Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all immigration policies of any sort are illegitimate and harmful.
France was brought up as a particular example. Also, this view point was not up for classroom debate -- you would get a bad grade if you deviated from this in homework essays.
I think true liberalism is not just having a general set of 'progressive' values, but also being open to dissenting opinions and facing them honestly and openly. That doesn't mean agreeing with those opinions, but it does mean being exposed to them and debating them.
What we see on campuses today doesn't sound like liberalism to me, but a reactionary movement that aims to protect an orthodoxy composed of generally liberal viewpoints not by engaging in debate, but by preemptively shaming and denouncing anyone who disagrees.
Even if you believe liberal viewpoints are generally correct, nobody has a total monopoly on Truth.
But that's a very mainstream position in economics, with much stronger arguments behind it than ideological purity. And it's typically supported by libertarians more than progressives, since the arguments are weakened by strong government-provided social services.
This is what I worry about, when I hear people complain that their views aren't tolerated on campus. Are they really being shut down by intolerant professors who won't accept dissent? Or are they dismissing ideas they don't immediately find reasonable as far-left propaganda and refusing to listen?
However there are obviously large cultural, economic, security and other logistical issues that would be caused by completely opening up national borders -- we're certainly no longer in the era before WWI when nobody needed a passport. The classroom certainly sounds like a legitimate place to bring up these rather mainstream viewpoints.
Did some research and it does seem like there are both student- and teacher-led protests that are crossing the line into unreasonableness (from my perspective), e.g. protests against a humanities class for being too Eurocentric [1], or student demands for a Jewish professor to be fired because he publicly disagrees with a 'Day of Absence' event that asks for white students and faculty to stay off campus [2].
Then there's the promulgation of microaggression theory on campuses, which seems perfectly tailored to encourage all students to view every statement in the least charitable light[3] and to search for possible racism, sexism, or other possible -isms.
The fact that some people on the left are acting in a way where any disagreement with some interpretation of 'progressive' ideals automatically leads to accusations of racism is alarming, and is exactly the sort of prejudice (in the literal definition of the word) that I think fellow liberals should rally against.
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college-...
[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/30/escalating-de... -
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-ris...
What mainstream economists believe all immigration policies are illegitimate and harmful? Not being snarky.
That would be considered a fairly ideological stance in most other fields. I've never heard that expressed in political science (some overlap with economics) from anyone but people on HN and Reddit.
This combination of ideas is not at all what is being espoused in liberal universities. They are pushing for both open borders (or at least amnesty and much less restrictive immigration laws) and guaranteed social services for immigrants.
Libertarians certainly don't view nations as "completely artificial illegitimate social construct" and I seriously doubt most college professors are teaching from that ideology's point of view. Libertarians are often as demonized as Republicans at universities.
But if nations aren't simply social constructs, what are they? Is it the word "artificial" that is so surprising?
Maybe I have more fringe beliefs than I thought I did.
A Schelling point for coordinated actions by large groups of people, organized around ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic grounds?
Everything is a social construct if we live in a society. The alternative would be to leave in an animalic state.
These arguments that "such-and-such is a social construct" are akin to "water is wet." Just a statement of fact with no obvious implications.
You might be confusing 'nation' with 'nation-state'; not all states are nation-states.
What would the alternative be?
As a counter anecdote, a small campus I worked at in rural Pacific Northwest, a liberal bastion right?
This campus was swarming with traditional values students who want to strike down gay marriage and cut all taxes
And I found them much less open to being reasoned with than extreme liberals who think nation states are social constructs (since they don’t exist in physics, they kind of are human social constructs? Not judging them, just pointing out a potential point of reference for viewing them that seems valid)
Like, God says so, end of discussion. The only way to attack that stance is to break their faith.
Where I went to school there were classes that counted for a good number of gen-eds but didn't have onerous pre-reqs. They were all terrible classes were like this. It was like they were daring all the engineering students to take a class on extremist feminism and not argue.
