E-Pluribus | March 8, 2024
Higher education is broken; the case for saving Harvard; and will the real liberals please stand up?
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jesse Adams: How Broken Is Academia?
“How broken is it?” a comedian’s audience might respond. At Persuasion, Jesse Adams relates some of his personal experiences to diagnose the problems and suggest some solutions in answer to that question.
From what I’ve seen in public broadcasting and at Columbia Journalism School, that dynamic often incentivized artful incorporation of consistently slanted narratives on hot-button political issues. At Columbia Law, it seemed to be a top priority to help codify talking points into statute—particularly when it came to expansive definitions of “equity.” In nearly a decade of reporting for Columbia Engineering, I watched the school move from sleepy backwater to enthusiastic cheerleader and enabler for whatever the sexier fields desired. And at the School of Public Health, in my final job for Columbia, I helped celebrate striving technocrats testing the outer limits of their authority since, during Covid, almost any social problem could be framed as an “epidemic.”
[. . .]
Not so surprisingly, the academic establishment’s first instinct amongst recent controversies has been to circle the wagons and resort directly to attack mode. In an op-ed for The New York Times shortly after her resignation from Harvard’s presidency, Dr. Claudine Gay wrote of the charges against her, “This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.” Yet, as experts acknowledge, it’s currently hard to say just how deep issues of plagiarism, non-replicability, and broader intellectual sloppiness really go.
“The bracing fact is that no one seems to know how extensive—or serious—the problem may actually be,” Inside Higher Ed reports. “But we found one point of general agreement: the heavy pressure academics are under to keep publishing fuels the problem, however widespread it may be.”
Artificial intelligence geared at detecting plagiarism and other red flags reportedly played a substantial role in exposing Gay’s record and seems poised to subject the entire universe of academic publishing to severe scrutiny. It may be telling that the controversy around Gay has prompted palpable anxiety and efforts to minimize the gravity of her infractions. “God knows, I think if we submitted every scholar in the United States to that kind of scrutiny, what would happen?” said Earl Lewis, professor of history at the University of Michigan, to The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Based on everything I’ve seen, my view is: Yes, let’s by all means authenticate everyone’s publications with the finest of fine-tooth combs. If that task is too terribly tedious for human beings to tackle, it’s getting easier and easier for AI. Integrity still matters, as does figuring out who’s still trying to maintain it. Let ‘er rip, and let the chips fall where they may!
The mid-term future of academic discourse may well be the story of a clash of algorithms: AI ever more precisely determining exactly what messaging influential “stakeholders” like in their clickbait versus watchdog AI becoming ever better at ferreting out academic misconduct. Perhaps technology might finally force academia to become as rigorous as it would like to think it is.
Read it all here.
Frederick Hess and Michael Q. McShane: Don’t Burn Down Harvard
We’ve all heard the admonition about babies and bath water. Frederick Hess and Michael McShane writing at The Dispatch say that principle applies to Harvard as well. Wishing the worst on politicized institutions of higher learning may feel good, but the two writers suggest we shouldn’t overlook the significant influence universities exert on our society, and that their influence doesn’t necessarily have to be negative.
In the wake of [recent Harvard scandals], it can be tempting to just say, “Burn it all down.” For years, progressives at Harvard and its peers have sought to use these institutions as a platform to promote political and social agendas, cultivate groupthink, and marginalize conservative thought.
Today, these institutions have lost the public’s faith, are being investigated by Congress, and are being rocked by angry donors and alumni challenges. Watching them finally get their comeuppance is gratifying. The idea of burning them down feels both just and richly deserved. But it would be wrong.
[. . .]
By definition, you can’t create 388-year-old institutions in a hurry. We can work at building newer, better institutions (witness hugely promising ventures like the University of Austin, which Kevin Williamson wrote about for The Dispatch, or Minerva University). However, the resources, relationships, alumni network, endowment, and influence that Harvard has acquired cannot be readily replicated.
We needn’t ignore the many failings of Harvard and other elite institutions to acknowledge the immense contributions they’ve made to American medicine, productivity, and national defense. Just last summer, Oppenheimer offered a pop culture reminder of how institutions like the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and the California Institute of Technology helped win World War II—even while relying on researchers with some remarkably dubious politics. We shouldn’t overlook the degree to which scholars at these institutions have made extraordinary contributions to our nation, science, and civilization even as we call out their more corrosive contributions.
Moreover, Harvard and the nation’s 200 or 300 other most influential colleges play a hugely outsize role in anointing and cultivating America’s future leaders—even as they serve only a small share of all students. Whether we like that or not, it’s a reality that will likely change only gradually (if at all) over the next decade or two.
[. . .]
What would changing these shortcomings in American higher education entail? The more straightforward measures address issues of campus culture—especially workloads, professorial expectations, and rigor.
