Monday, October 14, 2024

On the Role of Ideology in University Holidays

I contend that the ideological war being waged in the United States by the 2010s over whether October 12th should be “Indigenous People’s” Day or Columbus Day became real in 2021 when President Biden issued a proclamation commemorating “Indigenous People’s” Day not coincidentally to fall on the same day as Columbus Day. Similarly, though only unofficially, the United American Indians of New England have labeled Thanksgiving Day as “The National Day of Mourning” since 1970. The de facto hegemony of ideology in changing official U.S. holidays, including in the refusal of some people and even businesses to say “Christmas” even on Christmas Eve Day, has proceeded without the premise that ideology should play such a role being debated in public discourse. Instead, the onslaught has been enabled by the vehemence of the conquerors in insisting that their decisions be recognized and not contradicted. Once I went to a Unitarian “church” on a Thanksgiving expecting a spirit of gratefulness, as per President Lincoln’s proclamation establishing the date of the holiday after two years of brutal war between the CSA and USA. The sermon was instead on the need for sorrow instead. I walked out, shaking my head in utter disbelief. Perhaps some Americans might one day insist that a similar mood be preached in churches on Christmas Day. Both the need and insistence come with a tone of passive aggression, and are indeed power-grabs based in resentment, which Nietzsche argued is a major indication of weakness rather than strength, and thus self-confidence. Perhaps the manufactured dialectics, such as the one centered on October 12th, can be transcended in a Hegelian rather than religious sense at a higher level.


The full essay is at "October 12th: Happy Vikings Day."

Saturday, October 5, 2024

Cancelled Classes: Harvard’s Far-Left Ideological Courses Take a Hit

I contend that the more courses that are heavily ideological and biased in advocating a particular ideology that a university has, the higher the chances that a university will eventually suffer from a lack of educational legitimacy and perhaps even have to close down for want of students. Even great American universities such as Harvard and Yale are not immune. Their huge endowments could even function as organizational slack enabling a particular ideological bent to percolate throughout the universities for a long time with impunity due to the sheer amount of money in the universities respective invested wealth. When I was a student at Yale, I worked part-time at the Development Office calling alumni to give to the already-wealthy university. I had no idea at the time that being rich could actually harm a university, or allow for educational decadence with impunity. At Harvard in 2024, there was some indication that the students’ freedom in selecting some of their courses was serving a good purpose in putting biased-ideological courses out of business for lack of sufficient enrollment. The student marketplace could substitute for compromised university administration in its educational oversight function. Adam Smith would be proud.

Early in the Fall 2024 semester, Harvard University cancelled over 30 courses, with the History and Literature departments especially being adversely affected. A Harvard administrator chalked this up to five lecturers who “either departed or chose to do something else.”[1] Even so, a clue to yet another reason unstated by Harvard lies in the fact that at St. Joseph University in Pennsylvania, multiple sections of the university’s diversity course, Inequality in American Society, were cancelled for the Spring 2022 term “due to under enrollment.”[2] That is to say, at least some of the cancelled classes at Harvard may have been cancelled because too few students had enrolled in the courses. Furthermore, it is possible that Harvard students in general were more interested in obtaining knowledge than an ideological platform at university. To be sure, overlap between the two exists especially in humanities courses, and professors are only human so their personal opinions do slip out from time to time even in the best, most academic circumstances. Such a limited extent is hardly blameworthy.

Those lecturers or professors who feel the instinctual urge to go further in promoting an ideology, however, are indeed culpable, for they misuse their educational platform to indoctrinate students. Speaking at Yale in 2024, a professor at Arizona State University unabashedly and without any sense of shame admitted that she used her courses to promote her ideology because its cause “is too important” to be left out. Every ideologue views one’s ideology as important; this is almost a truism. We want to be happy, moreover, so we like those things that make us happy. In other words, humans have wills.

The courses cancelled in September, 2024 at Harvard include “Marx at the Mall: Consumer Culture & Its Critics,” “Global Transgender Histories,” “Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North America,” “The Making of Race across Latin America,” and “Global Histories of Capitalism.” Had the last one been offered, I might have tried to audit it because my research then was on the ethical and theological status of self-interest, which stems teleologically from self-love, in Adam Smith’s theory of the competitive-market mechanism.

I would not have sat in on “Global Transgender Histories” because its syllabus indicated that students would “become familiar with some of the global vocabulary of gender identities beyond the binary and . . . the historical impacts of phenomena such as racism, imperialization, and [the] medicalization on gender identities.”[3] Knowing the vocabulary used in other countries may not be very important, especially given the opportunity cost in terms of other knowledge that is not being learned in taking another course, such as one on comparative cultures more fundamentally. Additionally, bringing racism and imperialism in can be said to be needlessly ideological, as resentment, and a stretch from the ostensible topic of the course: gender as a social identity. It may be that there was not yet enough knowledge on transgender identities to fill an entire course. If so, then social identities could be a topic in a sociology course rather than the topic of a stand-alone course.

