Niall Ferguson is a historian who has been a professor at Oxford, New York University and Harvard. He is now at the Hoover Institution, a well-endowed conservative think tank located on the Stanford University campus. The following essay appeared on the Bloomberg News site.
Ferguson doesn’t acknowledge the paradox behind his proposal. He argues that academia has become so stifling of conservative ideas that it has become necessary to open a new college where those ideas could be freely expressed. Yet if every college student has been indoctrinated for many years, what accounts for the power of Trumpian ideas in American society today?
It’s true that Trump ideology is favored more by non-college graduates, while college graduates are likely to reject xenophobia, racism, homophobia, encouragement of violence, and contempt for democratic norms associated with Trumpism. If American higher education was having such a stifling effect on conservatism, why the power and spread of such noxious ideology?
I suppose that Ferguson might disassociate conservatism from Trumpism, but who in the Republican Party today represents those conservative ideas that Ferguson honors? Mitt Romney? Liz Cheney? They are outcasts in their own party.
Ferguson wrote:
If you enjoyed Netflix’s “The Chair” — a lighthearted depiction of a crisis-prone English Department at an imaginary Ivy League college — you are clearly not in higher education. Something is rotten in the state of academia and it’s no laughing matter.
Grade inflation. Spiraling costs. Corruption and racial discrimination in admissions. Junk content (“Grievance Studies”) published in risible journals. Above all, the erosion of academic freedom and the ascendancy of an illiberal “successor ideology”known to its critics as wokeism, which manifests itself as career-ending “cancelations” and speaker disinvitations, but less visibly generates a pervasive climate of anxiety and self-censorship.
Some say that universities are so rotten that the institution itself should simply be abandoned and replaced with an online alternative — a metaversity perhaps, to go with the metaverse. I disagree. I have long been skeptical that online courses and content can be anything other than supplementary to the traditional real-time, real-space college experience.
However, having taught at several, including Cambridge, Oxford, New York University and Harvard, I have also come to doubt that the existing universities can be swiftly cured of their current pathologies. That is why this week I am one of a group of people announcing the founding of a new university — indeed, a new kind of university: the University of Austin.
The founders of this university are a diverse group in terms of our backgrounds and our experiences (though doubtless not diverse enough for some). Our political views also differ. To quote our founding president, Pano Kanelos, “What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a belief that it is time for something new.”
There is no need to imagine a mythical golden age. The original universities were religious institutions, as committed to orthodoxy and as hostile to heresy as today’s woke seminaries. In the wake of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution, scholars gradually became less like clergymen; but until the 20th century their students were essentially gentlemen, who owed their admission as much to inherited status as to intellectual ability. Many of the great intellectual breakthroughs of the Enlightenment were achieved off campus.
Only from the 19th century did academia become truly secularized and professional, with the decline of religious requirements, the rise to pre-eminence of the natural sciences, the spread of the German system of academic promotion (from doctorate up in steps to full professorship), and the proliferation of scholarly journals based on peer-review. Yet the same German universities that led the world in so many fields around 1900 became enthusiastic helpmeets of the Nazis in ways that revealed the perils of an amoral scholarship decoupled from Christian ethics and too closely connected to the state.
Even the institutions with the most sustained records of excellence — Oxford and Cambridge — have had prolonged periods of torpor. F.M. Cornford could mock the inherent conservatism of Oxbridge politics in his “Microcosmographia Academica” in 1908. When Malcolm Bradbury wrote his satirical novel “The History Man” in 1975, universities everywhere were still predominantly white, male and middle class. The process whereby a college education became more widely available — to women, to the working class, to racial minorities — has been slow and remains incomplete. Meanwhile, there have been complaints about the adverse consequences of this process in American universities since Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind,” which was published back in 1987.
Nevertheless, much had been achieved by the later years of the 20th century. There was a general agreement that the central purpose of a university was the pursuit of truth — think only of Harvard’s stark Latin motto: Veritas — and that the crucial means to that end were freedom of conscience, thought, speech and publication. There was supposed to be no discrimination in admissions, examinations and academic appointments, other than on the basis of intellectual merit. That was crucial to enabling Jews and other minority groups to take full advantage of their intellectual potential. It was understood that professors were awarded tenure principally to preserve academic freedom so that they might “dare to think” — Immanuel Kant’s other great imperative, Sapere aude! — without fear of being fired.
The benefits of all this defy quantification. A huge proportion of the major scientific breakthroughs of the past century were made by men and women whose academic jobs gave them economic security and a supportive community in which to do their best work. Would the democracies have won the world wars and the Cold War without the contributions of their universities? It seems doubtful. Think only of Bletchley Park and the Manhattan Project. Sure, the Ivy League’s best and brightest also gave us the Vietnam War. But remember, too, that there were more university-based computers on the Arpanet — the original internet — than any other kind. No Stanford, no Silicon Valley.
Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all this gave rise. Yet, in the past decade, exhilaration has been replaced by suffocation, to the point that I feel genuinely sorry for today’s undergraduates.
In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented them from saying things they believed, up from 55% in 2019, while 41% were reluctant to discuss politics in a classroom, up from 32% in 2019. Some 60% of students said they were reluctant to speak up in class because they were concerned other students would criticize their views as being offensive.
Such anxieties are far from groundless. According to a nationwide survey of a thousand undergraduates by the Challey Institute for Global Innovation, 85% of self-described liberal students would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that they found offensive, while 76% would report another student.
In a study published in March entitled “Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination and Self-Censorship,” the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology showed that academic freedom is under attack not only in the U.S., but also in the U.K. and Canada. Three-quarters of conservative American and British academics in the social sciences and humanities said there is a hostile climate for their beliefs in their department. This compares to just 5% among left-wing faculty in the U.S.
Again, one can understand why. Younger academics are especially likely to support dismissal of a colleague who has made some heretical utterance, with 40% of American social sciences and humanities professors under the age of 40 supporting at least one of four hypothetical dismissal campaigns. Ph.D. students are even more intolerant than other young academics: 55% of American Ph.D. students under 40 supported at least one hypothetical dismissal campaign. “High-profile deplatformings and dismissals” get the attention, the authors of the report conclude, but “far more pervasive threats to academic freedom stem … from fears of a) cancellation — threats to one’s job or reputation — and b) political discrimination.”
These are not unfounded fears. The number of scholars targeted for their speech has risen dramatically since 2015, according to research by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. FIRE has logged 426 incidents since 2015. Just under three-quarters of them resulted in some kind of sanction — including an investigation alone or voluntary resignation — against the scholar. Such efforts to restrict free speech usually originate with “progressive” student groups, but often find support from left-leaning faculty members and are encouraged by college administrators, who tend (as Sam Abrams of Sarah Lawrence College demonstrated, and as his own subsequent experience confirmed) to be even further to the left than professors. There are also attacks on academic freedom from the right, which FIRE challenges. With a growing number of Republicans calling for bans on critical race theory, I fear the illiberalism is metastasizing.
Trigger warnings. Safe spaces. Preferred pronouns. Checked privileges. Microaggressions. Antiracism. All these terms are routinely deployed on campuses throughout the English-speaking world as part of a sustained campaign to impose ideological conformity in the name of diversity. As a result, it often feels as if there is less free speech and free thought in the American university today than in almost any other institution in the U.S.
To the historian’s eyes, there is something unpleasantly familiar about the patterns of behavior that have, in a matter of a few years, become normal on many campuses. The chanting of slogans. The brandishing of placards. The letters informing on colleagues and classmates. The denunciations of professors to the authorities. The lack of due process. The cancelations. The rehabilitations following abject confessions. The officiousness of unaccountable bureaucrats. Any student of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-20th century recognizes all this with astonishment. It turns out that it can happen in a free society, too, if institutions and individuals who claim to be liberal choose to behave in an entirely illiberal fashion.
How to explain this rapid descent of academia from a culture of free inquiry and debate into a kind of Totalitarianism Lite? In their book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” the social psychiatrist Jonathan Haidt and FIRE president Greg Lukianoff lay much of the blame on a culture of parenting and early education that encourages students to believe that “what doesn’t kill you makes you weaker,” that you should “always trust your feelings,” and that “life is a battle between good people and evil people.”
However, I believe the core problems are the pathological structures and perverse incentives of the modern university. It is not the case, as many Americans believe, that U.S. colleges have always been left-leaning and that today’s are no different from those of the 1960s. As Stanley Rothman, Robert Lichter and Neil Nevitte showed in a 2005 study, while 39% of the professoriate on average described themselves as left-wing in 1984, the proportion had risen to 72% by 1999, by which time being a conservative had become a measurable career handicap.
Mitchell Langbert’s analysis of tenure-track, Ph.D.-holding professors from 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges in 2017 found that those with known political affiliations were overwhelmingly Democratic. Nearly two-fifths of the colleges in Langbert’s sample were Republican-free. The mean Democratic-to-Republican ratio across the sample was 10.4:1, or 12.7:1 if the two military academies, West Point and Annapolis, were excluded. For history departments, the ratio was 17.4:1; for English 48.3:1. No ratio is calculable for anthropology, as the number of Republican professors was zero. In 2020, Langbert and Sean Stevens found an even bigger skew to the left when they considered political donations to parties by professors. The ratio of dollars contributed to Democratic versus Republican candidates and committees was 21:1.
