Monthly Archives: April 2021

Goodbye, Major League Baseball, and rest in peace

Im paraphrasing this passage from a famous baseball movie that everyone out there will obviously recognize:

The single thread that has bound our nation together for the last 150-odd years has been American baseball.

Our country has been plowed under by an armada of steam shovels, knocked down, erased, rebuilt, then knocked down again. But American baseball has always been there.

American baseball has been the one constant that got our country through two world wars, the Great Depression and the Cold War. This game defines what makes our nation great: Individual achievement, teamwork, humility and American exceptionalism. American baseball reminds us of all that is good and honorable about this country, and that it can be great once again if it is allowed to happen.

Major League Baseballs decision to remove the All-Star Game and the MLB players draft from Atlanta is yet another example of lemming management stupidly flinging themselves off the woke precipice all in the name of political correctness. Personally, Im appalled that our national pastime has been so shamelessly politicized all under the pretense of social justice.

Well, Commissioner (Rob) Manfred, MLB owners, and the players union have all shot yourselves in the proverbial posterior this time and its going to take more than the likes of Babe, Henry Aaron or Mark McGuire to save Major League Baseball. You have managed to completely destroy any sense of trust and loyalty this game once held, so rests in peace Americas pastime.

It was a great run while it lasted and in the meantime, Im going to start spending my hard-earned discretionary income on something more idyllic and apolitical ... like model railroading or stamp collecting.

Goodbye, Coca-Cola, Budweiser, McDonalds, Pizza Hut and all the other corporate entities who have drunk the progressive, woke Kool-Aid. Farewell Pepsi, Taco Bell, Burger King, Buffalo Wild Wings, Papa Johns and Chevrolet. Its going to really hurt when 75 million fans close their wallets this summer and the decision-makers have to answer to the shareholders next Christmas.

John Walker

Chief Petty Officer

U.S. Navy (retired)

Little Orleans

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Rest in peace, Major League Baseball | Letters To The Editor | times-news.com - Cumberland Times-News

Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie has told military personnel their "core business" will always be the "application of lethal violence" and warned "mission clarity" is vital to their work.

The blunt directive from the former Special Forces officer came as Morrison government figures also took aim at the Australian Defence Force (ADF) after scantily clad dancers helped to formally commission the Navy's newest ship, a move one senior MP dubbed a "shitshow".

Mr Hastie, who was last year promoted to his frontbench role, outlined his vision for the defence force in a message to his West Australian constituents.

"Our military serves a vital role across Australian society, whether during pandemic, flood or fire," Mr Hastie wrote in his most recent electorate newsletter.

"But the ADF's core business will always be the application of lethal violence in the defence of our values, sovereignty and interests. We should never forget that."

The Liberal MP, who entered Federal Parliament in 2015, previously served in the elite Special Air Service Regimentfor five years, including deploying to the war in Afghanistan.

In his emailed newsletter, Mr Hastie arguedthat "mission clarity is vital in the profession of arms".

"Without it, confusion grows confusion about role, identity and purpose. And confusion is deadly on the battlefield, at sea or in an aerial dogfight," he said.

"Mission focus is the foundation of victory. It keeps everyone driving towards a singular purpose."

Senior Morrison government figures said the Assistant Minister's message closely aligned with the directives new Defence Minister Peter Dutton issued to the ADF's top brass during their initial meetings.

Inside government, there are frustrations over recent military decisions seen as too "politically correct", such as a 2018 directive banning soldiers from wearing "death"symbols.

Concerns are also growing over the Defence Department's ability to deliver on ambitious demands such as those set out in the multi-billion-dollar Naval Shipbuilding Program.

Liberal backbencher Phillip Thompson, who is also a former soldier, said ministers Dutton and Hastie were making sure the ADF was focused on its main tasks.

"Having Minister Dutton at the helm and leading our Australian Defence Force, we're bringing back our core values we've gone a little bit woke over the past few years and we can't afford to be doing that."

