I am a prof at a small public liberal arts college that has had declining enrollment for the past decade. If the enrollment of New College ends up doubling over the next few years because students and their parents are attracted to an institution that does not suffer the sort of progressive capture that afflicts practically every other non-Christian small liberal arts college, Rufo will be able to declare mission accomplished. I suspect there will be other small colleges that seek to emulate this model.
A demographic cliff is approaching and young men are increasingly rejecting higher education. This is partly explained by academic deficits and job market forces, but it’s also driven by the perceived hostility of liberal arts colleges toward conservatives & (white) men. A related problem is the gender imbalance that exists at small liberal arts colleges that are over 60% female, so straight college women aren’t going to find boyfriends or potential husbands when they are in college. If New College can attract more conservative young men to increase their enrollment, conservative young women will follow. I assume the tuition is relatively low, considering it is a public institution, so I actually think this experiment may end up being successful in the long term. Small public liberal arts colleges everywhere are desperate to increase enrollment, but they are not actively targeting the group that possibly has the most growth potential, i.e. conservatives and young men.
I came here to post about recruiting problems and the demographic cliff, but you've already said it. :-)
Even public colleges with more male-attracting majors are talking about this problem, but you're right, it's especially acute at liberal arts colleges. Even the name-brand SLAC where I got my first gig after my PhD was having recruitment problems when I was there. It's much worse for less prestigious institutions.
I don't like Rufo's methods (the last thing higher ed needs is more highly paid administrative positions), but it would indeed be a big success if he could recruit students who might otherwise skip college.
I'm watching my SLAC I went to cut everything that attracted me to them in the first place (RIP World Languages Dep't), just to do the exact same thing every other SLAC in the area is doing, bullshit MAs degrees in business. Of course, the useless admin staff isn't feeling the squeeze, just the professors and lecturers.
Oh, geez, colleges don't exist for men to find a mate, they are (or should be) about education. I agree that we don't need to invent gender majors, but my gosh, I went to a Christian college and the level of "ring by spring" was intensely cringe.
On the other hand, what’s wrong with trying to meet someone to spend your life with when you’re young and surrounded with other young people? I think it’s a good strategy.
For people from small towns, going to college where you're surrounded by people who are (theoretically) interested in higher learning, who come from a variety of places, and who may be from a different socioeconomic group than you are -- can be a once in a lifetime opportunity. You are living in a central location, and have many opportunities to interact. She wasn't saying it's the ONLY reason to go to college.
This. I met my husband in college. I was 17, he was 18 and it was, of all things, at a dorm ice skating party for a dorm I didn’t even live in. We started dating when I was 19 and we eloped at 21 and 22.
Marrying a man who went to college (and has parents who went to college) definitely has helped the arc of my life. And I’ve been doing life for 22 years with a pretty awesome guy.
A lot of my friends met their spouses in high school or college, even if they didn’t marry until years later.
I don’t want my 20 yo son to rush anything relationship wise but I do consider the next few years of his life to be the most likely time for him to meet a potential spouse.
This goes more so for people who, for any mix of reasons (religious, culturally, personality), have no desire to date a ton of people and who have family as a main goal.
My son is the sort who, had they not had major values differences, he might well have ended up eventually marrying his first girlfriend. Instead, he broke it off with her after 6 months because he decided that their differences were too big of a gulf for marriage. She definitely wanted it to be a forever thing with him.
While I don’t want my son to get married quite as young as his dad and I did, I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t think it might happen.
I don't think that's what she's saying, though. Women don't tend to "marry down" in education and income, so if more women are highly educated than men and have more prestigious positions, their pool shallows.
“ A demographic cliff is approaching and young men are increasingly rejecting higher education. This is partly explained by academic deficits and job market forces, but it’s also driven by the perceived hostility of liberal arts colleges toward conservatives & (white) men.”
I think the latter is the great unspoken issue that universities face today. If the number of female, minority, underrepresented etc students dropped the same degree as male students have university administrators would be treating it as a crisis. But absolutely nothing, at least none of the recruitment efforts at my uni, is being done to address the new gender gap, and it gets dismissed (or worse) if brought up. I don’t know what the solution is–at the very least we should include intellectual diversity as part of DEI goals? But honestly this is where the ideological capture of university faculties is hurting… (Thanks for letting me get that off my chest)
> This is partly explained by academic deficits and job market forces, but it’s also driven by the perceived hostility of liberal arts colleges toward conservatives & (white) men.”
Alright. I'm going to play a bit of the contrarian here on the "male gap". And a little on the conservative gap.
The gap is almost entirely concentrated in the liberal arts. In fact, if you look at STEM degrees men overwhelming dominate.....something like 80%.
I propose the reason less men are attending college for liberal arts degrees is because they can earn as much or more by just immediately going into the job force. Especially if they're willing to work physically hard, dirty, risky blue collar work. And for the rest, the gap between college educated and not is very small. Usually you can catch up or exceed that gap within the 4 or 5 years it'd take you to slog through a non-STEM bachelors. The ROI just isn't there for men unless you're going for a STEM.
And let's just be honest....the majority of the population isn't academically capable of doing well in those careers.
You see a similar pattern for "liberal domination". In the STEMS, 50% or less identify as liberal or democrats. While the other 50% identify as mostly moderate and independent.
I have absolutely no idea about the political leanings of virtually all my STEM professors in Engineering. It just doesn't come up in discussions of differential equations or LaPlace transforms. And no one talks about whether Boyle's Law maximizes social equity.
I realize this is an old comment but you are 100% correct. The Comp Sci department at my college was 14% female and by far most of the women were exchange students from China. I believe this was the case for the Engineering department as well, maybe even less women. Mathematics had a higher percentage of women (maybe 22% female) but I think that might have to do with the fields of teaching and actuarial science attracting more women. Not sure. Anyway no political discussion ever happened, not even when Trump was elected. We were too busy struggling with our projects and too exhausted to care about much more than passing our really tough classes.
The model of turning around enrollments in a small university by increasing sports programs has been done before, and it’s been done by someone with a Florida connection. University of Florida President Ben Sasse used this strategy to balance the books when he was president of Midland University in Nebraska.
I have been completing my degree that I abandoned at a small Vermont liberal arts college almost two decades ago and yes, it is amazing - there are SO MANY MORE WOMEN NOW. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but I was surprised. They made up the vast majority of my sociology, public speaking, and world religions classes
I mean that’s a nice theory but it’s evident it’s failed to do this in hilarious fashion given they had to “recruit” 2 baseball teams worth of men in order to get over the 50% male mark.
Btw I had no problem “finding a husband” at a 65% female college. And my school had a pretty high gay male pop as well. So probably like 1/3 of students were men interested in women.
Maybe you were one of the hot ones? You are missing the point about her comment. If 65% of a college is females, and at your college there were a lot of gay males, then there were even LESS possible future mates for heterosexual females.
hardly, though my alma mater definitely has a crunchy reputation, men and women alike weren't exactly trying to be hot
I understood the points I just don't think it's that important. Not everyone meets their spouse in college or wants to, and things have moved on with dating apps and SM for the most part.
My larger point was that they had to goose the numbers in order to make it even appear that they are a "welcoming space" for men. That's really only true if you're a sub par baseball player. And that's inherently funny.
Hate to say it, but getting rid of the Gender Studies program will probably help with their rankings.
The ballooning of these types of "studies" programs in schools has not been great for kids who go into massive debt to get a degree that will not help you get a job.
Also, if they had very few gender studies majors & minors (which I guarantee is true) then they shuttered it to cut costs, not purely for ideological reasons. Most small universities with declining enrollment will eliminate such programs in the next decade if they haven’t already, even at very progressive places.
I'm also unsure why eliminating gender studies would be an attack on academic freedom. Even if the move is politically motivated (which it may or may not be) it's not limiting what any particular academic at the college can say, but rather which majors are offered.
Because it’s pretty obvious that Rufo & his ilk aren’t simply interested in dropping a major they looking to prevent certain ideas being taught.
The idea that they’d be fine with Professors being free to teach Judith Butler or Kimberlie Crenshaw just not under the umbrella of Gender Studies is ridiculous.
Anyone’s who read anything by Rufo should be able to tell he’s absolutely in favour of indoctrination, so long as it’s indoctrination in ideas he agrees with.
He’s an anti intellectual blowhard that doesn’t care about academic freedom in the slightest.
Right - what can you learn in gender studies that you couldn't also learn within other established disciplines that have higher standards for evidence/argumentation?
Do you have any evidence this is the case? I haven’t seen any and I strongly feel that if it were evident that the GS major was underperforming (eg attracting few students but taking up a lot of faculty teaching time) then Rufo would be talking about this.
I know a couple of people who wanted to major in stuff like that and they figured that the important part was having the degree and that for most jobs, the major didn't matter. They enjoyed their Women's Studies classes, so they might as well major in something like that if the major didn't matter.
I agree that having the degree is the most important part, but anyone who doesn't think the major matters is deceiving themselves. I've been on teams where we make hiring decisions and I would hire an English major over a Gender Studies major any day for the simple reason that getting an English degree probably requires better writing skills than a Gender Studies degree.
Hire to do what? There’s any number of fields where an understanding of gender could be hugely important. If you have the view that it’s only someone who’ll argue that women have penises and regurgitates Judith Butler then you’re dealing in simplistic stereotypes. Those people obviously exist but making sweeping judgments really isn’t helpful.
You have to hire gender studies majors so they can transcribe the list of all the newly minted Tumblr genders. It’s like the monks who produced illuminated copies of the Bible in the Middle Ages. There’s so many new genders that each gender studies major can only produce 2-3 good copies of all the genders in their lifetime.
If a school were petitioning to start a Gender Studies program, I certainly wouldn't fault any administrators who said no. You're not entitled to have certain departments.
When my alma mater was facing funding issues the president threatened to axe the computer science department. That would have been idiotic, and lead to worse outcomes for tons of students, but it wouldn't have been an academic freedom violation.
It's funny, protests/petitions are exactly what started these disciplines. A bunch of students at San Fran State demanded it and "went on strike", and now, "Studies"!
If they wanted to axe computer science because they had political or moral objections to what was being taught and felt they should be able to tilt the basis of what’s being taught to their own personal world view then it would be.
If funding was an issue and they wanted to cut back to ‘core’ programmes then fair enough, but ‘I think the ideas in this programme are nuts’ isn’t a great rationale.
I see your point, but I do think a univeristy should be dedicated to truth, otherwise it's a gender neutral finishing school. If a department hands out more lies than truth, it is a problem.
But it’s not a biology course, views on gender run the spectrum from biological determinism or blank slateism, to Butler’s ideas about Gender as performance to ideas about an inherent ‘gender identity’.
Whilst I don’t think all those ideas are equally valid, I do think it’s important they’re discussed and explored, that’s the point of academia.
Obviously if a program is simply teach one set of idea in a dogmatic fashion, but given we’re in realm of philosophy and politics pre-determining what is ‘truth’ isn’t any better.
TRA would like to take the discussion of certain ideas off the table because they’ve decided the question has been answered, why is the right doing that any better?
My current issue with gender studies as a program is that it seems to be philosophy-adjacent in that it is a philosophical subjective belief system, however unlike philosophy, there is no room or permit for debate. That's not to say that it should be "banned", but if one wanted to argue against its inclusion, I think it's a valid point to argue from.
How to correct a gender studies program towards truth is a practical question, if it isnt practical, them you should kill the program. I can imagine correcting it through a lot of hires, but will any students enroll?
Gender Studies should be a sub field of History, English, Psychology, etc; it shouldn’t be its own program. This is how Liberal Arts programs used to work; one of the many ways they shot themselves in the feet was when they started slicing off specialties into their own programs in the 80s’/90s. Woe to the English programs that divested themselves of Composition…
My view is that if a university is publicly funded, the democratically elected executive can decide whether certain majors are a waste of time. If the electorate doesn’t like it, they can factor that into their vote next time. The state is not obligated to fund underwater basket weaving.
You’re being incredibly naive if you think this is just about what majors are taught as opposed to what ideas. Rufo has been pretty open about his agenda. He believes in indoctrination, so long as they’re ideas he agrees with.
Okay but in fact it is perfectly legitimate for the state to say, “we are not going to pay to have certain ideas taught”. If the state doesn’t have to fund seminaries it doesn’t have to fund Judith Butler either. I’m not making any distinction between “majors” and “ideas”, I’m saying that no university teaches *all* ideas, and democratically elected officials are within their rights to decide which ones the state is going to subsidize.
“Okay but in fact it is perfectly legitimate for the state to say, “we are not going to pay to have certain ideas taught”
In some literal sense of course that’s true, but it’s true of any ideas so why the complaints about the lack of conservative ideas?
Are you arguing for each side to simply try and capture legislators and then have institutions not teach idea they don’t like because they’re under no literal obligation to teach any particular thinker.
If you’re choosing to not teach certain ideas because you don’t like them for political reasons you can’t also claim to be in favour of academic freedom.
About the only thing the Wokesters are right about is calling bs on the Rights Culture Warriors pretence to value free speech & academic freedom as principles.
Of course on all sides there are individuals who really do believe in these ideas, but the idea that anyone like Rufo does is laughable.
Saying everyone believes in indoctrination is overly reductive. There are better and worse ways of navigating controversial issues. One way is to stack the deck and only expose students to the best versions from one side of the argument and either none or the worst from the other side. Another approach is to try to be fair-minded and steel man the opposing perspectives, be honest about what we don't know, etc.
“So what is your alternative for choosing public school curricula?”
Trying to establish a process that’s independent of partisan politics.
I’m open to the idea it currently isn’t, but a culture war race to bottom of trying to impose the partisan view you happen to support once you gain power isn’t the solution.
I think Rufo would settle for a balanced presentation of ideas, he is more reasonable than his Twitter persona--which is geared to getting peeps on the bandwagon.
I think you’re being incredibly naive, I think the opposite that there’s every reason to believe he’s stumbled on a strategy to simply try and replace indoctrination he doesn’t like with indoctrination he does like.
I have no idea why Gender Studies students are willing to pay full tuition for a degree that will offer very few job prospects especially since DEI programs are drying up in the private sector. I think it should be an online degree and the cost should be half as much.
I have a major in Women's & Gender Studies, but I double majored. And I took it with a focus on Women's history and Gay/Lesbian history. As a huge history buff, this was a little self-indulgent. However, I would not say it was any lesser than any history degree just focused on women and gay people and on feminist thought and philosophy. Also, I managed to avoid most of the 'queer' stuff even though this was less than 10 years ago.
