HIGHER EDUCATION IS BEYOND PARODY.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, lets Cherian George sound off.  "The killing of Charlie Kirk highlights the need for universities to foster counter-polarizing dialogue, not commodified debates."

Any time somebody uses "commodified" In All Earnestness, you know that the nonsense will flow freely.  So let it be with Cheri.

The killing of political activist Charlie Kirk has thrown into sharp relief the hostility between conservatives and progressives and between champions of free speech and crusaders against hate propaganda. It also highlights a less obvious dichotomy: between a marketplace of commodified opinion, on the one hand, and seedbeds for deliberation and dialogue, on the other. The former dominates the political culture in open societies. The latter is what universities urgently need to cultivate.

The New York Times columnist Ezra Klein privileged the ethos of the marketplace in his immediate response to the news of Kirk’s death. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.

Because universities have been doing such a good job cultivating deliberation and (genuine) dialogue.  As far as Mr Klein's column, I excerpt heavily from it here.

Cher, though, doubles down on the amusing.

Klein’s tribute to an ideological opponent may be grounded in liberal political philosophy, but it fails to grasp the political economy of the marketplace that made Kirk a cultural powerhouse. A recent profile in The Economist, published before the shooting, pointed out that the teenaged Kirk “quickly figured out how to part Republican donors from their money. He told them that he was going to challenge the dominion of liberalism on America’s campuses. As college students began embracing illiberal ideas like ‘deplatforming’ conservative speakers, donors found Mr. Kirk’s sales pitch ever more appealing.” From 2018, he traveled with a camera crew, “the better to capture the idiocies of his opponents—who are still not old enough, in many cases, to order a beer.”

“In the early days,” the Economist profile continued, “Mr. Kirk attempted to win the hearts and minds of the people standing in front of him. Now, he turns them into content to win hearts and minds online.”

If the students' professors were asking the right questions in the classroom, there would be precious little opportunity for a Charlie Kirk to bring his tour to campus.  The not-yet-old-enough-to-legally-buy-a-beer would know how to engage those ideas in class or in those dorm room bull sessions we used to have.

I wonder if this excerpt says more about the columnist's teaching style than it does about the "Convince Me I'm Wrong" tour.

Encounters with difference need not be a performance designed for the attention economy. They can aim to find common ground if possible, and acknowledge shared humanity if not.

Which is precisely what a professor ought be doing.  A professor, in private life, might post one of those "In this house" signs, send lots of money to the Democrats, and perhaps dream of being recruited to some Washington brains trust: and in the classroom, must teach the New Deal in such a way that students have to puzzle out on their own whether Franklin Roosevelt was saint or scoundrel.

I raise the same question in that column's continuation.

Charlie Kirk’s terrain was a literal marketplace. There, verbal exchanges are commodified, packaged and monetized. The student who accepts an invitation to spar is not treated as a conversation partner, in a sincere attempt to increase mutual understanding. The goal is instead to reduce others to a caricatured “them,” which then also traps followers in a monolithic “us” conducive to mobilization and marketing.

Educators need to disabuse themselves of any naïve notion that the likes of Kirk model good-faith participation in the public sphere. He was not the first or only and won’t be the last entrepreneur to marketize the marketplace of ideas. The dominant talking-heads format of television news has for decades turned discussions about current affairs into a genre of unscripted reality TV entertainment, with guests and hosts chosen for their conflict potential. Social media algorithms famously heighten polarization for the commercial rewards it generates for platform owners.

Such exaggerated representations of differences of opinions and values are so ubiquitous that the resulting misperceptions may be self-fulfilling. If people feel that others are beyond reason and empathy, they are likely to act accordingly, withholding trust and cooperation. This creates a major problem for the future of democracy.

It's maybe sixty years too late to notice that these United States, and much of the old Free World, have deteriorated into low trust societies, and that higher education, with its critical theory fetish and Student Affairs curriculum does a pretty good job of undoing trust and cooperation.  So now it's time to lower the temperature and let the therapeutic thumbsuckers wet their beaks?  "Experienced mediators, whether professional dialogue facilitators or trained peers, nudge conversations along, modeling how questions can be crafted as invitations to share, not as traps for petty point scoring."

There's a lot more petty point scoring in a sophomore social science class than at a Turning Point event.

Je suis Charlie.