5 ms·

Leaders are using appeals to nostalgia, nationalism to attack higher education

51 points by rntn 1y ago

decremental 1y ago
[dead]
KyleW9 1y ago
While I was aware this issue existed in Hungary and the US, and was aware of the rise of nationalism in India (intensified by regional conflicts), I never made the connection that India would have a similar disdain towards higher education as the other countries.
epistasis 1y ago
This is how autocrats consolidate control and destroy freedom. Destroy all the institutions and the autocrat is the only source of truth, leadership, or organization. Classic Mao.
bee_rider 1y ago
I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech! I guess you only need a couple educated people to mind the social media bots.
- JadeNB 1y ago
  > I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech! I think that, for exactly this reason, it makes it easier to have a caste system, with a small educated elite that can exert essentially unchecked control over a populace that is too uneducated to master any of the levers of resistance. That's among people who think it through. I also think that there are plenty of leaders who don't think it through, and just let expert opinion against them, or whatever other factor, guide them into destruction without any real consideration of what comes after.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- globular-toast 1y ago
  I wouldn't assume there is a long term plan...
- mhuffman 1y ago
  >I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. I would guess (I am not in that cohort) that they would claim that their argument is that they are not arguing for an uneducated populace, but arguing against a "mis-educated" or "indoctrinated" populace. >What’s the long term plan? My guess here would be that the long term plan is to return to a "nicer" before-time that doesn't include things they don't like but does include things like helpful new technologies. I have found that people can rationalize nearly anything if they are allowed to define the constraints of their argument.
- cyberge99 1y ago
  Control. Uneducated people are easier to control and manipulate.
general1726 1y ago
Just one step from Soviet style intelligentsia purges.
like_any_other 1y ago
Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter. In the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs. - https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academic-freedom-in-crisis-punishment https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academic-freedom-in-crisis-puni... Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What; Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-coronavirus-protests-quarantine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-corona... Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. - published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00030651211008507 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000306512110085... ‘American Political Thought’ course at CU Denver removes all white men from curriculum - https://www.thecollegefix.com/american-political-thought-course-at-cu-denver-removes-all-white-men-from-curriculum/ https://www.thecollegefix.com/american-political-thought-cou... Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.” - https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tim-walz-brings-liberated-ethnic-studies-to-minnesota-radical-decolinization-election-44a267ca https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tim-walz-brings-liberated-ethnic... Guidance aims to encourage ‘anti-racist’ teacher training to maintain diverse educator workforce - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/25/teachers-taught-to-challenge-whiteness-in-schools/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/25/teachers-taught-... The Biden-Harris administration has been conditioning funding at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to advance research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine (STEMM) on “diversity statements” and equity requirements in what academics are calling a “politicized litmus test.” - https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-harris-admin-requires-corrupt-dei-ideological-litmus-test-nasa-innovation-funding-scientists-say https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-harris-admin-requires-co... Masters course renamed as academics worry term suggests ‘nationalist narratives’ - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/31/anglo-saxon-cancelled-to-decolonise-university-courses/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/31/anglo-saxon-canc... University of South Carolina Requires Students to Affirm Value of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ - https://freebeacon.com/campus/university-of-south-carolina-requires-students-to-affirm-value-of-diversity-and-inclusion/ https://freebeacon.com/campus/university-of-south-carolina-r... "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" - Harvard University professor Noel Ignatiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev Abolish the White Race - Harvard Magazine https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/abolish-the-white-race-html https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/abolish-the-white-ra... Mega-Study Finds That Minorities Don’t Receive Harsher Criminal Punishments, But That Academics Said So Anyway [..] A prior meta-study looking for racial bias in juvenile criminal sentences, for example, also found no statistically significant evidence of racism. Yet the Northeastern University professor who was its lead author, writing in the Journal of Criminal Justice, did not make that finding the paper’s takeaway. Instead, he disputed his own evidence, writing: “However, simple claims that race does not matter are also not supported by existing knowledge,” concluding the situation was “nuanced,” because, in certain sub-categories, the numbers differed slightly by race—even though if racism were actually to blame, such factors would be across the board, and all in one direction. - https://www.dailywire.com/news/mega-study-finds-that-minorities-dont-receive-harsher-criminal-punishments-but-that-academics-said-so-anyway https://www.dailywire.com/news/mega-study-finds-that-minorit... (If you think that the Daily Wire is unreliable, have a look at the studies themselves then: Study from the title of that article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359178923000927 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591... Study referred to in the quote: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004723521630023X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... Gee I wonder why academia is under attack.. must be because they're so principled and objective, speaking truth to power. And the explicitly ideological purges, sorry, hiring decisions, are never referred to as "attacks" - if they're referred to at all.