I went on to work for a domestic violence organization after graduation so I will say that my major was very pertinent to my work.
Ok maybe I am wrong and there are real venues of work available to gender studies major outside of DEI work or just becoming a professor of gender studies.
My alma mater has certificates for these types of "studies" programs. So you graduate with a degree in History, English, Econ etc and you also get a certificate in say, Gender Studies or Latin American Studies.
Princeton. I should add a caveat that students are always demanding that these programs get upgraded to a major. So something that was a certificate 10 years ago may be a major now. I believe African American Studies was upgraded in this manner.
It obviously depends to some degree on what actually is being taught and to what degree it’s reduced to a particular po mo/critical theory subset of ideas, but I did International Development postgrad & a lot of work that’s done internationally has a really strong gender component given the types of societies people are working in. Having a handle on ideas about Gender could be incredibly useful for that type of work. If you’re specialisation was say Judith Butler less so, but I’m not sure every programme is only teaching that strain of thinking.
From the perspective of an academic it’s a ham handed symbolic move, which will act primarily to chill speech - if the major was underperforming (low enrollment) and therefore cutting it is a cost saving measure, that would be one thing. But if not it’s bad business and faculty will get the message that their departments will be at risk if they teach similar topics.
How new majors and departments are made is generally from the faculty level up. Faculty propose a new program, including the classes required to complete the major(s). Then it gets approved up the chain typically with oversight from other faculty, and several levels of admins. Programs are deleted in the same way. I am aware of cases where majors and even departments are removed when they are underperforming in terms of cost effectiveness and generally I think that’s a good thing. But this isn’t.
Since you'r a working academic, I'm very curious as to your thoughts on the specific demographic cliff for the humanities and social sciences. Apparently, enrollments in these disciplines are in deep trouble, even at elite universities.
Everyone is struggling with the enrollments issue. Even hard sciences which once struggled with too many students. It seems lately where I’m at like students are attracted to some of these “softer” social science majors because they are easier and fashionable. Things like communications and environmental studies.
Hard science is too difficult to get a high gpa in and doesn’t have a “welcoming” reputation. Meanwhile Humanities like English philosophy and history, and traditional societal sciences like anthropology, economics are seen as old fashioned and stuffy so are also unpopular.
But I have no idea about national trends. Would be interested if you have data.
Hmm they are looking at raw numbers of graduates in humanities. I would like to see % of graduates in each major area (STEM, social science, humanities, arts), since that corrects for demographic changes which will impact all majors. It does seem from that graph like the Humanities slump predates the end of the millennial demo bubble by a few years (I think that hit around 2020)?
From where I'm sitting in a STEM department at a liberal arts school, we were doing great (overenrollment and high fac/student ratio was an issue) until the demographic slump hit. Then our enrollments dropped faster percentage wise than other majors because the colleges overall enrollment dropped (though the ceiling was very high). We're also having more trouble retaining students in the STEM majors because students are less prepared. A lot more of our students either flunk out or leave for a social sci major because they don't like getting C's. "Softer" majors will let them slide by but its harder to do that in STEM when they are required to learn things in the foundational courses in order to pass later ones.
I think that our business and education majors are holding strong. Along with social sciences. A lot of those majors require quite a bit of history and english which helps maintain those departments along with general education of course.
In attending classes over the past year, the biggest surprise to me is how many vet tech and "green business" students there are. It seemed like 1 out of every 3 people I met was training to be a vet tech.
This might be my most edgelordy position but I think that the "studies" departments are sort of poisoned from the start - they're not oriented towards truth seeking, and you can already pursue the study of any particular identity group of authors (in literature), identity political group (history or poli sci), etc. down the line within the confines of actual subjects. They basically act as activist spawning and training grounds, and it's weird that taxpayer dollars pay for that.
Like, I wouldn't want my taxes going to a Catholic Studies or Calvinist studies department that framed their entire discipline assuming the primacy of their viewpoint either.
Seems to me the problem is that the name is a lie. If the gender studies people actually studied gender using scientific methods, there would be no problem. There's a lot of weird interesting endocrinology and genetics, and plenty of real social science and history and law. In theory, a gender studies major is a perfectly reasonable interdisciplinary liberal arts degree.
But what actual gender studies departments doing is not that.
And feminist theory, which may at some points fit within social science at others it’s really a branch of philosophy.
Whilst I don’t doubt there’s many awful programs that teach in a way that means one need accept Judith Butler as a kind of prophet, I imagine there are others that genuinely do try and teach a broad range of ideas and do so critically.
Maybe, but Judith Butler by any reasonable standard is an obscure theorist who's added little of value to the field. A scholarly course on feminist philosophy could easily find other writers of more substance to analyze.
Whether you like it or not she’s been hugely influential, deciding to not teach her as opposed to actually teach her critically is no different from the people we all criticise for thinking no platforming is a solution to ideas they don’t like.
The reason she's been hugely influential is some radical academics force-fed her stuff to teenagers who didn't know any better. I would argue the same of many of the Critical Race Theory (in the academic sense of the term, not the Chris Rufo sense) figures. These people are nobodies who don't have much to say, good or bad.
If anything, these sorts of people could be covered in an academic context on that meta-level: how do people who haven't really succeeded get elevated past their station?
And again, taking the meaning of gender studies ingenuously, the heart of it is genetics and hormones. I would expect feminist theory to take up more than a small, perhaps elective portion of that degree.
I’d disagree with this. The heart of sex differences are female and male development yes. But women’s and men’s gender roles are obviously much more complicated and that’s what concerns feminism. After all the variation in these across time and space is incredibly diverse and interesting!
What were women’s (and men’s) internal lives like when they had fewer choices than now? Why do some cultures end up more gender egalitarian than others? How do different marriage systems impact gender roles? Etc etc.
I do think every gender studies major should take a biology class first though.
“Ideas I like should be taught, idea I don’t like shouldn’t”.
You comment is literally nothing more than that. To simply dismiss people who’ve clearly had a significant impact on modern thought as ‘nobodies’ isn’t a serious proposition. Anyone can do that to any thinker they happen to disagree with.
Well that is fair, but science is how you study gender.
If someone says they have an environmental studies degree and they spent all of their education looking at John Muir paintings and don’t know anything about hydrology or environmental law or nuclear power, that’s not much of an environmental studies degree. That’s art history.
Which isn’t reflective of the quality of the paintings; it’s just a question of what constitutes a rigorous education.
I think the intended implication of "studies" curriculums is exactly that it's a form of evaluating John Muir paintings, not a science.
There are Environmental Science degrees and they require all the core requirements of any other STEM. Environmental Studies is basically reading a lot of environment writings and texts and shooting the shit about them.
I'm not sure what Gender Science would be...other than Biology with a specialization in sex differences. But Gender Studies lack of science is right there in the name. :P
I don’t think the word science and the word study are mutually exclusive at all.
Connotatively, “studies” has come to imply an apotheosis of the decline in standards affecting academia (speaking as someone who’s done an awful lot of college over the past couple of decades) but it doesn’t have to be.
Looking up the Environmental Studies major at a place where I was once a student (they’re big on this sort of thing, which is why it came to mind for me), they require some basic science and statistics courses but they have different tracks for people who are more interested in policy (perhaps wanting to go to law school), vs arts and humanities, vs science. I don’t know what you do with an Environmental Studies (arts and humanities) degree; the people I knew in that the Environmental Science field were all interested in water quality, species conservation, that sort of thing.
I guess I’d encourage you to give a course in feminism a chance. Typically it’s about presenting a bunch of different ways of thinking about and issue and letting students interrogate them. I don’t think anyone is like “and then, in the end Judith Butler has solved the problem of gender! All hail Butler”
E.g. there are Marxist historians who function perfectly well in history departments, why can't there be feminist historians, feminist psychologists, etc. rather than giving that viewpoint its own department?
The scholars name escapes me, it’s been many years since I did undergraduate IR but they were great.
Really straight forward about the feminism being a ‘lens’ to look at IR questions from a particular perspective and very clear that they weren’t claiming it was how the world was.
Feminist Just War theory (drawing on the ethic of care) is really interesting, as it’s pretty clear that more mainstream theories often ignore the specific impact on women & children (over half humanity). Again, they weren’t looking to claim it was the one true way to see the world but with justification did argue it introduced a perspective that’s ignored or underplayed.
Whether feminists should be forced to be part of larger fields isn’t straightforward but I definitely think that something is lost when they don’t engage in other fields, hiding away in their own spaces specialised departments does make it way more likely dumb ideas thrive as they’re less likely to be challenged by people not worried about being seen as a bad feminist if they do.
Regarding the siloing of feminist scholars: this would be rare. Most of us are not in women’s and gender studies programs. And of those who are, probably the majority have joint appointments with a conventional discipline. The vast majority of us have trained in a conventional discipline, and I continue to think this is useful.
I did this 24 years ago and found the most poorly thought out ideological garbage being taught by and otherwise brilliant professor with a straight face. What a waste of her and our time.
One of the main books that course was based around had the thesis that all of US foreign policy in the 20th century was really about oppressing women.
Which is absolutely nonsense but the prof and 80% of the class lapped it up because US bad and girls good.
It was a thinking free zone. The intellectual equivalent of YouTube comments.
I took some philosophy courses at the University of Michigan when I was an undergrad there- about 30 years ago (!)
Unfortunately we had to look at some writings by Catherine McKinnon and other feminist thinkers of the time. I honestly thought they were hot garbage.
I remember one egregious essay I had to read. It was about how language was created by men, and so women didn't have the words to even think or speak about ourselves properly.
Sure, but why can't feminism be a sub-field of political science, history, etc.? I think the issues are worth exploring, it's more of a question of whether those issues deserve their own separate discipline.
Oh I think that’s fine, and often a good idea - largely what majors are offered has to do with a Mix of marketing and faculty convenience. That is departments make up new and interdisciplinary majors in order to attract more students (and admins approve them for this reason). If a particular faculty decides to organize their teaching within traditional disciplines that’s fine W me.
The thing I don’t like is the top down approach, which I think sends messages that chill speech, especially when paired with the other things Rufo/DeSantis are saying disparaging teaching anything about feminism or racism.
I think it’s a question of at what level. Having stringent views either way probably isn’t sustainable but I do think there’s a case for trying to ensure that at undergraduate level people have to have broad understanding and are exposed to a wide range of views. Being specific, my issue isn’t that Butler is read and taught but that it seems it’s possible to read & being taught Butler without having a grounding in ideas that present a different perspective or directly critique her.
It’s probably not so much is it ok for it to be a separate discipline but how is it structured, how narrow are the ideas that are being taught. If the starting position is that the crit theory/po mo world view is a kind of truth and criticism of it can be dismissed as simply a power move of white, male, cis blah blah, clearly that’s unhealthy, it certainly doesn’t have to be that.
Reading the history is pretty amazing. The "studies" departments were born in violence and threats of violence.
One year to the day before the strike, the editor of the student newspaper The Daily Gator, James Vaszko, was attacked by several Black students on November 7, 1967.[5][6] The "Gator incident", as it was called, occurred after he wrote an editorial petitioning the Carnegie Corporation of New York to withhold funds from proposed "service programs" including classes in Black history and culture requested by the Black Student Union.[6][9] After six assailants were arrested and suspended, the BSU held a press conference in order to elucidate the reasons for the classes they advocated. These programs were to be established to "awaken and develop Black awareness and consciousness,"[6] according to the San Francisco Strike Collection...
...As tension continued to rise, BSU & the Third World Liberation Front occupied the school's YMCA on March 23, 1968, forcing all YMCA employees to leave. Despite demands from President Summerskill to evacuate the premises, the students remained in protest to keep a revered faculty member as a professor. They listed their demands as:
An end to Air Force ROTC on campus,
Retention of Juan Martinez,
Programs to admit 400 ghetto students for the fall semester, and
The hiring of nine minority faculty members to support the minority students."...
...The fall of 1968 semester saw the formation of the Black Studies Department but also mounting tension. President Smith refused a demand by the California State Colleges trustees to relegate George Mason Murray (the Minister of Education for the Black Panther Party), a graduate student and instructor in the English department, to a non-teaching position. This came after Murray's remarks to students at Fresno State College where he allegedly said, "We are slaves, and the only way to become free is to kill all the slave masters."[6][9] Mounting pressure from trustees and administrators like SF State Chancellor Dumke induced Dr. Smith to suspend Murray despite threats of a strike from the BSU and led to the presentation of 15 demands from them and the TWLF...
Wow, and one of the demands was that the school admit all non-white applicants. Affirmative action ain't got nothing on the Third World Liberation Front!
Ah and of course the American Federation of Teachers supported all this, because why not, violence and ridiculous demands are central to a quality education 🙄
Also sort of pathetic that one of the demands was "no punishment for any of us" - maybe this was the point where people forgot the "civil" part of "civil disobedience", where you show the cruelty of the oppressor by accepting punishment with courage and fortitude. No, this is "we are special and should be allowed to break the rules, fuck that Gandhi and MLK Jr. noise."
Catholic studies majors could end up alright, due to the breadth of positions the religion and culture have been invovled with over 2000 years. Same for Jewish studies, exept increase by 1000 years. I think the reason why _these_ studies departments should be preserved is that _they are examples of cultures that our durable_, our current culture looks like it is not durable. Roman society, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and maybe some american cultures could also be studied--so somebody can tell us about a contrasting way of being.
This is a really bad episode. Why am I listening to a rehash of a Michelle Goldberg article in the NYT? Michelle is a partisan. You aren't getting a straight story from her. This was painfully presented from her performance at the Munk debates. She's a great partisan investigor -- she's a good writer and will dive into details in alignment with her biases.
I kept waiting for the "internet bullshit" to come in, but no not really. This was a political vent session. I get it. You don't like desantis -- that was painfully obvious and presented in the prior episode where Trace had to push back on you. Can we please get some more varied input on episodes than just "Michelle said this" and "fuck Chris rufo".
It is weird in the sense that the primary source material was literally just an NYT op-ed. I don't quite understand what additional reporting they did.
This is like the episodes where they just report on reactions to controversies on twitter it's not very interesting. I enjoy the banter but other than that I could just read Michelle Goldberg's piece instead if I wanted her take which is basically identical from any other liberal columnist on any subject involving Desantis in academia.
