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Previous Gallup polling found that Democrats expressed concern about the costs, while Republicans registered concern about politics in higher education. I thin

Previous Gallup polling found that Democrats expressed concern about the costs, while Republicans registered concern about politics in higher education. I think both parties are right. The cost of a university education has skyrocketed, which I believe is due to bloated administration. However, what has also occurred is a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views. I went to university 20 years ago, and it was common for people to challenge one another, regardless of their views, and not get punished for it. You can't seem to do that anymore, at least safely and without punishment. If you can't challenge your professors, can't challenge one another, are you learning or just being indoctrinated?

polishdude20 3y ago
"can't challenge your professors" Seems more like nowadays it's "if you can't be challenged by your professor"
- lupusreal 3y ago
  [dead]
- slackfan 3y ago
  It's both.
  - alpinisme 3y ago
    It’s absolutely not. The balance of power has shifted toward the students in recent years (for better or worse). If a professor is able to “punish” “contrarian views,” it is only to the extent that the rest of the students get behind it. But I also think the punished views are at most socially punished in all but outlier cases. Having worked in higher ed for a bit and then transitioned into tech, I can say that students are over quick (on both left and right) to chalk up a bad score (read: “b” when I thought I deserved an “a”) to a biased attitude toward content rather than a substantive objection to the quality of argument. One thing that is true of humans in general: we will more easily find the holes in the arguments we disagree with, and what’s more, most students have similar ish ideas (especially the “contrarian” ones), so after two years of teaching a class on (say) the history of the civil war or gender in 18th century literature, the arguments are going to be familiar enough that you can just pattern match on them.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
    It's more than that. And it's not just a "last 20 years thing", it probably goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, if not before. There is a subtle selection bias going on. Like-minded people congregate together. A college professor will favor students who are agreeable to his politics, and will offer encouragement and extra effort. Those students are likely to go into academia themselves (and those who don't act as casual/amateur recruiters out in the private sector, to that university and even to the professor). Balances shift, glacially. At some point, it becomes perceptible enough that some students actively avoid those professors, programs, and universities. It's polarized (the polarization was noted decades ago, before our current mess). The side that favors this process gives its biggest shit-eating grin, says that there is no such thing, and if there is, isn't it the other side's fault? The other side grumbles about how they're just indoctrinating kids (and you can find evidence of the grumbling going back at least through the 1960s, but picking up steam in the 1980s). It's very real. It's not a good situation. It's not very "diverse". It leads to warped perception from both camps. One now thinks it is the champion of reason and logic, of science (and it's not). The other side grows to distrust those very same things (we'll all feel the damage from that, if it's not already happening). And there isn't really any good fix to this.
    - UncleMeat 3y ago
      Picking up steam in the 80s? God and Man at Yale was published in 1951. Red Scare nonsense got lots of faculty members fired for being communist sympathizers in the 50s. Students were shot and killed by the national guard in the 60s.
      - slackfan 3y ago
        The fun thing is that none of that makes claim that they weren't communist sympathizers. Saying anything about bad regarding soviet internment camps was likely to get you some very funny looks in more than a few circles well into the 80s. The people that knew about them, and knew how things were over in the USSR would literally drop down to a whisper when discussing these things at the dinner table even in private company. Was it right to fire the professors? Debatable. Were they communist sympathizers? Most likely, considering the influence of the USCP and the money that Moscow was pumping into it. Remember, until the late 40s, or even the early 60s, Socialism, and it's final "logical conclusion" Communism was regarded as potentially sound political and economic theory by a majority of intellectuals, and most definitely Hollywood. (To be fair, Hollywood was pretty staunchly pro-soviet from the 20s onwards).
apwell23 3y ago
> which I believe is due to bloated administration this is just a symptom not the cause. Its not like they hired a lot of admins by accident.
- bequanna 3y ago
  There must be some “law of bureaucratic empire building” that discusses the inevitable headcount bloat caused by no accountability and ever increasing budgets.
  - RationPhantoms 3y ago
    It's not that hard to see parallels between economies with near-zero interest rates and academic institutions that have an equal almost-unlimited money supply with near-zero risk (one cannot get rid of student debt in bankruptcy court). Unchecked growth for sure.
    - apwell23 3y ago
      yea exactly. Saying admin or the new gym is the root cause doesn't make sense.
- Method-X 3y ago