The modern French nation is actually a left-wing construct -- an intentional product of the French Revolution. The Kingdom of France was not really a unified nation-state as we understand them today. There were multiple languages and a rich spectrum of local identities. French subjects were not necessarily French-speaking: their native tongue could just as well be Provençal, Italian or something else, and the King didn't really care.
The Revolution triggered local counter-revolutions of people who didn't necessarily think themselves as French in the sense that the new government in Paris wanted them to. (The War in the Vendée was a particularly bloody local war even by Revolution standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vendée)
To counter the insurgencies and establish their new order, the Revolutionary authorities set about to explicitly design what a French citizen should be. The predominance of the French language was one element of this.
Anecdotally, I was a political science major and there are always a few loud people who came to argue and not learn.
I'm baffled as to what else they could be.
Before the Brexit vote, I found it would offend many academics to even discuss that the vote might pass, and people might have legitimate greviences that would make them vote for Brexit.
Now, I'm personally against Brexit, but i think the main reason it passed was the "liberal elite" refused to even discuss with the people who wanted Brexit, so they they turned to the likes of UKIP, who would talk to them about the problems (and then lie to them, which is how we ended up in this Brexit mess).
If you reject not only the politics of your opponents, but the value of fact itself, why should they listen to or accommodate you?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/2/16588964/a...
Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4654597/bill-clinton-illegal-...: "That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens."
To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today.
Democrats in the late 60s wanted a national gun registry and ban handguns for anyone who can't demonstrate a need, with household self-protection not considered sufficient need. Any existing guns that didn't qualify would be confiscated. Republicans only wanted to ban things like assault weapons, ownership by felons, and carrying loaded weapons in public. Now, Democrats struggle to ban assault weapons, and Republicans oppose almost all forms of gun control.
FDR enacted a top marginal income tax rate of 94%. Republicans wanted taxes reduced, after the war, to a level that would pay for postwar government spending. Now, the top marginal income tax rate is 39.6%, with Democrats proposing little tweaks like increasing it a bit or increasing the payroll tax cap, and Republicans wanting to slash tax rates (I saw one the other day saying that we should aim for 1-2%) and not caring in the least about the increased deficits this would bring.
Seems to me that the American left is moving sharply right, to the point where the Democratic Party would be considered centrist or mildly right-wing by most standards, while the American right is also moving sharply right and is teetering on the precipice of going all-in on racist nationalism.
I've always thought this was a clever strategy, but apparently enough people live in their own social bubbles that many progressive types don't realise how unprogressive a lot of older, rural voters are (and you could argue they've been misled by their news providers into positions that are contrary to their own values and desires) and can't understand why compromise is necessasary to actually win elections.
Some have argued that this is bad because you need to inspire people, like Obama did, but Obama is another triangulator, so I'm not sure how that makes sense.
The Republican Party is clearly moving further right over a long time scale; the Democratic Party is also moving further left. Whether those things are true of the “American right” and “American left” is a little more complex question (from where I sit, it seems that the American Right is moving to the right more clearly and across the board, while the American left is moving left on social issues but not so much on economic issues, but that the economic left is starting to regain power in the Democratic Party, which if you mistake the Democratic Party for the American left looks like the left moving farther left on economic issues.)
> Take for example this speech by Bill Clinton in 1995
Bill Clinton is not, and never was, part of the American left. He is a moderate economic and social conservative—all the prominent liberal figures in the Democratic Party took a pass on the 1992 primary expecting Bush to be unbeatable. Paul Tsongas was probably the closest thing to a left candidate in a major party primary in 1992 (he was at least a solid social liberal), but his campaign was hampered by health concerns regarding his cancer (which turned out to be not entirely misplaced.)
> To think that this was a speech by a Democrat president about 20 years ago is unfathomable to the left today.