Commentators who argue that the pendulum will magically swing back betray a lack of understanding about the academic hiring and promotion process. With political discrimination against conservatives now overt, most departments are likely to move further to the left over time as the last remaining conservatives retire.
Yet the leftward march of the professoriate is only one of the structural flaws that characterize today’s university. If you think the faculty are politically skewed, take a look at academic administrators. A shocking insight into the way some activist-administrators seek to bully students into ideological conformity was provided by Trent Colbert, a Yale Law School student who invited his fellow members of the Native American Law Students Association to “a Constitution Day bash” at the “NALSA Trap House,” a term that used to mean a crack den but now is just a mildly risque way of describing a party. Diversity director Yaseen Eldik’s thinly veiled threats to Colbert if he didn’t sign a groveling apology — “I worry about this leaning over your reputation as a person, not just here but when you leave” — were too much even for an editorial board member at the Washington Post. Democracy may die in darkness; academic freedom dies in wokeness.
Moreover, the sheer number of the administrators is a problem in itself. In 1970, U.S. colleges employed more professors than administrators. Between then and 2010, however, the number of full-time professors or “full-time equivalents” increased by slightly more than 50%, in line with student enrollments. The number of administrators and administrative staffers rose by 85% and 240%, respectively. The ever-growing army of coordinators for Title IX — the federal law prohibiting sex-based discrimination — is one manifestation of the bureaucratic bloat, which since the 1990s has helped propel tuition costs far ahead of inflation.
The third structural problem is weak leadership. Time and again — most recently at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a lecture by the University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was abruptly canceled because he had been critical of affirmative action — academic leaders have yielded to noisy mobs baying for disinvitations. There are notable exceptions, such as Robert Zimmer, who as president of the University of Chicago between 2006 and 2021 made a stand for academic freedom. But the number of other colleges to have adopted the Chicago statement, a pledge crafted by the school’s Committee on Freedom of Expression, remains just 55, out of nearly 2,500 institutions offering four-year undergraduate programs.
Finally, there is the problem of the donors — most but not all alumni — and trustees, many of whom have been astonishingly oblivious of the problems described above. In 2019, donors gave nearly $50 billion to colleges. Eight donors gave $100 million or more. People generally do not make that kind of money without being hard-nosed in their business dealings. Yet the capitalist class appears strangely unaware of the anticapitalist uses to which its money is often put. A phenomenon I find deeply puzzling is the lack of due diligence associated with much academic philanthropy, despite numerous cases when the intentions of benefactors have deliberately been subverted.
All this would be bad enough if it meant only that U.S. universities are no longer conducive to free inquiry and promotion based on merit, without which scientific advances are certain to be impeded and educational standards to fall. But academic illiberalism is not confined to college campuses. As students collect their degrees and enter the workforce, they inevitably carry some of what they have learned at college with them. Multiple manifestations of “woke” thinking and behavior at newspapers, publishing houses, technology companies and other corporations have confirmed Andrew Sullivan’s 2018 observation, “We all live on campus now.”
When a problem becomes this widespread, the traditional American solution is to create new institutions. As we have seen, universities are relatively long-lived compared to companies and even nations. But not all great universities are ancient. Of today’s top 25 universities, according to the global rankings compiled by the London Times Higher Education Supplement, four were founded in the 20th century. Fully 14 were 19th-century foundations; four date back to the 18th century. Only Oxford (which can trace its origins to 1096) and Cambridge (1209) are medieval in origin.
As might be inferred from the large number (10) of today’s leading institutions founded in the U.S. between 1855 and 1900, new universities tend to be established when wealthy elites grow impatient with the existing ones and see no way of reforming them. The puzzle is why, despite the resurgence of inequality in the U.S. since the 1990s and the more or less simultaneous decline in standards at the existing universities, so few new ones have been created. Only a handful have been set up this century: University of California Merced (2005), Ave Maria University (2003) and Soka University of America (2001). Just five U.S. colleges founded in the past 50 years make it into the Times’s top 25 “Young Universities”: University of Alabama at Birmingham (founded 1969), University of Texas at Dallas (1969), George Mason (1957), University of Texas at San Antonio (1969) and Florida International (1969). Each is (or originated as) part of a state university system.
In short, the beneficiaries of today’s gilded age seem altogether more tolerant of academic degeneration than their 19th-century predecessors. For whatever reason, many prefer to give their money to established universities, no matter how antithetical those institutions’ values have become to their own. This makes no sense, even if the principal motivation is to buy Ivy League spots for their offspring. Why would you pay to have your children indoctrinated with ideas you despise?
So what should the university of the future look like? Clearly, there is no point in simply copying and pasting Harvard, Yale or Princeton and expecting a different outcome. Even if such an approach were affordable, it would be the wrong one.
To begin with, a new institution can’t compete with the established brands when it comes to undergraduate programs. Young Americans and their counterparts elsewhere go to college as much for the high-prestige credentials and the peer networks as for the education. That’s why a new university can’t start by offering bachelors’ degrees.
The University of Austin will therefore begin modestly, with a summer school offering “Forbidden Courses” — the kind of content and instruction no longer available at most established campuses, addressing the kind of provocative questions that often lead to cancelation or self-censorship.
The next step will be a one-year master’s program in Entrepreneurship and Leadership. The primary purpose of conventional business programs is to credential large cohorts of passive learners with a lowest-common-denominator curriculum. The University of Austin’s program will aim to teach students classical principles of the market economy and then embed them in a network of successful technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and public-policy reformers. It will offer an introduction to the world of American technology similar to the introduction to the Chinese economy offered by the highly successful Schwarzman Scholars program, combining both academic pedagogy and practical experience. Later, there will be parallel programs in Politics and Applied History and in Education and Public Service.
Only after these initial programs have been set up will we start offering a four-year liberal arts degree. The first two years of study will consist of an intensive liberal arts curriculum, including the study of philosophy, literature, history, politics, economics, mathematics, the sciences and the fine arts. There will be Oxbridge-style instruction, with small tutorials and college-wide lectures, providing an in-depth and personalized learning experience with interdisciplinary breadth.
After two years of a comprehensive and rigorous liberal arts education, undergraduates will join one of four academic centers as junior fellows, pursuing disciplinary coursework, conducting hands-on research and gaining experience as interns. The initial centers will include one for entrepreneurship and leadership, one for politics and applied history, one for education and public service, and one for technology, engineering and mathematics.
To those who argue that we could more easily do all this with some kind of internet platform, I would say that online learning is no substitute for learning on a campus, for reasons rooted in evolutionary psychology. We simply learn much better in relatively small groups in real time and space, not least because a good deal of what students learn in a well-functioning university comes from their informal discussions in the absence of professors. This explains the persistence of the university over a millennium, despite successive revolutions in information technology.
To those who wonder how a new institution can avoid being captured by the illiberal-liberal establishment that now dominates higher education, I would answer that the governance structure of the institution will be designed to prevent that. The Chicago principles of freedom of expression will be enshrined in the founding charter. The founders will form a corporation or board of trustees that will be sovereign. Not only will the corporation appoint the president of the college; it will also have a final say over all appointments or promotions. There will be one unusual obligation on faculty members, besides the standard ones to teach and carry out research: to conduct the admissions process by means of an examination that they will set and grade. Admission will be based primarily on performance on the exam. That will avoid the corrupt rackets run by so many elite admissions offices today.
As for our choice of location in the Texas capital, I would say that proximity to a highly regarded public university — albeit one where even the idea of establishing an institute to study liberty is now controversial — will ensure that the University of Austin has to compete at the highest level from the outset.
My fellow founders and I have no illusions about the difficulty of the task ahead. We fully expect condemnation from the educational establishment and its media apologists. We shall regard all such attacks as vindication — the flak will be a sign that we are above the target.
In our minds, there can be no more urgent task for a society than to ensure the health of its system of higher education. The American system today is broken in ways that pose a profound threat to the future strength and stability of the U.S. It is time to start fixing it. But the opportunity to do so in the classic American way — by creating something new, actually building rather than “building back” — is an inspiring and exciting one.
To quote Haidt and Lukianoff: “A school that makes freedom of inquiry an essential part of its identity, selects students who show special promise as seekers of truth, orients and prepares those students for productive disagreement … would be inspiring to join, a joy to attend, and a blessing to society.”
That is not the kind of institution satirized in “The Chair.” It is precisely the kind of institution we need today.
To contact the author of this story:
Niall Ferguson at nferguson23@bloomberg.net
Quick — everybody please comment on how everything Ferguson wrote is 100% wrong and is nothing but a right-wing narrative with zero relation to reality. Don’t concede a single point, because the right wing may later use it against you..
OK, Flerp, I’ll bite: Niall Ferguson is a Tory who has, among other things, defended colonialism. See here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/feb/20/niall-ferguson-interview-civilization
And Flerp? Your sarcasm is both duly noted and duly abhorred.
I hope the University of Austin becomes a reality. And, among other things, I hope it produces teachers who don’t fit the conventional mold.