The Queensland backbencher arguedthe ADF hadlurched "too far to the left" with its social agenda in recent years.

"Our ADF shouldn't be left or right, they should be straight down the middle of what their job is, and their job is to defend our nation, our interests, our values, our sovereignty, but also when we go on operations, have an unapologetic aggression and violence to get the mission done."

Neil James from the Australia Defence Association backed MrHastie's comments on the military's "core business", but rejected Mr Thompson's claim the ADF was becoming too "politically correct".

"The whole point about banning stupid cartoon symbols in the defence force is to restore professionalism as a war fighting organisation," he said.

"It's not a case of political correctness, it's a case of getting rid of a stupid young fashion that detracts from the professionalism."

One recent incident that caused annoyance inside federal government ranks was Navy's decision last weekend to invite a local group of scantily clad dancers to perform a routine that included twerking.

"The dancers are beside the point we're meant to be a fighting force," one government frontbencher told the ABC, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

"A question worth pondering: what would Horatio Nelson think of this shitshow?"

The minister claimed, "many MPs have expressed surpriseat this ceremony to government".

Mr Thompson questioned the appropriateness of having dancers.

"Standards in the ADF, and definitely when commissioning a ship, should be a little bit higher than that," he said.

"We've got the CDF, we've got members of Parliament there, and the Governor-General's there,I don't think it's appropriate to be twerking".

The ADF later clarified that the Governor-General and Chief of Navy were not present for the dancers -both men arrived minutes later.

The ABC has confirmed the Chief of Defence, General Angus Campbell, was present and watched the dance routine.

In a statement, the ADF defended the use of dancers, which it described as engaging with the local community.

"HAMS Supply and the Royal Australian Navy are committed to working with Australians from all backgrounds in actively supporting local charities and community groups," it said.

In 2019, when he was an LNP candidate, Mr Thompson apologised for a 2012 tirade on social media threatening to harm Muslims.

Editor's note April 15, 2021: An earlier version of this story contained a video that included vision of the Governor-General and Chief of Navy. The ABC has since confirmed both men arrived minutes after the dance performance finished. The video has been updated to reflect this.

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Military reminded core business is to use 'lethal violence' to defend Australia's values and sovereignty - ABC News

I wonder if Ill get canceled someday. I could trip up and say something awkward or inappropriate and get crushed for it. It could be a phrase in a Facebook post or a newspaper article like this. It could be a slip in the classroom that gets reported by a student. It doesnt bother me a lot. I know Im not perfect in word, deed, motive, or thought. And I dont worry much about what others think about me. But itd be painful and would hurt those around me.

Todays Cancel Culture is not entirely new. Political Correctness started in the 1980s and prompted people to speak more carefully about certain topics. If you crossed the line, some people would call you out and make life difficult for you. But there was a relatively healthy balance between valid concerns and silliness. Some people took it too seriously, while others would respond with eye-rolls.

Cancel Culture is Political Correctness on steroids. The approach is similar increased sensitivities for better and for worse with a heavy dose of fascism. Its practitioners rely on a powerful combination of public policy, social stigma, and economic consequences to enforce the regime. If you transgress today, you may lose your reputation, your job and your career.

You might also think of Cancel Culture as similar to the recent emergence of #Karen a light social-media poke at aspects of middle-aged, middle-class, social conservatism. Cancel Culture is a type of #Karen on the Left. But while theres a tongue-in-cheek humor to #Karen, Cancel Culture is deadly serious with much more at stake.

Cancel Culture starts with principles that range from legitimate to debatable and incoherent. Its practitioners can quickly get insistent and dogmatic. Its a religion that lacks mercy and grace, forgiveness and redemption. As any other religion, its never any fun arguing with its fundamentalists. It wars against civil liberties, free speech, and free thought. It is a threat to institutions ranging from higher education to comedy. It is stunningly illiberal. (Labeling it liberal is a terrible and ironic error.)

