The Closing of the American Mind

[Jacob]

It's not academia per se, but I view the apparently ongoing attack on Wikipedia by the reactionary right (American and otherwise) as part of the same trend.

Which - and I'm repeating myself - I view as a deliberate, well-funded, and incredibly effective propaganda effort that is paying off. The reactionary right and its funding oligarchs are winning the culture wars and the political wars because they have overall goals and a set of coherent strategies and tactics that they're executing.

The response, meanwhile seems to primarily be focusing on individual incidents in isolation and wondering (with regret and concern) why they're winning.

[crazy canuck]

I wonder how much Columbia worries that their alumni boosters are actually MAGA and MAGA-adjacent, such that taking such a stand threatens not only the funding from the federal government but also from their alumni network.  Some of the top administrators may even be in the MAGA-sympathetic group themselves.  It would help explain the seeming relief you mentioned.

Yes, that is a key issue that often gets overlooked.

[Baron von Schtinkenbutt]

I think the key to the successes the reactionary right have had is that they're unified in purpose and messaging.  It helps that the message is somewhat incoherent, and that they have been able to exploit the selective hearing and memory of many in their target audience.

In contrast, it sometimes seems that the only unity of purpose and messaging amongst the opposition is, "these guys are dangerous and must be stopped".  Once you get past that, you see squabbling over how to do it and resistance breaks down.

The reactionary right either seems to avoid such squabbles, or successfully marginalizes the dissenters if they don't come around.  It's easier to do as a reactionary rather than a progressive, because there's no real idealism behind being a reactionary so compromising your principles, as much as one has them, isn't a big deal.

[crazy canuck]

Yes, and I think the unifier of the reactionary right is fear of what will happen to them if they step out of line with whatever the great leader is thinking at the time.

[Sheilbh]

It's not academia per se, but I view the apparently ongoing attack on Wikipedia by the reactionary right (American and otherwise) as part of the same trend.

Which - and I'm repeating myself - I view as a deliberate, well-funded, and incredibly effective propaganda effort that is paying off. The reactionary right and its funding oligarchs are winning the culture wars and the political wars because they have overall goals and a set of coherent strategies and tactics that they're executing.

The response, meanwhile seems to primarily be focusing on individual incidents in isolation and wondering (with regret and concern) why they're winning.

To return slightly to academia I think there's been a long-standing conservative culture war against it, particularly in respect of the humanities and theory - see Allan Bloom.

But I think a large part of the vulnerability now is not directly because of that - or rather that other shifts and ideologies so undermined the foundations that it made academia vulnerable at this moment.

I mention in my earlier post about utility and "Davos man" because I do think that's a really important point of where it starts. That the value of universities and higher education is understood through their economic output. Whether that is through the research they provide, the regeneration in an area or the skilled workers they train. They are cogs within a globalised capitalist economy to be celebrated for the role they provide in keeping that economy going. I think that attitude is across the political spectrum and becomes really pervasive in the last 20-30 years. I think it is as much a part of the liberal centre (which is perhaps where it starts) as anywhere else. Many of the people rejecting it were deeply conservative in the sense that Atlantic piece suggests. Bloom himself was a translator of Plato and absolutely rejected the sort of "utility" idea of education - I think would talk about it in terms of "truth" and "excellence".

Which is, I think, where a left-wing utility and challenge to universities emerges, particularly in the humanities. As the humanities is less directly tied to the economy it is less able to demonstrate economic utility (with the exception of producing lawyers - dubious value), I think instead you tend to get an argument that they are useful politically. Fund or study the humanities and you will have the tools to understand what's going on politically and socially - and there may be some truth to that in some limited areas. But practically that's not the purpose of the humanities and you'll be funding say, an article on the Aztecs in Ulysses (a genuine recent article in James Joyce Quarterly I am desperate to read ). I think that perhaps particularly crystallises in recent years where there are things that people feel a need to understand (I think particularly BLM and Trump), and are then perhaps disillusioned when the humanities are capable of expanding your knowledge but not solving anything ("poetry makes nothing happen"). I also think running in parallel is a growing left (and correct) disillusion with those ideas of capital-t Truth and excellence, which a conservative defender of academia could make in an uncomplicated way, as they are undoubtedly elitist.

I think the combination of those two trends means that a lot of academia lacks the tools and vocaubulary and self confidence to defend itself and their purpose because it is elitist, marginally useful politically and uneconomic. And because the right's attack comes in a far more anti-intellectual form. It is not the Allan Bloom and the attack is not in favour of capital-t Truth and Plato-to-NATO western canon stuff. And also to be really blunt I think an awful lot of the attack on academia is simply because they can and it is a space in which they can send a message - particularly on dissent and pro-Palestinian views.

I'd add to VM's point that even when endowments are not tied up into specific things, there is also a very healthy structure for the funding of academia in service of the conservative movement in the US. If you are bright and on the right you will be talent spotted, space will be found for you in an "institution" or a "school" of varying levels of academic ability and credibility somewhere. So in their assault on higher education they aren't going to hurt themselves and academia that absolutely has a political utility for them will survive because it is already insulated even within the same institutions. They have their Patrick Deneens and Adrian Vermeules and law review writers with an unusual interest in Carl Schmitt - and their funding isn't necessarily from the general pile/common good.

I think the key to the successes the reactionary right have had is that they're unified in purpose and messaging.  It helps that the message is somewhat incoherent, and that they have been able to exploit the selective hearing and memory of many in their target audience.

In contrast, it sometimes seems that the only unity of purpose and messaging amongst the opposition is, "these guys are dangerous and must be stopped".  Once you get past that, you see squabbling over how to do it and resistance breaks down.