It’s a huge undertaking.
Note the totally predictable phenomenon here in the comments. It’s Pavlovian — people accustomed to inhabiting their ideological silo receive the signal that the speaker is “right wing,” and they can’t do anything but denounce the speaker as “right wing.” They don’t care about the details of what he says because they can’t conceive of a meaningful reality apart from a war between their tribe and the “right wing.” They’ll attack his character (which for all I know may be a terrible character) but they won’t engage any of the details because they don’t want to cede ground to the enemy. They don’t know who Dorian Abbot was and they won’t inquire; if they do know who he is, they don’t think there’s anything problematic about what happened to him; and the rare ones who do think there’s something problematic about it won’t say anything.
flerp,
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
You just wrote a long post denouncing and mischaracterizing what other people wrote in the comments.
Why have you appointed yourself to the job of policing the language and judging the persuasiveness of all posts critical of Niall Ferguson? Do you believe your personal opinion of whether someone’s reply meets some standard of excellence that you don’t hold yourself to is useful?
If you want to defend Niall Ferguson, just do it. Write a post explaining why you found his essay so persuasive. Defend the post you wrote about how terrific you think Niall Ferguson’s imaginary future university will be if someone replies to your post to argue with one of the points you made.
That is called having a conversation.
For future reference, I think we should all stipulate that most of our comments will not meet the high standard of discourse that you demand other people meet (but not yourself).
I actually believe that you may have an interesting perspective to offer about what it was in Niall Ferguson’s essay that you found so persuasive and why those points spoke to you.
But I don’t understand why you just keep sharing your opinion on other people’s opinions instead of your opinion on the subject that is being discussed.
By the way, invoking Dorian Abbott is like invoking Nikole Hannah-Jones. I have never seen a post about how all universities are hotbeds of right wing ideology and no other voices can be heard by invoking Nikole Hannah-Jones. And there are numerous voices on the left that are either cancelled who don’t get invited period.
Invoking Dorian Abbott is one of the weakest arguments I have heard. If you are going to make it, and not be a hypocrite, you should be just at outraged when people on the left are uninvited or not invited at all. They are less reported on because they don’t whine as much.
By the way, for anyone who doesn’t know who Dorian Abbot is, that hotbed of left wing ideology MIT — yes MIT!! — decided not to have him speak.
What happened to this victimized, silenced scholar?
“No sooner had M.I.T. canceled his speech than Robert P. George, director of Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, invited him to give the speech there on Thursday, the same day as the canceled lecture.”
Wow, that does suggest that poor victimized white man had to settle for giving a speech at a “lesser” university. It’s just like the McCarthy era!! Not.
So outrageous when privileged white men feel victimized and blame other people. But when other people experience the same so-called “victimization”, they are always to blame.
Does flerp know who any of these people are?
University of Alabama Dean Jamie Riley, fired for a tweet the Breitbart folks didn’t like.
George Washington University Associate Professor David Karpf — targeted by right wing NYT pundit Bret Stephens for daring to call a white man a bed bug! Yes, that Bret Stephens, the defender of “free speech” demonized Karpf in an attempt to get him fired.
Lisa Durden, an adjunct professor at Essex County College in New Jersey, fired
June Y. Chu, Dean at a Yale University college fired for writing a restaurant review in which she used the phrase “white trash”.
There are many more. In fact, Acadia University political scientist Jeffrey Adam Sachs did a study and it turns out that more professors and administrators are getting fired for saying something that offends conservatives than saying something than offends liberals.
Does invoking these names mean that I have proven that universities are hotbeds of right wing thought?
Some people don’t have the courage to defend Niall Ferguson’s views themselves, so they just attack those who criticize Ferguson and pretend there is a high standard of discourse that the critics of Ferguson haven’t achieved. And then they invoke some random victimized white guy’s name – not because they have the courage to defend Niall Ferguson’s essay but because invoking some supposedly victimized white guy’s name is the only way that those on the right seem to be able to support their opinions.
“They don’t know who Dorian Abbot was and they won’t inquire; if they do know who he is, they don’t think there’s anything problematic about what happened to him”
My reply to that comment has been held up. But apparently the person who posted the above thinks it supports his attacks on people here for writing comments that do not meet the standards he expects comments to meet.
MIT — yes, MIT!!! — the hotbed of left wing ideology uninvited Dorian Abbot to speak at an event and Princeton University immediately invited Dorian Abbot to speak on the day he was scheduled to speak at MIT.
Maybe this means that MIT needs to shut down for being a useless hotbed of left wing thought. Maybe this means that Princeton University is the model college of free speech that Niall Ferguson adores.
We don’t know. We just know that invoking the name of poor, victimized white guy Dorian Abbot is supposed to be convincing evidence of something or other. And how can anyone argue with that?
Flerp,
The blog here allows anonymous posting because Dr. Ravitch agrees with the backers of the University of Austin that teachers are afraid to say what they really believe because they would lose their job. There is some common ground.
TE, I allow anonymous posters because people who espouse liberal views might get death threats from rightwing crazies and might lose their jobs.
Ponderosa and flerp seem to be unaware that Diane Ravitch’s blog is a pro public schools blog and that most of the people who comment here are on the liberal or left side of the discussion. And yet Ponderosa and flerp leave the warm friendly glow of their right leaning silos to complain about we mere mortals year after year.
Hello! There are already scores of very conservative and very right wing colleges and universities!!!!
Examples of conservative colleges in conservative locations include Clemson University (South Carolina), Utah State, and the University of Alabama.
However, there are conservative colleges in liberal states. Pepperdine and Thomas Aquinas College are conservative colleges in California. Despite their location, they lean conservative because they’re Christian colleges.
And: University of Mississippi
Cedarville University
Brigham Young University—
Bob Jones University
Liberty University
Colorado Christian University
Lee University, etc., there are many more.
Stop being whiny little cry babies.
NYCPSP,
You can add Kathleen Stock to your list. If you are not familiar with Dr. Stock, you can read about her here: https://www.economist.com/britain/academic-freedom-in-british-universities-is-under-threat/21805537
Dr Ravitch,
As I said you and Ferguson agree that teachers are not able to say what they really believe because they are afraid of losing their job.
Alas I should tell the readers here that Dr. Kathleen Stock has resigned from her position as a philosophy professor. That decision was no doubt made more difficult given that her spouse is pregnant with their child.
Before last week, I posted anonymously because I didn’t want to receive nasty emails.
But now I have an even more convincing reason. I don’t want to have a crazed Rittenator shooting at me with an assault rifle when I step outside because he is deathly afraid I am going to take his gun away and shoot him with it.
How quickly the absurd becomes the real.
The Rittenator: “I’ll be back”
“That Rittenator is out there…It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse
or fearand it is deathly afraid that you will take it’s assault rifle away and use it on it. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!”— Kyle Reese, a character in the the Rittenator 2 movie
Sorry, that last quote by Kyle Reese was from the first Rittenator movie
te
The Economist is not without its own leanings. The Guardian described the low key opposition to Kathleen Stock on her campus. Right wing academics don’t experience the type of assaults aimed at abortion clinics nor the type of legislative efforts to shut them down. And, rightfully so. The right wing professors have agency. They could fix the problem they perceive. They could make their opposition to measures that discriminate against women, minority religion, POC, and LGBTQ as highly visible as they make their defense of White, male, heterosexual, Western civilization which is more accurately labeled culture.
I, for one, am extremely happy to have Flerp, and Ponderosa, Dienne77, and others who espouse views often excoriated here show up for these discussions. I find their differing views quite interesting, enjoy their wit, and appreciate this not being an echo chamber.
Flerp
I see you are having another breakdown. ” Why is everybody always picking on me”;
I keep asking you to show us the money. Are you seriously implying that students with a twitter account are a match for corporations and oligarchs who as Louis Powell said own the media and fund many university programs.
So are our Business and Economics Departments dominated by lefties.
Is there an active effort to Soros my school . Besides if there was he would be a bit player compared to the Koch network . An active effort to provide Internships , fellowships for left leaning students, and buy left leaning research . I doubt many corporations or billionaires would buy in .
Is there active outside funding for left wing student groups as there is for: Campus Reform, Young Americans for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, Turning Point USA. And let us not forget the Right Wing assault on school boards . When building a fascist authoritarian state one can not start too early.
“Unkoch My Campus reviewed the published materials of 28 conservative think tanks and political organizations with known ties to the Koch network from June 2020 to June 2021 and found that they had collectively published 79 articles, podcasts, reports or videos about Critical Race Theory. ”
Have State and federal legislature’s called for the firing of of Right Wing Instructors. Has Rachel Maddow or Michelle Goldberg used their megaphones to call for the dismissal of Right leaning instructors.
The Right’s Outrage Machine is built on constant whine and grievance.
There may be good reason that a plurality of College instructors and students lean left. They were not deprived of attention as a child.
Thank you, Joel. Well said.
Agree. Thank you Joel.
I prefer bubble and squeak to whine and grievance. But you’re definitely on to something!
“The Self-Reverent Right”
The Right is a whine
In bottle of Klein
The fruit of a vine
With Möbius twine
Thank you for the UnKoch reference in this context. UnKoch is an organization that honors democracy.
