This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You misunderstand: it's not DEI for conservatives, but ensuring that there's at least one witch in every panel and body of importance. There doesn't need to be parity, or quotas, or anything like that. Just the minority report. If you don't consent to the witch, then you're not really in favor of academic freedom: you're a monoculture of our enemies that needs to be blown up and you certainly don't need tax dollars that are paid by witches. If even the smallest of token concessions are impossible to negotiate, it's time to start indiscriminately nuking civilian targets.
After all, it's Hogwarts: School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and not Harvard: School of Progcraft and Libbery.
"You misunderstood, it's not DEI for conservatives, it's DEI for conservatives".
Also I skipped around that but you explicitly made it clear to understand that "diversity of thought" really just means conservatives which let's be honest really just means "people with similar idealogical views as Trump" and not say, an American capitalist and a Chinese style communist. If the only "diverse thought" is the thought the Leader agrees with, it doesn't sound like diverse thought to me.
Here's some "witches" you might not like but are broadly unpopular in American society, I guess we need to DEI these views too.
Open borders. Complete abolition of gender. Flat earthers. Men losing the right to vote. Forcibly seizing any and all guns in the US and executing anyone who tries to keep theirs. Mandatory abortions for whites.
If you don't consent to those witches then you're not really in favor of diverse thought. Or maybe idealogy DEI is just retarded.
"DEI for conservatives" or "ideology DEI" isn't really a coherent concept, because DEI is giving advantages to or having quotas for people specifically on the basis of characteristics that have no direct relation to their ability to contribute to the organization, motivated heavily by the belief that these characteristics have some correlation to the actual meaningful characteristics. Giving conservatives preferential treatment or using a conservative "Czar" to oversee such things is categorically different from that, because ideology - and specifically a diversity of ideology - does directly influence someone's ability to contribute to the organization, and certainly positively in this specific context.
I'd say that any well motivated academic would find such a regime to be useless, because they already prioritized diversity of thought in their hiring and admissions practices. Unfortunately, evidently, this has not been the case. Government mandate doesn't seem like a good solution to me, but honestly, I'm not sure if there's a good solution. The only real point of optimism I see is that this could teach academic institutions in the future to better regulate their ideological biases, such that the government doesn't become motivated to come in and regulate it for them. But if I'm being pessimistic, I'd say that Harvard's behavior shows that they're more likely to double down and circle the wagons further in the future, which will further discredit them as institutions for generating knowledge, which leaves a vacuum that is both bad in itself and will almost definitely be filled by things much worse.
This is identical to DEI arguments. As I'm sure you're aware, there has been a great deal of effort invested in the idea that diversity is not an ideological goal, it is a pragmatic benefit. The right-wing argument is that this is not true for, say, women, but is true for conservatives (and only conservatives, not other views with poor representation in academia).
No, it is not identical. I explained the significant difference in the above comment. DEI is specifically about adding diversity of things believed to be correlated with diversity of thought while this is an actual instance of directly adding diversity of thought. There's plenty to criticize about adding diversity of thought in this way, but it's categorically different from adding diversity of demographic characteristics under the belief that adding such diversity would increase diversity of thought.
The defense of forcing ideological diversity, per your own words, is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.
The defense of forcing background diversity is that it directly influences someone's ability to contribute to the organization.
Why? What is the categorical difference between "You need more conservatives because it will add perspectives you haven't considered" and "you need more [women/blacks/etc] because it will add perspectives you haven't considered". You don't actually articulate what makes it different.
The primary distinction I see is that while both are ideological arguments, the latter is not arguing for ideological representation while the former is. Other than that, either way you're dealing with an argument to use an imperfect proxy for some nominally desired underlying quality (and in both cases the nominally desired quality is a figleaf for ideological goals).
This isn't really a good characterization of DEI policies. You'd have to replace "background" with something like "superficial" or "demographic." But, in any case, the argument still works when considering "background," as below.
These are what I'd consider strawman/weakman versions of DEI, not the actual defensible portion of DEI. Even DEI proponents don't tend to say that the mere shade of someone's skin is, in itself, something that makes their contribution to the organization better. The argument is that the shade of their skin has affected their life experiences (perhaps you could call this their background - but, again, DEI isn't based on those life experiences, it's based on the superficial characteristics) in such a way as to inevitably influence the way they think, and the addition of diversity in the way people think is how they contribute better to the organization. This argument has significant leaps of faith that make it fall apart on close inspection, but it's still quite different from saying something like that someone's skin color has direct influence to diversity of thought, which would be a leap very few people would be willing to make.
