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EDIT: Ah, the dean's bizarre shot across the bow makes more sense now, after this article saying that donations are sinking across the board from alumni alienated by the new generation's passion for activism: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/05/us/college-protests-alumni-donations.html

 

EDIT EDIT: And a Storify from a former University of Chicago student body president completes the picture. University administrators, dealing with pressure from the students on sexual assault policies and campus policing transparency among other things, are trying to change the conversation to be about student entitlement because they refuse to be held accountable for their institution's decisions: https://storify.com/chewinchawingum/no-safe-spaces-except-for-those-in-power

 

Thanks for that additional context Gorm.  The former student president's experiences certainly match my own with some administrators at two different colleges. 

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Additional thought to this, in addition to the way that some administrators are insulated from the student body, attempting to coddle older, white donators by assuaging their fears that nothing will change and protecting them from challenging ideas seems to be doing exactly what the letter says that it won't. 

 

So, students: need challenged.  Alums: lolnope, they have checkbooks, do what they want

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Maybe I'm just not old enough yet, or maybe it's the college I went to, but haven't colleges always swayed toward liberal? What happens to these old white guys that the suddenly forget that?

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Maybe I'm just not old enough yet, or maybe it's the college I went to, but haven't colleges always swayed toward liberal? What happens to these old white guys that the suddenly forget that?

Most of the large ones anyway. Conservatives have never liked it. Also business schools and economics departments are usually more conservative.

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Maybe I'm just not old enough yet, or maybe it's the college I went to, but haven't colleges always swayed toward liberal? What happens to these old white guys that the suddenly forget that?

 

Well, at the end of the day, you're still talking about a historical body that comes from the middle and upper classes of white America for the average state and private school.  Which, even if they're "liberal", they're not necessarily going to have the same opinions or passion that other groups have brought to campuses.  Also, the gender disparity since the 1960s has radically changed on college campuses, so things like sexual assault and rape awareness exist in a very different context.  And I'd suspect that when you're talking about the top few percent of donating alums, traditionally minded men who attended an all white fraternity might by disproportionately represented in that group (though that is purely a guess).

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Maybe I'm just not old enough yet, or maybe it's the college I went to, but haven't colleges always swayed toward liberal? What happens to these old white guys that the suddenly forget that?

 

Young people are statistically more liberal (or less conservative, however you'd like to frame it) than older people, and college student bodies are mostly comprised of young people.

 

If the people in power don't see eye to eye with the student body, they're probably going to put forward whatever views they believe in.

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Maybe I'm just not old enough yet, or maybe it's the college I went to, but haven't colleges always swayed toward liberal? What happens to these old white guys that the suddenly forget that?

Most of the large ones anyway. Conservatives have never liked it. Also business schools and economics departments are usually more conservative.

 

More than that, it's the home of the Chicago School of Economics, Milton Friedman, and the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Boys.

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Other notable UofC alums:

 

Thomas Sowell, libertarian thinker, notable for his out spoken op-ed pieces challenging liberal concepts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell

 

But there is also this alum of UofC that amuses me. Loic Wacquant, who writes many books challenging the neoliberal economics that UofC. Wacquant primarily focuses on these systems "punish the poor."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lo%C3%AFc_Wacquant

 

Also, my father. He is unfortunately on board with the dean's anti-safe space opinion; my father being an old "white" man. Sigh.

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Thanks for those links, a long discussion I had on facebook with a friend (who is younger than me) was based around his praise for this announcement from UofC. Having those extra links should be sobering.

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Last post on the crisis in higher ed for a while, I promise, but this article from The Baffler does a great job of tying together the University of Chicago letter, the corporatization of the American university, and the transition of the university professorship into a low-paying contract position.
 

The publicized outcries of politically demanding students and the drastic administrative actions that can result from them are not the cause, but rather the symptom, of a corporate university system more concerned about ratings, money, and reputation than the effective conduct of student education. These outcries are saying something important about the state of higher education—namely, that learning and the collegiate experience generally are screwed over by an administrative regime for which "prestige" is primarily defined by money and brand value, not knowledge. But the more that pundits and political leaders continue to push a false narrative that scapegoats "coddled" students and liberal "having an opinion," the more people will continue to focus on the wrong thing, and the worse the problem will get. "A dog," as David Foster Wallace put it, "if you point at something, will look only at your finger."

 

I especially like that it corrects the perspective of the infamous Vox article "I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me." The titular professor isn't terrified of his students, he's terrified of his students getting him fired by the university. Somehow, that's the students' fault, because PC culture run amok.

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I saw something similar to what universities are seeing now regarding the PC culture discussion when I worked in medicine, and it's what ultimately pushed me out of the field.  Essentially what would happen is that insurance companies created what are now known as networks, which are really just providers they have negotiated rates with in exchange for steady business, and in theory generally improve the flow of information between general and specialized physicians.  What came next however is where things start to go wrong, where referrals were essentially created by insurance companies as a means of coercion, and doctors began to get rated based more on patient opinion than performance.  Nowadays one of the worst things you can do to your doctor is give them a bad rating on some website, with many insurance networks seeing anything other than a perfect score as a negative mark against that physician.  This is largely something that came about when insurance companies started to exert control over these networks they created (which are now pretty common and even involve hospitals).  I know at my university, despite the student body being overwhelmingly in favor of gay rights, it wasn't until 2012 that the school officially listed sexual orientation in it's non discrimination policy despite something like a 20 year campaign to have it included, and even then the statement makes sure to mention their catholic roots.  I've heard a number of stories of universities either merging or forming similar networks, and I'd be interested to know Gorm, as someone who is closer to this than most of us, how much if at all this is affecting policy at the institutions. 