LMAO, Joel.
Bubble and squeak!!!! HAAAAAA!!!! Falling off my chair.
And, another gem, SomeDAM!
Niall F. is this really horrible right wing libertarian, I can only stand about 5 minutes of his diatribes against anything that is even vaguely progressive or forward looking. Happy now flerp? Oh wait, Niall did say something I agreed with: that the earth revolves around the sun.
░░░░░░░░░░░░▄▄░░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░░░░░░█░░█░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░░░░░░█░░█░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░░░░░█░░░█░░░░░░░░
░░░░░░░░░█░░░░█░░░░░░░░
███████▄▄█░░░░░██████▄░░
▓▓▓▓▓▓█░░░░░░░░░░░░░░█░
▓▓▓▓▓▓█░░░░░░░░░░░░░░█░
▓▓▓▓▓▓█░░░░░░░░░░░░░░█░
▓▓▓▓▓▓█░░░░░░░░░░░░░░█░
▓▓▓▓▓▓█░░░░░░░░░░░░░░█░
▓▓▓▓▓▓█████░░░░░░░░░█░░
██████▀░░░░▀▀██████▀░░░░
Flerp expostulates his usual flerpian flerpisms with his flerpistic flair for enigmatic non sequiturs.
From nymag, 8-20-12: Paul Krugman wrote, quote, “There are multiple errors and misrepresentations in Niall Ferguson’s cover story in Newsweek — I guess they don’t do fact-checking — but this is the one that jumped out at me. Ferguson says:
“The president pledged that health-care reform would not add a cent to the deficit. But the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now estimate that the insurance-coverage provisions of the ACA will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012–22 period.”
Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as saying that CBO found that the Act will increase the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or even skimmed, the CBO report (pdf) knows that it found that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the deficit — because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for.” end quote
Over the years, Krugman and many other economists have had to correct and expose some of Ferguson’s outrageous articles, comments, reports.
Also from the same nymag article from 2012: Economist Brad DeLong is even harsher with regards to the ACA claim:
Fire his ass. Fire his ass from Newsweek, and the Daily Beast. Convene a committee at Harvard to examine whether he has the moral character to teach at a university. There is a limit, somewhere. And Ferguson has gone beyond it.
And that’s just one minor point — it’s only the very beginning.
At The Atlantic, and with the searing headline “As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize,” James Fallows writes, “A tenured professor of history at my undergraduate alma mater has written a cover story for Daily Beast/Newsweek that is so careless and unconvincing that I wonder how he will presume to sit in judgment of the next set of student papers he has to grade.”
Matthew Yglesias, meanwhile, addresses Ferguson’s point about the U.S. losing GDP ground to China, which comes complete with a graph: “Ferguson is implicitly making two points with this graphic and it’s difficult to know which of them is more absurd—the idea that Obama is responsible for rapid economic growth in China or the idea that if he were responsible that would be blameworthy.” end quote
There are more critics of Ferguson but this will suffice for now.
I have truly gone down the rabbit hole…There are at least 34 current Republican members of the House and Senate who attended Ivy League universities. Many of these, such as John Kennedy of LA (Vanderbilt) and Ted Cruz (Princeton and Harvard)regularly bash the elite schools that helped them get where they are. Duke has produced a pretty impressive quartet of politicians in its day that includes Richard Nixon, Mo Brooks, Stephen Miller, and Rand Paul. So there really is no liberal bias among Universities. Josh Hawley went to Yale and Stanford: he was obviously charging at those liberal windmills before fomenting insurrection…And we can’t forget Ron Desantis who attended Harvard and Yale…And where did Trump go to school? Some little podunk university know as Penn? Go ahead and start Austin University. I’m sure Boebert and Cawthorn would appreciate honorary degrees for all of their hard work avoiding actually legislating. All of this babbling is about winning through division. There are far more adults in the United States without degrees. It’s quite the stash of voters. As Trump once said, and I paraphrase, he loves the poorly educated. Machiavelli would be so proud.
I thought “The Chair” was a satire, but apparently NF is profoundly humor impaired. Here is a very conservative man who has no trouble commanding a forum and has had well paid positions at many bastions of so called liberal privilege, and he acts as if his point of view is being silenced. Now, that is delusional.
Spot on.
And to top it off, he got caught trying to get some right wing students to get dirt on a left wing student that he could use to silence that student.
The right wing has re-defined the meaning of “free speech”. It means that right wingers can say the most offensive things without being criticized for them. It means silencing their critics and those whose views they don’t like at all costs, and invoking a Rittenhouse trial obscene version of “self-defense” in which they justify the reprehensible things they do to silence their critics by claiming their own free speech would be endangered if those people were allowed to speak any critical words about them.
Niall Ferguson had to resign from the Hoover Institution at Stanford after the e-mail correspondence he had in which he basically asked two right wing students to dig up dirt he could use to silence a student whose politics he didn’t like went public.
I thought the entire essay was laughable. If Niall Ferguson wants to start a right wing university, he should start it! He was given loads of money to do so. He should just do it.
But instead, the entire essay is a case study in overcompensation. “We are going to start the absolutely greatest institution ever, the other institutions are so terrible, but we will be the greatest institution ever.” It reeks of insecurity. Niall Ferguson sounds like a much smarter version of Donald Trump promoting Trump University. Our university is going to be the very best, and anyone who criticizes us will be vindication that we are the best! We love free speech as long that speech tells us that our new university is the very best! And those other universities are very bad, but our university will be the very greatest university ever! It hasn’t opened yet, but it is going to be very best ever!
It’s an embarrassment. In fact, I am positive if an academic who wasn’t a privileged right wing white male was given gobs of money to open a new school and wrote an essay like that, they would be made the object of fun in every single supposedly “liberal” media outlet.
But in the typical double standard in which privileged right wing white people are held to a much lower standard, this essay will surely be well-received as a brilliant piece of writing.
Parents, forget Harvard and Princeton. They suck. Come to our far superior university. Your kids will come up the way you want them and it’s just like Oxford and Cambridge but much better!
Sadly, like Trump University, the people who respond to the over the top marketing will probably be the least savvy consumers. They won’t notice that there is little about how students would pursue high level science and mathematics. They will just read this marketing essay and assume that because Niall Ferguson says students at his university will learn from the best professors ever, it will be good.
Seriously, what an embarrassment. Niall Ferguson should start his university. But over the top bragging about it before it opens? It reeks of Trump University marketing.
Niall Ferguson should take a lesson from Jerry Falwell. Stop talking about how great your non-existent university is going to be. Open it, make it work, and improve it. I don’t like Liberty University, but the people who started it turned it into a real working college. They didn’t do the Trump University thing and try to con people into coming to something that didn’t even exist yet.
And by the way, I think it would be great if everyone says to Niall Ferguson “That’s great, it sounds like your new university will be just like Liberty University.” There are already some conservative universities that should be invoked as what this new one will be. Niall Ferguson didn’t mention them because he is a horrible snob. He desperately wants his university to be thought of with the same respect and admiration the universities he supposedly despises are.
If Niall Ferguson wasn’t a privileged conservative white man held to a lower standard, this essay would be perceived as him unwittingly unmasking his own deep insecurities. I almost feel sorry for him. He was a good scholar at one time, but I guess the accolades from that weren’t enough to compensate for his insecurities. Like Donald Trump, those insecurities infect his conduct and perception of the world.
I don’t like Liberty University, but the people who started it turned it into a real working college. They didn’t do the Trump University thing and try to con people into coming to something that didn’t even exist.
Amen to that.
This entire project is generating fabulous comedy. Parody Twitter accounts keep starting up and then getting shut down when the University of Austin complains and has them canceled. Several people have already resigned from their board or otherwise backed away, leading other Twitter accounts to pre-emptively resign from the board before they’ve joined it. It’s a great source of amusement.
Ha, I guess other people noticed what I did about the essay?
Ferguson doesn’t really want to do the hard work of starting a university. He just wants to brag about it. He is just a much smarter version of Trump.
There are more people involved than Ferguson and other announcements of the project too. There’s someone from Chicago who once wrote a pompous essay about how eating ice cream cones in public is disgusting, so there are questions about whether ice cream cones will be banned from campus (if they ever had a campus — highly unlikely). Also one or more Jeffrey Epstein associates involved, so you can guess where THAT commentary is going. … Right now the address is either a house or a law office; it’s been described as both.
Thanks for the information.
It just confirms what I thought after reading the essay. It’s a hoity toity version of Trump University.
As I posted above, they could just start the university. No one is stopping them. But the actual university is secondary. The primary mission of the people involved isn’t education. It’s all about promoting themselves and amplifying their grievances and pushing ideas that right wing billionaires like so they can be handsomely compensated at the same time.
So much bragging, so little substance. No doubt the university will be the greatest ever. Just like Trump U.
hoity toity as done by a “low-information” populace
Caroline-how do you find the Twitter accounts?
Well it turns out to be hard to find them because apparently the University of Austin folks spend all their time reporting them and getting them shut down! Because of course they’re so deeply committed to free speech. Early on, if you just searched University of Austin, you’d find one of their tweets and then a long string of hilarious parody accounts and comments. I screenshot a few but I can’t post screenshots in this blog, unfortunately.
