The Unmaking of the American University

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/03/16/the-unmaking-of-the-american-university

by rbanffy • 4 months ago

50 36 4 months ago

littlekey• 4 months ago

I liked the article, but I feel like this article, and many artices like, only hint or brush at truly one of the largest issues for conservatives: the numbers game. Strong majorities of professors, in pretty much every college in the United States, range from liberal to marxist. There just aren't enough conservative professors to go around! How many conservative professors even exist in the United States? 500? Maybe? Seems high honestly. (And of those, perhaps a dozen are actually honest to goodness God-fearing Conservatives, and not just libertarians.) So to me, it's no wonder that universities are such a target, pretty much everyone who staffs them, everyone who teaches at them, and everyone who attends them, is liberal.

add-sub-mul-div2• 4 months ago

It's not the fault of universities that education is incongruous with certain values like fear of change and progress.

paulddraper• 4 months ago

incongruous with certain values like fear of change and progress

I essentially agree.

Though “progress” connotes improvement.

Brave New World was extremely “progressive.”

pfannkuchen3• 4 months ago

It’s not the fault of the church that faith is incongruous with certain values like sin and blasphemy.

TimorousBestie3• 4 months ago

https://www.univstats.com/staffs/

There’s roughly 1.5 million post-secondary instructors in the United States, roughly half full-time.

Estimates of conservative faculty range between 7-15%. (FIRE, where the 15% figure comes from, probably overestimates due to their conservative bias.)

So approximately 50,000 to 110,000 conservative faculty. You’re off by a couple orders of magnitude.

There’s over 500 faculty working at Liberty University alone, never mind the other, larger Evangelical Christian schools.

fakedang• 4 months ago

Bro forgot that Christian universities exist in the deep south. Heck, BYU and TAMU are feeder schools for the CIA.

godsinhisheaven2• 4 months ago

Should've added to my comment, aside from the explicitly conservative colleges/unis, and seminaries. Filter those out, and how many do you have left? Still probably more than I was expecting, but still not many in the grand scheme of things.

mindslight• 4 months ago

Right and left are two modes of political thought. If you want to get to the real truths of matters, it is necessary to hop between both rather than following either one off into the weeds.

Of course institutions tasked with coming up with new lofty ideas and fleshing out large all-encompassing paradigms are going to be full of people who are biased towards leftist thought! Just as how police officers, who deal with a never ending stream of shitheads every day, are biased towards rightist thought.

The real core problem here is this framing of "liberals" as an outright enemy, rather than as fellow citizens to have a dialog with, as advanced by the right wing media machine over the past several decades.

The appropriate framing is rather how we create checks on these institutions to keep them from running off into the weeds. Both for wider society, and also for the effectiveness of the institutions themselves. And that's certainly not with just outright destruction as the overly simplistic populism has settled into.

epsteingpt• 4 months ago

The core fiction that enables the university to work is a dedication to 'truth' and progress through discussion. Safety and freedom is part of that bargain. Universities have failed on those accounts.

That breaks down when there isn't open discussion on campus. Communists were jeered but essentially allowed on campus in the 60s and 70s, even at the height of the cold war.

The left now holds a place of orthodoxy in the universities and power structures. Whether the 'right' can break it back into an enforced balance is yet to be seen.

Until then, the central tie of an otherwise diverse institution will break down and break into fragments. Which would be a shame. The opposition needs to "live" somewhere!

TimorousBestie3• 4 months ago

The core fiction that enables the university to work is a dedication to 'truth' and progress through discussion. . . . That breaks down when there isn't open discussion on campus.

Umberto Eco, “Ur-Fascism”: “Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.””

The left now holds a place of orthodoxy in the universities and power structures.

Eco: “Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. The followers must feel besieged.”

Whether the 'right' can break it back into an enforced balance is yet to be seen. . . . The opposition needs to “live” somewhere!

Eco: “However, the followers must be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”

21asdffdsa122• 4 months ago

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

nixon_why69• 4 months ago

I think its better to take aim at "safetyism" rather than the left or right. The last couple years have seen the right become increasingly good at weaponizing it although the left did have a head start.

