"does the fact that PC faded the way trends do, of its own accord, amount to a challenge to the wisdom of (for example) attempting to legislate against wokeness now?"
Maybe, but it's also possible that 90s PC was always limited in its power by a still-entrenched pro-institutional mindset that most people had, especially toward higher ed. …
"does the fact that PC faded the way trends do, of its own accord, amount to a challenge to the wisdom of (for example) attempting to legislate against wokeness now?"
Maybe, but it's also possible that 90s PC was always limited in its power by a still-entrenched pro-institutional mindset that most people had, especially toward higher ed. It seems like the difference between then and now is that now you really can bring institutions to their knees over "womyn," "pregnant people," etc. And part of this has to do with how hollowed out those institutions are by transactionalism, fear of market reprisals, etc. Policing people's speech is amusing if you're just a random scold. It's a lot different if you've suddenly got the ability to fire, de-license, or even imprison people.
To me this might be the key difference. I think the popular form of it is a fad that has already peaked and a lot of it was fed as a reaction to the particulars of Trump. However institutions have spent the last 3 decades being hollowed out by a combination of consumerism and austerity politics. There's no crusty old dean figure to stand up to it anymore in education and government and the NGO industrial complex.
The worst fears of conservatives are a fever dream but it's plenty capable of rendering all manner of organizations completely dysfunctional in a way the student activists of the PCU days weren't ever able to.
How do you figure it's "austerity politics", the universities that are leading the charge here are presently the most privileged institution financially, they basically don't pay taxes and have an effective monopoly on life changing goods (and charge accordingly).
There's a common progressive idea that this is because of "austerity politics" and "capitalism" when in fact the culprits here are some of the most privileged classes of current society.
Perhaps the political praxis, cancel culture, etc are how those organizations *obtain their privilege* in way of austerity politics and capitalism, but that's an interesting criticism of both progressive and conservative politics - money from social programs always goes to the privileged in favor of the disprivileged, and people with privilege will maneuver their way around the cuts.
They're not financed by predatory lending, the predatory lending was created because universities had managed to put themselves and their graduate in elite positions in society - first by eliteness, then by merit, and now... by wokeness.
"The system" doesn't, functionally exist as it pertains to Society:TM:, this is another set of progressive ideas that I find wrong, because it suggests somehow that the solution to "huh, all of our staunchest activists and advocates happen to benefit from immense class privilege and the solutions that get implemented seem to increase that class privilege" turns out to be - "more progressive activism", at no point does anyone ever even seek the answer to the question of "how do we keep fashionable New York socialite intellectual progressives from using leftism as a reason why they should get student loan forgiveness, it net increases equality but College is Important, nevermind that my diploma lets me work at a magazine in a vibrant gentrified neighborhood".
Materialist analysis of anywhere that isn't Blue America, economically - does not matter, because we have decided (as a national policy, in 1993) that we would all be richer and materially better off if we demolished all of the positions in the economy that didn't rely on being an apartment-dwelling, university educated manager.
I wonder what the percentage of college educated professionals work in Austin vice the entire rest of Texas?
Your critique only holds water to the extent that the economic center of gravity doesn't revolve around places where you have to get educated by University to get by, and to a certain degree - acclimate (read: learn to shut your mouth) to University values.
The problem here is that the elite status of University graduates has very little to do with capitalism.
Last I checked, Milton Friedman and his heirs at the George Mason University Economics department are themselves *against* giving private institutions free land to fund elite positional goods with tax money.
In fact, one of them even wrote a whole book on this topic.
In fact, I think this is an explicit weakness of left-material criticisms - many of the problems we see today come from living in a Democratic Society:TM: where any criticism of University has to answer to the public's mind about "rampant anti intellectualism".
I don't think that there's any room for entirely grant-and-tax-funded schools enforcing their values on the rest of the populace to be criticized under the grounds of capitalist oppression.
The problem is that the power structure being referenced is an ordinary democratic one, of the sort that Marxists would approve of as being a way to eliminate the oppression coming from the bourgeois classes.
