The hand that feeds

If it's a fight you want, it's a fight you'll get.

Conor Friedersdorf has a great piece up today on DEI statements in academia. Go read it, then come back. I agree with basically everything he says there.¹ I just want to play a bit of “yes, and-”

Here’s a passage that struck me as particularly important:

The costs of mandatory DEI statements are far too high to justify, especially absent evidence that they do significant good. Alas, proponents seem unaware of those costs. Yes, they know that they are imposing a requirement that many colleagues find uncomfortable. But they may be less aware of the message that higher-education institutions send to the public by demanding these statements.

Mandatory DEI statements send the message that professors should be evaluated not only on research and teaching, but on their contributions to improving society. Academics may regret validating that premise in the future, if college administrators or legislators or voters want to judge them based on how they advance a different understanding of social progress, one that departs more from their own—for example, how they’ve contributed to a war effort widely regarded as righteous.

And a few paragraphs down:

A society can afford its college professors radical freedom to dissent from social orthodoxies or it can demand conformity, but not both. Academic-freedom advocates can credibly argue that scholars must be free to criticize or even to denigrate God, the nuclear family, America, motherhood, capitalism, Christianity, John Wayne movies, Thanksgiving Day, the military, the police, beer, penetrative sex, and the internal combustion engine—but not if academics are effectively prohibited from criticizing progressivism’s sacred values.

It’s instructive to compare these warnings about the costs of DEI statements to what we’re already seeing happen in places like Florida and Texas, where conservative governors and state legislatures are passing laws and regulations that put a boot on the throat of higher education. Tenure is being gutted, academic freedom in teaching is being sharply curtailed, and unqualified political commissars are being put in positions of authority to try to steer the higher education system to the right — or into a ditch, whichever is easiest. This is a terrible state of affairs, and I absolutely condemn these assaults on academic freedom. And yet… what did you expect?

Friedersdorf gives a brief history of DEI statements and how they’ve grown and changed. They began with a praiseworthy idea: if academics are going out of their way to provide services to disadvantaged people in their community, that should be recognized and rewarded. But a system for recognizing community service rapidly evolved into a requirement that professors engage in community service (at least in the UC system, which is Friedersdorf’s main subject), and the overwhelming progressive bent of academia then interpreted this as a requirement to help promote progressive political projects. (50% of professors see DEI statements as “ideological litmus tests that violate academic freedom.”) This evolution occurred over the course of the last decade or so, a time when our politics went crazy, polarization went through the roof, the right shifted far to the right, and the left shifted far to the left. This last decade has had a similarly radicalizing effect in academia. Academia has always leaned to the left, but that lean has increased. The evolution of DEI statements is just one case in point.

In 1967, the University of Chicago’s Kalven Committee stated that “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” This is increasingly no longer the case, as professors and administrators are emboldened to weigh in on contemporary political controversies in a professional rather than personal capacity. DEI bureaucrats form “bias response teams” that serve as judge, jury and executioner to sniff out and expunge those who would violate progressive orthodoxies. Academia has always been implicitly left-leaning. More and more, it is explicitly on the left.

Perhaps this is somewhat overstated. I’ve been living and teaching in China for most of that least decade, and so I haven’t been part of an American department or participating in faculty meetings and dealing with the university bureaucracy myself. I’m getting this second-hand, through news stories, polling, and personal communications. Perhaps I’m getting a skewed perception here; I admit I can’t rule that out.

But while I think there’s room for debate about the degree to which American academia has shifted explicitly to the left, I think it’s hard to deny that it has shifted to the left. And while perhaps the public perception of that shift is misleading in various ways, the public perception matters a great deal.

The public perception of American academia is that it has collectively decided to pitch itself in favor of progressive political projects and, thus, against conservatives. Conservatives have noticed! They are taking that antagonism seriously and responding in kind. “You wish to be our enemy? Very well then; you are our enemy.” I’m sure that some will prefer things this way. Us vs them is cleaner and, perhaps, more honest.

But there’s a crucial power asymmetry at play here. In half of the country, state governments are controlled by Republicans. At the moment, Biden is in the White House. But the Republicans control the House, and the House controls federal spending. And political control is certain to shift in the future. If Ron DeSantis wins the presidency, he’s vowed to impose a version of the reforms he’s already pursuing in Florida through the accreditation powers of the Department of Education.

