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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025

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You're buying into it being lazily-indiscriminate

The prevailing sentiment of the comments here are calling for it to be intentionally indiscriminate. This is a clear motte-and-bailey. The motte is, "We can stop some of the most egregious wokeness going on, including outright discrimination on the basis of race/gender," and the bailey is, "We've completely lost the ability to extend a single shred of trust or faith, so we're going to indiscriminately shut it all down, like we're performing chemotherapy."

FWIW, I proposed pretty damn harsh coercive measures to force universities to fix shit a while back. It would cause them vastly more pain at an organizational level, with almost no need to interrogate individual grants much. One might even say that the stick behind such coercion would be 'indiscriminate' (why should someone who is researching the material properties of some new alloy structure or whatever lose their funding because the fru-frus on the other side of campus are discriminating based on race/gender?), but it would be applying significant leverage with a clear demand. It would be vastly more effective at driving plenary change, with clear game theory involved. Rather than random, indiscriminate shutting down of everything, such that no one has any idea how they can change behavior in order to benefit, it would be clear that institutions which manage to clean house are going to make bank, especially since those institutions which can't manage to clean house are going to be shut out entirely. Moreover, it also changes the individual incentives. If you're a hard sciencer who doesn't give a shit about wokeness, you might still find yourself accepting a job at a woke-ass uni, because that might be the place that really enables you to get grants, have equipment/space, top students, whatever. If suddenly, it doesn't matter what you personally do/don't do in your research, but staying at a woke uni means you're forbidden from getting grants, while moving to a cleaned up uni means gravy train, the unis that manage to clean house are going to get showered in top tier talent. No more unis managing to somehow attract some set of possibly politically-neutral, bank-making talent that they skim from to fund their crazy wokies.