Evidence shows these extremist positions come from Universities and Colleges - and they grow more and more extreme. But why? I speculate that it is due to "publish or perish" coupled with America having far too many professors in the humanities.
Getting tenure (and build a reputation) in Higher Ed requires publishing stuff that is "New" a…
Evidence shows these extremist positions come from Universities and Colleges - and they grow more and more extreme. But why? I speculate that it is due to "publish or perish" coupled with America having far too many professors in the humanities.
Getting tenure (and build a reputation) in Higher Ed requires publishing stuff that is "New" and compatible with the zeitgeist of the field.
In STEM fields, there are many unanswered questions that are related to active topics of research. A young scientist can select a question and publish an answer to build her/his reputation. Many scientific careers grew from picking a neglected topic and exploring it. The ultimate judge of the quality of these answers of question is Nature - via empiricism. Increasingly, STEM fields require large teams of Scientists who do competent work but do not have the reputation draw in grant dollars. (TBH: young scholars in STEM are starting to go woke, too. If the work cannot stand on its own, wokify it! Relabel your new, mediocre programming language as being trans- friendly! Whether or not you have had surgery and hormone treatment - it all compiles the same!)
It is harder in the humanities. First, humans have been talking about humans for millennia so there is little new to say about the human condition. Second, there isn't much funding for large teams to do big projects (and, frankly, how big of team do Humanities projects need?). This creates an environment for young humanities professors to make bold claims in order to get tenure and build their reputation (the alternative is to be assistant manager at a WalMart). To avoid that fate, many in the humanities take an old, popular argument and make it more extreme. For example, anti-racism asserts without evidence that everyone is either racist or anti-racist, with no grey areas. (making the state of racism unlike sex)
The next scholar has to push it further because just saying "S/He got it right" will not get you tenure. So the next one asserts without evidence that all Whites are intrinsically incapable of being anti-racist (but they point out that the fact that Whites cannot help being racists does not absolve them of blame!)
Now, we have humanities profs teach unwitting students about biological sex - they barely understand the biology and empiricism so they rely on sophistry and rhetoric to conflate biological sex with social gender. So the poor students come out less educated and more confused than when they went in - but they are very confident about their misunderstanding of biology. God help the families of those students when they return home for Thanksgiving!
I note that these woke-folks seem to be focused on issues related to race, identity and sex. I suspect it's because these topics attract adolescents and keep enrollments high (oh. I didn't mention the importance of enrollment - depts that have high enrollment grow whereas depts with low enrollments shrink). Also, since people tend to crave novelty profs have to keep pushing their positions, making them ever more extreme.
Here are 3 predictions of positions that will come out of academia in the next ten years:
1) Human sexes are on a spectrum but 'male' is not a legitimate sex on that spectrum - only female and intersex are. (They will have to redefine 'species' to explain how human males can interbreed with human females to produce fertile offspring - but that's child's play for them).
2) People who have sex with animals are not deviant, it's just a sexual orientation - anyone uncomfortable with humans having sex with animals is a bigot, and probably homophobic.
3) Recent arrivals from Africa - who tend to have more success than African-Americans whose families have been here for centuries - will be considered "White Adjacent".
Very interesting rundown on what happens in academia - you sound like you've spent rather a lot of time there. I think it's also that the kids want to hear a certain narrative and the academia model has d/evolved to treat students like customers, which they're not, but as you know 'the customer is always right'. So they learn a blinkered view of humanity that fits their constipated worldview and don't develop the resilience they need for the real world. Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff covered it in The Coddling of the American Mind. I also think critical everything theory simply provides an excuse to be a bigot (racist, antisemitic, misogynist, misandrist, homophobic, etc.) but against different people, or in different ways. (white people are evil, so are male people, white males are the worst, and anyone we don't like gets bleached (hence the sudden whitenizing of all Jews, and Asians to a certain degree, and yeah, I agree with her, some black people are going to find out they have been granted white privilege whether they want it or not. Yeah, I see the animals thing coming too, along with furries and 'Otherkin' as 'viable' identities, but I think the pedos will be moving in soon. I don't think biological sex can ever truly be considered a spectrum, but *feelings* about it could be. What a mad, insane, world we live in...