Whereas with targeting ideological diversity, someone who has a different ideology, by definition, adds a different perspective. That is a direct targeting of the actual thing that people are considering as being helpful to the organization, i.e. diversity of thought.
So again, no, the very concept of "DEI for conservatives," at least in the context of diversity of thought, is just incoherent. If people were calling for putting conservative quotas in the NBA or something, that might work as a comparison.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Those extremist strawmen are already well represented in American academia. You can easily find academics who are in favor of open borders, the complete abolition of gender, men not having the ability to vote, draconic gun control, and voluntary white extinctionism. (Flat earthism is the only one that doesn't belong.)
The fact that these viewpoints are tolerated while the slightest bit of pushback to global race communism isn't is strong evidence that this measure is necessary.
You can actually find plenty of conservative academics https://www.chronicle.com/article/actually-there-are-more-conservatives-on-the-faculty-than-you-think-study-finds https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2023/03/23/conservative_faculty_are_outliers_on_campus_today_110844.html
They're disproportionately left leaning but ~25% being conservative is still pretty meaningful and I simply think you have an absurd view of academia in general if you believe the literal Chinese communists, draconic anti gun and/or anti-male vote crowd would be more common. There might be some very particular fields at a few random colleges where that could be the case, I don't know every single college ever but overall it would be a hard sell to say that anywhere close to 25% of academia is hard open borders or wants whites exterminated.
Edit: You'd also be surprised how much you hear about universities are literally not true. Like that famous story of the professor who said a Chinese word that sounded like a slur being suspended, despite that literally not happening and him being found completely innocent in the internal investigation
What happened is that multiple students make a complaint, an investigation occurs (as it should, an investigation is how you find out if a complaint is legitimate or not), Patton willingly steps down from the one class it occured in during the investigation (and most likely to not have to deal with those students anymore), social media people just make up shit (like this inside higher Ed article claiming he was suspended in the title despite literally acknowledging he was not suspended in the body) a.nd they find him completely innocent and he is still teaching to this day.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Conservatives were deliberately driven out and are there in far below their proportions in the population. This isn't true of the groups you mention.
Also, having one witch everywhere is still far below the proportion in the population, so I wouldn't call that DEI.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think that this would work. For one thing, heterodox opinions are not neatly arranged on a line, and the faculty will end up having some leeway which kind of witch they want hired.
The witch for gender studies will not be some MRA. It will be someone who advocates castrating all the men. She checks all the boxes: she has a heterodox viewpoint (I hope), but also is not on the wrong side of the culture war.
The witch for climate science will be someone who wants humans to go back to the neolithic. The witch for evolutionary biology will advocate for Panspermia. The witch for Catholic theology will be a Zoroastrian. The witch for medicine will be a homeopath quack who is incoherent due to inebriation most of the time.
Unless Trump defines what the relevant controversies are which views represent significant opposite views, I don't think this will have much effect.
And while it is true that science sometimes clings to their cherished paradigms long after better ones come around ("Science advances one funeral at a time" and all that), I trust the federal government (and Trump in particular) even less than academia to recognize fruitful new paradigms. If we let him decide, then RFK will get tenure in medicine, some YEC will be forced on to the biology department and the odd proponent of mercantilism will represent heterodox economic viewpoints.
I'm very tempted to say that regarding the state of modern theology, a Zoroastrian at least believes in the principles of good and evil as being opposing divinities, and indeed in divinity. That would at least be closer to traditional Catholicism! So yeah, I'd take a theologian who believes in good and evil and gods and demons than someone who is all "it's all us, we're the most important beings".
I mostly picked them for "they are a small sect which has not been terrible successful as a meme; a far-group not an outgroup;"
If they picked an Agnostic, Muslim, Evangelical, Old Catholic, or worshipper of Santa Muerte, that would be giving aid and comfort to an outgroup instead.
(Naturally, theologians might select on different criteria than just outcomes -- perhaps a minor heresy is preferable to atheism, or perhaps it is the other way round.)
Zoroastrianism was the official religion of multiple dominant empires spanning over a millennium. Its influence didn’t wane because it was “an unsuccessful meme”; the final Zoroastrian Persian empire was militarily defeated by Muslims, who then ruthlessly persecuted the Zoroastrian holdouts, forcing them to flee to the Indian subcontinent, where, even as a minority religion vastly outnumbered by the populations around them, they managed to maintain their religion over a thousand years later. I don’t think it makes sense to treat it as some obscure sect that “lost out on the marketplace of ideas.”
Okay, I did not know this and I stand corrected.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Since the government's letter demands a "critical mass" in every academic department and teaching unit, it's subject to interpretation whether that calls for one witch or a coven of witches.
