Universities Should Teach That Which Is Good and True

Responding to comments on Today's College Courses

Here is the post in question:

Many people read it, some of them commented, one even wrote his own post in response, and I have things to say about all those comments and the post.

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1. Why Did I Write It?

To be totally clear, 95% of the motivation behind my post is summed up by this from Lirpa Strike:

We, the literary class, have been awash in all kinds of woke word salad for years. I think most of us mostly agree that it’s simply ugly and bad to write sentences like this:

A primary aim is to trouble the spatial, temporal, and conceptual bounds of what qualifies as the "urban," and to consider how distinct ways of imagining the city can and do support a range of political agendas and social movements.

Presumably, there is some meaning being conveyed. Also presumably, you could convey it with a sentence like “The definition of ‘city’ is fuzzy; different definitions serve different political aims.”

But a choice was made to phrase everything in terms of troubling and agendas and movements, and it’s a very identifiably woke choice to make.

So why did all the course-description-authors make a woke choice? How did this norm come about?

Virginia Weaver comments:

I sometimes have to write descriptions for my English courses (although I’m a grad student so I teach pretty basic undergrad courses and I avoid expressing my politics), and it’s mostly professors who write them at all levels except very basic required courses that have standard descriptions (like the normal-seeming, brief philosophy ones above). Grad class descriptions are supposed to appeal to students, but in the case of specialised undergrad courses, the goal is as often to appeal to advisors who are advising their undergrads on what to take. That’s probably why there can be such a massive disconnect between the tone of the description and the actual course: the description is marketing from one academic to other academics, the course is much less public-facing actual education.

This is fascinating to me—part of the mystery of all this was the heavy use of jargon in descriptions for even introductory courses. Potential students of introductory courses don’t know the jargon!—but academic advisors do, and if professors are writing for their sake, it makes a lot more sense.

In the original post, I included this course description as an example of undecipherable woke nonsense:

someone please tell me what is the vibrancy of black feminist theory

And a former teacher of mine, who has a Master’s Degree in this sort of thing ish, wrote to me:

I don’t care what you say, I’d take that Black Feminist Theory class. That shit sounds good if you know what the words mean.

If people like her—with Master’s Degrees in this sort of thing ish—are the target audience, then Professor Gail Lewis has in fact written an excellent course description.

So I think my initial aversion is mostly explainable as a sort of culture shock. I’ve simply come into contact with a super weird new epistemic community, and I should’ve expected there to be lots of words and constructions I didn’t know. (Sort of like how it felt going on LessWrong for the first time…)

All that said, I do have some pretty fundamental issues with the new culture. In particular: I don’t like it. It’s dumb and it’s bad, and it’s dumb and bad in a deeper and realer way than a glance at its off-putting aesthetics suggests.

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2. Embodiment and Scare Quotes

I complained a lot about the use of phrases like “black bodies” in lieu of “black people” or even (God forbid) “Black Folx.” I thought it was weird and dehumanizing to talk about how bodies oppress one another, or how “the disabled body [has] become a site for enacting imperial, national, and resistant politics.”

It was incredibly puzzling to me why all these critical theorists, who are usually obsessed with the evils of objectifying relationships, were so insistent on objectifying all the oppressed classes they wanted to uplift!

Luckily, the better-read-than-I David Muccigrosso had an explanation:

The “bodies” stuff grates on me too, but it basically comes from DuBois and his idea of “double consciousness” — the idea that a Black person (at his own time and stretching back into slavery) had to dramatically separate their inner life from their external actions.

So you’re getting the causality backwards. DuBois was in fact describing how dehumanizing it was to be forced to have that double consciousness, not trying to dehumanize anyone himself.

However, I think he’d probably be minorly annoyed by how that language of “bodies” has become separated from his theories and taken on its own wierd dynamics that he probably didn’t intend. He might not disagree with most of the actual substance of the theories based off of it, he’d probably just think that the language of “bodies” had really outgrown and outlived its usefulness.

It seems like the offending passage, from Du Bois’ 1903 The Souls of Black Folk, is this:

One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

And I completely agree with David’s point that it’s “outlived its usefulness.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Double Consciousness includes an excerpt from a more modern intersectional theorist’s work—Darlene Clark Hine wrote in 1993 that

had Du Bois specifically included the experiences and lives of black women in his lament, … instead of writing, “One ever feels his twoness”, he would have mused about how one ever feels her “fiveness”: Negro, American, woman, poor, black woman.

