The sensitive young LARPers on college campuses are not representative of young people broadly, or of the young voters who are falling away from Joe Biden's coalition.
I basically could not agree more and I say this as someone who's politics are very much to the left of yours and who likely has sympathies closer to the Palestinians*. There are a few things I wanted to add.
First, I've brought this up before on Matt Yglesias' substack but these protests are downstream of the fact we have as a culture wildly overromanticized the late 60s hippie movement. Maybe it's because the music from that era has endured so long (think CCR, think Hendrix, think anything associated with Woodstock), maybe because so many baby boomers lived through this period and clearly refuse to leave the stage or maybe just general "everything was better in the good ole days" mindset but man there is some rose tinted glasses about this movement. Maybe the most important thing to keep in mind; the hippie movement failed in its objective. The country elected Richard Nixon in 68 who very famously did not end the Vietnam War (in some ways made it worse given heightened bombing campaign and expansion to Cambodia. Hint hint to those protestors who say Trump can't be worse on this issue). And yet here we are seeing Columbia students very clearly aping the exact same tactics Columbia students used in 68. How did that work out?
Second. There is some opprobrium that should be thrown to older voters here. Again as Matt Yglesias has pointed out, campus controversy stories are some of the most read articles on the Times website. Given the age profile of the Times reader, this means that a whole lot of people over the age of 45 think this is one of the most important things to read about. And reality is Josh is right, these are mostly dumb college kids being dumb. This is not a harbinger of some youth oriented left wing rebellion that's going to take over America. This really doesn't warrant this much attention. I'm so glad Josh pointed out out small these protests really are. Take a look at those videos and take a closer look and see how many people are protestors and how many are onlookers taking videos on cell phones ore reporters. The latter is a much bigger part of these crowds than you realize once you look carefully.
Lastly, and related to my point about "rose tinted" glasses. Those 1968 hippie protests were not nearly as non-violent as history makes them out to be. I've brought up this example before, but please see this article about University of Georgia in https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/student-movements-of-the-1960s/. Key quote "On five separate occasions from 1968 to 1972, student activists attempted unsuccessfully to burn down the military building on campus". I bring up this article as this is University of Georgia, not Columbia. And this is Georgia in 1968-1972; not exactly a hot bed of lefty or left of center thought back then. In fact, quite the opposite if you ready any history book.
* I actually don't really know Josh's views on the Gaza War. I just know his politics are to the right of mine. Actually wouldn't shock me if our actual views are pretty closely aligned.
My consistent response to those who think that violence and agitation are positive goods is to point out that the result of the 60s was Nixon and the 1968 French riots led to a massive conservative majority. Beating down the crackpots and their pet victims is good, and if one is too ideologically blind to that then they’ll deserve whatever reprisals are inflicted.
Colleges and universities weren’t actors in the Vietnam War, either, but widespread campus protests occurred nonetheless. I think you’re on to something in labeling the Gaza protestors “LARPers.” It’s as if they’re playing at being Vietnam era protestors. Attending classes isn’t nearly as fun as protesting something, and young people are full of passion that has to find an outlet somewhere. That’s (ironically) also why young people make the best soldiers, especially of the cannon-fodder variety.
All of this makes me simultaneously annoyed at the protesting students and concerned that being so annoyed means I’ve become a hopeless curmudgeon.
If not "involved" I'd argue colleges/universities during the Vietnam war were "adjacent" due to being in the same country as one of the combatants, students' non-college peers being drafted to fight, and ROTC programs on campus promoting US military careers. None of these factors apply to the Gaza war.
And to further this point, the demands from protestors are along the lines of "divest from companies that we (the 19 year olds who have never had a job) have identified as somehow profiting from 'the genocide'".
A more tenuous connection you could not make, and yet....
I think you're right. I think the protesters are also missing the obvious difference between the war in Gaza and the Vietnam War: The US doesn't have troops in Gaza and is certainly is not going to be conscripting any of them into it.
Could not agree more Josh, and all of this was completely avoidable. As noted by the University of Florida in their statement last night, "This is not a daycare, and we do not treat protestors like children."
And a whole lot of good the "campus ban" did for he/she/they, as he/she/they was ON CAMPUS last night leading the mob that vandalized Hamilton Hall.
