Good points on Academic Dissent and thanks for the tip to that podcast episode. Really interesting to listen to.
I agree with you on the many current sins of academia, but I am curious: do you think that even if academia could/did reform itself that it would be protected from cuts by the current Trumpy GOP? Thanks to the DOGE-ing of USAID, NSF, NIH, and other funding sources, there's general anger in academia and a perception that Republicans want to cut academia regardless of the politics of the professors.
I'm also not sure even academic conservatives like Keith Whittington, Eugene Volokh, etc. would qualify as being acceptable to Rufo-ite activists; the debate a few years ago between Whittington and Rufo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLHrony2mns) was illuminating in how Rufo essentially just wants to do from the right what's been happening from the left.
Will be very curious to see the results of the HxA survey!
Yeah, something I was thinking about is that even serious researchers I know got their grant funding paused, and over at Health Sciences they're in hiring freeze. So the sledgehammer approach could be setting up bad incentives in the manner of "What's the penalty for being late? Death. What's the penalty for rebellion? Death. We're already late."
Thing is, rebellion in that scenario could be successful and have the payoff of surviving. Not sure what the not-getting-defunded analogue would be. I don't think doubling down on prog activism will do it in the near term.
I've seen people say that the pressure is supposed to motivate the serious people to clean their own house and police the activists. If it feels like they're screwed anyway, they might not bother. On the other hand, there's a lot of ruin in a university, and more $ and reputation to lose.
"I've seen people say that the pressure is supposed to motivate the serious people to clean their own house and police the activists" - I think we're likely to get the worst of all worlds on this: no "house-cleaning" (at least from what I've seen, there's a lot of doubling-down behind the scenes and no real change in beliefs), but instead more widespread cuts that mostly fall on the research side coupled with the prospects of a massive backlash in 2028 that make faculty members who do support reform likely to avoid sticking their necks out too far right now.
Good points on Academic Dissent and thanks for the tip to that podcast episode. Really interesting to listen to.
I agree with you on the many current sins of academia, but I am curious: do you think that even if academia could/did reform itself that it would be protected from cuts by the current Trumpy GOP? Thanks to the DOGE-ing of USAID, NSF, NIH, and other funding sources, there's general anger in academia and a perception that Republicans want to cut academia regardless of the politics of the professors.
I'm also not sure even academic conservatives like Keith Whittington, Eugene Volokh, etc. would qualify as being acceptable to Rufo-ite activists; the debate a few years ago between Whittington and Rufo (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLHrony2mns) was illuminating in how Rufo essentially just wants to do from the right what's been happening from the left.
Will be very curious to see the results of the HxA survey!
Yeah, something I was thinking about is that even serious researchers I know got their grant funding paused, and over at Health Sciences they're in hiring freeze. So the sledgehammer approach could be setting up bad incentives in the manner of "What's the penalty for being late? Death. What's the penalty for rebellion? Death. We're already late."
Thing is, rebellion in that scenario could be successful and have the payoff of surviving. Not sure what the not-getting-defunded analogue would be. I don't think doubling down on prog activism will do it in the near term.
I've seen people say that the pressure is supposed to motivate the serious people to clean their own house and police the activists. If it feels like they're screwed anyway, they might not bother. On the other hand, there's a lot of ruin in a university, and more $ and reputation to lose.
"I've seen people say that the pressure is supposed to motivate the serious people to clean their own house and police the activists" - I think we're likely to get the worst of all worlds on this: no "house-cleaning" (at least from what I've seen, there's a lot of doubling-down behind the scenes and no real change in beliefs), but instead more widespread cuts that mostly fall on the research side coupled with the prospects of a massive backlash in 2028 that make faculty members who do support reform likely to avoid sticking their necks out too far right now.
Yeah, I'm not super optimistic these days but I guess I'm staying on the train until the wheels come off.