British academia may need allies, but I'm not convinced it deserves them. It's become a playground for the bully-activists who feel entitled to public money all while denigrating said public.
I'd like to see academia thrive for the sake of the public good, but it's its own worst enemy these days, not a conservative with a mocking tone.
There's an odd parallel with 70s trade unions, i.e. dominated by the left and embarrassing for Labour. Of course, both had/have big problems with public opinion...
No it surely does not deserve them. Thomas himself is a model of the kind of deserving academic but....
1) no thinking person can seriously refute that the humanities and social sciences are (and have long been) dominated by leftist groupthink
2) the massive 'all must have prizes' 30-year expansion of academia has been to the detriment of academic rigor whilst - at the same time - doing no favours to the largely ill-suited young people who have been sucked in to its delusory intellectual fairytale only to find that their qualifications are of less and less real value.
3) the sort of DEI-bureaucracy nightmare that I reported on in this essay https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind (reviewing Heather Mac Donald's The Diversty Delusion) has received far less attention in the UK....but it has been happening here nevertheless.
Sticks and stones. If you don't tolerate noisy dissent, weak and stupid ideas survive and proliferate. Our problem right now is not too much dissent, but not enough. Good ideas will cope. Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.
I want to believe in the marketplace of ideas. But I just don't think it works.
Ultimately, there are certain properties of ideas that makes them spread throughout a culture more or less successfully than others - Richard Dawkins called these ideas "memes", before the word came to mean funny cat pictures and whatnot. And what makes an idea a successful meme has little to do with whether it is true or not. Society generally doesn't punish individuals for holding false beliefs, nor reward us for holding true beliefs, about contentious political issues; there is no mechanism for the best ideas to win.
With rice pudding, income tax, particle accelerators and Hamlet. There is a perfect mechanism for ideas to win: time. This is a mechanism which stress tests ideas to destruction. Good ones survive the — well, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to quote Hamlet.
Bad ideas spread like wildfire when it is fashionable and quickly die upon infrastructural testing. Credit derivatives. Non-fungible tokens. Cultural appropriation.
It has nothing to do with truth and falsity. It has to do with effectiveness. (“Transcendent truth” is great example of a bad idea that has failed badly over the last century.)
Particle accelerators have been developed by scientists using the scientific method, this is an entirely different (and much better) epistemological framework than how society comes to collective decisions, but it's also not something that's ever going to be adopted en masse outside of its original domain (partly with good reason; it's a great way of discovering truths about nature but useless for resolving moral dilemmas, it is not a universally applicable framework).
Rice pudding and Hamlet are cases of aesthetics. They aren't ideas so much as products; it doesn't really matter whether we agree on whether they are good or not because we can each decide for ourselves whether or not to consume them. Of course a free market works well to get individuals what they want, when they can make that decision individually, there is feedback on whether it was a good decision when the product is consumed, and when there is no particular prestige associated with liking or disliking such things (well, okay, there is for Hamlet, but this prestige has probably mostly caused more people to sit through Hamlet than really wanted to, your mileage may vary on whether that's a good thing or not).
Only income tax IMO really qualifies as a winner in the marketplace of ideas... or it would do, if that's how it had come about originally. But it came from the pre-democratic era, there was no marketplace of ideas, just a Prime Minister short of the money he needed to fight in the Napoleonic wars.
I don’t share your view of what counts as a meaningful idea.
I don’t agree, either, that science progresses by a better, or even different “epistemological framework”. Science is a social, contingent, community project that evolves, branches, fails and restarts essentially in the same way as does rice pudding, income tax and the Shakespeare canon (which is hardly the performative intellectual virtue signalling you make it out to be, by the way).
In any case I am not sure what your point is: as you saying that it would be better for ideas to float around essentially at random? Would that not therefore be entropic? Would that permit two complete strangers in different parts of the world to debate the merits of Shakespeare across a self-organising packet switching network?
And is a contrarian journalist throwing light (or shade) upon publicly funded academic projects which would otherwise escape scrutiny a good thing? Isn‘t that the market place of ideas in action?
Nietzsche again: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker:
Those who dominate the academy oppose liberal principles (e.g., freedom of expression, equality-before-the-law).
What is happening, including in US red states, is not attack on the university but is defense of the liberal university.