  Are you saying the bloated administration in a symptom of the political and social indoctrination going on in Universities? That's interesting. Can you elaborate?
  - pauldenton 3y ago
    Yes. These administrators are not teaching classes, they are not marking papers/exams. It's not unlike the Soviet Commissariat. They exist to enforce a political ideology, not do anything productive in reality.
  - panzagl 3y ago
    Presumably they mean that universities now hire lots of 'Deans of Politically Correct Thing' whereas when I went to school 30 years ago we had basically 1 dean per college.
addicted 3y ago
The political aspect is obviously not true relative to the past. The post WW, Cold War era was marked by the federal government, senators and intelligence agencies literally maintaining lists of “communists” that were blackballed almost entirely. Oppenheimer was released only recently, a movie which is all about how a tenuous communist connection led to the demise of the career of among the most famous scientists in WW2. Students were famously killed for protests in Berkeley just a few decades ago. And it’s only been a few decades that anyone but a white man was even allowed on campus. The idea that speech on campus is anyways more restricted than it has been in the past is ridiculous on its face. The idea that speech on campus is censored any more than in the past is very clearly not true. What might have changed is either the groups of people whose speech is curtailed has changed slightly, but more likely, you tend to hear a lot more about it because of social media.
- somenameforme 3y ago
  In the past students were not only for free speech, but actively fought for it. By contrast older individuals tended to be less supportive of such. Now those roles have largely swapped where age is, by far, the biggest predictor of somebody's position on freedom of speech (younger = less). And so the widespread censorship on college campuses is met with relatively little opposition. If there's a protest related to speech on college campuses now a days it's more like to be calling for more censorship, or cancelling somebody who said something perceived as offensive, rather than opposition to such behaviors. Hence one of the many reasons confidence in higher education is collapsing. In my mind higher education with censorship is teetering on being an oxymoron.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    The "widespread censorship" is not widespread. The number of "attempted disinvitations" (not even actual disinvitations) is not even visible on a chart of invited speakers at college campuses across time.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
matthewdgreen 3y ago
I think the people concerned about the price of college are basing their opinions on actual contact with the educational system: they generally have kids and paying for education is a serious challenge most families face. I wonder how many of the “college is politically intolerant” opinions are based on actual student dissatisfaction, and how much of that is based on sensational news reporting? (The same news reporting that has half of America convinced that you’ll be cut down by gunfire five minutes after arriving in any American city.) My experience from having conservative friends with kids in college is that the kids are mostly concerned with work and having a good time, and the parents are mostly concerned that their kids will develop bad thought patterns.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  Yep there's a baffling disconnect between widespread reporting on college "intolerance" and the reality. "Coddling of the American Mind" has a lot of mindshare but cites stupendously low numbers of "attempted disinvitations" as evidence of widespread left wing intolerance among students while moving the discussion right past actual nazi groups flyering Evergreen College and sending death threats to students. My alma mater is the University of Virginia. A wealthy conservative was so incensed by a sign saying "Fuck UVA" on a lawn dorm room that he went to campus to physically tear it down. This man was later appointed to the university Board of Visitors by the governor. My wife is a professor at a different university. There are groups of trained reactionary students who very carefully harass some of her colleagues and friends for being trans, for teaching african american history, and for teaching climate science in ways that ride right up against the edge of legal protection. 18 year olds don't know how to do this without help. If universities are commie monocultures, then why would these things be happening? And surely if universities were commie monocultures, we'd see the boogeyman departments like history and gender studies getting all the funding they want when what I actually see is these departments being completely unable to hire and all of the growth going to computer science programs.
  - tomrod 3y ago
    I think perhaps the grandparent commentator MUST be referencing the right-wing founding of alternative universities due to their anger that their worldview doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Surely they aren't supporting the notion that universities are commie monocultures.
mjburgess 3y ago
I think the misunderstanding here is that there is no campaign of 'indoctrination' -- rather both are caused by the same phenomenon. As universities increasingly operate like businesses, their administrations create business cultures -- stage-managed PR, no 'offense', etc. The issue in both cases is that universities are supposed to operate outside usual market forces and be run for the sake of inquiry, to the (very long run) benefit of society. There's a lot of irony in right wing people decrying allegedly 'left wing' campus policies which are none other than the symptom of applications of a right wing economic agenda. Such is the irony always here with market solutions proffered by people with values: market mechanisms do not operate on values; and without regulatory floors, tend to dispense with them rapidly. This is what has happened to universities over the last decade: the throwing away of high-risk, low-(market)-reward institutional values