So, Cancel Culture is highly problematic and ought to be canceled itself. But canceling is a matter of degree. We can all agree that some things ought to be canceled for example, sneezing more than two times in a row; the Teletubbies (at least black-and-white photos of them); and microwaving fish at work. Even so, as C.S. Lewis notes, we should try to love the sinner and hate the sin as we do this so well with ourselves.

And there is a time for some people to be cancelled if not overall, then in terms of their supposed membership in certain groups. If you support military interventionism or oppose school choice for the poor and middle class, then you might well be on the Left or a run-of-the-mill Democrat, but you should quit calling yourself a liberal.

If you said little or nothing about massive spending and debt under the last two GOP presidents or you routinely advocate federal government solutions to state-local problems, then you might be an ordinary Republican, but you should be cancelled as a conservative.

What if youre against abortion as a personal matter, but dont want to impose your views on others to protect the lives of the unborn? You change policy to take money from current and future taxpayers to finance abortion. And you choose a prominent Cabinet member who played a prominent part in suing a bunch of nuns to require them to have birth control in their health care coverage. Shouldnt you be canceled as a Catholic?

In Christian circles, this is often called church discipline. In Matthew 18:15-17, Jesus says If your brother or sister sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over. But if they will not listen, take one or two others along, so that every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church; and if they refuse to listen even to the church, treat them as you would a pagan or a tax collector.

This is terrific counsel. If someone wrongs you, talk with him. Maybe it was a misperception on your part. If not, hopefully, he will apologize and repent. If this doesnt solve the problem, bring in a third party to mediate. Often, the additional person can be more reasonable and objective in arbitrating the dispute. If this doesnt work, bring it to the group and cancel the wrongdoer if he wont repent.

We should never try to cancel people from their humanity. And we should rarely cancel them from their livelihoods. But we should cancel people from groups when they insist on violating its tenets and norms.

Eric Schansberg, Ph.D., is professor of economics at Indiana University Southeast, adjunct scholar for the Indiana Policy Review Foundation and author of Poor Policy: How Government Harms the Poor.

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To cancel or not; that Is the question - Shelbynews

There was a front page article in the JI regarding derogatory comments directed toward Asian Americans made by Rep. Michael Winkler. The article included profound apologies.

I happen to know quite a few Asian Americans. None of them feel discriminated against nor do they find the comments insulting.

One of my family members had a problem with a government agency. After several weeks of frustrating and futile efforts of dealing with the agency, my family member called Mike Winkler. He responded immediately, and went right into action to resolve the problem. Obviously, he is concerned about all his constituents. Representative Winkler asked all the pertinent questions necessary to take care of the issue. One question he didnt ask was, What color is your skin?

Perhaps its time to stop dancing around political correctness when it comes to words and go back to judging people on their actions.

See the rest here:

Letter to the editor: Judge people on their actions - Journal Inquirer

I am writing to respond to Mike Salmons recent article in the Springfield Connection concerning a Zoom meeting held by Lee District supervisor Rodney Lusk about the possibility of renaming the Lee District.

Since when did the distinguished Lee family name become a dirty word here in Northern Virginia? The rich heritage of both the Washington family and the Lee family provide so much tourism for our state. They provided a foundation from which our country emerged.

I am firmly opposed to changing the name of the Lee District. It is a very recognizable name that has been in place a long time.

With all the problems we are facing right now why should we waste time, energy, money and political capital arguing over a name change? This is political correctness run amok.

I am a 60-year-old lifelong Alexandrian and although I am a resident of the city of Alexandria proper, I spend a lot of time in the Lee District. It is like a second home to me. My family doctors office is in the Rosehill Shopping Center, I shop and dine out in Lee District, and I do research in the Franconia Museum where curators Carl Sell and Don Hakenson are tireless workers preserving our local heritage.

I attend sporting events and concerts in the Lee District and I am a member of the National Capitol Model Soldiers Society, which holds its monthly meetings at Edison High. I visit friends at their homes in the Lee District.

