ANOTHER VAST RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY.

The low estate to which higher education has sunk has nothing to do with its habits of admitting unprepared students and calling it access, exposing those matriculants to coreless curricula, and foisting degreed distressed material on employers.  Oh, no, not at all, it's that Trumpian noise machine.

Starting in 2021, Republicans in state legislatures around the country began mounting a political response to the Black Lives Matter movement. This political backlash, which right-wing provocateur Christopher Rufo called a counterrevolution, focused its ire on educators. K-12 teachers and public librarians faced book bans, gag orders, and accusations of being “groomers,” and Moms for Liberty groups hijacked school board meetings across the country. In this context, legislators also targeted higher education in an effort to ensure that political partisans could play a greater role determining the conversations taking place on campuses.

Much of the reporting on this legislation, such as the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act” in Florida or Texas Senate Bill 17 banning campus diversity efforts, focuses on individual bills. It often presents these bills as populist responses within a highly polarized America.

Dear reader, wouldn't you expect a committee of academicians to suggest that those populist responses might be ad popularum groupthink, unsupported by logic or evidence?  Unfortunately, the committee of academicians, members all of the American Association of University Professors, engage in ad popularum arguments as a defense of the wokeness being foisted on the common schools and the institutions of higher education.

[L]egislative efforts to weaken academic freedom and university governance are part of a well-organized and well-funded backlash that seeks to roll back the political, social, and cultural gains made in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and increased queer and trans visibility. During the summer of 2020 millions of people—across the United States and around the world—poured into the streets. In this context, federal agencies, state and municipal governments, corporations, sports teams, cultural figures, K-12 schools, and universities publicly committed to taking proactive steps to address generational and institutionalized racism. Within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, and following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and other Black Americans, a massive grassroots social movement profoundly shifted the political conversation about race and racism. These protests posed an existential threat to existing political and economic hierarchies. To confront this grassroots movement, wealthy donors—and the think tanks they fund—scrambled to develop a political response. They found success in fomenting a culture war backlash against K-12 and higher education.

That's an interesting spin on those fiery but mostly peaceful protests, isn't it?  My grassroots movement is a quest for justice, your grassroots movement is propped up by oligarchs.  Nice try.

Higher education's DeSantis problem, though, is self-inflicted, dear reader, and I ask you to hold two contrasting opinions in mind. First, that the use of public moneys to support education is censorship per se. Second, that universities exist to play around with ideas.  It's on the legislatures to trust the faculties to be good stewards of their curricula, and it's on the faculties to maintain standards of quality control on their inquiries.  The professor, however, defends the area studies types for abandoning those standards.

I concluded that post with "It is the responsibility of the faculty, whether in disciplinary organizations, or in shared governance, to evaluate their professional norms. The protest community disciplines have repeatedly trashed, sometimes gleefully, those norms, and thus provoked the incoming."  The association's position paper offers an incomplete defense of those protest communities.  "In recent years the university has germinated new ideas about race and racism, about gender identity, about American history, and about social equality. In 2020 these new ideas spread quickly from the campus to the street, and eventually even to the halls of power. Many of these ideas were developed and tested over decades of scholarship, peer review, debate, and critical engagement. They had been widely taken up because faculty, students, and the public found them compelling."  Not all of the public, which is why the incoming became as widespread as it has.  The "backlash," as the association has it, or the restoration of a state of good repair, as editors at Washington's Examiner suggest, will continue.

"Harvard has caved in, showing that student intifada will always prevail," they wrote. "This reversal speaks to the power of our movement, both on campus and worldwide."

We disagree. This reversal speaks to the fecklessness of administrators at elite universities, the rampant anti-Semitism and radical politics that dominate their ranks, and the case for serious students, parents, and faculty to flee these campuses. And of the student movement itself, its chief accomplishment is likely to be the further destruction of the institutions who abide its lawbreaking. Their prestige evaporates by the hour.

Tough luck for Isaac Kamola.  "These sensationalized and over-the-top attacks on higher education and academic freedom have meant that me and my colleagues—those of us who teach our students an unvarnished version of American history, who celebrate a plurality of ways of valuing each other and our identities, and who demand massive collective action to address looming crises—are increasingly treated as enemies."  Did he really think he and his colleagues could continue to stick metaphorical fingers in the eyes of Normals without provoking a fight?

There are no "nuanced and thoughtful conversations" when mobs are yelling "from the river to the sea" and Jewish students are hiding in the library attic or covering themselves with baseball caps rather than the more traditional headwear. There's a tension between protecting expression of controversial ideas and calling the expression of controversial ideas a "threat of harm." Whenever I sound off about Distressed Material, I surely am promising harm to the delusions that people who can't handle the material should get degrees. That should be obvious, but apparently you get to be president of the professors' guild by ignoring the obvious.

Our universities are being run by terminally stupid people.

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