What's Our Problem?, page 29
Albert Einstein once said, “The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not the learning of many facts, but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks.”136 This was certainly true for me. College taught me how to think, and how to learn, and I came out of college with a foothold on Grown-Up Mountain, ready for a lifetime of climbing.
I graduated in 2004, but my college experience wasn’t too far from the way Kors described college in the 1970s. The dramatic shift from Idea Lab campuses to Echo Chamber campuses has mostly happened over the past decade (people who have seen it happen firsthand point to late 2013 as the moment when the shift began to accelerate).137
Instead of pushing students off Child’s Hill toward more mature thinking, today’s colleges are nailing their feet to the top of it.
Instead of immersing students in a high-rung intellectual environment and teaching them how to be high-rung thinkers, colleges are immersing them in a low-rung environment and teaching them how to stay there.
Students pay colleges enormous sums of money because they want to grow into better and more knowledgeable thinkers—because they want to, before entering the workforce and adult life, spend four critical years sharpening their most important tool: their brain. And they’re not getting what they were promised.
Normally, when brands in an industry stop staying true to their promises, the market catches on and demand heads elsewhere. But at the moment, colleges have a monopoly on a bunch of irreplaceable services for young people: higher education, job application credentialing, the stamp of belonging to the elite class, and for many students, the last great chance to make lifelong friends. So the demand stays level even as the quality of the product deteriorates—which is part of why colleges have been allowed to slip this far without much consequence.
I dedicated this whole chapter to colleges because if we want to understand how a golem can conquer a liberal institution, it’s useful to look closely at a specific instance of it. But there’s another reason too: what happens on campuses has major implications for the rest of the country.
The Consequences of Campus Idea Supremacy, for Society
Today’s college students are tomorrow’s leaders. Depriving students of a rigorous intellectual boot camp doesn’t hurt only them, it makes tomorrow’s society a less informed, less intelligent place for everyone. According to a comprehensive study, people are at their most politically and ideologically impressionable between their mid-teens and mid-20s—so what they’re taught in college can stick with them forever.138 When, during those years, students are encouraged to think like political Zealots, it makes tomorrow’s society more politically polarized. And when millions of young people are encouraged to act like idea supremacists, idea supremacy quickly spreads into other parts of society.
Universities are society’s primary mechanism of knowledge discovery. Academic research is supposed to be the ultimate genie—a marketplace of ideas unlike any other, with rigorous rules and standards, and processes like peer review that institutionalize collaborative thinking to create a hyper-efficient truth-finding machine. But when a research institution is hijacked by a golem within its midst, all of those rules change. Peer review stops filtering out falsehoods and starts filtering out ideas that threaten the golem. The research institution becomes an instrument of the golem, serving not the veritas plaque above its gates but the needs of its new golem boss: feeding it with confirmation and protecting it from doubt. This cripples our society’s ability to learn new things.*
Perhaps even worse, it cripples our society’s ability to trust in the new things we do learn. Trust is the lifeblood of a healthy society. But while it takes decades to build the public’s trust, it doesn’t take long to shatter it. Most of today’s published research papers are still the product of a high-integrity peer review process, but they may have a harder time changing minds because of well-publicized corruption in other academic arenas. When the mantra “trust the science” is shown in some cases to mean “trust our ideology,” it makes fewer people trust the science.
And finally—
This story did not happen in isolation.
The Liberal Games is an artificial construct built to protect us from the Power Games. When a major part of a liberal society falls off the wagon and gets swallowed up by the Power Games, it is an ominous sign.
Social Justice Fundamentalism evolved inside of a progressive space and continually mutated until it had developed a resistance to academia’s high-rung immune system. It’s not a coincidence that the first schools it conquered were the softest targets—those farthest left, like Oberlin and Evergreen. As the golem continued to mutate, developing sneakier ways to become more impervious to attack and more lethal to challengers, it began to conquer the next softest targets, and then the next after that. Each time it learned to more finely tune its takeover abilities.
If you zoom out on all of society, academia is among the farthest-left sectors—the Oberlin of liberal institutions. The decades of evolution in the college incubator did more than optimize the SJF golem to resist the immune systems of progressive universities. It optimized it to conquer all progressive institutions.
Golems are endlessly greedy. Until they’re stopped by some more powerful force, they’ll continue to expand outward. And over the past few years, the SJF golem has come charging out of the campus gates.
* * *
this is how we do things here:
*The extent to which universities have lived up to the promise of a “truth” telos is more complicated. Many universities, including Harvard, have grappled with competing values like religion or political ideology.