Yeah, usually when they’re talking about NYT or some other liberal news story they’re debunking it and giving us a new perspective on how the prevailing wisdom is wrong, not echoing what we already read or hear everywhere else in MSM
The problem is J&K are at their worst when they criticize conservatives. Their biases allow them to ignore that they're engaging with strawmen and they don't have the reflexive urge to scratch an additional layer below the surface.
This was essentially an hour long podcast discussing an article in the NYT. As another commenter mentioned, there didn't seem to really be any additional reporting they did on this (perhaps other than repeating things they discussed on the prior episode on the new college of florida). J&K would never dedicate a whole hour to reading and agreeing with a single article in the NYPost/Fox News. It's just not comparable because they don't treat the inverse that way.
I think there's fair criticism to levy at Rufo/Desantis, but this was just an hour long high-fiving while they read each other the Michelle Goldberg piece. It's dumb and I expect more from the pod than just political venting.
I have news for you, they're often pretty sloppy when they criticize the left too. But people like yourself just enjoy it more and turn your brains off to listen to them bash the libs.
I'm happy to be convinced I am wrong here. Can you point me to an episode or two that you think is a fair comparison to this episode, but them criticizing the left?
Worse than sloppy. Jesse blanket declaring that NCF doesn't have a progressive bias on the basis of an extremely broad 100-level philosophy course description is just straight up lazy. Like I get that the guy is having fun on his European vacation but Jesus dude, if you aren't even going to pretend to bother to research an issue maybe it's better if you just react to Katie talking about furries for an hour.
I think the primary criticism is that there’s so much “it’s complicated” hand-wringing and attempts to find alternate sourcing and opinions when the shoe is on the other foot.
This seems like a pretty lazy, thinly-sourced op-ed.
It also belies a lack of understanding of collegiate athletics. College baseball, for example, is limited to 11.7 scholarships. Yes, that’s correct - 11.7. So almost no player receives a full ride and the school is very limited in what they can do. Title IX also comes into play - every male baseball scholarship has to be paired with a women’s sports scholarship as well.
I think they're often equally sloppy about criticizing the left but a certain segment of the audience starts getting really pedantic and rigorous when they feel attacked instead of just getting their normal dose of "libs are dumb"
You know what? I think that might be fair. On top of that, Gell-Mann amnesia effect applies to pretty much every media outlet, even ones we would prefer it not to. So anytime we are well-read or particularly informed about a subject a drive-by podcast (no offense) is going to come off badly.
Yeah I definitely like blocked and reported the least when it touches on things I understand well. I thought this episode was pretty typical except it had a little too much summary at the beginning. But again my knowledge of small liberal arts colleges in Florida is pretty sparse
A completely rubbish episode, and that's even grading it on a curve given some low quality episodes lately. The first half (everything before housekeeping) was a rehash of items already covered on BARPod. That could have been summed up in a minute, with a link to previous episodes in the show notes. The remainder was just taking some potshots at DeSantis and Rufo based on some stupid but uninteresting items that could have been compressed into a 5 minute segment. Ugh...
I get your frustration but the hosts have to take into account that every episode can have many new listeners. I'm a relatively new listener and often have no idea what they are talking about. I'm grateful when they explain a previously discussed topic. Most people don't want to go back and listen to an old and dated episode.
Also, I think they may just release too many episodes per month. They currently have 7-8 episodes a month but I think if they reduced it to 5-6 episodes they wouldn't have to scrape for content. Some episodes seem like they are made because they have to release something instead of having a good topic. Having said all of that, I still enjoy pretty much all of the shows even the ones that aren't their best.
My main issue with this episode wasn't that it covered a previously discussed topic, but rather that the payoff was far too small for the investment. The entire first half was a recap, this should have been limited to a few mins at most. Then the new stuff in the second half was quite underwhelming and added little to what had already been recapped. I could see it being OK for a new listener, but as a long time subscriber it felt like a rerun.
Maybe you're onto something with scraping for content, as the quality has been dropping noticeably over the past few months at least. But lazy rehashing of topics doesn't seem like the best way to address that
You’re going to have to come up with a different example for this thought experiment because wokesters taking over has literally been the state of higher education the last 60+ years.
If BARPod had already done a previous episode on a woke takeover and then rehashed it with another largely uninteresting episode, then yeah, my criticism would be the same.
It would have been really interesting if they actually like, compared this to other times in which the state decided to take over a flagging public college and how that all went, why it happened, etc.
Seriously, episodes like this make me feel like a sucker. I'm not asking for Radiolab-quality production here, but if I'm going to be paying to fund Jesse's European vacations and Katie's second home, I'd like them to try and pretend to put in a part-time job's worth of effort.
It's fascinating how fascinated everyone is with DeSantis - I can't believe there aren't other Republican governors / leaders doing some Really Interesting (dubious) things right now that we haven't been hearing about from every MSM outlet.
I thought it was interesting, for my part. I've read Rufo's book and I'm sympathetic to his description of the problems with wokeness, but it's interesting to see how that is playing out in real actions.
The problem is it’s pretty obvious that whilst he’s taken on some terrible ideas he’s a bad faith actor (he’s been pretty open about deliberately turning CRT into a slur rather than actually challenging the ideas) and his motivation isn’t an objection to indoctrination or a defence of free thought, it’s simply the wrong ideas. If the same level of indoctrination was coming from the right you know he’d be supportive.
Did they ask Rufo or the New College for comment? That seems like normal journalism, and I'm not sure that reading a Rufo tweet is the same thing.
This feeds back into J Mann's First Rule of Blocked and Reported: Katie and Jessie are good journalists, but their opinions are about as dumb as yours or mine
I think it's good that they challenged our views, but I think Charlie Kirk makes a better throw-away punching bag than Rufo. If they need to scratch the Blue itch, there are bigger poop shows on the right than New College.
That they didn't dig into whether or not anything like this has happened before (restructuring a failing college, especially a public one, and what it looked like, how it went, etc.) left me underwhelmed. But also that it was a public college was all the more reason why the state can go in and change how things are done. Plenty of private colleges were started and built by people who wanted _a specific thing_ (and a lot of those are shuttering these past 10 years).
Why _can't_ the 'owner' of something change how it's done, especially when its failing in the same way as private institutions?
I tend to agree with you--"I think Rufo is a fool" seems like a good summary of the podcast. Great. Now what? No curiosity into how the baseball team is going to compete (the college has probably got this covered)--just that they don't have that in place yet. Mmmmmkay.
Scholarships for baseball--ooooh! So freaky! Not.
Getting rid of Gender Studies. Departments come and go every day, the school has limited resources and gets to choose which come and go. No controversy here.
Interim president gets lots of money--that's what you do for an interim president. If he fails, Rufo owns that--if he succeeds will you give him credit for money well-spent?
I suppose there's some basis behind a legitimate critique that they're using the Left's playbook for these changes, and that's hypocritical, so there is that.
This is my time to shine! As part of the job I just left (last day was yesterday), I was responsible for tracking students' career outcomes. This is maybe the first episode ever where my professional background is relevant. My experience is at a business school, so much more career-focused than a liberal arts college, but our student body is about four or five times larger than New College's total enrollment.
In brief, it's tough to tell whether Chris Rufo or the New College website is correct about New College's post-graduation outcomes because New College's website provides so little information. Career outcomes are similar to the health care figures that Jesse so frequently writes about: there is a lot of very bad data out there, and people inevitably present it as both definitive and supportive of the narrative they want to tell.
The most important metrics for post-graduation information are: the percentage of students seeking a job who accepted a job within X months of graduation (the "placement rate"); the percentage pursuing continued education; and the percentage "still seeking" (that is, have not accepted a job offer or are enrolling in a specific graduate education program). The standards for what constitutes "a job," or how long after graduation is the right number of months, is decided by a number of different bodies. For undergraduate business schools, schools will often go with the standards demanded by the AACSB (the accreditation body for undergraduate business schools), or with the standards used by the business school magazine Poets & Quants, which ranks business schools. I'm not sure what small liberal arts colleges use as their standards. All of the career services people at New College seem to be active in the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), so I assume, if they use any standards at all in their data collection processes, they probably use NACE standards: https://www.naceweb.org/job-market/graduate-outcomes/first-destination/standards-and-protocols/.
All of the metrics above are mediated by the "response rate" and/or "knowledge rate." Most schools base their post-graduation outcomes on surveys administered to students before and after graduation (generally called First Destination Surveys) that ask about their post-grad plans. New College uses Handshake as its career management platform (job posting board), and Handshake does have a First Destination Survey module, but I can't tell if they actually use it. The "response rate" is the percentage of graduates who respond to the official first destination survey. The "knowledge rate" is the percentage of students for whom the school has reasonable confidence in the student's post-grad outcome: that is, "all the students who responded to our survey, plus the students we found on LinkedIn with jobs, plus the students who sent their professor an email they got a job at ABC Company." A school that reports very high percentages of students employed or in grad school after graduation, but which does not provide a response rate or knowledge rate, is not providing enough information to make an educated statement about how their students do after graduation, because they could be missing data on a huge percentage of their graduates (who are disproportionately likely to *not* have jobs or be in grad school, because students with jobs or going to grad school are more likely to publicize or share that information than students who don't have a job or haven't gotten into grad school).
The only data points I can find on the New College website are here: https://www.ncf.edu/admissions/outcomes-of-graduates/. Claim 1: "83%: Employed or in graduate school within four months of graduation." But 83% of whom? Of the most recent graduating class? The last five graduating classes? Of the students within the most recent graduating class for whom the school had knowledge of their post-graduation outcome? Who knows. Claim 2: "$55,000: Median salary of graduates within five years of graduation." First of all, yikes, is that a number you want to brag about? Secondly, is this the median salary of the specific graduating class from five years ago, or is it the median salary of all grads within the last five years? Claim 3: "$106,300: Median salary of graduates within ten years of graduation." This claim, frankly, beggars belief. How did they collect this information from alumni? How many alumni did they survey? Alumni surveys are notorious for getting low response rates.
It is possible that both Chris Rufo and the New College are "right," and just providing percentages from different denominators. It is possible that 83% *of the graduates for whom New College had knowledge of their post-graduation outcome* were employed or in postgraduate education AND that those graduates only made up half of the overall graduating class per Chris Rufo's tweet.
One thing I find suspect in Rufo's tweet is the claim that less than half of grads found work/education within *a year* of graduation. Almost nobody tracks students for a full year after graduation. Three to six months, sure. But I don't know anyone tracking students for a whole year after graduation, and I have to imagine that this number claimed by Rufo is lower than the real figure. A significant percentage of students anywhere get their shit together between three-six months after graduation and get *some* job somewhere.
I would be incredibly skeptical of any "outcomes" information published by universities without response/knowledge rate.
Thanks for the deep dive. Post-grad employment data is always subject to selection bias. The kid making $100k as a Microsoft software engineer can't wait to send in his survey. The kid making $25k at the Microsoft call center, not so much.
Thank you! I was doing to write something similar but this is perfect. The response rate issue is key–I’ve seen these surveys from graduates of my department and we often get, like 2-3 responses (but they do tend to be good numbers – response bias is helpful!)
I’d add that, in New College’s case, I don’t think they offer professional degrees, so they are going to have lower reported salaries after graduation because there aren’t CS majors blowing the curve. I think this is also why they do the 10-year salary report; it’s long been a claim of Humanities departments that their graduates’ salaries tend to start lower but catch up over time, so 10-year results can be useful. (But of course, as you suggest, it’s not clear what kind of data their figures are based on.)
I also imagine New College grads are rather more well-off and might generally take longer to get a job or go to grad school – gotta travel Europe for a year post-grad, right? Good for them but maybe not for the stats
Yeah that was one thing really missing from their understanding. “Oh know we can’t have political activists on the college board”. Ummm often like the governor’s buddies wife and his donors kid are on these boards. They aren’t filled with non-political people.
Loath as I am to ever take Jesse’s side over Katie’s, Arial font is barbaric and clearly indicative of deep-seated white supremacy (arial/aryan, need I say more?)
If you don’t have Garamond, Times is an acceptable consolation prize.
Supposedly sans-serif fonts like Ariel are better for Accessibility, being that various neurodivergent groups supposedly find them easier to read. For this reason they are nominally required for teaching materials at my university, though I have refused to give up my Baskerville font and have not yet been disciplined. It’s an issue that I’d love Jesse to dig into; my impression is that the science behind this is pretty junky
Ariel is a crime against the senses and humanity. That and New Calibri are set as defaults to screen for people too careless or tasteless to change the font.
Anybody who’s set type or spec’d a book design in the last 40 years knows, sans serif for display/heads ok but serif for text blocks. Trust the Science(tm)!
"I wouldnt want the left wing equivalent of Chris Rufo running a university" says Jesse. Just WTF do you think the status quo has been? What world have you been living in? They could have just closed New College, and would have been justified. They could have started a new school, and been justified. The nicer thing was to convert the existing school, not fire people, and get through all the red tape of starting a new school. It's a weak argument by BAR, but Im honestly glad they are not Just giving us what we want to hear--as much as it irritates me in this precise moment..
Come on, that is not who is running the schools. Faculty are on average liberal but we haaate the admins. Admins care about $$$, they don’t give a crap about “indoctrinating students” - they just want us to push our students through and out with degrees. They couldn’t care less what we teach as long as there are butts in seats.
Ya, that doesn’t track with the evidence or my experience. If administrators only cared about the money they wouldn’t be building out DEI bureaucracy, its expensive.
Moreover, individual administrators wish to burnish their reputation for wokeness, etc. In one instance I know of an admin broke the covid rules for an event at the behest of a “minoritized” group. The admin was more interested in appearing as an “ally” than feared placing the college in an actionable position or incurring anti-vax PR.
Admins aren’t just about money for the college, ideology or simple careerism is a thing especially in academia.
David makes a reasonable point, NCF is so maddening to the woksters because conservative control (or even just representation) in academia is so rare.
The admins include these programs because a loud minority of students and parents have come to demand and expect them. For schools struggling with declining enrollments (so almost all schools) It’s a selling point to prospective students and parents who have come to expect this stuff. They fear to lose the students who would see a lack of “dei” as a dealbreaker. Conservative students it’s thought won’t be turned off they’ll just roll their eyes, since it’s everywhere. A similar thing happens with athletic facilities. Having a huge brand new students athletics center is now considered standard. If you don’t have one you’ll lose those few students who would actually use it.
There’s also the fact that some of the admin bloat comes from actual regulations - every uni has to have a title ix office now.
