I’m here subscribing to you after reading this on BAR. Thank you for this optimistic and hopeful take. I often think Jesse and Katie are too careful in their pushback against woke policies/culture. I personally feel assaulted by the culture in which my kids are coming of age and on certain days I definitely am too angry to be effective. On those days I am thankful for the reasoned approach - BAR lets me laugh and calms me down.
But I’m also tired of being careful - the only way these topics will get into the mainstream conversation , given MSM, is for top-down policies like this. It is not safe for there to be so few people questioning the woke agenda. It is sneaking in and becoming codified because they don’t see through the language: “ obviously we want to be inclusive” and “I want more people to have happier lives so... equity.” The less thoughtful / more reactive parents around me are not thinking things through. The ones who are live in fear of others canceling them or their kids.
We’re need more examples of open pushback. UTAX is a hopeful project but it is too small. I am grateful to see existing universities create new heterodox spaces and programs. Very grateful.
Congrats on the spiffy new job title! I also had some issues with Katie and Jesse's take, which rightfully got a considerable amount of push back in the comments from people like myself, with recent or current experience in public universities in the South.
I agree with a lot of your take here. On the question of a "takeover" of an existing institution like New College, I think it's an approach that I wouldn't want, except I think shaking things up at some places may be what's needed to make substantial change in the trajectory towards doctrinaire thought at so many universities. As you pointed out with the planned University of Austin (best wishes for them, in all sincerity), trying to get a new university off the ground is extremely challenging, especially, I imagine, in the case of a public school. Would take a lot of political will to found a whole new university when UCF can just add a few thousand more to the roster, not to mention competing against institutions with very established reputations.
I also have to appreciate your shout out to GMU economics. I actually spent my first two years in undergrad studying economics and poly sci at Mason. I ended up having to transfer for family reasons, but I believe I learned a ton there and the perspectives I was exposed to have helped me be a more rigorous and balanced thinker to this day, even if, like you, I don't agree with a lot of the positions of, say, Caplan and Hanson. There is so much to be said for productive disagreement, and I think that's one of the values particularly at stake in academia today. I think you make a really good point about having viewpoint diversity *between* institutions, not necessarily expecting full diversity within each particular school.
I'm not a DeSantis fan (although I think attacks on him often go too far) and definitely not Rufo, I still hope that maybe something good will come of this experiment, or something similar at other schools, especially if it could be accomplished with a wee bit less fanfare.
Generally well reasoned, but this misses the mark in my opinion on why DeSantis and Rufo targeted New College. You parrot Rufo"s justification that his efforts are about fixing flagging enrollment numbers, but this just strikes me as more culture warring from DeSantis and Rufo
I agree that having some actual diversity of thought in universities would be good. However, realistically, you aren't going to take the most progressive college in Florida and make it genuinely heterodox. The most likely outcome is it gets a bit more friendly to conservatives and becomes more of a standard center-left university. This would serve to reduce political diversity in the state of Florida, by removing the most leftist university without adding anything genuinely conservative or heterodox. If Rufo and DeSantis were after genuine change, they could take a more centrist university and try to make it genuinely friendly to Conservatives thought. Of course, they aren't doing that, because they're really more interested in "owning the libs" by taking on New College. Rufo isn't an idiot, and making this about "poor enrollment" provides some cover for these actions. Really though, I just don't buy that Rufo cares *even the slightest amount* about poor enrollment at some random small Floridian college. I don't think he even cares about political diversity in universities. This all just strikes me as bog-standard culture warring with a bit of window dressing.
I won't pretend that it's all about enrollment numbers for them, but my impression of New College is that it's genuinely in a decline. Would it have been targeted if it was flourishing? I'm not sure, but that's not the world we're in. I've taken a (light) interest in the closure rate of universities for some time; there are a lot of colleges in precarious positions right now: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/closure-70-year-old-us-college-warning-whats-come
I don't think it's a stretch at all to notice that New College was in a more precarious spot than the other public universities in Florida and that, whatever the administration, that presented a problem to be dealt with. Nor is size irrelevant: a small university is easier to experiment with than a larger one.
Now, it's also not a coincidence, of course, that DeSantis's way of dealing with the problem was to toss Rufo and a bunch of conservatives onto the board and launch an attack. You're right to point out that much of the motive seems to be culture warring. They spotted an opportunity (a struggling progressive liberal arts college with former glory days) and ran with it. That it was heavily progressive definitely looks like part of the motivation, but I think you underestimate the other factors.
