleading statements end up getting the attention of the school's full administrative might (and often magnified or distorted to absurd levels).
I consider it my job to share vaguely related white trash anecdotes. Here goes.
I had a difficult time culturally in college, as well although this was the late aughts. Biggest piece is definitely on me for not using resources but a lot of it was class resentment. I worked in a developmental biology lab and got to see a lot of the more practical side of things and I just had this overwhelming sense of people phoning it in. Like, these were the same type of people who threw up all this stuff about the spotted owl (which later turned out to be wrong) and had just destroyed my home community basically on a whim because it kinda sorta aligned with their politics if you didn’t go down to a deep level of detail. I was always put in charge of things because I could get shit done, so there’s that, but man I just stopped giving a shit. I’d raise a criticism about what we were doing and instead of addressing anything about the science of it I’d get a “you’re an undergrad, it’s complicated” then see something written for publishing that wasn’t complicated at all and still didn’t address what I knew was right. I don’t think it can be overstated how much the education as a service model has just destroyed research. You can’t trust the overwhelming majority of shit that you see. People treat peer review like it’s replication and don’t even take the time to ask themselves stuff to check their null hypothesis. Everyone wants to treat rigor abs discovery like it’s something you can put into a checkbox.
I used to resent my upbringing a lot and thought I was a failure for just not getting it but looking back on it I think the sort of mentality I got from being raised around men who had their fingers/limbs ripped off by machinery has served me well.
Ex:
When I was in fourth grade my teacher died in the middle of class.
My dad was late picking me up in part because he had to make sure someone else could take over the cut off saw at the sawmill.
When he found me crying he got down on one knee, put his hand on my shoulder, and gave the sincerely best advice he knew how to give me and said: “Don’t be a pussy.”
Meaning, life is hard, terrible things are normal, and you’ve got to find it within yourself to persevere and still find good because no one else can do it for you.
I used to think that was really bad, but now that I’ve seen blue check mark Twitter I think it was for the best. Like literally. I make a decent income, own a home, and have a family. I don’t think any of that would be the case if I had “succeeded” at college and ended up doing research of no value to anyone.
DBAP! The best advice any dad can give his children. It’s life explained in four words.
Definitely not anything I’d recommend saying to a kid for anyone who has the cultural background to be reading this (I’d go with the interpretation with kindness attached that I laid out about terrible things being normal and courage being necessary) but for a guy who barely graduated high school and has only ever had three books read to him his entire life it was the best way he knew to say it.
What I was also trying to say and didn’t, making this seem out of left field entirely, is that this sentiment is just totally absent from our institutions. Everyone wants the safe space. No one wants to make a space safe. At some point you have to be the person who separated personal from important and that ethos is just dead in academia.
I really, really hope you don't actually think that's a helpful thing to say to a young child who just had someone close to them die unexpectedly in close proximity to them.
Sorry that upsets you. But it is truth. More Americans need to speak honestly to their kids about life and what it takes to be successful. We’ve got so much pathetic whining about “feelings” that we risk raising another generation of young people without the ability to struggle to succeed. Struggle is what it takes for most folks in this country. That is not true it seems for the “ [anyones] who has the cultural background to be reading this”. The hubris of that sentiment by Commenter “Some Guy” is pretty much at the core of the problems in America. We’ve lost the ability to deal with reality. Anyone who thinks this self selected readership knows how to address our problems is pretty much clueless. I sense you are also amongst the clueless adults here v
I'm a tenured professor in a school usually ranked around 30th-40th in the US; we have Nobel Laureates wandering the campus and hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding. As a "2nd tier" university I used to marvel at the madness at the top tier places and thought "thank god that's not us." But by 2020 it was us as well. The administrative staffing around "diversity" and associated progressive causes has exploded, and the tuition costs alongside it (note: there is some controversy around whether these two things have a causal relationship). I felt safe as a professor in a field far from politics, but I recently said something that caused an "investigation" to be initiated into whether my views are "properly aligned with those of the university." Fun times.