Right, but a loud minority is still a minority and doesn't justify the bloat, they'd be better off enticing the cohorts of Chinese students that fell off with the pandemic, who don't care about "baizuo" nonsense *and* pay full tuition. So, it still seems to be ideological in nature and not straight greed. There's lefty prestige stuff in there that wins awards for careerists but isn't likely to boost enrollment due to, as you mentioned, it being a loud minority. So, I think the idea that the admins aren't a big part of this woke indoctrination problem doesn't hold up.
I think they believe it does justify the bloat. I don't necessarily think they are very good at their jobs or thinking about this rationally, but that does seem to be what they are doing - reacting to their (perceived) customer base. In the long term it's a bad policy, I think, just like trying to sell prospies on athletic facilities and new buildings. Certainly they are sacrificing the academic reputation of the institution by pushing policies that maximize enrollment regardless of student academic readiness.
I agree that good admins should do things like try to enroll foreign students more as well, but, everyone else is also trying to do that kind of thing. Demography means there are more spots in ivy's that going to students who would have gone here. And we accept more students who would have gone to a less competitive school. On down the line.
I’m not sure what one wins if admins are pushing woke commissars and their authoritarian policies for pure “greed”rather than ideological conformity but even say you’re right, in practical terms, its a distinction without a difference.
The original point was that schools are ideologically captured currently, so crying at a shift in the ideological capture of one schools seems hypocrisy.
You responded that the admins aren’t ideologues themselves but greedy incompetents who are reacting to a vocal minority by installing commisars and firing teachers for “hate speech” and other nonsense. I mean, okay but in what material way does that refute the status quo being lefty ideological capture at the admin level?
Right, the admins are creating a need for themselves by creating a perceived need for action in response to everything, but it's not directly about money. Land O Lakes colleges love grandstanding
May I ask what type of school you're at? I surmise that David is describing "elite" schools with 10-15 applicants for every seat.
In the absence of financial pressure, administrators may be much more likely to concern themselves with mandating wokery in the curriculum. And sowing disregard for academic freedom and free speech.
Despite geographic proximity, Central Connecticut State and Wesleyan are on different planets.
My former small college likewise beefed up its athletic programs to build enrollment and added more athletic scholarships. Coaches routinely interfered with professors if the student athlete was failing. Retaining athletes was such a priority that faculty had to fill out midterm evaluation forms sent to the coaches.
BTW, baseball is super popular among Caribbean groups, so, yes, starting a baseball team in an area like Florida would likely increase the enrollment of students whose families are from the Caribbean (can be any skin color, can be Spanish or French or English or Creole speaking).
Yes, my small college had a baseball team and majority Caribbean-affiliated students.
Yeah exactly. They have to build up enrollment somehow in order to get the momentum growing. Student athletes also must live on campus. Even if they’re giving them scholarships those kids are paying plenty of money on room and board. To attract more (full) paying “customers” they need to create the right on campus culture. Since they want to attract conservatives it makes sense to focus on getting more young men on campus. Small liberal arts colleges have an problem with the skewed gender ratio favoring women over men 60/40 (it’s even worse at HBCUs). Gender imbalance is not a marketing problem if the students are mostly ENBY or headed for graduate school or a major city after college. But for middle class college kids from Florida who are just trying to get their BA and get out, potentially meeting a future spouse at college is a consideration. If your college gets a reputation of having more eligible straight men than other places, more traditionally minded women will want to attend and enrollment will continue to increase in a virtuous cycle, which should soon cover the cost of the athletic scholarships.
Maybe for large universities but for small colleges my guess is that athletics are an expense well justified by the recruitment and retention benefits.
Small colleges don’t have giant stadiums filled with alumni fans. Desperate for turn out, my former small college admins asked faculty to attend games so that the players would feel supported.
The frame used in the reporting on the “lower” GPA and test scores for the student athletes is highly misleading & potentially racist. We are talking about students that still have much higher grades and test scores relative to the general population of high school graduates.
“The combined GPA for student-athletes admitted to New College for the coming year was 3.61, compared with 3.7 for the overall population of 328 students enrolled so far. The student-athlete combined ACT score was 22 compared to 24 for the whole class. The student-athlete SAT score was 1097 compared to 1147 for the combined group of incoming students, according to records.”
The current average SAT score in 2022 was 1050 overall.
I also find it hypocritical that reporters are disparaging a University for admitting people with lower test scores and GPAs, considering a growing number of colleges no longer require standardized test scores, including all of the Ivy League schools.
Small universities are currently bending over backward to recruit more students from underrepresented backgrounds & low income neighborhoods, which is correlated with having lower grades & test scores for understandable reasons. If enrollment at my university went up by even 5% it would be the direct result of such efforts and no one would dare to mention a .09 drop in the incoming class GPA!
I disagree! At my institution faculty are all intensely worried about the lower level of selectivity. Students are Really struggling and it impacts the classroom environment and our ability to teach in 4 years what grad programs and employers have come to expect from our students. Admins want us to pass everyone, even if they don’t come to class and have demonstrated zero learning. It’s bad out there. Schools reputations are tanking fast.
Remember the UNC student athlete scandal? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I had classes with a couple football players at UNC over 20 yrs back. To say they were not up to the standard of the average student academically would be generous.
To date, I believe Columbia is the only Ivy to go test-,optional. But your point about the overall trend is a valid one.
Yes we can't demand that Harvard be more flexible in it's admissions standards in the name of diversity, but then cry foul when another school does it.
With ACT's in the low 20's, I'm not sure why GPA even matters. Particularly .09 difference.
It's clearly a regional level public school. They should accept virtually all applicants that meet a minimum bar that their school can handle and give a good, foundational education (required for getting a job, imo).
Also, anyone whose ever actually committed to a sport let alone to the degree required to play at a college level (even 2nd or 3rd tier college) would never question why this is taken into account when evaluating academic performance.
Take any random non-athlete. Then tell them in addition to the effort they put out, they are now required to do 3-4 hours a day of intense training. All year. . . weekends off. The majority's grades will plummet. Many will simply be broken mentally and have to quit.
I'll bet long term positive outcomes for an athlete with a 3.5 over a non-athlete with a 3.7 every single day of the week. (assuming equal course trajectory)
I also looked up the stats on admissions, and they admit 75% of applicants. So it’s ever been a highly selective place, even if students with relatively high grades are self-selecting into it.
And I agree that student athletes tend to be disciplined. At my institution they also have higher grades than the average student. We are also functionally open enrollment and recruit heavily from underrepresented groups and low income neighborhoods. Athletes are by no means worse academically than our average student.
Tons of assertions based on scant to little evidence in this episode. Very “cool kids table jocks are stupid blah blah” vibe. You’re telling me that it’s horrible that the new admin made the college more diverse along almost all factors (expect women who were overly represented initially) is a bad thing? Or that it’s obviously so to AA even though no evidence of that. They’re putting a lot of chips into the “this is going to go horribly wrong” bucket and I just hope I’ll still be a subscriber when they do the “checking in on New College of Florida” episode where they’re proved wrong in almost every respect.
I listened to the episode. I am not a fan of Chris Rufo. I think he’s a charlatan who benefits off others misery. I’m not sure if I agree with what he’s doing at New College HOWEVER part of me wonders if this needs to happen because our higher Ed is so captured by a fascist like ideology that purports to be tolerant but is aggressively intolerant
As opposed to being captured by the ideology Rufo & his ilk support.
Can’t we hold the position the Universities shouldn’t be looking to indoctrinate people regardless of what form the indoctrination takes and its pretty obvious from his writings that Rufo is pro indoctrination, so long as he agrees with the ideas.
Rufo is bad but who cares when the other side has him at 100:1 on campuses. Maybe even more. “Oh no this school will become ideologically captured”. Oh so just like nearly every single other school out there…
I said we should take the position that’s not ideal.
It’s amusing that so many on the Right who’ve presented themselves as champions of free thought and inquiry then reveal them to be merely partisan culture warriors, the response is “Yeah, but the other lot are doing it already so it’s fair game”.
It was obvious that that’s always been Rufo’s position, but you either believe in Academic freedom and the importance of viewpoint diversity or you don’t.
If you just want to be a Culture Warrior, you can’t complain if people point out your earlier principled statements were merely a ruse to advance a partisan agenda.
I'm not on the Right but nice try! Independent. If you choose to overlook that the vast, vast majority of colleges and universities are already indoctrination machines for the Left, and focus your ire on one college in Florida, you don't care about academic freedom because students across the nation are being given one side as their only option.
I don't want to speak for Miller, but maybe he/she'd be saying the same thing about a left-leaning institution if it had been the focus of the episode.
Well d’uh, I think anyone would have to have been living under a rock to not understand the problem with academia more broadly, but the idea that the solution is a disingenuous blowhard like Rufo is laughable.
I’m simply making the point that to defend academic freedom requires defending academic freedom, that Rufo clearly isn’t interested in that and that a culture war race to the bottom is terrible whoever is doing it.
A lot of the comments here seem to be willing to give Rufo a pass because ‘look at what the other lot do’.
There’s also a lot of comment that amount to ‘Stuff I agree with should be taught, stuff I disagree with is a waste of time’. That one side of aisle has more influence in Academia doesn’t make the other side attacking academic freedom ok.
A lot of the criticism of J&K seem to be they haven’t given Rufo the benefit of the doubt, but that requires pretending his real agenda isn’t patently obvious.
Man, Rufo is really missing a great opportunity, if I'm being charitable, to do a St John's style Great Books curriculum if he really wanted to create a rigorous non-left SLAC instead of aping every failing small college on the East coast.
Jesse, the "h" in Amherst is silent. Unfortunately I will have to cancel my primo subscription because of this egregious misrepresentation. Also: if there are any other members of the secret Western Mass TERF contingency reading this, please get in touch with me so we can hang out.
At least one was there last weekend, visiting relatives. They didn't suspect a thing. We really do need a secret signal for when we encounter each other in the wild.
Yeah there's definitely tells that someone is a tra but not too many terf tells... That they listen to bnr is a good one... My woke friends don't know it
Having lived in Boston, I can confirm that many people in Eastern Mass do pronounce the "h." Having grown up in Amherst, I can confirm that this is wrong: the "h" is silent.
I went to a college that played them in football and we called them Amherst with the "h"... Of course I never visited and did the tour because come on the Lord Jeffs? Might as well be a purple cow.
As a WMass-er I agree. The whole point of stupid Massachusetts name pronunciations is as a shibboleth! You can't say "Am*H*erst" and then talk about repping the home state. Shame!
Next thing you're going to start pronouncing the rest of the towns in this state the way they're spelled. Lee-oh-min-ster? Ugh, typical NYCers.
Where I'm from, which is a rural-ish area in PA, most of the liberals I knew were thoughtful well educated people. Then I moved to theAmherst/Northampton area and one of the first things that struck me was the number of psychics. I realized that people can be dumb and liberal too. It was a nice area in many ways, but I eventually moved back to where I'm from because i couldn't picture myself staying longterm.
I am a prof at a small public liberal arts college that has had declining enrollment for the past decade. If the enrollment of New College ends up doubling over the next few years because students and their parents are attracted to an institution that does not suffer the sort of progressive capture that afflicts practically every other non-Christian small liberal arts college, Rufo will be able to declare mission accomplished. I suspect there will be other small colleges that seek to emulate this model.
A demographic cliff is approaching and young men are increasingly rejecting higher education. This is partly explained by academic deficits and job market forces, but it’s also driven by the perceived hostility of liberal arts colleges toward conservatives & (white) men. A related problem is the gender imbalance that exists at small liberal arts colleges that are over 60% female, so straight college women aren’t going to find boyfriends or potential husbands when they are in college. If New College can attract more conservative young men to increase their enrollment, conservative young women will follow. I assume the tuition is relatively low, considering it is a public institution, so I actually think this experiment may end up being successful in the long term. Small public liberal arts colleges everywhere are desperate to increase enrollment, but they are not actively targeting the group that possibly has the most growth potential, i.e. conservatives and young men.
I came here to post about recruiting problems and the demographic cliff, but you've already said it. :-)
Even public colleges with more male-attracting majors are talking about this problem, but you're right, it's especially acute at liberal arts colleges. Even the name-brand SLAC where I got my first gig after my PhD was having recruitment problems when I was there. It's much worse for less prestigious institutions.
I don't like Rufo's methods (the last thing higher ed needs is more highly paid administrative positions), but it would indeed be a big success if he could recruit students who might otherwise skip college.
In a twist, I just learned that are new dean of liberal arts is actually a refugee from new college of Florida!
I'm watching my SLAC I went to cut everything that attracted me to them in the first place (RIP World Languages Dep't), just to do the exact same thing every other SLAC in the area is doing, bullshit MAs degrees in business. Of course, the useless admin staff isn't feeling the squeeze, just the professors and lecturers.
Oh, geez, colleges don't exist for men to find a mate, they are (or should be) about education. I agree that we don't need to invent gender majors, but my gosh, I went to a Christian college and the level of "ring by spring" was intensely cringe.
On the other hand, what’s wrong with trying to meet someone to spend your life with when you’re young and surrounded with other young people? I think it’s a good strategy.
If anything, I think Magic Wade was bemoaning the ability of young *women* to find mates in college.
For people from small towns, going to college where you're surrounded by people who are (theoretically) interested in higher learning, who come from a variety of places, and who may be from a different socioeconomic group than you are -- can be a once in a lifetime opportunity. You are living in a central location, and have many opportunities to interact. She wasn't saying it's the ONLY reason to go to college.
This. I met my husband in college. I was 17, he was 18 and it was, of all things, at a dorm ice skating party for a dorm I didn’t even live in. We started dating when I was 19 and we eloped at 21 and 22.
Marrying a man who went to college (and has parents who went to college) definitely has helped the arc of my life. And I’ve been doing life for 22 years with a pretty awesome guy.
A lot of my friends met their spouses in high school or college, even if they didn’t marry until years later.
I don’t want my 20 yo son to rush anything relationship wise but I do consider the next few years of his life to be the most likely time for him to meet a potential spouse.
This goes more so for people who, for any mix of reasons (religious, culturally, personality), have no desire to date a ton of people and who have family as a main goal.
My son is the sort who, had they not had major values differences, he might well have ended up eventually marrying his first girlfriend. Instead, he broke it off with her after 6 months because he decided that their differences were too big of a gulf for marriage. She definitely wanted it to be a forever thing with him.
While I don’t want my son to get married quite as young as his dad and I did, I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t think it might happen.