> He goes from bullshitting his way through the disciplinary meeting as if it were a discussion section ... to winding himself up as the most nelly, high-pitched eliminationist in history... to making trivial asides while applying lip gloss
Here is a fun story that is neither here nor there. I got nabbed at Big State U for having a flask at a football game, then running from a shacket temp. There was unfortunately an actual police officer at the top of the student section, and I got to go have a chat with the disciplinary office.
I put on slacks and a long-sleeved dress shirt and brought a notepad, as you do, taking this thing seriously, as you do. I had a thirty minute appointment with a disciplinary admin to, perhaps, kick off a longer process. When she found out that I was over 21 and ran from the shacket temp but *definitely stopped and did as I was told by the police officer*, we spent the rest of the session talking about recipes (it was shortly before Thanksgiving). There was no longer process (I think I had to pass a breathalyzer pregame for the rest of the season).
This is the best and most helpful argument I've read about these protests and similar kinds of demonstrations in recent years. Thank you, Josh! I've read your stuff for years--but this post made me a subscriber.
The original sin here is that places like Columbia are ascribing way more thoughtfulness and dignity to these kinds of actions than they deserve. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious arguments to be made about US foreign policy, Israel, etc. It’s also essential to protect people’s constitutional rights. But we shouldn’t pretend that the protestors are serious people making serious and thoughtful arguments. To do so is to gaslight yourself and others. (I'd argue that a good chunk of the commentary around the protests are doing this.) The fact that places like Columbia are taking these claims as serious critiques is to surrender their intellectual and moral authority. If the students are LARPing as serious activists, Columbia is LARPing as a serious institution.
I wonder what would happen if places like Columbia had responded to the protests by saying something like the following: We respect our students constitutional rights to protest, even when they are uninformed and lack any practical value or insight. We will also take appropriate actions if the protests violate university polices or obstruct with other students' constitutional rights. In the meantime, we ask student and faculty to do their best to not let the protests interfere with their studies and work.
The fundamental problem is that what Columbia is selling is “our students are so smart, thoughtful, and mature that even at 22 what they do is going to be good”. Otherwise, why bother competing to hire/admit/join up with Columbia kids over state school kids? Why aspire to be a Columbia kid when state school is much more accessible and much cheaper?
I feel like you shouldn't assume everyone in an anti-war protest is as weird as the weirdest person in an anti-war protest....
And clearly these people are not optimizing for odds of Biden being re-elected. They are just anti-war, so they do anti-war protests. You can disagree with their stance, but it's not a crazy or new thing to protest.
1) James isn't just some weirdo. He/she/they is one of the protest leaders and negotiated with Columbia on the protestors' behalf. If the protestors don't think James should be taken as representative, maybe they shouldn't have chosen him/her/them to represent them?
2) Calling for the end of Zionism is the opposite of anti-war. It might surprise these students to learn that there have actually been several wars fought already to try to bring about the end of Israel, and one of those wars is the reason that Israel gained control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the first place.
3) I don't think you can disagree with the protestors' stance, because their stance isn't coherent enough to disagree with. Columbia University is not capable of ending the war and neither is Joe Biden, and they are certainly not capable of ending Zionism. Columbia could meet the demand of divesting from ETFs that invest in companies that sell weapons to Israel, but I feel like we've kinda gotten past that at this point.
Some of them are anti-war and want a ceasefire. Some of them are "anti-colonial" and want the destruction of Israel. You certainly don't see any of them demanding that Hamas accept the peace plan that Egypt floated on Christmas.
I realize there is selective reporting and so until I see some polls of protesters (on the model of Rojas and Heaney), I won't speculate on the ratios of anti-war vs anti-Israel, but I suspect some people who started as the former got radicalized into the latter through groupthink.
Definitely seen cases in my personal circles of people saying dumb things, then backtracking into a more reasonable position when pushed a bit, so I agree with that view.
Unfortunately Mr. James is a great example of another issue in the Covid/Floyd era and remarkable he has re-appeared on Gaza policy. He was the student rep on the Boston School Committee and no matter what came out of his mouth he was celebrated by electeds which led to many policy changes that now don't look so great in retrospect. https://schoolyardnews.com/khymani-james-columbia-application-essay-on-exam-school-admissions-faa3b0dbd74
Part of the reason I am not a conservative is that public (state flagship) institutions obviously provide a far better and more valuable education for the money than overfunded private institutions. The ideology that private is automatically better than government-run completely ignores the grain of truth hidden within conservatism, which is that incentives matter (conservatives and liberals both err in that there is nothing magically good or bad inherent to government itself; government should be a tool and government incentives matter just as much as private incentives).
