Academe's Divorce from Reality
The Chronicle of Higher Education
The politics of the academy have been defeated. Its ideas, its assumptions, its opinions and positions — as expressed in official statements, embodied in policies and practices, established in centers and offices, and espoused and taught by large and leading portions of the professoriate — have been rejected. This was already evident before November 5. It can now no longer be denied.
Some data points: A post-election survey from Blueprint, a Democratic polling firm, discovered that, among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, “Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues than helping the middle class” ranked third, after only inflation and illegal immigration. Among swing voters, it ranked first. California approved a ballot measure to stiffen penalties for theft and drug crimes by a margin of 69-31. Los Angeles elected a former Republican as district attorney over the progressive incumbent by 61-38. Alameda County, which covers most of the East Bay including Berkeley, recalled its progressive DA by 63-37. Portland, Ore., elected a former businessman as mayor over the leading progressive candidate by 18 points.
We’ve seen comparable results in recent years. In 2020, California rejected affirmative action by 57-43. In 2021, Seattle elected a Republican city attorney over a police abolitionist, New York City elected Mayor Eric Adams — despite his manifest deficiencies — on a law-and-order platform, and Buffalo, N.Y., reelected its mayor as a write-in candidate by 19 points over the socialist to whom he had lost in the Democratic primary. In 2022, San Francisco recalled three progressive members of its Board of Education by lopsided margins, then recalled its progressive DA.
Survey findings tell the same broad story. A Marist poll this year revealed that 57 percent of Latinos surveyed are in favor of deporting all illegal immigrants. A Pew poll showed that 75 percent of Black respondents and 85 percent of Latinos are in favor of voter ID laws. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions, Gallup found that 52 percent of Black and 68 percent of Latino adults supported the decision. Another Pew poll, consistent with earlier findings, showed that only 4 percent of Latinos use “Latinx,” and that of those who have heard of the term, the vast majority reject it. And then there are perhaps the most important data points of all. Donald Trump increased his support among Black, Latino, and Asian voters from 2016 to 2020, then increased it again from 2020 to 2024 (he also got a majority of the Native American vote). The light was blinking. Now it’s solid red.
Over the last 10 years or so, a cultural revolution has been imposed on this country from the top down. Its ideas originated in the academy, and it’s been carried out of the academy by elite-educated activists and journalists and academics. (As has been said, we’re all on campus now.) Its agenda includes decriminalization or nonprosecution of property and drug crimes and, ultimately, the abolition of police and prisons; open borders, effectively if not explicitly; the suppression of speech that is judged to be harmful to disadvantaged groups; “affirmative” care for gender-dysphoric youth (puberty blockers followed by cross-sex hormones followed, in some cases, by mastectomies) and the inclusion of natal males in girls’ and women’s sports; and the replacement of equality by equity — of equal opportunity for individuals by equal outcomes for designated demographic groups — as the goal of social policy.
It insists that the state is evil, that the nuclear family is evil, that something called “whiteness” is evil, that the sex binary, which is core to human biology, is a social construct. It is responsible for the DEI regimes, the training and minders and guidelines, that have blighted American workplaces, including academic ones. It has promulgated an ever-shifting array of rebarbative neologisms whose purpose often seems to be no more than its own enforcement: POC (now BIPOC), AAPI (now AANHPI), LGBTQ (now LGBTQIA2S+), “pregnant people,” “menstruators,” “front hole,” “chest feeding,” and, yes, “Latinx.” It is joyless, vengeful, and tyrannical. It is purist and totalistic. It demands affirmative, continuous, and enthusiastic consent.
People are fed up, and I don’t just mean people who voted for Trump. A few days after the election, I was listening to The Brian Lehrer Show on New York Public Radio, which was broadcasting one of those endless postmortems that the media has been conducting, when another listener called in. She identified herself as Black, a Berkeley grad, “super liberal,” and a resident of Brownsville, a largely Black neighborhood. Referring to the burden that the influx of asylum-seekers has placed on the city’s resources and therefore on people’s lives (“I’m talking about Black people here, at the lower end of the economic spectrum”), and how you weren’t supposed to talk about it, how if you did talk about it you were accused of being racist, how you weren’t even supposed to notice it, how people were being asked “to engage in a cognitive dissonance that is literally not possible,” she finally said, with beautiful succinctness, “When did liberalism mean no common sense?” It’s clear that many Democrats have been wondering the same thing.
