Great post. I have been out of academia (except for adjuncting online) for the past decade, and worked at a small Christian university beforehand. But I too attended BU, in the poetry MFA program, an interesting experience for a 21 year old who had never left the South. Most of my classes were great (writing focused or poetry focused), and I was just so excited to be there. But that was almost 20 years ago now!
Sounds like a good experience. And the BU writing MFA has a great reputation. Most of the really dramatic changes in elite universities went into overdrive about 10 years ago now, so I'd believe that it was probably comparatively sane when you were there.
My brother is a math prof at the post-secondary level, in a technical school. But he is so discouraged by the culture of college that he has discouraged his own children from attending.
A book, a teacher, and learners—it's time for a return to the basics in the liberal arts.
I had the joy of reading this a few nights ago when I couldn't sleep. I was surprised you wrote it, as I know a lot of your life was tied up in the academy for a while, whereas I ran away as soon as I got that diploma.
I don't think I disagree with anything you said here. It is nice to finally be at a place where hardly anyone can deny the ideological conformity of higher education. As you noted, almost all of our trusted institutions have been compromised. I would despair, but it seems to me that Western civilization generally, and American political identity in particular, was formed in order to restore dignity and autonomy to individuals in the face of corrupt institutions. To my mind, we need only to 'remember,' in a sense, our roots and reclaim them. That will mean a lot more upsetting free speech and a departure from the duopoly in our political life. It is hard to know if it can be done in the face of rising globalist powers. Even so, I am excited at discourse that is growing more public.
In the Information Age, it seems to me that colleges have become largely irrelevant. Information has been democratized. Access to it is not nearly as difficult to navigate as it once was. Now the task is only to help folks figure out how to sift through the information they get. Colleges ideally are supposed to do this, but I don't think they have really done that for a long time. They have rather told people how to reach the predetermined acceptable conclusions by selectively marshaling what information they collect. Useless when seeking truth. So I'm all about creating networks for facilitating critical thinking. I think that would happen naturally without all of the interference and input from politics/media/propaganda. I think humans are naturally pretty smart, but large powered interests have designed ways to significantly compromise folks from thinking clearly.
I think that helping people to navigate information is only one of the functions colleges are supposed to perform. There's also the preservation and transmission of an elite culture, and by inference the cultivation of a self-aware elite class. I'm actually pro-this function, because I'd rather have a leadership class that's been trained in the foundations of our culture and in a self-sacrificial approach to privileged leadership, but I think elite colleges today are doing a terrible job of it, because they refuse to see any aspect of our parent culture as being worth preserving. In fact they see it as ipso facto illegitimate. I think I'll write a post or two about this aspect of the problem soon.
Haha that sounds so crazy to me. It’s like in Plato’s Republic when he makes the case for a ruling aristocracy. I’m just such an American populist. I hate that notion so much. I would rather have a bunch of salt of the earth people running a libertarian government than an elite ruling class any day. But if it is a given that we have to have elites (I guess I’m contesting that), then yes, I would like for them to be equipped to do it well.
Yeah, I just think the material conditions for a kind of broad-based American democracy in that populist sense aren't there. It always depended on an expansionist modus operandi and access to cheap land, so it was always going to be temporary and unstable. That's why I'd rather have a self-aware aristocracy with some democratic values than our current self-deluding aristocracy (self-deluding in that they consider themselves a meritocracy or rail against "privilege" when they're the most privileged people in the room) with its antidemocratic values. And anyway, the heyday of 20th-century democracy was anchored and made possible by the transatlantic WASP elite, educated at Harvard and Yale (or Oxford and Cambridge), democratic in outlook but aristocratic in breeding and habitus, and totally unapologetic about their privilege. Maybe I'm a Tocquevillian realist about hereditary privilege.
I haven't read anyone to help me connect democracy to expansionism and cheap land the way you refer to here. I find myself wondering if true democracy is possible now in a way that it never was before, as we are able to have good conversations and share massive amounts of information across great distances instantaneously. I really like the changes being seen in media. I am inclined to think that watchdog efforts are going to continue to get better. Systems requiring elites to govern the top may come to be seen as increasingly moribund and silly.