Regarding the course on race in Latin America, the ideological temptation may be to castigate the Caucasian race as the reason for teaching the course. Similarly, the slant in the “Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North America” could have been to interpret the “foundations of settler colonialism” in terms hostile to the European settlers while ignoring the scalping of women and children by the American Indians.[4] Grasping  from texts “the anxieties, joys, and power that arise when Indigenous people embrace their bodies” is loaded with ideologically-tinged terms, such as indigenous and embracing their bodies, as if the mind cannot be wrong in deciding that its associated physical body is wrong rather than the mind itself. I would wager that this point is rarely if even made in teaching a course on gender as being apart from the biology, the distinction of which could itself be an ideologically assumption.

Courses that are repeatedly or widely taught in a one-sided way in terms of knowledge are, I submit, suspect academically. This realization is probably not lost on the intelligent people whom Harvard selects to study at that university. I experienced such a course on Christian ethics at Yale’s divinity school in 2024. The young professor told the class that monogamy “violates Christian ethics because [monogamy] oppresses other legitimate gay lifestyles.” After that class, a student bristled when I suggested to her that the professor should have included the other side. That student replied that the students had already heard the arguments in favor of monogamy and that hearing them again would be traumatizing for some students. My jaw dropped. Perhaps in not wanting to traumatize students of theology, the professor intentionally omitted the counterarguments that include why both Paul and Augustine would object to the claim that monogamy violates Christian ethics. The professor was not about to say that “other gay lifestyles” can be said to be ethically inferior to monogamy because emotional intimacy in a romantic relationship suffers when extramarital sex occurs.

Consider the emotions that naturally go with the realization that, he may be having sex with another man right now instead of with me. The fear and hurt that emotional intimacy might be a part of the “open” sex with another man, which could eventually result in being replaced by the other man can be argued to render the open relationship unethical, for there is harm resulting from it. I am not claiming that every open relationship, gay or straight, necessarily occasions the fear and hurt, but I do think that there is a loss of emotional intimacy between two people in a relationship if sex is occurring outside of the relationship because sex necessarily involves closeness, even if just in touching another person’s body.

In being so extreme ideologically, Yale’s divinity school could be said to be a cult rather than a school within a university. Because Yale was so prestigious as a university at the time, the lack of oversight of its administration over the divinity school is perplexing. In the 1990s, Yale’s President Levin wanted to move the school geographically to the center of the campus from a half-mile up Prospect St, and the Provost wanted to close the school because it was accepting 70 percent of those who apply (in 2023, that figure was 50 percent), but Levin said, “As a Jewish man, I’m not going to be the president who closes Yale’s Christian divinity school.” Meanwhile, some students at the divinity school were complaining that moving to the central campus would immerse them with relativists, and Hitler, they said, was a relativist. The school was able to stay put, with the rest of the university unaware, at least as of 2024, of the resulting cost to the university as a great university.  

To be fair, Harvard was not without its own ideologically limited courses in 2024. The course, “Queering Education” included studying the “’hidden curriculum’ in American schools which privileges heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and ‘gendered identities’.”[5] Besides making up ideologically-laced words such as heteronormativity and cisnormativity, the latter unilaterally imposing “cis” on “binary” (i.e., no transsexual) people, the charge that a curriculum is hidden, as if it could be found only in playing a song backwards with the word Satan being only then recognizable, is dubious as well as biased (given the added word, privileges) because of course in studying a culture or society in which the vast majority of people are heterosexual and “cis,” things done by those people are naturally going to make up a sizable component of the knowledge that is imparted in the classroom. A course on the influence of trans-gendered Founders of the United States is not going to run very long before it runs out of material. Furthermore, that most (or all) of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention were heterosexual is much less important than learning the political (and economic) substance of the debates as reported by James Madison in his Notes. Once again, there is an opportunity cost in terms of the knowledge that is foregone in focusing on tertiary matters.

When I was a student at Yale, I took a course called “American Schools” in the teacher-preparation program in Yale College; I had to spend one afternoon a week sitting in on classes at local high schools. At one, the civics (government) teacher bragged to me that the textbooks were in the school’s basement because his course consisted of a series of films on immigrants because he was an immigrant. “Once a semester I have Rosa Delorio [the Congresswoman] visit the class to talk about the American system of government.” That was it because the vast majority of the class time was devoted to the teacher promoting his own political ideology in favor of immigration. The knowledge that he minimized is in my view very important in a civics class, especially since one function of public education in Connecticut is to prepare the kids to be voters who at least understand the system of government in which they live. That an ideological agenda in teaching can be so blind as to the opportunity cost should be a warning, or “red flag,” to us concerning just how illegitimate (and dangerous, cognitively) having heavily (and biased) ideologically-oriented courses can be in a school. Political campaigning and teaching knowledge to students are distinct activities, so they should not be conflated or allowed to substitute for the each other.


