Feb 4, 2023·edited Feb 4, 2023Liked by John Hawthorne
It should be obvious that my use of the second person as the comment continues isn't directed at John. I write to conservatives:
The indoctrination claim is given teeth by, for instance, English professors deciding to teach "cultural studies" with no background in anthropology, sociology, or psychology. It's shattered by simply opening the directory to any university and counting even the possible liberals against the inevitable conservatives. Why, and to what detrimental effect, would a professor of mechanical engineering act as a liberal indoctrinator? If we started at motive and opportunity, we'd end at "nothing to see here."
One of your heroes let Newt Gingrich teach history, and another one let Mitch Daniels do the same. I'm sure the Everett Massacre is a staple in their "classes." The Wharton School of Business is going to Hell for the sin of the Gentleman's C. Does that bother you?
We can't teach African American history, but any Fox junkie can register for the several military history courses offered at the local university. Those will never DeSantised by a conservative, not as long as he draws from the hip.
One nearly hilarious irony, except for what it's done to English departments, is that even the most "Marxist" postructuralist professors aren't really liberals, at least not in practice. They vote for Democrats, but how's that been working out? Whatever they might say, the French continentalists practicing philosophy without a license (as one of my former colleagues put it) are happily corporate, trying to maximize their salaries by competing with one another for territory, expecting job security according to a tenure system of hazing and clubbish approval that they lord over their supposed inferiors as if it were based on merit, and publishing as often to advance their careers as to contribute anything to cultural understanding. I've known English professors as convinced they were scientists as the anti-masker clowns wearing MAGA hats. They're stuck in Jameson's late capitalism, but they sure talk a good proletariat game. You have nothing to fear.
The business school at a university is looking for liberals. It can't seem to find them by "luring" their MBA professors "from the private sector." Even their adjuncts make two to three times what those awful indoctrinating history adjuncts make, because in right-wing university America, the average adjunct salary is a magic number no one actually earns. It exists in an empty bracket between the adjunct number and the "adjunct" number. Again, just test the odds on this: Liberal contingent labor makes less.
Yes, if you're a semi-qualified black lesbian, then your percentage chance at six-figure employment in the woke university is probably precisely the opposite of what it is in the "private sector." Is that what you conservatives are angry about? That you don't get to corner the market on racism and gender discrimination? Remember, every time an unjustified Affirmative Action hire is made, five Proud Boys get their wings.
Throw a dart into the athletic department, the staff of which permeates every aspect of university life, and hit a liberal. I dare you.
Please find me the liberals in the Construction Management program. You might have a crack at finding a few in the College of Engineering, of which the Construction Management program is kind of a jowly, barking mascot, but again, so what? Is a Hadron collider a gateway drug to feminism? Are you worried about closet liberals in civil engineering who get drunk at parties turning sophomores against oil companies? If so, then you should try stand-up comedy.
Are you more pissed because the STEM professors are speaking unintelligible English as their third language to lecture halls of 200 students? (Pro Tip: That's a horrible indoctrination method, so you should do your best to keep a recently arrived "Asian" woman in front of that calculus class. NOT ONE of those 200 kids will become a liberal).
Conservatives don't seem to care that we're educating students from Saudi Arabia and China who will pay full freight to take their degrees home so they can support into their own nations' economies. Often enough against ours. They don't need financial aid, though, right? So that's straight academic capitalist profiteering, baby! I guess liberal indoctrination to globalism is fine when the sheik makes sure the provost retires a multi-millionaire. No one in that arrangement--down to the (male) student from Riyadh who got an American degree in supply chain management--is a liberal.
How many liberals does it take to screw in a lightbulb in the Computer Science department, and how is it even remotely possible for them to indoctrinate anyone to wokeness as they do so? Is C+ really a code for Marxist rebellion? Or, perhaps, the people making claims about "the universities" being liberal are doing the coding. You know, in Q+.