The great political conflict in democracy is no longer about how much social to have in our democracy (more=left; less=right). It’s about how much liberal principle to have in our democracy, about the basic rights that protect the individual from arbitrary action by the powerful, by the state.
If you think US Republicans are bothered at all about intellectual curiosity, then I have a bridge to sell you...
(This is not to say that there aren't plenty of ordinary voters who might care about free enquiry & academic freedom; but the machine uses these stories to whip up its anti-intellectual base.)
Intellectually curious people don't become politicians. The people who go into politics have already figured out what they believe enough to feel it is worthwhile persuading others that that are right - you don't do that without a certain overconfidence in your own opinions.
I expect it is also true that an increasing number of people become politicians for the money. Politics in the US has become as effective as business at personal wealth-building for those who are successful at it.
Politics has always seduced people with the prospect of status and power.
In our current era of massive government, politics also seduces with the prospect of riches.
Funny, I find them the most intellectual curious party. That's why they are the most likely to disagree with academics: because they got curious and double checked things.
Ah I see. I was looking at the view count for your "series of posts" link. The first tweet got 33k views but the others in her list barely made 1000. But then I looked again at the grain trade tweet and it's to >2 million views! That's seriously bizarre. As you say, that one seems less bad than others in the list. I wonder why that one specifically went viral.
Echoing Georgia's sentiment. A problem I intuit is that (insofar as they can be seen as a bloc) ideologically leftishist academics are so deep into their self image as an enlightened group that the situation is not recoverable. Ask why university funding is not a public opinion priority in the current climate and I feel confident to make this prediction of the answer; that conservative media is bad for questioning research quality and people are stupid.
My limited contact with the field suggests that the issues are subsumed by identity. Us (the Elect) vs Them (the stupid public).
HI Thomas, as always, an interesting read. I don't read Gill's outputs and don't want to waste my time scrolling through her posts so can you elaborate on this please:: "Yet it is difficult to defend the work of some of Gill’s targets", which targets do you find hard to defend? Did she target the use of critical theory and autoethnography, which you identify as problematic? Incidentally, that masturbation paper received a lot of fully justified criticism from the Left too and I can't remember seeing anyone defending it. although I can imagine someone did. Its publication may say more about the broken journal system than the lack of critical reflexivity in academia, which, nevertheless does exist as it does everywhere.
There were unfortunately some academic defenders who appeared on Twitter once a conservative politician criticized it. Basically the reflexive need to hate on the right overrode the basic survival instinct that should have told them not to defend it.
My understanding is that the masturbation paper was only criticised within academia after the external criticism began. It seems to have been regarded as fine until people from outside the rariefied camp noticed it.
The reality is maybe 3 reviewers and the editor approved of the paper should that never have been published. Although obviously problematic, it’s not representative of the whole of academia as you suggest above.
What I suggested above is what I suggested above. Are you trolling? Asking Thomas to elaborate on something that you could easily look at yourself, but don't want to. Telling me what 'the reality' is, without providing any receipts. Inflating my observation into a straw man that you can knock down. I find this kind of internet commenting tedious.
It's not tolling to ask Thomas to cite examples of things he and Gill agree are problematic. It's generally not the reader's responsibility to retrieve citations. No one was aware of the masturbation paper until it was publicly outed, then everyone I knew criticised it. You say that it was regarded as fine "within academia" which suggests the whole of academia - I am telling you only a v small community regarded it as fine and this community while problematic is not representative of academia. You too could "easily look this up". PS I don't understand your hostility here and if this is the level of engagement I expect I won't be commenting on this blog in future.
Just read your substack Mike - you clearly have a distorted worldview possibly from spending too much time online. There is no need to reply to me as I won't read it and won't comment on here in future.
Def agree that we need to reform eccentric parts of the sector. But it's going to be hard, as others have said on this thread. Going forward, fees may be a big issue - the sector is under financial pressure and many want to raise them. But of course, that might make the sector more unpopular!
British academia may need allies, but I'm not convinced it deserves them. It's become a playground for the bully-activists who feel entitled to public money all while denigrating said public.
I'd like to see academia thrive for the sake of the public good, but it's its own worst enemy these days, not a conservative with a mocking tone.
There's an odd parallel with 70s trade unions, i.e. dominated by the left and embarrassing for Labour. Of course, both had/have big problems with public opinion...
No it surely does not deserve them. Thomas himself is a model of the kind of deserving academic but....