renewiltord 3y ago
A lot of the complaints about cancel culture actually come from the ability to challenge one’s lecturers.
bo1024 3y ago
You've been out of university 20 years. Is it possible your impression of today's university experience is biased by "the media", i.e. whatever makes for the most clickbait headlines?
notaustinpowers 3y ago
I agree with both, but the "indoctrination" isn't some liberal political plot for censorship. Because colleges are not educational institutions, they are investment businesses first and foremost with a side gig as a research institution that just so happens to teach people. They're going to censor any reputationally damaging speech like any and every business in the US. It just so happens that a lot of the right-wing talking points aren't attractive to a left-leaning student body. It's all brand protection, and we see that now with a lot of colleges struggling to find a way to handle campus talks, orgs, and protests about the Israel-Palestine conflict since the public left-leaning response is not lining up with the political left-leaning response.
LeanderK 3y ago
I finished my masters quite recently and this has not been my experience, although I'm german. I wonder if you have real experience or if it's just what you've read/heard? Because if you've ever taken any social science/philosophy seminars, they don't do anything else then arguing. Arguing about texts, arguing about each others opinions etc. Also arguing against the professors opinion. I don't agree at all about the indoctrination part. The idea to keep politics and higher education separate is laughable. You either create engineers without ANY exposure to social issues or you have politics in higher ed. Having political opinions is not doing science but trying to find scientific evidence is.
tomrod 3y ago
> However, what has also occurred is a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views. There is a world of difference between a "campaign of political and social indoctrination" and "worldview that doesn't hold up to the barest of scrutiny." Unless you're referencing the clear bias in universities in the US founded by GOP folks upset their particular indoctrination (religious or political)doesn't stand up to scrutiny, then not that were there were an organized campaign of political and social indoctrination for leftists that academics would lead the charge to attack it and get funding to both study it and find alternatives to it. Turns out when you encourage people to think for themselves they do.
- pauldenton 3y ago
  In many US colleges you have more Registered Communists, than Registered Republicans teaching classes
  - tomrod 3y ago
    Therefore, what? Two possible options among the universe of options: - The count of ideological voices somehow prevents minority views from publishing their views across the millions of venues? - Could it be that Registered Republican voices are few because the worldview doesn't stand up to scrutiny?
SantalBlush 3y ago
Education is indoctrination. [0][1] It is what you sign up for when you take a course. It is trivial to reject the principles of any college course on legitimate grounds; for one thing, you can just reject the axioms. Some degree of belief is required to accept any form of human knowledge. Maybe the problem is that indoctrination often goes beyond the scope of the course. If that is indeed happening, many would agree that it should stop. [0] Merriam-Webster: Indoctrinate: 1 : to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle 2 : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH [1] Wikipedia: Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or professional methodologies (see doctrine).
dougb5 3y ago
Can you say more about what you've observed around "can't challenge your professors"? My professor friends would all be delighted to be challenged more in class. (The problem they're having now, especially post-Covid, is more often lack of engagement from their students.) And my memory of college from 30 years ago is that the debate about what we now call "cancel culture" was just as fraught; it's just that it was called something different by US conservatives back then: "political correctness".
jrockway 3y ago
I also went to university 20 years ago, and don't really remember challenging professors or other classmates. You largely showed up to the huge lectures, turned in your solved problems, and took exams. The oddest experience I remember having was that we used US units in the thermodynamics class, which was a first for me (high school science was all metric). I also paid $750/semester because it was a state school and I was a resident. I really don't understand what people think goes on at universities. Sure, some students in their personal time have controversial takes on things. The vast majority of students are just doing their coursework, though. (And things are probably different if you are going for a more liberal arts-y education instead of a state-school engineering degree.)
clusterhacks 3y ago