I enjoyed reading your reply to my overlong comment. I think we are in agreement. BTW: I have spent most of my adult life in academia, for 25 years I was a research astronomer and for the past decade or so, I have been teaching. I mostly teach General Ed Astronomy because my 'mission' is to increase science literacy in America - it is a quixotic quest because academia's science literacy is plummeting at a staggering rate. Let me give you an example:
I was having beers with some friends in academia when some of their friends show up and joined us - they teach Philosophy. I tend to have a lot of respect for Philosophy because doing science well requires us to think about how we are thinking about things (metacognition is the douchey term for it). One of these Philosophers mentioned that she teaches a class on sex and gender - I replied that I have had discussions with a *lot* of biologists whether sex is binary or not and it is a complicated topic.
She and her ally eagerly agreed and somehow made a case that complexity in Biology supports their position that sex is a spectrum. I kept saying "The community of biologists does *not* have a consensus that sex is a spectrum." That did not seem to make them hesitant, as Philosophers, to speak for the field of Biology.
They quoted one estimate that 'intersex' makes up 5% of the spectrum and I pointed out that many biologists dispute that estimate for being far too high (the most common estimate is between 1 & 2%). They dismissed that, saying a lot of people are intersex and don't know it, justifying cherry-picking the higher estimate. I replied that *real* scientists do not make up new numbers because the old numbers are flawed. *Real* scientists make better measurements to get better numbers. They brushed that aside.
Then they made the absurd case that 5% is a *huge* number - why that exceeds the percentage of redheads! I replied, "First, no 5% is not a huge number, would you accept a 5% COLA in your salary during this period of inflation?" Then, because I am a scientist and am very careful about comparisons, I said "Comparing the percentage of an entire spectrum of non-male & non-female to the percentage of a SINGLE category of hair color is an apples to oranges comparison. It would only be valid if their position was that there are three sexes."
Once I got into the topic of measurements and analysis, they reverted to rhetoric and essentially based everything on their feelings and the feelings of intersex people (I should have walked away, saying I was searching for a person who is one exact sex: tight tush, big rack ... and a vagina. The last part is non-negotiable)
After beers one of the profs - who had a BS in Biology and wisely stayed out of it - told me that we were quibbling whether these variations are within the two sexes or constitute another sex, but the words do not change their nature or reality. Folks in the humanities spend all of their time thinking about things that humans have created so they lose sight of the Universe out there. It was there before us, it will be there after us, and it exists entirely independent of us. Our words and thoughts do not change it.
Maybe y'all should challenge them more on feelings. They may be *part* of the humanities but in the end, for something like sex, it's pretty immutable...feelings notwithstanding, you can't say transwomen are women because biology says they're not; and it's the gametes, as you point out, that ultimately define them. Everything else is window dressing, although it strikes me that bio males always think like bio males to some extent, as do bio females. Elliott Page is the most chicky transmale I've seen so far. I'm quite sure she will one day regret what she did to herself; it seems so ridiculously inauthentic, and I wouldn't say that about all transfolk.
I agree mostly, except the part about engaging with them. Arguing with an intellectual is like mud wrestling with a pig - you both wind up covered in muck but the pig actually likes it!
Instead, we should get word out that _some_ college degrees aren't worth the price. They don't provide marketable skills beyond what should have been learned in High School. Also, if a person must work 3 jobs to pay rent and student loans, then they don't have time & energy to ponder all the deep thoughts that these degrees introduce. It is just a waste. I call these 'dilettante degrees' because only kids with trust funds can afford to major in them.
Going to college nowadays is like entering indentured servitude - you have to work the rest of your life to earn your freedom. How ironic they bandy about decolonization when they are the biggest colonizers of the modern era.
Thank you for posting that video! It is excellent. I had heard most of those points before (Dr Asher has been saying this for a few years now) but that video is a nice summary of his points (there is an accompanying article on substack: https://boghossian.substack.com/p/dr-lyell-asher-why-colleges-are-becoming
Evidence shows these extremist positions come from Universities and Colleges - and they grow more and more extreme. But why? I speculate that it is due to "publish or perish" coupled with America having far too many professors in the humanities.