Despite protestations from the editors of the Harvard Crimson that students today are subject to the “absurd expectation of constant productivity,” the truth is that college students need to work harder.
[. . .]
University faculty also need to teach more. At the nation’s elite colleges, faculty typically teach one or two courses a semester. This equates to perhaps six hours a week (or less!) for 26 weeks of classes each year. Granted, good teaching also includes grading, mentoring, office hours, and more, so we’re not suggesting that a three-hour weekly course entails only three hours of work. But at elite colleges, faculty have learned to regard teaching and mentoring as unwelcome distractions from research and grant-chasing. That needs to change. It would be fair to expect faculty to teach three to five courses a semester, yielding a teaching week (factoring in responsibilities like preparation and grading) of 20 to 35 hours, while allowing institutions to serve more students, cut costs, and shift energy from campus theatrics to classroom tutelage. Elite institutions could do all this and still provide faculty with six months a year for research, writing, and other campus responsibilities.
And Harvard and its brethren need to raise their academic standards.
[. . .]
There’s also a need for reforms that address hiring, research, and the academic ecosystem. Today, it’s routine for academic cliques to use hiring and tenure decisions to build up the ranks of the like-minded—especially for scholars who inhabit the various “studies” departments or who have championed critical theory and the dissolution of the Western canon. What’s needed are arrangements that can help to establish a healthy heterodoxy, with academic departments consciously hiring the best candidates while ensuring that students are exposed to a variety of intellectual and methodological traditions.
Read the whole thing.
Nate Silver with Nick Gillespie: Libertarians Are the Real Liberals
Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight fame, recently joined Nick Gillespie on his podcast at Reason for a wide-ranging interview. Silver is a statistician and writer who, like many other formerly mainstream journalists, is now considered something of a rebel. Gillespie questions him on his perspective from this position on a number of issues.
Gillespie: Is progressivism, or wokeism, or identity politics the same as socialism minus economics? Then you're left with identity politics, or what's the defining attribute of that cluster?
Silver: No, I think reorienting the leftist critique around issues having to do with identity, particularly race and gender, as opposed to class, is interesting. I don't get into every detail of every debate, but when you have The New York Times at the 1619 project, the traditional crusty socialists didn't like that very much. That was a sign as an anthropologist about how even leftism and the new form of leftism are different in important respects.
Gillespie: Where are conservatives on this? If there's a crack up on the left between what might have been called liberals—for lack of a better term—and progressives, there's MAGA on the right. What's the non-MAGA right? Is that analogous to what's going on on the left?
Silver: As you pointed out earlier and as Hayek points out, America's weird in that we were the first country founded in Enlightenment values: the rule of law and free speech and individualism. The market economy is something that comes along right at this time. The Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment are very closely tied together historically. So if you are appealing to traditional American values, you're appealing to values that are fairly lowercase libertarian, certainly liberal values. [Sen.] Mitt Romney [R–Utah], a Republican, says he likes liberal democracy and uses that term correctly like people should. It is weird in that they are traditional American values.
I'm not a fan of almost anything about Donald Trump. I don't think it's the most constructive form of conservatism. And I do believe in technological and societal and economic progress. I think it's very important. It feels like there aren't very many people who do believe in progress anymore.
[. . .]
Gillespie: Are we finally seeing a kind of breakdown—not of the two-party system, because it's always going to be two parties—of the way Republicans and Democrats talk about the constellation of issues that define them. Is this the end of the road for that iteration?
Silver: When the end comes, it will come more quickly than people think. But I wouldn't bet on it happening in like the next five or ten years. In some ways, the parties have become more efficient about building their electoral coalition. It's a remarkable fact that in American politics, each party gets about half the vote. If you get 48 percent versus 52 percent, it's almost considered a landslide these days.
[. . .]
Gillespie: Why do you think other people—not woke progressives, but conservatives who constantly talk about the Constitution, or perhaps even libertarians in certain circumstances—think "let's be hypocritical in order to own the libs." What's going on there?
Silver: One of the universal truths about everything in life is that if you have a longer time horizon, you almost always benefit from that. People are trying to win the argument to feel satisfaction in that immediate moment or that hour. They think, "If I get into the left on things, not the left actually, it's kind of more kind of center-left partisan Democrats about Biden's age," and they think, "Well, if I can dunk on Nate Silver about Biden's age, then I'll win the argument." But the problem is, it's not an argument between you or me. Seventy percent of the American electorate thinks Biden is too old, very reasonably so I might add. Eighty is just above the threshold anyone should be commander in chief. But they're trying to win the argument and not win the war.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
Open discourse on college campuses only works if the rules around harassment are applied consistently. A lawsuit just filed against MIT alleges that the university has a double standard when it comes to anti-semitism.
TikTok: Champion of free speech, or a spy for the Chinese Communist Party?
And finally, Minnesota is poised to take action against the scourge of… unlicensed house painting! As the founders intended.