Their argument about higher ed institutions in Florida not necessarily being “woke“ because they are in Florida doesn’t make any sense. The majority of university faculty are not from the states where they get jobs! And they are also never trained at the universities where they end up working, they are trained at highly liberal institutions with PhD programs. The academic job market is ultra competitive and national. Even for a job at Southwestern Florida no name University. I cannot believe that Jesse and Katie do not understand this. 
This part was really frustrating. I have worked at one of the most conservative (not religious) universities in a stem department and it's incredibly liberal. Pronouns and diversity trainings are pushed on us though so far optional. So it really grinds my gears that one progressive university has some conservative trustees and the response is, build your own university? This is absurd. I am more likely to meet a Marxist than a republican in the humanities department.
If you want to make fun of the pronouns and the Enby and the trans overreach, but then immediate dismiss and ridicule an attempt in one state at one university to use the playbook in the other direction, then I don't know what to tell you.
Sorry to be spicy but I've rarely been more annoyed by a segment but appreciate how fair Katie was on Rufo
I studied social and earth science at several major public universities in the South (including Auburn in Alabama and George Mason in VA) and I'd largely agree. Yes, UF is not like Berkley, but that doesn't make it conservative. The faculty are definitely left of the states they are in as a whole, and I'd say in the liberal arts and humanities, essentially 100% left and I saw more of what we call now wokeness (ill-liberal left) becoming prominent and making its way into the sciences, where you could still reliably find centrists and right leaning liberals, even the odd conservative.
My only understanding of the DeSantis/Rufo University drama coming from this episode, I will say that I'm not siding with DeSantis's move, but, I'm sorry, I saw the changes between 2008-2017 when I was studying and researching at these institutions and it's been a pretty steady path towards the identitarian left. By the time I left, you weren't likely to find many more people identifying as communist than you would in 2008, but the number of people who thought the scientific method was a "western white male" way of thinking? Another story.
And the effects of this move towards the identitarian Left can't be good on the quality of the research at these institutions if free thought is discouraged. It's in the interests of universities to be less dogmatic.
Previewing your comments and preparing myself to be annoyed. I noticed some of my college friends having a freakout about this on FB, and I'm thinking "do they not know that nationwide college faculty lean Left HARD. Yes, they can have private colleges. But public universities are supposed to serve the public, and half of the country does not share their views (and given how conservative students feel they need to self-censor far more than other university students... at academic institutions where ideas are SUPPOSED to be challenged). This should not be controversial, unless deep down left-leaning people know and LIKE their control over academia.
Seriously. The idea that the views of half the electorate should not be represented on campus is ridiculous. From an institutional standpoint, it also seems really stupid. Universities have faculty (and administrators) using "conservative" and "republican" as epithets, and then look straight shocked when their *right wing* state legislature doesn't vote to give them money. I've never met so many clueless people as those with PhDs. "Fuck you, bigot supremacist asshole fascists!" is not a good opener to a fundraising email.
I hear complaints that universities are run like businesses: no, if they were run like businesses, they'd make sure they had a fair number of right wingers among the faculty and admin, if not to expressly lobby conservative legislators then at least to represent something they'd like to fund. This would be a smart insitutional strategy. Not to mention getting some cash from right-leaning private donors. Giving the finger to half the country is the dumbest approach ever.
Yeah I was annoyed because universities are already applying ideological litmus tests basically everywhere through required diversity statements (graded on adherence to leftist shibboleths) and by controlling what is allowed to be published. If you are going to be fair in the segment maybe point that out? That said I don’t support the Rufo approach because it just prompts a thermostatic backlash in the opposite direction, I think as wishy washy as Jesse Singal and Matt Yglesias are they are in the end more influential since real movement comes by shifting normy voters in the center. Look at how the trans discussion has shifted since we’ve started talking more about the real negatives associated with treatment rather than freaking out about drag queens.
"That said I don’t support the Rufo approach" -- isn't it possible that Rufo's approach looks unseemly because it's out in broad daylight? Meanwhile college & universities in the US have been systematically captured by the Left over a span of decades (just as intentionally).
I'm strongly against the left-identitarian litmus tests *and* strongly against an open, explicitly political takeover of a college. I think the latter is an extreme move that runs roughshod over academic freedom. There are other, less polarizing ways to address this.
Would we like a situation where every change of state government leads to a wholesale replacement of every board of every state university with transparently political appointees? Maybe that's an extreme thought experiment, but it seems dystopian to me.
I have some concerns that Rufo may have fallen prey to audience capture since his rise to prominence, but I completely agree with your point.
Katie and Jesse have spent huge chunks of their podcast demonstrating how many businesses, online communities, schools etc have been hijacked by a small faction of ‘woke’ activists. Rufo has been instrumental in showing that this has happened and also explicit in pointing out that the capture of institutions has been a specific policy aim for many of the more radical social justice groups for a long time.
I’ll be honest, I don’t necessarily support Rufo’s politics, mostly because I’m not even clear on what they are and I don’t think this episode spent any time trying to clarify them. However, I do support his approach. ‘This is what I’m concerned about and this is how I want to counter it’ is a lot better than ‘We have no agenda, but if we do its the right one and you’re a bigot’
I agree with everything you said. I'm not saying he hasn't fallen prey to audience capture (I feel like we see audience capture everywhere now, though, don't we?). I haven't followed his work closely enough to notice any changes in his style.
"However, I do support his approach. ‘This is what I’m concerned about and this is how I want to counter it’ is a lot better than ‘We have no agenda, but if we do its the right one and you’re a bigot’"
Same. He's transparent about his intentions, at least. Meanwhile the times I've listened to James Lindsay on his podcast (I can listen to anything if I'm doing boring household tasks), and hearing him reading the writings of people in the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, etc., where people planned out how to manipulate institutions over long time periods to affect changes in society to suit their motives. Hell, it's the whole CRT thing. They could claim "No one's teaching CRT in schools," because they were applying the principles of CRT *within* schools.
I prefer Rufo's approach, too. Everything is out in the open.
What is so bad in the "Rufo" approach, I wonder? He says he'll replace DEI with "equality, merit, and colorblindness", which could use a rewrite but in principle is exactly what it ought to be at all universities, regardless of political persuasion. His public statements are all about restoring liberal arts education.
If he instead replaces Ibram Kendi with Dinesh D'Souza and organizes mobs to physically assault any left of center speaker that comes on campus, that would be the right-wing inversion of the status quo. But even though that wouldn't be a great education, it probably wouldn't be any worse than what they're already doing.
The argument against him seems to be that his official stance is a lie and he'll really implement a far-right agenda because he's a political hack. Maybe that's true, but it doesn't seem like a strong argument.
I pretty much agreed with Katie's take on Rufo (because I'm all in for academic freedom, and he's clearly not), BUT I wanted to chime in on your thread to note that the humanities department in which I earned my PhD literally had multiple Marxists and one known Republican.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but if someone identifies as a Marxist, I am less likely to take anything seriously because of how Marxism keeps turning out. I don't dismiss everything they say out of hand, but being a Marxist today kind of means someone didn't think things through, hasn't paid attention to the last 100 years of history, engages in a lot of motivated reasoning, isn't good at thinking rationally or has some really concerning personality traits. (If someone identifies as a Freudian, I pretty much dismiss all of what they're saying because Freud was a grade A quack and his theories led to a lot of ineffective psychiatric care though at least he wasn't brutal.) I really don't understand why so many academics in non-STEM fields are Marxists. Is there something about Marxism that is uniquely appealing to academics?
Orthodox marxism would get you thrown out of modern socialist spaces which these days value 'racial and gender justice' as a priority. A real marxist believes in class struggle over all other things, there is a reason the saying goes 'no war but class war'. Marxism is dead in the west, the soviet union's collapse and the modern social justice left have killed it dead.
You do have a good point there about it appealing to academics who are by definition experts on something.
I will say there is something amazing about an ideology that claims to be the dictatorship of the proletariat but always seems to put the power in the hands of a decidedly-non proletarian expert class. And Marxism always seems to result in an expert class that was decidedly incompetent. I always come back to the Soviets elevating Lysenko, executing geneticists and refusing to drop the Lysenkoism after they suffered from repeated famines. I really would love to read good-quality social science research on that aspect of Marxism.
I think it's often (though not always) folks who *think* they are doubling down on the purest form of Everclear-proof progressivism, when in fact, they are pointing to the wall that progressive ideology inevitably hits--and then bashing their heads against it. (And ours.)
If you don’t support this playbook and overreach, why would you support conservatives doing it? It just seems like a really unprincipled stance to do that.
I actually don't support this on the basis of academic freedom and think it's a doomed project. Frequently on this pod they debunk some of the nutpicking on the left and the right (which is great) and in the grand scheme of things, I can't be bothered by one example of things going the other way. It seems like such an outlier and thus my frustration
I wish people overall were less ideological in terms of how they view the function of the University because there’s so much pragmatic stuff that has nothing to do with political views that gets lost.
I get that, but I think that it just feels very much about DeSantis is political ambition, and personally I just really hate when politicians screw with peoples lives to score political points. I grab that new college is a rare exception, in terms of how things are changed however, I guess I work at a university where we have had politically active conservative trustees, and the issue wasn’t so much about how they change curriculum, but that feeling that they have contempt for the faculty,. It played itself out in how they dealt with financial issues.  They made some irresponsible choices financially and then ignored faculty because it’s almost like a culture of doing that to the point where it feels just very frustrating that we can’t effectively work together on non-political strategic stuff that would help students.
I think we can agree on the point about the contempt for the faculty. So true. The faculty Senate is a waste of time cause leadership doesn't care, doesn't listen.
The reason you'd support it is because perfect is the enemy of good. It's good to take action, since no one else is acting at all. It'd be like saying that the Ukrainians are unprincipled to defend themselves from Russia. Sure, they're both killing but its not the same.
I admit that my analogy is overwrought and that Rufo and Co. will inevitably be an over-correction. Still, the Biden administration just rolled back to the title IX kangaroo courts. A reform that required a clown like Trump in office to appoint the bible-thumping sister of the Blackwater mercenary guy and we *still* couldn't get the Biden administration to agree that college apparatchiks aren't equipped to investigate crimes nor that a presumption of evidence is important.
I agree with you in principle and I don't like the playbook or overreach but principle isn't a suicide pact.
Exactly. Sure, this is a political move on DeSantis' part... affecting one small school. Meanwhile in Bidenland they're putting the school free lunch program on the chopping block if schools don't play the gender identity game (in a May 5, 2022, USDA memorandum to schools).
That’s a conservative interpretation of the guidance that’s not actually in the document itself.
Actually republicans have fought a lot harder to get rid of public school lunches the Democrats have. They fought against the extension of the waiver, giving universal free lunch in response to this interpretation and it wasn’t renewed.