gred 1y ago
> It’s part of a global trend: universities cast as enemies and institutions in need of reform. They are in need of reform. > As scholars who study nationalism, emotion and higher education, we explore the emotional politics behind these attacks. I don't think I trust you to diagnose your own condition. Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows.
- wredcoll 1y ago
  > Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows. That's a weird way to phrase "using governmental power to coerce speech from universities". What happened to freedom of speech?
- apical_dendrite 1y ago
  So you'd accept losing billions of dollars of cancer research a year so you can own the libs. Lovely.
  - gred 1y ago
    I'd love to have efficient, relevant, balanced, trustworthy academic institutions. I think we all want that. But IMO we're far from that ideal, and given where we are relative to where we'd like to be, one of the steps along the way is going to look a lot like "owning the libs".
    - apical_dendrite 1y ago
      Actually what's happening now isn't owning the libs. The tenured leftwing social science professors are mostly fine. They weren't getting a lot of federal grant money anyway. But the labs that study, say, brain cancer, are dependent on federal grant money. Now they're dealing with huge, often arbitrary budget cuts. So you get to feel like you're owning the libs, but really you're just hurting everyone.
random9749832 1y ago
A very bold title but not much to back it up. The so called "war" and "attack" is apparently banning gender studies.
- apical_dendrite 1y ago
  No, it's also banning and in some cases arresting foreign STEM students, and making billions of dollars of cuts to scientific and medical research.
  - random9749832 1y ago
    You are trying to do the lifting for an article that fails to make its own case. It got flagged anyway for being bait.
appreciatorBus 1y ago
Sample sentences below from recent work by the authors. > Anticolonial thought and praxis offer education scholars, activists, and practitioners an intellectual and political framework of connectivity and anticolonial solidarity that neither erases differences between decolonization and other political projects, nor fails to foreground community building between fields, approaches, and geographical regions. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/edth.12660 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/edth.12660 > This article addresses this gap by introducing the original concept of decolonial chronopolitics, a framework critiquing dominant temporalities underpinning the coloniality of knowledge. https://www.academia.edu/130467732/Decolonial_chronopolitics_Resisting_colonial_temporalities_in_transformative_learning https://www.academia.edu/130467732/Decolonial_chronopolitics... I can’t stand Trump or Orban and I’m aware of the dangers both people and their political styles pose to democracy writ large. But if this type of “research” is what we have to defend to protect higher ed, I don’t know if we are going to make it.
- Vektorceraptor 1y ago
  Yeah - one can simply feel it, where these people are coming from. I can't imagine anyone would be missing anything if they never published a single thing. I am exhausted of this type of journalism and activism.
Vektorceraptor 1y ago
There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress. Every time I read this kind of leftist propaganda, I lose hope for the world. The very people who present themselves as intelligent and morally superior fail to recognize the most basic contradictions within themselves: they claim that autocrats and populists sow fear and nostalgia, while they themselves are driven by fear of autocrats and long for utopia, while polarizing and dividing society for neglecting real problems and worries, due to idealization and generalization. It’s simply absurd, and I urge every leftist to stop this. I myself left university because of the moralistic and toxic irrationality and ideology I encountered. Isn't it strange that empirical sciences are not in dispute? It is always the same "circle" - the social justice circle. Social justice is not a scientific category. Just as the paradoxes of quantum mechanics have no direct consequences for politics, we should not treat the humanities as if they do either. Life is not a question or problem to be solved at the university...
- apical_dendrite 1y ago
  > There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress. In the abstract, no, I don't believe there is a conflict between nationalism and science. However, nationalism and populism can lead to belief systems and policies that are absolutely in conflict with science. For instance, when nationalism means "our universities should only be for our people", that is directly in conflict with science. Most famously, Hitler purged Jews from German universities, after which David Hilbert said "there is no mathematics at Gottingen". The Trump administration is trying to prevent universities from recruiting foreign students and researchers, and even arresting researchers who advocate for ideas they disagree with. Fundamentally this is incompatible with science. Limiting who can do the research to a small percentage of the world's population, and intimidating and persecuting researchers who express unfavored opinions does not produce good science.
  - Vektorceraptor 1y ago
    But did this "brain drain" throw Germany back into the Stone Age? I'm not too familiar with the historical details, but I don't know of any reports suggesting that Germany was scientifically damaged in the post-war period.
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]