To be fair, it's not necessarily the universities themselves that are leading the charge, but the students at those universities demanding mandatory Wokemon and that their opponents be silenced.
This exactly. Universities have over time, through a series of intentional and unintentional policy decisions, evolved in a direction of consumer facing businesses. They are also increasingly staffed by untenured educators on the front line subject to the pressures of activists in the student body on one end and administrators on the other more concerned with selling the place than the integrity of the educational mission.
The administrators also want to protect and expand their budgets and their turf.
More Woke, more committees, ombudspersons, outreach coordinators and other bullshit jobs to enforce and institutionalize Woke, enables them to do just that.
The only austerity practiced at a university is that of intellectual diversity. Believe me, there is plenty of money sloshing around, it only needs to be used for the "right" things. The adjunct crisis (which is a crisis) comes more from universities realizing how much cheap labor is out there. As Freddie spoke the other day, this is basic economics. Supply and demand.
"Capital" has a use for every single person who is getting paid. This is why they are getting paid. They bring some sort of value to someone, and in aggregate, this adds up to a functioning economy. There is nothing else to do this. The problem is that these over-credentialed feel that they are worth more, when, indeed, they simply aren't, as shown by the labor statistics.
And of course, there is going to be a rush to move to whatever is going to be the "next big thing", and by the time it is being touted by the chattering class, it will be too late. In other words, you need to stay ahead of the curve. See Freddie's post the other day, re pharmacists.
But, the core of our, I am speaking of western society here, issues is the conflict between communalism and individualism. I would say that you are correct in that we disagree on those grounds.
I don't know that there's the same state level funding focused on keeping the university affordable for its own sake. Agreed of course on the lack of intellectual diversity.
Also good to see you around, assuming you are the aaron david I think you are!
Money is definitely a bigger factor now. Unlike the 90's, most universities simply can't afford to piss of their students anymore because budgets are so tight and state money has dried up faster than the Colorado River. Admins will go the Moon if it means they can snare 10 students from another university.
Oh that's definitely part of it. If you look at both the number and salary of most academic admin jobs these days, it looks like a housing price index pre-2008. But while I would say it's a hefty chunk of the problem, I would not say it's 99% of the reason. That's a stretch.
They CANNOT "downsize their bloated admin payroll" and remain in compliance with DOE (and, for R1's, NSF, NIH, etc) reporting requirements. The reporting requirements are just staggering. If you don't work at a university, you have no idea.
I don't see how this gives you any insight into what people are doing all day. At the university where I've worked for 40 years, the staff are staggering under the workload and we desperately need more of them, not less. Just got a memo yesterday about how turnaround time on internal processing of external research proposals is going up (again).
Admin bloat is not a result of DEI initiatives though, it's been going on for decades now. The former did not originate to serve the latter at all, although I would readily admit they are doing that now. It just made it a LOT easier for all this DEI stuff to entrench itself into academia.
For Admin bloat: it's just plain ole' academic bureaucracy, government overreach, and basic greed that did that.
But- as is the case with a host of meritorious commonsense bloat-reducing reforms- what about all the newly unemployed school administrators/tax preparers/coal miners/tar sands extractors/prison guards/IT over-engineering workers/surveillance workers/click-through site profiteers/political campaign handlers/weapons industry employees/lobbyists/parking lot developers, &c. et. al, etc.???
Cut them loose, and then what? Why, many of those are High Paying (i.e. "vitally important") positions!
It's not super important that he uses Freud's somewhat discredited psychological framework to explain woke culture. What's important is that it helps clarify (at least for me) the broader dynamics at play in society as a whole and answers a question that has been bugging me for a while - how did the progenitors of the free-wheeling 60s turn into today's Puritans?
"does the fact that PC faded the way trends do, of its own accord, amount to a challenge to the wisdom of (for example) attempting to legislate against wokeness now?"
