Claudine Gay and the Limits of Social Engineering at Harvard
How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?
The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.
This resonates with my own experience in academia over the last decade. What was at first a slow drift became a sudden lurch toward the Left on so many cultural issues. Generally, that’s something I support. But with that lurch, all good sense and reason was thrown out the window.
I joined an MFA program where many people thought literature by white men, straight or not, was explicitly ‘less than.’ Where I was called a fascist for not introducing myself with pronouns, a white supremacist for merely editing a paper of a fellow student (yes!), a conservative because I argued that every person, regardless of their color and class and belief, is deserving of compassion.
Nevermind that the program chair — and his successor — were both white men. And really, really nevermind that the program chair was an admitted alcoholic known for his, um, terse and abrasive communication style. Now I’m not one to get on someone for being an asshole — pot, meet kettle — but I’m also not in charge of an academic program. (Some personality traits, believe it or not, should be disqualifying.) The performative outrage and yet complete inaction on issues of race and class is maddening. I was once told, and I’m not kidding here, that I was a “colonial apologist” because I would not give a land acknowledgement at the beginning of an in-person class, nevermind that I am leaving the land I own to the local tribe in my will.
What in the actual fuck.
What pains me most about this stuff is how much of a mockery it all makes of what I consider the most venerated institution in our culture. Academics are defined primarily by their ability to think, to make sense from nonsense, and yet they fully embraced the bullshit.
I’m as guilty as the rest — I fell for it too, at least for a while. I let my natural do-gooder tendencies take me beyond the realm of common sense. I’m both embarrassed by it and not — I really do think that much of this stuff comes from a place of good intentions — but we cannot abandon logic and reason in the name of wanting to do good. And especially not in academia.
A History of Feminist Antisemitism
“I think you mute the terror of the swastika.”
What a chilling line.
It’s almost as though our time spent on computers has deprived us of the ability to think with nuance and forced us into these false binaries.
I have watched a strange rise in antisemitism (not mere anti-Zionism) among my leftist friends. Why? I don’t quite know, but it’s unsettling.
It wasn’t just women of color who decided that Jewish women were too domineering, too successful, too white, too obsessed with the Holocaust, and too interested in their newfound ethnic identity as a way of dominating the newly identity-conscious feminist scene. New-Age feminists believed that Judaism had killed goddess worship, and white Socialist professors equated Jews with capitalists. But Jewish women had once considered women of color to be their natural allies, and now that the feminist theories and alliances of women of color were the most influential, it was their antisemitism that Jewish feminists called out most often. Women of color resented this criticism and said that it was racist.
I’m so glad to be a gay man.
In Underdogs: Social Deviance and Queer Theory, queer scholar Heather Love wrote that queer theory’s politics “are split between the liberalism of the civil rights movement and a lumpen appetite for destruction.” This new “queer” identity destroyed identity categories themselves. Love wrote that the vagueness of the term “queer”—sort of about sexual practices, but also not—coupled with the idea that everyone understands it but you, “creates a desire to be ‘in the know.’” Like the cultural ephemera it often turns to as its intellectual objects, queer theory thrived on the transgressive frisson of the unexpected and the illegitimate.
I couldn’t have said it better.
What’s the Problem with Disability Studies and the
“Disability Rights” Movement?
Ramping up the rhetorical and social stakes leaves us incapable of calling bullshit bullshit. As is always the case, the rise of identity politics in disability discourse has created a state of constant emotionalism, threat, and fear. People are afraid to engage because they expect, correctly, that saying anything that contradicts the activist crowd will simply result in them being called bigots. This causes problems all over our debates, but appears most glaring when it comes to the stupidest issues. For example, despite dogged insistence to the contrary, it is not the case that there has been a sudden massive increase in the prevalence of late-onset Tourette’s syndrome among adolescent women with TikTok accounts. There has not been some sort of incredible change to the epidemiology of Tourette’s, and essentially no one really believes that there has been. Instead, a lot of young woman started pretending to have Tourette’s syndrome out of a desire to belong and to differentiate themselves from their peers in the marketplace of attention, and as they were rewarded in that marketplace others responded by doing the same thing. Similarly, there has not been a sudden increase in dissociative identity disorder among very-online adolescent women, given that DID is a controversial diagnosis and the disorder known for its extreme rarity. Pretending to have multiple personalities is fun and edgy so some teenagers have done it a lot recently.