"which I believe is due to bloated administration." In my state's public university system, the amount of funding provided by the state to that system per full-time equivalent student has dropped to its lowest level (in 2017 according to the source I checked) since 1995. So the state commitment to funding is lower on a per-student basis. Universities have responded by raising tuition and other costs. All of those facts mean that the real, out-of-pocket cost to students has gone up. Looking at what information I can find on staff counts, the flagship state university data report in 1999/2000 shows a "grand total" of 10,000ish employees and a quick web search shows 13,000ish in 2023. I think we would have to slice and dice those numbers much better to see what the actual cost differences were for those two time periods. The number of students seems to have grown to about 128% of 1999/2000 total enrollment numbers to today's total. There is a deeper discussion to be had about the policy of funding state universities. Polls like the article show all segments of the public surveyed have declining confidence in higher education. That suggests to me that in general, people will be less inclined to have tax dollars invested into the public university system because they may see it as wasteful or not efficient. There is some much to unpack around universities and cost . . . and, of course, private university tuition costs have exploded. Although at those types of institutions, I think many non-name-brand (or non-ivy-ish) schools have a very high "sticker" cost that maybe no students actually pay . . .
NovemberWhiskey 3y ago
>The cost of a university education has skyrocketed Citation required ... the headline prices for colleges have gone up considerably, but so has the amount of scholarship and grant funding (i.e. universities discounting from publicly advertised prices). In fact, the average net cost-of-attendance (including tuition, fees, housing and food) for private, four-year colleges in the US is - in inflation-adjusted dollars - slightly lower now than it was in 2006-07 and has been trending down since 2016-17. This is also the reason why annual student loan borrowing peaked in 2010-11 (again, in inflation adjusted dollars), has been reducing year-on-year, and is now down over 35% since then. People obsess over the headline prices, which are almost never the prices actually paid. Any kind of sensible comparison has to be done on the basis of actual net cost-of-attendance. ref. https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%202023.pdf https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%...
stillwithit 3y ago
Where are you going to go? Who are you going to work with? Is there some place off Earth away from all these lessers you have to slum it with? What puts you above the other billions on the planet that they should validate your sensibilities and engage in vacuous rhetorical debate when we can all clearly see how day to day life works? Really tired of the puerile role play output of Karens, Special Boys, “free thinkers”. This planet and day to day is it. You’re not that smart or saying anything that novel.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
GenericPoster 3y ago
> are you learning or just being indoctrinated? This is such a strange comment and is so removed from my lived experience that I question whether its even real. Where is this indoctrination happening? The vast majority of my classes were dedicated to learning the subject and there was rarely any room for deviation. Especially not deviation that turned to religion or politics. Even when discussing religious texts in my philosophy classes, it was through the lens of an academic. The same way that we discussed plato and aristotle. There was open discussion and if the conversation turned aggressive or wasn't going anywhere it was quickly shut down. We all had a curriculum to follow and certain debates can be taken anywhere or happen outside of class. If you wanted to challenge your professors, it was about your grade and that was usually done during office hours. Professors are humans and they all have their quirks but I didn't experience anything out of the norm while talking to them or hearing about their interaction with others. As for challenging each other, I think we did more learning from each other than anything else and our opinions did change over time but that's not indoctrination, just part of growing up. You say you went to university 20 years ago but did you end up going back afterwards? If so, what are the differences you've personally noticed?
giovannibonetti 3y ago
> I think both parties are right. The cost of a university education has skyrocketed, which I believe is due to bloated administration. I think you're mistaking the how for the why. Prices raise as long as customers tolerate it, often for lack of competition — e.g. the low number of prestigious universities to land a good job. They raise costs through bloated administration, but if customers simply stopped paying, they would be forced to become more efficient and spend less on that. In fact, giving students more options to pay tuition over time indirectly increases prices, since they become capable of paying more — hence taking more debt — than they would otherwise.
skywhopper 3y ago
I think your view of current state of higher ed is distorted by the media you consume, and what stories make click-worthy headlines. Students challenge their professors all the time, probably more than they did 20 years ago. Just because certain news outlets and social media make sure you hear about a handful of students who had a bad time with one professor, often because they themselves were picking a fight rather than trying to have a fair conversation. But those stories have always happened. And likewise there's plenty of healthy discourse in college classrooms that you don't hear about or experience, since you aren't actually in college.

