This is the dumbest possible solution to this problem, but I think if the Ivys were better at sports, they wouldn't be so all consuming. Duke is an Ivy-level school, and it's reputation is 95% built on having the douchiest basketball team in the country. Notre Dame is an elite college as well that is mostly known as Catholic America's football team.
...huh. Huh. You're right. I live in the midwest, not terribly far from Notre Dame (about a 2.5 hour drive) and you're right. I never hear the conservative people in my life anyone talk about ND (or Duke, or UNC) the way they talk about the Ivies.
That said, there's a weird dichotomy here, because the people I know complain about those Ivies, but they would absolutely not shut the fuck up if their kids got in there. Little bit of a Ted Cruz/Josh Hawley situation.
If you're a person following politics who is bewildered by why politics has suddenly started on this, it helps to learn two things.
First, higher education is a *very small-c conservative* industry that cares an enormous amount about what the top schools are doing so everyone can try and emulate its best practices as soon as possible. What happens at Harvard trickles down to everywhere else. Talk to a tenured professor at any big state or private college; many of them know someone who got a PhD at an Ivy or did so themselves. When Harvard starts doing something, the entire system of higher education that educates roughly half of all American young adults immediately follows. This is why lots of progressives care; what happens at Harvard matters a lot for their political vision.
In America, as opposed to Europe, our left tradition overlaps heavily with a homegrown idea of *progressivism.* Progressivism is far less interested in Marx/class analysis, and far more interested in education and social reform. Of course they care what happens at Harvard; it is their tradition to care about such things. They really do believe education can reform society and make the world a better place. That's why progressives overwhelmingly make up professors in these schools. Conservatives simply care more about taking up other careers. Even back when Harvard was Republican in the 1920s, it had a ton of self-described progressives!
The second critical thing to know is that the current president, President Biden, has effectively written a check of half a trillion dollars to higher education (a). If Biden wrote half a trillion in NFL season pass tickets, it would follow that Republican politicians would start dragging NFL people to Congress for some hearings. Republicans are obsessed with marginal middle class income. It is their party's defining trait through 150 years. Of course they are going to start asking questions about why we're spending an additional .5 trillion dollars on an industry with very few Republicans in it. They'd be pretty stupid if they didn't do this; the main reason people vote for them is to keep their taxes down and thus cost of living maintained or growing. In an industry where we publicly underwrite over a trillion in loans (b), the taxpayer is going to notice that policy since COVID is increasingly shoveling hundreds of billions of additional dollars here. That's money we cannot use for other things or keeping taxes down.
Knowing just these two critical factors of higher education and spending, it makes a lot of sense why America's center-right and center-left increasingly care about education, why center-left papers like the NYT cover the topic nonstop for their educated readers, and why this topic has steadily risen in interest over the last decade. Until Americans find a way to *publicly* spend less *federal* money on higher education as an industry, they will continue to obsess over what their money is doing. Biden has thrown more fuel on this fire, because he believes college is very important and in fiscal terms, is arguably obsessed with it and leads a party that wants to spend even more. Republicans have noticed, and will continue to find ways to engineer a public voter consensus to spend that kind of money on other things instead.
Okay, nobody should pay attention Harvard, but the rightwing grifter/activist complex that's at work here is really interesting. Like, this Politico interview with Rufo is absolutely the most morbidly funny and scary thing I've read this year (in the past three days):
Is it anything like that DB piece from 2017-18 that interviewed a rightwing troll about how 4chan-literate fascists was deliberately trying to associate the "ok" handsign (and lactose tolerance) with nazism in order to weaken racial justice movements, stir chaos, and recruit, because it worked out so well when they did the same thing to Pepe the Frog, and concluded that Pepe the Frog was correctly identified as a neonazi symbol?
This story isn't interesting to me because it relates to the Ivy League. I'm equally interested in any case where an activist is shown to be false, or DEI philosophy is shown to be organizationally toxic. That applies to Boeing, Disney, and GMU.
Perhaps YOU think everyone cares about this story because it's related to the Ivy League. Perhaps many people care for different reasons.
Arnold Kling:
"The litmus test is what one thinks Claudine Gray represents. For some, she represents only one person. Maybe Harvard slipped up a bit in hiring her as President, but otherwise it is fine. Or maybe she only has enemies on the right, and she is a martyr.
