There's surely some left-leaning people that don't care much about abstract ideas but they'd probably be comfortable at most universities. You wrote an entire article about how "late-stage capitalism" is complete nonsense in your opinion, but it seems very popular with college students. Why should MAGA be disqualified when it seems like plenty of people go to college without engaging with ideas? If colleges allow any leftie, but only right-wingers interested in abstract concepts, that does seem like a reasonable thing for right-wingers to attack.
Let's say MAGA is completely successful and takes over the universities. Every professor is Steven Sailor, Curtis Yavin is the most assigned author, Ben Shapiro is the dean etc. In that environment, there'd still be a small minority of left-leaning students that feel comfortable defending their ideas but many students would never have to question their MAGA thoughts. In that scenario, someone could write this with the parties reversed, right?
Besides that hypothetical sitation, I don't think populists would agree with how you define a university's function. Instead, like Ben Shapiro, they would argue that universities exist to function as a sort of "old boy's club", gatekeeping high-status and high-paying jobs and doling them out to ideologues and class allies. Or they could, like Brian Caplan, view most higher education as signaling. Both of these seem like coherent models to me, even if I don't agree with them. Both of those (very-educated) men signed the letter and I think that this unstated disagreement with you over the purpose of university is why they did so.
Your first sentence is true, and I definitely don't think MAGA should be disqualified from anything. I just think they should be held to the same standard as everyone else, and not given a handicap with the aid of affirmative action. The fact that MAGA is underrepresented on campus is not evidence of bias against them, it's evidence that their beliefs are associated with other things (lower income, lower intelligence, lower performance in high school) that make it harder for them to compete on a level playing field.
I agree with much of your second paragraph too, but there's a difference between a *curriculum* that challenges left-leaning students with rational, evidence-backed conservative takes (which I support, and which the NYT op-ed endorsed, using the example of Nozick that I also cited in my late stage capitalism article) and an *admissions policy* that reduces standards to admit more conservatives. And even within that second thing, there's a difference between affirmative action for conservatives in general and for MAGA conservatives in particular, which could require especially low standards.
I agree with Caplan's signaling model and still think his letter is an insane screed more ideologically blinkered than the universities it criticizes.
You appear to contradict yourself when you simultaneously admit that campus is a more alienating experience for conservative students, but also claim that it is only hostile to people who are not curious. Also, while I have not personally been on an American campus, it’s hard to believe that given how much American college students appear to care about their political opinions that there is no hostel environment for people with minority opinions that are unpopular on campus. Of course, not all world views are equally likely to be true, but that applies to literally all perspectives and cannot be an argument against correcting a bias in academia. It is also just pure confirmation bias to pre-judge people by their conclusion when deciding who should be welcome on academia and therefore likely to produce systemic errors in academic research. I personally agree that populists tend to be specially mistaken and believe obviously untrue, things, but that doesn’t mean that there are not issues where they are right and academia is wrong, and it is valuable to have more of them to add to the perspective present in academia and ensure that we don’t have an anti-populous echo chamber.
Now to be entirely fair. This argument is especially applicable to feelds where ones political opinion is relevant to the issue. So for example, having more conservative students and professors in Physics is probably worthless. I also do think that the Trump administration appears likely to overdo affirmative action for conservatives, and I’m not sure that their approach would be better than what we have already, but that doesn’t mean the optimal amount of affirmative action for minority political opinions is zero. It just means that like everywhere else we need to be sensitive to trade-offs. The benefits of having more peer review from professors who are likely to have the opposite political bias of prevailing orthodoxies and research from people who come from alternative world views appears likely to benefit the pursuit of truth in my opinion. Of course, if you think that the current make up of academia has not significantly affected the pursuit of truth, this argument would be unconvincing since it relies on the assumption that current academia is biased in a liberal direction. I just find difficult to believe that having such a large supermajority of liberals in academia doesn’t affect truth seeking, especially given how much people today take care about their political beliefs and affiliation. If you do accept that such a bias exists it would be very surprising to conclude that the optimal amount of affirmative action is zero, given the obvious benefits of introducing perspectives which have a bias against them in academia. Also, I do think that in practice given the shortage of Trump supporting candidates in practice, such affirmative action will largely benefit never Trump Republicans who nevertheless agree with him on a lot of policy. Remember this is being imposed on universities from outside, and they don’t appear to like it much, so I expect they’ll do their best to try to circumvent it or reduce its impact which should somewhat take care of Trump’s excessive zeal.