I suspect that the states just didn’t wanna pay for free lunch, but just wanted to blame the Democrats
They tried to put in a rule change to Title IX so that gender identity is on level with biological sex, which is a slap in the face to the women who fought for representation in education & athletics in this country. They're still going through all of the responses from the public comment period. Being a girl/woman isn't an idea in a male's head. Forcing schools to adapt their anti discrimination policies to include gender will mean there would be places for boys, and coed spaces for girls. Believing in objective reality of the two sexes shouldn't be solely a conservative interpretation.
"I suspect that the states just didn’t wanna pay for free lunch, but just wanted to blame the Democrats." They don't want the people in their states to suffer. They may see things differently than Dems but it's pretty immature to paint them all as evil.
If you’re against things, being overly ideological, the solution isn’t finding someone with a different ideology. That’s actually not taking any action, but it just deepening the war
I actually don’t mind colleges being liberal. I think it is an ideology that better fosters exploration and inclusion. Wokeness isn’t liberalism though, its authoritarianism. Worse, liberalism has thus far been incapable of combating the institutional capture and its having a real impact on us all now, even outside of acadamia. So, if the political group I’d prefer to remedy the situation can’t or won’t, then its time to try something else. Rufo, hack that he is, has gotten results, imperfect to be sure and motivated by an ideology I don’t agree with entirely but its has gone too far and our complacency has emboldened these woke authoritarians. So if fighting back against this craziness deepens the “war” then, so be it.
Co-sign. The Left has had a decades long effort to take over academic institutions and they did it. They can't stand it that Conservatives put a similar long-term strategy to get more judges appointed; they rail against it. Conservatives are giving this project at one small college a go, and people are losing their minds because they see academia as theirs alone.
What are your suggestions for how colleges & universities in the US to be less ideological? We know that most of them lean heavily to the Left already, but you're saying this one college getting a Conservative board is too ideological.
 Ruffo is a blatant political player and he’s publicly posturing.  I sometimes feel like people are so reflexively antiwoke that they just hate anything left does and can’t look at some guy who’s talking about reshaping an entire college an image he wants as not being problematic.
He doesn’t talk about a vision that has anything to do with education. That should be decried.
He’s not the first conservative to get on a state board of trustees at a state university. There are other instances where right wingers really are coming down on state institutions like university of North Carolina and university of Wisconsin among others.
What is the biggest thing that you do? You start out with having elected trustees and not appointees.  Yoy can have people who have educational goals, and not ideological ones.
 I don’t get this idea that you don’t solve a problem by just re-creating it in a conservative image rather than say, the problem or people being too ideological. These schools need to start thinking about a positive vision, and some thing that includes the entire community.
Having been involved in hiring process, this gets me especially steamed because it's straight up discriminatory. Wait 5 minutes and California will replace half the board of trustees with "marginalized people"
Additionally, it's not just--or even primarily--the faculty who drive the progressiveness. The administrative staff push so much of this stuff. The lower and middle levels of the administration are full of people who spent tens of thousands of dollars on Masters of Higher Education Administration, or Masters of Leadership, or some other master degree that provides almost no practical training but included lots of fantastic content from the same educational wizards who brought us Whole Language Learning.
Let's take student organizations. In response to an anonymous post on a social media account in which someone claiming to be a student of color who felt uncomfortable at a meeting of the Super Smash Brothers Club, some Assistant Director of Student Leadership makes a rule saying every student organization has to have an official representative on a Student Diversity Council or they aren't eligible for funding from the school. Ostensibly, this is a fairly minimal change: on paper, all it means is one student needs to go to one meeting once a semester. The student organizations then each appoint or elect a new position so that students can put "VP of Diversity" on their resume. All those students then need to do something to justify their position, but don't really know anything about "diversity," so they go to the same Assistant Director of Student Leadership and ask what to do, and now that person has an enormous amount of personal control over content that gets transmitted by students into ostensibly "student-run" organizations.
"All those students then need to do something to justify their position, but don't really know anything about "diversity," so they go to the same Assistant Director of Student Leadership and ask what to do"
First response they get "Do you have any grudges to settle?"
Umbridge is perhaps my favorite literary villain of all time. Just the perfect encapsulation of petty tyrants everywhere.
But that being said, I feel like I should clarify that, unlike Umbridge, the anonymous Assistant Director here is not (necessarily) making a deliberate play for power over people's lives. They're more likely just trying to use the authority they have to make sure all students have a positive experience. It's entirely well-intentioned.
I agree. I attended a small state university in a deep south town where there's still to this day a Confederate flag hanging on Main Street about 3 mi from campus, and a law on the books
in the town that all homeowners have a gun. But many of my professors there were professed Marxists, and in two of my African American history courses I and two other non-BIPOC students were asked to explain our presence in the classes. The majority of students *were* conservative, but most of my professors in the humanities were quite vocally on the far left.
The professor who was driven to suicide after he made some un-woke comments at UNC Wilmington, for example. (https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/on-prof-mike-adams-suicide-one-year-later/). Wilmington NC is deep south. The town government was overthrown by legitimate white supremacists during the reconstruction era. But the university is apparently crazy in a different way now.
On the charming end of this scale, I had a male student attend the women in engineering panel. He wanted to get information for yia younger sister. Heart melted
Yes. This was about 15 years ago too. I don't think students today would think twice about being asked why they would take a class on a subject that didn't directly relate to one of their identities.
Was thinking the same. Their whole small minded take on Florida was gross. UF super liberal. State colleges and south Florida in general is NOT “the South.” Travel more? Idk guys.
I went back to school a few years ago, at a podunk university in a midwestern city where the kids are half religious and five years behind on everything going on in the world. Pronouns everywhere, no speaking freely.
Oh man, they really misunderstand how malleable college students are as well! There’s a reason why Gen z & millennials are sympathetic toward Palestine. It’s not because they read about the conflict in Gaza in the news, it’s because they took courses from professors who taught them about this from their anti-Israel perspective.
I agree with Katie and Jesse. Most students are not taking on the political beliefs of their professors, they're taking their beliefs from their friends and social media. My college professors were all very weird and out of touch and I definitely never agreed with them about anything.
I remember thinking my English prof (eccentric chain smoking old lady) was out of touch because she didn’t acknowledge preferred pronouns at our painfully woke women’s college that may have been mentioned in this ep. Now I realize she was based. As in literally grounded in material reality.
I will never not think it's absurd that women's colleges of all places are engaging in this theater. Previously they'd get to be proud of graduates are breaking the glass ceiling in (insert field here), but if a chunk of their female students now deny that they're even women, as NBs or saying they're "he/hims," and if they really believe in gender ideology they have to think of those females as Real Men... there's nothing to celebrate. "Oh, a man got appointed to (insert title). Yay. Go patriarchy."
Politely disagree. It's not necessarily that I think the professors *themselves* are the biggest agents for disseminating a political belief, but instead that they can make the difference between whether or not their students who have a variety of takes feel free to speak out. That's where a professor who is either "woke" (I'm just using it as shorthand) or sympathetic and feels like their hands are tied can make a big difference because they allow the most radical students to run the conversation and turn it into a lecture.
Yes, friends and social media matter, but if professors don't facilitate the exchange of a variety of viewpoints in their classes, they are sending the message to students that those ideas aren't worthy of debate. The one place in their lives where they'd be forced to think more deeply about issues from a different perspective is lost.
For sure friends and social media are a bigger influence, but when your professor is also saying it 1) it pretty much gives you license not to question any of it 2) it gives it that voice of "authority."
I was a STEM major, so I definitely took what my bio/chem professors said more seriously than what any of my friends thought or what anyone said on social media. When I took social science electives where the professor disagreed with my preconceived notions, I wrote them off and did whatever I had to do to get the grade. But when I took a social science elective and the professor AGREED with me? Well, wasn't that professor just the smartest person who ever lived! And I sure did memorize every bit of course material to bring up in Facebook/Reddit arguments for the next five years.
I went to University of Michigan nursing school ( graduated in '91) and I worshiped my professors. I thought they were the coolest women in the world. My kids attend nursing school at University of Pittsburgh, and they feel the same way about almost all of their professors. I wonder it it's a STEM thing?
It's hard to directly indoctrinate someone with a particular point, but it is in some sense easier to impart a worldview simply by never teaching anyone disconfirming evidence. And there is a lot of basic stuff that is not being taught in college.
At the colleges I've worked at, student activists have been pro-Palestinian (and sometimes overtly antisemitic) in ways that many of the professors disagree with. I'd say your median lefty humanities professor supports Palestinian rights in some form, is willing to criticize Israel's government, and still wants to distinguish between those positions and antisemitic ones. A Jewish academic friend of mine who holds these views adds that she gets concerned when people criticize *only* the Israeli government among all the other governments one could criticize.
Student activists, on the other hand, tend to be less up on the various angles of this debate or, in more extreme cases, not worried about antisemitism because they view Jews as white and privileged.
A minority of professors have views that are closer to the student activists'. But in general, I think our friend with the unpronounceable name (EKG2 . . .) and Amy are correct to note that students are much more likely to absorb the more extreme views from their peers than from their professors.
"students are much more likely to absorb the more extreme views from their peers than from their professors."
But professors are the ones that can make them see that more than one view is worthy of debate. If they're too ideological in one direction, and don't push their students to consider other viewpoints, and give those viewpoints class time -- they reinforce the idea that differing opinions are "unsafe" and unworthy of debate. (They're also failing their students by making them less effective thinkers overall, because unchallenged ideas don't lead to persuasive arguments.)
I hope this is still true. I went to Barnard (part of Columbia U consortium) at the same time as Bari Weiss and this was definitely not the case in the ME studies department and for a significant portion of professors in other disciplines.
No, they didn’t say they weren’t malleable, they said they are peer-driven and exposed to more left-y ideas from a larger and more diverse peer group and that they don’t care much what adults think about the world. They said professors are overrated relative to those other influences, which is true--most young people assume they know better than the older generation anyway. Also, I wouldn’t conflate Gen Z and Millennials. Most college students don’t even take courses on Israel and Palestine. Smart kids test out and the ones who end up in the world history survey courses are usually checked out. Outside of a small group of top achievers, if college students have opinions, they are peer-driven and from alternative media sources. I feel like these complaints about professors indoctrinating students come from people who had college professors with more radical beliefs than them, which proves the point that the impact is minimal because those people still kept their own beliefs even before an age in which the information available and narrative spin was more accessible and heterogeneous.
I remember seeing a study from a few years ago of like 20 somethings. They were equally sympathetic and unsympathetic to both sides. It was fascinating. As in the the vast majority thought both groups were wrong or both groups were right.
Also. People are in an echo chamber so you are just hearing things from your own viewpoint. So if you are pro Palestinian, that is all you will hear. Same for Israel. Also. Youtube and Tiktok videos have ZERO context. So college may have influence but so does social media.
