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I don’t think everyone needs to go to college. That was a lie sold to us for generations, and what do we have to show for it? We have people selling coffee because their masters in English literature doesn’t really let them do anything useful.
But academia has bigger issues. We’ve got the whole indoctrination factory aspect of it.
Unfortunately, some people still need to go to college because some careers require college degrees. That’s not going to change.
Luckily, academia can be saved. Somehow, some way, things and be changed on our college campuses so that ideology takes a backseat to learning. You know, just to shake things up.
It isn’t going to be easy, as this survey from FIRE shows:
FIRE surveyed 6,269 faculty members at 55 major colleges and universities over a three-month period for “Silence in the Classroom: The 2024 FIRE Faculty Survey Report,” and discovered a fraught campus atmosphere in which wide swaths of those surveyed admitted to hiding their political views to avoid censure.
Among the many findings:
87% of faculty reported finding it difficult to have an open and honest conversation on campus about at least one hot button political topic.
About 1 in 7 faculty members (14%) reported being disciplined or threatened with discipline for their teaching, research, academic discussions, or off-campus speech.
35% reported toning down their written work to avoid controversy. Shockingly, this is nearly four times the 9% of faculty who said this when the same question was asked of social scientists in the 1950s.
“The McCarthy era is considered a low point in the history of American academic freedom with witchhunts, loyalty tests, and blacklisting in universities across the country,” said FIRE’s Manager of Polling and Analytics Nathan Honeycutt. “That today’s scholars feel less free to speak their minds than in the 1950s is a blistering indictment of the current state of academic freedom and discourse.”
That’s right, during the height of the McCarthyism, when everyone was supposedly terrified to say what they really thought, people felt so much more free to speak their minds than they do today.
Non-liberals are definitely concerned with people finding out about their politics, with conservatives being three times more concerned, and they have a reason to be concerned. Check this out.
Nearly 40 percent would see a conservative as a poor fit for their department just because they’re conservative, while only three percent see that with a liberal.
Meanwhile, just 20 percent see them as a positive fit compared to 71 percent who favor a liberal in that slot.
It’s insane.
And this is the world we’re sending our children into.
To change academia into something that doesn’t make our collective stomachs churn, we’d have to undermine this.
See, it shouldn't matter that most of academia is liberal. Not in and of itself, anyway. If they kept their political views out of their work, it wouldn’t be an issue.
The problem is that liberals can’t keep that in check. They don’t seem to be capable of not injecting politics into every aspect of their lives. They can’t talk about their hobbies without not just injecting politics into their comments somehow but also assuming everyone around them is just as liberal as them. If they do this with their hobbies, you know they’re going to do it professionally.
Plus, under the idea of academic freedom, there’s not a lot you can do to prevent it. You just have to replace people as you can. The problem is that so often, people who are already in that department are part of the process of finding a replacement. It’s going to come up.
That’s part of where DEI statements came into play.
It was part of what Glenn Reynolds called a “preference falsification.” That’s where you’re forced to profess belief in something you really don’t believe, that you know to be untrue.
In the case of DEI, applicants had to talk about all the ways they’d advance the DEI cause, despite the fact that at least a certain percentage of them were just saying what they thought would get them in the door, either because they just didn’t care all that much or because they were vehemently against the inherent racism that is DEI. It doesn’t matter why, though. They’d still have to bend the knee and kiss the ring.
While that seems to be fading as a lot of schools kill the practice, it’s still going to be difficult to reform academia while so many academics like the status quo as it is.
It can still be done, but it’s not going to be easy.
The question is whether it’s really even worth it or whether we should burn it all to the ground and build something new.
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Politics, culture, a dose of snark, and a profound love of personal and economic freedom.