Cochrane and I (and others of our age and outlook) think that she represents nearly everything that has gone wrong with higher education. In the choices he lays out in the first paragraph quoted above, universities are choosing the first mission over the second. This is a top-to-bottom issue. It reflects the preferences of many of the faculty (although by no means all) and the preferences of many in the current generation of students. If there is a battle for the heart and soul of higher education, the forces of social justice activism are winning—arguably, they have completely won."
This story is so compelling to me because it's so rare. I KNOW (to a certainty) that there are many, many people in academia who have either built their careers or had theirs ruined (depending on their ideological valence) based on how well they reflected establishment narratives. There's too much of that kind of thing going on, and when I see a chink in the armor of the (failing) Leftist managerial elite I get excited. I don't give a shit about the Ivy League.
The role of the President of Harvard is to raise more money for Harvard. Because of the events of the past few weeks, she is no longer an effective fund-raiser. So she's gone. This is really all anyone needs to know.
On the one hand, Jeremiah Johnson is absolutely right that there has been way too much coverage of Claudine Gay as a Fundamentally Scandalous Figure, and basically all of that coverage has been based on bad faith behavior by Elise Stefanik, Chris Rufo, or other racist space fillers. (I should perhaps add that I'm not sure exactly how much coverage there has been in that mold, other than "more than zero". FSF journalism is presumptively damaging to the public square.)
On the other hand, I actually do kind of care about the way that academia has so thoroughly degenerated into a content mill that plagiarism, research fraud, and noise mining scandals involving the parts of academia most closely associated with government policy have become so commonplace as to reliably become part of the cable TV grift. To be clear, of course, this is a fact that *enables* idiot douchebags like Chris Rufo and David Barton (or James Somerton, for that matter), not a reason to trust them.
This is the dumbest possible solution to this problem, but I think if the Ivys were better at sports, they wouldn't be so all consuming. Duke is an Ivy-level school, and it's reputation is 95% built on having the douchiest basketball team in the country. Notre Dame is an elite college as well that is mostly known as Catholic America's football team.
I can't decide whether this idea is idiotic or brilliant, which means we should probably try it
We're they having these debates a century ago when Harvard-Yale had national title implications?
...huh. Huh. You're right. I live in the midwest, not terribly far from Notre Dame (about a 2.5 hour drive) and you're right. I never hear the conservative people in my life anyone talk about ND (or Duke, or UNC) the way they talk about the Ivies.
That said, there's a weird dichotomy here, because the people I know complain about those Ivies, but they would absolutely not shut the fuck up if their kids got in there. Little bit of a Ted Cruz/Josh Hawley situation.
If you're a person following politics who is bewildered by why politics has suddenly started on this, it helps to learn two things.
First, higher education is a *very small-c conservative* industry that cares an enormous amount about what the top schools are doing so everyone can try and emulate its best practices as soon as possible. What happens at Harvard trickles down to everywhere else. Talk to a tenured professor at any big state or private college; many of them know someone who got a PhD at an Ivy or did so themselves. When Harvard starts doing something, the entire system of higher education that educates roughly half of all American young adults immediately follows. This is why lots of progressives care; what happens at Harvard matters a lot for their political vision.
In America, as opposed to Europe, our left tradition overlaps heavily with a homegrown idea of *progressivism.* Progressivism is far less interested in Marx/class analysis, and far more interested in education and social reform. Of course they care what happens at Harvard; it is their tradition to care about such things. They really do believe education can reform society and make the world a better place. That's why progressives overwhelmingly make up professors in these schools. Conservatives simply care more about taking up other careers. Even back when Harvard was Republican in the 1920s, it had a ton of self-described progressives!
The second critical thing to know is that the current president, President Biden, has effectively written a check of half a trillion dollars to higher education (a). If Biden wrote half a trillion in NFL season pass tickets, it would follow that Republican politicians would start dragging NFL people to Congress for some hearings. Republicans are obsessed with marginal middle class income. It is their party's defining trait through 150 years. Of course they are going to start asking questions about why we're spending an additional .5 trillion dollars on an industry with very few Republicans in it. They'd be pretty stupid if they didn't do this; the main reason people vote for them is to keep their taxes down and thus cost of living maintained or growing. In an industry where we publicly underwrite over a trillion in loans (b), the taxpayer is going to notice that policy since COVID is increasingly shoveling hundreds of billions of additional dollars here. That's money we cannot use for other things or keeping taxes down.