polishdude20 3y ago

"can't challenge your professors" Seems more like nowadays it's "if you can't be challenged by your professor"

lupusreal 3y ago
[dead]
slackfan 3y ago
It's both.
- alpinisme 3y ago
  It’s absolutely not. The balance of power has shifted toward the students in recent years (for better or worse). If a professor is able to “punish” “contrarian views,” it is only to the extent that the rest of the students get behind it. But I also think the punished views are at most socially punished in all but outlier cases. Having worked in higher ed for a bit and then transitioned into tech, I can say that students are over quick (on both left and right) to chalk up a bad score (read: “b” when I thought I deserved an “a”) to a biased attitude toward content rather than a substantive objection to the quality of argument. One thing that is true of humans in general: we will more easily find the holes in the arguments we disagree with, and what’s more, most students have similar ish ideas (especially the “contrarian” ones), so after two years of teaching a class on (say) the history of the civil war or gender in 18th century literature, the arguments are going to be familiar enough that you can just pattern match on them.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  It's more than that. And it's not just a "last 20 years thing", it probably goes back to the beginning of the 20th century, if not before. There is a subtle selection bias going on. Like-minded people congregate together. A college professor will favor students who are agreeable to his politics, and will offer encouragement and extra effort. Those students are likely to go into academia themselves (and those who don't act as casual/amateur recruiters out in the private sector, to that university and even to the professor). Balances shift, glacially. At some point, it becomes perceptible enough that some students actively avoid those professors, programs, and universities. It's polarized (the polarization was noted decades ago, before our current mess). The side that favors this process gives its biggest shit-eating grin, says that there is no such thing, and if there is, isn't it the other side's fault? The other side grumbles about how they're just indoctrinating kids (and you can find evidence of the grumbling going back at least through the 1960s, but picking up steam in the 1980s). It's very real. It's not a good situation. It's not very "diverse". It leads to warped perception from both camps. One now thinks it is the champion of reason and logic, of science (and it's not). The other side grows to distrust those very same things (we'll all feel the damage from that, if it's not already happening). And there isn't really any good fix to this.
  - UncleMeat 3y ago
    Picking up steam in the 80s? God and Man at Yale was published in 1951. Red Scare nonsense got lots of faculty members fired for being communist sympathizers in the 50s. Students were shot and killed by the national guard in the 60s.
    - slackfan 3y ago
      The fun thing is that none of that makes claim that they weren't communist sympathizers. Saying anything about bad regarding soviet internment camps was likely to get you some very funny looks in more than a few circles well into the 80s. The people that knew about them, and knew how things were over in the USSR would literally drop down to a whisper when discussing these things at the dinner table even in private company. Was it right to fire the professors? Debatable. Were they communist sympathizers? Most likely, considering the influence of the USCP and the money that Moscow was pumping into it. Remember, until the late 40s, or even the early 60s, Socialism, and it's final "logical conclusion" Communism was regarded as potentially sound political and economic theory by a majority of intellectuals, and most definitely Hollywood. (To be fair, Hollywood was pretty staunchly pro-soviet from the 20s onwards).

apwell23 3y ago

> which I believe is due to bloated administration this is just a symptom not the cause. Its not like they hired a lot of admins by accident.

bequanna 3y ago
There must be some “law of bureaucratic empire building” that discusses the inevitable headcount bloat caused by no accountability and ever increasing budgets.
- RationPhantoms 3y ago
  It's not that hard to see parallels between economies with near-zero interest rates and academic institutions that have an equal almost-unlimited money supply with near-zero risk (one cannot get rid of student debt in bankruptcy court). Unchecked growth for sure.
  - apwell23 3y ago
    yea exactly. Saying admin or the new gym is the root cause doesn't make sense.
Method-X 3y ago
Are you saying the bloated administration in a symptom of the political and social indoctrination going on in Universities? That's interesting. Can you elaborate?
- pauldenton 3y ago
  Yes. These administrators are not teaching classes, they are not marking papers/exams. It's not unlike the Soviet Commissariat. They exist to enforce a political ideology, not do anything productive in reality.
- panzagl 3y ago
  Presumably they mean that universities now hire lots of 'Deans of Politically Correct Thing' whereas when I went to school 30 years ago we had basically 1 dean per college.