I'm relatively skeptical that the value recieved from most of these institutions (a few STEM schools excepted) is in the education provided. The boost to earnings is really just from showing you pass the admission standards at a very selective institution. Realistically, few graduates make use of skills they learn in college in their professions and those who do often could have learned them at Kahn academy.
Realistically from this perspective, community colleges (basically 100% a government-run product) provide the most actual useful knowledge (practical health professions programs like nursing or med tech programs, and other certificate programs where you learn an actual skill). Engineering and STEM and the more accounting/finance oriented business programs are useful too though. I agree a large part of the value is in signaling, but I also think that the bundling of signaling + a modestly useful education (or at least a demonstration that someone can work moderately hard for a sustained period of time to get decent grades) is still worthwhile. And state schools provide that for less.
But they don't signal high quality. Think of college as just a really expensive version of the SAT. It doesn't help you because you learn something from it but because a good score (good school) shows you possess desierable properties.
And it's really not such a bad deal. Humans are deeply inclined to these kind of status displays. We used to send people to finishing schools and even hunter gatherers have expensive and dangerous coming of age rituals that serve no direct purpose.
Setting it up so that money and attention funds and encourages research (and maybe a bit of citizen education) is a pretty decent deal relative to the other ways it could have gone.
But you are correct, as far as it comes to government support (asides from pure research grants) the gov should be encouraging more ppl to go to more affordable schools because even if the individual wins by going to the more elite place only 1% of people can be in the top 1%.
One of the things about this entire saga that blows me away is how badly the Ivies have come out of this. Not only the Ivies, my alma mater, NYU and other schools as well, but the Ivies in particular are going to emerge from this with severely damaged brands. Centuries of legacy are being destroyed in a matter of mere months, as we watch.
It's particularly ironic when it's the highly-resourced private institutions that should be able to just directly shut this shit down, and have an army of lawyers backing them up.
The institutions with the most inane protest problems, by all rights, should be community colleges and Directional State.
Of fucking course those protestors are hard to take seriously. College is where we send people to grow up but I don't really think all the upset and outrage is really about what some silly college students say.
It's a demand that those in power give your community the same treatment and concern as other communities. Had universities not treated other, even more minor incidents of racist, homophobic or sexist behavior as such a big deal than I don't think people would care about this as much.
So yes, there is a certain performative element to this and a certain "but mom, when my sister got hurt she got an ice cream" but at the same time there is a very real sense that your community is under attack if you can't receive the same protections from the powers that be under similar situations.
And yes, it does appear that Americans from all across the political spectrum have learned that the way you petition for respect is by playing up your victimhood and accusing anyone who doesn't take it seriously of being ok with X-ism. And that is unfortunate, but at the same time, people will do what works so if you want to change that dynamic people need to stop rewarding it.
I’m not sure you are accurate in your assessment. The left has been educating kids to think like this on campus and for quite some time now, and it’s also happening in K-12. The actual teachers coming out of the colleges of education are indoctrinated in this. Don’t give Joe a pass. He could stop this BS any day he chooses to.
There is alot of work being done there by "like this", yes there are some ways that the DEI/SJ progressive left is similar (though that constituency is smaller than one might think and when you talk to people in private there is less unanimity than one might think... people just don't like to voice views they fear are unpopular).
It's really a pretty good mirror of what's happening on the right. The crazies who actually personally approve of things like Jan 6th are rarer than might appear because people don't like to stand up and voice views which might get booed by the vocal elements of their tribe. And even then there is the issue of which message feels more important (yah I don't like X but we can't let this shit be used to distract us the plight of the Palestinians or the bad behavior of the Dems so I should keep quiet)
And yah Biden could come out and opine that he disapproves of the behavior the protestors tolerate. Just like all the R politicians could condemn Trump's bad behavior like Romney but politicians are inherently cowards and don't want to end up like Cheney.
Again, how you draw those lines is doing a great deal of work. The most extreme MAGA folks are a small fraction of R's and the rest of the people support Trump but don't believe he acted well on Jan 6th or in the GA call. But even if the people who think that was a good thing are a minority no one on the right wants anyone to raise those criticisms because it **sounds** like you are siding with the left and opposing Trump/MAGA even if u believe: that was bad behavior but still way better than Biden.