…And once we’ve reached “fiveness,” I think the plot’s been lost. The number of oppressed classes these days appears to be basically infinite, and once n gets large enough, you’re not gonna have any individual person left over. At that point, we’re talking just about some weird soulless cloud of oppression which inhabits—hey, look at that, a body.

I don’t see how else you can get from Du Bois’ initial idea—that a black American sees and must reconcile both his blackness and his Americanness—to the “disabled body as a site” without losing some agency along the way.

Even if it’s downstream of Du Bois’ compassionate depiction of an extremely oppressed black man, it’s hard for me to see today’s body-first language as anything but a domineering insistence that one’s identity is about group-membership first, and individuality second (if at all).

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EDIT: Other commenters suggested that body-talk maybe comes from Foucault’s work, not Du Bois’. I know very little about all that, but will reflexively point to what Yascha Mounk has said about Foucault’s relation to what he calls the ‘Identity Trap’:

[Foucault] would say, “The boundaries of these groups are somewhat arbitrary and socially constructed, and so to think that homosexuals should naturally understand each other, because we're all part of the same group, or that members of one group can't understand members of the other group, is buying into a naive idea of who we are, what defines us, and so on.” And then in terms of the second interpretation of intersectionality, that all these forms of oppression go together, I think he would be sympathetic to some of that. But he might say that the idea that we know how to make progress on any one of those things is dubious, and the idea that we know exactly the grand narrative of how to build the just world across all of those domains is the opposite of the kind of critical spirit that we should affect. And in that way, I think it is interesting that even though the identity synthesis originates in a rejection of grand narratives, the new ideology it inspires becomes one of the most dominant grand narratives of our time. Foucault certainly would have recognized that.

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My other fairly superficial complaint was about the use of scare quotes in course descriptions—in particular, sentences like this are really fucking annoying:

We will consider how terms like "women" and "men," "femininity" and "masculinity," "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality," and "gender" and "transgender" have structured people’s experiences and perceptions of bodies – their own and others’.

I figured that this was the result of some ugly, presumptuous attitude:

It’s like the point is to say, “My words can mean whatever I want them to. But your words—well, they also mean whatever I want them to…”

Xarvard man Jonathan Schneiderman disagreed:

The point isn’t to be sassy and snide; it is literally to indicate that, say, “homosexuality” is being dealt with initially as a semantic label rather than with the assumption that there is something called homosexuality and that we all know what it is and that the word has always been used in the same way. Is homosexuality a behavior? A lifestyle? An “orientation”? (What does that mean?) Are homosexual desires “perverse,” which implies that only a few people experience them and that they are bad, or are they “base,” which implies that everyone experiences them but that the point is not to act on them? And what constitutes a homosexual desire? Does only an active, articulated desire to have sex with someone of the same sex qualify?

… it doesn’t take that much exploration to see that categories we think of as received and stable are often not that way, and that a lot can be learned by beginning with treating them as semantic labels rather than as though one already knows exactly what they mean. One of the main things I learned from my course on the “New Negro Renaissance” was that the term “New Negro” was almost entirely a floating signifier, used between 1895 and around 1935 to refer to all sorts of black people and visions of the black future, reflecting a discourse that was highly variegated but united by a progressive impulse such that it was useful for everyone from WEB Du Bois to Marcus Garvey to Jean Toomer to be described as a “New Negro” by somebody.

I think this is a great comment, and I mostly agree with it, and I also continue to think that I’m absolutely right.

Now, I say I only mostly agree because, in certain cases, there’s absolutely no way that the course-description-author is planning to do a careful conceptual analysis of a term. Take, for instance, this bit from the critical theory of disability course description:

How do people “become” disabled and how does one inhabit a disabled body?

It’s pretty obvious that people can and do become disabled—they get paralyzed, or conked in the head, or whatever, and then they can do fewer things than they could before. The quotation marks imply that this is somehow debatable—that there’s room for disagreement over whether anyone can truly go from not-disabled to disabled like that.