Re: cheap land and expansionism, a lot of Founding Fathers and other political theorists from that era leaned heavily on the conditions of material equality as an indispensable prerequisite for democracy. They thought people have to *be* relatively equal in order to behave as equals politically. The easy path upwards into land ownership for new immigrants from the UK and Europe made that possible in a way it wasn't in the old country. This is part of the background for Jefferson's vision for America as a country of yeoman farmers. If anyone can think of good specific references, please chime in.
>Systems requiring elites to govern the top may come to be seen as increasingly moribund and silly.
But not by elites, and they tend to have outsized influence by definition. Which is why I doubt the increasing connectivity of information systems will lead to a democratic revolution. Looking at the rise of digital surveillance and population control, it seems more likely to catalyze the opposite.
This might be a difference between your Protestantism and my catholic tendencies — I see the ubiquity of class and status differences throughout history and conclude this is a stable attractor, very difficult to enduringly suppress. I'm always tepid about any attempts to rework human nature beyond its natural limits, and I think this may be one of those limits. So, IMO, better to have a well-educated and properly civic-minded elite than a rapacious and philistine one, which is what we've got now.
I don’t think college is lame. However I DID cringe at that Sufi class story. Way to take all the fun out of learning. I took a psych class where we did kundalini yoga and meditation and after a 2 min warning about not being a jerk about doing something from another culture and if you suddenly start wearing a bindi or wearing a turban, people are probably going to think you’re a poser, we all moved on. College and grad school were honestly the best things that ever happened to me, especially my first year taking history, literature, social science. I was like Ariel, a whole new world opened up. I studied humanities and some science, anthropology major, psychology and pre med minors. But I do agree that the for profit academia industrial complex (making up that name, basically I mean the US higher educational system) is extremely messed up, the cost of college is sickening, and for what? And do you think if the funding structure of the US higher Ed was different, unis wouldn’t have to jump on hashtag trends, pander and use fear and guilt as a way to turn wealthy white tears into funding streams to fuel some sort of popularity contest? Or maybe I’m missing the boat. I’m sure there are multiple reasons at play. I also wonder if we weren’t in lockdown with our eyes glued to our phones and our nervous systems already in super fear mode, maybe the Floyd fallout would’ve happened differently. In any case, it’s hard to think about the future of college without thinking of the current and future state of work, and the economy. What jobs are even going to be needed in 20 years? When my aunts went to college in the 60s -80’s they could work full time in the summer and pay for both room and board and tuition for the year, when I went to college one had to work 55 hours every week of the year to pay for both. My first semester of college was $1881, my last was $5300. Yeah, I agreed to pay it, but still it’s shady how they give you the bill after you already stated the term as opposed to alerting you to a tuition hike. I don’t know what the future will hold when my kids are old enough to go for college. In a romantic way, I still love the fantasy that college is a way to learn about the world via liberal arts so one can be a well rounded participant in society. Anyways, great article and thanks for sharing.
Thanks. I also enjoyed college and am glad I went (both to college and grad school). I really am proud of the university BU was went I started attending, and I'm grateful for all the weird stuff I learned there, from the neurobiology of the dopamine system (important for studying the biological foundations of ritual) to the history of religion and science in the middle ages. But you put it well: mainstream American academia is committed to turning "wealthy white tears into funding streams to fuel some sort of popularity contest," which every institution wants to win. It's embarrassing and lame, even if the concept and ideal of college is very much not lame. I have high hopes for alternatives to the legacy institutions. The University of Austin in Texas and Thomas More College in New Hampshire are two (very different) institutions where I think the romantic idea of learning about the world through immersion in a living tradition of liberal arts is still alive.
Readers who were intrigued by Connor's article may be interested in reading/reviewing this article on Qeios. [I am not connected with Qeios; just sharing so that readers who may be outside of academia can connect with researchers. I received an email from Qeios about this article which is how I know about it].
Qeios is a free, open-access publishing platform with no editors making accept/reject decisions. Reviewers are responsible for validating papers and they communicate with authors publicly after publication. This fosters a transparent system that emphasizes robust research and controls the dissemination of flawed works.