How did things get to this pass? And how did the academy, the school and citadel and engine of this revolution, become so desperately out of touch with reality, including the reality of people’s lives outside the liberal elite, their needs and beliefs and experiences? One answer is that academics tend to live inside a bubble. They socialize with other academics; far more than used to be the case, they marry other academics; and, of course, they work with other academics. When groups whose members are broadly similar in outlook are isolated from external influences, two things happen: Their opinions become more homogeneous, and their opinions become more extreme. Which is exactly what’s been taking place in the academy in recent decades. The ratio of liberals to conservatives has soared, and more of those who identify as left identify as far left. And both of those trends are more pronounced in the fields and institutions that are leading the revolution: the humanities, the social sciences exclusive of economics, the “studies” programs and departments, the schools of education and social work, the elite universities, and the liberal-arts colleges.
Those fields have another thing in common: They are intellectually corrupt. You know what I’m talking about. Any fool idea passes muster, no matter how preposterous, as long as it conforms to prevailing theoretical trends and preferred ideological positions. Nobody wants to make waves: to speak up at a conference, to undermine a colleague or colleague’s student, to invite examination of their own research. Data is massaged; texts are squeezed or bound and gagged. Jargon helps to paper over cracks in logic; countervailing evidence is tucked under the cushions. Standards are ignored to the point where no one can even recall what they are anymore. It’s no wonder that the social sciences are suffering a replication crisis. In the humanities, there is no crisis, because there is no replication to begin with, no factual claims to reproduce, only “readings,” “interventions,” “Theory.”
The reason that these disciplines can drift so far from reality is that they are not answerable to reality. If an engineer miscalculates an equation, the building falls down. But what would accountability to reality even mean in the humanities, given that their findings are never applied? It’s not like there are going to be consequences for saying something stupid about Shakespeare. In the social sciences, and, less often, in the hybrid “studies” fields, findings are applied, but it isn’t clear that there’s much of a feedback loop there either. How many hypotheses in psychology have been abandoned because they led to bad educational policy? How many gender-studies scholars have rethought their suppositions in the face of the calamity of gender youth medicine? The more a field becomes beholden to theory, or Theory, the further it floats away from empirical observation and therefore correction. The enterprise becomes entirely self-referential, words built on words, a kind of intellectual Ponzi scheme.
So how are academics going to respond to their political repudiation? One alternative — the likeliest one — will be to stay the course. The people have spoken, but the people are wrong. They’ve been misinformed and disinformed. They are victims of false consciousness, too benighted to understand their own interests. They are racist, sexist, xenophobic, yearning for a strongman. The attitude reminds me of the few American Communists who were still around when I was young — scientifically certain of everything as they headed ineluctably toward political extinction.
But academics have another option. They can entertain the possibility that they’ve been wrong, about a lot of things and for a long time. They can consider that the notion that Harris lost because of racism and sexism is belied by the fact that we have already elected a Black president; that Harris received a larger share of the white vote than Joe Biden; that a female presidential candidate has already won the popular vote; that the nation, far from distrusting women with executive office, has elected 44 female governors in 31 states; that 16 of those governors have been Republicans, which means that most Republicans supported them; that those states include not only blue or purple ones but Alabama, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and South Dakota; that Kansas and Texas have actually elected Democratic women governors; and that while there are surely people in this country who wouldn’t vote for a woman or nonwhite presidential candidate, they also surely wouldn’t vote for any Democrat. That Harris lost for other reasons altogether.
They might further consider that the majority of Black, Latino, and Asian Americans do not share their politics or ideology; that the people who speak for those communities in elite liberal spaces — not only colleges and universities but the media, the arts, the nonprofits — share the politics and points of view not of those communities but of other liberal elites and therefore do not, in the simplest and most important sense, represent them; that progressives have been promulgating policies in the names of those communities that they reject — for Blacks, police defunding and abolition; for Latinos, lax immigration and border enforcement — and that they reject them for good reasons. That identity is not a very useful way of understanding people’s motivations.
Finally, they might consider that to say that certain people “vote against their interests” is not only condescending but wrong. People know what their interests are. They know it much better than you do. Their interests are the same as everybody else’s: public safety, economic security and opportunity, and on top of that a little dignity, a little respect. And while Trump is hardly likely to advance those goals, the 80 percent of the country that lies below the upper middle class is perfectly justified in doubting whether the Democratic Party, and the elites that run and influence it, will do so either, because for decades they have not. Yes, Trump is appalling, evil, criminal. But the worse he is, the worse the liberal elite must be, if so many prefer him to them.
Ten years ago, I published a book, Excellent Sheep, that argued that the meritocratic elite, which includes the professoriate as well as the academy’s administrative class, had become self-serving, self-perpetuating, and, as leaders of our most important institutions, incompetent. It had lost its authority. It had lost its legitimacy. The time had come for it to step aside in favor of a new, more democratic dispensation. Nine months after the book came out, the rough beast glided down his gilded escalator. A few months after that, a wild-haired septuagenarian socialist almost single-handedly destroyed the Clinton-Obama establishment. One would think the message would’ve been received by now. The message is you failed. Sit down, be humble, and listen and learn.