And behind it all there's a price to be paid

Elite universities are politically isolated

Edit: I rewrote the final paragraph since it was long on expressions of frustration and short on cogent summary of my main concern.

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the political slant of higher education where I argued that, as universities have become more stridently and explicitly left-leaning, they have pitched themselves as enemies of the right. Conservative politicians have responded by noticing this and acting accordingly, cutting university budgets and exerting greater ideological control over universities where possible. This is a bad thing — I’m opposed to political control of higher education — but it’s inevitable. Academics started a fight they couldn’t win, and apparently they did so because they were naively unaware that the other side would fight back at all. My point was that this is very stupid, and when things work out badly for the academics, we’ll largely have ourselves to blame. I think that take has held up pretty damn well in light of recent events.

One point that I had thought of making but didn’t (it ended up getting cut for space, and now I’m angry at myself because I’d have looked extra prescient if I’d included it) is that universities don’t just need to worry about loss of government money. They also need to worry about loss of money from private donors. Universities rely to a large (and indefensible) extent on funding from private donors. If they alienate those donors politically, that’s another revenue stream that will dry up. We’ve seen some of that happen over the last two months. I expect it to continue. This is another continuing hazard.¹

But what’s particularly interesting to me is the way that the Israel/Palestine conflict has precipitated the current intense wave of political attacks on higher education. This is due to another dynamic that I hadn’t really thought through in my previous post. So let’s talk about Hidden Tribes.

If you haven’t heard of the Hidden Tribes study, I’ll get to it in a second. But before I do, let’s work up to it a bit by first principles. A question: How many political tribes are there in America? The obvious answer is “Two, the red tribe and the blue tribe.” And there’s a lot of truth to that answer, but it also sweeps a lot under the rug. Scott Alexander helped popularize the idea of a “red tribe” and a “blue tribe,” but in the post where he did that, he couldn’t help but include a third tribe, a “grey tribe,” of libertarian-ish, tech-ish, Bay Area-ish nerds. That “grey tribe” is influential in some ways, but they’re a vanishingly small percentage of the American population. They just happen to be the group that Scott Alexander belongs to. And he even admits that, for all intents and purposes, the grey tribe (or at least his sub-tribe within the grey tribe) is part of the larger blue tribe. But still! We’re not like those blue tribers.

The existence of a presidential system with first-past-the-post elections basically forces there to be only two major political parties in America. And so, when it comes time to vote for President (and most other major elected offices), everyone ultimately ends up sorting themselves onto Team Red or Team Blue, at least temporarily. But how many different underlying political ideologies are there really? How many smaller tribes make up the two larger tribes? In some sense, of course, there are as many different political ideologies as there are people. No two people have the exact same beliefs about every single politically relevant issue. Yet surely there are some relevant sub-party-level political clusters in American political thought.

This is what the Hidden Tribes study set out to analyze. They used statistical techniques to evaluate a large body of opinion survey data to try to identify and characterize clusters of mid-level political clustering. They ended up identifying seven different political tribes. Three are on the left, progressive activists (8% of the population), traditional liberals (11%) and passive liberals (15%). Two are in the middle, moderates (15%) and the politically disengaged (26%). And two are on the right, traditional conservatives (19%) and devoted conservatives (6%). The point of the report was that inordinate amounts of attention get paid to the views and activities of the fringe tribes, the progressive activists and devoted conservatives. That’s because they tend to be the loudest in proclaiming their relatively radical views. But really they’re only about 1/7 of the population.

One of the things that interests me the most about the Hidden Tribes report is the divide between the three parts of the left. Passive liberals will express politically leftish views if pressed, but they don’t offer them up eagerly. They’re mostly politically disengaged and tend to be both younger and more fatalistic. “Sure, better healthcare would be better and of course I support that, but it’ll never happen with Washington being corrupt the way that it is.” The traditional liberals are older, center-left types who are highly politically informed and engaged, but also the most likely of the liberal groups to be religious and patriotic, and more tolerant of diverse viewpoints. Then there are the progressive activists who are, for lack of a better word, the woke.

Passive liberals aren’t the ones making headlines; they might share some of the political commitments with progressive activists, but they fundamentally don’t care enough. Traditional liberals aren’t the ones making headlines either; again, they’ll share political commitments with progressive activists, but they’re more tolerant and willing to compromise, partly in virtue of being more socially conservative in their own lives (but if you want to live differently, that’s fine!). Progressive activists are the ones who go to protests (together with a smattering of traditional liberals).

One implication of this study is that, when you think about “wokeness” as a social phenomenon, it really is a fringe ideology. It’s passionately embraced by 8% of the population, or about 1 in 12 people. So next time you see a group of young lefty types on the news, chanting slogans that sound insane to you, just remember, these people represent less than 10% of the population. They’re the wing nuts.

Now, that’s not to say that they’re without allies. If it comes down to a pitched battle between the progressive activists and some of the groups on the right, the traditional liberals will frequently leap to the defense of the progressive activists (and the passive liberals will limp along as well if you push them). And in presidential elections, all the liberal groups will line up against Trump. But in the day to day of political debate, they’re a fringe who just ends up on the news a whole lot.