Getting tenure (and build a reputation) in Higher Ed requires publishing stuff that is "New" and compatible with the zeitgeist of the field.
In STEM fields, there are many unanswered questions that are related to active topics of research. A young scientist can select a question and publish an answer to build her/his reputation. Many scientific careers grew from picking a neglected topic and exploring it. The ultimate judge of the quality of these answers of question is Nature - via empiricism. Increasingly, STEM fields require large teams of Scientists who do competent work but do not have the reputation draw in grant dollars. (TBH: young scholars in STEM are starting to go woke, too. If the work cannot stand on its own, wokify it! Relabel your new, mediocre programming language as being trans- friendly! Whether or not you have had surgery and hormone treatment - it all compiles the same!)
It is harder in the humanities. First, humans have been talking about humans for millennia so there is little new to say about the human condition. Second, there isn't much funding for large teams to do big projects (and, frankly, how big of team do Humanities projects need?). This creates an environment for young humanities professors to make bold claims in order to get tenure and build their reputation (the alternative is to be assistant manager at a WalMart). To avoid that fate, many in the humanities take an old, popular argument and make it more extreme. For example, anti-racism asserts without evidence that everyone is either racist or anti-racist, with no grey areas. (making the state of racism unlike sex)
The next scholar has to push it further because just saying "S/He got it right" will not get you tenure. So the next one asserts without evidence that all Whites are intrinsically incapable of being anti-racist (but they point out that the fact that Whites cannot help being racists does not absolve them of blame!)
Now, we have humanities profs teach unwitting students about biological sex - they barely understand the biology and empiricism so they rely on sophistry and rhetoric to conflate biological sex with social gender. So the poor students come out less educated and more confused than when they went in - but they are very confident about their misunderstanding of biology. God help the families of those students when they return home for Thanksgiving!
I note that these woke-folks seem to be focused on issues related to race, identity and sex. I suspect it's because these topics attract adolescents and keep enrollments high (oh. I didn't mention the importance of enrollment - depts that have high enrollment grow whereas depts with low enrollments shrink). Also, since people tend to crave novelty profs have to keep pushing their positions, making them ever more extreme.
Here are 3 predictions of positions that will come out of academia in the next ten years:
1) Human sexes are on a spectrum but 'male' is not a legitimate sex on that spectrum - only female and intersex are. (They will have to redefine 'species' to explain how human males can interbreed with human females to produce fertile offspring - but that's child's play for them).
2) People who have sex with animals are not deviant, it's just a sexual orientation - anyone uncomfortable with humans having sex with animals is a bigot, and probably homophobic.
3) Recent arrivals from Africa - who tend to have more success than African-Americans whose families have been here for centuries - will be considered "White Adjacent".
Very interesting rundown on what happens in academia - you sound like you've spent rather a lot of time there. I think it's also that the kids want to hear a certain narrative and the academia model has d/evolved to treat students like customers, which they're not, but as you know 'the customer is always right'. So they learn a blinkered view of humanity that fits their constipated worldview and don't develop the resilience they need for the real world. Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff covered it in The Coddling of the American Mind. I also think critical everything theory simply provides an excuse to be a bigot (racist, antisemitic, misogynist, misandrist, homophobic, etc.) but against different people, or in different ways. (white people are evil, so are male people, white males are the worst, and anyone we don't like gets bleached (hence the sudden whitenizing of all Jews, and Asians to a certain degree, and yeah, I agree with her, some black people are going to find out they have been granted white privilege whether they want it or not. Yeah, I see the animals thing coming too, along with furries and 'Otherkin' as 'viable' identities, but I think the pedos will be moving in soon. I don't think biological sex can ever truly be considered a spectrum, but *feelings* about it could be. What a mad, insane, world we live in...