1. Dave Huber, “Harvard Cancels over 30 Courses; Far-Left History & Literature Classes Hardest Hit,” The College Fix, September 28, 2024.
2. “Diversity Course Enrollment Drops After School Stops Ordering Students to Take It,” The College Fix, December 13, 2021.
3. Dave Huber, “Harvard Cancels over 30 Courses; Far-Left History & Literature Classes Hardest Hit,” The College Fix, September 28, 2024.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.

Tuesday, April 23, 2024

Yale Police Arrest 47 Students: A Symptom

A university is not an inner city, and thus should not be policed as such, as if students were hostile gang members in need of constant surveillance. On April 22, 2024, I was not a bit surprised in reading that Yale, which I had hitherto described as a private police-state on steroids, ordered its own private police to arrest 47 students that morning on charges of criminal trespassing on campus for having brought and set up tents days earlier. Even though temporary housing goes beyond political protest per se and the students could have returned day after day to Beinecke Plaza to protest—venting off stream that could be justified by the U.S. Government’s continued financial, military, and political enabling of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza—that Yale’s administration put the plaza under police guard after employees had removed the tents is indicative of a police-state mentality that is not conducive to academic pursuits. Furthermore, arresting students for criminal trespassing rather than simply removing the tents demonstrates an inner-city policing mentality that is out of place on a prestigious university's campus.

Alternatively, the university could have sent security employees rather than its private police force—and notice that both Columbia and NYU used municipal rather than private police! Rather than charging students with trespassing, Yale could have used its on-campus security to tell the students to pack up their tents as cleaning crews cleaned the plaza. “You can come back to protest, but tents are not allowed and right now we are cleaning the plaza from the weekend.” Some students had even brought tall wooden bookshelves with which to promote books on the topic. How Yalie! Boola Boola!

April 22, 2024 at Yale as Yale's private police force arrests students for trespassing (YDN)

Nevertheless, erecting tents and bookshelves is not political protesting. Had particular students refused to pack up, then the university could have called the New Haven police, whose legitimacy is solid from a democratic standpoint, to respond in a per person way. At the very least, the local police should have handled any local residents having tents there. It is entirely reasonable for a university to tell students (and especially local residents!) to remove furniture and tents from campus. Regarding New Haven residents who came to Yale's campus to "set up shop," Yale is not a state university. It would be highly presumptuous for a townie to refuse to pack up, but students should be handled differently, for they are neither locals nor even customers as their university status is academic in nature andthey should thus be dealt thusly. Deans rather than handcuffs, unless the latter are absolutely necessary as a last resort, should do the heavy lifting.

Such a draconian measure as saturating Beinecke Plaza with university police to do a mass arrest as if students on their own campus constitutes trespassing might fit an inner-city mentality, but on a college campus, the trust and stability of students at their school undoubtedly could only take a hit. Put another way, I doubt that Yale students looked at Yale police employees (and their ubiquitous vehicles on campus) the same way for the rest of the 2024 spring term. Certainly, claims by the police employees that they are there to protect the students would fall on deaf ears, as it should.

When Yale graduate students who were teaching assistants had been on strike sometime in the 1990s, while I was a student there, some of them had tents in Beinecke Plaza. I used to walk past them after eating breakfast at Commons (sadly, along with the advent of Yale’s police presence on campus at least as of 2023, breakfast was no longer served at Commons when I returned in September, 2023 as an alumni scholar in residence). Back in the 1990s, there was no hint of possible arrest for trespassing. Of course, Yale was not a campus saturated with security guards and Yale police employees back then; Sterling library did not have its own security force making rounds every 20 minutes or so, disturbing students who study in the stacks. Tents were fine (though not my preference).  A double-standard surfaces, however, 25 years later, now that Israel was being criticized. At the very least, the president of Yale had a personal conflict of interest that inadvertently played into the double standard. 

I contend that Yale students should protest the police-state mentality itself at Yale, and the resulting saturation of security and university police personnel and cars on and even off campus. A local resident told me in December, 2023 that Yale police regularly arrest locals leaving bars at night OFF-CAMPUS, and yet The Yale Daily News reported on April 22, 2024 that Yale police have no jurisdiction off Yale’s property—even on the local streets themselves that border or even run through campus, such as those that intersect at Grove and Prospect, where the sit-down protest resumed on April 22nd after the arrests. Yale police self-entitlement hardly stops at the edges of Yale's campus. It’s no wonder that Yale students walked into an intersection owned by the city just beyond Beinecke Plaza in preferring to be subject to a police force of an inner city to Yale’s private police state. Arresting young-adult students—many undergraduates still being teenagers!—for trespassing on campus for having set up tents is in my view unnecessary and thus indicative of a mentality of domination and even aggression of easy targets. It is not as if an Ivy League university is at all like an inner city, or populated as such.