51 points by rntn 1y ago

[dead]

While I was aware this issue existed in Hungary and the US, and was aware of the rise of nationalism in India (intensified by regional conflicts), I never made the connection that India would have a similar disdain towards higher education as the other countries.

epistasis 1y ago

This is how autocrats consolidate control and destroy freedom. Destroy all the institutions and the autocrat is the only source of truth, leadership, or organization. Classic Mao.

bee_rider 1y ago

I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech! I guess you only need a couple educated people to mind the social media bots.

JadeNB 1y ago
> I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. What’s the long term plan? Modern industry is high tech. Modern war is high tech. Even modern propaganda is high tech! I think that, for exactly this reason, it makes it easier to have a caste system, with a small educated elite that can exert essentially unchecked control over a populace that is too uneducated to master any of the levers of resistance. That's among people who think it through. I also think that there are plenty of leaders who don't think it through, and just let expert opinion against them, or whatever other factor, guide them into destruction without any real consideration of what comes after.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
globular-toast 1y ago
I wouldn't assume there is a long term plan...
mhuffman 1y ago
>I don’t really get why anybody would want to rule over an uneducated populace. I would guess (I am not in that cohort) that they would claim that their argument is that they are not arguing for an uneducated populace, but arguing against a "mis-educated" or "indoctrinated" populace. >What’s the long term plan? My guess here would be that the long term plan is to return to a "nicer" before-time that doesn't include things they don't like but does include things like helpful new technologies. I have found that people can rationalize nearly anything if they are allowed to define the constraints of their argument.
cyberge99 1y ago
Control. Uneducated people are easier to control and manipulate.

general1726 1y ago

Just one step from Soviet style intelligentsia purges.

like_any_other 1y ago

Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter. In the US, over a third of conservative academics and PhD students have been threatened with disciplinary action for their views while 70% of conservative academics report a hostile departmental climate for their beliefs. - https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academic-freedom-in-crisis-punishment https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academic-freedom-in-crisis-puni... Are Protests Dangerous? What Experts Say May Depend on Who’s Protesting What; Public health experts decried the anti-lockdown protests as dangerous gatherings in a pandemic. Health experts seem less comfortable doing so now that the marches are against racism. - https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-coronavirus-protests-quarantine.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/06/us/Epidemiologists-corona... Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. - published in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/00030651211008507 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000306512110085... ‘American Political Thought’ course at CU Denver removes all white men from curriculum - https://www.thecollegefix.com/american-political-thought-course-at-cu-denver-removes-all-white-men-from-curriculum/ https://www.thecollegefix.com/american-political-thought-cou... Fourth-graders must “identify the processes and impacts of colonization and examine how discrimination and the oppression of various racial and ethnic groups have produced resistance movements.” High-school students are told to “develop an analysis of racial capitalism” and “anti-Blackness” and are taught to view themselves as members of “racialized hierarchies” based on “dominant European beauty standards.” - https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tim-walz-brings-liberated-ethnic-studies-to-minnesota-radical-decolinization-election-44a267ca https://www.wsj.com/opinion/tim-walz-brings-liberated-ethnic... Guidance aims to encourage ‘anti-racist’ teacher training to maintain diverse educator workforce - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/25/teachers-taught-to-challenge-whiteness-in-schools/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/25/teachers-taught-... The Biden-Harris administration has been conditioning funding at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to advance research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Math, and Medicine (STEMM) on “diversity statements” and equity requirements in what academics are calling a “politicized litmus test.” - https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-harris-admin-requires-corrupt-dei-ideological-litmus-test-nasa-innovation-funding-scientists-say https://www.foxnews.com/media/biden-harris-admin-requires-co... Masters course renamed as academics worry term suggests ‘nationalist narratives’ - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/31/anglo-saxon-cancelled-to-decolonise-university-courses/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/31/anglo-saxon-canc... University of South Carolina Requires Students to Affirm Value of ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ - https://freebeacon.com/campus/university-of-south-carolina-requires-students-to-affirm-value-of-diversity-and-inclusion/ https://freebeacon.com/campus/university-of-south-carolina-r... "treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity" - Harvard University professor Noel Ignatiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noel_Ignatiev Abolish the White Race - Harvard Magazine https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/abolish-the-white-race-html https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2002/09/abolish-the-white-ra... Mega-Study Finds That Minorities Don’t Receive Harsher Criminal Punishments, But That Academics Said So Anyway [..] A prior meta-study looking for racial bias in juvenile criminal sentences, for example, also found no statistically significant evidence of racism. Yet the Northeastern University professor who was its lead author, writing in the Journal of Criminal Justice, did not make that finding the paper’s takeaway. Instead, he disputed his own evidence, writing: “However, simple claims that race does not matter are also not supported by existing knowledge,” concluding the situation was “nuanced,” because, in certain sub-categories, the numbers differed slightly by race—even though if racism were actually to blame, such factors would be across the board, and all in one direction. - https://www.dailywire.com/news/mega-study-finds-that-minorities-dont-receive-harsher-criminal-punishments-but-that-academics-said-so-anyway https://www.dailywire.com/news/mega-study-finds-that-minorit... (If you think that the Daily Wire is unreliable, have a look at the studies themselves then: Study from the title of that article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1359178923000927 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13591... Study referred to in the quote: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S004723521630023X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00472... Gee I wonder why academia is under attack.. must be because they're so principled and objective, speaking truth to power. And the explicitly ideological purges, sorry, hiring decisions, are never referred to as "attacks" - if they're referred to at all.