And that’s just ridiculous! It’s insane—one can become disabled, and if the sentence simply asked “How do people become disabled?” it would still be asking something useful and meaningful.¹

Now, in the case of “homosexuality” and the like, Jonathan is probably right. The point is to ask questions about the way we use those terms, and analyze how they might fall short.

This is a fun sort of thing to do! I like doing it very much, and also it definitely tends to be a snide and presumptuous exercise. I think a good analogy for what these professors are (probably) doing is what Matt Walsh (definitely) did in his film What Is a Woman?: it’s just-asking-questions-ing, with a pretty predictably partisan slant. It’s saying “haha, you think "[x]" means [y], when in fact it means whatever I want it to.”

I could be wrong about this—it could be that these classes and professors are honestly engaged in value-neutral conceptual-analytical-fact-finding—but I’m skeptical. Why? Well…

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3. Course Descriptions As Theses

My most substantive complaint about these course descriptions was that they read more like “some sort of a thesis statement from the professor” than anything else. (h/t Yosef for pointing out that this observation was “possibly meaningful.”)

Harjas Sandhu’s reply post was mostly about this too. (I recommend reading it first, then coming back, though I’ll quote the most relevant bits below.)

Harjas argued, in essence, that I was being way too cynical about the content of most of these courses. In particular, my complaining about “neoliberalism” popping up everywhere was misguided.

For instance, I was upset about an Elementary Portuguese class that had its students “discuss and interpret challenging themes such as racism, neoliberalism, and sexism from minority perspectives.”

I hesitantly accepted the inclusion of racism and sexism, but was utterly baffled by the fact “neoliberalism” was listed alongside them.

Harjas suggested:

Well, if someone's looking to become a scholar in Portuguese, perhaps doing some kind of gender or race studies, it would be very important for them to have the language background to engage with texts written in Portuguese. Same with someone who is looking to analyze how neoliberalism has affected Portugal and Portuguese-speakers—I suspect it's being used here as a [stand]-in for "colonialism", which Portugal notoriously did a lot of.

This seems like… kind of a stretch. The Portuguese had left Brazil by 1822, but neoliberalism was only invented sometime in the 1930s. So the idea that it could stand in for the horrors of colonialism is pretty incoherent—if market forces were behind that era’s abuses at all, they certainly weren’t the result of a principled, careful market-forward state policy like neoliberalism.

More likely, the immediate cause was a sort of ugly racial supremacy tossed into a Hobbesian state of nature—cruelty and slavery were convenient, justified by good-ol’-fashioned prejudice, and practiced in pursuit of profit. (Not in pursuit of neoliberal free markets. Free markets don’t have forced labor!)

In fact, it’s this conflation of capitalism with ALL OF THE EVILS OF HISTORY EVER that I’m taking issue with! The promotion of market-based economics has little to do with colonialism and the slave trade—in fact, early capitalist thinkers like Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill were famously egalitarian abolitionists who were much more cautiously supportive of colonialism than typical of the time.²

It’s true that you can be ultimately charitable and say, “No, this is just the special language of academia. When they say neoliberalism, they really mean colonialism proper.” But at some point this all has to map back onto reality, and pretty often, whoever’s doing the mapping-back forgets to do the translating-back, and you end up with a ton of Ivy Leaguers who hate capitalism in all its forms, and blame it for all the historical evils of the world.

If you think this doesn’t happen, I mean… try following the opinion section of the Yale Daily News or the Columbia Spectator for a month or two during the school year. It absolutely happens.

Now, in fairness, in this case, the actual syllabus for the Portuguese class seems to be totally normal. Neither neoliberalism nor capitalism is mentioned once, there’s only a passing reference to “a colonial perspective that shapes the world,” and the wackiest it gets is framing part of the class around:

Understanding how the perspectives of minorities (women of color, indigenous people, immigrants, LGBTQIA+ community) mobilize a set of linguistic resources (lexicon, syntax, semantics, historical references) that lead to an understanding of texts and their sociocultural context.

I think this is sort of silly—in fact, I’ve written before about the silliness of shunting cultural learning into language classes—but whatever, point taken, I am humbled, this class is mostly ok.

It does beg the question: why write “neoliberalism” on the cover? Why make the class seem weirder and woker than it really is?