It's not hard to see why the so-called "anti-Israel" perspective has currency, though. A visit to the region with open eyes (which I have done) reveals a profoundly oppressive system of illegal land-invasion settlements, wall-building, and legal depredations, many of which were literally copied from the apartheid regime in South Africa. One can visit Yad Vashem and appreciate the horror of the Shoah while noting ruefully that it directly overlooks the site of Deir Yassim, where Israeli paramilitaries massacred Palestinian civilians in 1948. The complications and tensions are thick on the ground, but Americans are typically presented a whitewashed, extremely pro-Israeli version of the region and its history (if anything at all), and surely we'd rather not see how our $4 billion in military aid is really being used today. If Millennials and Zoomers are developing a different view than previous generations, it is a badly-needed historical corrective that places a value greater than zero on Palestinian suffering.
I have been really sympathetic to this view, but I was really unsettled by something my sister and I witnessed in France a few years ago.
We were in a small-ish city for a couple days, and saw a pro Palestinian protest march. Most of the people marching were clearly not ethnically French; they were Arabic, and were chanting things about "The Jews". The French crowds they were passing through mostly ignored them. No one looked alarmed or put out.
My sister and I were both.
We gave the protestors dead-eyed thousand yard stares. I personally think that people with light colored eyes are particularly good at glaring.
Nasty chanting in Europe about getting rid of Jews is no bueno in my book.
I had a whole reply written but it got deleted. The thing is, the majority of those student activists have never been to the region. They are not hearing things from another perspective. And on college campuses, while there is a focus on Palestinian suffering, there is a lot of anti Israel bashing as well. Which I think if rather than focusing on how badly Palestinians live, the focus is on how Zionism is racism, that is more anti Israel activity than pro Palestinian activism. (
And as for 0 focus on Palestinian suffering. This has beeb going on for at at least 2 decades. And I am not sure how that creates any sort pf balance at all.
I think it's true that the establishment media in the US has had a distinct pro-Israel bent, but the pro-Palestinian side presented by activists isn't really reflective of reality either. Activists present the most sanitized, sympathetic version of Palestinians possible. The Palestinian college students doing Nazi salutes while being inducted into terrorist groups don't, shockingly, feature prominently in their agenda. Moreover, irredentist language and rhetoric is absolutely normalized. The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at my university sells merch with a map of Palestine that includes all of Israel as part of Palestine.
I mean, irredentism is understandable given the history of the region, and it's part of the challenge of addressing the conflict. As I mentioned above, one can hold complete, heartfelt sympathy for the plight of post-WWII Jewish refugees, while also acknowledging that the British & the U.N. handing over the land of Palestinians - land in which they've lived for literal millennia, and for many centuries with Christians, Jews, and Muslims side-by-side - to settlers, including many Russian Jewish settlers that brought an eliminationist fervor to their Zionism, was a terrible, tragic mistake. I deplore the violent rhetoric that appears within some Palestinian circles and would not disbelieve that the kind of incident you cited happens, but I think taking it as *fully representative* of the Palestinian situation is very misguided. It would be like suggesting antifa represents the opinions of the Democratic Party. I personally know many Palestinians who are desperate to work for peace and would similarly deplore the use of terrorism and Nazi imagery. The anger is, unfortunately, understandable, as so many Palestinians feel they have no recourse in the midst of a massive Israeli military occupation, supported by the U.S., which leads to illegal Israeli settlements being built daily on West Bank land that the U.N. has agreed belongs to Palestinians; checkpoints that prevent Palestinians from traveling freely; and towering prison walls that hem people in. That a people so deeply wounded by horrific historical injustice could turn around and create a nation-state that inflicts such injustice on others is a bitter and grievous irony.
I was unfamiliar with Deir Hassim and tried to read a little about it & (without claiming any conclusions) new research questions the original descriptions of what happened.
First of all it’s Deir Yassin. Second, requesting credible citations for ‘literally copied from the apartheid regime in South Africa’. Finally, in 2023 it’s beyond laughable to say Americans are only exposed to a ‘whitewashed, extremely pro-Israeli version of the region and its history’
I beg your pardon for my typo - N and M are next to each other on the American keyboard, and since I'm not fluent in Arabic and was copying the name from my handwritten notes from my recent visit to the region, I didn't notice the error.
As to the apartheid policies: I don't know what you consider "credible," but the IMEU has a broad overview of the relationship between the state of Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa (https://imeu.org/article/an-overview-apartheid-south-africa-israel), and Foreign Policy did a deep dive on the long history between the regimes: https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/05/24/israels-most-illicit-affair/. If memory serves, the citation in my notes was referring to Shimon Peres' secret communication with South African officials in 1974, praising the regime and comparing Israel's situation with South Africa. Menachem Begin's government took increasingly active steps to adopt policies that mirror South Africa's.
The statement 'literally copied' may thus be a slight rhetorical overreach, but just look at the situation with open eyes: in the decades since, Israel has built walls around Palestinians; dispossessed Palestinians of their land and resources (water, telecommunications, etc.); and created a legal regime that prevents many Palestinians from voting or moving freely. It is the systematic dehumanization of an indigenous population in favor of an economically advanced settler population. It literally meets the ICC and UN definitions of an apartheid regime, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu said "Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders." Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli NGOs Yesh Din and B'Tselem have all published reports that document the situation and agree that the term is applicable.
I am a professor at FSU in a social science, so thought I’d chime in. I’ve been there a few years and my impression is that, like most of higher ed, the faculty is quite liberal/democrat. (I’m a rare moderate/conservative/libertarian type.) But I’ve never thought “wokeness” was a powerful force here, at least not the sillier stuff that this podcast often exposes. True, there are pretty homogeneous left-wing perspectives about things like “social justice”, climate change being apocalyptic, support for affirmative action and BLM, belief in some ill-defined “systemic racism”, loathing of the current SCOTUS, etc. But when I shared the JEDI thing from Scientific American with some colleagues, they rolled their eyes. I take solace in that!
With students, it’s much more mixed, and I know I have everything from socialists to Trump supporters in my classes. I get a general lean left vibe, like conservatives are more wary of sharing opinions in class, but it’s not overwhelming or stultifying.
It’s actually admin that seem most likely to have pronouns in their bios, consistent with the theory that they mostly went to very woke education schools.
Another rare disagreement with Katie, based totally on my own "lived experience":
In the 1970s I attended a pretty traditional and conservative Southern university, where most of the faculty were a bit more progressive than the administration. While it's true that my overall political orientation did not change much in college, I have to say that the professors and the curricula had a huge influence on certain aspects of my worldview. The most life-changing example was a science-y course about the environment that turned me into a tree-hugging meat avoider. Maybe I was more impressionable than most young adults, but I do think that college instruction can be highly influential on students' developing attitudes and beliefs.
Thank you for this comment! I was thinking the same thing. I work at a university and have seen whole curricula revamped around “anti-racist” ideas. This means that you don’t have an English class on Shakespeare; you have class on “Decolonizing Shakespeare.” Even if the professor isn’t especially charismatic or influential, students will come out with very specific viewpoints because everything is taught through a particular lens.
And these ideas are permeating curriculum all over, not just at the little private liberal arts.
Faculty were likewise more progressive than administrators at the conservative college I attended, so I was surprised to read about Samuel Abrams' research that found administrators to be to the left of professors. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, because his research does fit my anecdotal experiences in working at secular colleges.
Keep in mind that a large factor in recent administrative bloat is the expansion of the DIE bureaucracy and also "student services". You'd have to think 98% of those folks are leftists by definition.
That's actually a complicated picture. At small institutions, many of the non-faculty professional positions are filled by (1) alums and (2) partners/spouses of faculty. At larger institutions, you get those groups plus a good number of people with professional experience in things like fundraising and alumni giving.
Professional staff have much less contact with students than faculty--yes, I'm including the staff directly hired to help students with things like time management, mental health, and winning fellowships--so while I agree that many of these folks are progressive, I don't think they influence students nearly as much as favorite professors do.
Rufo makes me happy FIRE is around to tackle illiberal nonsense on campus in a far more balanced, effective, and truly classically liberal way than he does.
I wish I could be more sympathetic to Rufo for times he brings bad educational practices to light. But I have the frustration with him I have with Sohrab Amari: they’re mirror images of the left they oppose. Neither side of the culture war will completely triumph over the other, and it’s dangerous for warriors on either side to insist on total victory.
Another place where Latin students have an advantage - until about 2015 I had only seen "cis" and "trans" used to describe the sections of Gaul in relation to the Alps (cisalpine and transalpine Gaul)
My exposure to "cis" and "trans" prior to the mid 2010s was either in the context of organic chemistry (cis and trans stereoisomers of certain molecules), or in the context of reading about the Middle East in the early 20th century. Transjordan I believe is now the country of Jordan and Cisjordan is the present day West Bank.
There's a dark joke in there somewhere, but I'm not caffeinated enough to make it.
The country of Jordan was originally created by splitting off half of the Mandate of Palestine, which was then called the Emirate of Transjordan. They changed the name after they took over land on the west side of the River Jordan during the Israeli War of Independence.
I was also surprised to hear that, but then I looked it up--in this case "transJordan" and "cisJordan" seem to refer to the Jordan RIVER (as in "that side" and this side" of the river), so the commenter above is correct that some people seem to have referred to the west bank of the river as the "cisJordan" . . . side, I guess? And there are apparently some people/sources who refer to the entire region between the Jordan and the Mediterranean as "cisJordan." I couldn't find anything that referred to the REGION of the "West Bank" as "CisJordan," but maybe there is and I just didn't see it.
I believe the West Bank is referred to as some variant of Cisjordan in Romance languages: Cisjordanie in French, Cisjordânia in Portuguese, Cisjordania in Spanish, etc.. I can't remember seeing "Cisjordan" used in English to refer to the West Bank (i.e. the formerly Jordanian-occupied bit).
That being said, it's important to remember that "the West Bank" is a bit of Jordanian propaganda, applied to the territory they occupied during the Israeli War of Independence and then annexed. Prior to that, the hill country north of Jerusalem was Samaria, and the hill country around Jerusalem and to the south was Judea.
Well sure, around where I live you'd get QUITE the side-eye for saying the "West Bank" or even "settlements." A lot of people even still say YeSh"A (Yehuda, Shomron v'Aza--in English, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza). Do you happen to know how it was called in Arabic at that time? I imagine they weren't calling it "Yehuda vShomron" but maybe I'm wrong.
I have no idea what the Arabs called Judea or Samaria. Based on some quick scanning of Ottoman administrative maps, they definitely saw them as distinct areas, because they were occasionally part of different administrative units.
I likewise first encountered it in organic chemistry in my late teens, then in the context of the late Habsburg Empire once it was split into a dual monarchy - Transleithania ("beyond the river Leitha") was the region governed by Hungary, Cisleithania the region governed by Austria.