Plasma covered a lot, but I just want to emphasize that I'm by no means suggesting we "pre-judge people by their conclusion when deciding who should be welcome on academia." Everyone should be welcome in academia. But they should award admission and professorships based on merit, and populist beliefs are not that. If measures of academic merit are inversely associated with populist conservative beliefs, that's a better argument against conservative populism than it is against academia.
Fair on reading your article, I think I was misreading you when I thought that you are actively suggesting that populism was evidence of lack of merit. Although then again, I do admit that if I ran into two academics, and all I knew about them, was that one of them was a populist and another was not. I would probably assume the populist was less meritorious. So even this position isn’t crazy.
> You appear to contradict yourself when you simultaneously admit that campus is a more alienating experience for conservative students, but also claim that it is only hostile to people who are not curious.
There's no contradiction there. The entire point of the essay is that right-wing populism is inherently incurious, and since populism has taken over the conservative movement, conservatives are therefore much more likely to feel alienated on campus. The conservatives who *are* curious and intellectual, who are mostly libertarians or never-Trumpers, do still feel at home on campus.
> Also, while I have not personally been on an American campus, it’s hard to believe that given how much American college students appear to care about their political opinions that there is no hostel environment for people with minority opinions that are unpopular on campus.
You probably should go on an American campus before making claims about how much American college students care about politics. If you're getting your perception of your average college student based on news articles about the most outrageous events that have happened on campus, then you are going to have no idea what the average college student is like.
> Of course, not all world views are equally likely to be true, but that applies to literally all perspectives and cannot be an argument against correcting a bias in academia. It is also just pure confirmation bias to pre-judge people by their conclusion when deciding who should be welcome on academia and therefore likely to produce systemic errors in academic research.
But you're the one pre-judging conclusions here - you're assuming that there must be just as many curious, intellectual conservatives as there are left-wing people with those traits, and that therefore underrepresentation of conservatives must be the result of bias against them. But this is just plainly false if you look at the current state of the conservative movement. Any institution that selects for intelligence, curiosity, concern for truth, etc., without selecting directly for particular positions is just naturally going to have fewer conservatives in it, because those traits are rarer among conservatives. There are of course exceptions, like libertarians and never-Trumpers, that were pointed out in the article, hence why those groups are still represented, perhaps even overrepresented, on campus (to be clear, I think it's good that they're overrepresented, because opinions disproportionately held by smarter, more intellectually honest people *should* be overrepresented).
> I personally agree that populists tend to be specially mistaken and believe obviously untrue, things, but that doesn’t mean that there are not issues where they are right and academia is wrong, and it is valuable to have more of them to add to the perspective present in academia and ensure that we don’t have an anti-populous echo chamber.
Sure, but ideologies are not a monolith. Ideas that populists are right about are likely to be held by some smart, honest non-populists as well. Furthermore, populists still exist on campus, they're just rarer than they are in the general public. The real question here is, "Is the proportion of populists that exist in the general public also the optimal proportion to exist on campus?" And there's no reason to think it's beneficial to have such a large portion of academia be composed of people who are frequently egregiously wrong and only occasionally right about something others had wrong.
> I also do think that the Trump administration appears likely to overdo affirmative action for conservatives, and I’m not sure that their approach would be better than what we have already, but that doesn’t mean the optimal amount of affirmative action for minority political opinions is zero.
Maybe, but even if you think some non-zero amount is necessary, zero affirmative action is much better than what Trump wants. I think a better policy is just to make sure professors aren't actively hostile against conservatives for their views alone and encourage a culture of open-mindedness, to ensure that universities are only selecting against conservatives who genuinely deserve to be selected against.
I do agree that there is a danger of academia producing biased conclusions because there are so many left-wing people in it, but I worry just as much about the biased conclusions that it would reach if we had affirmative action for Trump supporters. I think we would end up with something even worse in the latter case - explicitly selecting for certain views creates a perverse incentive to be very biased towards those views.
When I was referring to the article indicating that conservatives feel less welcome on campus, I was thinking of Andrew’s claim that he had a feeling that it was him against the world, and the fact that left-wing Profs would actively intervene in debates to favour their own view points. While he personally did not mind it, this is mostly because of his unusual psychology and left-wing people obviously did not face any such comparable pressure. I certainly do not expect that the percentage of views among the average public would be equal to what we should expect out of academia. I just think that in an environment where 80 90% of people are liberals and 10 20% are conservatives. It is inevitable that there will be some Discrimination simply because of how tribal humans tend to be. If you don’t share this intuition that probably explains most of our disagreement. I do want to note though that even many people opposed to Trump think cancel culture was real problem in academia, so it’s not just me who thinks there is likely to be discrimination against certain view points.