Same here. The problem is that it's really hard to call out shit your party does the other party are loud critics of because even the people who also disliked that shit see you as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
--
Also re these being a small fraction of Dems, I don't think you can say that while making it broad enough to cover most people graduating from education schools.
I don’t side with either. I can’t deal with progressives or MAGA. I’m a moderate bipartisan wing Dem. In my LD, I’m an elected PCO. That’s in Seattle. The progs hate me. Literally.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Just to illustrate that it's pretty standard and universal for political leaders to find it very hard to criticize people on their side doing bad things once the other side gets upset about it.
It's really the same reason why we don't react well to someone saying, "You know the Nazis were absolutely right, it is very important to value unspoiled nature." It's a correct sentiment and it was a very big part of the nazi thing...but it doesn't matter since emotionally our brains scream "you're siding with the bad guy"
At heart, we are emotional little monkeys and we tend to have a strong emotional response to someone we thought was on "our" side support our enemy against us. So after the right makes a great deal of noise critisizing something done by the left it can get hard for Biden to call it out even if most of the left thinks it's bad too. Criticism expresses the literal fact but also carries a subtext based on whose criticism did you decide to repeat out of all the many bad things in the world.
This sounds too Thomas Friedmanesque to be true but yesterday I got a ride home from the airport from a first gen African immigrant whose kid got a full ride scholarship to Columbia and is majoring in CS. He's telling his kid to stay in the dorm because he's afraid he'll lose everything if he gets caught up. This whole debacle is bullshit.
You already have two different offerings under your media company. Perhaps it’s time to start a third where you can incorporate this branding and style.
The hottest take of all, which you allude to, is that Columbia should just have in-person classes
Absolutely
Hard agree
I basically could not agree more and I say this as someone who's politics are very much to the left of yours and who likely has sympathies closer to the Palestinians*. There are a few things I wanted to add.
First, I've brought this up before on Matt Yglesias' substack but these protests are downstream of the fact we have as a culture wildly overromanticized the late 60s hippie movement. Maybe it's because the music from that era has endured so long (think CCR, think Hendrix, think anything associated with Woodstock), maybe because so many baby boomers lived through this period and clearly refuse to leave the stage or maybe just general "everything was better in the good ole days" mindset but man there is some rose tinted glasses about this movement. Maybe the most important thing to keep in mind; the hippie movement failed in its objective. The country elected Richard Nixon in 68 who very famously did not end the Vietnam War (in some ways made it worse given heightened bombing campaign and expansion to Cambodia. Hint hint to those protestors who say Trump can't be worse on this issue). And yet here we are seeing Columbia students very clearly aping the exact same tactics Columbia students used in 68. How did that work out?
Second. There is some opprobrium that should be thrown to older voters here. Again as Matt Yglesias has pointed out, campus controversy stories are some of the most read articles on the Times website. Given the age profile of the Times reader, this means that a whole lot of people over the age of 45 think this is one of the most important things to read about. And reality is Josh is right, these are mostly dumb college kids being dumb. This is not a harbinger of some youth oriented left wing rebellion that's going to take over America. This really doesn't warrant this much attention. I'm so glad Josh pointed out out small these protests really are. Take a look at those videos and take a closer look and see how many people are protestors and how many are onlookers taking videos on cell phones ore reporters. The latter is a much bigger part of these crowds than you realize once you look carefully.
Lastly, and related to my point about "rose tinted" glasses. Those 1968 hippie protests were not nearly as non-violent as history makes them out to be. I've brought up this example before, but please see this article about University of Georgia in https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/student-movements-of-the-1960s/. Key quote "On five separate occasions from 1968 to 1972, student activists attempted unsuccessfully to burn down the military building on campus". I bring up this article as this is University of Georgia, not Columbia. And this is Georgia in 1968-1972; not exactly a hot bed of lefty or left of center thought back then. In fact, quite the opposite if you ready any history book.
* I actually don't really know Josh's views on the Gaza War. I just know his politics are to the right of mine. Actually wouldn't shock me if our actual views are pretty closely aligned.
My consistent response to those who think that violence and agitation are positive goods is to point out that the result of the 60s was Nixon and the 1968 French riots led to a massive conservative majority. Beating down the crackpots and their pet victims is good, and if one is too ideologically blind to that then they’ll deserve whatever reprisals are inflicted.