Please send me an email if there's more about that you can share! Sorry you went through it
I was at a dinner with my brother and his then girlfriend a few years back. I had clumsily recited a Chappelle bit (can't remember which but I remember it was pretty tame). I could clearly tell I had upset her, after apologizing if I offended. Her response was that she thought that kind of humor shouldn't be allowed.
I nearly spilt my coffee out my mouth, I thought she had got me and I started laughing at what I thought was her joke. She was dead serious and explained to me that it was harm and shouldn't be allowed along with a litany of other thought crimes.
My brother would tell me later (his facial expression at that diner made it clear to let it then let it go) that she adopted this way of life in a elite New England college.
That was my first "something's wrong' moment in terms of dealing with this new mindset of free speech and it's acceptance. Normally you'd expect this sort of thinking from busy body conservatives.
Words are violence is the ultimate luxury belief.
i think we all realize now that the Stepford Wokes from elite institutions are the new "busybody conservatives"
"Normally you'd expect this sort of thinking from busy body conservatives."
Check your biases at the door, please. You read Singal, for god's sake. As Commenter RJF writes about Singal's work above, " ... attention to detail, deep dive approach is synonymous with intellectual honesty. His articles could be titled: 'hold your horses, let’s take a proper look at what is being said.'" A part of the objection to "cancel culture" is precisely the "busybody" behavior of the Liberals.
Forgive me I don't understand the point you are trying make?
You saying that conservatives weren't the main instigators of this type of discourse? Or that it was always in conjunction with an equal amount from the liberals?
In any event, I'm not trying to score points as much date myself. I remember a time at a family dinner party in my youth and a relative sneering "those dam liberals, will even defend Nazis!" Perhaps I was to young to know better but I remember Charlton Heston bitching about rap music and Jerry Falwell trying to pull the plug on Teletubbies.
I don't remember the Real World/Road World's demographic clamouring for people to be shut out. Maybe I remembered wrong.
Not remotely the point of the article, but a pro-mask mandate protest? Nearly one year after the vaccine? What the fuck?
I call them Branch Covidians. No Covid mitigation practice is ever too stringent and keeping it going forever is too short.
Nice! But I don't think the Davidians were as fucked in the head as these elite, privileged Wokesters. They had a belief system that, no matter how bizarre, they kept to themselves without trying to control the behavior of strangers.
And they're outside!
At the beginning of the pandemic my sister got scolded by someone for not wearing a mask. My sister was outside, alone on her side of the street and not within half a block of anyone. And yet, some busybody felt she had to do her civic duty and run over to yell at a perfect stranger.
Masks are a secular hijab, change my view.
I mean, you know they work, right? I saw that myself as a contact tracer. Are they perfect? Of course not! But they do lessen risk.
You don’t know why I wore a mask for two years. I’m a nurse and I’ve been wearing them for thirty years. I didn’t do it to adhere to left religion.
That said, I think the time for mask mandates is long past.
Did you wear a cloth mask with a smiley face on it that you kept in your pocket otherwise and hadn't washed in a week and took it off anyhow in close quarters so you could have a Coke?
The argument is not simply "masks work". In strict controlled circumstances with consistent protocols they work. For mass society down to age 2? And now we're talking about sanctioning a world leader because of a $60 mask fine?
Settle yourself, buddy!
I was just answering why I don't think masks are a secular hijab! Which, why did I even bother? In retrospect it was ill advised to respond to someone who throws out an outrageous statement and then says "change my mind". Could you imagine someone saying something like that in real life?
Solid, great argumentation as always. I think Jesse‘s attention to detail, deep dive approach is synonymous with intellectual honesty. His articles could be titled: “hold your horses, let’s take a proper look at what is being said.”
Great article!! ( or piece? I don't know). Anyway, that story about the Smith college janitor was infuriating. I pity the future boss and co-workers of Kanoute.