So please leave the traditional name of the Lee District alone. Changing the name would only divide the community and create confusion and distrust and we dont want that, do we?

Greg Paspatis

Alexandria

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Opinion: Letter to the Editor: Leave Lee District Name - Virginia Connection Newspapers

Image: Pixabay

Why the lefts turn from higher education has coincided with a newfound conservative appreciation for it.

The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in BostonCristina Viviana GroegerHarvard University Press, $35 (cloth)

Lets Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal EducationJonathan MarksPrinceton University Press, $27.95 (cloth)

The politics of higher education are changing.

For decades the basic arrangement has had ascendant conservatives arrayed against it and liberals engaged in a defensive rearguard action. The rightwing onslaught was spearheaded by the likes of William F. Buckley, whose God and Man at Yale (1951) decried the secularization of an elite institution overrun by Keynesians and collectivists. The onslaught endured through the end of the twentieth century in the work of people like Allan Bloom, whose 1987 best-seller The Closing of the American Minda broadside in the so-called canon warsdeplored the rise of relativism on campus and the sidelining of great ideas by works by scholars from historically marginalized groups, supposedly promoted in the academy due to political trendiness rather than merit.

The conservative fantasy of the campus as a mythical space of open discourse and reasoned argument is defined most of all by who doesnt get to take part.

Both books were, in the manner of their times, part of an anti-intellectual and anti-academic red scare that weaponized reactionary notions of who belongs in the academy and who doesnt. Meanwhile, it was Ronald Reagans education secretary, William Bennett, who hypothesized that tuition rose because of increasing federal student aidcasting universities as villains that feed off both taxpayers and their own students. The debate over higher education throughout this period mirrored attitudes toward intellectualism in generalsince, it was assumed, the academy was where the intellectuals were to be found. Buckley, for his part, gleefully declared that he would rather be ruled by the first two thousand people in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty.

Given this ideological arrangement, it is no surprise that liberalsincluding those who help to formulate higher ed policyhave long embraced claims that a college degree pays off in the form of higher earnings and better career opportunities. After all, this view allows them to defend their commitments in terms that might appeal to conservatives: higher education is good for the economy, this messaging goes, not for namby-pamby reasons like scholarship for its own sake or for broader societal transformation. One product of such thinking is The Race between Education and Technology by Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, who couch the argument for higher education in the language of human capitalportraying it as an engine of both individual economic improvement and macroeconomic growth.

But it is also not surprising that a younger generation of left intellectuals has turned against higher education, given that it has turned against them. Following years of austerity budgets and the systematic deprofessionalization of academic labor, millennials and their generational successors have found it harder and harder to get faculty positions. As for students, a college degree of some sort has become a near-universal standard for younger cohorts entering an increasingly credentialized labor market. For them, the university has meant neither an enriching intellectual experience that sets them on a path of humanistic, lifelong inquiry nor a path to middle-class economic stability, but rather escalating tuition for degrees of questionable value that sets them on a path of crushing, lifelong debt. Once popular on the right, the Bennett hypothesis is likely to find more and more of its adherents on the left.

Alongside this left turn away from higher education has been a newfound conservative appreciation for it, couched in a critique of college campuses as sites of elite liberalism and social justice warriors run amok. According to this narrative, the values of free and open discourse, passionate debate, and the marketplace of ideas have been shut down by liberal scolds and race-conscious administrators beholden to woke ideology, and it is up to conservatives to resurrect them.

Two new books, Cristina Viviana Groegers The Education Trap and Jonathan Markss Lets Be Reasonable, illustrate this changing polarity. The former is primarily a work of history about the restructuring of education at the secondary and post-secondary levels in Boston during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Lets Be Reasonable is more personal and polemicalthe factually untethered musings of a conservative professor at a liberal arts college on the demise of reasonability in an academy beholden to a small but culturally hegemonic left. Taken together, the two volumes exemplify the shifting ideological valence of higher education in 2021.