Munchausen syndrome:
*Most scholars actually call it “factitious disorder”—but Munchausen syndrome is the better-known term.
of an all-encompassing Force:
*Quick refresher: The Force is my term for the guiding principle of Social Justice Fundamentalism—the idea that American and other Western societies are embedded at every level by identity-based oppression. The oppression always goes in the same direction, downward on the Intersectional Stack, with cisheterosexual, white, able men at the top and women, people of color, and LGBTQ people down below. According to the SJF narrative, every interaction, every assumption, every social norm is an expression of the Force, whether we’re conscious of it or not.
their relationship with Ideology X:
*We’re using this diagram to categorize people on a college campus, but the same diagram applies to how any human environment relates to any set of ideas.
the cost of open resistance grows:
*The scarier it gets to speak out, the more that line between the Timid Skeptics and Vocal Skeptics moves to the right. If it gets bad enough, all skeptics go timid, leaving no vocal skeptics on campus.
an incredibly liberal group of administrators:
*One telling trend: In 2014 the website FiveThirtyEight published statistics about commencement speeches across the top 60 national and liberal arts universities, specifically looking at instances in which the address was given by a political figure. In 2003 and 2004, 30 commencement addresses at these 60 top schools were given by political figures: 16 progressive, 14 conservative. Ten years later, at the same 60 schools, there were 25 commencement speeches by political figures in 2013 and 2014: 25 progressive, zero conservative. (Enten 2014)
hostility toward the shrinking intellectual minority.:
*In Chapter 3, we saw this phenomenon play out in the feedback loop that led to the ideological purification of America’s two political parties.
those biases generally point in the same direction:
*We can think of this like a courtroom. When both sides of a case are properly represented, neither attorney can get away with too much BS because one attorney yells out “objection!” when the other tries something sneaky. Politically homogeneous universities are like courtrooms with only one attorney. Not only is the other side not properly represented, but the dominant side can get away with more bias, more straw man arguments, and more motte-and-bailey defenses when there’s no opposition there to yell “objection!”
protecting free speech rights on college campuses:
*FIRE has been incorrectly called a conservative organization by its critics. In fact, FIRE is politically neutral and regularly criticizes illiberal behavior by the Right as well as the Left. The organization more often criticizes illiberalism from the left because its primary focus has been on higher education, where the left variety is more prominent.
to share her views on police shootings:
*In her book The War on Cops, Mac Donald argues against the widespread narrative that racist cops pose the greatest threat to young Black men and maintains that the prevalence of that narrative has had negative effects for Black people.
as many event disruptions as the Right:
*FIRE’s official metric is not whether protests were “by the Left” or “by the Right” but rather by people “to the left” or “to the right” of the speaker. FIRE notes that many of the blocked speakers would consider themselves progressive.
exercising their right to mobilize and organize:
*This is a classic example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy we talked about in Chapter 2 (in which someone who makes a hard-to-defend “bailey” argument, when attacked, retreats up to the “motte” castle, swapping out their weak argument for a stronger one). In this case, Giovannetti reframes the bailey position “voices we don’t like should never be quoted in the campus newspaper” as the much more defensible motte position “we just want to protect these movements and make sure people’s voices can be heard.”
alongside the vast increase in student tuition:
*According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the overall Consumer Price Index rose 214% between 1990 and 2020, college tuition rose 1,184% during that stretch.
As of 2022, 456 U.S. colleges:
*According to Speech First, which examined 821 U.S. colleges, 66% of the public four-year colleges (250) and 46% of the private four-year colleges (204) they examined had bias-response teams. Both of these numbers are around double what FIRE had identified in 2017. (Speech First 2022)
between the two figures:
*Summers acknowledges the obvious normative question that would pop up here—“Is our society right to have familial arrangements in which women are asked to make that choice and asked more to make that choice than men?”—and says that’s a question he wants to come back to.
the smallest contributor of the three:
*He notes: “I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong, because I would like nothing better than for these problems to be addressable simply by everybody understanding what they are, and working very hard to address them.”
the result of injustice:
*As we noted, the axiom only applies when the disparity fits the SJF worldview—i.e., when it negatively affects groups downward on the Intersectional Stack, in the direction of the Force. When a disparity goes in the other direction—like the fact that, according to National Student Clearinghouse data, women make up about 60% of today’s American college students—the axiom goes away.
from the Council of Graduate Schools, seem unsurprising:
*It’s worth noting that Summers’ talk was about sciences like math and engineering. When health and medical sciences are included in the definition of STEM, there are more women than men enrolled in STEM grad programs. (Perry 2018)
resistance to learning and knowing:
*Applebaum quotes some examples of resistance: “remaining silent, evading questions, resorting to the rhetoric of ignoring color, focusing on progress, victim blaming, and focusing on culture rather than race.”