1) no thinking person can seriously refute that the humanities and social sciences are (and have long been) dominated by leftist groupthink
2) the massive 'all must have prizes' 30-year expansion of academia has been to the detriment of academic rigor whilst - at the same time - doing no favours to the largely ill-suited young people who have been sucked in to its delusory intellectual fairytale only to find that their qualifications are of less and less real value.
3) the sort of DEI-bureaucracy nightmare that I reported on in this essay https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/how-diversity-narrows-the-mind (reviewing Heather Mac Donald's The Diversty Delusion) has received far less attention in the UK....but it has been happening here nevertheless.
Thanks Graham! I'm going to read your essay...
Thanks Thomas.....I'll be interested to hear what you make of it.
Sticks and stones. If you don't tolerate noisy dissent, weak and stupid ideas survive and proliferate. Our problem right now is not too much dissent, but not enough. Good ideas will cope. Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.
I want to believe in the marketplace of ideas. But I just don't think it works.
Ultimately, there are certain properties of ideas that makes them spread throughout a culture more or less successfully than others - Richard Dawkins called these ideas "memes", before the word came to mean funny cat pictures and whatnot. And what makes an idea a successful meme has little to do with whether it is true or not. Society generally doesn't punish individuals for holding false beliefs, nor reward us for holding true beliefs, about contentious political issues; there is no mechanism for the best ideas to win.
And yet, here we are.
With rice pudding, income tax, particle accelerators and Hamlet. There is a perfect mechanism for ideas to win: time. This is a mechanism which stress tests ideas to destruction. Good ones survive the — well, the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” to quote Hamlet.
Bad ideas spread like wildfire when it is fashionable and quickly die upon infrastructural testing. Credit derivatives. Non-fungible tokens. Cultural appropriation.
It has nothing to do with truth and falsity. It has to do with effectiveness. (“Transcendent truth” is great example of a bad idea that has failed badly over the last century.)
Can I recommend Stuart Brand’s concept of pace layering as an articulation of how good ideas prevail over time. https://jollycontrarian.com/index.php?title=Pace_layering
This is not a great list of examples.
Particle accelerators have been developed by scientists using the scientific method, this is an entirely different (and much better) epistemological framework than how society comes to collective decisions, but it's also not something that's ever going to be adopted en masse outside of its original domain (partly with good reason; it's a great way of discovering truths about nature but useless for resolving moral dilemmas, it is not a universally applicable framework).
Rice pudding and Hamlet are cases of aesthetics. They aren't ideas so much as products; it doesn't really matter whether we agree on whether they are good or not because we can each decide for ourselves whether or not to consume them. Of course a free market works well to get individuals what they want, when they can make that decision individually, there is feedback on whether it was a good decision when the product is consumed, and when there is no particular prestige associated with liking or disliking such things (well, okay, there is for Hamlet, but this prestige has probably mostly caused more people to sit through Hamlet than really wanted to, your mileage may vary on whether that's a good thing or not).
Only income tax IMO really qualifies as a winner in the marketplace of ideas... or it would do, if that's how it had come about originally. But it came from the pre-democratic era, there was no marketplace of ideas, just a Prime Minister short of the money he needed to fight in the Napoleonic wars.
It is not an exhaustive list.
I don’t share your view of what counts as a meaningful idea.
I don’t agree, either, that science progresses by a better, or even different “epistemological framework”. Science is a social, contingent, community project that evolves, branches, fails and restarts essentially in the same way as does rice pudding, income tax and the Shakespeare canon (which is hardly the performative intellectual virtue signalling you make it out to be, by the way).
In any case I am not sure what your point is: as you saying that it would be better for ideas to float around essentially at random? Would that not therefore be entropic? Would that permit two complete strangers in different parts of the world to debate the merits of Shakespeare across a self-organising packet switching network?
And is a contrarian journalist throwing light (or shade) upon publicly funded academic projects which would otherwise escape scrutiny a good thing? Isn‘t that the market place of ideas in action?
Nietzsche again: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker:
That which doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger.
“Left-liberals” no longer dominate academia.
Those who dominate the academy oppose liberal principles (e.g., freedom of expression, equality-before-the-law).
What is happening, including in US red states, is not attack on the university but is defense of the liberal university.