Groegers book covers the beginning of the high school movement, the era during the early twentieth century when secondary schooling spread across the United States. It draws on a remarkable breadth of sources, from ethnographies and interviews to public directories, the full-sample decennial censuses made public relatively recently, and other statistical sources. The thesis is stated upfront. Education became a central means of social mobility, Groeger argues, at the same moment that it became a new infrastructure for legitimizing social inequality. While providing economic opportunities to some workers, the expansion of schooling actually undercut the power of others.

Far from reducing socioeconomic inequality, more widespread formal education actually solidified it under the rising tide of corporate capitalism.

The high school movement was the social process by which attendance at and graduation from secondary school became universal (or nearly universal) among native-born Americans. The transformation is conventionally dated from 1910 or so (though Groeger shows it started earlier in Boston), when the graduation rate in the relevant age cohort was less than 10 percent. By 1950 the graduation rate had grown to over 50 percent, and attendance was nearing universality outside the segregated South. Graduation rates continued to increase in subsequent decades in the process of desegregation and the enfranchisement of southern Black communities. Nearly every school district came to offer some form of secondary schooling over that time period, though it took time for what we now conceive as a public high school education to become standardized. One striking feature of this transformation is that it was decentralized. No federal program sought to bring about universal secondary education; rather the impetus came from local status competition for what counted as a complete education expected of local children and young adults, operating in combination with unemployment crises and sectoral transformations that removed children from the labor force.

The Education Trap is usefully understood in reference to The Race between Education and Technology, which treats the high school movement as an episode of forward-thinking public improvement from the ground up, a civic-minded provision of secondary education as a public good in response to the demands of technological change. Groegers narrative complicates this picture by introducing class conflict. It studies who exactly availed themselves of new opportunities, foregrounding the way class patterns of formal and informal education help to explain contemporaneous socialization into occupational and status hierarchies. The result is a more complete and convincing picture of the high school movement than Goldin and Katzs, one that punctures the central conceit of liberal educational philosophy in the late twentieth century. Far from reducing socioeconomic inequality, more widespread formal education actually solidified it under the rising tide of corporate capitalism.

Each chapter of the book focuses on a particular class, tracing its relationship to the shifting structures of education and work. Organized craft workers, for instance, avoided formal vocational education outside the workplace, perceiving it as an employer-backed threat to their control over apprenticeshipsand thereby over entry into the ranks. Craft unions didnt want their ability to withhold skilled labor undermined by strikebreakers trained through mechanisms outside their control. Moreover, vocational education that would actually prepare workers for such jobs was and always has been prohibitively expensive. Goldin and Katz treat the lagging high school enrollment patterns of men and boys in industrialized regions as a puzzle amid the larger trend of rising high school enrollment and graduation rates in the early twentieth century. Groeger solves the puzzle by pointing out that formal education was not the accepted route into industrial occupations.

Feminized domestic labor likewise resisted the introduction of formalized training for jobs where none had previously existed, exasperating progressive do-gooders who thought that such schemes as Schools of Housekeeping would empower the poor and downtrodden to enter the professional classes and avoid prostitution. In fact, this training was viewed as inconvenient, irrelevant, and unnecessaryif not a further exploitation at the hands of employers (say, when unpaid work was required for certification). The reformers read this hostility as either a congenital disinclination to education or complacency. The 1895 annual report of the Womens Educational and Industrial Union declared, The competent general housework girl is practically a thing of the past. . . . The demand for household servants is greater than the supply, thus giving little incentive to maids to become really skilled in their work. What the organization interpreted as an excess of demand over supply was in fact the reluctance of domestic workers to respond to the WEIUs own placement services even as they were besieged by would-be employers of domestic labor enthusiastic to have an outside organization exist for the purpose of certifying applicants as biddable. These reactions exemplify the limits of formalized education to change work conditions in occupations with a clear gendered division of labor and norms around who can attain the job and how.

