A response to some very thoughtful and intelligent reader feedback
Over at this site’s old home, I received the following comments in response to my higher ed piece:
Well.. you all prioritized indoctrination over fundamentals. You prioritized luxury for the tenured and the DEI administrations, rather than value to the student. And you all encouraged radicalism, Marxism, and antisemitism.
What did you all think would happen? Did you think you were creating something of value with all this? Seriously? You created a monster that ate its young, saddling them with debt, teaching them to hate, to prioritize ideologies that make people unhappy because they require a level of orthodoxy that is not attainable while at the same time teaching them to hate, envy, and denigrate any group designated by the acolytes of your religion.
Yes, I read the piece. All it talked about was symptoms. The problem is the ideology and values that allowed that system to dominate the higher education system.
And then this one:
Leftism is an ideology of self-loathing, hating one's gender, flag and history. And this is what's taught...no wonder there's a mental health crisis with our college aged youth.
I don’t know how a person could manage to find a post of mine and somehow think I’m a fan of DEI regimes or the left’s tendency to peformatively (and selectively) denounce western culture.
But, hey, maybe this means moving to Substack has increased my reach!
So here’s the thing: yes, I was primarily describing symptoms, because this essay is written from a first-person perspective as a series of anecdotes. I make some gestures toward more systemic causes of these trends but I don’t go into much detail. That would be a completely fair criticism if this essay were purporting to do something it’s not purporting to do.
The trends described in this piece have nothing to do with Marxism, nor with any other developments that most people would regard as explicitly ideological. Kids aren’t depressed because they’ve been tricked into being antisemitic. I do think there’s something to the notion that indoctrinating kids with pessimistic nihilism harms their mental health–it certainly fosters a “can’t win, don’t try” attitude, if nothing else–but the culture war shit this re-poster doesn’t like are not the root cause of anything.
DEI bullshit is a salve. It’s a means of establishing moral superiority and grasping toward a sense of agency while operating within a system that is very deeply broken on multiple fronts. There do exist people who perform land acknowledgements in the morning and then go straight to the synagogue to bid on freshly stolen Palestinian homes in the evening, but such profane creatures are thankfully pretty rare, even if they wield outsize influence over the state of the academy (and your brain). The vast majority of students are, at most, only tertiarily effected by the existence of mutants of this caliber. And while these students probably suffered some negative influence, at some point, by some variety of DEI stormtrooper, such experiences likewise didn’t have that much direct or noticeable impact on their day-to-day experiences as students.
Ultimately, this all redounds to the McKinziefication of higher education. I’m sorry to break this to you, but the people who goad institutions (large and small, corporate and non-profit) to regard all labor costs as waste and all automation/dehumanization as a priori good are the exact same ones who want to subject all human interaction to HR review. These vampires fucking love therapy speak and tattletale culture, and they have no problems whatsoever with teaching kids that all laws were created because of chattel slavery or that whiteness is a poison or whatever. Wokeness is, ultimately, a bipartisan project.
You’ve fallen for the same culture war bullshit that the people you hate have fallen for.