It’s struck me that the campus politics are a diversion from the real issue, which is the preservation of Israel as a secure Jewish homeland
I have no policy prescriptions as to how to best achieve that
But I do know that October 7th was a watershed event and I do know that Israeli citizens need support from the diaspora
And I’d respect the machers like Ackman and Rowan a lot more if they pivoted with their checkbooks to support Israeli citizens in need rather than close them in a vain and churlish effort to punish administrators and students
Thé action that’s important is not in Cambridge or West Philly
I went to the relatively-rowdier Berkeley of the late 90's and cozy confines of Rice in the mid 00's, which were such disparate experiences that I didn't think much about the woke revolution or the emergence of safe spaces...colleges are all a bit weird in their own unique ways. At least until John McWhorter started to sounding the alarm in 2020.
Even then, I didn't realize the rot until the recent cowardly open letter incident. If you write one, have the balls to fucking own it. And if you realize you're wrong, retract it. This anonymous open letter business really bothers me. If nothing else, you'd think that college would teach you words matter.
The university reactions to October has convinced me that liberals need to make a break with leftists (communism curiousness is no longer an youthful folly as it was a few weeks ago). So thanks for this essay discussing the befuddling (to outsiders) causes of the campus dysfunction.
Sorry I really struggled reading this article as it made little to no sense to me. Did you just equate elite university wokeism as a misdirected privileged protest to 75 years of Zionist apartheid?
I think you're right about Oct 7 as a kind of watershed in revealing the rift between "liberal" and "progressive." I'll again mention, hopefully not tiresomely, George Packer's "Last Best Hope," where he distinguishes between "Smart America" (the Clinton/Obama, mostly college-educated, moderate school) and "Just America" (the woke, and to some extent, Bernie Sanders school). His definitions map onto your distinctions.
Over on Inner Life I also mentioned John Ellis's 1997 "Literature Lost," which showed (back when I first became aware of it) how deconstruction theory was a mask for rigid identity-based ideologies. So you could, with one breath, leverage Saussure and Derrida to destabilize white patriarchy (because reality is just a linguistic construction), and with the other quite seriously advocate for ethnic separatism.
I might gently quarrel with you about the Iraq War. I myself participated in protests of that war, even in the sleepy Midwest -- I recall it as a similar time of ideological division. If it caused no ripples in your circles then, that is a curious data point to ponder.
One point I'd like to hear more about is your passing reference to a class war, which isn't developed much here. The notion that education is getting more expensive without getting more valuable is unassailably true. Some of that is indicative of class -- posh amenities like lazy rivers or upscale dormitories (which have to err on the side of pleasing wealthier students) drive up tuition. But you miss an irony in administrative bloat contributing to that. This includes DEI staff, but it also includes many people who are ostensibly trying to close the class gap by providing tutoring and other remedial services, as well as consultants trying to leverage predictably employability as proof of ROI.
The class war is worth probing further, because the professoriate is part of that managerial class you're alluding to. And first-gen professors like me are rapidly disappearing.
One of your saddest assertions is that elite education exists just for producing more corporate managers. I still believe that liberal education should be democratizing in that it allows everyone to participate in the examined life -- and to pursue the richest life possible as a result. The fixation on a jobs-based curriculum lowers a lid on the horizon for middle class and low-income students, boxing them into predetermined professional paths rather than allowing them to explore freely. I'd once imagined that wealthier students enjoyed more freedom in examining themselves and discovering where they belonged in the world. But as many friends have told me, there is considerable pressure on the children of a Goldman Sachs executive to follow the same path. If all college is good for is widening the income and longevity gaps, then it is a serious moral problem indeed.
It's no longer confined to campuses. Lots of young ideological grads have made it into company HRs. Once company policy is set, the rest of the workforce has to conform or be cast out. 'How did my goals this year support anti-racism', is a section in this year's evaluation.