Colleges and universities weren’t actors in the Vietnam War, either, but widespread campus protests occurred nonetheless. I think you’re on to something in labeling the Gaza protestors “LARPers.” It’s as if they’re playing at being Vietnam era protestors. Attending classes isn’t nearly as fun as protesting something, and young people are full of passion that has to find an outlet somewhere. That’s (ironically) also why young people make the best soldiers, especially of the cannon-fodder variety.
All of this makes me simultaneously annoyed at the protesting students and concerned that being so annoyed means I’ve become a hopeless curmudgeon.
If not "involved" I'd argue colleges/universities during the Vietnam war were "adjacent" due to being in the same country as one of the combatants, students' non-college peers being drafted to fight, and ROTC programs on campus promoting US military careers. None of these factors apply to the Gaza war.
And to further this point, the demands from protestors are along the lines of "divest from companies that we (the 19 year olds who have never had a job) have identified as somehow profiting from 'the genocide'".
A more tenuous connection you could not make, and yet....
They could demand the release of American citizens being held hostage in Gaza by Hamas.
... just kidding...
Excellent points all - thank you.
I think you're right. I think the protesters are also missing the obvious difference between the war in Gaza and the Vietnam War: The US doesn't have troops in Gaza and is certainly is not going to be conscripting any of them into it.
Could not agree more Josh, and all of this was completely avoidable. As noted by the University of Florida in their statement last night, "This is not a daycare, and we do not treat protestors like children."
And a whole lot of good the "campus ban" did for he/she/they, as he/she/they was ON CAMPUS last night leading the mob that vandalized Hamilton Hall.
> “Center for Student Success and Intervention”
> He goes from bullshitting his way through the disciplinary meeting as if it were a discussion section ... to winding himself up as the most nelly, high-pitched eliminationist in history... to making trivial asides while applying lip gloss
Here is a fun story that is neither here nor there. I got nabbed at Big State U for having a flask at a football game, then running from a shacket temp. There was unfortunately an actual police officer at the top of the student section, and I got to go have a chat with the disciplinary office.
I put on slacks and a long-sleeved dress shirt and brought a notepad, as you do, taking this thing seriously, as you do. I had a thirty minute appointment with a disciplinary admin to, perhaps, kick off a longer process. When she found out that I was over 21 and ran from the shacket temp but *definitely stopped and did as I was told by the police officer*, we spent the rest of the session talking about recipes (it was shortly before Thanksgiving). There was no longer process (I think I had to pass a breathalyzer pregame for the rest of the season).
Anyway, I did not bring any lip gloss.
Shows how effective the "Center for Student Success and Intervention" is. As in not.
But I never took a flask to a game again!
This is the best and most helpful argument I've read about these protests and similar kinds of demonstrations in recent years. Thank you, Josh! I've read your stuff for years--but this post made me a subscriber.
The original sin here is that places like Columbia are ascribing way more thoughtfulness and dignity to these kinds of actions than they deserve. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t serious arguments to be made about US foreign policy, Israel, etc. It’s also essential to protect people’s constitutional rights. But we shouldn’t pretend that the protestors are serious people making serious and thoughtful arguments. To do so is to gaslight yourself and others. (I'd argue that a good chunk of the commentary around the protests are doing this.) The fact that places like Columbia are taking these claims as serious critiques is to surrender their intellectual and moral authority. If the students are LARPing as serious activists, Columbia is LARPing as a serious institution.
I wonder what would happen if places like Columbia had responded to the protests by saying something like the following: We respect our students constitutional rights to protest, even when they are uninformed and lack any practical value or insight. We will also take appropriate actions if the protests violate university polices or obstruct with other students' constitutional rights. In the meantime, we ask student and faculty to do their best to not let the protests interfere with their studies and work.
The fundamental problem is that what Columbia is selling is “our students are so smart, thoughtful, and mature that even at 22 what they do is going to be good”. Otherwise, why bother competing to hire/admit/join up with Columbia kids over state school kids? Why aspire to be a Columbia kid when state school is much more accessible and much cheaper?
"emotionally incontinent"
I feel like you shouldn't assume everyone in an anti-war protest is as weird as the weirdest person in an anti-war protest....
And clearly these people are not optimizing for odds of Biden being re-elected. They are just anti-war, so they do anti-war protests. You can disagree with their stance, but it's not a crazy or new thing to protest.
1) James isn't just some weirdo. He/she/they is one of the protest leaders and negotiated with Columbia on the protestors' behalf. If the protestors don't think James should be taken as representative, maybe they shouldn't have chosen him/her/them to represent them?
