...pissing on academia. Some of it, admittedly, is self-serving and stupid, but some of it has enough truth in it to be amusing. For example:
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
Clearly some truth to this, though this stuff is mostly confined to the feebler parts of the humanities and social sciences [sic], plus of course the schools of education and social work, and the various "studies" programs. It has made inroads, sadly, into philosophy over the quarter-century, as we have had occasion to document on many occasions.
Academics, he writes, might,
...consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.
If they're realists about democracy, they might also consider the possibility that Harris lost for no reason at all, other than the random factors that influence the voters who decide elections.
As I said, parts of this essay are stupid: people make mistakes about their interests all the time; millions of people are subjected to large amounts of naked propaganda (Fox News, anyone?); the essay exaggerates the power of the academy and the extent to which the electoral results were a response to academic ideas; and so on. The issue where the academy is most out of step with the electorate writ large is, as the author notes, in its dogmatic commitment to "diversity" and racial preferences. This, by itself, is going to lead to a conflagration and perhaps disaster--since there's no denying that Trump has the tools to create real problems for higher education, and may finish it off as the world leader.
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