Not true, at least on social issues, which is what the universities are getting burned for. Policy positions that were mainstream in 2000 are now painted as far-right.
That's how society progresses though. Before 1865, slavery was mainstream and abolitionists were weird radical crazies. Before 1965, "Jim Crow" laws that said non-whites had to use different bathrooms and drinking fountains were mainstream, and people who opposed them were seen as unreasonable.
And back in the 1960s a planned economy was normal and reasonable, and many progressives openly called for normalisation of sex with teenagers. Sometimes shifts in attitudes are progress. Sometimes they're just a random walk. Sometimes the left is right, sometimes the right is.
Also to some degree there is anti-elitist backlash after being told you need to have a bachelor's, which is very expensive at these universities, but also it's basically impossible to get an entry-level white collar job without one these days; and for a while the economy bifurcated with different outcomes for white-collar knowledge vs. blue-collar workers.
And this anti elitist backlash will lead to… greater wealth inequality as the middle class is forced to cash out their equity and investments in a down market to be gobbled up by the top 1% like Elon Musk.
While I know this, I will say there is a communication issue in which sneering and lecturing is not really an effective way to persuade others.
The government never prevented anyone from speaking. Free speech was not violated when assholes were banned from platforms for being assholes. The owners of those platforms are not the government. https://leftycartoons.com/2018/08/01/i-have-been-silenced/
Read the Twitter files. The government was actively involved in censorship. Zuckerberg has also stated the FBI was demanding certain posts be removed / demoted, users shadow banned, etc. The CIA also infiltrates and subverts many organizations and platforms. Wouldn't be surprised if they operate here, they've definitely been manipulating Reddit for at least the past decade.
You wouldn't have to keep referencing a tenuous connection in The Twitter Files (cue: X-Files theme music) if you came around to seeing government and corpos as quite similar creatures on a spectrum of coercion rather than as completely disjoint and disparate things.
So called "conservatives" were soooo close to being able to have this realization before they regained the power of the government, vested it all in a unitary execuking, and went back to seeing that extraconstitutional coercion as a feature (like many "progressives" had for ~10 years or so).
There are some reasons that I think you probably know, which don't receive enough time and attention 1) Despite an appearance of being "left leaning" (according to polls of faculty political sentiment) they continue to gatekeep education behind prohibitively expensive tuition that is out of reach of lower economic strata without crippling debt, and have simultaneously struggled to produce graduates whose economic dif…
I have multiple family members that are frustrated with higher learning because their children came out of the system more liberal-minded than when they entered. In this politically divided climate they feel like the university system “stole” their children from them. In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.
> In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.
I think this probably the case as well. If I look back at how my own views shifted, the shift very likely would’ve happened regardless of if I’d attended university, assuming everything else was the same. It wasn’t the university that resulted in the shift as much as it was my getting out of my local bubble out into the world and experiencing it for myself.
Basically any kind of life experience that brings a young person to actually think and more deeply consider the world around them is likely to result in some level of individuation and shift away from inherited views. It’s perfectly natural and healthy.
There's a highly emotional Right-Left culture war going on in America. Many of our "flagship" universities conspicuously sided with the Left - at least on most of the "litmus test" issues. And where universities didn't do that, the Right found it advantageous to talk up the association & outrage anyway. Any decent History Prof. could have explained to the U's that openly taking one side in long-term cultural wars was…
Billionaires shifted the overton window by pouring money into extreme right-wing media outlets and social media platforms. Every other existing institution now appears "left-wing" by comparison. That's not universities' fault.
Honestly man since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the left in the US threw their whole weight into pushing the Overton window on identity politics/intersectionality to the point that "real" old time leftists and communists (like my father) were treated like some sort of conservatives, lol. They went way past the sustainable point.
There are some reasons that I think you probably know, which don't receive enough time and attention 1) Despite an appearance of being "left leaning" (according to polls of faculty political sentiment) they continue to gatekeep education behind prohibitively expensive tuition that is out of reach of lower economic strata without crippling debt, and have simultaneously struggled to produce graduates whose economic dif…
I have multiple family members that are frustrated with higher learning because their children came out of the system more liberal-minded than when they entered. In this politically divided climate they feel like the university system “stole” their children from them. In reality I don’t think people’s political opinions change very much and they are just mad that their children individuated.
People's political opinions definitely change, especially with age and wealth.
Regardless of your stance on affirmative action, it should be very suspicious that all prestigious universities implemented it until it was banned while support in the general population is mixed.
I'm not sure how that follows. Do elite universities typically track the general population?
There are some reasons that I think you probably know, which don't receive enough time and attention 1) Despite an appearance of being "left leaning" (according to polls of faculty political sentiment) they continue to gatekeep education behind prohibitively expensive tuition that is out of reach of lower economic strata without crippling debt, and have simultaneously struggled to produce graduates whose economic dif…
Also to some degree there is anti-elitist backlash after being told you need to have a bachelor's, which is very expensive at these universities, but also it's basically impossible to get an entry-level white collar job without one these days; and for a while the economy bifurcated with different outcomes for white-collar knowledge vs. blue-collar workers.
60% of the US workforce these days is white collar, and it's one of the great illusions of our time. Most of these jobs only exist to keep busy the 60% of the US workforce that has a degree. In the 1940's about 30% of the US workforce was white collar and only 5% had degrees. What caused this change? It's probably because blue collar workers made so much money and had so much leverage that businesses shipped all their jobs overseas. Blue collar people actually make real things and perform useful toil for society, whereas now they're working fake jobs for less money which they're told has higher social status. It's genius the way the system works. The way it takes from people (student loans, less pay) while persuading them they got a better deal. But how can you have a society where the majority of workers are administrators? Well you needn't look any further than America to find your answer. One day the music is going to stop and other nations, like China, whose workers held no such delusions of grandeur, will have the advantage. Their illusion is that the government is a dictatorship of proles, which makes people think it's high status to be a prole. Plus when your government is officially one big labor union, you can effectively ban unions from interfering with production.
The last year and a half in particular has exposed just what a sham the academic freedom fo colleges really is. We've always heard that the college tenure system encourages freedom of expression and academic freedom without the pressure of potential job loss. Instead what we have iscollege professors and administrations who move is absolute lockstep and have acted like jack-booted Gestapos to crush and punish First A…
This is why I always have and always will prefer community colleges. Their boards are elected officials. Not perfect, but 1000 times better than just having wealth.
Election is a bad way to choose almost anything. The enthusiasm of Americans for adding yet more elected roles rather than, say, having anything done by anybody competent is part of how they got here. The only place elections are even a plausible choice is political office - with an election and as close as you can to universal suffrage now the idiots running things are everybody's fault, although Americans even mana…
democracy is bad but its still better than more autocratic systems because it encourages change which keeps succession well-oiled and also acts as a vent for tyranny to curtail its worst excesses. This applies as much to politics as it does a school board.