Maybe, but it's also possible that 90s PC was always limited in its power by a still-entrenched pro-institutional mindset that most people had, especially toward higher ed. It seems like the difference between then and now is that now you really can bring institutions to their knees over "womyn," "pregnant people," etc. And part of this has to do with how hollowed out those institutions are by transactionalism, fear of market reprisals, etc. Policing people's speech is amusing if you're just a random scold. It's a lot different if you've suddenly got the ability to fire, de-license, or even imprison people.
To me this might be the key difference. I think the popular form of it is a fad that has already peaked and a lot of it was fed as a reaction to the particulars of Trump. However institutions have spent the last 3 decades being hollowed out by a combination of consumerism and austerity politics. There's no crusty old dean figure to stand up to it anymore in education and government and the NGO industrial complex.
The worst fears of conservatives are a fever dream but it's plenty capable of rendering all manner of organizations completely dysfunctional in a way the student activists of the PCU days weren't ever able to.
How do you figure it's "austerity politics", the universities that are leading the charge here are presently the most privileged institution financially, they basically don't pay taxes and have an effective monopoly on life changing goods (and charge accordingly).
There's a common progressive idea that this is because of "austerity politics" and "capitalism" when in fact the culprits here are some of the most privileged classes of current society.
Perhaps the political praxis, cancel culture, etc are how those organizations *obtain their privilege* in way of austerity politics and capitalism, but that's an interesting criticism of both progressive and conservative politics - money from social programs always goes to the privileged in favor of the disprivileged, and people with privilege will maneuver their way around the cuts.
They're not financed by predatory lending, the predatory lending was created because universities had managed to put themselves and their graduate in elite positions in society - first by eliteness, then by merit, and now... by wokeness.
"The system" doesn't, functionally exist as it pertains to Society:TM:, this is another set of progressive ideas that I find wrong, because it suggests somehow that the solution to "huh, all of our staunchest activists and advocates happen to benefit from immense class privilege and the solutions that get implemented seem to increase that class privilege" turns out to be - "more progressive activism", at no point does anyone ever even seek the answer to the question of "how do we keep fashionable New York socialite intellectual progressives from using leftism as a reason why they should get student loan forgiveness, it net increases equality but College is Important, nevermind that my diploma lets me work at a magazine in a vibrant gentrified neighborhood".
Materialist analysis of anywhere that isn't Blue America, economically - does not matter, because we have decided (as a national policy, in 1993) that we would all be richer and materially better off if we demolished all of the positions in the economy that didn't rely on being an apartment-dwelling, university educated manager.
I wonder what the percentage of college educated professionals work in Austin vice the entire rest of Texas?
Your critique only holds water to the extent that the economic center of gravity doesn't revolve around places where you have to get educated by University to get by, and to a certain degree - acclimate (read: learn to shut your mouth) to University values.
The problem here is that the elite status of University graduates has very little to do with capitalism.
Last I checked, Milton Friedman and his heirs at the George Mason University Economics department are themselves *against* giving private institutions free land to fund elite positional goods with tax money.
In fact, one of them even wrote a whole book on this topic.
In fact, I think this is an explicit weakness of left-material criticisms - many of the problems we see today come from living in a Democratic Society:TM: where any criticism of University has to answer to the public's mind about "rampant anti intellectualism".
I don't think that there's any room for entirely grant-and-tax-funded schools enforcing their values on the rest of the populace to be criticized under the grounds of capitalist oppression.
The problem is that the power structure being referenced is an ordinary democratic one, of the sort that Marxists would approve of as being a way to eliminate the oppression coming from the bourgeois classes.
To be fair, it's not necessarily the universities themselves that are leading the charge, but the students at those universities demanding mandatory Wokemon and that their opponents be silenced.
This exactly. Universities have over time, through a series of intentional and unintentional policy decisions, evolved in a direction of consumer facing businesses. They are also increasingly staffed by untenured educators on the front line subject to the pressures of activists in the student body on one end and administrators on the other more concerned with selling the place than the integrity of the educational mission.