I do agree that going along with Trump‘s current agenda would likely be a big mistake given what kind of a precedent it would set for the government interfering with universities, especially given Trump’s undemocratic tendencies, and the fact that the cost of such a legal dispute that many universities are unlikely litigate matters, even where his actions are clearly illegal. I’m also just sceptical that you can simply talk people into being more open minded, especially when there are entire academic sub fields that appear to be half about criticising research for not being left wing enough. Academia has left-wing fields like feminist epistemology that appear to be obvious liftwing echo chambers, but no right wing counterparts to balance them. I’m not even touching the fields like continental marxism that appear to be actively producing little of value. Now, of course, those fields are segregated from more important fields to be fair, but does seem like symptoms of an obvious problem.
I will conceive that a lot of this isn’t really quantitatively done and based on my own impressions and it’s entirely possible, for example, that cancel culture was actually not as bad as I think, and I’m just receiving a non-representative sample of cancellations. Still, I hope I have communicated where I’m coming from so that you can have an easier time pointing out where you think I’m going wrong. I will also clarify that most of my issues are about the social sciences and humanities, and I do think doing this in the hard sciences would be a big mistake, and 50% affirmative action is way too much. I just think that right now most of the mistakes I see academia making are in a liftwing direction, which is why I worry that conservatives are not getting adequate representation compare to what would be optimal.
Yeah, I agree that cancel culture and certain fields that basically require left-wing assumptions to participate in them are bad - I just think that affirmative action for conservatives, and particularly populist conservatives, is not a good way to fix those problems. Partially because it creates a perverse incentive to shift your beliefs towards the political side that gets affirmative action, and partially because MAGA conservatism in general is far more biased and hostile to truth than most left-wing positions, such that having a large percentage of academia made up of them would lead to an academy with worse epistemic norms. I do think cultural change can fix some of the problems with academia - after all, it's what caused those problems in the first place - so I'm not as pessimistic about the possibility of encouraging a more open-minded culture on colleges.
There's surely some left-leaning people that don't care much about abstract ideas but they'd probably be comfortable at most universities. You wrote an entire article about how "late-stage capitalism" is complete nonsense in your opinion, but it seems very popular with college students. Why should MAGA be disqualified when it seems like plenty of people go to college without engaging with ideas? If colleges allow any leftie, but only right-wingers interested in abstract concepts, that does seem like a reasonable thing for right-wingers to attack.
Let's say MAGA is completely successful and takes over the universities. Every professor is Steven Sailor, Curtis Yavin is the most assigned author, Ben Shapiro is the dean etc. In that environment, there'd still be a small minority of left-leaning students that feel comfortable defending their ideas but many students would never have to question their MAGA thoughts. In that scenario, someone could write this with the parties reversed, right?
Besides that hypothetical sitation, I don't think populists would agree with how you define a university's function. Instead, like Ben Shapiro, they would argue that universities exist to function as a sort of "old boy's club", gatekeeping high-status and high-paying jobs and doling them out to ideologues and class allies. Or they could, like Brian Caplan, view most higher education as signaling. Both of these seem like coherent models to me, even if I don't agree with them. Both of those (very-educated) men signed the letter and I think that this unstated disagreement with you over the purpose of university is why they did so.
Your first sentence is true, and I definitely don't think MAGA should be disqualified from anything. I just think they should be held to the same standard as everyone else, and not given a handicap with the aid of affirmative action. The fact that MAGA is underrepresented on campus is not evidence of bias against them, it's evidence that their beliefs are associated with other things (lower income, lower intelligence, lower performance in high school) that make it harder for them to compete on a level playing field.
I agree with much of your second paragraph too, but there's a difference between a *curriculum* that challenges left-leaning students with rational, evidence-backed conservative takes (which I support, and which the NYT op-ed endorsed, using the example of Nozick that I also cited in my late stage capitalism article) and an *admissions policy* that reduces standards to admit more conservatives. And even within that second thing, there's a difference between affirmative action for conservatives in general and for MAGA conservatives in particular, which could require especially low standards.
I agree with Caplan's signaling model and still think his letter is an insane screed more ideologically blinkered than the universities it criticizes.
"is biased only against stupid or incurious people."
At this point, only the stupid and Incurious denied that current universities are run by the stupid and the incurious.