There were many amusing comments as the head honcho of the University of Chicago signed on and then resigned because the University of Austin people were blasting all established colleges (such as, you know, his). Then Steven Pinker of Harvard resigned, reportedly because photos of him with Jeffrey Epstein were circulating. Another academic (name lost to memory) said he was backing away, also because of the comments blasting established colleges. Tom Nichols tweeted: “Just in case, I will preemptively announce that I too will be stepping down from the University of Austin.” And things keep going from t here.
carolinesf, I read that Larry Summers and Bari Weiss were also founders of the University of Austin! The jokes write themselves.
The Academe Blog has some clever tweets under the heading, “Welcome to Rogue’s Gallery University”
Tweet reproductions- taken down
Ferguson’s criticism of higher education points to a disturbing trend among conservatives. Isolation is a frequent path so many ultra-conservatives are pursuing. Privatization of education and home schooling are sometimes an element of this isolating trend. There is a current the migration of ultra-conservative minded individuals to the northwest states of Idaho, Montana, eastern Washington and Oregon. There is even a petition circulating in Oregon promoting the secession of eastern Oregon to allow it to join Idaho. In the South there are some conservative only housing developments under construction as well. This withdrawal from society at large is a disturbing trend because there is a sense of inherent militarism in some of these northwest migrations that may be a future threat to the Republic. Some of us are old enough to remember the Montana free men standoff twenty-five years ago.
By coincidence, an avowedly conservative fellow teacher was bemoaning the increasingly wacky nature of some of his fellow conservative friends. The phenomenon of political migration is something he noticed as well, since it has occurred in his own family.
Lots of the traditional conservatives in these areas think that the newcomers are extremists as well. Wanting to withdrawal from mainstream society is not necessarily a conservative value.
cx: withdraw
That’s what I am hearing from my conservative (not wingnut hard right) friends. The problem is they don’t go public because they are afraid of social media trolls.
Or, they don’t go public because they know conservative values can be code for being against equality for women, LGBTQ and POC. They don’t want to defend the indefensible.
Peculiar. Seems to me none of my students report the maligned purveyance of liberalism when they report back from their university experience.
Ferguson wrote a nice book about what he values from Western Culture. He is a good writer and I enjoyed the book, even noting how his basic thematic explanation of World History was similar to my own (The central theme of history from the Age of Exploration to World War II is European domination). We departed company on some of the value judgements concerning matters.
Bari Weiss is attached to the Austin operation.
As long as Koch, Gates, Waltons and other libertarians stop buying influencers at state universities and at other schools where, without financial inducement, there is strong advocacy for democracy, it’s o.k. with me if the Austin operation becomes the West’s equivalent to Jerry Falwell’s Liberty U or Ave Maria in Florida.
I think both the male and female students and faculty should wear skirts, “as a charity to” the opposite sex, prevents their curves from showing. That prescription is from the former Ass’t Dean of Academic Affairs and Assoc. Director of the Law School at Oklahoma University as quoted by OU Daily, 2018)
Austin U should hire that guy as President.
Yep, they should go for it. But the media should be shamed for acting as a PR arm for something that doesn’t exist.
There are MANY conservative colleges. Ferguson and company are such snobs and this essay is about presenting themselves as something other than Bob Jones University.
Bari Weiss is going to teach at the new university that is just like Bob Jones U. People should ask her if the new college will be better than Bob Jones University or not as good.
The Washington Post has published at least two articles praising this new conservative college. I wonder if Niall plans to move to Austin.
Praising the new conservative college that doesn’t exist yet?
Sounds about right. A dressed up version of Trump U., except it’s a PR tool for the ideas of right wing billionaires instead of a PR and money-making tool for Trump.
I totally ❤ your name for this place, Linda
The University of Grievance
ROFLMSAO! (the S is for “sweet”)
I second that.
University of Grievance perfectly captures the attitude.
Maybe they can make Niall Ferguson Chair of the Grievance Studies Program.
He seems to be pretty well versed on the subject.
They can call themselves the “Whiners”
I like the title that the Academe Blog gave it, Rogues Gallery University.
“…where a lecture by the University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was abruptly canceled because he had been critical of affirmative action — academic leaders have yielded to noisy mobs baying for disinvitations.” From Ferguson’s essay above.
Ferguson shows his hand here. The complaints against affirmative action seem to be off the table when it comes to disagreement. Ferguson should go to a school board meeting about masks if he really wants to see a noisy mob really bay. Public protest is a right protected by the First Amendment. Ferguson himself used his book, Civilization: The West and the Rest, to argue that it was the West that introduced and promulgates the idea of rights. For those of us who want this right protected, Ferguson appears to approve of this right only if the protestors agree with him.
From the guardian, 8-21-12, concerning an article that Niall F. wrote in Newsweek: quote,
Back at the Atlantic, associate editor Matthew O’Brien has published “a full fact-check” of Ferguson’s “very bad” piece. “Rather than make [the] straightforward case against the current administration,” O’Brien says, “Ferguson delves into a fantasy world of incorrect and tendentious facts. He simply gets things wrong, again and again and again.” At Salon, Alex Pareene describes Ferguson as an “intellectual fraud” and his article as “based on a bunch of crap he made up.”
Even the king of US political bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, calling himself “an old and good friend” of Ferguson’s, accuses the historian of “massively – and rather self-evidently – distorting” Obama’s record and promises several more posts on the subject, because sadly “the piece is … ridden with errors and elisions and non-sequiturs”. Heaven forbid that Ferguson may, for once, have bitten off a little bit more than even he can chew. end quote
The operation should trademark the name, “University of Grievance.”
I speculate that WaPo likes the school because Larry Summers does. How do we process Summers, Steven Pinker (advisor to the Austin operation, well, just resigned) and Jeffrey Epstein?
The cast of Austin characters also includes Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of Palantir with Peter Thiel.
So, Republican Thiel said women voting in a capitalistic democracy is an oxymoron.
I think I’m seeing a pattern about women (and, girls) in the new conservative order…wait…I mean old order.
When the new order returns to the old order, it doesn’t want to be without someone like Sohrab Ahmari, a fan of Hungary’s Orban, who also likes the Austin operation. Orban wrote, conservative Christians should seek to use the values of civility and decency to enforce our order and our orthodoxy.
Yep- I’m seeing a pattern
Niall Ferguson is either willingly ignorant and/or a total liar out to mislead as many people as possible.
Conservative thinking individuals do have a choice if they want to attend a conservative college, but tyrant (I find it interesting that “tyrant” starts with a T and so does “Trump”) supporters like Niall Ferguson do not want any other choice but conservative colleges so they can program everyone and no one has a choice.
“2022 Most Conservative Colleges in America”
“Explore the most conservative colleges ranking based on student reviews of the political leanings of the campus community. Compare colleges with the most conservative students. Read more on how this ranking was calculated.”
https://www.niche.com/colleges/search/most-conservative-colleges/
When you click that link, at first the list may not seem that long until you scroll to the end of the first page and realize it is the first of 35 pages. I counted 25 conservative colleges listed on the 1st page. If there are 25 on each page that adds up to more than 800 conservative colleges to select from.
Of course, I’m also convinced that many colleges on this list would fail the MAGA test for an extreme right Traitor Trump-supporting college that eaches only conspiracy theories as an alternative reality.
From salon, 5-24-11, by Michael Lind: Quote – Ferguson, described as a “dashing Brit” by gossip columnist Grove, praised Republican congressman Paul Ryan’s scheme for abolishing Social Security and Medicare, a plan so callous and unpopular that other Republicans have scrambled to distance themselves from it. The Dashing Brit then told the assembled plutocrats that unemployed Americans are lazy: “The curse of long term unemployment is that if you pay people to do nothing, they’ll find themselves doing nothing for long periods of time.” On an earlier occasion he created a stir when he compared Barack Obama to the lascivious cartoon character Fritz the Cat, because, he said, both are “black and lucky.” and [snip]
According to Ferguson, Britain should have stayed out of World War I and allowed Imperial Germany to smash France and Russia and create a continental empire from the Atlantic to the Middle East. The joke is on Ferguson’s American conservative admirers, inasmuch as he laments the defeat of the Kaiser’s Germany because it accelerated the replacement of the British Empire by the United States of America and the eclipse of the City of London by Wall Street:
Had Britain stood aside — even for a matter of weeks — continental Europe could therefore have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today — but without the massive contraction in British overseas power entailed by the fighting of two world wars … And there plainly would not have been that great incursion of American financial and military power into European affairs which effectively marked the end of British financial predominance in the world. end quote
This arrogant insufferable clown wished that the British Empire was still basking in the sun.
Well, the self-pitying right-wing academics who think themselves so put upon because they can’t blather in public anymore about male and white and Western superiority being based in TRUE but FORBIDDEN SCIENCE will have a place to hang their hoods. I think they might as well come completely out and call this “Truther University,” in keeping with the new Trump “Truth Social” network and its “truthings” and “retruthings.” No degrees at this “university,” I hear, but doubtless having spent some of Daddy’s money on classes there will look very good to the wealthy and powerful looking at former students’ resumes. A sigle. I’m a member of the coven.