2) Calling for the end of Zionism is the opposite of anti-war. It might surprise these students to learn that there have actually been several wars fought already to try to bring about the end of Israel, and one of those wars is the reason that Israel gained control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the first place.
3) I don't think you can disagree with the protestors' stance, because their stance isn't coherent enough to disagree with. Columbia University is not capable of ending the war and neither is Joe Biden, and they are certainly not capable of ending Zionism. Columbia could meet the demand of divesting from ETFs that invest in companies that sell weapons to Israel, but I feel like we've kinda gotten past that at this point.
Those are all fine disagreements to have. Thinking a protest is stupid does not mean people shouldn't be allowed to protest.
It's definitely the case that Biden could choose to stop sending weapons, so it's not as incoherent as you say.
This would be true if the protests were anti-war, which they are not, as opposed to pro-eliminationist war of return, which they are.
Some of them are anti-war and want a ceasefire. Some of them are "anti-colonial" and want the destruction of Israel. You certainly don't see any of them demanding that Hamas accept the peace plan that Egypt floated on Christmas.
I realize there is selective reporting and so until I see some polls of protesters (on the model of Rojas and Heaney), I won't speculate on the ratios of anti-war vs anti-Israel, but I suspect some people who started as the former got radicalized into the latter through groupthink.
Definitely seen cases in my personal circles of people saying dumb things, then backtracking into a more reasonable position when pushed a bit, so I agree with that view.
> They are just anti-war, so they do anti-war protests.
I mean, that's really not true. There are more than a few wars happening in the world right now, and they're pretty mum on those.
That's every antiwar protest ever.
Unfortunately Mr. James is a great example of another issue in the Covid/Floyd era and remarkable he has re-appeared on Gaza policy. He was the student rep on the Boston School Committee and no matter what came out of his mouth he was celebrated by electeds which led to many policy changes that now don't look so great in retrospect. https://schoolyardnews.com/khymani-james-columbia-application-essay-on-exam-school-admissions-faa3b0dbd74
I love this post so much.
A simple solution to the "elite university problem" is to stop hiring these fuckwits in the first place. Boom, no longer elite.
Finally, with regard to the inflammatory request for refund, I'd totally wear an "I'm gay for Josh Barro" t-shirt. Merch possibility?
Part of the reason I am not a conservative is that public (state flagship) institutions obviously provide a far better and more valuable education for the money than overfunded private institutions. The ideology that private is automatically better than government-run completely ignores the grain of truth hidden within conservatism, which is that incentives matter (conservatives and liberals both err in that there is nothing magically good or bad inherent to government itself; government should be a tool and government incentives matter just as much as private incentives).
I'm relatively skeptical that the value recieved from most of these institutions (a few STEM schools excepted) is in the education provided. The boost to earnings is really just from showing you pass the admission standards at a very selective institution. Realistically, few graduates make use of skills they learn in college in their professions and those who do often could have learned them at Kahn academy.
Realistically from this perspective, community colleges (basically 100% a government-run product) provide the most actual useful knowledge (practical health professions programs like nursing or med tech programs, and other certificate programs where you learn an actual skill). Engineering and STEM and the more accounting/finance oriented business programs are useful too though. I agree a large part of the value is in signaling, but I also think that the bundling of signaling + a modestly useful education (or at least a demonstration that someone can work moderately hard for a sustained period of time to get decent grades) is still worthwhile. And state schools provide that for less.
But they don't signal high quality. Think of college as just a really expensive version of the SAT. It doesn't help you because you learn something from it but because a good score (good school) shows you possess desierable properties.
And it's really not such a bad deal. Humans are deeply inclined to these kind of status displays. We used to send people to finishing schools and even hunter gatherers have expensive and dangerous coming of age rituals that serve no direct purpose.
Setting it up so that money and attention funds and encourages research (and maybe a bit of citizen education) is a pretty decent deal relative to the other ways it could have gone.
But you are correct, as far as it comes to government support (asides from pure research grants) the gov should be encouraging more ppl to go to more affordable schools because even if the individual wins by going to the more elite place only 1% of people can be in the top 1%.
One of the things about this entire saga that blows me away is how badly the Ivies have come out of this. Not only the Ivies, my alma mater, NYU and other schools as well, but the Ivies in particular are going to emerge from this with severely damaged brands. Centuries of legacy are being destroyed in a matter of mere months, as we watch.