Not any more than it was at the time; the left disliked Clinton during the primary in 1992, mostly saw him as the lesser of three evils in the general (though Perot’s anti-NAFTA stand got him some support from the left even though he was not in any way a left candidate), and attacked him mercilessly from 1993 on when it came to policy as most of his gestures toward the left in the campaign turned out to be hollow, and his health care reform foundered on exactly the grounds the left challenged it earlier: it was overly complex in pursuit of buy-in that wouldn't come anyway from corporate interests, when there was a strong public majority support for simple single-payer.
But seriously, this is exactly the sort of attitude and comment that gave us Trump as president. The idea that truth is relative was taught to the America public by the academy. Now you say that the academy is a place dedicated to the pursuit of "knowledge" and speak of the "value of fact" as if these are absolutes. But you do so just after talking about "consensus reality." Make up your mind. Either reality is defined by consensus or not.
If "consensus reality" isn't able to convince me that it will benefit me, why would I pursue it? And if "consensus reality" isn't even able to get enough consensus to keep Trump out of the White House, then you'll have to pardon me for laughing your "reality" right out the door.
You made your bed. Now you're lying in it and complaining that others won't join you.
Or perhaps it's simpler than that: a large swath of Americans unimpressed Hillary Clinton's largely uninteresting business-as-usual policies matching her husband's mildde-of-the-road governance with no real winners or interesting nuggets, up against the usual conservative base that will vote for just about anybody who claims loyalty with the Elephant (even if they don't really fit the profile, as Trump certainly did not).
How about everybody just stop coming up with hot takes on the election for five seconds. Your nitpick about the liberals in your life or sensationalized in the newspaper really did not matter. Sorry.
Because "you" (i.e. the right wing, in your analogy) can muster more votes from the political center than "they" can and can put into place governmental and economic policy that can disrupt or damage said "spaces dedicated dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge" greatly.
The ivory tower doesn't exist in a vacuum. Its gates can be besieged by the populace and it can fall to its besiegers.
This, extremely low, bar "elitist" as it may be is necessary to provide at least the bare minimum of protection against bad actors. People unwilling to change their view poison the space for all participants. The pursuit of an unmoderated ideal is a false one.
The problem is the gap between consensus reality and objective reality.
A lot of what the American left has been preaching recently (the Russia-Trump story, for instance) has no basis in objective reality, but people believe it because everyone else believes it. When a small number of large companies control almost the entirety of the media, it's not difficult to change consensus reality.
This claim has no basis in objective reality.
Collusion by Trump campaign with the Russian government is not an issue brought up by the left specifically (if anything, it's catnip for centrists; the left have bigger fish to fry), and that you're framing it as such makes me think you're using it as an excuse to ignore it.
Things like 3 million illegal aliens voted in California, or Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or John Podesta running a sex ring in the basement of a pizza parlor, are better examples of ideas fully divorced from objective reality.
The two clauses in this sentence are contradictory. You are claiming that conservatives are stupid because they reject the herd mentality.
Think about that.
> increasingly less welcome in spaces dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge.
Consensus reality is the opposite of the pursuit of knowledge. This is readily demonstrated by the decaying social trust in higher education.
the "consensus" gave them the Presidency, House and Senate
Edit: they were in place during Johnson's administration
This kind of justification doesn't help the already partisan environment and further encourages tribalism and defence of bad ideas.
The optics of the article makes it looks like "we don't like you, so we're going to hit you where it hurts", something that the constitution seeks to prevent(re: "tyranny of majority").
Freedom of speech suppression isn't exclusively a left problem as can be seen in the link below, I'd agree that it's more of a left problem than right: https://www.thefire.org/resources/disinvitation-database/
What we need is more debate not less, and taxing endownments isn't going to help that, I'm, not sure what will though either, people seemingly don't want to debate anymore.
Why shouldn't major universities pay their fair share to help society? Most of these elite universities literally pocket billions of dollars at the end of the fiscal year. Major universities have essentially evolved into corporations.
Universities exploit ridiculous student loan programs to make indentured servants out of their customers.