And the answer is, again, Virginia’s comment from the beginning: the description is written to appeal to woke academics, not to students interested in the class on their own accounts.

Another neoliberalism-inflected class whose description pissed me off was Social Theory of the City. Its “primary aim is to trouble the spatial, temporal, and conceptual bounds of what qualifies as the "urban," and to consider how distinct ways of imagining the city can and do support a range of political agendas and social movements.”

Harjas thinks that description “truly just makes sense.” He writes:

I'd probably learn a lot about how the people who first established cities built them around race divisions and on top of the lands of Indigenous people (re: colonization), about things like the drag Ballroom scene of the mid-19th-century.

…

Also, city structure is inherently political^. I live in Chicago and currently intern with the Cook County Office of the Treasurer, so I literally deal with how redlining and property taxes have been used to favor certain parts of the city and worsen Black communities and neighborhoods. The city is genuinely one of the best places for "intersectional" analysis; there are a lot of really interesting perspectives on cities that you’ll never be exposed to on your own!

But, looking through this course’s syllabus, I’m really not finding sober analysis of redlining and historical discrimination, or even fun stories about drag balls.³

Its discussion of discrimination consists in one week of “Urban Political Economy”—check out the two assigned readings here and here; spoiler alert: neither is anything close to the work of an economist—and one of “Theoretical Perspectives on Gentrification.” Readings are here, here, and here [the first two chapters of part 1]—again, these are not particularly careful, empirical, or reasonable works. The description for the third, a book published in 1996, says:

Public policy and the private market are conspiring against minorities, working people, the poor, and the homeless as never before.

This is crazy! My guess is that working people, the poor, and the homeless are all pretty happy about this graph:

source

Which, presumably, also resulted from whatever aspects of public policy and the private market were supposedly conspiring against them.

As for the indigenous history of cities—the syllabus spends one week on “Cities and Settler Colonialism” and another on “Urban Indigeneity, Urban Land Back.”

I don’t doubt that you can learn some interesting history from this class—but I think that any urban planner who takes it will end up thinking stupider and worse things about designing cities than they would’ve thought otherwise.

And that’s a pretty key point! In the initial post, I wrote that these were “quite plausibly net-negative programs and courses.” There was some confusion in the comments about what I meant by this, and a couple people suggested that I was probably referring to some sort of big utilitarian calculation, where the overall impact of these courses comes out negative.

I often do use the term “net-negative” like that, but in this case, my point was meant to be even more specific: I think these courses are teaching less than nothing. They’re full of falsehoods and incorrect ways of thinking about the world—so not only do they ultimately result in bad outcomes, they also immediately result in students believing fewer true things.

I’ll revisit that point momentarily, but first, a Harjas-response lightning round:

• Histories and Ethnographies of the Corporation

  Anthropology 6842—a class for graduate students who want to learn about “early modern corporations and colonialisms; states and corporations; labor; transformations of corporations in the neoliberal era; corporate "culture"; corporate philanthropy; and methodological considerations for conducting research on/in corporations.”

  Harjas thinks this course makes sense and is fine; I’m pretty sure I agree. I probably just got a little too jumpy about “neoliberalism” being thrown in. No syllabus is listed, so I officially retract my complaining about it.

• Hemispheric Poetics & Politics

  This is a Spanish comparative literature class that covers:

  “the so-called Banana Wars, the disintegration of the Good Neighbor era, the inter-American Cold War [what?], US-backed dictatorships and occupations, the neoliberal national security complex, and how these foreign policies "come home." Writing in real time or decades later, we consider how poets "sing," witness, document, confront, or denaturalize [🙄] these hemispheric realities, write in tension or collaboration with others across borders, and create transformative knowledges that allows us to see—and read—the American hemisphere differently.”