The chief of Yale's department of police at the time had been the chief of the New Haven police department for more than a decade, and he participated in an Israel-led program for police as reported by The Yale Daily News on April 22, 2024. To be sure, he did graduate from Yale College, and more than a decade later, he received a degree from Yale’s divinity school, ironically a Christian divinity school. Even so, I contend that his policing at Yale did not reflect his having been a member of the Yale community, but, rather, his time as head of New Haven’s police department. I contend that Yale should not be policed at all like an inner city, and even hiring retired inner-city police employees risks having students treated very unfittingly. For one thing, Yale students (and thus alumni), employees, and faculty are vetted, whereas the residents of crime-ridden urban areas are obviously not.

Nevertheless, at Yale during the fall of 2023, a thug security employee stalked me three times on campus. The local creeper even hid behind a car to take pictures of me one night as I was walking down Prospect Street. Why does Yale hire local creepers who are too weakly constituted to know the difference between a university like Yale and an inner city? I had complained twice with photo evidence, but I soon discovered that a dean at Yale refused to get the bully fired. Get the thugs off the payroll! Where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire. Simply put, Yale is not New Haven. The other school is much better situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As far as the wildly excessive police presence on Yale’s campus on a daily basis, and even AFTER the tents were cleared on April 22, 2024 at Beinecke Plaza and then on the following day, I’m not the only Yalie to have left. A lawyer who studied at Yale and went on to teach there told me after he and I both had left, “It has gotten really bad there.” I knew he meant it in terms of the sheer meanness, but all I had to do was mention the constant police and security presence everywhere on campus and the guy was firmly nodding his head in agreement. Its certainly ironic when being so "in control" evinces things being out of control. Try squeezing jello in your hand if you don't believe me. Tightness gone too far.   

I submit that something has gone very wrong when an academic campus looks like a police-zone even after an incident has been ended. On April 23, 2024, the day after, CNN reported that Beineke Plaza “was closed and under police guard.”[1] If tents had really been the problem, the university would have allowed students to hold protests there as long as they were not setting up camp. For their part, the students should have given in on the tents in order to stay in the plaza on April 22nd. 

That “50 to 60 Yale police” employees had been at the plaza on the morning of the arrests, along with 15 police from New Haven just shows the over-extent of police presence at Yale and the underlying mentality.[2] Why have the second jurisdiction there?  To intimidate? Only Yale’s police “were involved in arresting protesters.”[3] From a democratic standpoint, it should have been the reverse; like Columbia, Yale should have called the local police department like anyone else. Fifty to sixty Yale police, doubtless with an overwhelming show of their vehicles with lights flashing, is not only excessive, but it pensively baits violance and at the very least stubbornness, which is exactly what they got. 

Even on the following evening, there were five Yale police employees standing in front of the main library, and several security cars stationary on a nearby walkway between the library and the law school, and doubtlessly more Yale police and security in the plaza while a protest was going on nearby, on Cross-Campus lawn until 10 pm. Why all the fear? The protesters had moved from the street intersection at 5pm as New Haven police had asked. Paranoia and an aggressive bent are in my view the underlying causes, and the resulting visuals doubtlessly cause student and faculty discomfort and impede studying. That this was presumably not a concern to Yale’s police and security departments should be something Yale Corporation's board might want to reflect on. 

I had seen such an over-reactive, passive-aggressive, and even paranoid mentality on a daily basis at Yale during the 2023-2024 academic year that I was not at all surprised to read that the reaction to the tents was draconian as well and went on well after the tents had been taken down. Was a full-frontal militaristic assault by some Yale students really likely even after all the arrests?  Why have the plaza then under “police guard?” Why have it closed at all, if the tents were really the problem? I’m sure that even on the day after, that part of the campus looked even more like a police zone than the campus typically looked in 2023-2024. The Rambo mentality has no place at a university like Yale. Students and alumni can unite to defend academia from such interlarding encroachments that do not respect academia. Oil and water do not mix. A university is not an inner city. Where is Yale's board of directors in all this? Silence itself can be enabling.


Thursday, April 11, 2024

The University of California at Berkeley

In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on  instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather  obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped  up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library,  which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common.  



The full essay is at "The University of California." 