No babies were murdered by Hamas militants in Israel on Oct 7. This fabrication has been fact checked and debunked by multiple sources. You are also repeating in language used to dehumanize the Palestinian resistance. There are other analyses which accord better with how we as philosophically-minded thinkers and psychologists understand that actual (non-dehumanized) humans behave. Experts on an NPR show argued that Hamas had planned a carefully controlled military operation, to get hostages to negotiate for the release of the thousands of Palestinians held illegally for years in Israel, without charge, including many women and children. Indeed one Israel-released video shows a Hamas fighter asking a woman in a vehicle if she was a soldier. The mayhem and civilian murders at the festival and in on kibbutzim were the result of ordinary Gazan civilians entering Israel after the fence was breached and found to be relatively unguarded. Some of them went to find hostages that they turned over to the Hamas soldiers; others went on a rampage. Unplanned, spantaneous rampage by people living in an apartheid state. Then Israeli Apache helicopters and tanks arrived and probably killed another 400 Israeli civilians and also led to those images of burned out cars and houses.
Even the link to the Substack post you give, which is very critical of Western coverage of the Hamas attacks, acknowledges that babies died that day. So did many children. I don't think the ugliness of the Hamas attacks is up for question, and I'm not inclined to refer to Hamas as Palestinian resistance movement. I'm also very critical of many of Israel's actions, especially through not limited to the continued barbarism toward Palestinians in the West Bank and to the apparent intention to annex (?) Gaza. As I said in the footnotes, this situation is extremely complex.
But the fact that there's a lot of alignment between the people shouting "from the river to the sea" and the people calling America a racist, genocidal settler-colonial state inclines me to take seriously the danger that this sort of rhetoric poses to the country I live in and to myself. I think most Americans are probably similarly skeptical, and most academics (frankly) aren't, because academia has selected for people who really *do* think America and Israel are both fundamentally illegitimate for several decades. This is another example of the enormous worldview gulf between academia and society that I think will eventually, maybe pretty soon, lead to a massive drawdown of investment in, and prestige for, legacy higher education in the US.
Great post. I have been out of academia (except for adjuncting online) for the past decade, and worked at a small Christian university beforehand. But I too attended BU, in the poetry MFA program, an interesting experience for a 21 year old who had never left the South. Most of my classes were great (writing focused or poetry focused), and I was just so excited to be there. But that was almost 20 years ago now!
Sounds like a good experience. And the BU writing MFA has a great reputation. Most of the really dramatic changes in elite universities went into overdrive about 10 years ago now, so I'd believe that it was probably comparatively sane when you were there.
My brother is a math prof at the post-secondary level, in a technical school. But he is so discouraged by the culture of college that he has discouraged his own children from attending.
A book, a teacher, and learners—it's time for a return to the basics in the liberal arts.
I had the joy of reading this a few nights ago when I couldn't sleep. I was surprised you wrote it, as I know a lot of your life was tied up in the academy for a while, whereas I ran away as soon as I got that diploma.
I don't think I disagree with anything you said here. It is nice to finally be at a place where hardly anyone can deny the ideological conformity of higher education. As you noted, almost all of our trusted institutions have been compromised. I would despair, but it seems to me that Western civilization generally, and American political identity in particular, was formed in order to restore dignity and autonomy to individuals in the face of corrupt institutions. To my mind, we need only to 'remember,' in a sense, our roots and reclaim them. That will mean a lot more upsetting free speech and a departure from the duopoly in our political life. It is hard to know if it can be done in the face of rising globalist powers. Even so, I am excited at discourse that is growing more public.
In the Information Age, it seems to me that colleges have become largely irrelevant. Information has been democratized. Access to it is not nearly as difficult to navigate as it once was. Now the task is only to help folks figure out how to sift through the information they get. Colleges ideally are supposed to do this, but I don't think they have really done that for a long time. They have rather told people how to reach the predetermined acceptable conclusions by selectively marshaling what information they collect. Useless when seeking truth. So I'm all about creating networks for facilitating critical thinking. I think that would happen naturally without all of the interference and input from politics/media/propaganda. I think humans are naturally pretty smart, but large powered interests have designed ways to significantly compromise folks from thinking clearly.