  Harjas responds that the inter-American Cold War is just a thing in certain academic circles, so I officially retract my “[what?].” And I agree with him that the Banana Wars are bad and worth studying…

  However! I maintain that reading Latinx poetry is a deeply weird way to study historical things. Harjas says he’s willing to give the professor the benefit of the doubt; I, personally, think all poetry that doesn’t rhyme is garbage, so am not.⁴

  The posted syllabus is woefully incomplete, consisting only of “snapshots” from a past English-language version of the class. I’ll put them in a footnote in case you’re curious.⁵

  I’d also be remiss not to point out that the course’s “Values Statement” includes this chestnut:

  Student behavior or speech that disrupts the instructional setting or is clearly disrespectful to the professor or fellow students will not be tolerated. If you feel that these principles are not being upheld (microaggressions count!), please discuss this issue with me as soon as possible during office hours or via email. (emphasis in original)

  Per Wikipedia,

  Microaggression is a term used for commonplace verbal, behavioral or environmental slights, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward members of marginalized groups.

  I should hope this professor is using some other definition, because it’d really be very crazy to have no tolerance for “commonplace unintentional slights” in the classroom!

• Special Topics in Performance Studies

  This one is probably my favorite:

  We explore how different ideas of virtuosity, risk, precarity, radicalism, community, and solidarity are shaped by space and place. We reflect on the ways in which performance has been unevenly recorded and disseminated to remap histories of the field. We rethink how local dance and theater economies are governed by world markets and neoliberal funding models and ask how individual bodies can intervene in these global systems.

  I made fun of it:

  For years, theater majors have asked, Why won’t anyone buy tickets to my local community theater production? Finally, this course answers: Neoliberalism, of course!

  But Harjas was much nicer:

  Of course someone has to study this. And of course, if you’re studying to be a performer of some kind, you’d ideally have some understanding of how market dynamics have evolved to eliminate some forms of performance art from existence (or at least existence as a profitable way to sustain oneself). This is inextricably tied to capitalism and market dynamics, which neoliberalism is probably just a shoo-in for.

  I agree with what he says…. But it implies that theater majors should probably take some sort of econ or business class, rather than one which encourages them to “rethink … and ask how individual bodies can intervene in these global systems.”

  Again no syllabus is listed, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this is likely to be less a class about surviving as a performer in a capitalist world, and more about reshaping your performance to protest that world. The course claims to “explore different ideas of virtuosity, risk, precarity, radicalism, community, and solidarity,” which mostly reinforces my assumptions.

• Bodies and Pleasures, Sex and Gender

  You’ve seen most of this description already:

  We will consider how terms like "women" and "men," "femininity" and "masculinity," "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality," and "gender" and "transgender" have structured people’s experiences and perceptions of bodies – their own and others’. We will interrogate the dynamic and often contested relationship between "gender" and sexuality," and their constitution through other axes of power and difference, including race, class, and (dis)ability.

  Harjas writes that:

  even more than anything else Ari has listed, this one just seems correct. If you've never realized that femininity and masculinity affect the way that people perceive their bodies, or that conceptions of what are traditionally feminine or masculine are highly affected by race (picture a tradwife and trad-husband in your head. Now tell me what they look like and what race they are), or that feminine or masculine high fashion are EXPENSIVE and thus wearing certain feminine or masculine clothing like fancy dresses or expensive suits are class-based (and accordingly your perception of yourself as a masculine or feminine person), I don't know what to tell you.

  Obviously Harjas is right that gender, sex, bodies, pleasures, race, class, and (dis)ability are all real things that interact with each other.

  But my sense is that this class will do a much worse job explaining how than, e.g., Cartoons Hate Her’s The Gender Wars Are Class Wars.

  Per the syllabus, the “Bodies and Pleasures” course spends eight weeks on transgender and nonbinary theory, then one week on sex work, one on “Modern Sexuality,” one on “The Politics and Poetics of Pleasure,” and the last week on “Queer Politics.”

  This comes from a department that, until 1998, was called “Women’s Studies”—it is, of course, now Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Again, I think it’s fine if you want to take this course—but CHH will undoubtedly teach you more about the interplay of class with sex relations.

  I should also mention that this course sounds ridiculously easy. It’s a semester-long college class in which you must:

  • Participate in class (20% of your grade).

  • Write 4 short critical response papers (750 words max; 40%)

  • Write a final paper (2000-2500 words; 40%)

  This is a 200-level seminar! How is it you only have to do as much total writing as there is in a long blog post? (This one, by the way, is significantly longer than all four papers and the final put together.)

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4. What Should the University Be?

In my initial post, I wrote that “the point of the university is to train people to work useful jobs, and think clearly, and do good things, right?”

