Corrupting The University

In order to take control of a country, zealots have to undermine not just people who may have been educated to be independent thinkers, but the very idea and legitimacy of a liberal education. Those intent upon spreading belief in “the Big Lie,” for instance, must attack the institutions committed to truth-seeking and a commitment to verifiable evidence.

So we see the escalating attacks on knowledge, on science , on expertise. We see a co-ordinated effort to replace the very concept of education with the far less threatening goal  of job training.

And we see unremitting attacks on the nation’s universities.

I spent twenty-one years as a faculty member at a public university, and I would be the last person to claim that all is well in academia. There are plenty of legitimate criticisms that can–indeed, should–be leveled: bloated administrations, too-cozy relationships with moneyed donors, a knee-jerk tendency to “cancel” proponents of currently unpopular positions, and a depressing willingness to equate academic success with job placement statistics.

That said, the degree to which the GOP is waging war on education–at both the public school and college levels–  seems unprecedented.

I’ve previously posted about former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s efforts to destroy the University of Wisconsin–including his attempt to change the century-old mission of the University system by removing language about the “search for truth” and “improving the human condition” and replacing those phrases with “meeting the state’s workforce needs.”

At least Walker understood the need to be sneaky.  Florida Governor Ron DeSantis–a poster boy for today’s GOP–hasn’t bothered to hide his animus for science, truth and higher education. The results have been ugly.

A special panel created by the faculty at the University of Florida has completed a review of the academic environment there, and what it has to say is not flattering.  As The Miami Herald reports, the report shows that academics in Florida live in a literal state of fear; one where they don’t dare tell the truth out of fear of reprisals from Gov. Ron DeSantis. That’s particularly true when it comes to revealing the facts about COVID-19.

The report makes it clear that researchers felt a great deal of outside pressure in preparing research information for publication. That sometimes meant that information was delayed, or not published at all. In some cases, scientists were told not to reveal their affiliation with the university when releasing information, or to take the University of Florida name off presentations.

All because they were not allowed to do anything that could be viewed as criticizing DeSantis, or policies related to COVID-19. Faculty in the university’s Health Department were warned that funding might be “in jeopardy if they did not adopt the state’s stance on pandemic regulations in opinion articles.”

DeSantis’ attacks went well beyond his approach to COVID.

Course descriptions, websites, and other materials concerning the study of race and privilege had to be hidden, altered, or removed. The persecution in this area became so ridiculous that instructors were told:

“The terms ‘critical’ and ‘race’ could not appear together in the same sentence or document.”

Much of this bullying has occurred “under the radar,” but a few months ago, national media reported that the University of Florida was prohibiting three professors from testifying as experts in a lawsuit challenging a new law restricting voting rights. The prohibition was justified by the the University on the grounds that “it goes against the school’s interest by conflicting with the administration of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.”

There was a sufficient outcry that the University reversed that decision, but it is blindingly obvious that less well-publicized efforts to “get along” with the Governor remain in place.

It isn’t only Florida.

At a time when University Presidents are chosen more for their fundraising abilities than for their devotion to scholarship, some are using their authority to simply remove inconvenient scholarship from  their institutions. Here in Indianapolis, the administration of Marian University has simply eliminated its department of political science. 

The school’s administration has failed to offer a rationale for removing political science, a program with as many declared majors as most other liberal arts programs on campus —and which you would think is especially important, given the troubled state of U.S. political life–and especially since the faculty vociferously opposed the decision. The linked report notes that no other major was targeted for elimination.

The dispassionate pursuit of science, evidence and “inconvenient”  knowledge is being targeted by ideologues, autocrats and their facilitators. To the extent that they are successful, this country is in deep, deep trouble.

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Hype And Reality–Hoosier Version

It’s one thing when progressives or liberals criticize a state’s governance; it’s considerably more interesting–and should be more persuasive–when that criticism comes from the same side of the political aisle as the party controlling that state.

Aaron Renn is a conservative. He recently authored a lengthy article in a publication called American Affairs Journal (a publication with which I am unfamiliar) analyzing Indiana’s performance under the much-hyped “pro-business” model favored by the GOP supermajorities that dominate the Hoosier State. His recitation is much, much kinder to former Governor Mitch Daniels and even to former culture warrior/pious hypocrite Mike Pence than I personally feel is warranted, and his bona fides as a conservative are indisputable.