I guess I'm particularly cynical about DeSantis's actions given his presidential ambitions. Legitimately fixing a university takes time; seems unlikely there will be actual meaningful progress on this prior to the 2024 Presidential election. There is little incentive for him to actually care about fixing this university, since that's unlikely to help his presidential campagin. Conversely, making this another culture war touchpoint gave him another dose of publicity prior to the election.
I'd also argue that the fact that DeSantis added Rufo of all people gives away his true intentions. What does Rufo know about higher education that qualifies him to be on that board? He is there solely because he's a national figure, and DeSantis wants to maximize the cultural war impact.
What does a dentist or a lawyer or a CEO know about higher education?—but those are the more typical choices for a board like this one. It’s not clear to me that deep knowledge of higher education is the standard, much as we might wish it were so.
I would describe my moderately greater optimism not as a result of thinking DeSantis has incentive to care about fixing anything long-term, but as a result of thinking some of the people he appointed do. Culture warriors jump from topic to topic, creating news cycles and then moving on to their next hit. But someone has to stay behind, so when the culture warrior’s action is “appoint someone else to look over something”, those people, of capable, can do the more serious work in the background after the buzz has faded.
I’m a bit less sanguine about this after seeing the man who got the nod for university president, but the general principle still holds.
I’m not sure I understand the milquetoast approach of some allegedly heterodox thinkers to addressing the aggressive indoctrination camps formerly known as universities. The time has long passed when there was a leftist “bias” at these institutions. If a student or faculty member isn’t a vociferous far left ideologue, they had better we’ll learn to stay camouflaged and we’ll hidden in the shadows or face severe repercussions. Any policy response to this horrifying phenomenon is far more likely to be weak and ineffective than too extreme. And I say this as someone who voted for Buttigieg in the last primary.
The biggest issue I have is with this part of your commentary:
In the social sciences and humanities—the domains I find most compelling—serious conservative thought is almost wholly absent, and with that absence comes real loss, especially for those who disagree with conservatism. Hiring conservative professors in overwhelmingly liberal humanities departments is part of the solution, but another serious part—and a responsibility that can only fall on conservatives themselves—is the cultivation of more intellectually serious humanities and social sciences departments, alongside liberal arts colleges, with sincere commitments to presenting conservative thought.
Specifically, I find that this is expecting the tail to wag the dog - to a large degree progressive liberal values and assumptions are baked into the institutions of these fields to such a degree that "intellectual seriousness" is arrogated into "agreement with the progressive left".
So if you have to not be a conservative to seriously engage with the field, judging conservatives by their degree of serious engagement and "truth seeking" is not something they can meaningfully do, even if they wanted to - because "the spirit of truth seeking" in current year involves accepting a large number of progressive shibboleths. "Conservatives should just become progressives instead" just doesn't work.
The classical defense of this in the reddit era was that "facts have a liberal bias", but in the same way, that hackneyed response deliberately ignores the degree to which the institutions in charge of creating and publishing only the facts that are permissible to your typical, upper middle class progressive.
Something that continues to bother me about Jonathan Haidt is that he often draws on references from "The Canon". He'll cite John Stuart Mill, or Emile Durkheim, or start a whole new venture called "After Babel", and you'll kind of nod along with his brief summaries of their work. It's very annoying because I've read like half of On Liberty, maybe 20 pages of the bible, and I don't really care that much to get down to the library and get up to speed on the classics of modern political thought. And also, these biblical references always end up the same way: you go to the actual bible and it's like three or four lines that have spun into an entire book's worth of headcannon that floats around in the ether and everyone knows the longer version, but can't point you to it.
But you go to Tracing Woodgrains' substack and he'll give you references to Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, along with Blocked and Reported, Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Jonathan Haidt and you nod along with the brief summaries and memories flood your mind of the great times you spent in their comments sections. I mean, I've probably browsed less than 5% of SSC and Marginal Revolution and haven't read The Sequences, but somehow the Rationalist Canon seems a lot more fun and approachable, and at the very least I'm more familiar with it.
If one were to buy into the idea that "there is nothing new under the sun", then the references you choose are almost arbitrary, and I could present the same ideas with pop songs, video game characters, or Magic the Gathering cards, instead of philosophers or bloggers. In fact, you could probably do factor analysis and come up with some t-factor along which everything aligns itself.
Yeah, the appointment of Corcoran isn't a great sign. I took the time to watch a speech he gave at Hillsdale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVujpIator0 - it has a few bright spots, like a discussion of the science of reading, but you're correct that by and large he's unambiguously and emphatically a partisan culture warrior. We'll see where it goes, but I don't think he was the right choice for that position.
