WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE UNIVERSITY?

Common Dreams regular Mike Lofgren suggests that reports of the bolshevization of the universities are exaggerated.

There is in fact an ideology behind most universities, but unnoticed because it suffuses so much of American life: the corporate model of creeping bureaucratization and a metastasizing and overpaid upper management. They follow a business model geared to generating costs that result in tuition rising faster than the cost of living, while what is supposed to be the core personnel—the instructors—are paid relatively paltry sums. Somehow no one finds it strange that the right mocks them as "elites," when the junior professorate subsists on service worker compensation.

An acquaintance who teaches at a public university wrote the following to me: "Anyone who has spent any time at a university understands that most institutions of higher education are functionally right wing—something that they are able to conceal, perhaps even sincerely, with a cloak of social liberalism. They will adopt the fashionable vernacular, and essentially say, 'We pay our part time faculty poverty wages and give no benefits, but we support BIPOC and LGBTQ+ Americans!'"

Meanwhile, he suggests, there are a few overtly traditional-conservative institutions that explicitly position themselves in opposition to the wokies:  Hillsdale, plus Bob Jones, Pat Robertson's Regent, Jerry Falwell's Liberty, none of which turn out senior faculty for institutions with the U.S. News problem or nominees to the High Bench.

Meanwhile, there's more deconstruction on hand for traditional methods of inquiry.

Ideal applicants will demonstrate an approach to science and technology grounded in histories of and innovative methods of analyzing anticolonial, decolonizing, liberationist political thought and praxis, push the boundaries of the fields they inhabit, ask provocative questions, and relate critically and creatively to norms of knowledge production. Potential areas of research and teaching focus, among various areas of expertise, include but are not limited to environmental racism; climate justice; genomic justice; war technologies; medicine; public health; governance of science and technology; science policy; criminology, surveillance, and policing; border control; educational technologies; new media studies; critical data studies; histories of antiracism and anticolonialism in science, including the impact of grassroots collective and communal movements against racist science.

Bone in the nose optional.  I doubt any explanation of the Big Bang anomaly or a cure from cancer will be turned up by someone au courant with the latest Trendy Theories.  But I digress.

Mr Lofgren finds more subversion at work.

The Federalist Society, the shadowy cabal that vets federal court nominees of Republican presidents, vetted hiring and admissions to George Mason University's law school, which was not coincidentally named after Antonin Scalia. GMU has also been the recipient of donations from the Koch brothers and other right-wing funders.

For decades, law schools have been special targets of the right-wing influence machine, as Jane Mayer points out in her book Dark Money. She quotes the Powell memo's author, who said, ". . . the judiciary may be the most important instrument for social, economic, and political change."

That "shadowy cabal" has been so successful that an ongoing attempt by "conservative" judges to no longer hire Yale Law graduates as clerks ... might boomerang.

The highest levels of the federal judiciary have for too long been dominated by graduates of the same handful of select law schools, and it’d be a mistake to say we’re better for it. The illusion of meritocracy they sell has, if anything, helped to sustain the conservative legal movement’s own illusion of balls-and-strikes impartiality and the “originalism” that purportedly guides it—the Supreme Court’s majority bloc has cultivated an aura of exclusivity and scholarly diligence even as it increasingly resembles nothing more than an appendage of the Republican Party.

Yale in particular has been a feeder program and networking pen for the men (mostly) who have done the most to weaponize the legal system for conservative ends. I’m referring to people like Samuel Alito, whose belligerent opinion in Dobbs ended the federal right to abortion by leaning on literally medieval texts, and his colleagues Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. Josh Hawley, who led the congressional opposition to certifying the 2020 election results, would not be a senator from Missouri today had he not been a Yale Law School graduate and Supreme Court clerk years ago. I don’t know that Ho is doing this for the soundest reasons, but it’s about time someone recognized Connecticut’s preeminent pedigree-mill for what it is and tried to shut the whole thing down. We could at least try unplugging it and then plugging it back in.

No doubt, though, the "shadowy cabal" has a short list of eligibles from Scalia or wherever else the long countermarch through the institutions has reached the law schools.