Hi Sam! It probably goes without saying the vast majority of human beings on this planet do not want war of conflict of any kind as you and I both do. What Hamas has done is a crime against humanity, a war crime and is most certainly punishable for their actions. The rhetoric coming out of the current right wing Israeli Gov't ,however, as a result is just as bad as Hamas in many respects hence, the word genocide is now being used by some. Norm Finklestein was recently on Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Mate and elucidates many years of experience with the conflict as an academic and Jewish activist. Halper and Mate also just had Ofer Cassif on their show this week, he's a member of the Israeli Knesset and was recently suspended from Parliament for calling for a ceasefire (of all things). Listening to both these gentlemen and their perspective on the conflict as a whole has helped greatly bring a more fulsome picture to the entirety of the issue (even with their own bias) so it's not necessary to repeat any of it. The take away for me anyway beyond the obvious crimes and atrocities being meted out by both sides is - an immediate ceasefire has to be the first and only priority. And yet Israel and the US both refuse this call. Why would they do this? I think the answer lies in several new developments the main stream media has gone silent on. One, the Israeli gov just declared martial law on Israeli citizens. Two, the Israeli gov just issued a law saying any demonstration by Israeli citizens can now be met with live ammunition. Three, the Hannibal Directive is also active and was likely invoked on the night of the attack. Four, thousands of Palestinian children have been needlessly killed in the bombings in the last couple of days and has to stop in order to regain our own humanity as civilized people.Five, the threat of a much larger conflict in the region now looms as a very real and almost likely outcome of this conflict. Hence, the need for a ceasefire is even more important than ever.
I hope you can take the time to listen to what people outside the echo chambers in the US are promoting because we both know this is all starting to look and sound like another excuse to legislate away rights and freedoms behind the chaos of conflict and also the calls by the US to invade Iran are no different than the ones we now know were lies against Iraq. The similarities are becoming too obvious behind the atrocities committed by Hamas on 10/7.
Speaking of class wars, if you have elite institutions that are now basically only admitting the elite or wannabe-elite (who, despite the many ways one can define "elite," choose to define it similarly as these institutions do), you create the conditions for an intra-elite civil war. The so-called diverse classes of elite universities don't aspire to return to their non-metropolitan hometowns; everyone ends up wanting to move to a few select cities, all competing for the same jobs. Thus, the obsession with small-but-important identitarian power differentials in the culture industries (media, academia, entertainment, etc.), where all the elites and wannabe-elites aspire to be. These elite institutions' biggest flaw is the product of their biggest success: they've sold their version of a dream life too well, but there isn't nearly enough room for all the believers.
It’s struck me that the campus politics are a diversion from the real issue, which is the preservation of Israel as a secure Jewish homeland
I have no policy prescriptions as to how to best achieve that
But I do know that October 7th was a watershed event and I do know that Israeli citizens need support from the diaspora
And I’d respect the machers like Ackman and Rowan a lot more if they pivoted with their checkbooks to support Israeli citizens in need rather than close them in a vain and churlish effort to punish administrators and students
Thé action that’s important is not in Cambridge or West Philly
I went to the relatively-rowdier Berkeley of the late 90's and cozy confines of Rice in the mid 00's, which were such disparate experiences that I didn't think much about the woke revolution or the emergence of safe spaces...colleges are all a bit weird in their own unique ways. At least until John McWhorter started to sounding the alarm in 2020.
Even then, I didn't realize the rot until the recent cowardly open letter incident. If you write one, have the balls to fucking own it. And if you realize you're wrong, retract it. This anonymous open letter business really bothers me. If nothing else, you'd think that college would teach you words matter.
The university reactions to October has convinced me that liberals need to make a break with leftists (communism curiousness is no longer an youthful folly as it was a few weeks ago). So thanks for this essay discussing the befuddling (to outsiders) causes of the campus dysfunction.
Sorry I really struggled reading this article as it made little to no sense to me. Did you just equate elite university wokeism as a misdirected privileged protest to 75 years of Zionist apartheid?
I think you're right about Oct 7 as a kind of watershed in revealing the rift between "liberal" and "progressive." I'll again mention, hopefully not tiresomely, George Packer's "Last Best Hope," where he distinguishes between "Smart America" (the Clinton/Obama, mostly college-educated, moderate school) and "Just America" (the woke, and to some extent, Bernie Sanders school). His definitions map onto your distinctions.
Over on Inner Life I also mentioned John Ellis's 1997 "Literature Lost," which showed (back when I first became aware of it) how deconstruction theory was a mask for rigid identity-based ideologies. So you could, with one breath, leverage Saussure and Derrida to destabilize white patriarchy (because reality is just a linguistic construction), and with the other quite seriously advocate for ethnic separatism.