addicted 3y ago

The political aspect is obviously not true relative to the past. The post WW, Cold War era was marked by the federal government, senators and intelligence agencies literally maintaining lists of “communists” that were blackballed almost entirely. Oppenheimer was released only recently, a movie which is all about how a tenuous communist connection led to the demise of the career of among the most famous scientists in WW2. Students were famously killed for protests in Berkeley just a few decades ago. And it’s only been a few decades that anyone but a white man was even allowed on campus. The idea that speech on campus is anyways more restricted than it has been in the past is ridiculous on its face. The idea that speech on campus is censored any more than in the past is very clearly not true. What might have changed is either the groups of people whose speech is curtailed has changed slightly, but more likely, you tend to hear a lot more about it because of social media.

somenameforme 3y ago
In the past students were not only for free speech, but actively fought for it. By contrast older individuals tended to be less supportive of such. Now those roles have largely swapped where age is, by far, the biggest predictor of somebody's position on freedom of speech (younger = less). And so the widespread censorship on college campuses is met with relatively little opposition. If there's a protest related to speech on college campuses now a days it's more like to be calling for more censorship, or cancelling somebody who said something perceived as offensive, rather than opposition to such behaviors. Hence one of the many reasons confidence in higher education is collapsing. In my mind higher education with censorship is teetering on being an oxymoron.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  The "widespread censorship" is not widespread. The number of "attempted disinvitations" (not even actual disinvitations) is not even visible on a chart of invited speakers at college campuses across time.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

matthewdgreen 3y ago

I think the people concerned about the price of college are basing their opinions on actual contact with the educational system: they generally have kids and paying for education is a serious challenge most families face. I wonder how many of the “college is politically intolerant” opinions are based on actual student dissatisfaction, and how much of that is based on sensational news reporting? (The same news reporting that has half of America convinced that you’ll be cut down by gunfire five minutes after arriving in any American city.) My experience from having conservative friends with kids in college is that the kids are mostly concerned with work and having a good time, and the parents are mostly concerned that their kids will develop bad thought patterns.

UncleMeat 3y ago
Yep there's a baffling disconnect between widespread reporting on college "intolerance" and the reality. "Coddling of the American Mind" has a lot of mindshare but cites stupendously low numbers of "attempted disinvitations" as evidence of widespread left wing intolerance among students while moving the discussion right past actual nazi groups flyering Evergreen College and sending death threats to students. My alma mater is the University of Virginia. A wealthy conservative was so incensed by a sign saying "Fuck UVA" on a lawn dorm room that he went to campus to physically tear it down. This man was later appointed to the university Board of Visitors by the governor. My wife is a professor at a different university. There are groups of trained reactionary students who very carefully harass some of her colleagues and friends for being trans, for teaching african american history, and for teaching climate science in ways that ride right up against the edge of legal protection. 18 year olds don't know how to do this without help. If universities are commie monocultures, then why would these things be happening? And surely if universities were commie monocultures, we'd see the boogeyman departments like history and gender studies getting all the funding they want when what I actually see is these departments being completely unable to hire and all of the growth going to computer science programs.
- tomrod 3y ago
  I think perhaps the grandparent commentator MUST be referencing the right-wing founding of alternative universities due to their anger that their worldview doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Surely they aren't supporting the notion that universities are commie monocultures.

mjburgess 3y ago

I think the misunderstanding here is that there is no campaign of 'indoctrination' -- rather both are caused by the same phenomenon. As universities increasingly operate like businesses, their administrations create business cultures -- stage-managed PR, no 'offense', etc. The issue in both cases is that universities are supposed to operate outside usual market forces and be run for the sake of inquiry, to the (very long run) benefit of society. There's a lot of irony in right wing people decrying allegedly 'left wing' campus policies which are none other than the symptom of applications of a right wing economic agenda. Such is the irony always here with market solutions proffered by people with values: market mechanisms do not operate on values; and without regulatory floors, tend to dispense with them rapidly. This is what has happened to universities over the last decade: the throwing away of high-risk, low-(market)-reward institutional values

renewiltord 3y ago

A lot of the complaints about cancel culture actually come from the ability to challenge one’s lecturers.