Those self-pitying right wing academics have always been free to “blather on”.
Their faux “free speech” movement is about their demanding the right to blather on WITHOUT CRITICISM ALLOWED OF ANYTHING THEY SAY.
They don’t believe in “free speech” and never have. They have distorted the meaning of the idea of free speech to mean: we conservatives must be allowed to spew the most reprehensible things and our critics must be silenced.
The first amendment reads “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech” but today’s conservatives seem to believe that meant that certain privileged people could speak and no one else could criticize.
Nailed it, NYC!
A sigle is an arcane symbol, such as one used as signatures of demons in grimoires. –Bob Shepherd, Master of the Dark Arts at Flor-uh-Duh Academy for Socialist Demonology
Sorry, that would be Bob Shepherd, Master of the Dark Arts at the Flor-uh-duh Academy for Little Scholars of Socialist Demonology and Critical Race Theory
Ha!
“Why I joined the University of Austin Advisory Board”…”I’m a political Catholic…”
Sohrab Ahmari, author of the above as written in the American Conservative (11-16-2021), summed up his explanation by writing. “I think it’s just about time that orthodox believers returned the favor to liberal institutions.” Ahmari likens the “favor” granted by the orthodox to Aquinas’ efforts to “unmask and combat heresies” Aquinas put eternal law at the top, followed by natural law, then human law.
Ahmari is Iranian American. He wrote a memoir about his conversion to Catholicism.
How much of a meander was that?
It’s pretty funny that Ahmari pretends people linked to Jeffrey Epstein wouldn’t welcome the anti-woman bias of the Bible (as interpreted by men).
IMO, Bari Weiss is merely making book for herself by being involved. Her schtick is a lucrative one.
Sohrab Ahmari will be quite comfortable at Austin U. (1) Andrew Sullivan describes his liberal conservatism as rooted in his Catholic background. He was President of AEI until 2019. (2) At 16, Arthur Brooks converted to Catholicism after a semi-mystical experience.
(3) Malcolm Gladwell, one of the public advocates for Austin U., claims to be a liberal but, his record tells me he hasn’t strayed from his prior commitment to conservatism. An interview at Patheos says the following about Gladwell, ” in recent years he has become fascinated by the Jesuits.” The article adds that he sees himself as “a wanna be Catholic”. (4) A second A.U. advocate, Ross Douthat, is a convert to Catholicism.
Then, there’s the Lutheran clergy, formerly Concordia President, John Nunes. In 2019, his wife, also an employee of the University, was embroiled in a lawsuit about privacy issues.
Conservatives and right wingers are non-stop entitled cry babies. If people don’t bow down to their every hiccup and exhalation they cry victimhood, cancel culture and those nasty woke people are doing mean things to me! Wah, Wah! First, as Lloyd pointed out, there are a plethora of very conservative and very right wing colleges and universities all over the map. Stop whining and go to the conservative colleges. There is no systemic or severe cancel culture at the universities that the righty tighties are always moaning and complaining about. Conservatives can shoot their mouths off at the Ivy League, however the more liberal students/faculty have every right to complain or protest some of the garbage coming out of conservative mouths. There is no political or ideological litmus test for enrolling students or hiring faculty. There might be a few examples in which students went overboard in their protestations but it is rare. The liberal colleges/universities have truck loads of free speech. The problem is, the tender little conservatives are thin-skinned, can’t take criticism and are terrified of the big mean liberals.
I think that in fact there is such a cancel culture and it cancels ideas that are quite dear to the right, such as extreme sexism and racism. These things are in fact not tolerated much in universities OR IN PUBLIC GENERALLY these days, and right wingers feel aggrieved that they can’t just say now what they think, egregious stuff on the order of Samuel Johnson’s “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”
In fact, people do lose this or that, sometimes, now, for saying such repugnant crap. There are some folks, like Jordan Peterson, who have built huge reputations and followings based on just such grievance, and Stephen Pinker, court singer for right wingers, is constantly whining about this.
Negative social sanction of extremist views is a healthy phenomenon. It’s hilarious that these people want to create a University of Grievance (Linda’s superb formulation) as a result. Poor pampered, spoiled babies. And the irony of the fact that they are both so pampered and so aggrieved is delicious farce.
Yes! Harry Truman said something about the GOP that jives with what you said: “I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”
cx: Steven Pinker
Pinker is just pathetic
Free Speech Crusader Steven Pinker Blocking Anyone Mentioning His Epstein Ties
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5pn87/free-speech-crusader-steven-pinker-blocking-anyone-mentioning-his-epstein-ties
Pinker: But we live in the best of all possible worlds! Brought to you by rich, white, Western men! Don’t worry. Be happy. Everybody sing!
Bob
It’s actually very ironic and funny that you corrected the spelling, given what is written in the Vice article I linked to
“In an unsealed manuscript written by Virginia Giuffre—one of the main survivors of Epstein’s trafficking ring to come forward—Giuffre says she was forced to sleep with a Harvard professor named “Stephen,” his last name redacted, and described him as “a quirky little man with white hair and a mad scientist look about him.” Pinker’s name is spelled “Steven” with a ‘v.”
You say Stephen, I say Steven
Let’s call the whole thing 📴
Well, of course, at this point this stuff is just speculation. Epstein did have a very wide circle of acquaintance and funded these Edge meetings with a lot of high-profile public intellectuals. I was saddened to see Daniel Dennett in those photos from that airplane, though I think Dennett’s most high-profile philosophical ideas ludicrous: https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/philosophical-zombies-with-chairs-in-philosophy-of-mind-or-confessions-of-a-neo-dualist/
I must say that that description by Giuffre, when I first read it, hit me like a thunderbolt. OMG. But this is a very serious charge and has to be dealt with seriously. The risk that a person is innocent of this but accused in the court of public opinion exists. This is a matter for the law to figure out.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/21/us/man-wrongful-conviction-1-5-million-trnd/index.html
Please note that I am EMPHATICALLY not excusing academics feeding from the Epstein trough after he was convicted (and not really punished) for sexual crimes against minors. That’s uttery inexcusable.
What has Pinker actually done to qualify him as an intellectual?
He runs around giving talks at TED, Edge and all the rest but it means nothing.
He writes windy, tendentious, books, written simply enough that oligarchs can read them, argued with all the skill of a winning high-school debater, on the themes, “People with power are there not because Daddy had power but because they are superior in virtue of their intelligence” and “Things are a lot better because such people are in control.” He might not actually BE an intellectual, but he looks and acts the part, like Jeff Goldblum in The Fly or Jurassic Park. And he serves admirably the function of court poet. “Hey you, poet. Tell them how chivalrous and noble and handsome I am and how skillful at sacking cities and maidens.”
He’s kinda Ayn Rand Lite.
“The meek shall inherit the earth.” The right wing’s anger is ratcheting up because the meek aren’t buying the message. Imagine how mad you’d be if you were a conservative Catholic or evangelical man and you had to watch American men and women change their views.
Reality would bite if you’d functioned based on the construct that you enjoyed i.e. Christ ordained women to be deferential to men.
The meek aren’t buying it. LMAO!
“Epstein’s grift was to hook scientists up with the super rich”
We’ll probably never know the extent of the scientists’ attraction to the exploitation of young women. In a better world the scientists et. al. would be honest.
I have long been fascinated by Acosta’s comment that he was told to lay off Epstein because “he belongs to intelligence.”
Epstein’s grift was to hook scientists up.
There, more concise.
Wolf in Sheep’s Cothing
The meek ain’t buying
What brash are selling
Cuz sheep are dying
And teeth are telling
Lay off Einstein because “he belongs to intelligence” would also make sense.
Haaaaa!!!!
Epstein’s grift was to hook scientists up.”
Yes.
Epstein was a hooker.
Would the male version of Ayn Rand be Ayn Randy?
Or would it be ” I’m Randy”?
I guess that would be spelled
Aym Randy
Blackmail has long been a staple of intelligence agencies.
The honey trap, but with a really sick twist
What gets me about this is how blatant the cover-up is. First, for soliciting prostitution with minors, he gets most of the charges never even made and a sentence of a few months with his days off to go to his office and have sex. Then, a goon tries to kill him in jail and, a few days later, this guy with the goods on a huge slew of wealthy and powerful people conveniently kills himself while he is conveniently not being watched. If you believe that, you will absolutely believe anything. And his residences had computer surveillance centers in them wired to cameras everywhere, but there are no videos, no photos. Those have mysteriously, magically, miraculously vanished.
These people can get away with this right out in the open, in plain sight, like drug cartel bosses in small towns in the Third World.
Rampant, endemic corruption at the highest levels, and everyone knows it
But Linda, it doesn’t have to be some intelligence agency somewhere in the world. It can be just plain, old organized criminal activity involving politicians
Poet-
Enjoyed the humor. Harry Thomas observed about Austin U.
Chair of the Department of Medicine, Scott Atlas (1) Infectious Disease- Deborah Birx (2) Emergency Medicine- Simone Gold (3) Primary Care- Joseph Ladapo
Bob-
Thanks for sharing my incredulity at the missing videos.