gred 1y ago

> It’s part of a global trend: universities cast as enemies and institutions in need of reform. They are in need of reform. > As scholars who study nationalism, emotion and higher education, we explore the emotional politics behind these attacks. I don't think I trust you to diagnose your own condition. Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows.

wredcoll 1y ago
> Some of the Trump administration's actions in this area are misguided, but I am enjoying watching them challenge some of the left's sacred cows. That's a weird way to phrase "using governmental power to coerce speech from universities". What happened to freedom of speech?
apical_dendrite 1y ago
So you'd accept losing billions of dollars of cancer research a year so you can own the libs. Lovely.
- gred 1y ago
  I'd love to have efficient, relevant, balanced, trustworthy academic institutions. I think we all want that. But IMO we're far from that ideal, and given where we are relative to where we'd like to be, one of the steps along the way is going to look a lot like "owning the libs".
  - apical_dendrite 1y ago
    Actually what's happening now isn't owning the libs. The tenured leftwing social science professors are mostly fine. They weren't getting a lot of federal grant money anyway. But the labs that study, say, brain cancer, are dependent on federal grant money. Now they're dealing with huge, often arbitrary budget cuts. So you get to feel like you're owning the libs, but really you're just hurting everyone.

random9749832 1y ago

A very bold title but not much to back it up. The so called "war" and "attack" is apparently banning gender studies.

apical_dendrite 1y ago
No, it's also banning and in some cases arresting foreign STEM students, and making billions of dollars of cuts to scientific and medical research.
- random9749832 1y ago
  You are trying to do the lifting for an article that fails to make its own case. It got flagged anyway for being bait.

appreciatorBus 1y ago

Sample sentences below from recent work by the authors. > Anticolonial thought and praxis offer education scholars, activists, and practitioners an intellectual and political framework of connectivity and anticolonial solidarity that neither erases differences between decolonization and other political projects, nor fails to foreground community building between fields, approaches, and geographical regions. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/edth.12660 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/edth.12660 > This article addresses this gap by introducing the original concept of decolonial chronopolitics, a framework critiquing dominant temporalities underpinning the coloniality of knowledge. https://www.academia.edu/130467732/Decolonial_chronopolitics_Resisting_colonial_temporalities_in_transformative_learning https://www.academia.edu/130467732/Decolonial_chronopolitics... I can’t stand Trump or Orban and I’m aware of the dangers both people and their political styles pose to democracy writ large. But if this type of “research” is what we have to defend to protect higher ed, I don’t know if we are going to make it.

Vektorceraptor 1y ago
Yeah - one can simply feel it, where these people are coming from. I can't imagine anyone would be missing anything if they never published a single thing. I am exhausted of this type of journalism and activism.

Vektorceraptor 1y ago

There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress. Every time I read this kind of leftist propaganda, I lose hope for the world. The very people who present themselves as intelligent and morally superior fail to recognize the most basic contradictions within themselves: they claim that autocrats and populists sow fear and nostalgia, while they themselves are driven by fear of autocrats and long for utopia, while polarizing and dividing society for neglecting real problems and worries, due to idealization and generalization. It’s simply absurd, and I urge every leftist to stop this. I myself left university because of the moralistic and toxic irrationality and ideology I encountered. Isn't it strange that empirical sciences are not in dispute? It is always the same "circle" - the social justice circle. Social justice is not a scientific category. Just as the paradoxes of quantum mechanics have no direct consequences for politics, we should not treat the humanities as if they do either. Life is not a question or problem to be solved at the university...

apical_dendrite 1y ago
> There is no contradiction between patriotism, nationalism and science or progress. In the abstract, no, I don't believe there is a conflict between nationalism and science. However, nationalism and populism can lead to belief systems and policies that are absolutely in conflict with science. For instance, when nationalism means "our universities should only be for our people", that is directly in conflict with science. Most famously, Hitler purged Jews from German universities, after which David Hilbert said "there is no mathematics at Gottingen". The Trump administration is trying to prevent universities from recruiting foreign students and researchers, and even arresting researchers who advocate for ideas they disagree with. Fundamentally this is incompatible with science. Limiting who can do the research to a small percentage of the world's population, and intimidating and persecuting researchers who express unfavored opinions does not produce good science.
- Vektorceraptor 1y ago
  But did this "brain drain" throw Germany back into the Stone Age? I'm not too familiar with the historical details, but I don't know of any reports suggesting that Germany was scientifically damaged in the post-war period.

aaron695 1y ago

[dead]