A claxon should go off every time a liberal is spotted among the C-suite administrators making more than $200k a year. You will never find less-liberal liberals than the ones who work 70 hours a week trying to justify their existences in the midst of administrative bloat while they create adjunct pools or contingent labor budgets in order to fulfill the very purpose of a university. Go ahead and listen to them talk about how horrible the GOP is. They run the 21st century plantation system. Were it 1862 they'd be asking their house N what he thinks of all this mess.
I have worked at five universities, ranging in student population from 1,200 to 36,000, and I have never heard of a Board of Trustees member who would be recognized as a socialist progressive with an anti-capitalist indoctrination program in mind for the school. I have seen Lockheed Martin write the curriculum for an aero class. I've seen Eli Lilly threaten a working group that didn't produce the stats Lilly wanted in exchange for grant money. Rolls Royce wanted to set up shop in my latest university employer's garage. I'm sure it was to rally students against the 19th century labor laws of Indiana.
I'm a progressive who has been directly, viciously screwed over by so-called liberals. I have only peripherally been screwed over by conservatives, and at least they write into the contract how they're about to do it. To the very best of my ability, I've never indoctrinated a single person to anything but a sound and valid argument. I can sometimes gauge when that's working by how often I get shouted down by a bald woman with a nose piercing calling me a mansplainer within measurable proximity of some hill jack dip-spitting sophomore studying forestry calling me a snowflake on Facebook. My worst enemies at Purdue were in the English department, and some of my greatest supporters were in engineering and veterinary medicine. Is that evidence of my being a liberal indoctrinator? God, I hope so.
These blunt instruments in the anti-woke school of populist frenzy ought to be foam-fingered fans of the current university system. Big Ten universities like Purdue are selling their souls and their Colleges of Liberal Arts to become mere trade schools. They're widget factories, a right-winger's wet dream. But what so often happens when some conservative gets what he wants? He whines for more. He claims the liberal who sold out to centrism and gave away the store--from us to him--is a communist.
You chose a great subject and wrote a great piece on it, John. Thanks for indulging me here.
It should be obvious that my use of the second person as the comment continues isn't directed at John. I write to conservatives:
The indoctrination claim is given teeth by, for instance, English professors deciding to teach "cultural studies" with no background in anthropology, sociology, or psychology. It's shattered by simply opening the directory to any university and counting even the possible liberals against the inevitable conservatives. Why, and to what detrimental effect, would a professor of mechanical engineering act as a liberal indoctrinator? If we started at motive and opportunity, we'd end at "nothing to see here."
One of your heroes let Newt Gingrich teach history, and another one let Mitch Daniels do the same. I'm sure the Everett Massacre is a staple in their "classes." The Wharton School of Business is going to Hell for the sin of the Gentleman's C. Does that bother you?
We can't teach African American history, but any Fox junkie can register for the several military history courses offered at the local university. Those will never DeSantised by a conservative, not as long as he draws from the hip.
One nearly hilarious irony, except for what it's done to English departments, is that even the most "Marxist" postructuralist professors aren't really liberals, at least not in practice. They vote for Democrats, but how's that been working out? Whatever they might say, the French continentalists practicing philosophy without a license (as one of my former colleagues put it) are happily corporate, trying to maximize their salaries by competing with one another for territory, expecting job security according to a tenure system of hazing and clubbish approval that they lord over their supposed inferiors as if it were based on merit, and publishing as often to advance their careers as to contribute anything to cultural understanding. I've known English professors as convinced they were scientists as the anti-masker clowns wearing MAGA hats. They're stuck in Jameson's late capitalism, but they sure talk a good proletariat game. You have nothing to fear.
The business school at a university is looking for liberals. It can't seem to find them by "luring" their MBA professors "from the private sector." Even their adjuncts make two to three times what those awful indoctrinating history adjuncts make, because in right-wing university America, the average adjunct salary is a magic number no one actually earns. It exists in an empty bracket between the adjunct number and the "adjunct" number. Again, just test the odds on this: Liberal contingent labor makes less.