The idealized liberal college education espoused as a timeless principle today was a recent and historically contingent construction, one that served to undermine rather than promote social mobility.

Groegers analysis is most interesting in relation to three other classes that were just coming into being during this period and were characterized in relation to formal education: white-collar clerical and retail workers, liberal professions (such as teaching and school administration, as well as the law), and new corporate managers and executives.

The corporate transformation of the economy during this era created an abundance of occupations in the first group: telephone operators, secretaries, clerks, bookkeepers, and the like. Their ranks were filled by women and the first native-born generations in immigrant families. These workers welcomed the new educational opportunities, perceiving them as entryways into the American mainstream and a means of economic improvement. When juxtaposed with the wariness of more established communities and workers, this pattern illustrates a crucial lesson: education was embraced by those for whom it was useful and avoided by those who (rightly) perceived it as a threat. There is thus no simple education is good conclusion to be drawn here.

By the beginning of the twentieth century Boston had a raft of proprietary options for secondary education like the Burdett College of Business and Shorthand and the School of Successful Salesmanship. These schools conducted business based on their reputation for securing employment for their graduatesor at least claiming to do so. The parallels between these institutions and the for-profit colleges of today are striking, providing another corrective to those of us who have embraced the high school movement as testament to the superiority of public goods over private, discriminatory, and often fraudulent institutions. Groeger even mentions the imprisonment of the School of Successful Salesmanships proprietor for fraudan example that wont be lost on readers who recall that predatory lending at for-profit universities in our own day has suffered little consequence. Eventually, the demand for the kind of education offered in proprietary institutions, combined with the institutions questionable practices, led the city to open and expand existing public high schools.

Locals further demanded that the growing school system hire graduates of Bostons teaching colleges rather than out-of-towners. This move was part of a push to create a public university (with attendant degree-granting and certification powers) open to immigrants and their families, an effort that was repeatedly blocked by existing private colleges and their powerful allies in the legislature. Instead, private colleges established schools of education to professionalize education itself, creating a gendered division of labor within that expanding sector. The teachers employed in the new secondary schools were mostly women but their principals, superintendents, and the social scientists studying themtrained at Harvards Graduate School of Educationwere all men.

There are limits to formalized education's abilityto change work conditions in occupations with a clear gendered division of labor and norms around who can attain the job and how.

Finally, prior to this period, the route to a senior position in a Boston merchant or banking house would have been through a de facto apprenticeship as a clerk. The new corporate economy filled these jobs with second-generation immigrants and women, at the same time denying them a path to promotion into management. Instead, management training happened at Harvard College, which repurposed the bachelor of arts degree toward what we now conceive as a general liberal arts education in order to create an impermeable class and gender boundary between the graduates of public high schools and the college graduates who became their bosses. Under its president Charles Eliot, Harvard created an elective system in order that a student develops and increases his own powers, and gains command of those powers.

Its graduates moved seamlessly into industry, equipped with a liberal education that differentiated them from the new masses of white-collar workersall with the help of the schools cultivated alumni network. College education thus became a useful marker of who belonged in corporate management, shielding the ruling class from threats to its hegemony posed by new employment opportunities further down the occupational hierarchy. As Groeger summarizes, The reconstruction of economic opportunity on the basis of education created a new institutional and ideological infrastructure for upholding socioeconomic inequality. The upshot of this important analysis is that the idealized liberal college education espoused as a timeless principle today was a recent and historically contingent construction, one that served to undermine rather than promote social mobility.

None of this makes it into Lets Be Reasonable, which tries to take the history and politics out of higher education at the same time that it issues an explicitly conservative call to action for a conservative audience to take up arms in its defense. Erasing the actual social conditions in which college education operates, Marks instead sees timeless principles of reason under threat from social justice warriors dead set on undermining once-great institutions. John Locke is the guiding spirit, set up in opposition to what universities have supposedly become. Universities, as if bored with what they call critical thinking, he writes in the first chapter, have unfurled a multitude of other banners sporting other terms: diversity, empathy, world citizenship, civic engagement, and so on.