Thank you.
Anytime, sister. 🫶
I have met, oh, one or two couples who met their spouses in college. Not exactly a cultural crisis that it occurs.
I don't think that's what she's saying, though. Women don't tend to "marry down" in education and income, so if more women are highly educated than men and have more prestigious positions, their pool shallows.
(“On average” throat-clearing)
Maybe it’s changing, I’ll have to look into it more.
My personal anecdotes point to the opposite conclusion of yours, but personal anecdotes aren’t really conclusive.
“ A demographic cliff is approaching and young men are increasingly rejecting higher education. This is partly explained by academic deficits and job market forces, but it’s also driven by the perceived hostility of liberal arts colleges toward conservatives & (white) men.”
I think the latter is the great unspoken issue that universities face today. If the number of female, minority, underrepresented etc students dropped the same degree as male students have university administrators would be treating it as a crisis. But absolutely nothing, at least none of the recruitment efforts at my uni, is being done to address the new gender gap, and it gets dismissed (or worse) if brought up. I don’t know what the solution is–at the very least we should include intellectual diversity as part of DEI goals? But honestly this is where the ideological capture of university faculties is hurting… (Thanks for letting me get that off my chest)
> This is partly explained by academic deficits and job market forces, but it’s also driven by the perceived hostility of liberal arts colleges toward conservatives & (white) men.”
Alright. I'm going to play a bit of the contrarian here on the "male gap". And a little on the conservative gap.
The gap is almost entirely concentrated in the liberal arts. In fact, if you look at STEM degrees men overwhelming dominate.....something like 80%.
I propose the reason less men are attending college for liberal arts degrees is because they can earn as much or more by just immediately going into the job force. Especially if they're willing to work physically hard, dirty, risky blue collar work. And for the rest, the gap between college educated and not is very small. Usually you can catch up or exceed that gap within the 4 or 5 years it'd take you to slog through a non-STEM bachelors. The ROI just isn't there for men unless you're going for a STEM.
And let's just be honest....the majority of the population isn't academically capable of doing well in those careers.
You see a similar pattern for "liberal domination". In the STEMS, 50% or less identify as liberal or democrats. While the other 50% identify as mostly moderate and independent.
I have absolutely no idea about the political leanings of virtually all my STEM professors in Engineering. It just doesn't come up in discussions of differential equations or LaPlace transforms. And no one talks about whether Boyle's Law maximizes social equity.
I realize this is an old comment but you are 100% correct. The Comp Sci department at my college was 14% female and by far most of the women were exchange students from China. I believe this was the case for the Engineering department as well, maybe even less women. Mathematics had a higher percentage of women (maybe 22% female) but I think that might have to do with the fields of teaching and actuarial science attracting more women. Not sure. Anyway no political discussion ever happened, not even when Trump was elected. We were too busy struggling with our projects and too exhausted to care about much more than passing our really tough classes.
The model of turning around enrollments in a small university by increasing sports programs has been done before, and it’s been done by someone with a Florida connection. University of Florida President Ben Sasse used this strategy to balance the books when he was president of Midland University in Nebraska.
I have been completing my degree that I abandoned at a small Vermont liberal arts college almost two decades ago and yes, it is amazing - there are SO MANY MORE WOMEN NOW. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but I was surprised. They made up the vast majority of my sociology, public speaking, and world religions classes
I mean that’s a nice theory but it’s evident it’s failed to do this in hilarious fashion given they had to “recruit” 2 baseball teams worth of men in order to get over the 50% male mark.
Btw I had no problem “finding a husband” at a 65% female college. And my school had a pretty high gay male pop as well. So probably like 1/3 of students were men interested in women.
Maybe you were one of the hot ones? You are missing the point about her comment. If 65% of a college is females, and at your college there were a lot of gay males, then there were even LESS possible future mates for heterosexual females.
hardly, though my alma mater definitely has a crunchy reputation, men and women alike weren't exactly trying to be hot
I understood the points I just don't think it's that important. Not everyone meets their spouse in college or wants to, and things have moved on with dating apps and SM for the most part.
My larger point was that they had to goose the numbers in order to make it even appear that they are a "welcoming space" for men. That's really only true if you're a sub par baseball player. And that's inherently funny.
You'd think a 60+% female student body would be recruitment leverage enough for young men
...
From your perspective, do you think it's just a perceived hostility? I can't help but think that there's something to it.
Hate to say it, but getting rid of the Gender Studies program will probably help with their rankings.
The ballooning of these types of "studies" programs in schools has not been great for kids who go into massive debt to get a degree that will not help you get a job.
Also, if they had very few gender studies majors & minors (which I guarantee is true) then they shuttered it to cut costs, not purely for ideological reasons. Most small universities with declining enrollment will eliminate such programs in the next decade if they haven’t already, even at very progressive places.
I'm also unsure why eliminating gender studies would be an attack on academic freedom. Even if the move is politically motivated (which it may or may not be) it's not limiting what any particular academic at the college can say, but rather which majors are offered.
Because it’s pretty obvious that Rufo & his ilk aren’t simply interested in dropping a major they looking to prevent certain ideas being taught.
The idea that they’d be fine with Professors being free to teach Judith Butler or Kimberlie Crenshaw just not under the umbrella of Gender Studies is ridiculous.
Anyone’s who read anything by Rufo should be able to tell he’s absolutely in favour of indoctrination, so long as it’s indoctrination in ideas he agrees with.
He’s an anti intellectual blowhard that doesn’t care about academic freedom in the slightest.
Right - what can you learn in gender studies that you couldn't also learn within other established disciplines that have higher standards for evidence/argumentation?
Or couldn’t learn by mentally
Masturbating in a locked cell.
I’m using this.
😂
Do you have any evidence this is the case? I haven’t seen any and I strongly feel that if it were evident that the GS major was underperforming (eg attracting few students but taking up a lot of faculty teaching time) then Rufo would be talking about this.
I know a couple of people who wanted to major in stuff like that and they figured that the important part was having the degree and that for most jobs, the major didn't matter. They enjoyed their Women's Studies classes, so they might as well major in something like that if the major didn't matter.
I agree that having the degree is the most important part, but anyone who doesn't think the major matters is deceiving themselves. I've been on teams where we make hiring decisions and I would hire an English major over a Gender Studies major any day for the simple reason that getting an English degree probably requires better writing skills than a Gender Studies degree.
I would avoid gender studies majors because it involves the "anti-skill" of parroting dogma and grandstanding with a disdain of balanced analysis.
I would never want to hire a gender studies person. I honestly do not see the upside.
Hire to do what? There’s any number of fields where an understanding of gender could be hugely important. If you have the view that it’s only someone who’ll argue that women have penises and regurgitates Judith Butler then you’re dealing in simplistic stereotypes. Those people obviously exist but making sweeping judgments really isn’t helpful.
Well, what job would they be uniquely qualified for that isn’t teaching gender studies?
Are there any gender studies graduates who think that queer theory is bullshit?
You have to hire gender studies majors so they can transcribe the list of all the newly minted Tumblr genders. It’s like the monks who produced illuminated copies of the Bible in the Middle Ages. There’s so many new genders that each gender studies major can only produce 2-3 good copies of all the genders in their lifetime.
It can be that, but other commenters have pointed out it isn’t always and certainly doesn’t have to be.
I’ve had similar experiences. It matters immensely and they’re getting binned with a gender studies major.
If a school were petitioning to start a Gender Studies program, I certainly wouldn't fault any administrators who said no. You're not entitled to have certain departments.
When my alma mater was facing funding issues the president threatened to axe the computer science department. That would have been idiotic, and lead to worse outcomes for tons of students, but it wouldn't have been an academic freedom violation.
It's funny, protests/petitions are exactly what started these disciplines. A bunch of students at San Fran State demanded it and "went on strike", and now, "Studies"!
https://www.history.com/news/san-francisco-state-student-strike-black-studies
It would depend why.
If they wanted to axe computer science because they had political or moral objections to what was being taught and felt they should be able to tilt the basis of what’s being taught to their own personal world view then it would be.
If funding was an issue and they wanted to cut back to ‘core’ programmes then fair enough, but ‘I think the ideas in this programme are nuts’ isn’t a great rationale.
I see your point, but I do think a univeristy should be dedicated to truth, otherwise it's a gender neutral finishing school. If a department hands out more lies than truth, it is a problem.
But it’s not a biology course, views on gender run the spectrum from biological determinism or blank slateism, to Butler’s ideas about Gender as performance to ideas about an inherent ‘gender identity’.
Whilst I don’t think all those ideas are equally valid, I do think it’s important they’re discussed and explored, that’s the point of academia.
Obviously if a program is simply teach one set of idea in a dogmatic fashion, but given we’re in realm of philosophy and politics pre-determining what is ‘truth’ isn’t any better.
TRA would like to take the discussion of certain ideas off the table because they’ve decided the question has been answered, why is the right doing that any better?
My current issue with gender studies as a program is that it seems to be philosophy-adjacent in that it is a philosophical subjective belief system, however unlike philosophy, there is no room or permit for debate. That's not to say that it should be "banned", but if one wanted to argue against its inclusion, I think it's a valid point to argue from.
How to correct a gender studies program towards truth is a practical question, if it isnt practical, them you should kill the program. I can imagine correcting it through a lot of hires, but will any students enroll?
Gender Studies should be a sub field of History, English, Psychology, etc; it shouldn’t be its own program. This is how Liberal Arts programs used to work; one of the many ways they shot themselves in the feet was when they started slicing off specialties into their own programs in the 80s’/90s. Woe to the English programs that divested themselves of Composition…
My view is that if a university is publicly funded, the democratically elected executive can decide whether certain majors are a waste of time. If the electorate doesn’t like it, they can factor that into their vote next time. The state is not obligated to fund underwater basket weaving.
You’re being incredibly naive if you think this is just about what majors are taught as opposed to what ideas. Rufo has been pretty open about his agenda. He believes in indoctrination, so long as they’re ideas he agrees with.
Okay but in fact it is perfectly legitimate for the state to say, “we are not going to pay to have certain ideas taught”. If the state doesn’t have to fund seminaries it doesn’t have to fund Judith Butler either. I’m not making any distinction between “majors” and “ideas”, I’m saying that no university teaches *all* ideas, and democratically elected officials are within their rights to decide which ones the state is going to subsidize.
“Okay but in fact it is perfectly legitimate for the state to say, “we are not going to pay to have certain ideas taught”
In some literal sense of course that’s true, but it’s true of any ideas so why the complaints about the lack of conservative ideas?
Are you arguing for each side to simply try and capture legislators and then have institutions not teach idea they don’t like because they’re under no literal obligation to teach any particular thinker.
If you’re choosing to not teach certain ideas because you don’t like them for political reasons you can’t also claim to be in favour of academic freedom.
About the only thing the Wokesters are right about is calling bs on the Rights Culture Warriors pretence to value free speech & academic freedom as principles.
Of course on all sides there are individuals who really do believe in these ideas, but the idea that anyone like Rufo does is laughable.
Two sides of the same coin.
Saying everyone believes in indoctrination is overly reductive. There are better and worse ways of navigating controversial issues. One way is to stack the deck and only expose students to the best versions from one side of the argument and either none or the worst from the other side. Another approach is to try to be fair-minded and steel man the opposing perspectives, be honest about what we don't know, etc.
“So what is your alternative for choosing public school curricula?”
Trying to establish a process that’s independent of partisan politics.
I’m open to the idea it currently isn’t, but a culture war race to bottom of trying to impose the partisan view you happen to support once you gain power isn’t the solution.
I think Rufo would settle for a balanced presentation of ideas, he is more reasonable than his Twitter persona--which is geared to getting peeps on the bandwagon.
I think you’re being incredibly naive, I think the opposite that there’s every reason to believe he’s stumbled on a strategy to simply try and replace indoctrination he doesn’t like with indoctrination he does like.
Watch what Rufo does a little bit more closely and with more nuance. Where is the indoctrination he does like being taught at New College.
I have no idea why Gender Studies students are willing to pay full tuition for a degree that will offer very few job prospects especially since DEI programs are drying up in the private sector. I think it should be an online degree and the cost should be half as much.
I have a major in Women's & Gender Studies, but I double majored. And I took it with a focus on Women's history and Gay/Lesbian history. As a huge history buff, this was a little self-indulgent. However, I would not say it was any lesser than any history degree just focused on women and gay people and on feminist thought and philosophy. Also, I managed to avoid most of the 'queer' stuff even though this was less than 10 years ago.
I went on to work for a domestic violence organization after graduation so I will say that my major was very pertinent to my work.
Ok maybe I am wrong and there are real venues of work available to gender studies major outside of DEI work or just becoming a professor of gender studies.
There definitely are. There was another student in the major who double majored with psychology who was planning on being a sex therapist.
My alma mater has certificates for these types of "studies" programs. So you graduate with a degree in History, English, Econ etc and you also get a certificate in say, Gender Studies or Latin American Studies.
Seems like a fair compromise.
This seems totally reasonable
Maybe ask what university this is?
Princeton. I should add a caveat that students are always demanding that these programs get upgraded to a major. So something that was a certificate 10 years ago may be a major now. I believe African American Studies was upgraded in this manner.
I think the black and orange is "Halloweentown University State"
It obviously depends to some degree on what actually is being taught and to what degree it’s reduced to a particular po mo/critical theory subset of ideas, but I did International Development postgrad & a lot of work that’s done internationally has a really strong gender component given the types of societies people are working in. Having a handle on ideas about Gender could be incredibly useful for that type of work. If you’re specialisation was say Judith Butler less so, but I’m not sure every programme is only teaching that strain of thinking.
From the perspective of an academic it’s a ham handed symbolic move, which will act primarily to chill speech - if the major was underperforming (low enrollment) and therefore cutting it is a cost saving measure, that would be one thing. But if not it’s bad business and faculty will get the message that their departments will be at risk if they teach similar topics.
How new majors and departments are made is generally from the faculty level up. Faculty propose a new program, including the classes required to complete the major(s). Then it gets approved up the chain typically with oversight from other faculty, and several levels of admins. Programs are deleted in the same way. I am aware of cases where majors and even departments are removed when they are underperforming in terms of cost effectiveness and generally I think that’s a good thing. But this isn’t.
Since you'r a working academic, I'm very curious as to your thoughts on the specific demographic cliff for the humanities and social sciences. Apparently, enrollments in these disciplines are in deep trouble, even at elite universities.