My favorite is the Van Der Werff letter to Vox, in which she stresses that she does not want Yglesias fired or disciplined--perish the thought!--but that his presence at Vox made her feel "less safe." When I first read that, years ago, I immediately thought, "Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?"
Also--and this is 100% griping--I am awfully tired of Van Der Werff wrapping herself in the rainbow flag when, at the publishing of the Harper's letter, she'd been out for about ten goddamn minutes. I realize that whenever people come out they tend to get absorbed in their outness--I certainly went through that--but I have had my fill of newbies acting like they invented the concept of queerness. It's like, "Emily, focus on real equality issues and stop being scared of the bad man who likes free expression."
I got banned from a subreddit for suggesting that people who have been out as trans for like 5 minutes _might_ not be the people who we should be listening to about trans issues. I was told that was "bad faith" and I was "just making up a person to get mad at" and was like "you _definitely_ know these people. we all do". (I'd link the comment but it was deleted. The whole post was, even though it had hundreds of upvotes. It's extremely innocuous, you're just not allowed to push back at from trans maximalism on most subreddits, apparently including r/neoliberal).
I get that in general every single person who is a mod on reddit is young and in college, but that sort of ties in to Jesse's point: if these same illiberal people who are making a mess of liberal organizations are _also_ in charge of what is acceptable to say on social media, that might not be a great thing for society.
"Trans maximalism" is a great way to describe the way the gay rights movement has been hijacked.
Agree. But, Kanoute is on social media and the stories in the NYT and NYPost are easily found. If an employer fails to do even a cursory Google search on a potential candidate as a part of a background check before interviewing, then they might just deserve this whiny racialized narcissist.
That an applicant for a position lists Smith on her resume is itself a red flag. Same for the rest of the Seven Sisters schools and a few others who are hot beds of privileged idiocy.
What is weird, considering she is an African immigrant, is how damn entitled she is. She is acting like a rich white mean girl.
She uses a cafeteria that is only supposed to be for high school kids attending summer camp. Then she goes into a partitioned off part and settles in.
All people working with minors have to have clearances for God's sake. And she just waltzes in, going where she wants, rules be damned. Accuses people of racism will nilly. Ugh!
It goes with the DEI mentality. Mandating "Inclusion" of folks because of their identities to achieve "Diversity" (as though that had value in and of itself - it does not) and then forcing equal outcomes, that is to get "Equity", is just Affirmative Action on high test steroids. AA was, while a noble thought, wrong, wrong, wrong from the start. And we've devolved to the point that some of society believe that "merit" is racist. It could be that Kanoute is a "victim," a victim of a society that has pushed her along because of her identity. She hasn't't learned to think analytically, but only, in her case, racially.
On the other hand, she no doubt has exposure to a gaggle of privileged white mean girls and perhaps has simply adopted the same behavior.
This hits the nail on the head:
"The issue is much more what college administrators do when a small minority of students try to inflict illiberalism and misery on the broader campus community..."
I'm a college professor at a non-elite public university in flyover country. The overwhelming majority of my students are just trying to get through their coursework while juggling work, bills, and anxiety. Some are also intellectually motivated, engaged, and open-minded, but exceedingly few are so dogmatic in their views that they won't entertain contrarian ideas, which I frequently introduce in my courses. Most students at the majority of universities no one cares about simply don't have the time or massive sense of entitlement required to take their professors' or classmates' words out of context and attempt to cancel them by whipping up outrage on social media.
That being said, all it takes is one student who wants to become twitter famous by outing their professor as a racist, sexist, or transphobic to destroy someone's career. I am not so arrogant as to believe I'm immune from this and I tread carefully while teaching political science courses. For instance, I teach about Title IX and while I cover how it governs the way universities adjudicate cases of alleged sexual assault, harassment, and misconduct, I don't touch transgender issues with a ten foot pole.
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out..."
They're now coming for the professors and ironically, we're the ones who birthed these students...The snake eats its own tail.
Late capitalism’s class war waged by comfortably off types against the losers from decades of financialism and globalisation is a breathtaking moment.