The administrators also want to protect and expand their budgets and their turf.
More Woke, more committees, ombudspersons, outreach coordinators and other bullshit jobs to enforce and institutionalize Woke, enables them to do just that.
As also at nonprofits
The only austerity practiced at a university is that of intellectual diversity. Believe me, there is plenty of money sloshing around, it only needs to be used for the "right" things. The adjunct crisis (which is a crisis) comes more from universities realizing how much cheap labor is out there. As Freddie spoke the other day, this is basic economics. Supply and demand.
-aaron david
"Capital" has a use for every single person who is getting paid. This is why they are getting paid. They bring some sort of value to someone, and in aggregate, this adds up to a functioning economy. There is nothing else to do this. The problem is that these over-credentialed feel that they are worth more, when, indeed, they simply aren't, as shown by the labor statistics.
And of course, there is going to be a rush to move to whatever is going to be the "next big thing", and by the time it is being touted by the chattering class, it will be too late. In other words, you need to stay ahead of the curve. See Freddie's post the other day, re pharmacists.
Really, this is all economics 101.
No need to call anyone names.
But, the core of our, I am speaking of western society here, issues is the conflict between communalism and individualism. I would say that you are correct in that we disagree on those grounds.
I don't know that there's the same state level funding focused on keeping the university affordable for its own sake. Agreed of course on the lack of intellectual diversity.
Also good to see you around, assuming you are the aaron david I think you are!
Money is definitely a bigger factor now. Unlike the 90's, most universities simply can't afford to piss of their students anymore because budgets are so tight and state money has dried up faster than the Colorado River. Admins will go the Moon if it means they can snare 10 students from another university.
Oh that's definitely part of it. If you look at both the number and salary of most academic admin jobs these days, it looks like a housing price index pre-2008. But while I would say it's a hefty chunk of the problem, I would not say it's 99% of the reason. That's a stretch.
They CANNOT "downsize their bloated admin payroll" and remain in compliance with DOE (and, for R1's, NSF, NIH, etc) reporting requirements. The reporting requirements are just staggering. If you don't work at a university, you have no idea.
Do you work at a university?
I don't see how this gives you any insight into what people are doing all day. At the university where I've worked for 40 years, the staff are staggering under the workload and we desperately need more of them, not less. Just got a memo yesterday about how turnaround time on internal processing of external research proposals is going up (again).
The institutions that have the worst cases of modern PC are the richest. I'm not sure how it follows that austerity is a factor.
The admin explosion is due to federal Dept of Education mandates to comply with This and with That.
Admin bloat is not a result of DEI initiatives though, it's been going on for decades now. The former did not originate to serve the latter at all, although I would readily admit they are doing that now. It just made it a LOT easier for all this DEI stuff to entrench itself into academia.
For Admin bloat: it's just plain ole' academic bureaucracy, government overreach, and basic greed that did that.
It won't solve it, but it will certainly help a helluva lot. It's just not that simple.
But- as is the case with a host of meritorious commonsense bloat-reducing reforms- what about all the newly unemployed school administrators/tax preparers/coal miners/tar sands extractors/prison guards/IT over-engineering workers/surveillance workers/click-through site profiteers/political campaign handlers/weapons industry employees/lobbyists/parking lot developers, &c. et. al, etc.???
Cut them loose, and then what? Why, many of those are High Paying (i.e. "vitally important") positions!
reported for insensitive Colorado River metaphor.
Reported for not believing women
There is no winning.
Dam you
Reported for too soon
That’s What Sh
nm
Your comment (particularly the last 2 sentences) brought to mind this slightly tangential piece: https://criticaltherapyantidote.org/2022/08/08/freud-explains-cancel-culture/
It's not super important that he uses Freud's somewhat discredited psychological framework to explain woke culture. What's important is that it helps clarify (at least for me) the broader dynamics at play in society as a whole and answers a question that has been bugging me for a while - how did the progenitors of the free-wheeling 60s turn into today's Puritans?