You appear to contradict yourself when you simultaneously admit that campus is a more alienating experience for conservative students, but also claim that it is only hostile to people who are not curious. Also, while I have not personally been on an American campus, it’s hard to believe that given how much American college students appear to care about their political opinions that there is no hostel environment for people with minority opinions that are unpopular on campus. Of course, not all world views are equally likely to be true, but that applies to literally all perspectives and cannot be an argument against correcting a bias in academia. It is also just pure confirmation bias to pre-judge people by their conclusion when deciding who should be welcome on academia and therefore likely to produce systemic errors in academic research. I personally agree that populists tend to be specially mistaken and believe obviously untrue, things, but that doesn’t mean that there are not issues where they are right and academia is wrong, and it is valuable to have more of them to add to the perspective present in academia and ensure that we don’t have an anti-populous echo chamber.
Now to be entirely fair. This argument is especially applicable to feelds where ones political opinion is relevant to the issue. So for example, having more conservative students and professors in Physics is probably worthless. I also do think that the Trump administration appears likely to overdo affirmative action for conservatives, and I’m not sure that their approach would be better than what we have already, but that doesn’t mean the optimal amount of affirmative action for minority political opinions is zero. It just means that like everywhere else we need to be sensitive to trade-offs. The benefits of having more peer review from professors who are likely to have the opposite political bias of prevailing orthodoxies and research from people who come from alternative world views appears likely to benefit the pursuit of truth in my opinion. Of course, if you think that the current make up of academia has not significantly affected the pursuit of truth, this argument would be unconvincing since it relies on the assumption that current academia is biased in a liberal direction. I just find difficult to believe that having such a large supermajority of liberals in academia doesn’t affect truth seeking, especially given how much people today take care about their political beliefs and affiliation. If you do accept that such a bias exists it would be very surprising to conclude that the optimal amount of affirmative action is zero, given the obvious benefits of introducing perspectives which have a bias against them in academia. Also, I do think that in practice given the shortage of Trump supporting candidates in practice, such affirmative action will largely benefit never Trump Republicans who nevertheless agree with him on a lot of policy. Remember this is being imposed on universities from outside, and they don’t appear to like it much, so I expect they’ll do their best to try to circumvent it or reduce its impact which should somewhat take care of Trump’s excessive zeal.
Plasma covered a lot, but I just want to emphasize that I'm by no means suggesting we "pre-judge people by their conclusion when deciding who should be welcome on academia." Everyone should be welcome in academia. But they should award admission and professorships based on merit, and populist beliefs are not that. If measures of academic merit are inversely associated with populist conservative beliefs, that's a better argument against conservative populism than it is against academia.
Fair on reading your article, I think I was misreading you when I thought that you are actively suggesting that populism was evidence of lack of merit. Although then again, I do admit that if I ran into two academics, and all I knew about them, was that one of them was a populist and another was not. I would probably assume the populist was less meritorious. So even this position isn’t crazy.
> You appear to contradict yourself when you simultaneously admit that campus is a more alienating experience for conservative students, but also claim that it is only hostile to people who are not curious.
There's no contradiction there. The entire point of the essay is that right-wing populism is inherently incurious, and since populism has taken over the conservative movement, conservatives are therefore much more likely to feel alienated on campus. The conservatives who *are* curious and intellectual, who are mostly libertarians or never-Trumpers, do still feel at home on campus.
> Also, while I have not personally been on an American campus, it’s hard to believe that given how much American college students appear to care about their political opinions that there is no hostel environment for people with minority opinions that are unpopular on campus.
You probably should go on an American campus before making claims about how much American college students care about politics. If you're getting your perception of your average college student based on news articles about the most outrageous events that have happened on campus, then you are going to have no idea what the average college student is like.
> Of course, not all world views are equally likely to be true, but that applies to literally all perspectives and cannot be an argument against correcting a bias in academia. It is also just pure confirmation bias to pre-judge people by their conclusion when deciding who should be welcome on academia and therefore likely to produce systemic errors in academic research.
But you're the one pre-judging conclusions here - you're assuming that there must be just as many curious, intellectual conservatives as there are left-wing people with those traits, and that therefore underrepresentation of conservatives must be the result of bias against them. But this is just plainly false if you look at the current state of the conservative movement. Any institution that selects for intelligence, curiosity, concern for truth, etc., without selecting directly for particular positions is just naturally going to have fewer conservatives in it, because those traits are rarer among conservatives. There are of course exceptions, like libertarians and never-Trumpers, that were pointed out in the article, hence why those groups are still represented, perhaps even overrepresented, on campus (to be clear, I think it's good that they're overrepresented, because opinions disproportionately held by smarter, more intellectually honest people *should* be overrepresented).