It's particularly ironic when it's the highly-resourced private institutions that should be able to just directly shut this shit down, and have an army of lawyers backing them up.
The institutions with the most inane protest problems, by all rights, should be community colleges and Directional State.
Of fucking course those protestors are hard to take seriously. College is where we send people to grow up but I don't really think all the upset and outrage is really about what some silly college students say.
It's a demand that those in power give your community the same treatment and concern as other communities. Had universities not treated other, even more minor incidents of racist, homophobic or sexist behavior as such a big deal than I don't think people would care about this as much.
So yes, there is a certain performative element to this and a certain "but mom, when my sister got hurt she got an ice cream" but at the same time there is a very real sense that your community is under attack if you can't receive the same protections from the powers that be under similar situations.
And yes, it does appear that Americans from all across the political spectrum have learned that the way you petition for respect is by playing up your victimhood and accusing anyone who doesn't take it seriously of being ok with X-ism. And that is unfortunate, but at the same time, people will do what works so if you want to change that dynamic people need to stop rewarding it.
I’m not sure you are accurate in your assessment. The left has been educating kids to think like this on campus and for quite some time now, and it’s also happening in K-12. The actual teachers coming out of the colleges of education are indoctrinated in this. Don’t give Joe a pass. He could stop this BS any day he chooses to.
There is alot of work being done there by "like this", yes there are some ways that the DEI/SJ progressive left is similar (though that constituency is smaller than one might think and when you talk to people in private there is less unanimity than one might think... people just don't like to voice views they fear are unpopular).
It's really a pretty good mirror of what's happening on the right. The crazies who actually personally approve of things like Jan 6th are rarer than might appear because people don't like to stand up and voice views which might get booed by the vocal elements of their tribe. And even then there is the issue of which message feels more important (yah I don't like X but we can't let this shit be used to distract us the plight of the Palestinians or the bad behavior of the Dems so I should keep quiet)
And yah Biden could come out and opine that he disapproves of the behavior the protestors tolerate. Just like all the R politicians could condemn Trump's bad behavior like Romney but politicians are inherently cowards and don't want to end up like Cheney.
The active MAGA wing politicos are a majority portion of Rs. The active Progressivist wing are a small percentage of Ds.
Again, how you draw those lines is doing a great deal of work. The most extreme MAGA folks are a small fraction of R's and the rest of the people support Trump but don't believe he acted well on Jan 6th or in the GA call. But even if the people who think that was a good thing are a minority no one on the right wants anyone to raise those criticisms because it **sounds** like you are siding with the left and opposing Trump/MAGA even if u believe: that was bad behavior but still way better than Biden.
Same here. The problem is that it's really hard to call out shit your party does the other party are loud critics of because even the people who also disliked that shit see you as giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
--
Also re these being a small fraction of Dems, I don't think you can say that while making it broad enough to cover most people graduating from education schools.
I don’t side with either. I can’t deal with progressives or MAGA. I’m a moderate bipartisan wing Dem. In my LD, I’m an elected PCO. That’s in Seattle. The progs hate me. Literally.
I didn't mean to suggest otherwise. Just to illustrate that it's pretty standard and universal for political leaders to find it very hard to criticize people on their side doing bad things once the other side gets upset about it.
It's really the same reason why we don't react well to someone saying, "You know the Nazis were absolutely right, it is very important to value unspoiled nature." It's a correct sentiment and it was a very big part of the nazi thing...but it doesn't matter since emotionally our brains scream "you're siding with the bad guy"
At heart, we are emotional little monkeys and we tend to have a strong emotional response to someone we thought was on "our" side support our enemy against us. So after the right makes a great deal of noise critisizing something done by the left it can get hard for Biden to call it out even if most of the left thinks it's bad too. Criticism expresses the literal fact but also carries a subtext based on whose criticism did you decide to repeat out of all the many bad things in the world.
This sounds too Thomas Friedmanesque to be true but yesterday I got a ride home from the airport from a first gen African immigrant whose kid got a full ride scholarship to Columbia and is majoring in CS. He's telling his kid to stay in the dorm because he's afraid he'll lose everything if he gets caught up. This whole debacle is bullshit.
Are you adding "thieving fag" t-shirts to your merch offerings? If so, may I have one?
I’m not sure this really fits our brand.
You already have two different offerings under your media company. Perhaps it’s time to start a third where you can incorporate this branding and style.
Poor Ken is going to hate having to read this as the contact email in every episode of the podcast version.