I’m here subscribing to you after reading this on BAR. Thank you for this optimistic and hopeful take. I often think Jesse and Katie are too careful in their pushback against woke policies/culture. I personally feel assaulted by the culture in which my kids are coming of age and on certain days I definitely am too angry to be effective. On those days I am thankful for the reasoned approach - BAR lets me laugh and calms me down.
But I’m also tired of being careful - the only way these topics will get into the mainstream conversation , given MSM, is for top-down policies like this. It is not safe for there to be so few people questioning the woke agenda. It is sneaking in and becoming codified because they don’t see through the language: “ obviously we want to be inclusive” and “I want more people to have happier lives so... equity.” The less thoughtful / more reactive parents around me are not thinking things through. The ones who are live in fear of others canceling them or their kids.
We’re need more examples of open pushback. UTAX is a hopeful project but it is too small. I am grateful to see existing universities create new heterodox spaces and programs. Very grateful.
Congrats on the spiffy new job title! I also had some issues with Katie and Jesse's take, which rightfully got a considerable amount of push back in the comments from people like myself, with recent or current experience in public universities in the South.
I agree with a lot of your take here. On the question of a "takeover" of an existing institution like New College, I think it's an approach that I wouldn't want, except I think shaking things up at some places may be what's needed to make substantial change in the trajectory towards doctrinaire thought at so many universities. As you pointed out with the planned University of Austin (best wishes for them, in all sincerity), trying to get a new university off the ground is extremely challenging, especially, I imagine, in the case of a public school. Would take a lot of political will to found a whole new university when UCF can just add a few thousand more to the roster, not to mention competing against institutions with very established reputations.
I also have to appreciate your shout out to GMU economics. I actually spent my first two years in undergrad studying economics and poly sci at Mason. I ended up having to transfer for family reasons, but I believe I learned a ton there and the perspectives I was exposed to have helped me be a more rigorous and balanced thinker to this day, even if, like you, I don't agree with a lot of the positions of, say, Caplan and Hanson. There is so much to be said for productive disagreement, and I think that's one of the values particularly at stake in academia today. I think you make a really good point about having viewpoint diversity *between* institutions, not necessarily expecting full diversity within each particular school.
I'm not a DeSantis fan (although I think attacks on him often go too far) and definitely not Rufo, I still hope that maybe something good will come of this experiment, or something similar at other schools, especially if it could be accomplished with a wee bit less fanfare.
Generally well reasoned, but this misses the mark in my opinion on why DeSantis and Rufo targeted New College. You parrot Rufo"s justification that his efforts are about fixing flagging enrollment numbers, but this just strikes me as more culture warring from DeSantis and Rufo
I agree that having some actual diversity of thought in universities would be good. However, realistically, you aren't going to take the most progressive college in Florida and make it genuinely heterodox. The most likely outcome is it gets a bit more friendly to conservatives and becomes more of a standard center-left university. This would serve to reduce political diversity in the state of Florida, by removing the most leftist university without adding anything genuinely conservative or heterodox. If Rufo and DeSantis were after genuine change, they could take a more centrist university and try to make it genuinely friendly to Conservatives thought. Of course, they aren't doing that, because they're really more interested in "owning the libs" by taking on New College. Rufo isn't an idiot, and making this about "poor enrollment" provides some cover for these actions. Really though, I just don't buy that Rufo cares *even the slightest amount* about poor enrollment at some random small Floridian college. I don't think he even cares about political diversity in universities. This all just strikes me as bog-standard culture warring with a bit of window dressing.
I won't pretend that it's all about enrollment numbers for them, but my impression of New College is that it's genuinely in a decline. Would it have been targeted if it was flourishing? I'm not sure, but that's not the world we're in. I've taken a (light) interest in the closure rate of universities for some time; there are a lot of colleges in precarious positions right now: https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/closure-70-year-old-us-college-warning-whats-come
I don't think it's a stretch at all to notice that New College was in a more precarious spot than the other public universities in Florida and that, whatever the administration, that presented a problem to be dealt with. Nor is size irrelevant: a small university is easier to experiment with than a larger one.
Now, it's also not a coincidence, of course, that DeSantis's way of dealing with the problem was to toss Rufo and a bunch of conservatives onto the board and launch an attack. You're right to point out that much of the motive seems to be culture warring. They spotted an opportunity (a struggling progressive liberal arts college with former glory days) and ran with it. That it was heavily progressive definitely looks like part of the motivation, but I think you underestimate the other factors.
I guess I'm particularly cynical about DeSantis's actions given his presidential ambitions. Legitimately fixing a university takes time; seems unlikely there will be actual meaningful progress on this prior to the 2024 Presidential election. There is little incentive for him to actually care about fixing this university, since that's unlikely to help his presidential campagin. Conversely, making this another culture war touchpoint gave him another dose of publicity prior to the election.