I might gently quarrel with you about the Iraq War. I myself participated in protests of that war, even in the sleepy Midwest -- I recall it as a similar time of ideological division. If it caused no ripples in your circles then, that is a curious data point to ponder.
One point I'd like to hear more about is your passing reference to a class war, which isn't developed much here. The notion that education is getting more expensive without getting more valuable is unassailably true. Some of that is indicative of class -- posh amenities like lazy rivers or upscale dormitories (which have to err on the side of pleasing wealthier students) drive up tuition. But you miss an irony in administrative bloat contributing to that. This includes DEI staff, but it also includes many people who are ostensibly trying to close the class gap by providing tutoring and other remedial services, as well as consultants trying to leverage predictably employability as proof of ROI.
The class war is worth probing further, because the professoriate is part of that managerial class you're alluding to. And first-gen professors like me are rapidly disappearing.
One of your saddest assertions is that elite education exists just for producing more corporate managers. I still believe that liberal education should be democratizing in that it allows everyone to participate in the examined life -- and to pursue the richest life possible as a result. The fixation on a jobs-based curriculum lowers a lid on the horizon for middle class and low-income students, boxing them into predetermined professional paths rather than allowing them to explore freely. I'd once imagined that wealthier students enjoyed more freedom in examining themselves and discovering where they belonged in the world. But as many friends have told me, there is considerable pressure on the children of a Goldman Sachs executive to follow the same path. If all college is good for is widening the income and longevity gaps, then it is a serious moral problem indeed.
It's no longer confined to campuses. Lots of young ideological grads have made it into company HRs. Once company policy is set, the rest of the workforce has to conform or be cast out. 'How did my goals this year support anti-racism', is a section in this year's evaluation.
IDFK. 🤷♂️
Hi Sam! It probably goes without saying the vast majority of human beings on this planet do not want war of conflict of any kind as you and I both do. What Hamas has done is a crime against humanity, a war crime and is most certainly punishable for their actions. The rhetoric coming out of the current right wing Israeli Gov't ,however, as a result is just as bad as Hamas in many respects hence, the word genocide is now being used by some. Norm Finklestein was recently on Useful Idiots with Katie Halper and Aaron Mate and elucidates many years of experience with the conflict as an academic and Jewish activist. Halper and Mate also just had Ofer Cassif on their show this week, he's a member of the Israeli Knesset and was recently suspended from Parliament for calling for a ceasefire (of all things). Listening to both these gentlemen and their perspective on the conflict as a whole has helped greatly bring a more fulsome picture to the entirety of the issue (even with their own bias) so it's not necessary to repeat any of it. The take away for me anyway beyond the obvious crimes and atrocities being meted out by both sides is - an immediate ceasefire has to be the first and only priority. And yet Israel and the US both refuse this call. Why would they do this? I think the answer lies in several new developments the main stream media has gone silent on. One, the Israeli gov just declared martial law on Israeli citizens. Two, the Israeli gov just issued a law saying any demonstration by Israeli citizens can now be met with live ammunition. Three, the Hannibal Directive is also active and was likely invoked on the night of the attack. Four, thousands of Palestinian children have been needlessly killed in the bombings in the last couple of days and has to stop in order to regain our own humanity as civilized people.Five, the threat of a much larger conflict in the region now looms as a very real and almost likely outcome of this conflict. Hence, the need for a ceasefire is even more important than ever.
I hope you can take the time to listen to what people outside the echo chambers in the US are promoting because we both know this is all starting to look and sound like another excuse to legislate away rights and freedoms behind the chaos of conflict and also the calls by the US to invade Iran are no different than the ones we now know were lies against Iraq. The similarities are becoming too obvious behind the atrocities committed by Hamas on 10/7.
Speaking of class wars, if you have elite institutions that are now basically only admitting the elite or wannabe-elite (who, despite the many ways one can define "elite," choose to define it similarly as these institutions do), you create the conditions for an intra-elite civil war. The so-called diverse classes of elite universities don't aspire to return to their non-metropolitan hometowns; everyone ends up wanting to move to a few select cities, all competing for the same jobs. Thus, the obsession with small-but-important identitarian power differentials in the culture industries (media, academia, entertainment, etc.), where all the elites and wannabe-elites aspire to be. These elite institutions' biggest flaw is the product of their biggest success: they've sold their version of a dream life too well, but there isn't nearly enough room for all the believers.