The reactionary right either seems to avoid such squabbles, or successfully marginalizes the dissenters if they don't come around.  It's easier to do as a reactionary rather than a progressive, because there's no real idealism behind being a reactionary so compromising your principles, as much as one has them, isn't a big deal.

Yes but I think you could also frame that in the opposite way - so I sort of feel like a real strength of the American right is the extent to which very different sets of opinions are able to bury the hatchet around a common political cause. But it sort of means you do have Hayek and Friedman if that's your thing, or Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom (perhaps not anymore), or in modern times possibly Vermeule and "common good constitutionalism". If you're bright and right-wing there are lots of different schools and mentors you can sort of attach yourself too (and what you're doing is sort of the gourmet cooking end of what will end up on Truth Social once it's been through the process) but they can all sit under the same flag.

While I think the rest of academia is not there to serve a political cause. They're genuinely doing independent study that does not necessarily serve a political end - and there isn't a left/liberal equivalent of all the intellectual infrastructure of the conservative movement. So, despite the conservative fear, there isn't really a "liberal academia" in the same way as there is a conservative one on the right. And at the same time I feel like the band of academics who get picked up within official Democrat and "respectable" policy circles seems a lot narrower and excludes lots of academia that might well be more liberal or on the left intellectually (and useful to think with) because it's not on the right page/fully aligned politically.

[Jacob]

Isn't that kind of saying the same thing, Sheilbh?

There's a coherent (if broad and multi-faceted) intellectual and political movement on the right, which includes academics.

On the other hand there are a bunch of intellectuals, politicians, and academics that are left aligned, but they are not all coherent.

The left represents the free market of ideas, and that free market is losing because it is being out-organized, out-bought, and out-bullied by the oligarch funded right.

[Sheilbh]

Yeah I agree. I just think you can emphasise it slightly differently. I don't think the incoherence is just in the messaging. I think my read would be that the right isn't coherent intellectually at all - there are contradictory intellectual strands that don't work together on an intellectual level at all. But they are united on a political project (I also think there's more unity from a perspective of "aesthetics" which I think might matter too). Those contradictory strands are helpful at a time when things are a little bit in flux and Trump is leading the right as he doesn't really have many (any?) fixed beliefs and everyone's rowing in behind the power project. And bluntly, if you have to pivot several times a day, the intellectual incoherence - or diversity - helps.

Within academia I don't think there is a "left" or "liberal" academia in any meaningful sense. I don't think it's that politically coherent. From the outside I think while the liberal/left side especially in the US maybe isn't more intellectually coherent, but has a narrower intellectual bandwidth. I think there's a bundle of ideas and they very often seem to go together. I think there's something to the Ganz argument that they exercised discipline by removing their cranks which is great when everything's going well but is a limit when the existing system hits a crisis because you've got rid of the people thinking and working outside of it. But as I say I don't think there's any political unity.

Possibly a mutual incuriousity plays a role here. I feel like, unlike the right, the institutions of liberal/left politics aren't interested in ideas, which I'd slightly distinguish from "expertise" (or perhaps don't feel they need to organise them because they're on the right side anyway) - and I think the academics/intellectuals on that side aren't as interested in buttressing power/don't have the organisation. And I don't think this used to be the case I think at the time Buckley was writing for example, I think there as more of a connection between academia to organised politics - I'm not sure why it shifted. Possibly the rise of the New Left and sixties starting a long march through the institutions which disconnected that world from practical politics at exactly the point the right were creating their own counter-insitutions?

Although I'm not sure on the free market side of things - I think even if it's small-p politics resources and success in academia is more political than that even if you don't have donors with their own intellectual agenda. And I think fashion/the desire to be current matters in academia as much as anywhere else (at least, perhaps, to the funders who aren't right-wing foundations doling out grants).

[Oexmelin]

The free market of ideas has always been a pretty lousy metaphor, precisely because it never was a free market, and ideas aren't transacted. You don't buy a ready made product.

I am just going to illustrate Sheilbh's point with a personal anecdote. At the beginning of Trumpism, I suggested to my colleagues in my Early Modern history workshop that we should organize public-facing events which directly engaged with current-affairs topics. It was met with strong pushbacks: the best way to fight Trumpism, I was told, was to promote knowledge for knowledge's sake.

I said I agreed, in principle. Such an idea could hold, when all the cultural sphere around us subscribed to the idea, promoted it, and thus, we could find strong backers elsewhere. But now, we lived in a world where our own colleagues in STEM thought we were useless (it had been demonstrated at an Arts and Science meeting a few weeks before). We needed to find ways to articulate anew the humanist project - except, humanist project now is now so exploded, so atomized, it's really hard to find common ground - and the humanities themselves really suck at feeling a sense of emergency. It's one of the strength of the humanities, a sort of timelessness, but it makes us terrible at answering a political crisis. What remained were the sort of milquetoast petition of principles about « critical thinking skills », which has little political purchase, because people aren't able to see the connection between analyzing silent film, or thinking about 16th century Senegambia and applicability. Ours is a culture obsessed with outputs, and utility - even when there is undoubtedly an appetite for all things cultural.

For humanists, humanities had become a truism. Something we never felt the need to defend, because the existence of the institution was the project, and to defend it was to admit it could be questioned.

We never organized those public facing events.

To a large extent, the problems of the Democratic Party are the same as those of academia. They are creatures of institutions, attached to the replication of these institutions, which serve each individual professor / aides well, but do not lend themselves well to building collective fights. People have confused a position of comfort with a position of principle, and without having to actually defend their institutions, abandoned the battlefield.