Note that the current wave of attacks are all justified by safetyism, they're pushed by an anti-semitism task force that's encompassed any anti-war sentiment.

mastermage• 4 months ago

I think these comparisons between left and right, always break down when one side clearly does not want others to live. I am fine with opposition when we can both agree on the fundamentals that every person deserves to live (and probably a good life too not just barely scraping by). There are alot of people now again, that do not belive in this fundamental principle.

pjc50• 4 months ago

The opposition needs to "live" somewhere!

Not if they're systematically wrong about everything. There's no need to keep an intellectual disease vector in the academy any more than there would be a moral obligation to open your windows to the malaria mosquitos.

Climate change and medicine are the largest, most visible aspects of this, but it's intellectual dishonesty all the way down.

Note that this has got much worse since about the Obama era. There are no true small-c conservative intellectuals any more.

joquarky• 4 months ago

The 2008 financial crisis is when the intellectually honest conservatives threw in the towel and let the sociopaths take over.

mghackerlady2• 4 months ago

Oh no, a group consisting of people applying scientific methodology and 20 year olds is quite fond of an objectively scientific and idealist political philosophy. Color me shocked

abeppu• 4 months ago

That breaks down when there isn't open discussion on campus. Communists were jeered but essentially allowed on campus in the 60s and 70s, even at the height of the cold war.

I think that's a misleading telling of the history. During the 40s and 50s a lot of people were fired for suspected or real links to communism and some schools even demanded loyalty oaths. Courts struck down a bunch of laws that were used to fire people but many rulings didn't land until the 60s. Angela Davis was famously fired in 1969.

21asdffdsa122• 4 months ago

The only solution is to recognize that bipartisanship is unavoidable and to found conservative or really liberal universities.

xorvoid• 4 months ago

Strongly disagree. This is just increasing the "political temperature". The only true solution is people learning to talk and disagree with each other without "taking their ball and going home". Sorting ourselves into ideological camps on everything is destructive.

rbanffy5• 4 months ago

What would “conservative” universities teach? The role of chemtrails in minority violence? Creationism? Why the Earth, despite being flat, is perceived as round? Cognitive differences between races of people? Why is climate change actually a Global Cooling?

Universities should be places where truth is sought without prejudice.

awkward• 4 months ago

Safety and freedom is incompatible with direct political control. Respect for truth is a false value if what truth is is to be put to a vote or changed to match the whims of whoever is in power.

jarjoura• 4 months ago

This whole article is nonsense.

Yes, the Trump administration fucked over a decade of university research with his weird DEI campaign. That same fuckery also blew up all kinds of research grants not tied to universities. I'm sure some of us here know someone directly impacted by that decision. It was cruel and ruthless.

Otherwise, everything else that article talks about is a nothing-burger.

I can't tell you my professors' political beliefs, nor did I care. I went to school to learn about the world and topics that interested me. If there was a professor who tried to radicalize me or speak about things I didn't agree with, I would have dropped the class.

Some students are like me, and are there loving the process of learning. Other students couldn't care less, and are happy just to get the grade and get out of there. Either way, if a teacher is going to make a course an extension of their personal beliefs, I highly doubt any student will suddenly assimilate if they didn't already agree. They'll just bitch to their friends that the professor is some wacko, and roll their eyes.

No no, some conservatives are just trying to do what they love doing and that's get academics worked up and divided for empty rhetoric.

superxpro12• 4 months ago

The whole point is censorship of ideals right wing deems unfavorable.

Throughout my entire education, not once did I have to deal with a professor who was some ideological firebrand.

The right has invented a narrative to falsely justify their efforts to censor all education and shape nationwide discourse in their favor. Because they can't win any other way.

rbanffy5• 4 months ago

speak about things I didn't agree with, I would have dropped the class

This attitude bothers me a bit. It robs you of being proven wrong. You might be right, but you might also be wrong. If you consistently avoid listening to why you might be wrong, you rob yourself from the chance to learn, which is why we all go to school.

The Unmaking of the American University

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