The End of Being a Duke Professor and What It Means for the Future of Higher Ed

University is a place of learning as they say. An important thing to learn is how to exert power over those around you. One way of doing that is to leverage the irrationality of large institutions in your favor.

Large institutions, including whole countries, buy into different ideologies at different times. And so, to exert power over someone you just have to denounce them as not falling in line with the current ideology. You can then bet on the system "crushing" them so to speak without you lifting a finger.

In a communist totalitarian country, if you didn't like your neighbor's haircut, just tell the police they engaged in propaganda against the workers' party, and there is a good change their livelihood could get considerably worse. It just takes one phone call.

Want ruin someone's life in US today? Call child protective services and tell them you saw their kids playing unsupervised outside and you're "very worried" and hang up. Then watch them get house and work visits for quite a while.

Going back to the article at hand, I suspect there is a similar process happening in some of these cases. For every student actually feeling harmed by a professor like this, there is a student who realizes they can claim they are harmed, and then they can both eliminate the professor, and gain social standing points for "standing up" and "fighting against the system". Two birds with one stone so to speak. That is indeed a very important and valuable lesson to learn.

> Last April, I was informed that my contract would expire in one year—and was then assigned to teach two classes of the very same required Sanford course, one in the fall and one this spring, in which I supposedly had a tendency to harm students. If Sanford actually believed their own rhetoric, they would be guilty of knowingly endangering their students.

This is beautiful. Pure ideology at work. You can tell because of the ridiculous contradiction at play. Everyone in the game knows that the professor didn't harm anyone, otherwise why the heck would they ask him to teach another class. But they also know that they will suffer a similar fate if they don't fall in line.

It will only lead to a greater chilling effect as time goes on, and whereas great universities once taught the ability to critically consider the available information, they are rapidly reaching the point where they only serve to push people towards grossly limited and increasingly dogmatic world views.

In an increasingly polarised society it terrifies me that both of the the left and the right seem to consider liberty an enemy.

Future leaders in minority communities need to be able to defend themselves but learning to do it by firing academics on negative feedback feels like the wrong lesson. I'd rather they did it in a real ballot box, not in academia. The guy may be a complete dick, but I don't get the feeling he's David Duke or John Birch society stooge.