Erasing the actual social conditions in which college education operates, Marks instead sees timeless principles of reason under threat from social justice warriors dead set on undermining once-great institutions.

The book consists of an episodic and polemical recounting of controversies on campus over the past decade, from politically correct placemats at Harvard dining halls to the policing of micro-aggressions. It joins a long tradition of conservative outrage, from Buckley and Bloom to James Buchanan and Nicos Devletoglous Academia in Anarchy (1970) and the latest Substack screed about cancel cultures newest victim. Marks positions himself against what he calls the conservative movements anti-intellectual attack on higher educationespecially that of the so-called paleocons. Take Michael Anton, author of The Flight 93 Election manifesto, which claimed that universities are wholly corrupt and operate in service to a leftist globalist junta, to whom the conservative intellectual establishment is uncomfortably close and thereby compromised. Marks defines himself against this brand of conservatism, apparently to claim the middle ground, but he also indulges the notion that leftist professors are indoctrinating the children of nice conservative families with poisonous ideas.

Despite the polemicism, it is evident that Marks cares greatly for his students and for the work of teaching and scholarship. One gets the feeling that he is justifying his lifes work within the ivory tower to himself and to an audience that he considers his peers (professional, think tank, movement conservative types). But a central flaw of the book is its deeply distorted representation of college studentsa consequence, perhaps, of extrapolating too much from his own career spent teaching humanities in small liberal arts colleges (though I doubt his portrayal is even true of students there). Like much popular coverage of the higher education landscape, Lets Be Reasonable focuses on the wealthiest institutions, those that tend to house the most privileged students. His portrait of college students makes them out to be nave, young adults, with opinions easily manipulated by professorsan infantilization starkly out of touch with the realities of higher education today.

To begin with, the vast majority of students do not attend elite schools or small liberal arts colleges. At the 32,000student state flagship where I teach, undergraduates come to class knowing more about the world than I did when I was in college, but on the other hand, they evidently dont know one another terribly well despite taking advanced coursework in the same major, likely because many have families and jobs and most live off campus.

Universities today have increasingly oppressivepower hierarchies.Those sitting at the top have learned how to use egalitarian language while they do everything in their power to perpetuate the very power imbalance that they decry.

Beyond these demographic misrepresentations, you also wont learn from Markss book, which acts as though college campuses are conservative-free spaces, that there already is a very well organized conservative presence on them today: the far-right, white supremacist, and misogynistic incel cultures Talia Lavin writes at length about in Culture Warlords (2020), the part of the conservative movement that actually has representation among the young. For all their careful cultivation, the Young Republican types Marks and so many other conservative writers on higher education conceptualize as principled cultural conservativessamizdat George Willsdont exist. The ones who are portrayed that way dispense with the costume in the privacy of anonymous online chat forums for purer expressions of alt right beliefs. One could imagine a more broadly appealing working-class cultural conservatism that would hold up expensive, exploitative universities as elite liberal villains; that seems to be where Marks wants to go. The problem is that the constituency for such a political tendency probably wouldnt identify itself as a student movement. And in any case, that is absolutely not what Marks is offering. His target is not the reality of academia but a conservative caricature of it.

As a result, Marks glosses over the question of where power really lies in neoliberalized higher ed institutions. The people in charge arent the hectoring campus radicals but administrators selected and elevated through close relations with outside funders, alumni philanthropists, federal research agencies, private sector partners, gargantuan university health systems, and state legislators. Yet still Marks sees only a leftist assault. The left is so embedded not only at left-branded places like Oberlin and Berkeley, he writes, but also at Grandees R Us Harvard, that one no longer needs student activists and radical professors with imposing beards to march around and demand things.