But where are the representatives of those people? Where are the Jesse Singals, Matt Yglasii, F deBoers with actual political gravitas rather than good wordsmithery? They are endlessly exploited and let down by this lack of quality representation. In turn this creates a feedback loop where they cling to someone like Trump (or Le Pen where I live) and are then mocked and vilified, kind of understandably but unfairly.
Frankly I’m bored until an articulate representative of the least privileged people of ALL colours and cultural backgrounds bothers to show up.
Nigel Farage? Much more politically savvy, and actually got his goal.
He’s a classic of the genre, I’m afraid. A grifter (now making money from publishing a dubious financial tip sheet). Just another narcissistic sociopath with the smarts to know what upsets ‘ordinary decent people’ but who doesn’t really *represent* them.
All politicians are narcissists and grifters. That's the baseline. But he actually got something big done that voters wanted, unlike most who promise the world and then don't do it.
All true, although Farage doesn't represent the crushed classes. UKIP's base was angry nationalistic older folk who were further right than the Tories. He certainly started the Brexit ball rolling but never advocated for any other reform to level the odds for the formerly unionised and relatively affluent working class who became the underclass in Britain.
Farage represents himself, it just turned out he was able to engage half the country with those interests, which is no small thing.
But the interesting thing (and we are hijacking Jesse's page here) is that leaving the EU was a socialist left position from c.1975-2010. Jeremy Corbyn was anti-EU until 5 minutes before the referendum, precisely because the EU was hurting the working class, by undercutting wages with Eastern European workers.
The left did a backflip (driven by the metro-elite/Davos side of the party, not concerned with keeping their own jobs but with affording Polish nannies and having second homes in France), and labeled anti-EU sentiment as "racist".
The irony is, if Corbyn had stuck to his guns about the EU, he'd probably be prime minister now.
I think a lot about this, having once been enthusiastically Remain then gradually becoming disillusioned and finally cast out for not wanting to cancel Brexit haha! The referendum was my introduction to identity politics and how unhelpfully it essentialises everything. Thanks to you lot over there haha! From my (one and only) home in France I now cede the page back over to Jesse :)
"I’m interested in the norms that prevail in elite institutions on issues of identity, speech, and disagreement, because these norms go a long way toward determining what academic research is funded and disseminated, how young thinkers are socialized, what news stories get written versus ignored or suppressed, and so on."
I also wonder how elite institutions influence the wider landscape of higher ed. I'd have to think, say, Harvard's practices have a trickle-down effect, right?
It trickles down in a number of ways. First, articles in various journals (especially education journals) that are not just published, but then put on syllabi at top schools, discussed on Twitter, made a big deal about at conferences, etc. often provide all the proof necessary to "decide" on these issues (regardless of follow-up studies, concerns about methodology, etc.). If it's published and gets popular, it's gospel. This gets specific ideas on the radar of academics, while professional associations meetings can take care of the rest of the staff. Social networks are key parts of the speed of the spread, but it's these "I saw X idea on a professional panel at Y conference" and the fact you can say it comes from a "Harvard" or "Stanford" study that give it the stamp of approval (so education schools in particular at these places play a not-surprisingly very large role in dissemination of some of these ideas).
How do these spread at your average campus though? Usually it's some kind of person who's interested in getting ahead--a dean who wants to move up to provost, a staffer who wants to become an assistant dean--or someone else worried about their position on campus becoming redundant. These people become, as the sociologists would say, norm entrepreneurs--they bring these ideas up at meetings on campus, organize events, and wield their newfound authority on these matters as a weapon. They point to the "prestigious" institutions doing this as proof that they need to as well, but it's somewhat subtle because people on these campuses know very well that they aren't Harvard. So there's kind of a vague appeal to "experts" on these issues instead, often backed by the prestige credentials of said expert.