So what about performance? What does Renn see when he looks to the evidence supporting the “business-friendliness” of Indiana? Let me share a few of his statistics/observatons:

When Indiana became a Republican trifecta state, its average disposable income had actually declined to 89.5 percent of the national level. By 2019 (pre-pandemic),2 it had fallen slightly to only 89.4 per­cent, and during the pandemic it dropped to 88.7 percent in 2020. In short, under Republican leadership the state’s relative incomes started out low and got even lower….

Measured since the pre–Great Recession employment peak in 2007, Indiana has only grown its job base by 5.8 percent, trailing the national average of 9.4 percent…

Under Republican leadership, Indiana’s disposable incomes have declined relative to the national average. Since 2000, the state ranks a dismal forty-sixth in median wage growth, and the growth in median earnings has been at only half the rate of the rest of the country. Only 42 percent of workers in the state earn a living wage (adjusted for cost of living) and have employer-provided health insurance…

Indiana ranks thirty-ninth in its share of jobs in new companies, the major source of job creation, and has more old firms than young ones..

.Indiana’s demographics are also weak. During the 2010s, the state’s population grew by only 4.7 percent versus a national average of 7.4 percent. Its population growth rate has been decelerating since 2000. During the 2010s, the state grew at less than half the rate it did during the 1990s, when under Democratic gubernatorial leadership. Most of this drop mirrored the national trend, but Indiana’s growth rate declined more rapidly than the nation’s as a whole. Large portions of the state are either stagnant or declining in population. Over half of the state’s counties—forty-nine out of ninety-two—lost population during the 2010s.

Renn points out that weak population growth means equally weak labor force growth, which also means “that the era of job growth in Indiana is nearing an end.” If such job growth requires an educated population, we’re also out of luck: he notes that the state “also lags in educational attainment, with only 26.9 percent of the state’s adults holding a college degree, forty-second in the nation.”

He also acknowledges what our legislature–dominated by rural interests–persistently refuses to admit: to the extent there is any good economic news, it is due to the performance of the state’s metropolitan areas–especially Indianapolis. Indianapolis has 31 percent of the state’s population, but was responsible for 74 percent of the state’s population growth over the past decade, including, importantly, a “disproportionate and growing” share of the state’s educated residents.

That means that the parts of the state outside Indianapolis’ metro area are actually performing even more poorly than those weak state-level averages indicate.

What should concern our legislative overlords is another worrisome fact:  Indianapolis’ growth has come largely from the rest of the state. Renn reports that some 90 percent of the city’s net in-migration comes from the rest of Indiana; that is very different from the growth of Sunbelt cities like Austin, Nashville, and Raleigh, which have a national draw. In effect, he says, Indianapolis has grown by drain­ing the rest of the state.

Summing up, Renn says:

In the end, Indiana built its sandbox, but not very many people or businesses want to play in it, and the ones who do don’t have much money. The state attracts few new residents on net, and the businesses that are locating there are predominantly low-wage employers taking advantage of the state’s lower-skilled, poorly paid workforce.

Republicans like to talk about running government like a business. If Indiana actually were a business, shareholders would replace the man­agement after such a poor showing.

But of course, Indiana is gerrymandered to give outsized power to its dwindling number of rural residents, who resent the state’s city-dwellers and dismiss all the evidence of economic mis-management.

They’ll keep voting for the pro-gun, anti-choice, anti-vaccine (and frequently anti-Black) culture warriors –and buying into the clearly dishonest hype about Indiana’s “pro-business” policies.

Honest to goodness, Indiana!!

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A Damning Critique

When a noted Constitutional scholar and a retired federal judge jointly issue a damning critique of the current Supreme Court, the particulars of that criticism are worth considering.

Lawrence Tribe and Nancy Gertner have co-authored such an essay for the Washington Post.

Tribe, as Americans who follow such matters know, is a highly respected constitutional scholar who taught at Harvard; Gertner is a retired federal judge. Both served on Biden’s Commission charged with reviewing the operations of the Supreme Court , and both now endorse the (longstanding) scholarship advocating the addition of Justices. Interestingly, they write that they entered the Commission’s deliberations with different preferences for addressing the Court’s declining legitimacy–initially, both had favored term limits but not expansion.

They changed their minds.

After serving on the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court over eight months, hearing multiple witnesses, reading draft upon draft of the final report issued this week, our views have evolved. We started out leaning toward term limits for Supreme Court justices but against court expansion and ended up doubtful about term limits but in favor of expanding the size of the court.