At our DEI professional development training at my school, we broke out into groups to talk about ourselves and had to introduce ourselves by our identity categories, and one for the terms was “cis,” which a lot of the teachers and staff didn’t know. One woman asked about it and a bunch of people nodded like they were wondering as well, and after the facilitator explained it, people acted as if they understood, and I’m pretty sure most of them couldn’t recall it today. I think the idea was just that we get to know one another and talk about ourselves, but it would have been cool to have other questions like, how do you feel about astrology, cats, and horror movies, because those are the real things that connect or divide us.
Identity categories are so fucking boring. Tell me about which movies or books that you love so much you revisit them, the best pizza you ever had, which ice cream is your favorite.
I had the pleasure of learning about the term "cis" in 1997.
I was at an inservice for University of Chicago Hospital nurse administrators given by a "sexologist" Scare quotes here- because come on, a sexologist?
Anyway, we got to see lots of slides showing post-up fake penises, which were god awful. Then she put a ton of dildos in the middle of the table, just to show what's out there. We were instructed to talk to our elderly female patients about their masturbation needs and to suggest dildos with hand hold suitable for arthritic hands.
Yeah, I didn't do that.
Along with the cis terminology, we were told that we should refer to ourselves as "natal women" to distinguish ourselves from just "women", who can apparently be men.
For some reason “Winn*b*go” being this unspeakable slur sort of reminds me how “Belgium” in the hitchhikers guide is the most unspeakable word in the universe.
There's actually a ton of "official" native names that are anglicized/francicized from exonyms, many disparaging, given by more-eastern tribes that Europeans met first. Ranging from "they speak pretty normal" (about the Illini), "they have dugout canoes" (about the Missouria), to "they're snakes" (about the Sioux and Iroquois, the latter being more uncertain etymology).
i think jesse and katie are wrong about how liberal FSU or UF are. faculty in red-states like texas, eg UT, are also woke. so i'm pretty sure same at FSU or UF.
i think a lot of katie's argument about rufo's attempt to march through the institutions applies to what the left did successfully. harvard was built to train elites and protestant ministers. ag schools were built to train farmers etc. they've just been repurposed in the last few generations. they didn't build it. rufo is playing the game, nasty as it might be.
Actually you know I can formalize this. I call these Wolf's Laws:
Wolf's First Law: Anyone attempting to monetize, politicize or weaponize an indigenous heritage is faking until proven otherwise.
Wolf's Second Law: If someone claims heritage from more than 2 native groups, they're all fake. Real Natives don't have to hedge about which band they're from.
Katie: "I'm going to steelman the conservative point of view here. It's mostly based on religion so it's incompatible with federally funded education."
I think Katie does way better than most. The problem is that they are rarely exposed to those people on the right in the way the right is soaking (like it or not) in lefty culture and opinions which are EVERYWHERE. It’s hard to steelman what you don’t know or worse you only know the caricatured version of the right presented in lefty entertainment and media. Jesse has trouble sometimes but don’t you think Katie really tries? I do.
I'd agree with those points, and I should emphasize that I don't believe they're intentionally misrepresenting points. Moreso what you mentioned that they don't have much direct exposure to opposing views, other than extreme versions or versions presented by the left.
This is a very common error: generally, federal funds cannot go to religious education at the K-12 level - (though in certain cases religious schools may get Title I funds, along with school lunch subsidies.
But at the post-secondary level, religious schools are routinely eligible for Pell Grants and federally-backed student loans.
(I wish I could remember where I read it, but some dude posed the question of why people go apoplectic over the idea of one penny in vouchers going to K-12 religious schools, while nobody says a word about Pell Grants and student loans)
On the topic of political views in Florida public universities, Ben Sasse is to be the president of the University of Florida. It's probably more of a flagship institution. And I think is Sasse is a far more serious and thoughtful person than Rufo, who actually respects principles of academic freedom in ways that Rufo doesn't.
I like Sasse, although I'm to his left politically, and I hope his interest in academic freedom keeps him from culture warring with the humanities departments. (As someone who's spent a lot of time in humanities departments, I have much less confidence in the reactions of the humanity professors, TBH. Sorry to tattle on my people.)
It does make me chortle my most cynical chortle that the ladder Sasse used to climb upward in academia was a US SENATORSHIP.
No "probably" about it, UF is the flagship, or perhaps co-flagship with FSU.
I've admired Sasse's interactions with Braver Angels in particular, so I agree that he's serious and thoughtful. It's still a pretty political appointment, but it's better than I might have expected from De Santis.
I am not the biggest fan of Chris Rufo but I think mandating public colleges actually help their students find jobs with their very expensive higher educations is very defensible as a public policy.
He's been absolutely amazing for us and innovative in income sharing arrangements in lieu of student loans. And he's really good on free speech. I miss him already.
Doesn't "somebody else built that, and then you took it over for your own pet ideological project" describe the entirety of left-leaning academia (i.e., all of academia that isn't explicitly a conservative Christian college)? I wouldn't personally want to go to Chris Rufo U, but I also have a hard time getting upset about one tiny conservative taxpayer-funded college in a vast sea of lefty taxpayer-funded colleges.
And FWIW, I think the stated goals for New College sound pretty good, I just do not expect, based on their histories, that those goals will be the result of Rufo et al.'s efforts.
I also wanna point out that it was the Obama administration that started requiring universities to post information about how much money graduates of those universities were making with those degrees.
Which were then gamed quite well. More than one school offered to "sponsor" unpaid internships by essentially paying the salary the organization should have been paying the worker. Suddenly, the "employed nine months after graduation" stat started looking really good.
As someone “in the business”--colleges do not have good data on their student’s wages. There are three potential sources of wage data and they are all... problematic.
First: alumni surveys. The problems with these are obvious and well laid-out in the ancient statistics bible How to Lie With Statistics and the problem gets worse the smaller the subpopulation you are working with. Evaluating individual programs from these would be amazing but requires a better response rate. (Recent grads: please participate. You should get one of these about 6 months after graduation.)
Second: Unemployment Insurance Data. This is available but requires working with state unemployment agencies, and so may only include data for certain states. The UI programs usually collect data on the economic sector but not the position pf the worker--so the Walmart bagger and Walmart accountant are both Retail. It also shows wages not hours (45k, 50 hr weeks and 45k, 30 hour weeks are really different). It also sparse for the self-employed, like a lot of trades and agriculture.
Third: Third-party specialists. One in the field will scan resumes on job sites for your school name and present insights about what title they list and likely wages. This also undercounts fields where people don’t post resumes (see self-employment, trades).
The feds have tax data, and I would love it is they’d use it to make those decisions (and also have a Gainful Employment rule for master’s programs because they are the next frontier for scammy for-profit programs and not just by the usual suspects.)
Oh yeah! To try going after scammy for profit Unis. I’m old enough to remember when “trying to prevent colleges from saddling students with useless overpriced degrees” was a left-leaning value.
Just getting to the end of Jesse’s story, and Katie says “I don’t see much of a difference between what she did & Rachel Dolezal...” and I mentally interject: “or any trans-identified male like Dylan Mulvaney as an example.” Mulvaney makes bank off an imagined “girlhood” fabricated in his mind and rewarded for it financially, and reputation-wise by the sitting President no less.
But by all means destroy this one possibly unwell woman for making a few thousand bucks.
If I’m off base here, please tell me, but how is this different from Susan Meacham, the story on which Katie issues a correction noting that Meacham is actually struggling with bipolar disorder (the non-TikTok variety). Mentally well people don’t create false identities, but it makes for an entertaining podcast segment I suppose.
You and I definitely don’t see eye to eye on everything about gender, but we absolutely do on this piece. No one has given me a good explanation on what is different about transgender vs. transracial. A white person assuming a black or indigenous racial identity and demanding space be made for them within social, institutional and/or legal frameworks created for the advancement of black and indigenous people is not different than a man doing so with women.
This also bothers me with “queer” identities taken on by definitely straight people.
I was involved in a similar discussion downthread. I maintained that it's one thing to lie about your ethnic background/identity. (Liz Warren, Ward Churchill, Sacheen Littlefeather). But it's a whole other level further down the spectrum of mental/emotional instability to drastically alter your physical appearance. (LeClaire, Dolezal, Jessica Krug).
Elected official is of greater significance than a New Age “artist.” I haven’t really followed that guy’s story much. In the end I think the GOP is justified in keeping him off committees relating to national security, but the final call is with the people in his district (it’s a given he won’t be re-elected).
However, I suppose as a categorical statement (“unwell people don’t create false identities “) it does leave out the compulsive liars.
I still don’t really think this one woman’s story is pod-worthy.
I can’t say I was surprised to hear Jesse’s literally genocidal idea of dropping “ze” as a pronoun, considering how many trans children he has literally murdered with his own hands. And now NYT is platforming this bloodthirsty monster?!
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[Disclaimer: “Literally” is not to be taken literally in this context, and “genocidal” should be understand as “something that could conceivably lead to genocide in a very indirect way in the fevered imagination of a barely-pubescent child. “Bloodthirsty,” however, should be understood as invoking the blood libel.]
Their argument about higher ed institutions in Florida not necessarily being “woke“ because they are in Florida doesn’t make any sense. The majority of university faculty are not from the states where they get jobs! And they are also never trained at the universities where they end up working, they are trained at highly liberal institutions with PhD programs. The academic job market is ultra competitive and national. Even for a job at Southwestern Florida no name University. I cannot believe that Jesse and Katie do not understand this. 
This part was really frustrating. I have worked at one of the most conservative (not religious) universities in a stem department and it's incredibly liberal. Pronouns and diversity trainings are pushed on us though so far optional. So it really grinds my gears that one progressive university has some conservative trustees and the response is, build your own university? This is absurd. I am more likely to meet a Marxist than a republican in the humanities department.
If you want to make fun of the pronouns and the Enby and the trans overreach, but then immediate dismiss and ridicule an attempt in one state at one university to use the playbook in the other direction, then I don't know what to tell you.
Sorry to be spicy but I've rarely been more annoyed by a segment but appreciate how fair Katie was on Rufo
I studied social and earth science at several major public universities in the South (including Auburn in Alabama and George Mason in VA) and I'd largely agree. Yes, UF is not like Berkley, but that doesn't make it conservative. The faculty are definitely left of the states they are in as a whole, and I'd say in the liberal arts and humanities, essentially 100% left and I saw more of what we call now wokeness (ill-liberal left) becoming prominent and making its way into the sciences, where you could still reliably find centrists and right leaning liberals, even the odd conservative.
My only understanding of the DeSantis/Rufo University drama coming from this episode, I will say that I'm not siding with DeSantis's move, but, I'm sorry, I saw the changes between 2008-2017 when I was studying and researching at these institutions and it's been a pretty steady path towards the identitarian left. By the time I left, you weren't likely to find many more people identifying as communist than you would in 2008, but the number of people who thought the scientific method was a "western white male" way of thinking? Another story.
And the effects of this move towards the identitarian Left can't be good on the quality of the research at these institutions if free thought is discouraged. It's in the interests of universities to be less dogmatic.