These entrepreneurs often have a fertile recruiting ground of moderate-to-far-left liberals among the faculty and staff who genuinely want to "do something" to address societal issues that they've seen on the news and think that participating in a workshop on "microaggressions" or "decolonizing the curriculum" is a way to do that. This also opens up more opportunities to signal that you "care" and that you are "doing something," which can then lead over time to a race to signal that you care *more* and are more concerned DEI than your less-enlightened competition on campus. Over time, those who resist or question this get ostracized, or occasionally even shouted down.
An additional path here too is accreditation, in which retired academics and admins--many who are fully onboard with recent woke stances--make demands that a campus "do something" about DEI issues. Since these kinds of threats directly impinge on the viability of a campus, they give a great deal of grist to those interested in wielding wokeness as a weapon in meetings.
A similar pattern follows with students, starting with the student leadership on campus. They quickly realize that DEI is not only a way to increase a number of resume-friendly positions that they can hold (as well as often a path to getting internships or scholarships, as they read the applications for those), but also a cudgel to use against their enemies and, as some start to realize, authority figures on campus.
I think many of these mid-tier schools are just a few years behind the elite schools on these issues. Yes, there's less $$ to throw at some of these issues, but there's definitely some and the pressure will continue to mount for all schools to "do more". For every one story of overreach at Yale, there are probably dozens at other lowered-ranked colleges that just don't get reported.
I teach in NYC public high schools and in recent years students have started adopting this lingo too. I'm talking working class Hispanic students in the Bronx talking about white people as colonizers and referring to things as problematic. Elite institutions matter because what happens there trickles down.
Some of the lingo and coursework has made it to a community college in the pine barrens in south jersey, so when people say “it’s just the elite schooools, nothing to worry about” it gets my hackles up.
Yes, I'm not sure at all sure that elite schools are more intolerant. Some of the more egregious examples -- say the Bret Weinstein case at Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA -- were hardly at elite institutions.
Could it be that we’re more likely to hear about the schools that journalists attend, or who people in journalists’ social circles attended?
Saying these things don’t happen outside of elite institutions or that the SJW lessons aren’t being taught in podunk towns seems like an assumption.
When I toured Ohio State with my oldest daughter five years ago, we were told about a position available that students could take that would give them free room and board. They had to declare themselves trans or a trans ally.
I also think he misses the point. I taught many first-generation & working class students at a Catholic college—many held conservative, traditional views on religion, authority, and social hierarchies. So, many students seemed to perceive that debate with other students or with the professors was disrespectful. Many of them assumed there was a “correct” answer and they probably thought my effort to generate conflicting views in class discussions was some kind of trick or trap. I finally decided I wasn’t going to be able to single-handedly grant them the sense of entitlement to engage in open debate with an authority figure, especially one who was grading them.
I recommend this essay by Batya Ungar-Sargon....should not be paywalled.
"The New Class Chasm in the Culture Wars"
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/04/20/the_new_class_chasm_in_the_culture_wars_147496.html
It's all about the Karens. Seeking consensus is a wonderful thing. But consensus is hard to find. So once found, it must be enforced!
Bari Weiss had a good podcast about the Central Park Karen; have you heard it?
Oh yes!
Of all the different types of "Karens" I have heard of no one ever mentions "The Social Justice Karen"...
https://twitter.com/TheOnlyDJQualls/status/1269390458095984640?t=P-peSF__OPqosAlQlmLMGQ&s=19
Is there any chance you could unlock this article so that I could share it with my students? We just had our class wrap-up, and to a fault students in my first year seminar (required humanities course with students from all disciplines) talked about how important it was to them to be able to have respectful, open discusses with their peers. They get to stay together in a rather small class for the entire year, so the opportunity to build trust and community is there. If possible, would like to put this on the syllabus in the fall to open up discussions right at the beginning of the year. Your hard work and willingness to take unwarranted abuse are tremendous marks of courage. p.s. I bet you will have particular insight into the Florida textbook case about CRT using the IAT (a great part of your book).
Seems to be everywhere. I had to leave several religious forums because the "non-binaries" began to demand special pronouns and privileges.