Yes, if you're a semi-qualified black lesbian, then your percentage chance at six-figure employment in the woke university is probably precisely the opposite of what it is in the "private sector." Is that what you conservatives are angry about? That you don't get to corner the market on racism and gender discrimination? Remember, every time an unjustified Affirmative Action hire is made, five Proud Boys get their wings.
Throw a dart into the athletic department, the staff of which permeates every aspect of university life, and hit a liberal. I dare you.
Please find me the liberals in the Construction Management program. You might have a crack at finding a few in the College of Engineering, of which the Construction Management program is kind of a jowly, barking mascot, but again, so what? Is a Hadron collider a gateway drug to feminism? Are you worried about closet liberals in civil engineering who get drunk at parties turning sophomores against oil companies? If so, then you should try stand-up comedy.
Are you more pissed because the STEM professors are speaking unintelligible English as their third language to lecture halls of 200 students? (Pro Tip: That's a horrible indoctrination method, so you should do your best to keep a recently arrived "Asian" woman in front of that calculus class. NOT ONE of those 200 kids will become a liberal).
Conservatives don't seem to care that we're educating students from Saudi Arabia and China who will pay full freight to take their degrees home so they can support into their own nations' economies. Often enough against ours. They don't need financial aid, though, right? So that's straight academic capitalist profiteering, baby! I guess liberal indoctrination to globalism is fine when the sheik makes sure the provost retires a multi-millionaire. No one in that arrangement--down to the (male) student from Riyadh who got an American degree in supply chain management--is a liberal.
How many liberals does it take to screw in a lightbulb in the Computer Science department, and how is it even remotely possible for them to indoctrinate anyone to wokeness as they do so? Is C+ really a code for Marxist rebellion? Or, perhaps, the people making claims about "the universities" being liberal are doing the coding. You know, in Q+.
A claxon should go off every time a liberal is spotted among the C-suite administrators making more than $200k a year. You will never find less-liberal liberals than the ones who work 70 hours a week trying to justify their existences in the midst of administrative bloat while they create adjunct pools or contingent labor budgets in order to fulfill the very purpose of a university. Go ahead and listen to them talk about how horrible the GOP is. They run the 21st century plantation system. Were it 1862 they'd be asking their house N what he thinks of all this mess.
I have worked at five universities, ranging in student population from 1,200 to 36,000, and I have never heard of a Board of Trustees member who would be recognized as a socialist progressive with an anti-capitalist indoctrination program in mind for the school. I have seen Lockheed Martin write the curriculum for an aero class. I've seen Eli Lilly threaten a working group that didn't produce the stats Lilly wanted in exchange for grant money. Rolls Royce wanted to set up shop in my latest university employer's garage. I'm sure it was to rally students against the 19th century labor laws of Indiana.
I'm a progressive who has been directly, viciously screwed over by so-called liberals. I have only peripherally been screwed over by conservatives, and at least they write into the contract how they're about to do it. To the very best of my ability, I've never indoctrinated a single person to anything but a sound and valid argument. I can sometimes gauge when that's working by how often I get shouted down by a bald woman with a nose piercing calling me a mansplainer within measurable proximity of some hill jack dip-spitting sophomore studying forestry calling me a snowflake on Facebook. My worst enemies at Purdue were in the English department, and some of my greatest supporters were in engineering and veterinary medicine. Is that evidence of my being a liberal indoctrinator? God, I hope so.
These blunt instruments in the anti-woke school of populist frenzy ought to be foam-fingered fans of the current university system. Big Ten universities like Purdue are selling their souls and their Colleges of Liberal Arts to become mere trade schools. They're widget factories, a right-winger's wet dream. But what so often happens when some conservative gets what he wants? He whines for more. He claims the liberal who sold out to centrism and gave away the store--from us to him--is a communist.
You chose a great subject and wrote a great piece on it, John. Thanks for indulging me here.