students would “develop a critical:
*When “critical” is used in this kind of way, it almost always refers to the SJF meaning (e.g., as it’s used in “critical race theory”), not to the more common usage, as in “critical thinking.” In this description, a “critical awareness” essentially translates to “a mindset that sees things through the SJF worldview.”
social-justice-related classes:
*A professor I spoke to believes many of these requirements were created in order to “guarantee tenured employment for social justice professors.” She explained it like this: “Social justice classes have a really hard time filling their classes and their majors, but they continue to get new tenure lines and funding. So you have five gender studies professors, with expensive pension and benefits packages, all teaching classes with seven students in them, when those same 35 kids could be taught by one political science or history professor.”
hypothetical about workplace discrimination:
*Extra note of absurdity: The school then required this professor to participate in months-long “training on classroom conversations that address racism”—and the training materials used the same redacted slur the professor was placed on leave for.
UCLA suspended the professor:
*One more because I just have to tell you: A Fordham University professor was fired after he accidentally confused the names of two Black students in class.
(172 of the punished professors were tenured—27 of those were fired):
*By the way, the primary purpose of tenure is to protect professors from pressure to conform to whatever ideological fads would inevitably come, so they could remain independent. Firing tenured professors for offending the sensibilities of a particular political ideology directly contradicts that purpose.
(from 30 in 2015 to 122 in 2021):
*FIRE’s director Greg Lukianoff notes in Reason that this trend is especially pronounced in the top-ranked schools. The top ten ranked schools alone account for 15% of the total incidents.
Here’s a sampling:
*See Chart 19 in David Randall’s “Social Justice Education in America” report for a long list of similar job postings.
And Washington. And Ohio State. And Hartford:
*Relevant other thing that happened: In 2017, Republican Iowa Senator Mark Chelgren proposed a law that would mandate that Iowa’s state universities hire Republicans and Democrats in roughly equal numbers. This law (which didn’t advance beyond its introduction) would also require an ideological litmus test—an attempt to remedy one wrong with another wrong.
has permeated American college campuses:
*Just the small sampling we’ve covered here has included stories at 60 different colleges.
thinker looking something like this:
*People often refer to the “Dunning-Kruger” phenomenon when describing this kind of path. In fact, Dunning-Kruger refers to something a bit different. (Dunning 2011)
our society’s ability to learn new things:
*In Chapter 8 of The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch argues that institutions like universities are society’s only effective truth-discovery mechanisms: “Without the places where professionals like experts and editors and peer reviewers organize conversations and compare propositions and assess competence and provide accountability … there is no marketplace of ideas; there are only cults warring and splintering and individuals running around making noise. This is why the corruption of reality-based institutions is so dangerous.”
Interlude
The Digital Cudgel
There was a time, long, long ago, when social media was a nice place. Nice people on Facebook shared stories about their days and photos of their vacations, and nice people wrote nice comments underneath. Other nice people would post tweets about how much they liked coffee or how silly their dog was, while others would post perfectly square, exquisitely filtered photos of mountains on Instagram.1
In his TED Talk, journalist and author Jon Ronson talks about the niceness of Twitter back then:
In the early days of Twitter, it was like a place of radical de-shaming. People would admit shameful secrets about themselves, and other people would say, "Oh my God, I'm exactly the same." 2
People living in social media’s Nice Age would probably be shocked to know only a decade later, social media would be like this:
How, in just a few short years, did a place for nice people to be nice to each other become a place for mean people to scream at each other?
The thing is, social media wasn’t just a fun place to hang out, it was a wildly profitable new business model. Social media platforms had struck the internet’s version of oil—attention—and the platforms’ early versions had only scratched the surface of what was possible. While we were busy sharing our thoughts and being silly with each other, the leaders of the platforms were busy innovating.
In 2009 and 2010, new buttons appeared on social media platforms, allowing people to “like” and “share” and “retweet” each other’s posts.3 Simple chronological social media feeds became algorithmically manipulated feeds, geared toward maximum engagement. The more likes and retweets a post got, the more the algorithms smiled upon them. And guess who suddenly got real interested in all this?
Our Primitive Minds crave attention and status, and the new, evolved social media platforms now offered both of these in the form of a quantifiable gamified system. Post the right post and you’ll get lots of likes and shares. Do that enough times and you’ll get lots of followers, maybe even enough to get verified. All of this taps deeply into our primitive psychology, and Primitive Minds across the world became addicted to the game, optimizing their behavior for maximum algorithmic rewards.