Friday, February 16, 2024

The Humanities on Climate Change

William Paley claimed that the “university exists to form the minds and the moral sensibilities of the next generation of clergymen, magistrates, and legislators.”[1] The assumption at Cambridge in 1785 was that both “individual conduct and a social order pleasing to God can be known and taught.”[2] To know outside of divine revelation what is pleasing to God was typically considered to be presumptuous back then because human finite knowledge cannot claim to encompass all possible knowledge. This could not even be claimed of AI a couple decades into the twenty-first century. Although infinity itself is not necessarily a divine concept—think of infinite space possibly being in the universe—it cannot be said that humans have, or even are capable of having, infinite knowledge. Theists and humanists can agree on this point. So, when a professor decides that a political issue is so important that using a faculty position to advocate for one’s own ideology in the classroom, presumptuousness can be said to reek to high heaven. I assume that any ideology is partial, and thus partisan, rather than wholistic. Both the inherently limited nature of the human brain, and thus human knowledge, and the presumption of an instructor to use the liberal arts, or the humanities more specifically, to advocate for one’s own ideology were strikingly on display on a panel on what the humanities should contribute on climate change. The panel, which consisted mostly of scholars from other universities, took place at Yale University on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, 2024. Perhaps on that day in which the two holidays aliened, both fear of our species going extinct—literally turning to dust—and love of our species and Earth could be felt.  That we can scarcely imagine our planet without our species living on it does not mean that such a scenario could not happen; and yet I contend that the humanities should not sell its soul or be romanticized ideologically to be transacted away into vocational knowledge, as if the humanities would more fittingly ask how to do something rather than why something is so. Going deeper, rather than departing from the intellectual raison d’être in order to tread water at the surface, metastasizing into training and skills, is not only the basis of the humanities’ sustainable competitive advantage in a university, but also the best basis from which the humanities can make a contribution to solving the problem of climate change by getting at its underlying source. Neither a political ideology or skills in “knowledge-use” can get at that; rather, they are oriented to relieving symptoms, which although very harmful, could be more expeditiously redressed by discovering and understanding their root cause. So I’m not claiming that universities should do away with applied science and research on technology, such as to absorb carbon from the seas and atmosphere; rather, I contend that the liberal arts and sciences, especially the humanities, should not be turned into engines of application. 

One panelist opened minds in the room to a tension within liberal arts. While the humanities are liberating for a free person, individual research and truth-seeking are in tension with forming groups with shared understandings. Both, the panelist asserted, are part of liberal arts education. When I was a student at Yale, I applied truth-seeking to theology, philosophy, and history, and constitutional law; I also joined a debating society, or “political party,” in the Yale Political Union. Some of the ideas I came up with in my studies were unique, and I conformed to an ideology in a debating society (which owned one of Yale’s secret societies). The other members of that “political party” engaged with me during the debates on ideas stripped of the usual distracting media-driven sideshows.  Both my own studies and debate in the Yale Political Union held my ideology in check, though obviously didn’t eliminate it.

In fact, both my ideas and ideology have changed since I studied at Yale; for one thing, I went on to study historical moral, political, and religious thought at another university after graduating from Yale. I had moved from natural science, to business, to the social sciences, and finally to the humanities. I wanted a firm foundation in the latter. After all, political economy and economics were once part of philosophy; Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy. It is from my broad educational background, to which I sacrificed entirely too many years of my youth (without being a professional student!), that I took in the panel’s opinions on how the humanities should address climate change. I was not looking through ideological glasses so much as through those of the humanities and business.

A participant on the panel defended the liberal arts, possibly because business-oriented “academic” administrators at some schools were shedding parts of the humanities.  The University of West Virginia, for example, had recently announced that it would eliminate foreign language study because the students’ eventual employers would not value that kind of knowledge. Not even administrators at business schools should delimit courses offered to those which the administrators think CEO’s would like. When I was a graduate student in business at Indiana University, the dean told the incoming class that we would not use the knowledge we obtain for 10 or 15 years. “We’re not here to train you,” the dean said. Indeed, more than one CEO told me that they did not want business schools to train future employees. We can do that; we want business schools do what we can’t do—educate them. Indeed, large CPA firms were hiring English majors because such students could reason well. Deans of the liberal arts and science should therefore not listen to the corporate sycophants running business schools.

Liberal arts “are about questioning and liberating,” one of the panelists insisted.  During World War II, the liberal arts were criticized in the U.S. for being a luxury that a country at war simply could not afford. Wendall Wilke, who ran for U.S. president against Roosevelt in 1940, defended the humanities as the franchise of the mind to free the mind, and an open mind is beneficial to economic and political freedom—virtues whose value could be confirmed merely by looking over at Nazi Germany. Wilke’s claim is in line with Paley’s thesis that the humanities are useful in terms of individual conduct and social order, whether of a religion, an economy, a political system, or a university.

If the liberal arts really are about asking why beyond the opinions broadcasted on a public square, and are thus about freeing the mind from societal constraints, then it could be asked, as one participant did: “Is climate-change a necessary thing that liberal arts and science has to do, or is covering climate-change a luxury?” What is the opportunity cost—the benefit that is foregone—in orienting the liberal arts and sciences to applied work so as to reduce carbon emissions? If a person loses one’s soul to be someone else, I submit that the benefit would be less than had the person stayed true to oneself in making a contribution. The same holds for academic disciplines. Math students should not be forced to be trained in accounting. I once worked in that field, and, believe me, I’m no mathematician.