Kids do dumb things and I’m not particularly mad about it. I do, however, think that if it goes unchecked this stuff could have serious negative consequences for how our culture views mental illness. What’s striking is how scared many people seem to be about calling this obvious bullshit out as obvious bullshit. When I talk about this, I press and probe and ask people if any of it passes the smell test. And just about nobody says “Yes, it’s credible that there are more authentic cases of dissociative identity disorder in my TikTok feed than there have been confirmed cases in medical history.” Nobody’s that dumb. But they’re unwilling to just say, yeah, that’s bullshit. They ummm and they uhhhh and they tiptoe around and they dance, and they do so because they’ve absorbed the attitude that criticizing anyone’s specific claims to disability means that you’re somehow callous towards disability in general. They also won’t call bullshit on bullshit because they’re afraid of being tarred with the “ableism” accusation. The whole thing makes it harder for us to think and talk intelligently about how to best accommodate disability in our society.
This resonates. In my masters program, this is all terrifically common. I’ve been afraid to call out bullshit when I see it precisely before I’m afraid of being called out as ‘callous.’ More worryingly, I’ve seen professors and administrators — at multiple universities — be cowed into silence, afraid the DEI office might come from their job should they speak out.
To say this is depressing is an understatement. Academia should be the one institution in American life immune from irrationality, from illiberalism. And yet it’s embraced them with abandon as students, now ‘customers’ in a capitalist model, have become empowered by social media.
The young, myself included, don’t always know best, and it hurts watching people that know better say nothing.
On Elite Campuses, a New Protest Demand: Unwavering Support
Young people now arrive at elite colleges with the assumption that not only will they be seen, heard and meticulously cared for, but also that their own politics will broadly align with those of the institutions they have chosen to attend. They have been given little reason to think otherwise.
With universities run as for-profit business, why are we surprised that students are now insisting “the customer is always right?”
To be clear: the customer is not always right.
Yet we’ve let this attitude persist in the larger economy for at least as long as I’ve been alive. Let’s not act surprised when this attitude follows capitalism everywhere it insists on going. Academia is no exception.
The naivety of some grown adults — in this case, college administrators hell-bent on making ever-more money off their students — is astonishing. If you use people, expect them to use you in return.
No One Wants Independence
…it’s a profoundly weird (if surprisingly common) rhetorical move to say “I support you for your independence, but you wrote something I disagree with, so I’m not supporting you anymore.” It should go without saying - saying stuff that you don’t agree with is an expression of my independence, and it’s strange to endorse independence in the commission of telling me that you expected me to adhere to your own views. Subscribe or cancel as you will. But are you really out to support independence of thought if you don’t support it when that independence results in an opinion you don’t like?
This Is What ‘Decolonization’ Looks Like
On Saturday, as the raping and murdering and kidnapping were happening in Israel, Najma Sharif, a writer for Soho House magazine and Teen Vogue, posted on X: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
…
What would this death cult do if it could do anything? We have glimpsed that over the past 72 hours. We know what they are capable of, and we know that they have many defenders here at home. Those who imagine themselves fomenting the long-awaited revolution. Those who know that the beloved academic language of decolonization means nothing if you’re unwilling to see it enacted in flesh, and especially blood.
This is a fascinating time to be watching the politics of academia.
A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected From Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.
According to its 29 authors, who are primarily scientists (including two Nobel laureates) in fields as varied as theoretical physics, psychology and pharmacokinetics, ideological concerns are threatening independence and rigor in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. Though the goal of expanding opportunity for more diverse researchers in the sciences is laudable, the authors write, it should not be pursued at the expense of foundational scientific concepts like objective truth, merit and evidence, which they claim are being jeopardized by efforts to account for differing perspectives.
This encapsulates why the Left, once the bastion of Enlightenment principles, has left me behind in recent years.
It should go without saying — but in today’s polarized world, unfortunately, it doesn’t — that the authors of this paper do not deny the existence of historical racism or sexism or dispute that inequalities of opportunity persist. Nor do they deny that scientists have personal views, which are in turn informed by culture and society. They acknowledge biases and blind spots.
Where they depart from the prevailing ideological winds is in arguing that however imperfect, meritocracy is still the most effective way to ensure high quality science and greater equity.
The lack of nuance on the political Left is troubling and has become stunningly common. Here are some of their greatest hits: I’ve been called a “white supremacist” by fellow grad school writers because I edit their work. (In their view, the very act of editing is oppression.) Fellow academics have called me “conservative” because I argue for compassion for everyone — including for white, rural, conservative people. I’ve been called a transphobe because biological sex is real, and I have no compunctions saying so. I’ve been called an “assimilationist” because I’m a gay man who lives in a small rural town surrounded by conservative straight people.
(It’s important to note that the Left hasn’t swung out farther left. They’ve swung toward illiberalism, and in that sense, I think they’ve made a swing to the right.)
One needn’t agree with every aspect of the authors’ politics or with all of their solutions. But to ignore or dismiss their research rather than impartially weigh the evidence would be a mistake. We need, in other words, to judge the paper on the merits. That, after all, is how science works.
Logic, reason, the scientific method, the pursuit of objectivity… when and why did these ideals fall from favor?