Previewing your comments and preparing myself to be annoyed. I noticed some of my college friends having a freakout about this on FB, and I'm thinking "do they not know that nationwide college faculty lean Left HARD. Yes, they can have private colleges. But public universities are supposed to serve the public, and half of the country does not share their views (and given how conservative students feel they need to self-censor far more than other university students... at academic institutions where ideas are SUPPOSED to be challenged). This should not be controversial, unless deep down left-leaning people know and LIKE their control over academia.
Seriously. The idea that the views of half the electorate should not be represented on campus is ridiculous. From an institutional standpoint, it also seems really stupid. Universities have faculty (and administrators) using "conservative" and "republican" as epithets, and then look straight shocked when their *right wing* state legislature doesn't vote to give them money. I've never met so many clueless people as those with PhDs. "Fuck you, bigot supremacist asshole fascists!" is not a good opener to a fundraising email.
I hear complaints that universities are run like businesses: no, if they were run like businesses, they'd make sure they had a fair number of right wingers among the faculty and admin, if not to expressly lobby conservative legislators then at least to represent something they'd like to fund. This would be a smart insitutional strategy. Not to mention getting some cash from right-leaning private donors. Giving the finger to half the country is the dumbest approach ever.
Yeah I was annoyed because universities are already applying ideological litmus tests basically everywhere through required diversity statements (graded on adherence to leftist shibboleths) and by controlling what is allowed to be published. If you are going to be fair in the segment maybe point that out? That said I don’t support the Rufo approach because it just prompts a thermostatic backlash in the opposite direction, I think as wishy washy as Jesse Singal and Matt Yglesias are they are in the end more influential since real movement comes by shifting normy voters in the center. Look at how the trans discussion has shifted since we’ve started talking more about the real negatives associated with treatment rather than freaking out about drag queens.
"That said I don’t support the Rufo approach" -- isn't it possible that Rufo's approach looks unseemly because it's out in broad daylight? Meanwhile college & universities in the US have been systematically captured by the Left over a span of decades (just as intentionally).
I'm strongly against the left-identitarian litmus tests *and* strongly against an open, explicitly political takeover of a college. I think the latter is an extreme move that runs roughshod over academic freedom. There are other, less polarizing ways to address this.
Would we like a situation where every change of state government leads to a wholesale replacement of every board of every state university with transparently political appointees? Maybe that's an extreme thought experiment, but it seems dystopian to me.
I have some concerns that Rufo may have fallen prey to audience capture since his rise to prominence, but I completely agree with your point.
Katie and Jesse have spent huge chunks of their podcast demonstrating how many businesses, online communities, schools etc have been hijacked by a small faction of ‘woke’ activists. Rufo has been instrumental in showing that this has happened and also explicit in pointing out that the capture of institutions has been a specific policy aim for many of the more radical social justice groups for a long time.
I’ll be honest, I don’t necessarily support Rufo’s politics, mostly because I’m not even clear on what they are and I don’t think this episode spent any time trying to clarify them. However, I do support his approach. ‘This is what I’m concerned about and this is how I want to counter it’ is a lot better than ‘We have no agenda, but if we do its the right one and you’re a bigot’
I agree with everything you said. I'm not saying he hasn't fallen prey to audience capture (I feel like we see audience capture everywhere now, though, don't we?). I haven't followed his work closely enough to notice any changes in his style.
"However, I do support his approach. ‘This is what I’m concerned about and this is how I want to counter it’ is a lot better than ‘We have no agenda, but if we do its the right one and you’re a bigot’"
Same. He's transparent about his intentions, at least. Meanwhile the times I've listened to James Lindsay on his podcast (I can listen to anything if I'm doing boring household tasks), and hearing him reading the writings of people in the Frankfurt School, Marcuse, etc., where people planned out how to manipulate institutions over long time periods to affect changes in society to suit their motives. Hell, it's the whole CRT thing. They could claim "No one's teaching CRT in schools," because they were applying the principles of CRT *within* schools.
I prefer Rufo's approach, too. Everything is out in the open.
What is so bad in the "Rufo" approach, I wonder? He says he'll replace DEI with "equality, merit, and colorblindness", which could use a rewrite but in principle is exactly what it ought to be at all universities, regardless of political persuasion. His public statements are all about restoring liberal arts education.
If he instead replaces Ibram Kendi with Dinesh D'Souza and organizes mobs to physically assault any left of center speaker that comes on campus, that would be the right-wing inversion of the status quo. But even though that wouldn't be a great education, it probably wouldn't be any worse than what they're already doing.
The argument against him seems to be that his official stance is a lie and he'll really implement a far-right agenda because he's a political hack. Maybe that's true, but it doesn't seem like a strong argument.
Pretty sure Matt Yglesias is both too snarky and too technical to influence normies.
I pretty much agreed with Katie's take on Rufo (because I'm all in for academic freedom, and he's clearly not), BUT I wanted to chime in on your thread to note that the humanities department in which I earned my PhD literally had multiple Marxists and one known Republican.
I don't mean to be a jerk, but if someone identifies as a Marxist, I am less likely to take anything seriously because of how Marxism keeps turning out. I don't dismiss everything they say out of hand, but being a Marxist today kind of means someone didn't think things through, hasn't paid attention to the last 100 years of history, engages in a lot of motivated reasoning, isn't good at thinking rationally or has some really concerning personality traits. (If someone identifies as a Freudian, I pretty much dismiss all of what they're saying because Freud was a grade A quack and his theories led to a lot of ineffective psychiatric care though at least he wasn't brutal.) I really don't understand why so many academics in non-STEM fields are Marxists. Is there something about Marxism that is uniquely appealing to academics?
Orthodox marxism would get you thrown out of modern socialist spaces which these days value 'racial and gender justice' as a priority. A real marxist believes in class struggle over all other things, there is a reason the saying goes 'no war but class war'. Marxism is dead in the west, the soviet union's collapse and the modern social justice left have killed it dead.
A theory that doesn't work and requires slavish devotion? Sounds like most academics I know ;)
'Is there something about Marxism that is uniquely appealing to academics?'
It concentrates economic power in the hands of experts rather than diffuses it to the unwashed masses in an 'unplanned' economy.
You do have a good point there about it appealing to academics who are by definition experts on something.
I will say there is something amazing about an ideology that claims to be the dictatorship of the proletariat but always seems to put the power in the hands of a decidedly-non proletarian expert class. And Marxism always seems to result in an expert class that was decidedly incompetent. I always come back to the Soviets elevating Lysenko, executing geneticists and refusing to drop the Lysenkoism after they suffered from repeated famines. I really would love to read good-quality social science research on that aspect of Marxism.
I think it's often (though not always) folks who *think* they are doubling down on the purest form of Everclear-proof progressivism, when in fact, they are pointing to the wall that progressive ideology inevitably hits--and then bashing their heads against it. (And ours.)
Priors confirmed! Yes!
If you don’t support this playbook and overreach, why would you support conservatives doing it? It just seems like a really unprincipled stance to do that.
I actually don't support this on the basis of academic freedom and think it's a doomed project. Frequently on this pod they debunk some of the nutpicking on the left and the right (which is great) and in the grand scheme of things, I can't be bothered by one example of things going the other way. It seems like such an outlier and thus my frustration
I wish people overall were less ideological in terms of how they view the function of the University because there’s so much pragmatic stuff that has nothing to do with political views that gets lost.
I get that, but I think that it just feels very much about DeSantis is political ambition, and personally I just really hate when politicians screw with peoples lives to score political points. I grab that new college is a rare exception, in terms of how things are changed however, I guess I work at a university where we have had politically active conservative trustees, and the issue wasn’t so much about how they change curriculum, but that feeling that they have contempt for the faculty,. It played itself out in how they dealt with financial issues.  They made some irresponsible choices financially and then ignored faculty because it’s almost like a culture of doing that to the point where it feels just very frustrating that we can’t effectively work together on non-political strategic stuff that would help students.
I think we can agree on the point about the contempt for the faculty. So true. The faculty Senate is a waste of time cause leadership doesn't care, doesn't listen.
The reason you'd support it is because perfect is the enemy of good. It's good to take action, since no one else is acting at all. It'd be like saying that the Ukrainians are unprincipled to defend themselves from Russia. Sure, they're both killing but its not the same.
I admit that my analogy is overwrought and that Rufo and Co. will inevitably be an over-correction. Still, the Biden administration just rolled back to the title IX kangaroo courts. A reform that required a clown like Trump in office to appoint the bible-thumping sister of the Blackwater mercenary guy and we *still* couldn't get the Biden administration to agree that college apparatchiks aren't equipped to investigate crimes nor that a presumption of evidence is important.
I agree with you in principle and I don't like the playbook or overreach but principle isn't a suicide pact.
Exactly. Sure, this is a political move on DeSantis' part... affecting one small school. Meanwhile in Bidenland they're putting the school free lunch program on the chopping block if schools don't play the gender identity game (in a May 5, 2022, USDA memorandum to schools).
https://www.usda.gov/media/press-releases/2022/05/05/usda-promotes-program-access-combats-discrimination-against-lgbtqi
That’s a conservative interpretation of the guidance that’s not actually in the document itself.
Actually republicans have fought a lot harder to get rid of public school lunches the Democrats have. They fought against the extension of the waiver, giving universal free lunch in response to this interpretation and it wasn’t renewed.
I suspect that the states just didn’t wanna pay for free lunch, but just wanted to blame the Democrats
They tried to put in a rule change to Title IX so that gender identity is on level with biological sex, which is a slap in the face to the women who fought for representation in education & athletics in this country. They're still going through all of the responses from the public comment period. Being a girl/woman isn't an idea in a male's head. Forcing schools to adapt their anti discrimination policies to include gender will mean there would be places for boys, and coed spaces for girls. Believing in objective reality of the two sexes shouldn't be solely a conservative interpretation.
"I suspect that the states just didn’t wanna pay for free lunch, but just wanted to blame the Democrats." They don't want the people in their states to suffer. They may see things differently than Dems but it's pretty immature to paint them all as evil.
Universal free lunch is just a boon to the food service companies.
If you’re against things, being overly ideological, the solution isn’t finding someone with a different ideology. That’s actually not taking any action, but it just deepening the war
I actually don’t mind colleges being liberal. I think it is an ideology that better fosters exploration and inclusion. Wokeness isn’t liberalism though, its authoritarianism. Worse, liberalism has thus far been incapable of combating the institutional capture and its having a real impact on us all now, even outside of acadamia. So, if the political group I’d prefer to remedy the situation can’t or won’t, then its time to try something else. Rufo, hack that he is, has gotten results, imperfect to be sure and motivated by an ideology I don’t agree with entirely but its has gone too far and our complacency has emboldened these woke authoritarians. So if fighting back against this craziness deepens the “war” then, so be it.