The great political conflict in democracy is no longer about how much social to have in our democracy (more=left; less=right). It’s about how much liberal principle to have in our democracy, about the basic rights that protect the individual from arbitrary action by the powerful, by the state.
If you think US Republicans are bothered at all about intellectual curiosity, then I have a bridge to sell you...
(This is not to say that there aren't plenty of ordinary voters who might care about free enquiry & academic freedom; but the machine uses these stories to whip up its anti-intellectual base.)
The words “intellectual” and “curiosity” strike me as unlikely to be associated with modern US politicians of any party.
Intellectually curious people don't become politicians. The people who go into politics have already figured out what they believe enough to feel it is worthwhile persuading others that that are right - you don't do that without a certain overconfidence in your own opinions.
I expect that is true for many.
I expect it is also true that an increasing number of people become politicians for the money. Politics in the US has become as effective as business at personal wealth-building for those who are successful at it.
Politics has always seduced people with the prospect of status and power.
In our current era of massive government, politics also seduces with the prospect of riches.
Funny, I find them the most intellectual curious party. That's why they are the most likely to disagree with academics: because they got curious and double checked things.
I'm curious why you say these posts got wide attention. It looks like only about 1000 people saw them?
The linked tweet got over 33k views. And Gill made many others...
Ah I see. I was looking at the view count for your "series of posts" link. The first tweet got 33k views but the others in her list barely made 1000. But then I looked again at the grain trade tweet and it's to >2 million views! That's seriously bizarre. As you say, that one seems less bad than others in the list. I wonder why that one specifically went viral.
Echoing Georgia's sentiment. A problem I intuit is that (insofar as they can be seen as a bloc) ideologically leftishist academics are so deep into their self image as an enlightened group that the situation is not recoverable. Ask why university funding is not a public opinion priority in the current climate and I feel confident to make this prediction of the answer; that conservative media is bad for questioning research quality and people are stupid.
My limited contact with the field suggests that the issues are subsumed by identity. Us (the Elect) vs Them (the stupid public).
HI Thomas, as always, an interesting read. I don't read Gill's outputs and don't want to waste my time scrolling through her posts so can you elaborate on this please:: "Yet it is difficult to defend the work of some of Gill’s targets", which targets do you find hard to defend? Did she target the use of critical theory and autoethnography, which you identify as problematic? Incidentally, that masturbation paper received a lot of fully justified criticism from the Left too and I can't remember seeing anyone defending it. although I can imagine someone did. Its publication may say more about the broken journal system than the lack of critical reflexivity in academia, which, nevertheless does exist as it does everywhere.
There were unfortunately some academic defenders who appeared on Twitter once a conservative politician criticized it. Basically the reflexive need to hate on the right overrode the basic survival instinct that should have told them not to defend it.
My understanding is that the masturbation paper was only criticised within academia after the external criticism began. It seems to have been regarded as fine until people from outside the rariefied camp noticed it.
The reality is maybe 3 reviewers and the editor approved of the paper should that never have been published. Although obviously problematic, it’s not representative of the whole of academia as you suggest above.
So how comes none of the journal's regular readers raised the alarm? Perhaps there aren't any, hmm?
What I suggested above is what I suggested above. Are you trolling? Asking Thomas to elaborate on something that you could easily look at yourself, but don't want to. Telling me what 'the reality' is, without providing any receipts. Inflating my observation into a straw man that you can knock down. I find this kind of internet commenting tedious.
It's not tolling to ask Thomas to cite examples of things he and Gill agree are problematic. It's generally not the reader's responsibility to retrieve citations. No one was aware of the masturbation paper until it was publicly outed, then everyone I knew criticised it. You say that it was regarded as fine "within academia" which suggests the whole of academia - I am telling you only a v small community regarded it as fine and this community while problematic is not representative of academia. You too could "easily look this up". PS I don't understand your hostility here and if this is the level of engagement I expect I won't be commenting on this blog in future.
Just read your substack Mike - you clearly have a distorted worldview possibly from spending too much time online. There is no need to reply to me as I won't read it and won't comment on here in future.
Thanks for the appraisal of my newsletter, Huw. Much appreciated and totally relevant to Thomas's typically excellent piece.
Def agree that we need to reform eccentric parts of the sector. But it's going to be hard, as others have said on this thread. Going forward, fees may be a big issue - the sector is under financial pressure and many want to raise them. But of course, that might make the sector more unpopular!