So how can the humanities help us to understand climate change? A couple panelists distinguished local, national, and global social scales. Scaling, or viewing the world in terms of different scales, was said to be relevant to climate-change. One question that the liberal arts and science could answer is, “Are different scales naturally related?”  I thought of the natural fractals in chaos theory, and the research that has gone into applying the natural sciences, including evolution, to social organization. By 2020, the imprint from the aggregated energy consumption of individuals was clear on the global scale; we had entered the Anthropocene era in which aggregated individual conduct really could change the natural world on a global scale. Even so, studying scaling only goes so far; it does not get at the root cause: why the aggregated individual conduct is now so detrimental on the global scale scientifically.

Time can be thought of as a scale. Universities are not necessarily set up for the long term, one panelist claimed; and yet another panelist pointed out that, traditionally, college has been seen as a leisure, and thus not something oriented to a demand for immediate action. Indeed, going to college used to be a luxury because students could take several years off full-time work in order to become knowledgeable. I would add being better at reasoning, which training students at skills does not sharpen nearly as much. This is one reason why I studied at Yale after my studies in business. It is also why Richard Brodhead, the dean of Yale College when I was at Yale wrote to the undergraduates in the liberal arts and sciences that business would not be major. “Let us educate you; we know how to do that. Then you can go out and get trained.”

Certainly, the humanities are not inherently oriented to serve immediate action, and yet climate change has become urgent because governments have not stood up to their polluters. Is this, however, the root cause? Does losing the climate-change battle boil down to a dysfunctional political economy steeped in corruption? The humanities can dig deeper than political economy. So to siphon the liberal arts and basic sciences into serving only that which is immediately useful can be reckoned as dogmatic both in terms of being arbitrary and imposed. Einstein was not awarded a Nobel prize for either of his theories of relativity because at the time they could not be tested empirically. It was more than ten years after his general theory in 1905 until a solar eclipse provided empirical support that gravity from a large mass bends space itself. Limiting theorizing on astrophysics to knowledge that can be empirically tested and is immediately useful would a the very least be “penny proud; pound foolish.” Such a foolish litmus test would cut off too much paradigm-changing knowledge. I don’t think the stricture of immediate usefulness should deplete human knowledge of the possibility of on-going scientific revolutions; they are hard enough, as Thomas Kuhn argued. I submit that this also applies to the humanities. Should they study only those causes that can be immediately acted upon? At the very least, uncovering a cause of a phenomenon instantly highlights the symptoms as symptoms.

Such artificial delimiters as immediate action come from not only positivists such as Popper in the natural sciences, but also from business schools, especially in a culture in which business is revered. I suspect that many humanities professors in the American states are unaware of how much they have imported not only from business schools, but also from the business world itself. One of the panelists insightfully observed that education as (vocational) training is transactional, whereas the mantra of the liberal arts and sciences is knowledge for its own sake. So it is at a fundamental level that the litmus test of immediate action is so exogenous, or foreign, to the humanities. Unfortunately, vocational skill had been eclipsing even basic knowledge at many American universities since the rise of business schools in the 1980s. American business culture has been so salient in the societal cultures of many of the American states that even humanities professors at state universities especially use power-point presentations with knowledge as bullet-points.

The panelist from Arizona State University taught at the time in the School of Ocean Futures, which in turn is in that university’s College of Global Futures, as if they were labels for academic schools of knowledge rather than being in actuality marketing slogans and ideological jargon. She spoke in terms of training students in skills on useful knowledge. That only such knowledge is to be taught and researched there is clear, for the panelist bragged that useful knowledge is literally “etched in the stone” that displays the university’s mission. It is significant that Einstein would not have been welcomed at ASU.

Furthermore, that panelist spoke of “teams” of students in her classroom, as if she were a manager at a corporation referring to her subordinates. She also spoke of the need to turn her students into leaders, by which she meant practitioners. The term leadership had come to be so vague that it could be both a vehicle and cover for  ideologically-infused agendas. For example, in business world, “leadership coaches” roam free-lance on a bad metaphor without even bothering to distinguish leadership from management or supervision. It was as if that panelist were so ensconced in vocational jargon that she took it as legitimate for academic knowledge.

It was very clear that she thought that the humanities should only be “applied knowledge.” She bragged that ASU was inaugurating a “general sustainability” requirement for every student as a means to get them to display leadership in 20 years. Never mind that sustainability is not an academic term, and yet ASU has a School of Sustainability (and another of Leadership). She said that the “sustainability” requirement is meant to “train students to envision alternative futures will give skills.” She was quite explicit that training is what university faculty should do. That this might fit a school of global futures does not mean that her vocational orientation should be applied to faculty and students in the liberal arts and sciences. Of course, requiring certain courses with a vocational and ideological agenda comes with an opportunity cost because other courses that might otherwise be required are not chosen. Rather than studying one issue, students’ reasoning ability, which they could apply to any topic, could benefit from requiring a course in logic. Also, a semester or two of Latin would help immensely with understanding English grammar, which, along with logic is (as I have found) extremely useful in writing on a variety of issues. The world needs excellent thinkers rather than just skill-doers.