Co-sign. The Left has had a decades long effort to take over academic institutions and they did it. They can't stand it that Conservatives put a similar long-term strategy to get more judges appointed; they rail against it. Conservatives are giving this project at one small college a go, and people are losing their minds because they see academia as theirs alone.
What are your suggestions for how colleges & universities in the US to be less ideological? We know that most of them lean heavily to the Left already, but you're saying this one college getting a Conservative board is too ideological.
 Ruffo is a blatant political player and he’s publicly posturing.  I sometimes feel like people are so reflexively antiwoke that they just hate anything left does and can’t look at some guy who’s talking about reshaping an entire college an image he wants as not being problematic.
He doesn’t talk about a vision that has anything to do with education. That should be decried.
He’s not the first conservative to get on a state board of trustees at a state university. There are other instances where right wingers really are coming down on state institutions like university of North Carolina and university of Wisconsin among others.
What is the biggest thing that you do? You start out with having elected trustees and not appointees.  Yoy can have people who have educational goals, and not ideological ones.
 I don’t get this idea that you don’t solve a problem by just re-creating it in a conservative image rather than say, the problem or people being too ideological. These schools need to start thinking about a positive vision, and some thing that includes the entire community.
I had the same thought. Really strange.
Having been involved in hiring process, this gets me especially steamed because it's straight up discriminatory. Wait 5 minutes and California will replace half the board of trustees with "marginalized people"
Additionally, it's not just--or even primarily--the faculty who drive the progressiveness. The administrative staff push so much of this stuff. The lower and middle levels of the administration are full of people who spent tens of thousands of dollars on Masters of Higher Education Administration, or Masters of Leadership, or some other master degree that provides almost no practical training but included lots of fantastic content from the same educational wizards who brought us Whole Language Learning.
Let's take student organizations. In response to an anonymous post on a social media account in which someone claiming to be a student of color who felt uncomfortable at a meeting of the Super Smash Brothers Club, some Assistant Director of Student Leadership makes a rule saying every student organization has to have an official representative on a Student Diversity Council or they aren't eligible for funding from the school. Ostensibly, this is a fairly minimal change: on paper, all it means is one student needs to go to one meeting once a semester. The student organizations then each appoint or elect a new position so that students can put "VP of Diversity" on their resume. All those students then need to do something to justify their position, but don't really know anything about "diversity," so they go to the same Assistant Director of Student Leadership and ask what to do, and now that person has an enormous amount of personal control over content that gets transmitted by students into ostensibly "student-run" organizations.
"All those students then need to do something to justify their position, but don't really know anything about "diversity," so they go to the same Assistant Director of Student Leadership and ask what to do"
First response they get "Do you have any grudges to settle?"
j/k (mostly)
I'm what you said about this Assistant Director of Student Leadership and have Professor Umbridge from Harry Potter in my head.
Umbridge is perhaps my favorite literary villain of all time. Just the perfect encapsulation of petty tyrants everywhere.
But that being said, I feel like I should clarify that, unlike Umbridge, the anonymous Assistant Director here is not (necessarily) making a deliberate play for power over people's lives. They're more likely just trying to use the authority they have to make sure all students have a positive experience. It's entirely well-intentioned.
The derangement in universities is everywhere, including the various places in the deep south that I've been.
I agree. I attended a small state university in a deep south town where there's still to this day a Confederate flag hanging on Main Street about 3 mi from campus, and a law on the books
in the town that all homeowners have a gun. But many of my professors there were professed Marxists, and in two of my African American history courses I and two other non-BIPOC students were asked to explain our presence in the classes. The majority of students *were* conservative, but most of my professors in the humanities were quite vocally on the far left.
The professor who was driven to suicide after he made some un-woke comments at UNC Wilmington, for example. (https://www.carolinajournal.com/opinion/on-prof-mike-adams-suicide-one-year-later/). Wilmington NC is deep south. The town government was overthrown by legitimate white supremacists during the reconstruction era. But the university is apparently crazy in a different way now.
Oh my lord that story is so sad!!
When is this madness going to stop?
You mean you guys were singled out and had to say why you were taking the course?
On the charming end of this scale, I had a male student attend the women in engineering panel. He wanted to get information for yia younger sister. Heart melted
What a peach!
Yes. This was about 15 years ago too. I don't think students today would think twice about being asked why they would take a class on a subject that didn't directly relate to one of their identities.
Was thinking the same. Their whole small minded take on Florida was gross. UF super liberal. State colleges and south Florida in general is NOT “the South.” Travel more? Idk guys.
I went back to school a few years ago, at a podunk university in a midwestern city where the kids are half religious and five years behind on everything going on in the world. Pronouns everywhere, no speaking freely.
Oh man, they really misunderstand how malleable college students are as well! There’s a reason why Gen z & millennials are sympathetic toward Palestine. It’s not because they read about the conflict in Gaza in the news, it’s because they took courses from professors who taught them about this from their anti-Israel perspective.
I agree with Katie and Jesse. Most students are not taking on the political beliefs of their professors, they're taking their beliefs from their friends and social media. My college professors were all very weird and out of touch and I definitely never agreed with them about anything.
I remember thinking my English prof (eccentric chain smoking old lady) was out of touch because she didn’t acknowledge preferred pronouns at our painfully woke women’s college that may have been mentioned in this ep. Now I realize she was based. As in literally grounded in material reality.
I will never not think it's absurd that women's colleges of all places are engaging in this theater. Previously they'd get to be proud of graduates are breaking the glass ceiling in (insert field here), but if a chunk of their female students now deny that they're even women, as NBs or saying they're "he/hims," and if they really believe in gender ideology they have to think of those females as Real Men... there's nothing to celebrate. "Oh, a man got appointed to (insert title). Yay. Go patriarchy."
Politely disagree. It's not necessarily that I think the professors *themselves* are the biggest agents for disseminating a political belief, but instead that they can make the difference between whether or not their students who have a variety of takes feel free to speak out. That's where a professor who is either "woke" (I'm just using it as shorthand) or sympathetic and feels like their hands are tied can make a big difference because they allow the most radical students to run the conversation and turn it into a lecture.
My thoughts as well: https://www.blockedandreported.org/p/episode-148-chris-rufo-takes-over/comment/12107756
Yes, friends and social media matter, but if professors don't facilitate the exchange of a variety of viewpoints in their classes, they are sending the message to students that those ideas aren't worthy of debate. The one place in their lives where they'd be forced to think more deeply about issues from a different perspective is lost.
^This
Why not both?
For sure friends and social media are a bigger influence, but when your professor is also saying it 1) it pretty much gives you license not to question any of it 2) it gives it that voice of "authority."
I was a STEM major, so I definitely took what my bio/chem professors said more seriously than what any of my friends thought or what anyone said on social media. When I took social science electives where the professor disagreed with my preconceived notions, I wrote them off and did whatever I had to do to get the grade. But when I took a social science elective and the professor AGREED with me? Well, wasn't that professor just the smartest person who ever lived! And I sure did memorize every bit of course material to bring up in Facebook/Reddit arguments for the next five years.
Interesting!
I went to University of Michigan nursing school ( graduated in '91) and I worshiped my professors. I thought they were the coolest women in the world. My kids attend nursing school at University of Pittsburgh, and they feel the same way about almost all of their professors. I wonder it it's a STEM thing?
It's hard to directly indoctrinate someone with a particular point, but it is in some sense easier to impart a worldview simply by never teaching anyone disconfirming evidence. And there is a lot of basic stuff that is not being taught in college.
This is what I meant.
At the colleges I've worked at, student activists have been pro-Palestinian (and sometimes overtly antisemitic) in ways that many of the professors disagree with. I'd say your median lefty humanities professor supports Palestinian rights in some form, is willing to criticize Israel's government, and still wants to distinguish between those positions and antisemitic ones. A Jewish academic friend of mine who holds these views adds that she gets concerned when people criticize *only* the Israeli government among all the other governments one could criticize.
Student activists, on the other hand, tend to be less up on the various angles of this debate or, in more extreme cases, not worried about antisemitism because they view Jews as white and privileged.
A minority of professors have views that are closer to the student activists'. But in general, I think our friend with the unpronounceable name (EKG2 . . .) and Amy are correct to note that students are much more likely to absorb the more extreme views from their peers than from their professors.
"students are much more likely to absorb the more extreme views from their peers than from their professors."
But professors are the ones that can make them see that more than one view is worthy of debate. If they're too ideological in one direction, and don't push their students to consider other viewpoints, and give those viewpoints class time -- they reinforce the idea that differing opinions are "unsafe" and unworthy of debate. (They're also failing their students by making them less effective thinkers overall, because unchallenged ideas don't lead to persuasive arguments.)
I hope this is still true. I went to Barnard (part of Columbia U consortium) at the same time as Bari Weiss and this was definitely not the case in the ME studies department and for a significant portion of professors in other disciplines.
No, they didn’t say they weren’t malleable, they said they are peer-driven and exposed to more left-y ideas from a larger and more diverse peer group and that they don’t care much what adults think about the world. They said professors are overrated relative to those other influences, which is true--most young people assume they know better than the older generation anyway. Also, I wouldn’t conflate Gen Z and Millennials. Most college students don’t even take courses on Israel and Palestine. Smart kids test out and the ones who end up in the world history survey courses are usually checked out. Outside of a small group of top achievers, if college students have opinions, they are peer-driven and from alternative media sources. I feel like these complaints about professors indoctrinating students come from people who had college professors with more radical beliefs than them, which proves the point that the impact is minimal because those people still kept their own beliefs even before an age in which the information available and narrative spin was more accessible and heterogeneous.
I mean, they did literally say they don't think they're malleable
I remember seeing a study from a few years ago of like 20 somethings. They were equally sympathetic and unsympathetic to both sides. It was fascinating. As in the the vast majority thought both groups were wrong or both groups were right.
Also. People are in an echo chamber so you are just hearing things from your own viewpoint. So if you are pro Palestinian, that is all you will hear. Same for Israel. Also. Youtube and Tiktok videos have ZERO context. So college may have influence but so does social media.
It's not hard to see why the so-called "anti-Israel" perspective has currency, though. A visit to the region with open eyes (which I have done) reveals a profoundly oppressive system of illegal land-invasion settlements, wall-building, and legal depredations, many of which were literally copied from the apartheid regime in South Africa. One can visit Yad Vashem and appreciate the horror of the Shoah while noting ruefully that it directly overlooks the site of Deir Yassim, where Israeli paramilitaries massacred Palestinian civilians in 1948. The complications and tensions are thick on the ground, but Americans are typically presented a whitewashed, extremely pro-Israeli version of the region and its history (if anything at all), and surely we'd rather not see how our $4 billion in military aid is really being used today. If Millennials and Zoomers are developing a different view than previous generations, it is a badly-needed historical corrective that places a value greater than zero on Palestinian suffering.
I have been really sympathetic to this view, but I was really unsettled by something my sister and I witnessed in France a few years ago.