bo1024 3y ago

You've been out of university 20 years. Is it possible your impression of today's university experience is biased by "the media", i.e. whatever makes for the most clickbait headlines?

notaustinpowers 3y ago

I agree with both, but the "indoctrination" isn't some liberal political plot for censorship. Because colleges are not educational institutions, they are investment businesses first and foremost with a side gig as a research institution that just so happens to teach people. They're going to censor any reputationally damaging speech like any and every business in the US. It just so happens that a lot of the right-wing talking points aren't attractive to a left-leaning student body. It's all brand protection, and we see that now with a lot of colleges struggling to find a way to handle campus talks, orgs, and protests about the Israel-Palestine conflict since the public left-leaning response is not lining up with the political left-leaning response.

LeanderK 3y ago

I finished my masters quite recently and this has not been my experience, although I'm german. I wonder if you have real experience or if it's just what you've read/heard? Because if you've ever taken any social science/philosophy seminars, they don't do anything else then arguing. Arguing about texts, arguing about each others opinions etc. Also arguing against the professors opinion. I don't agree at all about the indoctrination part. The idea to keep politics and higher education separate is laughable. You either create engineers without ANY exposure to social issues or you have politics in higher ed. Having political opinions is not doing science but trying to find scientific evidence is.

tomrod 3y ago

> However, what has also occurred is a campaign of political and social indoctrination, and censorship of contrarian views. There is a world of difference between a "campaign of political and social indoctrination" and "worldview that doesn't hold up to the barest of scrutiny." Unless you're referencing the clear bias in universities in the US founded by GOP folks upset their particular indoctrination (religious or political)doesn't stand up to scrutiny, then not that were there were an organized campaign of political and social indoctrination for leftists that academics would lead the charge to attack it and get funding to both study it and find alternatives to it. Turns out when you encourage people to think for themselves they do.

pauldenton 3y ago
In many US colleges you have more Registered Communists, than Registered Republicans teaching classes
- tomrod 3y ago
  Therefore, what? Two possible options among the universe of options: - The count of ideological voices somehow prevents minority views from publishing their views across the millions of venues? - Could it be that Registered Republican voices are few because the worldview doesn't stand up to scrutiny?

SantalBlush 3y ago

Education is indoctrination. [0][1] It is what you sign up for when you take a course. It is trivial to reject the principles of any college course on legitimate grounds; for one thing, you can just reject the axioms. Some degree of belief is required to accept any form of human knowledge. Maybe the problem is that indoctrination often goes beyond the scope of the course. If that is indeed happening, many would agree that it should stop. [0] Merriam-Webster: Indoctrinate: 1 : to imbue with a usually partisan or sectarian opinion, point of view, or principle 2 : to instruct especially in fundamentals or rudiments : TEACH [1] Wikipedia: Indoctrination is the process of inculcating a person with ideas, attitudes, cognitive strategies or professional methodologies (see doctrine).

dougb5 3y ago

Can you say more about what you've observed around "can't challenge your professors"? My professor friends would all be delighted to be challenged more in class. (The problem they're having now, especially post-Covid, is more often lack of engagement from their students.) And my memory of college from 30 years ago is that the debate about what we now call "cancel culture" was just as fraught; it's just that it was called something different by US conservatives back then: "political correctness".

jrockway 3y ago

I also went to university 20 years ago, and don't really remember challenging professors or other classmates. You largely showed up to the huge lectures, turned in your solved problems, and took exams. The oddest experience I remember having was that we used US units in the thermodynamics class, which was a first for me (high school science was all metric). I also paid $750/semester because it was a state school and I was a resident. I really don't understand what people think goes on at universities. Sure, some students in their personal time have controversial takes on things. The vast majority of students are just doing their coursework, though. (And things are probably different if you are going for a more liberal arts-y education instead of a state-school engineering degree.)