I enjoyed reading your reply to my overlong comment. I think we are in agreement. BTW: I have spent most of my adult life in academia, for 25 years I was a research astronomer and for the past decade or so, I have been teaching. I mostly teach General Ed Astronomy because my 'mission' is to increase science literacy in America - it is a quixotic quest because academia's science literacy is plummeting at a staggering rate. Let me give you an example:
I was having beers with some friends in academia when some of their friends show up and joined us - they teach Philosophy. I tend to have a lot of respect for Philosophy because doing science well requires us to think about how we are thinking about things (metacognition is the douchey term for it). One of these Philosophers mentioned that she teaches a class on sex and gender - I replied that I have had discussions with a *lot* of biologists whether sex is binary or not and it is a complicated topic.
She and her ally eagerly agreed and somehow made a case that complexity in Biology supports their position that sex is a spectrum. I kept saying "The community of biologists does *not* have a consensus that sex is a spectrum." That did not seem to make them hesitant, as Philosophers, to speak for the field of Biology.
They quoted one estimate that 'intersex' makes up 5% of the spectrum and I pointed out that many biologists dispute that estimate for being far too high (the most common estimate is between 1 & 2%). They dismissed that, saying a lot of people are intersex and don't know it, justifying cherry-picking the higher estimate. I replied that *real* scientists do not make up new numbers because the old numbers are flawed. *Real* scientists make better measurements to get better numbers. They brushed that aside.
Then they made the absurd case that 5% is a *huge* number - why that exceeds the percentage of redheads! I replied, "First, no 5% is not a huge number, would you accept a 5% COLA in your salary during this period of inflation?" Then, because I am a scientist and am very careful about comparisons, I said "Comparing the percentage of an entire spectrum of non-male & non-female to the percentage of a SINGLE category of hair color is an apples to oranges comparison. It would only be valid if their position was that there are three sexes."
Once I got into the topic of measurements and analysis, they reverted to rhetoric and essentially based everything on their feelings and the feelings of intersex people (I should have walked away, saying I was searching for a person who is one exact sex: tight tush, big rack ... and a vagina. The last part is non-negotiable)
After beers one of the profs - who had a BS in Biology and wisely stayed out of it - told me that we were quibbling whether these variations are within the two sexes or constitute another sex, but the words do not change their nature or reality. Folks in the humanities spend all of their time thinking about things that humans have created so they lose sight of the Universe out there. It was there before us, it will be there after us, and it exists entirely independent of us. Our words and thoughts do not change it.
Maybe y'all should challenge them more on feelings. They may be *part* of the humanities but in the end, for something like sex, it's pretty immutable...feelings notwithstanding, you can't say transwomen are women because biology says they're not; and it's the gametes, as you point out, that ultimately define them. Everything else is window dressing, although it strikes me that bio males always think like bio males to some extent, as do bio females. Elliott Page is the most chicky transmale I've seen so far. I'm quite sure she will one day regret what she did to herself; it seems so ridiculously inauthentic, and I wouldn't say that about all transfolk.
I agree mostly, except the part about engaging with them. Arguing with an intellectual is like mud wrestling with a pig - you both wind up covered in muck but the pig actually likes it!
Instead, we should get word out that _some_ college degrees aren't worth the price. They don't provide marketable skills beyond what should have been learned in High School. Also, if a person must work 3 jobs to pay rent and student loans, then they don't have time & energy to ponder all the deep thoughts that these degrees introduce. It is just a waste. I call these 'dilettante degrees' because only kids with trust funds can afford to major in them.
Going to college nowadays is like entering indentured servitude - you have to work the rest of your life to earn your freedom. How ironic they bandy about decolonization when they are the biggest colonizers of the modern era.
Agreed. Also:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hybqg81n-M
Thank you for posting that video! It is excellent. I had heard most of those points before (Dr Asher has been saying this for a few years now) but that video is a nice summary of his points (there is an accompanying article on substack: https://boghossian.substack.com/p/dr-lyell-asher-why-colleges-are-becoming
Thanks for posting the article!
C’mon now! Stop confusing us with the facts! It’s not FAIR!!!! Whaaaaah!!!
A very good analysis of why:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hybqg81n-M