> I personally agree that populists tend to be specially mistaken and believe obviously untrue, things, but that doesn’t mean that there are not issues where they are right and academia is wrong, and it is valuable to have more of them to add to the perspective present in academia and ensure that we don’t have an anti-populous echo chamber.
Sure, but ideologies are not a monolith. Ideas that populists are right about are likely to be held by some smart, honest non-populists as well. Furthermore, populists still exist on campus, they're just rarer than they are in the general public. The real question here is, "Is the proportion of populists that exist in the general public also the optimal proportion to exist on campus?" And there's no reason to think it's beneficial to have such a large portion of academia be composed of people who are frequently egregiously wrong and only occasionally right about something others had wrong.
> I also do think that the Trump administration appears likely to overdo affirmative action for conservatives, and I’m not sure that their approach would be better than what we have already, but that doesn’t mean the optimal amount of affirmative action for minority political opinions is zero.
Maybe, but even if you think some non-zero amount is necessary, zero affirmative action is much better than what Trump wants. I think a better policy is just to make sure professors aren't actively hostile against conservatives for their views alone and encourage a culture of open-mindedness, to ensure that universities are only selecting against conservatives who genuinely deserve to be selected against.
I do agree that there is a danger of academia producing biased conclusions because there are so many left-wing people in it, but I worry just as much about the biased conclusions that it would reach if we had affirmative action for Trump supporters. I think we would end up with something even worse in the latter case - explicitly selecting for certain views creates a perverse incentive to be very biased towards those views.
When I was referring to the article indicating that conservatives feel less welcome on campus, I was thinking of Andrew’s claim that he had a feeling that it was him against the world, and the fact that left-wing Profs would actively intervene in debates to favour their own view points. While he personally did not mind it, this is mostly because of his unusual psychology and left-wing people obviously did not face any such comparable pressure. I certainly do not expect that the percentage of views among the average public would be equal to what we should expect out of academia. I just think that in an environment where 80 90% of people are liberals and 10 20% are conservatives. It is inevitable that there will be some Discrimination simply because of how tribal humans tend to be. If you don’t share this intuition that probably explains most of our disagreement. I do want to note though that even many people opposed to Trump think cancel culture was real problem in academia, so it’s not just me who thinks there is likely to be discrimination against certain view points.
I do agree that going along with Trump‘s current agenda would likely be a big mistake given what kind of a precedent it would set for the government interfering with universities, especially given Trump’s undemocratic tendencies, and the fact that the cost of such a legal dispute that many universities are unlikely litigate matters, even where his actions are clearly illegal. I’m also just sceptical that you can simply talk people into being more open minded, especially when there are entire academic sub fields that appear to be half about criticising research for not being left wing enough. Academia has left-wing fields like feminist epistemology that appear to be obvious liftwing echo chambers, but no right wing counterparts to balance them. I’m not even touching the fields like continental marxism that appear to be actively producing little of value. Now, of course, those fields are segregated from more important fields to be fair, but does seem like symptoms of an obvious problem.
I will conceive that a lot of this isn’t really quantitatively done and based on my own impressions and it’s entirely possible, for example, that cancel culture was actually not as bad as I think, and I’m just receiving a non-representative sample of cancellations. Still, I hope I have communicated where I’m coming from so that you can have an easier time pointing out where you think I’m going wrong. I will also clarify that most of my issues are about the social sciences and humanities, and I do think doing this in the hard sciences would be a big mistake, and 50% affirmative action is way too much. I just think that right now most of the mistakes I see academia making are in a liftwing direction, which is why I worry that conservatives are not getting adequate representation compare to what would be optimal.
Yeah, I agree that cancel culture and certain fields that basically require left-wing assumptions to participate in them are bad - I just think that affirmative action for conservatives, and particularly populist conservatives, is not a good way to fix those problems. Partially because it creates a perverse incentive to shift your beliefs towards the political side that gets affirmative action, and partially because MAGA conservatism in general is far more biased and hostile to truth than most left-wing positions, such that having a large percentage of academia made up of them would lead to an academy with worse epistemic norms. I do think cultural change can fix some of the problems with academia - after all, it's what caused those problems in the first place - so I'm not as pessimistic about the possibility of encouraging a more open-minded culture on colleges.