Knowing just these two critical factors of higher education and spending, it makes a lot of sense why America's center-right and center-left increasingly care about education, why center-left papers like the NYT cover the topic nonstop for their educated readers, and why this topic has steadily risen in interest over the last decade. Until Americans find a way to *publicly* spend less *federal* money on higher education as an industry, they will continue to obsess over what their money is doing. Biden has thrown more fuel on this fire, because he believes college is very important and in fiscal terms, is arguably obsessed with it and leads a party that wants to spend even more. Republicans have noticed, and will continue to find ways to engineer a public voter consensus to spend that kind of money on other things instead.
(a) https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2023/7/17/biden-income-driven-repayment-budget-update
(b) https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-statistics/
Okay, nobody should pay attention Harvard, but the rightwing grifter/activist complex that's at work here is really interesting. Like, this Politico interview with Rufo is absolutely the most morbidly funny and scary thing I've read this year (in the past three days):
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/03/christopher-rufo-claudine-gay-harvard-resignation-00133618
Is it anything like that DB piece from 2017-18 that interviewed a rightwing troll about how 4chan-literate fascists was deliberately trying to associate the "ok" handsign (and lactose tolerance) with nazism in order to weaken racial justice movements, stir chaos, and recruit, because it worked out so well when they did the same thing to Pepe the Frog, and concluded that Pepe the Frog was correctly identified as a neonazi symbol?
#neverforget
This story isn't interesting to me because it relates to the Ivy League. I'm equally interested in any case where an activist is shown to be false, or DEI philosophy is shown to be organizationally toxic. That applies to Boeing, Disney, and GMU.
Perhaps YOU think everyone cares about this story because it's related to the Ivy League. Perhaps many people care for different reasons.
Arnold Kling:
"The litmus test is what one thinks Claudine Gray represents. For some, she represents only one person. Maybe Harvard slipped up a bit in hiring her as President, but otherwise it is fine. Or maybe she only has enemies on the right, and she is a martyr.
Cochrane and I (and others of our age and outlook) think that she represents nearly everything that has gone wrong with higher education. In the choices he lays out in the first paragraph quoted above, universities are choosing the first mission over the second. This is a top-to-bottom issue. It reflects the preferences of many of the faculty (although by no means all) and the preferences of many in the current generation of students. If there is a battle for the heart and soul of higher education, the forces of social justice activism are winning—arguably, they have completely won."
This story is so compelling to me because it's so rare. I KNOW (to a certainty) that there are many, many people in academia who have either built their careers or had theirs ruined (depending on their ideological valence) based on how well they reflected establishment narratives. There's too much of that kind of thing going on, and when I see a chink in the armor of the (failing) Leftist managerial elite I get excited. I don't give a shit about the Ivy League.
The role of the President of Harvard is to raise more money for Harvard. Because of the events of the past few weeks, she is no longer an effective fund-raiser. So she's gone. This is really all anyone needs to know.
I'm kind of torn on this.
On the one hand, Jeremiah Johnson is absolutely right that there has been way too much coverage of Claudine Gay as a Fundamentally Scandalous Figure, and basically all of that coverage has been based on bad faith behavior by Elise Stefanik, Chris Rufo, or other racist space fillers. (I should perhaps add that I'm not sure exactly how much coverage there has been in that mold, other than "more than zero". FSF journalism is presumptively damaging to the public square.)
On the other hand, I actually do kind of care about the way that academia has so thoroughly degenerated into a content mill that plagiarism, research fraud, and noise mining scandals involving the parts of academia most closely associated with government policy have become so commonplace as to reliably become part of the cable TV grift. To be clear, of course, this is a fact that *enables* idiot douchebags like Chris Rufo and David Barton (or James Somerton, for that matter), not a reason to trust them.
See, eg:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2017/01/30/no-guru-no-method-no-teacher-just-nature-garden-forking-paths/
http://datacolada.org/113
And somewhere, Hope Hicks looks down at her notebook, finds 'Claudine Gay', and crosses another name off her list.
...the internet has poisoned my brain.