We were in a small-ish city for a couple days, and saw a pro Palestinian protest march. Most of the people marching were clearly not ethnically French; they were Arabic, and were chanting things about "The Jews". The French crowds they were passing through mostly ignored them. No one looked alarmed or put out.
My sister and I were both.
We gave the protestors dead-eyed thousand yard stares. I personally think that people with light colored eyes are particularly good at glaring.
Nasty chanting in Europe about getting rid of Jews is no bueno in my book.
I had a whole reply written but it got deleted. The thing is, the majority of those student activists have never been to the region. They are not hearing things from another perspective. And on college campuses, while there is a focus on Palestinian suffering, there is a lot of anti Israel bashing as well. Which I think if rather than focusing on how badly Palestinians live, the focus is on how Zionism is racism, that is more anti Israel activity than pro Palestinian activism. (
And as for 0 focus on Palestinian suffering. This has beeb going on for at at least 2 decades. And I am not sure how that creates any sort pf balance at all.
I think it's true that the establishment media in the US has had a distinct pro-Israel bent, but the pro-Palestinian side presented by activists isn't really reflective of reality either. Activists present the most sanitized, sympathetic version of Palestinians possible. The Palestinian college students doing Nazi salutes while being inducted into terrorist groups don't, shockingly, feature prominently in their agenda. Moreover, irredentist language and rhetoric is absolutely normalized. The Students for Justice in Palestine chapter at my university sells merch with a map of Palestine that includes all of Israel as part of Palestine.
I mean, irredentism is understandable given the history of the region, and it's part of the challenge of addressing the conflict. As I mentioned above, one can hold complete, heartfelt sympathy for the plight of post-WWII Jewish refugees, while also acknowledging that the British & the U.N. handing over the land of Palestinians - land in which they've lived for literal millennia, and for many centuries with Christians, Jews, and Muslims side-by-side - to settlers, including many Russian Jewish settlers that brought an eliminationist fervor to their Zionism, was a terrible, tragic mistake. I deplore the violent rhetoric that appears within some Palestinian circles and would not disbelieve that the kind of incident you cited happens, but I think taking it as *fully representative* of the Palestinian situation is very misguided. It would be like suggesting antifa represents the opinions of the Democratic Party. I personally know many Palestinians who are desperate to work for peace and would similarly deplore the use of terrorism and Nazi imagery. The anger is, unfortunately, understandable, as so many Palestinians feel they have no recourse in the midst of a massive Israeli military occupation, supported by the U.S., which leads to illegal Israeli settlements being built daily on West Bank land that the U.N. has agreed belongs to Palestinians; checkpoints that prevent Palestinians from traveling freely; and towering prison walls that hem people in. That a people so deeply wounded by horrific historical injustice could turn around and create a nation-state that inflicts such injustice on others is a bitter and grievous irony.
I was unfamiliar with Deir Hassim and tried to read a little about it & (without claiming any conclusions) new research questions the original descriptions of what happened.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/remember-deir-yassin
First of all it’s Deir Yassin. Second, requesting credible citations for ‘literally copied from the apartheid regime in South Africa’. Finally, in 2023 it’s beyond laughable to say Americans are only exposed to a ‘whitewashed, extremely pro-Israeli version of the region and its history’
I beg your pardon for my typo - N and M are next to each other on the American keyboard, and since I'm not fluent in Arabic and was copying the name from my handwritten notes from my recent visit to the region, I didn't notice the error.
As to the apartheid policies: I don't know what you consider "credible," but the IMEU has a broad overview of the relationship between the state of Israel and the apartheid regime in South Africa (https://imeu.org/article/an-overview-apartheid-south-africa-israel), and Foreign Policy did a deep dive on the long history between the regimes: https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/05/24/israels-most-illicit-affair/. If memory serves, the citation in my notes was referring to Shimon Peres' secret communication with South African officials in 1974, praising the regime and comparing Israel's situation with South Africa. Menachem Begin's government took increasingly active steps to adopt policies that mirror South Africa's.
The statement 'literally copied' may thus be a slight rhetorical overreach, but just look at the situation with open eyes: in the decades since, Israel has built walls around Palestinians; dispossessed Palestinians of their land and resources (water, telecommunications, etc.); and created a legal regime that prevents many Palestinians from voting or moving freely. It is the systematic dehumanization of an indigenous population in favor of an economically advanced settler population. It literally meets the ICC and UN definitions of an apartheid regime, and Archbishop Desmond Tutu said "Israel has created an apartheid reality within its borders." Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli NGOs Yesh Din and B'Tselem have all published reports that document the situation and agree that the term is applicable.
Another aspect of this is that indoctrination needn’t be in the classroom, professors are needed as advisors for on campus groups as well.
Agree. It's all part of the culture, and university is a place for twenty-somethings to take cues from on what's culturally relevant.
I am a professor at FSU in a social science, so thought I’d chime in. I’ve been there a few years and my impression is that, like most of higher ed, the faculty is quite liberal/democrat. (I’m a rare moderate/conservative/libertarian type.) But I’ve never thought “wokeness” was a powerful force here, at least not the sillier stuff that this podcast often exposes. True, there are pretty homogeneous left-wing perspectives about things like “social justice”, climate change being apocalyptic, support for affirmative action and BLM, belief in some ill-defined “systemic racism”, loathing of the current SCOTUS, etc. But when I shared the JEDI thing from Scientific American with some colleagues, they rolled their eyes. I take solace in that!
With students, it’s much more mixed, and I know I have everything from socialists to Trump supporters in my classes. I get a general lean left vibe, like conservatives are more wary of sharing opinions in class, but it’s not overwhelming or stultifying.
It’s actually admin that seem most likely to have pronouns in their bios, consistent with the theory that they mostly went to very woke education schools.
Another rare disagreement with Katie, based totally on my own "lived experience":
In the 1970s I attended a pretty traditional and conservative Southern university, where most of the faculty were a bit more progressive than the administration. While it's true that my overall political orientation did not change much in college, I have to say that the professors and the curricula had a huge influence on certain aspects of my worldview. The most life-changing example was a science-y course about the environment that turned me into a tree-hugging meat avoider. Maybe I was more impressionable than most young adults, but I do think that college instruction can be highly influential on students' developing attitudes and beliefs.
Thank you for this comment! I was thinking the same thing. I work at a university and have seen whole curricula revamped around “anti-racist” ideas. This means that you don’t have an English class on Shakespeare; you have class on “Decolonizing Shakespeare.” Even if the professor isn’t especially charismatic or influential, students will come out with very specific viewpoints because everything is taught through a particular lens.
And these ideas are permeating curriculum all over, not just at the little private liberal arts.
Faculty were likewise more progressive than administrators at the conservative college I attended, so I was surprised to read about Samuel Abrams' research that found administrators to be to the left of professors. Maybe I shouldn't have been surprised, because his research does fit my anecdotal experiences in working at secular colleges.
There may have been a shift over the last few decades, as administrative bloat has spread across academia.
That sounds very plausible to me.
Keep in mind that a large factor in recent administrative bloat is the expansion of the DIE bureaucracy and also "student services". You'd have to think 98% of those folks are leftists by definition.
That's actually a complicated picture. At small institutions, many of the non-faculty professional positions are filled by (1) alums and (2) partners/spouses of faculty. At larger institutions, you get those groups plus a good number of people with professional experience in things like fundraising and alumni giving.
Professional staff have much less contact with students than faculty--yes, I'm including the staff directly hired to help students with things like time management, mental health, and winning fellowships--so while I agree that many of these folks are progressive, I don't think they influence students nearly as much as favorite professors do.
Rufo makes me happy FIRE is around to tackle illiberal nonsense on campus in a far more balanced, effective, and truly classically liberal way than he does.
I wish I could be more sympathetic to Rufo for times he brings bad educational practices to light. But I have the frustration with him I have with Sohrab Amari: they’re mirror images of the left they oppose. Neither side of the culture war will completely triumph over the other, and it’s dangerous for warriors on either side to insist on total victory.
Another place where Latin students have an advantage - until about 2015 I had only seen "cis" and "trans" used to describe the sections of Gaul in relation to the Alps (cisalpine and transalpine Gaul)
My exposure to "cis" and "trans" prior to the mid 2010s was either in the context of organic chemistry (cis and trans stereoisomers of certain molecules), or in the context of reading about the Middle East in the early 20th century. Transjordan I believe is now the country of Jordan and Cisjordan is the present day West Bank.
There's a dark joke in there somewhere, but I'm not caffeinated enough to make it.
I do think that the citizens of Jordan would be slightly surprised to discover that they're all trans.
I want to be entgeigen or znsammen.
The country of Jordan was originally created by splitting off half of the Mandate of Palestine, which was then called the Emirate of Transjordan. They changed the name after they took over land on the west side of the River Jordan during the Israeli War of Independence.
I am pretty sure Transjordan was far more than half of the Mandate. Well. Maybe not far more. But it was not split in half..
Oh, yeah, it was more than half the area; I was using "half" pretty loosely. It was much less than half the population, though.
I was also surprised to hear that, but then I looked it up--in this case "transJordan" and "cisJordan" seem to refer to the Jordan RIVER (as in "that side" and this side" of the river), so the commenter above is correct that some people seem to have referred to the west bank of the river as the "cisJordan" . . . side, I guess? And there are apparently some people/sources who refer to the entire region between the Jordan and the Mediterranean as "cisJordan." I couldn't find anything that referred to the REGION of the "West Bank" as "CisJordan," but maybe there is and I just didn't see it.
You learn something new every day.
I believe the West Bank is referred to as some variant of Cisjordan in Romance languages: Cisjordanie in French, Cisjordânia in Portuguese, Cisjordania in Spanish, etc.. I can't remember seeing "Cisjordan" used in English to refer to the West Bank (i.e. the formerly Jordanian-occupied bit).
That being said, it's important to remember that "the West Bank" is a bit of Jordanian propaganda, applied to the territory they occupied during the Israeli War of Independence and then annexed. Prior to that, the hill country north of Jerusalem was Samaria, and the hill country around Jerusalem and to the south was Judea.
Interesting about the romance languages!
Well sure, around where I live you'd get QUITE the side-eye for saying the "West Bank" or even "settlements." A lot of people even still say YeSh"A (Yehuda, Shomron v'Aza--in English, Judea, Samaria, and Gaza). Do you happen to know how it was called in Arabic at that time? I imagine they weren't calling it "Yehuda vShomron" but maybe I'm wrong.
I have no idea what the Arabs called Judea or Samaria. Based on some quick scanning of Ottoman administrative maps, they definitely saw them as distinct areas, because they were occasionally part of different administrative units.
I likewise first encountered it in organic chemistry in my late teens, then in the context of the late Habsburg Empire once it was split into a dual monarchy - Transleithania ("beyond the river Leitha") was the region governed by Hungary, Cisleithania the region governed by Austria.