Except on university campuses.

University campuses are famously liberal. That’s not to say that they’re entirely populated by progressive activists. There’s plenty of traditional liberals, and even a smattering of moderates and the various disaffected groups. (And there’s, like, two or three traditional conservatives per campus, usually in the economics department.) But progressive activists are not the 8% of the population of college campuses that you’ll find nation-wide. They’re closer to 50% of the population among the professoriate. (That’s the number of professors who support DEI statements in hiring and promotions, as opposed to the 50% who see them as a political litmus test; enthusiasm for conditioning employment on a willingness to affirm progressive pieties is precisely the thing that separates progressive activists from other groups on the left, so this is a pretty good proxy measure for how common progressive activism is on campus.) And that explains the dynamic on college campuses pretty well. Half of academics are members of the activist fringe, and most of the rest are at least somewhat ideologically sympathetic and so mostly happy to go along to get along.

In my earlier post, I put things in terms of the red-blue divide. Half of the country is red, yet college campuses are deep blue, and getting increasingly loud about it, and thus attracting the ire of the red half of the country. But here’s perhaps a better way to put it: The country is politically diverse, yet elite college campuses are overwhelmingly controlled by the most annoying activist 8% of the population, with the tacit consent of groups representing maybe another quarter of the population. Take those groups as a whole, and you’ve got the red-blue dynamic I highlighted before. But there are ideological differences between the progressive activists and the other liberals, and so it would be a huge problem for academia if something were to happen to split the progressive activists from the traditional liberals. Because if that were to happen, academia would lose its traditional political buffer, and it would be them against, roughly, 92% of the country. It would be an absolute bloodbath in terms of public relations and subsequent political pressure.

Fortunately for academia, traditional liberals have long been happy to stick with the progressive activists (although sometimes reluctantly), particularly against the threat from the right.

Unfortunately for academia, on October 7, Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza, killing 1200 innocent Israelis and setting off a war in the Gaza strip. This created a wedge. Traditional liberals tend to have mixed feelings on Israel, desiring a two state solution, thinking that Israel has treated the Palestinians horribly, but that Israel still has a right to defend itself and to exist, deploring the killing of innocent civilians on both sides. Lots of secular Jews are traditional liberals. The progressive activists, on the other hand, celebrated Hamas, chanted “From the river to the sea,” tore down posters of hostages, and began talking passionately about the evils of settler colonialism. The dominos fell from there.

University administrators, themselves overwhelmingly of a progressive activist bent, reflexively sided with the progressive activists. Conservatives attacked, because of course they did. They already saw universities as an inviting political target. And, for the first time, traditional liberals balked in their reflexive defense of the progressive activists. “Sure the Palestinians deserve better than what Israel has been doing to them, but if you’re advertising your protest with the image of a hang glider and a machine gun and chanting “Intifada revolution,” you’re not really on my side.” College presidents were hauled before Congress where they were startled to find they had no friends. They were made to look stupid by Elise Stefanik, of all fucking people. It was a PR bloodbath. And the noose tightened. Liz Magill resigned from U Penn. The governor of Oklahoma issued an executive order banning DEI from public universities in the state. Big dollar donors withdrew their donations. More congressional hearings are scheduled.

The wagons are circling again. Traditional liberals are slipping back into their old role as defenders of the progressive activists against the onslaught of their old, common enemy. We’re returning to the old equilibrium. But we won’t get all the way back where we started. The weakness has been exposed, the right smells blood, and the universities were the enemy anyway.

So long as universities are funded and regulated by those who are their explicit political enemies, they are vulnerable to all kinds of attack. Previously, I had worried about the fact that universities are 90% populated by people that represent the politics of 50% of the country. That’s bad enough, but the problem is worse than that. Because once we take a more nuanced look at political groups, it’s more accurate to say that universities are 50% populated by people that represent the politics of 8% of the country, and that 50% wields massive institutional power, particularly at elite universities. While those 8% have political allies in lots of political fights, those alliances can come apart, depending on the issue. This makes universities much more vulnerable to political pressure than my previous analysis suggested. Universities that continue to stridently pursue progressive activism are setting themselves up for massive political failure. Fringe political positions, by their nature, cannot command bipartisan support. The tumult of the last two months is, I fear, just the beginning of the trouble for elite higher education.

Do you wanna change it?

1. One thing that I’m not worried about much is loss of funding from student tuition. I’m sure that, at the margin, some students will decline to apply to Harvard for political reasons. But the most politically engaged universities also tend to be among the most selective. If a school that accepts 10% of its applicants loses half of its applicants, it will select 20% of its applicants and still have a full entering class paying tuition. To the extent that these political fights cause fewer students overall to attend college, it will be the least-selective and least-political schools that are hardest hit. A bitter irony, that. But as a result, I don’t anticipate student tuition to provide much real leverage over the political lean of universities. Although it might provide other, less tangible leverage. Highly selective schools like being highly selective, and it will be a bit embarrassing if they have to lower admissions standards somewhat to fill their classes.