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On 9/12/2016 at 11:07 PM, itsamoose said:

I know at my university, despite the student body being overwhelmingly in favor of gay rights, it wasn't until 2012 that the school officially listed sexual orientation in it's non discrimination policy despite something like a 20 year campaign to have it included, and even then the statement makes sure to mention their catholic roots.  I've heard a number of stories of universities either merging or forming similar networks, and I'd be interested to know Gorm, as someone who is closer to this than most of us, how much if at all this is affecting policy at the institutions. 

 

Mercifully, most universities are resistant to forming formal or informal consortia because they tend to see their fellow universities, whether sharing their economic background or their geographical proximity, as "peers" only in the sense of competition. The fact that most universities strongly prefer internal hires (or, at least, external hires of people making lateral career moves from other universities) is much of what's enforcing a lot of cross-institutional conformity in policy. They're all drinking from the same well, as it were. Otherwise, attacks on tenure and related attempts to tear down the protection of free speech in an academic space come from an effort to remain competitive in what's dimly apprehended by various administrations to be the "marketplace" of higher education.

 

It's definitely happening, though, and not as an unintended consequence of institutional policy. You have big universities and small ones integrating more and more corporate features to make themselves more attractive to donors, all of whom only know what success looks like through the lens of a business that's out to make money. The adjuncts in my city unionized last spring, after a near-libelous campaign by every college and university in the region to the tune that a union would either take a chunk of your already-small adjuncting fee or prevent you from working entirely, and the retaliations are already happening: an excessive surcharge of fifty dollars has been tacked onto every grad student's attendance fees, which raises approximately half a million dollars for my institution alone to pay for a 3% raise for adjuncts with over five years' experience (yay, $3090 a class instead of $3000, half a decade of experience is sure paying off) and a union office staffed by five volunteers, and meanwhile the new five-year seniority preference is being spun by my university as an ironclad rule that freezes new adjuncts out of classes and builds resentment for the older ones that fought for the union. Divide and conquer, the old union-busting tactic, being used on a five-month-old union, yep! Meanwhile, at my undergrad institution, the vaunted tenet of "self-governance" has been gradually dismantled since before I graduated, with the final nail being the abandonment of a "safety first" alcohol policy for a more punitive one structured around mandatory reporting. Who cares if Grinnell has record lows of hospitalizations for alcohol poisoning, because there's no fear of punishment for getting your friend help; people won't donate if they think students are drinking too much! In an object lesson on the humorless strictures of university administration, a student attempted to hold an event titled "The Funeral for Self-Gov" last spring and the dean of student life blocked it until he added a question mark to the end. All this, because Grinnell thinks making itself more "businesslike" will attract East Coast money and boost it from being the peer of Oberlin and Carleton to the peer of Haverford and Amherst, which would attract more money and justify pushing tuition past its current $59,000-a-year absurdity.

 

So yeah, the fact that most professors are contract employees living precariously from review to review is not something the average university cares about, because it's already working for them. Right now, there's virtually an endless supply of adjuncts in every major metropolitan era, courtesy of the bottom falling out of academia with the Boomers, and the high turnover tends to increase student satisfaction, because bad reviews really do have the power to get people fired... all of which also only matters to universities insofar as a small percentage of those students will someday become wealthy donors themselves. The institutional pressure for universities, as far as I can tell it, is that each one of them is dying to move up in the US News and World Report rankings, increasing the available prestige that can be monetized, and so they each have their eye on their would-be peers higher up on the list, trying to beat them out at being more professional and profitable. It's a gross race to the bottom.

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I know that everyone's been making fun of David Brooks for his latest gaffe of condescending about condescending about sandwich meats (which, in my mind, isn't as sad as him complaining about no one wanting to hang out with him lately or about researching Trump's Russia scandal being too much work, but diff'rent strokes), but I actually got a lot out of a Slate article about how David Brooks almost comes around to a backdoor understanding of class privilege, but then backs away when it becomes clear that class privilege is can intersect with and be compounded by white privilege, male privilege, straight privilege, able privilege, and so on. Nwanevu scores a ton of points on his own, so it's foolish for me to paraphrase his words here, except that I'd go farther and say that Brooks and conservatives at a whole don't just seem incidentally blind to privilege that isn't class privilege, which is revealed to them by their politics, but willfully blind to all privilege that isn't class privilege expressly because of their politics. Regardless, it's a great read.

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As a Canadian who just (like two hours ago) got home from a week's vacation in the States, I'd just like to throw in how continually weirded out I am by the fact that Democratic Socialism is considered a fringe thing down South. Good on you though! Change (and normalization) has to start somewhere!

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