Everyone is struggling with the enrollments issue. Even hard sciences which once struggled with too many students. It seems lately where I’m at like students are attracted to some of these “softer” social science majors because they are easier and fashionable. Things like communications and environmental studies.
Hard science is too difficult to get a high gpa in and doesn’t have a “welcoming” reputation. Meanwhile Humanities like English philosophy and history, and traditional societal sciences like anthropology, economics are seen as old fashioned and stuffy so are also unpopular.
But I have no idea about national trends. Would be interested if you have data.
https://hechingerreport.org/proof-points-the-number-of-college-graduates-in-the-humanities-drops-for-the-eighth-consecutive-year/
Hmm they are looking at raw numbers of graduates in humanities. I would like to see % of graduates in each major area (STEM, social science, humanities, arts), since that corrects for demographic changes which will impact all majors. It does seem from that graph like the Humanities slump predates the end of the millennial demo bubble by a few years (I think that hit around 2020)?
From where I'm sitting in a STEM department at a liberal arts school, we were doing great (overenrollment and high fac/student ratio was an issue) until the demographic slump hit. Then our enrollments dropped faster percentage wise than other majors because the colleges overall enrollment dropped (though the ceiling was very high). We're also having more trouble retaining students in the STEM majors because students are less prepared. A lot more of our students either flunk out or leave for a social sci major because they don't like getting C's. "Softer" majors will let them slide by but its harder to do that in STEM when they are required to learn things in the foundational courses in order to pass later ones.
I think that our business and education majors are holding strong. Along with social sciences. A lot of those majors require quite a bit of history and english which helps maintain those departments along with general education of course.
Very similar situation for me here. We are losing tons of engineers to soft STEM. Comp sci and cyber especially
In attending classes over the past year, the biggest surprise to me is how many vet tech and "green business" students there are. It seemed like 1 out of every 3 people I met was training to be a vet tech.
Gender Studies=Fashion, cosmetology, and theater; am I missing anything?
This might be my most edgelordy position but I think that the "studies" departments are sort of poisoned from the start - they're not oriented towards truth seeking, and you can already pursue the study of any particular identity group of authors (in literature), identity political group (history or poli sci), etc. down the line within the confines of actual subjects. They basically act as activist spawning and training grounds, and it's weird that taxpayer dollars pay for that.
Like, I wouldn't want my taxes going to a Catholic Studies or Calvinist studies department that framed their entire discipline assuming the primacy of their viewpoint either.
Seems to me the problem is that the name is a lie. If the gender studies people actually studied gender using scientific methods, there would be no problem. There's a lot of weird interesting endocrinology and genetics, and plenty of real social science and history and law. In theory, a gender studies major is a perfectly reasonable interdisciplinary liberal arts degree.
But what actual gender studies departments doing is not that.
And feminist theory, which may at some points fit within social science at others it’s really a branch of philosophy.
Whilst I don’t doubt there’s many awful programs that teach in a way that means one need accept Judith Butler as a kind of prophet, I imagine there are others that genuinely do try and teach a broad range of ideas and do so critically.
Maybe, but Judith Butler by any reasonable standard is an obscure theorist who's added little of value to the field. A scholarly course on feminist philosophy could easily find other writers of more substance to analyze.
Whether you like it or not she’s been hugely influential, deciding to not teach her as opposed to actually teach her critically is no different from the people we all criticise for thinking no platforming is a solution to ideas they don’t like.
The reason she's been hugely influential is some radical academics force-fed her stuff to teenagers who didn't know any better. I would argue the same of many of the Critical Race Theory (in the academic sense of the term, not the Chris Rufo sense) figures. These people are nobodies who don't have much to say, good or bad.
If anything, these sorts of people could be covered in an academic context on that meta-level: how do people who haven't really succeeded get elevated past their station?
And again, taking the meaning of gender studies ingenuously, the heart of it is genetics and hormones. I would expect feminist theory to take up more than a small, perhaps elective portion of that degree.
“The heart of gender is genetics and hormones”
I’d disagree with this. The heart of sex differences are female and male development yes. But women’s and men’s gender roles are obviously much more complicated and that’s what concerns feminism. After all the variation in these across time and space is incredibly diverse and interesting!
What were women’s (and men’s) internal lives like when they had fewer choices than now? Why do some cultures end up more gender egalitarian than others? How do different marriage systems impact gender roles? Etc etc.
I do think every gender studies major should take a biology class first though.
“Ideas I like should be taught, idea I don’t like shouldn’t”.
You comment is literally nothing more than that. To simply dismiss people who’ve clearly had a significant impact on modern thought as ‘nobodies’ isn’t a serious proposition. Anyone can do that to any thinker they happen to disagree with.
Are you using the terms sex and gender interchangeably here? Genetics and hormones are a part of sex, sure. But gender?
TBF....it's not "Gender Science".
Well that is fair, but science is how you study gender.
If someone says they have an environmental studies degree and they spent all of their education looking at John Muir paintings and don’t know anything about hydrology or environmental law or nuclear power, that’s not much of an environmental studies degree. That’s art history.
Which isn’t reflective of the quality of the paintings; it’s just a question of what constitutes a rigorous education.
I think the intended implication of "studies" curriculums is exactly that it's a form of evaluating John Muir paintings, not a science.
There are Environmental Science degrees and they require all the core requirements of any other STEM. Environmental Studies is basically reading a lot of environment writings and texts and shooting the shit about them.
I'm not sure what Gender Science would be...other than Biology with a specialization in sex differences. But Gender Studies lack of science is right there in the name. :P
I don’t think the word science and the word study are mutually exclusive at all.
Connotatively, “studies” has come to imply an apotheosis of the decline in standards affecting academia (speaking as someone who’s done an awful lot of college over the past couple of decades) but it doesn’t have to be.
Looking up the Environmental Studies major at a place where I was once a student (they’re big on this sort of thing, which is why it came to mind for me), they require some basic science and statistics courses but they have different tracks for people who are more interested in policy (perhaps wanting to go to law school), vs arts and humanities, vs science. I don’t know what you do with an Environmental Studies (arts and humanities) degree; the people I knew in that the Environmental Science field were all interested in water quality, species conservation, that sort of thing.
I guess I’d encourage you to give a course in feminism a chance. Typically it’s about presenting a bunch of different ways of thinking about and issue and letting students interrogate them. I don’t think anyone is like “and then, in the end Judith Butler has solved the problem of gender! All hail Butler”
E.g. there are Marxist historians who function perfectly well in history departments, why can't there be feminist historians, feminist psychologists, etc. rather than giving that viewpoint its own department?
There are and there’s feminist Internal Relations scholars.
These exist along side bespoke departments, often I imagine within the same institution.
There’s a bunch of fields you could make an argument for only existing within some larger field, it’s not just feminism.
The scholars name escapes me, it’s been many years since I did undergraduate IR but they were great.
Really straight forward about the feminism being a ‘lens’ to look at IR questions from a particular perspective and very clear that they weren’t claiming it was how the world was.
Feminist Just War theory (drawing on the ethic of care) is really interesting, as it’s pretty clear that more mainstream theories often ignore the specific impact on women & children (over half humanity). Again, they weren’t looking to claim it was the one true way to see the world but with justification did argue it introduced a perspective that’s ignored or underplayed.
Whether feminists should be forced to be part of larger fields isn’t straightforward but I definitely think that something is lost when they don’t engage in other fields, hiding away in their own spaces specialised departments does make it way more likely dumb ideas thrive as they’re less likely to be challenged by people not worried about being seen as a bad feminist if they do.
You may be thinking of Cynthia Enloe?
Regarding the siloing of feminist scholars: this would be rare. Most of us are not in women’s and gender studies programs. And of those who are, probably the majority have joint appointments with a conventional discipline. The vast majority of us have trained in a conventional discipline, and I continue to think this is useful.
It wasn’t Enloe, but definitely part of that school of thinkers.
I did this 24 years ago and found the most poorly thought out ideological garbage being taught by and otherwise brilliant professor with a straight face. What a waste of her and our time.
One of the main books that course was based around had the thesis that all of US foreign policy in the 20th century was really about oppressing women.
Which is absolutely nonsense but the prof and 80% of the class lapped it up because US bad and girls good.
It was a thinking free zone. The intellectual equivalent of YouTube comments.
I took some philosophy courses at the University of Michigan when I was an undergrad there- about 30 years ago (!)
Unfortunately we had to look at some writings by Catherine McKinnon and other feminist thinkers of the time. I honestly thought they were hot garbage.
I remember one egregious essay I had to read. It was about how language was created by men, and so women didn't have the words to even think or speak about ourselves properly.
Ugh.
Sure, but why can't feminism be a sub-field of political science, history, etc.? I think the issues are worth exploring, it's more of a question of whether those issues deserve their own separate discipline.
Oh I think that’s fine, and often a good idea - largely what majors are offered has to do with a Mix of marketing and faculty convenience. That is departments make up new and interdisciplinary majors in order to attract more students (and admins approve them for this reason). If a particular faculty decides to organize their teaching within traditional disciplines that’s fine W me.
The thing I don’t like is the top down approach, which I think sends messages that chill speech, especially when paired with the other things Rufo/DeSantis are saying disparaging teaching anything about feminism or racism.
Agreed - I don't think Rufo is on a truth-seeking mission, he's on a power-seeking mission.
I think it’s a question of at what level. Having stringent views either way probably isn’t sustainable but I do think there’s a case for trying to ensure that at undergraduate level people have to have broad understanding and are exposed to a wide range of views. Being specific, my issue isn’t that Butler is read and taught but that it seems it’s possible to read & being taught Butler without having a grounding in ideas that present a different perspective or directly critique her.
It’s probably not so much is it ok for it to be a separate discipline but how is it structured, how narrow are the ideas that are being taught. If the starting position is that the crit theory/po mo world view is a kind of truth and criticism of it can be dismissed as simply a power move of white, male, cis blah blah, clearly that’s unhealthy, it certainly doesn’t have to be that.
Yeah they have always been a bad idea. They were bad 25 years ago, worse today. Religion masquerading as academics.
Reading the history is pretty amazing. The "studies" departments were born in violence and threats of violence.
One year to the day before the strike, the editor of the student newspaper The Daily Gator, James Vaszko, was attacked by several Black students on November 7, 1967.[5][6] The "Gator incident", as it was called, occurred after he wrote an editorial petitioning the Carnegie Corporation of New York to withhold funds from proposed "service programs" including classes in Black history and culture requested by the Black Student Union.[6][9] After six assailants were arrested and suspended, the BSU held a press conference in order to elucidate the reasons for the classes they advocated. These programs were to be established to "awaken and develop Black awareness and consciousness,"[6] according to the San Francisco Strike Collection...
...As tension continued to rise, BSU & the Third World Liberation Front occupied the school's YMCA on March 23, 1968, forcing all YMCA employees to leave. Despite demands from President Summerskill to evacuate the premises, the students remained in protest to keep a revered faculty member as a professor. They listed their demands as:
An end to Air Force ROTC on campus,
Retention of Juan Martinez,
Programs to admit 400 ghetto students for the fall semester, and
The hiring of nine minority faculty members to support the minority students."...
...The fall of 1968 semester saw the formation of the Black Studies Department but also mounting tension. President Smith refused a demand by the California State Colleges trustees to relegate George Mason Murray (the Minister of Education for the Black Panther Party), a graduate student and instructor in the English department, to a non-teaching position. This came after Murray's remarks to students at Fresno State College where he allegedly said, "We are slaves, and the only way to become free is to kill all the slave masters."[6][9] Mounting pressure from trustees and administrators like SF State Chancellor Dumke induced Dr. Smith to suspend Murray despite threats of a strike from the BSU and led to the presentation of 15 demands from them and the TWLF...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World_Liberation_Front_strikes_of_1968
Wow, and one of the demands was that the school admit all non-white applicants. Affirmative action ain't got nothing on the Third World Liberation Front!
Ah and of course the American Federation of Teachers supported all this, because why not, violence and ridiculous demands are central to a quality education 🙄
Also sort of pathetic that one of the demands was "no punishment for any of us" - maybe this was the point where people forgot the "civil" part of "civil disobedience", where you show the cruelty of the oppressor by accepting punishment with courage and fortitude. No, this is "we are special and should be allowed to break the rules, fuck that Gandhi and MLK Jr. noise."
Catholic studies majors could end up alright, due to the breadth of positions the religion and culture have been invovled with over 2000 years. Same for Jewish studies, exept increase by 1000 years. I think the reason why _these_ studies departments should be preserved is that _they are examples of cultures that our durable_, our current culture looks like it is not durable. Roman society, Greek, Chinese, Japanese and maybe some american cultures could also be studied--so somebody can tell us about a contrasting way of being.
More or less my position as well
This is a really bad episode. Why am I listening to a rehash of a Michelle Goldberg article in the NYT? Michelle is a partisan. You aren't getting a straight story from her. This was painfully presented from her performance at the Munk debates. She's a great partisan investigor -- she's a good writer and will dive into details in alignment with her biases.
I kept waiting for the "internet bullshit" to come in, but no not really. This was a political vent session. I get it. You don't like desantis -- that was painfully obvious and presented in the prior episode where Trace had to push back on you. Can we please get some more varied input on episodes than just "Michelle said this" and "fuck Chris rufo".
I'm just disappointed.
It is weird in the sense that the primary source material was literally just an NYT op-ed. I don't quite understand what additional reporting they did.
This is like the episodes where they just report on reactions to controversies on twitter it's not very interesting. I enjoy the banter but other than that I could just read Michelle Goldberg's piece instead if I wanted her take which is basically identical from any other liberal columnist on any subject involving Desantis in academia.
Yeah, usually when they’re talking about NYT or some other liberal news story they’re debunking it and giving us a new perspective on how the prevailing wisdom is wrong, not echoing what we already read or hear everywhere else in MSM
Every single time they criticize conservatives people make this comment. Seems like what people actually don't like is conservatives being criticized.
The problem is J&K are at their worst when they criticize conservatives. Their biases allow them to ignore that they're engaging with strawmen and they don't have the reflexive urge to scratch an additional layer below the surface.
This was essentially an hour long podcast discussing an article in the NYT. As another commenter mentioned, there didn't seem to really be any additional reporting they did on this (perhaps other than repeating things they discussed on the prior episode on the new college of florida). J&K would never dedicate a whole hour to reading and agreeing with a single article in the NYPost/Fox News. It's just not comparable because they don't treat the inverse that way.