Harjas thought this was wrong:

To me, the point of the university is to learn and produce knowledge.

Let’s assume he’s right: that colleges are mostly around to help us know things for the sake of their being known.

Do these sorts of über-woke courses do a good job of that, generally speaking?

No, they really don’t!

I think they fail at knowledge production in around five different ways:

1. Misleading covers are not cool. Status and language games are annoying and inefficient; professors writing course descriptions for non-students makes very little sense. It would be much better if classes with “neoliberalism” on the cover had “neoliberalism” inside, and if classes whose descriptions “sound good if you know what the words mean” used words whose meanings were more widely known.

   To a limited extent, every class description suffers from this defect: it’s hard to explain what will be learned to someone who hasn’t learned it yet! But this tendency is certainly more pronounced in the über-woke set, and that’s not a great sign.

2. Quite relatedly: being so deeply out of touch is not cool. Status games become especially costly when higher education is under attack for playing the status games too much. Adaptation is necessary for survival—if writing crazy woke course descriptions might cost your university billions of dollars, you should stop doing it! Or, at the very least, you should have some decent, principled reason for continuing to do it—something more convincing than “oh, it’s just this special fake language that no one really takes seriously, but everyone still uses it ‘cause lol why not?”

3. On the object-level, mixing up of history & now is not cool. If you’re a class listed under “[X] Studies,” then my natural assumption is that you’re trying to say something about now. The things that are happening to [X] in the present, and what other things you think should be happening instead.

   What you say can (should!) be informed by history—but it shouldn’t be conflated with it. Unfortunately, most of these classes seem like an exercise in pure conflation: I’m thinking, in particular, of things like “Colonialism and Climate Crisis” or “Another "Other" – Introducing Critical Theories and Histories of Disability.” They’re pretty on the nose about mixing historical thing with current problem.

   Of course, past discrimination undoubtedly has some effect on present ills—but it’s important not to let that claim generalize to “present ills are caused by discrimination,” because pretty soon some people will start hearing “present ills are caused by present discrimination,” and everything will have gone to shit.

   Think I’m exaggerating? I am not: this is the story of critical race theory. Jeff Maurer’s True Talk: I Don't Actually Know What “Caused By Racism” Means is an excellent piece that shouldn’t exist—it only does because, for decades, academics have been (intentionally or not) confusing the discourse around racial discrimination to the point that it’s not clear whether “racism” refers primarily to a series of lynchings and massacres in the 1920s, or the act of complimenting a black woman’s hair today.⁶

4. Similarly, unthoughtful hatred of capitalism is not cool. In a footnote, Harjas says he read Marx’s Capital and found it very eye-opening, and in a comment, he writes about reading Locke and Hobbes and Smith too. I think that all of that is fine and good! Colleges should absolutely teach all the various warring theories of the world,⁷ and let students think about whether to feel good or bad about them.

   They should, of course, also teach the history of how these various theories fared: how systems of Marxism compare to systems of Smithism capitalism, and so on.

   But! What they should really not do is shunt various critical theories in everywhere. That is not cool at all. In fact, I’m almost tempted to say something like, “if you put anything Marx-ish in the syllabus, you have to make ‘Intro to European Communism and the Soviet Union’ a pre-requisite.”

   …Which is a bit extreme, but the point I’m trying to make is this: 99.9% of Leftist rhetoric relies in one way or another on the idea that capital is evil and exploitative. If you pump students full of that Leftist rhetoric—which takes the evil of capital as a given—they’re more likely to eventually have absorbed a bunch of Marxist ideas uncritically.

   And that’s not what an institution of knowledge and learning should do! It’s fine and good to teach various criticisms capitalism, but, Christ, if you want students to come out well-adjusted and sane people, you’ve gotta teach the subject fairly! The subliminal ideological capture I’m talking about is a real problem—it’s downright bad to churn out many thousands of unthoughtful Marxists and critical theorists every year.

5. Finally, easy classes and safetyism are not cool. If the university is all about learning, surely it’s about learning-to-learn too, right?

   Well, in many cases, that involves lighting a bit of a fire under your students’ asses. Classes need to be challenging, they need to involve work—enough work to keep students seriously engaged. And they also need to involve discussion—free-enough discussion that interesting ideas will be had and shared.