It also implies that one can't change one's mind. "Wait," the Statistics department chair says, "we hired you to represent the Frequentists, what are you doing using Bayesean statistics in your research?!"
More options
Context Copy link
To any reasonable observer who's not already part of the in-group and selectively blind to conflict theory when it suits him, this is obviously DEI for conservatives.
Obviously this new emphasis of viewpoint-inclusion is intended to benefit conservatives here and now, and I’m fine with that. I would be much happier with race-based AA if the ratio of white to black had become 300:1 as with conservatives in the humanities.
To be fair, it’s technically viewpoint neutral. In comparison to DEI for BIPOC which very clearly names the beneficiaries, the beneficiaries here would depend on the composition of the field at any given time.
Thus:
Xi Jinping thought may be many things, but I’d be hard pressed to call it conservative. And I would be in favour of much of this - it seems clear that those in charge have been misusing their ability to label viewpoints as ‘stupid’ or ‘respectable’ to favour their side. See for example the ‘women are only weaker than men because of nutrition’ stuff that was going around. A lot of the stuff that is treated as absurd is vetoed by inertia and politics - for example I have no idea what Xi Jinping thought is, or what arguments creationists make.
Even assuming that it's 100% viewpoint-neutral, and even in a hypothetical scenario in which there isn't a raging culture war being wages - how would you even classify people? How do you measure viewpoint diversity? How do you quantify conservative-ness or liberal-ness? What even is the spectrum on which to measure viewpoints, and what is the target value for balance?
I think this is the same point that @FCfromSSC sometimes gestures at: this is a relatively straightforward problem to solve in a cooperative non-adversarial environment and a very difficult one in an adversarial environment.
Given a list of candidates, I’m confident that either of us would be able to put together a reasonable analysis of which candidates have views broadly in line with the current consensus and which don’t. I’m also confident we could work together and create a merged analysis with perhaps a bit of bickering and horse-trading but no fundamental issues.
I’m NOT confident that I could write a set of rules that would be serviceable and not easily abused at scale. Perhaps a mathematical sentiment analysis, but that’s obviously less ideal.
In general, I think that once you start thinking about how to do the latter, your civilisation is already in deep trouble. Thus the meme about law as an incredibly rickety construction propped up by one beam called ‘the word [reasonable]’.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It absolutely is, and the response to it has left me feeling rather ambivalent and frustrated.
I oppose any kind of intervention like this. At the same time, I have been listening to voices on the left, even outside the US, objecting that this is like Russia, autocratic, despotic, McCarthyite, the government imposing an ideology, unconstitutional, violating the very principles of the American experiment, and so on.
And all I can think is - boy, I'm sure glad that the American government wasn't making ideological demands of universities in the name of diversity before this. Can you imagine how horrifying that would have been? Lucky nothing like that has ever happened before!
What the Trump administration is doing is bad, and pretty indefensible. However, it is only a fraction of what his opponents have been shamelessly doing for decades. 'Viewpoint diversity', while a good ideal in the abstract, cannot be imposed like this without horribly undermining the very purpose of a university as an educational and research institution. But the exact same things are true of racial diversity, gender diversity, and so on. May we at least hope that this will cause people to react against the entire notion of imposed diversity requirements?
Well, we may hope anything. But I doubt anything will happen. No one of significance is going to notice the hypocrisy. The right will keep on saying "it's okay for us to do it because they did it first", and the left will keep on saying "this is nothing like what we did how dare you even compare them", and principles will remain alien to this entire discourse.
When Arnaud Amalric said 'Kill them all, God will know his own', there was a recognition that at least some people in the city were good Christians and not heretics. It's an olive branch from the Red Tribe to have at least some tokens within the institutions to have them not recognized as partisan enemies: a university full of gay race communists has no Reds within it and can be attacked without regret or pause.
Well, congratulations, academia: you drove out all the witches, and now Trumpemort is here to destroy you. Universities have lost tax-free exemptions and their endowment because of racial prejudice before: certainly the universities have uncontroversially engaged in such as the Asian lawsuits have revealed. If they're not even capable of denouncing their own radicals then what are they good for? As Pol Pot wisely said: 'to keep you is no benefit: to destroy you is no loss.'
More options
Context Copy link
Perhaps a steel man could be that if humans of different races are interchangeable then race-based quotas let you spread academic caress between races without affecting the serious business of thinking that goes into them. Whereas viewpoint quotas affect the actual business of the academy. But I don’t see how to square that view with ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘lived experience’.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link