ASU at the time had an applied lab in a new building. The technological research there was on “carbon trees,” which can absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Such labs are definitely needed, and this need is indeed urgent. Imposing that on humanities faculty and students is thus not only unnecessary, as it would be duplicative, but also, as I have already argued, detrimental to the humanities. Even the priority of ASU’s president at the time on forging lucrative applied labs with corporations and government can be criticized as detrimental to the liberal arts and basic sciences. Ironically, post-doctoral researchers in those labs have complained that the funding by the university has not been sufficient for a course of research to be followed to a conclusion.

The participant from ASU also admitted that she was unapologetically ideological in the classroom in advocating her ideology of “stewardship and responsibility” applied only to climate-change. She also answered a question by insisting that advocating is a legitimate teaching role because her issue is “too important.” No ideological faculty member of a university would need to use much self-discipline in pledging not to advocate on issues that are not important. In short, her stance would open the flood-gates to going after “bad” ideologies and promoting one’s own as a significant part of teaching. It is telling that the panelist viewed critical thinking as being able to distinguish “true from false information.” When I heard that, I thought of “fake news.” Even though I believe that climate change is a very important issue, I don’t see a college teacher’s role as including rebutting statements made on Fox News.

Recall Paley’s caveat that we presume that our knowledge is of individual conduct and social orders that are pleasing to God. Viewing one’s own ideology as true knowledge is antipodal to Paley’s epistemological humility. The ASU panelist, whose background outside of academia includes advocating on her issue to Congress, was narrowing, and thus warping, “critical thinking” to being ideologically opposed to conservatives. Of course, she had not applied such thinking to her assumption of having true information, or even to her assumption that her cause is so vitally important that it is worth hijacking her teaching role to spread her ideology in the classroom. What about nuclear war? What about AI getting out of hand? What about the impotency of human rights in the extant global order? Are teachers whose values galvanize to any of these issues not allowed to turn their respective classrooms into ideological soapboxes because these issues are not important enough? Strangely, she said that liberal arts students should come to “appreciate different ways of seeing things.” Apparently, this is so as long as their views are in sync with her ideology. I submit that different ways include unpopular, and thus disliked, ways. To the extent that the status quo itself has contributed to the problem of climate change, then thinking through alternative paradigms and getting to the root problem of the extant paradigm is of great value. I submit that the world needs a lot of different and more fundamental thinking even though ideological strictures narrow or even block such thinking.

Lastly, the panelist from ASU was dismissive of another panelist’s suggestion that in the humanities, the question of whether our “virus” species—think of the film, The Matrix—should survive should be asked. She said that’s a bad question, so she would bar it even in the humanities. Her prejudice was clear when she referred to the humanities as being “too Ivory Tower.”  Although the event was indeed atop the Kline Tower on Yale’s campus, the building’s exterior walls were still made of brick rather than ivory.

So, what can the humanities offer in line with the nature of that knowledge? Beyond scaling, I suggest that rather than showing ASU students maps of places that may be flooded from climate change, the distinction between a cause and symptoms should be studied. Going beyond the latter would be extremely beneficial to the survival of our species. I would include study of Thomas Malthus’s 1798 text, Essay on Population, because the expediential increase in (over) population during the twentieth century is arguably the root cause of climate change. Deep thinking, rather than being trained on decision-making skills, not only is the forte of the liberal arts (and sciences), but paradoxically can also leap over policy and technology in revealing the underlying problem, which is a prerequisite to really solving the problem rather than merely addressing admittedly injurious symptoms as they crop up. Malthus claims that a species’ population can outstrip its food supply, and I would add its energy supply. If we don’t self-regulate our species’ population, nature will step in, whether in pestilence, disease, or war, according to Malthus. We could add to these three a shift in the equilibriums of the global climate and ecosystems beyond the habitable zone for homo sapiens. We, the wise human species, likely have innate and learned attributes responsible for the astonishingly fast growth and size of human population on earth. So we can go even deeper than overpopulation by focusing in the humanities on its deep knowledge. Even theory development in the social sciences can be done in part to rectify the flawed institutional political and related economic systems and cultures that have enabled the explosive population growth. If our species of homo sapiens really is wise (sapientia), then reducing knowledge to skills that are the immediately useful seems perplexing to me. Ironically, going deeper has a better chance of solving a myriad of problems beyond a few quick fixes.


1. A. M. C. Waterman, Political Economy and Christian Theology since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 211.
2. Ibid.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Yale Vipers

Even though it is sometimes difficult to "read between the lines" to assess whether or not people in an organization are welcoming or tacitly "showing you the door," the message is undoubtable and even palpable when "all the arrows are pointing in the same direction." In the case of Yale, where I have been an alumni scholar temporarily in residence during the 2023-2024 year, the university's administration could do its alumni a big favor by explicitly saying that we are not welcome back on campus, except to visit and of course donate money. Instead, passive aggression, unaccountability, and even unwarranted retaliation rule the roust there, in what is a toxic organizational culture. 