   But these woke classes don’t seem so well set up for all that!

   Recall the “Bodies and Pleasures” class which involves writing a total of 5000 words—or consider Black Feminist Theory, which asks students to, over the course of an entire semester, produce a 3-4 page “manifesto” and a “digital scrapbook.”⁸

   And, of course, the Latinx poetry class’ anti-microaggression policy is about as speech-stifling as it gets. You could probably pick a paragraph at random from this post, read it aloud in that class, and have better-than-even odds of getting kicked out…

To be clear, I appreciate Harjas’ reply a lot. I think being super-charitable is generally good, and I’m really glad that Harjas has mostly met with interesting ideas and people coming out of courses like these.

Commenter Alex seems to have had a similar experience, where professors just weren’t as crazy as they advertised themselves to be.

I think these are likely true stories, and in a way, they’re very reassuring… but they also seem to suggest the weirdest possible scenario!

If most academics are just using crazy woke language as a strange sort of front for what are actual very good and normal ideas, and everyone in academia knows this is going on, and the whole might of the federal government is crashing down on the universities over this—then why hasn’t anything changed?

If the “it’s not really that bad” stories are all true, why won’t the norms shift even slightly? Why is there no effort to honestly represent the normalness underneath it all, when there’s now such a clear incentive to?

Status games are fun and all, but I can’t imagine these very-normal-and-reasonable academics would want their universities’ doors shuttered, right?

I mean, they say they do, of course. But they don’t mean it! Once you get to know them, they’re always very nice and normal and respectful of their institutions…

And I think this is the root of what’s so unsettling about all this. If it’s all a mirage, why won’t it fade? As far as I can tell, in a general sense, the things one says eventually become the things one believes—why would academics, who’ve been saying crazy things since the 90s, be immune? Occam’s razor suggests that they really just are crazy!

If a professor talks like a lunatic, writes like a lunatic, and refuses to not talk or write like a lunatic even when his livelihood is at risk—isn’t it possible he’s just a lunatic?

I want to be careful about what I’m claiming here: I don’t think the entire academy is infected with the woke mindvirus or anything. And I definitely don’t think universities should lose their federal funding—that money mostly goes to health and science research which extends our lives and makes them better.

But charitability has its limits. There have got to be at least a few bad apples who believe and teach deeply bad and wrong things. And somehow, it’s those few apples who’ve been able to hijack the language and professional norms of many more apples—pretty much all the apples who teach in any department with a name ending in “Studies.”

This is not good! We should want it to happen less—and to make it happen less, we first have to admit that it really is absolutely happening. It’s not all a surface-level aesthetic criticism—something’s gone wrong at a fundamental level, and we should care about fixing it.

another reason not to cut off funding: university architecture is top-notch, and must be protected at all costs.

1. If you have an objection to this, I’m 90% sure that my response is, “No, if that was the point the author wanted to make, they would’ve put ‘disabled’ in quotes. Putting the quotes around ‘become’ really is just incoherent nonsense.”

2. In particular, they endorsed its ability to bring technology and Enlightenment ideals to distant corners of the world, and probably vastly underestimated the human toll.

Incidentally, I suspect their views on anticolonialism would be well summed-up by Mather Byles (via Bryan Caplan):

Which is better - to be ruled by one tyrant three thousand miles away or by three thousand tyrants one mile away?

3. I want to be clear that what I’m doing here is fundamentally very unfair: the syllabi for these courses are generally not public, and there’s really no way Harjas could’ve accessed them. Point is, Harjas is cool & good, even if he ended up wrong about the course’s content (in my eyes).

4. “How do you know the poetry doesn’t rhyme?” you ask. I answer:

5. This is all they’ve posted; writing that “[t]he syllabus will necessarily be changed to focus exclusively on Spanish-language poetic texts from Latin American and the Latinx United States.”

6. I realize that it’s pretty dumb to put an exaggeration at the end of a paragraph that starts with “Think I’m exaggerating? I am not” but here we are.

7. Including Georgism, please.

8. Here’s the relevant bit of the Black Feminist Theory syllabus:

While we’re here: the “X number of spoons” bit is insane and for babies (not college students).