Maxwell’s trial will tell the tale of embedded corruption.
I doubt that Maxwell’s trial will reveal much. I suspect that the fix is already in about what she will give up and what she won’t. But we’ll see.
Here is Steven Pinker’s Vita. Folks might note the 89 articles published in scholarly journals. There are, of course, also a large number of book chapters and books. His h-index is 101, that is he has 101 publications each of which was cited by at least 101 other publications.
Vita: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pinker/files/long_cv_april_2014.pdf
Yes. He published significant work in linguistics. Then he turned to being court singer for those at the top of the Western power structure. His wife, Rebecca Goldstein, is a breathtakingly good fiction writer and a fine philosopher of science. I highly recommend her novels The Mind/Body Problem and Mazel and her collection of short stories Strange Attractors, which contains one of my handful of favorite short stories ever–a truly profound piece called “The Legacy of Raizel Kaidish.” Her book on Kurt Gödel, Incompleteness, is also a fabulous read.
Pinker did not do revolutionary work in linguistics that I know about, and I’ve read in linguistics for many, many years, but few do, and it’s perfectly respectable to add a bit to the sum of knowledge here and there. He is no Chomsky. He does a lot of popularizing with a right-wing bent.
I am grateful for popularizers. But they have to be read with one’s crap detector handy.
te
If AEI and their brethren in the Koch network liked you and so did the well-funded universe of Bill Gates, your articles would go viral. And, the citations wouldn’t be limited to main stream references, I’ll bet you could pick up an NBER shout out, an Economist shoutout, etc.
btw te,
If you were interviewed for an article about wokeness and your position was against CRT, would your lead be, “I’m a Christian and an Economist”? I’ve never seen that kind of thing before but, one of the academics associated with Austin U. positioned himself just that way.
I had to laugh at his justification for opposition to wokeness in a publication of a church that overtly discriminates against women without apology because that’s way Christ wanted it.
Linda,
That is not how academic publishing works. Here are some of his most cited articles:
On Language and Connectionism: Analysis of a Parallel Distributed Processing Model of Language Acquisition (2,403)
Overregularization in Language Acquisition (1,307 citations)
A Neural Dissociation Within Language: Evidence that the Mental Dictionary is Part of Declarative Memory, and that Grammatical Rules are Processed by the Procedural System (1,102 citations)
Mental rotation and orientation- dependence in shape recognition (1,083 citations)
Do you really think these articles went “viral” among cognitive psychologists because of the Koch foundation?
Your point is very well made, TE.
Bob
Even Epstein’s conviction For ” soliciting prostitution with a minors” was twisted.
The young girls were not “prostitutes”.
That sick bastard had raped many of them and threatened them and their families if they did not do what he wanted.
Calling them prostitutes not only blamed the victims but it made it seem like Epstein was simply doing what thousands of men regularly do in places like Las Vegas.
And with regard to the scientists and others who met with Epstein after his conviction, I can’t feel the least bit sorry for them if the public speculate about why they were associating with Epstein. Of course not all (and perhaps only a small fraction ) of them were engaging in untoward activity, but these were not stupid men. No one was forcing them to associate with Epstein and most of the scientists could have legitimately gotten research money from more “traditional” funding sources (eg, NSF).
That these men were meeting with Epstein is disgusting regardless of how innocent the meetings were .
And for them to now act indignant that their reputation has taken a hit as a result of decisions that they willingly (eagerly?) made is just pathetic.
I should have said Epstein had raped all of them, not just “many of them”.
Since they were under the age of consent, It was statutory rape regardless of how some defense lawyer argued it.
This is exactly so.
Teachingeconomist
If Pinker were publishing in physics journals, his citation numbers might mean something.
But psychology, a field rife with studies with such low statistical power as to render the findings essentially meaningless?
Spare us your continued bullshit and go back to your idiotic tweets about football and basketball.
A dumber, less skillful person than Pinker is goes about achieving the same ends by a different means: Mel Gibson does his film Apocalypto and depicts native Americans as evil savages, but then a ship arrives carrying The True Cross and redeems them all to death.
So Pinker’s stuff gets cited a lot .
Whoopdy doop!
So does lots and lots of meaningless trash.
For example, how many times was Chetty et Al’s VAM based study on the impacts of teachers cited?
I keep getting these emails from Academia.edu that all take the form of “Your name was mentioned in a paper by . . . .”
As though the thing that I would be most concerned with knowing about is whether I was mentioned by somebody somewhere in some paper. LOL. Nice to know that professional academics have such lofty concerns!
Reminds me of a line from some Robert Altman movie in which someone brags that she slept with a guy who slept with a woman who slept with Stephen Stills.
I get daily notices from academia.edu. Like you, I don’t care if I was mentioned.
It does tickle me pinker, however, when some quip or neologism or idea gets stolen and used here and there. This must happen to you a lot, Diane. So many ideas I have encountered in your work that I then see repeated and sometimes built upon elsewhere. I think that this is because you write stuff that matters.
Ofc, I can’t know that this or that thing I run across is, in fact, mine, what with the Zeitgeist and convergent evolution and all. And that’s just peachy.
Pinker’s main problem is that (like many folks in TEs field of economics) he believes he is an expert on everything when the reality is that he is an expert on nothing.
So that’s what he should write about: nothing.
Or maybe about hair dye, since he does seem to know something about that. Probably aren’t many academics his age who have a habit of dying their gray hair blond — so he will be more attractive to the babes? Although if he’s after the latter, he should probably get a trim and a comb, so he doesn’t look like this 🤡
Nothing turns out to be quite interesting because of virtual particles, which pop into and out of existence even faster than Trump contradicts himself, to deafening applause of both x and not-x.
Evolutionary Psychology and Genetic Determinism are twin pseudosciences and the themes of Pinker’s big, fat books. The argument is basically that people are who they are because of their genetic inheritances, that the rich and powerful are where they are because these superior genes give them superior intelligence, and the world is a much, much better place because these people have been in control since the Enlightenment. (See Pinker’s books How the Mind Works, The Blank Slate, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Rationality.) The court singer for the Western oligarchy. “You there, poet. Tell them how handsome and virile I am, how doughty, how skillful at sacking cities and maidens.”
te and Bob-
How many citations did Theranos have before it imploded? “Hero worship is still a problem in Silicon Valley”, 8-29-2021, Kari Paulson reporting from San Francisco.
Bob
Some physicists suspect that virtual particles are nothing more than a calculational trick that allows them to get answers to problems they have difficulty answering without positing virtual particles.
If one assumes that the vacuum is teaming with the virtual particles posited by Quantum field theory, one comes up with a value for the vacuum energy that is too large by some 120 powers of ten over the actual , experimentally determined value.
Any reasonable person would say that means there is something wrong with the underlying assumption about virtual particles. And in this particular case, it has to be very very (very (did I say very?)) wrong.
Well, the right wing physicists, chemists, biologists, geologists, mathematicians and engineers are fully justified in wanting their own university because the lefty scientists, mathematicians and engineers are completely undermining all of those disciplines.
So much so that the Standard Model of physics now only includes left handed particles.
And if things keep going as they have, engineers will soon only make cars that turn to the left.
And don’t even get me going on left wing computer scientists.
Word has it that they are now working on a version of Alexa that only answers to lefties. They plan to call it Alefta.
And the left wing mathematicians are the absolute worst.
They have eliminated the whole right (positive) half of the number line and only use negatives, which means an additional negative sign is required whenever one wishes to express a positive quantity.
Right wing “polymath” Tyler Cowen is also in the Austin U mix. In no surprise whatsoever, Cowen leads the Mercatus Center (Koch).
And the left wing biologists are genetically engineering animals that only have a left side.
They released the CRT monster from a lab in Wuhan!
Critical Right Theory , outlined by The 2016 Project, says that all liberals are evil and that Barack Obama is the Antichrist
I thought that was AOC.
She’s the antiMary
The Antimary. LOL. That’s priceless.
A couple more articles that add flavor, “Why Can’t We Just Remain on Top Forever?” (added significance as noted below), posted at PSUVanguard. And, at the Guardian, 11-17-2021, there’s “…They’re Keeping Their Day Jobs”.
Guardian speculates that Jon Lonsdale is the moneyman. Multiple details about his alleged courting rituals appeared in court records in 2015, including the word, “master”. San Francisco magazine posted about it, 1-30-2015, “Details Emerge in Joe Lonsdale Assault Lawsuit.” Both Lonsdale and his girlfriend were at Stanford, he as a mentor and she as a mentee (what could possibly go wrong?)
Lonsdale’s 10 year ban from campus was rescinded when the case was resolved. Lonsdale said there was no truth to the story.
Lonsdale is reported to have said that men who take paternity leave are “losers”. It was in reference to the Transportation Secretary’s leave.
There are quite a few public intellectuals who make a nice living being court singers for the oligarchy and their pet ideas, such as evolutionary psychology and genetic determinism. We are here because we are superior.