I think that helping people to navigate information is only one of the functions colleges are supposed to perform. There's also the preservation and transmission of an elite culture, and by inference the cultivation of a self-aware elite class. I'm actually pro-this function, because I'd rather have a leadership class that's been trained in the foundations of our culture and in a self-sacrificial approach to privileged leadership, but I think elite colleges today are doing a terrible job of it, because they refuse to see any aspect of our parent culture as being worth preserving. In fact they see it as ipso facto illegitimate. I think I'll write a post or two about this aspect of the problem soon.
Haha that sounds so crazy to me. It’s like in Plato’s Republic when he makes the case for a ruling aristocracy. I’m just such an American populist. I hate that notion so much. I would rather have a bunch of salt of the earth people running a libertarian government than an elite ruling class any day. But if it is a given that we have to have elites (I guess I’m contesting that), then yes, I would like for them to be equipped to do it well.
Yeah, I just think the material conditions for a kind of broad-based American democracy in that populist sense aren't there. It always depended on an expansionist modus operandi and access to cheap land, so it was always going to be temporary and unstable. That's why I'd rather have a self-aware aristocracy with some democratic values than our current self-deluding aristocracy (self-deluding in that they consider themselves a meritocracy or rail against "privilege" when they're the most privileged people in the room) with its antidemocratic values. And anyway, the heyday of 20th-century democracy was anchored and made possible by the transatlantic WASP elite, educated at Harvard and Yale (or Oxford and Cambridge), democratic in outlook but aristocratic in breeding and habitus, and totally unapologetic about their privilege. Maybe I'm a Tocquevillian realist about hereditary privilege.
I haven't read anyone to help me connect democracy to expansionism and cheap land the way you refer to here. I find myself wondering if true democracy is possible now in a way that it never was before, as we are able to have good conversations and share massive amounts of information across great distances instantaneously. I really like the changes being seen in media. I am inclined to think that watchdog efforts are going to continue to get better. Systems requiring elites to govern the top may come to be seen as increasingly moribund and silly.
Re: cheap land and expansionism, a lot of Founding Fathers and other political theorists from that era leaned heavily on the conditions of material equality as an indispensable prerequisite for democracy. They thought people have to *be* relatively equal in order to behave as equals politically. The easy path upwards into land ownership for new immigrants from the UK and Europe made that possible in a way it wasn't in the old country. This is part of the background for Jefferson's vision for America as a country of yeoman farmers. If anyone can think of good specific references, please chime in.
>Systems requiring elites to govern the top may come to be seen as increasingly moribund and silly.
But not by elites, and they tend to have outsized influence by definition. Which is why I doubt the increasing connectivity of information systems will lead to a democratic revolution. Looking at the rise of digital surveillance and population control, it seems more likely to catalyze the opposite.
This might be a difference between your Protestantism and my catholic tendencies — I see the ubiquity of class and status differences throughout history and conclude this is a stable attractor, very difficult to enduringly suppress. I'm always tepid about any attempts to rework human nature beyond its natural limits, and I think this may be one of those limits. So, IMO, better to have a well-educated and properly civic-minded elite than a rapacious and philistine one, which is what we've got now.
I don’t think college is lame. However I DID cringe at that Sufi class story. Way to take all the fun out of learning. I took a psych class where we did kundalini yoga and meditation and after a 2 min warning about not being a jerk about doing something from another culture and if you suddenly start wearing a bindi or wearing a turban, people are probably going to think you’re a poser, we all moved on. College and grad school were honestly the best things that ever happened to me, especially my first year taking history, literature, social science. I was like Ariel, a whole new world opened up. I studied humanities and some science, anthropology major, psychology and pre med minors. But I do agree that the for profit academia industrial complex (making up that name, basically I mean the US higher educational system) is extremely messed up, the cost of college is sickening, and for what? And do you think if the funding structure of the US higher Ed was different, unis wouldn’t have to jump on hashtag trends, pander and use fear and guilt as a way to turn wealthy white tears into funding streams to fuel some sort of popularity contest? Or maybe I’m missing the boat. I’m sure there are multiple reasons at play. I also wonder if we weren’t in lockdown with our eyes glued to our phones and our nervous systems already in super fear mode, maybe the Floyd fallout would’ve happened differently. In any case, it’s hard to think about the future of college without thinking of the current and future state of work, and the economy. What jobs are even going to be needed in 20 years? When my aunts went to college in the 60s -80’s they could work full time in the summer and pay for both room and board and tuition for the year, when I went to college one had to work 55 hours every week of the year to pay for both. My first semester of college was $1881, my last was $5300. Yeah, I agreed to pay it, but still it’s shady how they give you the bill after you already stated the term as opposed to alerting you to a tuition hike. I don’t know what the future will hold when my kids are old enough to go for college. In a romantic way, I still love the fantasy that college is a way to learn about the world via liberal arts so one can be a well rounded participant in society. Anyways, great article and thanks for sharing.