In their essay, they explained that their vote in favor of the final report did not signal  agreement with all of it, but approval of the process, which they note accurately reflected the complexity of the issue and the diversity of views.

There has never been so comprehensive and careful a study of ways to reform the Supreme Court, the history and legality of various potential reforms, and the pluses and minuses of each. This report will be of value well beyond today’s debates.

In two paragraphs that sum up not just the opinions of these two experts, but–sadly–the all-too-obvious reality of where we find ourselves today, they accurately pinpoint the defects of today’s Court and the impact of those defects on efforts to remedy America’s ills.

But make no mistake: In voting to submit the report to the president neither of us cast a vote of confidence in the Supreme Court itself. Sadly, we no longer have that confidence, given three things: first, the dubious legitimacy of the way some justices were appointed; second, what Justice Sonia Sotomayor rightly called the “stench” of politics hovering over this court’s deliberations about the most contentious issues; and third, the anti-democratic, anti-egalitarian direction of this court’s decisions about matters such as voting rights, gerrymandering and the corrupting effects of dark money.

Those judicial decisions haven’t been just wrong; they put the court — and, more important, our entire system of government — on a one-way trip from a defective but still hopeful democracy toward a system in which the few corruptly govern the many, something between autocracy and oligarchy. Instead of serving as a guardrail against going over that cliff, our Supreme Court has become an all-too-willing accomplice in that disaster.

The essay accuses today’s Court of operating to entrench the power of one political party  by upholding measures to constrict the vote and deny ballot access to people of color and other minorities, and by “allowing legislative district lines to be drawn that exacerbate demographic differences”–i.e., refusing to hold gerrymandering unconstitutional.  And they note that, absent intervention, a Supreme Court that “has been effectively packed”  “will remain packed into the indefinite future, with serious consequences to our democracy.”

This is a uniquely perilous moment that demands a unique response.

The concluding paragraphs are worth pondering and– if the political will can be mustered (a critical unknown)–acted upon.

Though fellow commissioners and others have voiced concern about the impact that a report implicitly criticizing the Supreme Court might have on judicial independence and thus judicial legitimacy, we do not share that concern. Far worse are the dangers that flow from ignoring the court’s real problems — of pretending conditions have not changed; of insisting improper efforts to manipulate the court’s membership have not taken place; of looking the other way when the court seeks to undo decades of precedent relied on by half the population to shape their lives just because, given the new majority, it has the votes.

Put simply: Judicial independence is necessary for judicial legitimacy but not sufficient. And judicial independence does not mean judicial impunity, the illusion of neutrality in the face of oppression, or a surface appearance of fairness that barely conceals the ugly reality of partisan manipulation.

Hand-wringing over the court’s legitimacy misses a larger issue: the legitimacy of what our union is becoming. To us, that spells a compelling need to signal that all is not well with the court, and that even if expanding it to combat what it has become would temporarily shake its authority, that risk is worth taking.

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Could This Work?

A couple of weeks ago, a commenter posted a YouTube video from February of 2019, in which actress Jennifer Lawrence introduced viewers to a nonprofit organization called Represent Us.

You really need to click through and watch it, because the summary I’m about to provide is incomplete, and doesn’t do it justice.

The basic premise upon which the organization proposes to function is that mending American democracy must come at the state level–that only when we end corruption in a sufficient number of states will we be able to move the federal government and federal courts in a positive direction.

The video was made in 2019, and I haven’t heard anything about this effort in the intervening years, but according to its website, the organization remains active. It’s harder to tell whether–like so many other efforts to salvage the American Idea–it has failed to energize enough people to get the job done.

I had two competing reactions to that video.

The first was triggered by the imminent victory of the pro-fetal-life movement, which will overturn (explicitly or by eviscerating) Roe v. Wade. That will return the issue to the states, and in a “best-case” scenario, will activate a significant percentage of the 60% of Americans who want Roe retained and send an impressive number of them to their respective statehouses. If that happens–if voters in large-enough numbers are sufficiently enraged and motivated–the state-level reforms identified in the video are much more likely to occur.

That scenario is the optimistic one. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my optimism is at death’s door.

Over the last few months, I’ve had multiple discussions–with my children, with friends, with former colleagues–about the state of American and global governance. Attitudes ranged from deep depression to resigned acceptance, but virtually everyone I’ve talked to believes that–as one person put it– America is over. Democracy has had its day.  Autocrats  and their fearful and tribal supporters are on the ascent worldwide.