Jonathan Haidt (an atheist who purportedly thinks Christians have glorious attributes) is also in the Austin U mix. I don’t know if the transcript of Haidt’s speech, posted at the Gospel Coalition site, which he gave to the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities Conference, is recorded accurately but, if it is, it’s a whopper.
Consider that 60-80% of the people in the two major conservative religions who attend worship services regularly voted for Trump, a bully, a racist, a womanizer,…
Haidt reportedly said in his speech that the Christian students in his classes when he taught in Virginia, “radiated a kind of sweetness, gentleness and humility….It’s in our nature to be religious. There’s a God-shaped hole in the heart of each man.” He described the Christian religious as shunning bullies and cheaters.
If Haidt really said the things that were reported, maybe somebody should buy him a history book. I can agree with him that evangelical women are taught to be “sweet” to their husbands e.g. Josh Duggar’s wife. And, I can agree that Irish Catholics, facing the starvation of a million Irish, at the hands of economic barbarians, didn’t fight back… does that reflect humility or gentleness?
Haidt made his name with his Moral Foundations Theory, which posits that there are six foundations that underlie people’s moral systems:
Care/harm
Fairness/cheating
Loyalty/betrayal
Authority/subversion
Sanctity or purity/degradation
He then pointed out that liberals are concerned about the first two and conservatives with the last three. So far, so good. A very useful framework. Simple but useful, and with demonstrable predictive power.
But then he took this entirely off the rails when he turned to trying to show why the conservatives were right and the liberals were wrong. I was saddened to see him head in that direction.
cx: five foundations
Haidt latter added a sixth, Liberty/Oppression. Because his was very concerned to make the argument that leftists want to oppress people and conservatives are glorious defenders of liberty.
cx: he was
Haidt- A real piece of work.
I suspect that this post will go into moderation.
I thought I would share a little example of the generally benign influence of British colonialists that Dr. Ferguson is so enamored of. WARNING: This passage is not for the faint of heart. The passage can be found in the Introduction to critic Stephen Greenblatt’s collection of essays called Learning to Curse. Greenblatt took the passage from Edmund Scott’s Exact Discourse of the Subtilties, Fashions, Pollicies, Religion, and Ceremonies of the East Indians (1606). Scott was an agent of the East India Company in Java in the first years of the seventeenth century. In this passage, Scott writes proudly, for a general audience of his peers, about how he treated a Chinese goldsmith who he and his compatriots believed to be a gold thief.
“Wherefore, because of his sullenness, I thought I would burn him now a little (for we were now in the heat of our anger). First I caused him to be burned under the nails of his thumbs, fingers, and toes with sharp hot iron, and the nails to be torn off. And because he never blemished [i.e. turned pale] at that, we thought that his hands and legs had been numbed with tying; wherefore we burned him in the arms, shoulders, and neck. But all was one with him. Then we burned him quite through the hands, and with rasps of iron tore out the flesh and sinews. After that, I caused them to knock the edges of his shin bones with hot searing irons. Then I caused cold screws or iron to be screwed into the bones of his arms and suddenly to be snatched out. After that all the bones of his fingers and toes to be broken with pincers. Yet for all this he never shed tear; no, nor once turned his head aside, nor stirred hand or foot; but when we demanded any question, he would put his tongue between his teeth and strike his chin upon his knees to bite it off. When all the extremity we could use was but in vain, I caused him to be put fast in irons again; where the emmets [ants] (which do greatly abound there) got into his wounds and tormented him worse than we had done, as we might well see by his gesture. The [Javanese] king’s officers desired me he might be shot to death. I told them that was too good a death for such a villain. . . . But they do hold it to be the cruellest and basest death that is. Wherefore, they being very importunate, in the evening we led him into the fields and made him fast to a stake. The first shot carried away a piece of his arm bone, and all the next shot struck him through the breast, up near to the shoulder. Then he, holding down his head, looked upon the wound. The third shot that was made, one of our men had cut a bullet in three parts, which struck upon his breast in a triangle; whereat he fell down as low as the stake would give him leave. But between our men and the Hollanders, they shot him almost all to pieces before they left him.
Greenblatt modernized the spelling for the ease of his readers. Here’s a taste of it in the original:
Wherefore be∣cause of his sullennesse, and that it was hee that fired •s, I thought I would burne him now a little, for wee were now in the heate of our anger. First I caused him to be burned vnder the nayles of his thumbes, fingers, and toes with sharpe hotte Iron, and the nayles to be torne off, and because hee neuer blemished at that, we thought that his handes and legges had beene nummed with tying. Wherefore wee burned him in the armes, shoulders, and necke, but all was one with him: then wee burned him quite thorow the hindes, and with •a•phes of Iron to•e out the flesh and sinewes. After that I caused them to knocke the edges of his shinne bones with hotte searing Irons. Then I caused colde sence of Irone to bee serued into the bones of his armes, and sodenly to bee snatched out:
The whole can be found here: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A11767.0001.001?view=toc
cx: whom he and his compatriots believed to be
Greenblatt, if you haven’t read him, is the guy who created the approach to literary interpretation known as The New Historicism. He is an exceptionally able writer of breathtaking scholarship and an ability to render complex ideas simply and clearly and engagingly. His most famous and popular book is Swerve. But I much more highly recommend his Tyrant, which applies lessons from Shakespeare to the Trump presidency, and his The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve. Both are great good fun and informed by deep scholarship.
Greenblatt’s application of lessons from Shakespeare to the Trump Presidency is masterfully done. He simply draws the lesson, without mentioning Trump, and it is, in each case, blindingly obvious that Trump is the target. There is, in each case, that shock of recognition. It’s a very funny and effective technique. Masterful. Again, I highly recommend that book, Greenblatt, Stephen. Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics. Norton, 2018.
Borrowing Greenblatt’s technique:
Riddle me, riddle me, riddle me this . . .
Who am I?
I am. . . .
From New York
In the construction/building trades
I. . . .
Launder money for mobsters
Evade taxes
Do lots and lots and lots of big cash deals
Brag constantly about my wealth and my genius
Have the “best” of everything
Keep my tax returns and sources of income very, very secret
Have a violent temper
Have a thing for junk food
Speak in toddler English
Demand loyalty oaths from subordinates, and if they
don’t deliver, get rid of them
Thrive on obsequiousness from those around me
Am constantly paranoid about betrayal
Constantly ridicule others
Constantly make up belittling nicknames and think that this is extraordinarily funny
Gesticulate a lot
Have two expressions: 1. utter rage and 2. smirk
Am casually and profoundly racist
Am extraordinarily narcissistic
Have a comb-over
Wear expensive, dapper suits
Am a serial abuser of women
Am a blowhard
Cannot utter a sustained, coherent thought
Conduct business out of my “club”
Constantly complain about “fake news”
Am surrounded by dirty lawyers
Am subject to lots and lots and lots of investigations that don’t stick
Brag about how they will never catch up to me, that I can get away with anything
Figured it out yet?
Gotti. John Gotti.
The current British Royal family is just a continuation of said colonialism.
The behavior of Prince Andrew is exhibit A(hole)
And the British public nonetheless still worship their precious Queen, who has been shielding her son.
It’s bizarre and more than a little sick.
In the new Bond movie, the villain says, people want to be ruled.
There is a very good reason why the colonies broke away from England.
They were being ruled by folks who believed in the divine right of cockroaches.
The divine right of cockroaches. LMAO!!! Perfect.
Of course most humanities and liberal arts departments are liberal, but most business and business administration departments are conservative. Most hard science departments could probably care less. It is too bad that people on both sides – liberals and conservatives can’t talk TO/WITH each other anymore.
And, in other news from the carnival, Kyle Rittenhouse had an audience with Glorious Leader Who Shines More Orange Than Does the Sun today.
Of course he did.
Rittenhouse and Sandmann have futures in Congress.
Rittenhouse’ education rivals Boebart’s
It’s terrifying to consider you are most probably correct. Remember the good old days when that would have been considered a bad joke?
Yes
Austin U is off to a rocky start, although, critics have lamented that it is in the 5th circuit
where any fraud conviction is overturned.
A proponent of the school suggested that Adams relied on Cicero’s writings when he identified U.S. threats likened to “Rome is dying”. The Austin U fan was upbraided by Seth Bernard, “Cicero wrote De Re Publica in the 50’s BCE; I don’t think he knew then, “Rome was burning”, whatever that means. The major part of the text as we now have it wasn’t discovered and published until 1822 well after Adam’s presidency. G’luck with your new academic venture.”
Daily Kos about Austin U., “An anti-woke Uni that is also a Bible college for libertarians.”
Given the background of the associated academics, literally a Bible College.
A tweet from the internet, Bari Weiss’ crew are academics who wouldn’t learn to code.
The football team’s name, Robber Barons ( a name rejected by Stanford)
CBS News did an interesting segment: It said to imagine that wealth in the U.S. were a piece of pumpkin pie divided into ten pieces, These would be distributed as follows:
Plate of the top 20 percent: 9 pieces
Next two plates (40 percent): 1 piece divided extremely unequally between them (80 then 20 percent of a piece)
Plate of the next 20 percent: a few crumbs
Plate of the bottom 20 percent: No pie, no crumbs, but a bill for pie
Happy Thanksgiving!