I think there's fair criticism to levy at Rufo/Desantis, but this was just an hour long high-fiving while they read each other the Michelle Goldberg piece. It's dumb and I expect more from the pod than just political venting.
I have news for you, they're often pretty sloppy when they criticize the left too. But people like yourself just enjoy it more and turn your brains off to listen to them bash the libs.
I'm happy to be convinced I am wrong here. Can you point me to an episode or two that you think is a fair comparison to this episode, but them criticizing the left?
Worse than sloppy. Jesse blanket declaring that NCF doesn't have a progressive bias on the basis of an extremely broad 100-level philosophy course description is just straight up lazy. Like I get that the guy is having fun on his European vacation but Jesus dude, if you aren't even going to pretend to bother to research an issue maybe it's better if you just react to Katie talking about furries for an hour.
Agree with this wholeheartedly
I think the primary criticism is that there’s so much “it’s complicated” hand-wringing and attempts to find alternate sourcing and opinions when the shoe is on the other foot.
This seems like a pretty lazy, thinly-sourced op-ed.
It also belies a lack of understanding of collegiate athletics. College baseball, for example, is limited to 11.7 scholarships. Yes, that’s correct - 11.7. So almost no player receives a full ride and the school is very limited in what they can do. Title IX also comes into play - every male baseball scholarship has to be paired with a women’s sports scholarship as well.
I think they're often equally sloppy about criticizing the left but a certain segment of the audience starts getting really pedantic and rigorous when they feel attacked instead of just getting their normal dose of "libs are dumb"
You know what? I think that might be fair. On top of that, Gell-Mann amnesia effect applies to pretty much every media outlet, even ones we would prefer it not to. So anytime we are well-read or particularly informed about a subject a drive-by podcast (no offense) is going to come off badly.
Yeah I definitely like blocked and reported the least when it touches on things I understand well. I thought this episode was pretty typical except it had a little too much summary at the beginning. But again my knowledge of small liberal arts colleges in Florida is pretty sparse
The numbers did not add up
I see this a lot & not just BAR. There’s a section of the audience that listen to just hear the woksters get bashed.
A completely rubbish episode, and that's even grading it on a curve given some low quality episodes lately. The first half (everything before housekeeping) was a rehash of items already covered on BARPod. That could have been summed up in a minute, with a link to previous episodes in the show notes. The remainder was just taking some potshots at DeSantis and Rufo based on some stupid but uninteresting items that could have been compressed into a 5 minute segment. Ugh...
I get your frustration but the hosts have to take into account that every episode can have many new listeners. I'm a relatively new listener and often have no idea what they are talking about. I'm grateful when they explain a previously discussed topic. Most people don't want to go back and listen to an old and dated episode.
Also, I think they may just release too many episodes per month. They currently have 7-8 episodes a month but I think if they reduced it to 5-6 episodes they wouldn't have to scrape for content. Some episodes seem like they are made because they have to release something instead of having a good topic. Having said all of that, I still enjoy pretty much all of the shows even the ones that aren't their best.
My main issue with this episode wasn't that it covered a previously discussed topic, but rather that the payoff was far too small for the investment. The entire first half was a recap, this should have been limited to a few mins at most. Then the new stuff in the second half was quite underwhelming and added little to what had already been recapped. I could see it being OK for a new listener, but as a long time subscriber it felt like a rerun.
Maybe you're onto something with scraping for content, as the quality has been dropping noticeably over the past few months at least. But lazy rehashing of topics doesn't seem like the best way to address that
I think Jesse literally phoning it in from pit stops on his European vacation explains the recycled content to a great extent
Which is pretty reasonable, It's August and people go on vacation. For some reason this doesn't bum me out at all.
And if this was Wokesters having taken over a publicly funded college in a similar manner, your criticism would be the same?
If J&K based a full episode solely on a Fox News article in order to bash the wokesters, yes the criticism would be fairly leveled exactly the same.
You’re going to have to come up with a different example for this thought experiment because wokesters taking over has literally been the state of higher education the last 60+ years.
If BARPod had already done a previous episode on a woke takeover and then rehashed it with another largely uninteresting episode, then yeah, my criticism would be the same.
It would have been really interesting if they actually like, compared this to other times in which the state decided to take over a flagging public college and how that all went, why it happened, etc.
You know it wouldn't
I gotta agree with you on the first half rehash, I actually began to wonder if I hadn’t already heard this episode
Seriously, episodes like this make me feel like a sucker. I'm not asking for Radiolab-quality production here, but if I'm going to be paying to fund Jesse's European vacations and Katie's second home, I'd like them to try and pretend to put in a part-time job's worth of effort.
It's fascinating how fascinated everyone is with DeSantis - I can't believe there aren't other Republican governors / leaders doing some Really Interesting (dubious) things right now that we haven't been hearing about from every MSM outlet.
I thought it was interesting, for my part. I've read Rufo's book and I'm sympathetic to his description of the problems with wokeness, but it's interesting to see how that is playing out in real actions.
The problem is it’s pretty obvious that whilst he’s taken on some terrible ideas he’s a bad faith actor (he’s been pretty open about deliberately turning CRT into a slur rather than actually challenging the ideas) and his motivation isn’t an objection to indoctrination or a defence of free thought, it’s simply the wrong ideas. If the same level of indoctrination was coming from the right you know he’d be supportive.
Did they ask Rufo or the New College for comment? That seems like normal journalism, and I'm not sure that reading a Rufo tweet is the same thing.
This feeds back into J Mann's First Rule of Blocked and Reported: Katie and Jessie are good journalists, but their opinions are about as dumb as yours or mine
Chris Rufo is a fucking nerd and I hope the baseball team he recruited beats him up when they get to campus.
I think it's good that they challenged our views, but I think Charlie Kirk makes a better throw-away punching bag than Rufo. If they need to scratch the Blue itch, there are bigger poop shows on the right than New College.
Oh lordy I’d forgotten about Charlie Kirk since I’m not on Twitter anymore. Talk about punchable ;)
That they didn't dig into whether or not anything like this has happened before (restructuring a failing college, especially a public one, and what it looked like, how it went, etc.) left me underwhelmed. But also that it was a public college was all the more reason why the state can go in and change how things are done. Plenty of private colleges were started and built by people who wanted _a specific thing_ (and a lot of those are shuttering these past 10 years).
Why _can't_ the 'owner' of something change how it's done, especially when its failing in the same way as private institutions?
They can and should. the problem is they started by enriching their friends and are doing a pretty shit job of it
I tend to agree with you--"I think Rufo is a fool" seems like a good summary of the podcast. Great. Now what? No curiosity into how the baseball team is going to compete (the college has probably got this covered)--just that they don't have that in place yet. Mmmmmkay.
Scholarships for baseball--ooooh! So freaky! Not.
Getting rid of Gender Studies. Departments come and go every day, the school has limited resources and gets to choose which come and go. No controversy here.
Interim president gets lots of money--that's what you do for an interim president. If he fails, Rufo owns that--if he succeeds will you give him credit for money well-spent?
I suppose there's some basis behind a legitimate critique that they're using the Left's playbook for these changes, and that's hypocritical, so there is that.
I’m not sure the incoming GPAs indicate much more than that high school grades are more bullshit than ever now.
Yeah, all I could hear was "grade inflation" when they read those numbers.
3.96 is the new 2.5
This is my time to shine! As part of the job I just left (last day was yesterday), I was responsible for tracking students' career outcomes. This is maybe the first episode ever where my professional background is relevant. My experience is at a business school, so much more career-focused than a liberal arts college, but our student body is about four or five times larger than New College's total enrollment.
In brief, it's tough to tell whether Chris Rufo or the New College website is correct about New College's post-graduation outcomes because New College's website provides so little information. Career outcomes are similar to the health care figures that Jesse so frequently writes about: there is a lot of very bad data out there, and people inevitably present it as both definitive and supportive of the narrative they want to tell.
The most important metrics for post-graduation information are: the percentage of students seeking a job who accepted a job within X months of graduation (the "placement rate"); the percentage pursuing continued education; and the percentage "still seeking" (that is, have not accepted a job offer or are enrolling in a specific graduate education program). The standards for what constitutes "a job," or how long after graduation is the right number of months, is decided by a number of different bodies. For undergraduate business schools, schools will often go with the standards demanded by the AACSB (the accreditation body for undergraduate business schools), or with the standards used by the business school magazine Poets & Quants, which ranks business schools. I'm not sure what small liberal arts colleges use as their standards. All of the career services people at New College seem to be active in the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE), so I assume, if they use any standards at all in their data collection processes, they probably use NACE standards: https://www.naceweb.org/job-market/graduate-outcomes/first-destination/standards-and-protocols/.
All of the metrics above are mediated by the "response rate" and/or "knowledge rate." Most schools base their post-graduation outcomes on surveys administered to students before and after graduation (generally called First Destination Surveys) that ask about their post-grad plans. New College uses Handshake as its career management platform (job posting board), and Handshake does have a First Destination Survey module, but I can't tell if they actually use it. The "response rate" is the percentage of graduates who respond to the official first destination survey. The "knowledge rate" is the percentage of students for whom the school has reasonable confidence in the student's post-grad outcome: that is, "all the students who responded to our survey, plus the students we found on LinkedIn with jobs, plus the students who sent their professor an email they got a job at ABC Company." A school that reports very high percentages of students employed or in grad school after graduation, but which does not provide a response rate or knowledge rate, is not providing enough information to make an educated statement about how their students do after graduation, because they could be missing data on a huge percentage of their graduates (who are disproportionately likely to *not* have jobs or be in grad school, because students with jobs or going to grad school are more likely to publicize or share that information than students who don't have a job or haven't gotten into grad school).
The only data points I can find on the New College website are here: https://www.ncf.edu/admissions/outcomes-of-graduates/. Claim 1: "83%: Employed or in graduate school within four months of graduation." But 83% of whom? Of the most recent graduating class? The last five graduating classes? Of the students within the most recent graduating class for whom the school had knowledge of their post-graduation outcome? Who knows. Claim 2: "$55,000: Median salary of graduates within five years of graduation." First of all, yikes, is that a number you want to brag about? Secondly, is this the median salary of the specific graduating class from five years ago, or is it the median salary of all grads within the last five years? Claim 3: "$106,300: Median salary of graduates within ten years of graduation." This claim, frankly, beggars belief. How did they collect this information from alumni? How many alumni did they survey? Alumni surveys are notorious for getting low response rates.
It is possible that both Chris Rufo and the New College are "right," and just providing percentages from different denominators. It is possible that 83% *of the graduates for whom New College had knowledge of their post-graduation outcome* were employed or in postgraduate education AND that those graduates only made up half of the overall graduating class per Chris Rufo's tweet.
One thing I find suspect in Rufo's tweet is the claim that less than half of grads found work/education within *a year* of graduation. Almost nobody tracks students for a full year after graduation. Three to six months, sure. But I don't know anyone tracking students for a whole year after graduation, and I have to imagine that this number claimed by Rufo is lower than the real figure. A significant percentage of students anywhere get their shit together between three-six months after graduation and get *some* job somewhere.
I would be incredibly skeptical of any "outcomes" information published by universities without response/knowledge rate.
Thanks for the deep dive. Post-grad employment data is always subject to selection bias. The kid making $100k as a Microsoft software engineer can't wait to send in his survey. The kid making $25k at the Microsoft call center, not so much.
Its so notoriously bad that the ur-text of statistics errors, How to Lie With Statistics, opens with an alumni salary survey as an example.
I knew these numbers could be fishy but didn't understand the details. Thanks!
Thank you! I was doing to write something similar but this is perfect. The response rate issue is key–I’ve seen these surveys from graduates of my department and we often get, like 2-3 responses (but they do tend to be good numbers – response bias is helpful!)
I’d add that, in New College’s case, I don’t think they offer professional degrees, so they are going to have lower reported salaries after graduation because there aren’t CS majors blowing the curve. I think this is also why they do the 10-year salary report; it’s long been a claim of Humanities departments that their graduates’ salaries tend to start lower but catch up over time, so 10-year results can be useful. (But of course, as you suggest, it’s not clear what kind of data their figures are based on.)
I also imagine New College grads are rather more well-off and might generally take longer to get a job or go to grad school – gotta travel Europe for a year post-grad, right? Good for them but maybe not for the stats
Still trying to wrap around the line where Jesse says he doesn't want to see any left-aligned Chris Rufo-like figures at other universities either.
Uh, I have some bad news for you...
Yeah that was one thing really missing from their understanding. “Oh know we can’t have political activists on the college board”. Ummm often like the governor’s buddies wife and his donors kid are on these boards. They aren’t filled with non-political people.
Yeah, there's even a catchy phrase for it: the long march through the institutions.
Hahaha!
Loath as I am to ever take Jesse’s side over Katie’s, Arial font is barbaric and clearly indicative of deep-seated white supremacy (arial/aryan, need I say more?)
If you don’t have Garamond, Times is an acceptable consolation prize.
Cambria forever! (Any serif font is preferable to sans serif, though.)
Georgia!
Atkinson Hyperlegible looks badass, is accessible, and it's like really, really legible. Superior on all fronts.
Team Arial for the win (if Calibri is not available)
Team Calibri here❤️
Ugh, who invited all these MS Word nerds?
I’ve pledged my allegiance to Garamond in this comment thread before!
Both Jesse and Katie are wrong this time. Garamond is good. Both Arial and Times are ready for retirement.
Supposedly sans-serif fonts like Ariel are better for Accessibility, being that various neurodivergent groups supposedly find them easier to read. For this reason they are nominally required for teaching materials at my university, though I have refused to give up my Baskerville font and have not yet been disciplined. It’s an issue that I’d love Jesse to dig into; my impression is that the science behind this is pretty junky
Ariel is a crime against the senses and humanity. That and New Calibri are set as defaults to screen for people too careless or tasteless to change the font.
Anybody who’s set type or spec’d a book design in the last 40 years knows, sans serif for display/heads ok but serif for text blocks. Trust the Science(tm)!
Nothing will ever beat Wingdings.
Team Katie on this one.
Garamond? You really thought this was a good take but it’s clear Courier New is the crème de la crème of fonts
"I wouldnt want the left wing equivalent of Chris Rufo running a university" says Jesse. Just WTF do you think the status quo has been? What world have you been living in? They could have just closed New College, and would have been justified. They could have started a new school, and been justified. The nicer thing was to convert the existing school, not fire people, and get through all the red tape of starting a new school. It's a weak argument by BAR, but Im honestly glad they are not Just giving us what we want to hear--as much as it irritates me in this precise moment..