Demanding things, needless to say, is not the same as getting them. Just consider the demands made of Harvards current president, Lawrence Bacow, that have gone unheeded. Universities today are exactly the same as any other institution in contemporary U.S. lifewhich is to say, places where power hierarchies are increasingly oppressive and where those sitting at the top have learned how to use egalitarian language while they do everything in their power to perpetuate the very power imbalance that they decry. Meanwhile, university administrators and senior officials at the Department of Education have proven quite willing to indulge conservative demands to marginalize Palestinian solidarity movements on campus at the behest of Zionist activists and the institutions backing them.

A further signal of where power truly lies in neoliberal academia can be found in Markss admission that his colleagues have rarely treated him unprofessionally due to his outspoken conservative identity as a scholar. By contrast, as an outspoken leftist economist, I am treated unprofessionally by my colleagues all the timedespite 70 percent of the profession identifying as a Democrat (at least as far as these things can be measured). The department where I teach has also been targeted by conservative philanthropic interests, who have in some cases gained the sympathetic ear of university administrators.

Markss vision of left power on campus has never been an accurate assessment of U.S. higher education.

Since liberals vastly outnumber conservatives in academia, Marks writes, conservatives must be bearing the brunt of whatever political discrimination may be occurring there. In economics, at least, this latter claim is flatly false, and it probably isnt true in other disciplines either. Conservatives may not be numerous in some places on campus, but that doesnt mean theyre discriminated against. They enjoy power enough not to be treated unprofessionally precisely because of the mechanisms that exist to protect and promote them, punish their supposed tormentors, and defund anyplace that might make it possible for their antagonists to earn a living. Meanwhile, Markss vision of left power on campus has never been an accurate assessment of U.S. higher educationnot when Buchanan laid it out in similarly colorful language in 1970 following high-visibility campus upheavals and the vast expansion of publicly funded state university systems to educate the Baby Boomers, and certainly not now.

Perhaps most tellingly, the book is also in some cases straightforwardly self-contradictory. Markss gratuitous attack on the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement conflicts with the books overarching plea for free speech and liberal discourse. In this move we see how the elitist notion of a liberal education, whether in the era Groeger writes about or today, is weaponized by the right to beat down claims to social equality. The conservative fantasy of the campus as a mythical space of open discourse and reasoned argument is defined most of all by who doesnt get to take part.

For decades the received wisdom in higher education policy circles has been rooted in the theory of human capital. In that light, five or ten years ago Markss argument might have appeared as a relatively innocuous backward-looking paean to a golden age of liberal education outside a market logic. But now it seems like Marks is pointing the way forward. He marshals a number of thinkers, organizations, and statements that he considers himself in solidarity with, from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and its Chicago Principles (essentially a protest against campus political correctness based on a letter issued by the dean of students at the University of Chicago in 2016 as a warning to incoming freshman but evidently aimed more at garnering applause from concerned alumni) to Heterodox Academy (Jonathan Haidts project to protect professors from student blowback for expressing views supposedly unfashionable with campus PC culture). All of this infrastructure, like Markss book itself, is the product of the Charles Koch Institutes funding and partnership. He acknowledges right up front that he received generous financial support from the Koch Foundation and its offshoot, the Institute for Humane Studiesknown for harboring anonymous members of the online far right.

As the meritocratic model of what higher education is for comes under more and more pressure in light of its evident failures, these offerings tell us what the conservative response will be: raise the drawbridge, keep out the rabble.

In this respect, Markss book is quite similar to another recent conservative book about higher education (backed by the same funders), despite coming to what appears to be a starkly different conclusion. Bryan Caplans The Case Against Education: Why the Education System is a Waste of Time and Money (2018) pours scorn on the idea that near-universal higher education does society any good. Caplans effort is primarily concerned with returning to a world in which higher education is far from universaland so, in its way, is Markss. As the meritocratic model of what higher education is for comes under more and more pressure in light of its evident failures, these offerings tell us what the conservative response will be: raise the drawbridge, keep out the rabble.

Originally posted here:

The New Politics of Higher Education - Boston Review