Thanks. I also enjoyed college and am glad I went (both to college and grad school). I really am proud of the university BU was went I started attending, and I'm grateful for all the weird stuff I learned there, from the neurobiology of the dopamine system (important for studying the biological foundations of ritual) to the history of religion and science in the middle ages. But you put it well: mainstream American academia is committed to turning "wealthy white tears into funding streams to fuel some sort of popularity contest," which every institution wants to win. It's embarrassing and lame, even if the concept and ideal of college is very much not lame. I have high hopes for alternatives to the legacy institutions. The University of Austin in Texas and Thomas More College in New Hampshire are two (very different) institutions where I think the romantic idea of learning about the world through immersion in a living tradition of liberal arts is still alive.
According to postmodern theory, demography is an act of violence...the fascist hubris of those would count people...
Readers who were intrigued by Connor's article may be interested in reading/reviewing this article on Qeios. [I am not connected with Qeios; just sharing so that readers who may be outside of academia can connect with researchers. I received an email from Qeios about this article which is how I know about it].
Censorship on Campuses
https://www.qeios.com/read/CMVJP3
Qeios is a free, open-access publishing platform with no editors making accept/reject decisions. Reviewers are responsible for validating papers and they communicate with authors publicly after publication. This fosters a transparent system that emphasizes robust research and controls the dissemination of flawed works.
https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/why-the-guardians-hamas-mass-rape
No babies were murdered by Hamas militants in Israel on Oct 7. This fabrication has been fact checked and debunked by multiple sources. You are also repeating in language used to dehumanize the Palestinian resistance. There are other analyses which accord better with how we as philosophically-minded thinkers and psychologists understand that actual (non-dehumanized) humans behave. Experts on an NPR show argued that Hamas had planned a carefully controlled military operation, to get hostages to negotiate for the release of the thousands of Palestinians held illegally for years in Israel, without charge, including many women and children. Indeed one Israel-released video shows a Hamas fighter asking a woman in a vehicle if she was a soldier. The mayhem and civilian murders at the festival and in on kibbutzim were the result of ordinary Gazan civilians entering Israel after the fence was breached and found to be relatively unguarded. Some of them went to find hostages that they turned over to the Hamas soldiers; others went on a rampage. Unplanned, spantaneous rampage by people living in an apartheid state. Then Israeli Apache helicopters and tanks arrived and probably killed another 400 Israeli civilians and also led to those images of burned out cars and houses.
Even the link to the Substack post you give, which is very critical of Western coverage of the Hamas attacks, acknowledges that babies died that day. So did many children. I don't think the ugliness of the Hamas attacks is up for question, and I'm not inclined to refer to Hamas as Palestinian resistance movement. I'm also very critical of many of Israel's actions, especially through not limited to the continued barbarism toward Palestinians in the West Bank and to the apparent intention to annex (?) Gaza. As I said in the footnotes, this situation is extremely complex.
But the fact that there's a lot of alignment between the people shouting "from the river to the sea" and the people calling America a racist, genocidal settler-colonial state inclines me to take seriously the danger that this sort of rhetoric poses to the country I live in and to myself. I think most Americans are probably similarly skeptical, and most academics (frankly) aren't, because academia has selected for people who really *do* think America and Israel are both fundamentally illegitimate for several decades. This is another example of the enormous worldview gulf between academia and society that I think will eventually, maybe pretty soon, lead to a massive drawdown of investment in, and prestige for, legacy higher education in the US.