clusterhacks 3y ago

"which I believe is due to bloated administration." In my state's public university system, the amount of funding provided by the state to that system per full-time equivalent student has dropped to its lowest level (in 2017 according to the source I checked) since 1995. So the state commitment to funding is lower on a per-student basis. Universities have responded by raising tuition and other costs. All of those facts mean that the real, out-of-pocket cost to students has gone up. Looking at what information I can find on staff counts, the flagship state university data report in 1999/2000 shows a "grand total" of 10,000ish employees and a quick web search shows 13,000ish in 2023. I think we would have to slice and dice those numbers much better to see what the actual cost differences were for those two time periods. The number of students seems to have grown to about 128% of 1999/2000 total enrollment numbers to today's total. There is a deeper discussion to be had about the policy of funding state universities. Polls like the article show all segments of the public surveyed have declining confidence in higher education. That suggests to me that in general, people will be less inclined to have tax dollars invested into the public university system because they may see it as wasteful or not efficient. There is some much to unpack around universities and cost . . . and, of course, private university tuition costs have exploded. Although at those types of institutions, I think many non-name-brand (or non-ivy-ish) schools have a very high "sticker" cost that maybe no students actually pay . . .

NovemberWhiskey 3y ago

>The cost of a university education has skyrocketed Citation required ... the headline prices for colleges have gone up considerably, but so has the amount of scholarship and grant funding (i.e. universities discounting from publicly advertised prices). In fact, the average net cost-of-attendance (including tuition, fees, housing and food) for private, four-year colleges in the US is - in inflation-adjusted dollars - slightly lower now than it was in 2006-07 and has been trending down since 2016-17. This is also the reason why annual student loan borrowing peaked in 2010-11 (again, in inflation adjusted dollars), has been reducing year-on-year, and is now down over 35% since then. People obsess over the headline prices, which are almost never the prices actually paid. Any kind of sensible comparison has to be done on the basis of actual net cost-of-attendance. ref. https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%202023.pdf https://research.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/Trends%20Report%...

stillwithit 3y ago

Where are you going to go? Who are you going to work with? Is there some place off Earth away from all these lessers you have to slum it with? What puts you above the other billions on the planet that they should validate your sensibilities and engage in vacuous rhetorical debate when we can all clearly see how day to day life works? Really tired of the puerile role play output of Karens, Special Boys, “free thinkers”. This planet and day to day is it. You’re not that smart or saying anything that novel.

deleted 3y ago

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GenericPoster 3y ago

> are you learning or just being indoctrinated? This is such a strange comment and is so removed from my lived experience that I question whether its even real. Where is this indoctrination happening? The vast majority of my classes were dedicated to learning the subject and there was rarely any room for deviation. Especially not deviation that turned to religion or politics. Even when discussing religious texts in my philosophy classes, it was through the lens of an academic. The same way that we discussed plato and aristotle. There was open discussion and if the conversation turned aggressive or wasn't going anywhere it was quickly shut down. We all had a curriculum to follow and certain debates can be taken anywhere or happen outside of class. If you wanted to challenge your professors, it was about your grade and that was usually done during office hours. Professors are humans and they all have their quirks but I didn't experience anything out of the norm while talking to them or hearing about their interaction with others. As for challenging each other, I think we did more learning from each other than anything else and our opinions did change over time but that's not indoctrination, just part of growing up. You say you went to university 20 years ago but did you end up going back afterwards? If so, what are the differences you've personally noticed?

giovannibonetti 3y ago

> I think both parties are right. The cost of a university education has skyrocketed, which I believe is due to bloated administration. I think you're mistaking the how for the why. Prices raise as long as customers tolerate it, often for lack of competition — e.g. the low number of prestigious universities to land a good job. They raise costs through bloated administration, but if customers simply stopped paying, they would be forced to become more efficient and spend less on that. In fact, giving students more options to pay tuition over time indirectly increases prices, since they become capable of paying more — hence taking more debt — than they would otherwise.

skywhopper 3y ago

I think your view of current state of higher ed is distorted by the media you consume, and what stories make click-worthy headlines. Students challenge their professors all the time, probably more than they did 20 years ago. Just because certain news outlets and social media make sure you hear about a handful of students who had a bad time with one professor, often because they themselves were picking a fight rather than trying to have a fair conversation. But those stories have always happened. And likewise there's plenty of healthy discourse in college classrooms that you don't hear about or experience, since you aren't actually in college.