Come on, that is not who is running the schools. Faculty are on average liberal but we haaate the admins. Admins care about $$$, they don’t give a crap about “indoctrinating students” - they just want us to push our students through and out with degrees. They couldn’t care less what we teach as long as there are butts in seats.
Ya, that doesn’t track with the evidence or my experience. If administrators only cared about the money they wouldn’t be building out DEI bureaucracy, its expensive.
Moreover, individual administrators wish to burnish their reputation for wokeness, etc. In one instance I know of an admin broke the covid rules for an event at the behest of a “minoritized” group. The admin was more interested in appearing as an “ally” than feared placing the college in an actionable position or incurring anti-vax PR.
Admins aren’t just about money for the college, ideology or simple careerism is a thing especially in academia.
David makes a reasonable point, NCF is so maddening to the woksters because conservative control (or even just representation) in academia is so rare.
The admins include these programs because a loud minority of students and parents have come to demand and expect them. For schools struggling with declining enrollments (so almost all schools) It’s a selling point to prospective students and parents who have come to expect this stuff. They fear to lose the students who would see a lack of “dei” as a dealbreaker. Conservative students it’s thought won’t be turned off they’ll just roll their eyes, since it’s everywhere. A similar thing happens with athletic facilities. Having a huge brand new students athletics center is now considered standard. If you don’t have one you’ll lose those few students who would actually use it.
There’s also the fact that some of the admin bloat comes from actual regulations - every uni has to have a title ix office now.
Right, but a loud minority is still a minority and doesn't justify the bloat, they'd be better off enticing the cohorts of Chinese students that fell off with the pandemic, who don't care about "baizuo" nonsense *and* pay full tuition. So, it still seems to be ideological in nature and not straight greed. There's lefty prestige stuff in there that wins awards for careerists but isn't likely to boost enrollment due to, as you mentioned, it being a loud minority. So, I think the idea that the admins aren't a big part of this woke indoctrination problem doesn't hold up.
I think they believe it does justify the bloat. I don't necessarily think they are very good at their jobs or thinking about this rationally, but that does seem to be what they are doing - reacting to their (perceived) customer base. In the long term it's a bad policy, I think, just like trying to sell prospies on athletic facilities and new buildings. Certainly they are sacrificing the academic reputation of the institution by pushing policies that maximize enrollment regardless of student academic readiness.
I agree that good admins should do things like try to enroll foreign students more as well, but, everyone else is also trying to do that kind of thing. Demography means there are more spots in ivy's that going to students who would have gone here. And we accept more students who would have gone to a less competitive school. On down the line.
I’m not sure what one wins if admins are pushing woke commissars and their authoritarian policies for pure “greed”rather than ideological conformity but even say you’re right, in practical terms, its a distinction without a difference.
The original point was that schools are ideologically captured currently, so crying at a shift in the ideological capture of one schools seems hypocrisy.
You responded that the admins aren’t ideologues themselves but greedy incompetents who are reacting to a vocal minority by installing commisars and firing teachers for “hate speech” and other nonsense. I mean, okay but in what material way does that refute the status quo being lefty ideological capture at the admin level?
Right, the admins are creating a need for themselves by creating a perceived need for action in response to everything, but it's not directly about money. Land O Lakes colleges love grandstanding
May I ask what type of school you're at? I surmise that David is describing "elite" schools with 10-15 applicants for every seat.
In the absence of financial pressure, administrators may be much more likely to concern themselves with mandating wokery in the curriculum. And sowing disregard for academic freedom and free speech.
Despite geographic proximity, Central Connecticut State and Wesleyan are on different planets.
I’m not at an ivy - everyone but the ivies is struggling with enrollments
My former small college likewise beefed up its athletic programs to build enrollment and added more athletic scholarships. Coaches routinely interfered with professors if the student athlete was failing. Retaining athletes was such a priority that faculty had to fill out midterm evaluation forms sent to the coaches.
BTW, baseball is super popular among Caribbean groups, so, yes, starting a baseball team in an area like Florida would likely increase the enrollment of students whose families are from the Caribbean (can be any skin color, can be Spanish or French or English or Creole speaking).
Yes, my small college had a baseball team and majority Caribbean-affiliated students.
Oh and students from Caribbean-affiliated families are more likely to be socially and politically conservative--a likely factor here.
Yeah exactly. They have to build up enrollment somehow in order to get the momentum growing. Student athletes also must live on campus. Even if they’re giving them scholarships those kids are paying plenty of money on room and board. To attract more (full) paying “customers” they need to create the right on campus culture. Since they want to attract conservatives it makes sense to focus on getting more young men on campus. Small liberal arts colleges have an problem with the skewed gender ratio favoring women over men 60/40 (it’s even worse at HBCUs). Gender imbalance is not a marketing problem if the students are mostly ENBY or headed for graduate school or a major city after college. But for middle class college kids from Florida who are just trying to get their BA and get out, potentially meeting a future spouse at college is a consideration. If your college gets a reputation of having more eligible straight men than other places, more traditionally minded women will want to attend and enrollment will continue to increase in a virtuous cycle, which should soon cover the cost of the athletic scholarships.
Aren’t college sports, especially men’s, also a big money maker for the school?
Maybe for large universities but for small colleges my guess is that athletics are an expense well justified by the recruitment and retention benefits.
Small colleges don’t have giant stadiums filled with alumni fans. Desperate for turn out, my former small college admins asked faculty to attend games so that the players would feel supported.
No. At the vast majority of universities, sports are a net loser.
The frame used in the reporting on the “lower” GPA and test scores for the student athletes is highly misleading & potentially racist. We are talking about students that still have much higher grades and test scores relative to the general population of high school graduates.
“The combined GPA for student-athletes admitted to New College for the coming year was 3.61, compared with 3.7 for the overall population of 328 students enrolled so far. The student-athlete combined ACT score was 22 compared to 24 for the whole class. The student-athlete SAT score was 1097 compared to 1147 for the combined group of incoming students, according to records.”
The current average SAT score in 2022 was 1050 overall.
I also find it hypocritical that reporters are disparaging a University for admitting people with lower test scores and GPAs, considering a growing number of colleges no longer require standardized test scores, including all of the Ivy League schools.
Small universities are currently bending over backward to recruit more students from underrepresented backgrounds & low income neighborhoods, which is correlated with having lower grades & test scores for understandable reasons. If enrollment at my university went up by even 5% it would be the direct result of such efforts and no one would dare to mention a .09 drop in the incoming class GPA!
I disagree! At my institution faculty are all intensely worried about the lower level of selectivity. Students are Really struggling and it impacts the classroom environment and our ability to teach in 4 years what grad programs and employers have come to expect from our students. Admins want us to pass everyone, even if they don’t come to class and have demonstrated zero learning. It’s bad out there. Schools reputations are tanking fast.
Remember the UNC student athlete scandal? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I had classes with a couple football players at UNC over 20 yrs back. To say they were not up to the standard of the average student academically would be generous.
To date, I believe Columbia is the only Ivy to go test-,optional. But your point about the overall trend is a valid one.
Yes we can't demand that Harvard be more flexible in it's admissions standards in the name of diversity, but then cry foul when another school does it.
With ACT's in the low 20's, I'm not sure why GPA even matters. Particularly .09 difference.
It's clearly a regional level public school. They should accept virtually all applicants that meet a minimum bar that their school can handle and give a good, foundational education (required for getting a job, imo).
Also, anyone whose ever actually committed to a sport let alone to the degree required to play at a college level (even 2nd or 3rd tier college) would never question why this is taken into account when evaluating academic performance.
Take any random non-athlete. Then tell them in addition to the effort they put out, they are now required to do 3-4 hours a day of intense training. All year. . . weekends off. The majority's grades will plummet. Many will simply be broken mentally and have to quit.
I'll bet long term positive outcomes for an athlete with a 3.5 over a non-athlete with a 3.7 every single day of the week. (assuming equal course trajectory)
I also looked up the stats on admissions, and they admit 75% of applicants. So it’s ever been a highly selective place, even if students with relatively high grades are self-selecting into it.
And I agree that student athletes tend to be disciplined. At my institution they also have higher grades than the average student. We are also functionally open enrollment and recruit heavily from underrepresented groups and low income neighborhoods. Athletes are by no means worse academically than our average student.
I would like to register my disgust that “E-Sports” is apparently now a college athletic program.
Somebody please tell me “E sports” means Wrestling On Ecstasy.
Eh, if golf can be a “sport” I have no problem with video games or drone racing being a sport.
I guess, like...why? What's wrong with that?
🤮
Succinct, as always.
Tons of assertions based on scant to little evidence in this episode. Very “cool kids table jocks are stupid blah blah” vibe. You’re telling me that it’s horrible that the new admin made the college more diverse along almost all factors (expect women who were overly represented initially) is a bad thing? Or that it’s obviously so to AA even though no evidence of that. They’re putting a lot of chips into the “this is going to go horribly wrong” bucket and I just hope I’ll still be a subscriber when they do the “checking in on New College of Florida” episode where they’re proved wrong in almost every respect.
I listened to the episode. I am not a fan of Chris Rufo. I think he’s a charlatan who benefits off others misery. I’m not sure if I agree with what he’s doing at New College HOWEVER part of me wonders if this needs to happen because our higher Ed is so captured by a fascist like ideology that purports to be tolerant but is aggressively intolerant
As opposed to being captured by the ideology Rufo & his ilk support.
Can’t we hold the position the Universities shouldn’t be looking to indoctrinate people regardless of what form the indoctrination takes and its pretty obvious from his writings that Rufo is pro indoctrination, so long as he agrees with the ideas.
Rufo is bad but who cares when the other side has him at 100:1 on campuses. Maybe even more. “Oh no this school will become ideologically captured”. Oh so just like nearly every single other school out there…
"Can’t we hold the position the Universities shouldn’t be looking to indoctrinate people regardless of what form the indoctrination takes"...
*whispiers* They already are.
Where in my comment did I say it wasn’t?
I said we should take the position that’s not ideal.
It’s amusing that so many on the Right who’ve presented themselves as champions of free thought and inquiry then reveal them to be merely partisan culture warriors, the response is “Yeah, but the other lot are doing it already so it’s fair game”.
It was obvious that that’s always been Rufo’s position, but you either believe in Academic freedom and the importance of viewpoint diversity or you don’t.
If you just want to be a Culture Warrior, you can’t complain if people point out your earlier principled statements were merely a ruse to advance a partisan agenda.
I'm not on the Right but nice try! Independent. If you choose to overlook that the vast, vast majority of colleges and universities are already indoctrination machines for the Left, and focus your ire on one college in Florida, you don't care about academic freedom because students across the nation are being given one side as their only option.
I don't want to speak for Miller, but maybe he/she'd be saying the same thing about a left-leaning institution if it had been the focus of the episode.
Well d’uh, I think anyone would have to have been living under a rock to not understand the problem with academia more broadly, but the idea that the solution is a disingenuous blowhard like Rufo is laughable.
I’m simply making the point that to defend academic freedom requires defending academic freedom, that Rufo clearly isn’t interested in that and that a culture war race to the bottom is terrible whoever is doing it.
A lot of the comments here seem to be willing to give Rufo a pass because ‘look at what the other lot do’.
There’s also a lot of comment that amount to ‘Stuff I agree with should be taught, stuff I disagree with is a waste of time’. That one side of aisle has more influence in Academia doesn’t make the other side attacking academic freedom ok.
A lot of the criticism of J&K seem to be they haven’t given Rufo the benefit of the doubt, but that requires pretending his real agenda isn’t patently obvious.
You crossed a line there when you invoked my children.
Fuck off. Blocked.
Man, Rufo is really missing a great opportunity, if I'm being charitable, to do a St John's style Great Books curriculum if he really wanted to create a rigorous non-left SLAC instead of aping every failing small college on the East coast.
It's almost like this Rufo guy isn't totally on the level
I mean, it kind of sounded like that was the goal, but now it’s pretty clear that this is just a Ramsey Sports and Outdoors-style bust out
Jesse, the "h" in Amherst is silent. Unfortunately I will have to cancel my primo subscription because of this egregious misrepresentation. Also: if there are any other members of the secret Western Mass TERF contingency reading this, please get in touch with me so we can hang out.
Cambridge TERF here, not close enough, but we are here in belly of the progressive elite beast.
An unenviable position! Though I wonder how many secret TERFs there are in Cambridge. My guess would be more than one would suspect.
At least one was there last weekend, visiting relatives. They didn't suspect a thing. We really do need a secret signal for when we encounter each other in the wild.
Maybe like an exaggerated salute that we hold at the end!
Yeah there's definitely tells that someone is a tra but not too many terf tells... That they listen to bnr is a good one... My woke friends don't know it
Ooh wait Cambridge New England? There's a Boston discord...
But just out of curiosity, what is it called?
II am moving in three days! If I had only known!
I also don’t know what discord is and willfully remain ignorant.
Hmmm, those of us east of Worcester tend to say the H in Amherst.
Having lived in Boston, I can confirm that many people in Eastern Mass do pronounce the "h." Having grown up in Amherst, I can confirm that this is wrong: the "h" is silent.
Didn’t Amherst books even sell t-shirts to that effect? Something like, ‘Amherst, where only the ‘h’ is silent’
Psst there's a new England barpod discord
Yeah, I lol'd at all the Western Mass goofery on this.
Also, if there's a TERF contingent in the Pioneer Valley, they're so far underground they're hitting magma.
can confirm, the magma is very hot
I went to a college that played them in football and we called them Amherst with the "h"... Of course I never visited and did the tour because come on the Lord Jeffs? Might as well be a purple cow.
They're the Mammoths now; Lord Jeff is very cancelled. The Mammoths isn't quite as good as the Polar Bears, but I'm biased.
As a WMass-er I agree. The whole point of stupid Massachusetts name pronunciations is as a shibboleth! You can't say "Am*H*erst" and then talk about repping the home state. Shame!
Next thing you're going to start pronouncing the rest of the towns in this state the way they're spelled. Lee-oh-min-ster? Ugh, typical NYCers.
Where I'm from, which is a rural-ish area in PA, most of the liberals I knew were thoughtful well educated people. Then I moved to theAmherst/Northampton area and one of the first things that struck me was the number of psychics. I realized that people can be dumb and liberal too. It was a nice area in many ways, but I eventually moved back to where I'm from because i couldn't picture myself staying longterm.