Academia has grown accustomed to having a fountain of government money at its disposal. Through direct funding of state universities, and through research grants and federal student aid to both public and private universities, billions of dollars flow into American higher education. What would happen if that were cut off? Government funding — from conservative governments, as often as not — is the hand that feeds academia. Why are academics so hungry for a bite?

Is this unfair? Is it offensive and outrageous that we must take orders on political matters from people with whom we might stridently disagree? Yes, sure, of course. But when Ron DeSantis asks “Why shouldn’t I cut your funding? Why shouldn’t I squash your commitment to progressive politics?”, how do we respond? The answer can’t be “Because it would be unfair, offensive, and outrageous!” It’s not enough to speak truth; we must convince, because otherwise our funding will be cut. And I don’t think there’s anything we can say that would convince so long as the political valence of academia remains unchanged.

Too often, I get the impression that the typical scholar in American academia sees their proper role as opposing conservative politics and sees the proper role of conservative politicians as funding them nonetheless, because education and academic freedom are important. Education and academic freedom are important. Yet the simple fact is that academia cannot be an institution that takes one side in partisan political conflict, and yet still expect to receive bipartisan funding and support. Traditionally, academia has enjoyed that bipartisan funding and support because it has been seen as a fundamentally non-partisan enterprise that happens to shelter a number of partisans. But this is no longer the case. As the politics of academia have changed, that bipartisan support has decayed. Maybe that’s for the best. The moral clarity of the good fight, the refusal to bend the knee to those who don’t deserve our respect… it feels good, doesn’t it? But if it is to be a struggle, then the other side will fight back. Surely you saw this coming, right? Are you so naive that you thought you would be well-treated and protected by your explicit political enemies?

Given academia’s addiction to political money and the existence of state regulatory regimes that look after how that money is spent, an opposition between academia and government is akin to labor action against management. But there’s an important difference in the power balance. When the workers at the widget factory strike, the boss will hire scabs and call in the Pinkertons because the boss really wants the widget factory up and running again. But conservative politicians have no interest in preserving higher education in its present form. They’d prefer reform back toward the earlier model of non-partisan higher education. But if that’s not on the table, conservative politicians will prefer the destruction of academia to its continuation. Like the Emperor said to Luke: “If you will not be turned, you will be destroyed.” I saw a tweet by a professor at a Texas university complaining that the recent tenure reforms will destroy Texas higher education rather than reform it towards the center. This is a fair analysis of the effect of the Texas reforms, but, like… you get that the Texas GOP is perfectly happy with that outcome, right?

I’m not saying that Florida and Texas are doing the right thing; they’re not. I’m just looking at this from a realpolitik perspective. The hostile response from GOP governments to the increasingly strident progressivism of contemporary academia is obvious, inevitable, and understandable. When universities get explicitly political, they’re signing up for war, and they will suffer losses in the conflict.

If you’re ok with that, I respect your position. I don’t agree, but that’s a subject for a different post. I just want to make sure everyone’s on the same page about what we’ve signed up for here.

The title of this post is taken from a Nine Inch Nails song that I love, not just because it rocks, but because Trent Reznor’s lyrics pose an interesting challenge.

The chorus is pro-rebellion:

Just how deep do you believe?
Will you bite the hand that feeds?
Will you chew until it bleeds?
Can you get up off your knees?
Are you brave enough to see?
Do you wanna change it?

And yet that second verse —

What if this whole crusade's a charade
And behind it all there's a price to be paid
For the blood on which we dine
Justified in the name of the holy and the divine

What do universities gain by being progressive critics themselves, rather than simply the home to progressive critics, as they traditionally were? And what do they lose?

1. My only quibble is that, as I’ve argued around here before, “diversity” and “inclusion” are both vague terms (Diversity of what? Inclusion of what?), and no one is for diversity of everything and inclusion of everything. “DEI” must always be interpreted relative to some standard. So while Friedersdorf repeatedly avows that he’s in favor of diversity, I have to ask “diversity of what?” since I can make little sense of being in favor of diversity as such. So I also disagree with Friedersdorf’s contention at the end of the piece - which gives rise to its headline - that DEI is hypocritical because it rejects viewpoint diversity and inclusion. It’s not hypocritical. DEI just doesn’t mean viewpoint DEI (at least not how it’s practiced).