At our DEI professional development training at my school, we broke out into groups to talk about ourselves and had to introduce ourselves by our identity categories, and one for the terms was “cis,” which a lot of the teachers and staff didn’t know. One woman asked about it and a bunch of people nodded like they were wondering as well, and after the facilitator explained it, people acted as if they understood, and I’m pretty sure most of them couldn’t recall it today. I think the idea was just that we get to know one another and talk about ourselves, but it would have been cool to have other questions like, how do you feel about astrology, cats, and horror movies, because those are the real things that connect or divide us.
Identity categories are so fucking boring. Tell me about which movies or books that you love so much you revisit them, the best pizza you ever had, which ice cream is your favorite.
I first heard about cis people in 2012 on Jezebel. People were talking about cis women. Took me awhile to get it
I had the pleasure of learning about the term "cis" in 1997.
I was at an inservice for University of Chicago Hospital nurse administrators given by a "sexologist" Scare quotes here- because come on, a sexologist?
Anyway, we got to see lots of slides showing post-up fake penises, which were god awful. Then she put a ton of dildos in the middle of the table, just to show what's out there. We were instructed to talk to our elderly female patients about their masturbation needs and to suggest dildos with hand hold suitable for arthritic hands.
Yeah, I didn't do that.
Along with the cis terminology, we were told that we should refer to ourselves as "natal women" to distinguish ourselves from just "women", who can apparently be men.
I think most people have heard of trans fats (though no one really calls naturally occurring unsaturated fats "cis").
Latin class and the video game Caesar 3 where I was made governor of Cisalpine Gaul then the significantly more stabby Transalpine Gaul.
I agree with this statement, Randolph Carter.
The word is probably cognate to "this", right?
No--"cis" ultimately comes from the Proto-Indo-European *ke, meaning "here," making it a cognate with the word "here."
Functional, it usually means “this side” as opposed to some being across or on the other side or something. Ex. Cisalpine Gaul and Transalpine Gaul.
Yes, that's how "cis" is used, but that doesn't make it a "cognate" of "this." Cognates are words that descend from the same linguistic root word.
For some reason “Winn*b*go” being this unspeakable slur sort of reminds me how “Belgium” in the hitchhikers guide is the most unspeakable word in the universe.
There's actually a ton of "official" native names that are anglicized/francicized from exonyms, many disparaging, given by more-eastern tribes that Europeans met first. Ranging from "they speak pretty normal" (about the Illini), "they have dugout canoes" (about the Missouria), to "they're snakes" (about the Sioux and Iroquois, the latter being more uncertain etymology).
i think jesse and katie are wrong about how liberal FSU or UF are. faculty in red-states like texas, eg UT, are also woke. so i'm pretty sure same at FSU or UF.
i think a lot of katie's argument about rufo's attempt to march through the institutions applies to what the left did successfully. harvard was built to train elites and protestant ministers. ag schools were built to train farmers etc. they've just been repurposed in the last few generations. they didn't build it. rufo is playing the game, nasty as it might be.
Anyone monetizing or weaponizing an indigenous identity should be assumed to be faking it until proven otherwise.
Actually you know I can formalize this. I call these Wolf's Laws:
Wolf's First Law: Anyone attempting to monetize, politicize or weaponize an indigenous heritage is faking until proven otherwise.
Wolf's Second Law: If someone claims heritage from more than 2 native groups, they're all fake. Real Natives don't have to hedge about which band they're from.
hmm what else...
Wolf's Third Law: The more 'woke' or 'queer' a person claiming native ancestry presents, the less likely it is to be real.
So I'm guessing the wolf is your spirit animal?
named for Dr. Amie Wolf https://www.ubyssey.ca/news/dr-amie-wolf-fired/
Katie: "I'm going to steelman the conservative point of view here. It's mostly based on religion so it's incompatible with federally funded education."
???
I've found Katie and Jesse largely incapable of steelmanning views that they don't already share (primarily conservative/Republican ones).
People who live in NYC are living in a bubble. There is no one as provincial as a person who lives in a big city.
I think Katie does way better than most. The problem is that they are rarely exposed to those people on the right in the way the right is soaking (like it or not) in lefty culture and opinions which are EVERYWHERE. It’s hard to steelman what you don’t know or worse you only know the caricatured version of the right presented in lefty entertainment and media. Jesse has trouble sometimes but don’t you think Katie really tries? I do.
I'd agree with those points, and I should emphasize that I don't believe they're intentionally misrepresenting points. Moreso what you mentioned that they don't have much direct exposure to opposing views, other than extreme versions or versions presented by the left.
I know, it’s frustrating!
This is a very common error: generally, federal funds cannot go to religious education at the K-12 level - (though in certain cases religious schools may get Title I funds, along with school lunch subsidies.
But at the post-secondary level, religious schools are routinely eligible for Pell Grants and federally-backed student loans.
(I wish I could remember where I read it, but some dude posed the question of why people go apoplectic over the idea of one penny in vouchers going to K-12 religious schools, while nobody says a word about Pell Grants and student loans)
On the topic of political views in Florida public universities, Ben Sasse is to be the president of the University of Florida. It's probably more of a flagship institution. And I think is Sasse is a far more serious and thoughtful person than Rufo, who actually respects principles of academic freedom in ways that Rufo doesn't.
I like Sasse, although I'm to his left politically, and I hope his interest in academic freedom keeps him from culture warring with the humanities departments. (As someone who's spent a lot of time in humanities departments, I have much less confidence in the reactions of the humanity professors, TBH. Sorry to tattle on my people.)
It does make me chortle my most cynical chortle that the ladder Sasse used to climb upward in academia was a US SENATORSHIP.
No "probably" about it, UF is the flagship, or perhaps co-flagship with FSU.
I've admired Sasse's interactions with Braver Angels in particular, so I agree that he's serious and thoughtful. It's still a pretty political appointment, but it's better than I might have expected from De Santis.
I am not the biggest fan of Chris Rufo but I think mandating public colleges actually help their students find jobs with their very expensive higher educations is very defensible as a public policy.
Check out Purdue under Mitch Daniels! https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/too-bad-there-are-so-few-like-him/
He's been absolutely amazing for us and innovative in income sharing arrangements in lieu of student loans. And he's really good on free speech. I miss him already.
Mitch4Prez
David French? what are you doing in the BARpod comments section???
There are dozens of us!
Hey there are you in my town? We should have coffee!
Just a loyal boilermaker unfortunately on the east coast. I would love to have coffee!!
Let me know if you ever make it to Indy!
Doesn't "somebody else built that, and then you took it over for your own pet ideological project" describe the entirety of left-leaning academia (i.e., all of academia that isn't explicitly a conservative Christian college)? I wouldn't personally want to go to Chris Rufo U, but I also have a hard time getting upset about one tiny conservative taxpayer-funded college in a vast sea of lefty taxpayer-funded colleges.
And FWIW, I think the stated goals for New College sound pretty good, I just do not expect, based on their histories, that those goals will be the result of Rufo et al.'s efforts.
I also wanna point out that it was the Obama administration that started requiring universities to post information about how much money graduates of those universities were making with those degrees.
Which were then gamed quite well. More than one school offered to "sponsor" unpaid internships by essentially paying the salary the organization should have been paying the worker. Suddenly, the "employed nine months after graduation" stat started looking really good.
As someone “in the business”--colleges do not have good data on their student’s wages. There are three potential sources of wage data and they are all... problematic.
First: alumni surveys. The problems with these are obvious and well laid-out in the ancient statistics bible How to Lie With Statistics and the problem gets worse the smaller the subpopulation you are working with. Evaluating individual programs from these would be amazing but requires a better response rate. (Recent grads: please participate. You should get one of these about 6 months after graduation.)
Second: Unemployment Insurance Data. This is available but requires working with state unemployment agencies, and so may only include data for certain states. The UI programs usually collect data on the economic sector but not the position pf the worker--so the Walmart bagger and Walmart accountant are both Retail. It also shows wages not hours (45k, 50 hr weeks and 45k, 30 hour weeks are really different). It also sparse for the self-employed, like a lot of trades and agriculture.
Third: Third-party specialists. One in the field will scan resumes on job sites for your school name and present insights about what title they list and likely wages. This also undercounts fields where people don’t post resumes (see self-employment, trades).
The feds have tax data, and I would love it is they’d use it to make those decisions (and also have a Gainful Employment rule for master’s programs because they are the next frontier for scammy for-profit programs and not just by the usual suspects.)
Oh yeah! To try going after scammy for profit Unis. I’m old enough to remember when “trying to prevent colleges from saddling students with useless overpriced degrees” was a left-leaning value.
Just getting to the end of Jesse’s story, and Katie says “I don’t see much of a difference between what she did & Rachel Dolezal...” and I mentally interject: “or any trans-identified male like Dylan Mulvaney as an example.” Mulvaney makes bank off an imagined “girlhood” fabricated in his mind and rewarded for it financially, and reputation-wise by the sitting President no less.
But by all means destroy this one possibly unwell woman for making a few thousand bucks.
If I’m off base here, please tell me, but how is this different from Susan Meacham, the story on which Katie issues a correction noting that Meacham is actually struggling with bipolar disorder (the non-TikTok variety). Mentally well people don’t create false identities, but it makes for an entertaining podcast segment I suppose.
You and I definitely don’t see eye to eye on everything about gender, but we absolutely do on this piece. No one has given me a good explanation on what is different about transgender vs. transracial. A white person assuming a black or indigenous racial identity and demanding space be made for them within social, institutional and/or legal frameworks created for the advancement of black and indigenous people is not different than a man doing so with women.
This also bothers me with “queer” identities taken on by definitely straight people.
transgender and transracial are the same thing.
> Mentally well people don’t create false identities
That seems pretty wrong to me as a categorical statement, or at the very least begging the question.
Is George Santos “mentally unwell”?
I was involved in a similar discussion downthread. I maintained that it's one thing to lie about your ethnic background/identity. (Liz Warren, Ward Churchill, Sacheen Littlefeather). But it's a whole other level further down the spectrum of mental/emotional instability to drastically alter your physical appearance. (LeClaire, Dolezal, Jessica Krug).
Elected official is of greater significance than a New Age “artist.” I haven’t really followed that guy’s story much. In the end I think the GOP is justified in keeping him off committees relating to national security, but the final call is with the people in his district (it’s a given he won’t be re-elected).
However, I suppose as a categorical statement (“unwell people don’t create false identities “) it does leave out the compulsive liars.
I still don’t really think this one woman’s story is pod-worthy.
I can’t say I was surprised to hear Jesse’s literally genocidal idea of dropping “ze” as a pronoun, considering how many trans children he has literally murdered with his own hands. And now NYT is platforming this bloodthirsty monster?!
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[Disclaimer: “Literally” is not to be taken literally in this context, and “genocidal” should be understand as “something that could conceivably lead to genocide in a very indirect way in the fevered imagination of a barely-pubescent child. “Bloodthirsty,” however, should be understood as invoking the blood libel.]