I'd also argue that the fact that DeSantis added Rufo of all people gives away his true intentions. What does Rufo know about higher education that qualifies him to be on that board? He is there solely because he's a national figure, and DeSantis wants to maximize the cultural war impact.
What does a dentist or a lawyer or a CEO know about higher education?—but those are the more typical choices for a board like this one. It’s not clear to me that deep knowledge of higher education is the standard, much as we might wish it were so.
I would describe my moderately greater optimism not as a result of thinking DeSantis has incentive to care about fixing anything long-term, but as a result of thinking some of the people he appointed do. Culture warriors jump from topic to topic, creating news cycles and then moving on to their next hit. But someone has to stay behind, so when the culture warrior’s action is “appoint someone else to look over something”, those people, of capable, can do the more serious work in the background after the buzz has faded.
I’m a bit less sanguine about this after seeing the man who got the nod for university president, but the general principle still holds.
"Fields Medal winner Matthew Thurston" --> William (usually called Bill) Thurston
GUH. No idea how I screwed that up while linking directly to his wiki page. Thanks—fixed.
I’m not sure I understand the milquetoast approach of some allegedly heterodox thinkers to addressing the aggressive indoctrination camps formerly known as universities. The time has long passed when there was a leftist “bias” at these institutions. If a student or faculty member isn’t a vociferous far left ideologue, they had better we’ll learn to stay camouflaged and we’ll hidden in the shadows or face severe repercussions. Any policy response to this horrifying phenomenon is far more likely to be weak and ineffective than too extreme. And I say this as someone who voted for Buttigieg in the last primary.
The biggest issue I have is with this part of your commentary:
In the social sciences and humanities—the domains I find most compelling—serious conservative thought is almost wholly absent, and with that absence comes real loss, especially for those who disagree with conservatism. Hiring conservative professors in overwhelmingly liberal humanities departments is part of the solution, but another serious part—and a responsibility that can only fall on conservatives themselves—is the cultivation of more intellectually serious humanities and social sciences departments, alongside liberal arts colleges, with sincere commitments to presenting conservative thought.
Specifically, I find that this is expecting the tail to wag the dog - to a large degree progressive liberal values and assumptions are baked into the institutions of these fields to such a degree that "intellectual seriousness" is arrogated into "agreement with the progressive left".
So if you have to not be a conservative to seriously engage with the field, judging conservatives by their degree of serious engagement and "truth seeking" is not something they can meaningfully do, even if they wanted to - because "the spirit of truth seeking" in current year involves accepting a large number of progressive shibboleths. "Conservatives should just become progressives instead" just doesn't work.
The classical defense of this in the reddit era was that "facts have a liberal bias", but in the same way, that hackneyed response deliberately ignores the degree to which the institutions in charge of creating and publishing only the facts that are permissible to your typical, upper middle class progressive.
Something that continues to bother me about Jonathan Haidt is that he often draws on references from "The Canon". He'll cite John Stuart Mill, or Emile Durkheim, or start a whole new venture called "After Babel", and you'll kind of nod along with his brief summaries of their work. It's very annoying because I've read like half of On Liberty, maybe 20 pages of the bible, and I don't really care that much to get down to the library and get up to speed on the classics of modern political thought. And also, these biblical references always end up the same way: you go to the actual bible and it's like three or four lines that have spun into an entire book's worth of headcannon that floats around in the ether and everyone knows the longer version, but can't point you to it.
But you go to Tracing Woodgrains' substack and he'll give you references to Bryan Caplan, Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, along with Blocked and Reported, Scott Alexander, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Jonathan Haidt and you nod along with the brief summaries and memories flood your mind of the great times you spent in their comments sections. I mean, I've probably browsed less than 5% of SSC and Marginal Revolution and haven't read The Sequences, but somehow the Rationalist Canon seems a lot more fun and approachable, and at the very least I'm more familiar with it.
If one were to buy into the idea that "there is nothing new under the sun", then the references you choose are almost arbitrary, and I could present the same ideas with pop songs, video game characters, or Magic the Gathering cards, instead of philosophers or bloggers. In fact, you could probably do factor analysis and come up with some t-factor along which everything aligns itself.
Yeah, the appointment of Corcoran isn't a great sign. I took the time to watch a speech he gave at Hillsdale: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVujpIator0 - it has a few bright spots, like a discussion of the science of reading, but you're correct that by and large he's unambiguously and emphatically a partisan culture warrior. We'll see where it goes, but I don't think he was the right choice for that position.