Of course, none of this may matter in the end, thanks to our unwillingness to confront climate change when we could have moderated its effects.

It’s hard to argue with this gloomy analysis.

When I look at the collection of deranged and incompetent people serving in Congress, when I think of the millions of people who cast their 2020 vote for a man whose terrifying inadequacies and mental illness were impossible to miss, and the large numbers who still believe in the Big Lie and QAnon…when I think of the state-level lawmakers focused on protecting the “rights” of nutcases with guns but who are unwilling to protect citizens from a pandemic (not to mention the culture warriors willing to die to “own the libs”) …It’s really hard to envision a happy ending.

If any of you can talk me off the edge, I’m listening…..

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Scapegoating

Indianapolis readers of this blog may remember P.E. MacAllister, now deceased. P.E. was a local businessman/philanthropist, the sort of Republican who used to exist “back in the day”–a model citizen who placed good government above partisanship, and when a Democrat was elected Mayor, willingly worked with him on city projects.

P.E. was also a serious biblical scholar, who wrote a book called–if memory serves–The Tongue of the Serpent. It was in his book (which he graciously gifted me) that I encountered the origins of scapegoating.

Evidently, in biblical times, the inhabitants of a village would come together, and one of them would lay hands on the head of a live goat while confessing all the iniquities of the people– all their transgressions, all their sins. They would put those sins  on the head of the goat, and send it away into the wilderness.

Where is that goat when you need it…??? Ah, well….

Scapegoating, as we all know, has evolved, with various marginalized folks taking the place of the goat. It now works with other unfortunate practices, especially hate speech and disinformation, and the prevalence and impact of all of those practices has been magnified by social media.

The Brookings Institution has published a report suggesting how concerned folks might deal with these techniques of spreading online racism. The report, titled “Bystander Intervention on Social Media,” stresses the need for online interventions against the “very real threats that can grow out of online abuse,” and identifies four primary discourses for spreading racism online: stereotyping, scapegoating, allegations of reverse racism, and echo chambers.

The researchers wanted to identify effective strategies available to bystanders that might be used to combat hate speech and misinformation online. At a time when many of us feel helpless to counter the mounting threats we face–growing tribalism, the rise of autocracy, climate change, etc. etc.–it’s comforting to be told that there is actually something individuals can do about at least one of the challenges we face–online racism.

We found that people of color are being targeted by organized misinformation efforts using digital technologies. We identified four primary racist discourses that operate on social media: stereotyping, scapegoating, allegations of reverse racism, and echo chambers. For example, Trump’s March 2020 tweet involves scapegoating in that he blames Chinese people and China for the spread of coronavirus in the U.S., thereby absolving his government of responsibility. Addressing racism on social media requires understanding that users who spread racist misinformation do so differently, sometimes compounding multiple forms of racism in just one post.

The researchers identified several techniques for combating online racism, and emphasized that they aren’t equally effective.

For instance, our study reveals that education and evidence-based or content-moderated discourse are prosocial techniques. These reactions to racist posts foster dialogue in the same way that they seek to debunk racist rhetoric. On the other hand, some methods, such as callouts, ridicule, and insults, were antisocial. These methods failed to minimize the hostility amongst users or against persons of color. Therefore, Internet users who want to speak out against online racism must consider the purpose of their interactions. If they want to reduce the presence of racism on social media, they must keep in mind that certain approaches may have the opposite effect.

Effective or not, the use of  any intervention tactics was relatively rare.  Most users on the platforms analyzed by the researchers simply refrained from intervening in racist conversations entirely. Only around one in every six Twitter conversations and somewhat fewer than 40% of Reddit discussions included any bystander behavior. The authors say that needs to change.

As the article concluded:

“Silence and inaction do nothing but cause biased perpetrator behaviors to proliferate as they feel unquestioned.” This is one of the most important implications from our analysis. Targeted aggressions can have real consequences on a victim’s mental and physical health. When bystanders step in and help to make aggressions visible, disarm the situation, educate the perpetrator, and seek external reinforcement or support, these approaches provide crucial support in preventing some of the most detrimental effects. Understanding the best strategies for online bystander intervention is the first step in targeting aggression online. If we want to see a genuine change in how social media users discuss racism, we must foster a digital culture that values prosocial discourse.

Distasteful as it can be to engage with bigots, we need to take this advice seriously.

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