The full essay is at "Yale Vipers."

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

On Universities Cancelling Classes on Some Minor Holidays for Ideological Purposes

Higher education is not valued equally in the various American states. Where academia is not particularly valued, other things can intercede as priorities even at the universities themselves at the expense of academics. In such places, even the universities themselves may value being academic institutions too little by allowing other societal agendas to eclipse the distinctly academic mission. Indeed, even academic administrators may be infected with an ideology currently in fashion societally, and insufficiently academically minded to thwart the interlarded non-academic values that seek hegemony even on academic campuses.

The value that a university places on its academic classes as a priority can be gauged by whether classes meet on minor holidays. Even if the length of the semester is not shorted as a result, breaking up contiguous class days may have negative academic effects. My point here, however, is that cancelling classes for minor reasons demonstrates a lack of respect for the academic functioning of universities as regards teaching and learning course material.

In 2019 at Yale, classes met on Columbus Day, Veterans Day, and Presidents Day even if administrative offices were closed. Harvard’s academic calendar explicitly stated that classes would meet on Veterans Day and President’s Day (Columbus Day being the exception among the minor holidays for the academic year). Classes are different; they are too important to be interrupted for every minor holiday. Yet those very academic universities have not been above cancelling classes on a minor holiday, and for ideological reasons. Martin Luther King's day is a case in point. 

Out in the provinces, Arizona’s major universities cancel classes for Veteran’s Day, perhaps out of deference to the military-industrial presence in the state. The privileging of that holiday is all the more conspicuous because Columbus Day is practically ignored, perhaps owing to the numbr of American Indians in Arizona. In fact, no mention was made of that holiday in the 2019-2020 academic calendars of the University of Arizona and Arizona State University—the latter having Fall Break instead on the Monday and Tuesday.
 
The cultural differentials between New England and Arizona cannot be ignored; they are essentially different countries. In 2017, Arizona teachers came in last in the U.S., and, moreover, K-12 (pre-college education) had consistently came in at 48th or 49th out of the 50 States for years. In an analysis by WalletHub, Arizona’s pre-college education came in at 49th out of the 50 States, whereas Massachusetts and Connecticut came in at first and third, respectively.[1] Including standardized tests such as the SAT gave the interstate comparison particular credence. Besides having a high drop-out rate at the high-school level, Arizona had a high drop-out rate at ASU and likely at the University of Arizona too given the low standardized entrance exam scores. We can conclude that education was valued much more in New England than in Arizona. 

I contend that ideology had come to play an outsided role not only in the creation of new national holidays in the U.S., but also in how much in a given state closes for a holiday. For example, not allowing classes to meet even at the public universities on Veterans Day in Arizona is a way of instilling the value of a military to young adults, many of whom could be expected to vote in line with what they believe is important. Businesses and the government of Arizona there doubtlessly benefitted by more money for military contractors. 

Of course, cancelling classes for minor holidays has a drawback. As cited above, Arizona has ranked 49 out of the 50 states on the quality of education, and that state has been known to be notoriously low in having a college-educated citizenry. The low value placed on education in Arizona has been exacerbated by the predominant politically conservative bent there. Even if the state was becoming competitive for both of the major parties, the extreme nature of the conservatism has been well documented. Enough of Arizona’s tax-payers have referred to taxes as theft (by the government) that the lack of K-12 funding per pupil and the high pupil-teacher ratio relative to the other States can be understood. Beyond the conservative politics, the sheer aggressive prejudice on the streets (i.e., low and perhaps middle-income residents) against ASU students and even highly educated people belies any suggestion that the locals respect higher education. The attitude obviously excluded respect for the academic functions of universities. Accordingly, the few major universities (ASU and AU) there strove for legitimacy in financial rather than academic terms. Students at ASU regularly referred to their university as being primarily about money. As a business, the university would follow the banks and close for the minor federal holidays. In effect, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University morphed into something more familiar to, and valued by the typical Arizona citizen. 

The role of ideology in deciding which minor holidays on which to cancel classes also infects the Ivy League universities. Even though the value of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln far surpasses that of Martin King for the U.S., the elite schools have not have classes on King's day but have had classes on President's Day (and Veterans Day). The picking and choosing among holidays that are all minor rather than one of the majors, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Independence Day, points to the involvement of ideology. I would expect all of the minor holidays to be insufficient in cancelling classes. The privileging of some such holidays over others is just not fair. I contend that interrupting the rhythem of a semester and sending the message that academics is not the highest value at a university, especially if the university is a citidel in protecting the value of academic knowledge, are not wise.  


1, Adam McCann, “States with the Best & Worst School Systems,” Wallethub.com, July 29, 2019.