Hirsanyi: "We Have No Constitutional or Moral Duty to Subsidize Harvard"
Also: it's a good idea to withhold funding from highly-politicized, ideologically captured departments and programs--which are generally those with low intellectual standards. The more ideologically captured and less rigorous a department is, the less valuable and more dangerous it is. Sociology is a good example. It has been firmly captured by the left, to such a point that one of the hottest debates in the discipline concerns whether it should mainly be scientific or mainly be activist. Other examples include almost all the "x-studies" programs and departments--women's-, gender-, queer-, black/African-American-, "Latinx-," "post-colonial-," and on and on.
There is just about no reason at all for the U.S. government to fund academic programs dedicated to promoting bad reasoning and politically biased anti-liberal/anti-American/anti-Western attitudes. If these programs were intellectually rigorous and/or were producing actual knowledge, the question of funding might be a difficult one. But they are not. Anyone who has interacted with students and "scholars" in such disciplines know that their "arguments" rarely rise about "that's racist." Students who major in such disciplines often come out of college reasoning less well than they went into it, when at least they were guided mainly by common sense. What they learn is little more than extremist ideological nonsense. The "method," such as it is, is to seek out tenuous, free-associative, often accidental linguistic or metaphorical connections between non-leftist arguments and anything that might be interpreted as bigoted, no matter how implausible the connection might be. An actual example from Andrea Nye's Word of Power: A Feminist Reading of the History of Logic: logicians speak of "chains of arguments." Chains are used to enslave. Therefore logic is oppressive. Another from the same source: bad arguments are said to be invalid. 'Invalid,' if pronounced with emphasis on the first syllable, means a disabled person. Therefore, logic is "ableist"... This is not a strawman. This is, in fact, an extremely influential method of "reasoning" on the academic left.
Of course anyone can learn to simply say "that's racist" in response to every challenge. It's a lot easier than actually learning to reason. Students who learn to "reason" in this way not only fail to learn to actually reason, they learn to replace actual thought and reasoning with mindless, rote nonsense. Left to their own devices, they'd likely be at least average reasoners. Instead, they are trained to be stupid.
But, as Hirsanyi notes, it would be very difficult to withhold money only from such disciplines. Money, being fungible, can be shuffled around behind the scenes. So I don't pretend that such an approach is likely to work--I'm just saying it would be good if it did.
Again I'll note: I'm not wild about the approach of the Trump administration. But we are facing the possibility not merely of the destruction of the university, one of mankind's greatest institutions, but, worse, of its transformation into a tool of Orwellian totalitarianism.
The Trump administration is, again, the lesser evil.
Though, of course, I could be wrong.
posted by Winston Smith at
9:31 AM
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