Biden's Student Problem

The Perils of Pandering

The campus mess metastasizes. With immigration fading as an issue for the moment—the Mexican government has decided to help Biden staunch the flow—anarchy, spiced by overweening privilege, emerges as a possible flashpoint in the coming election. The ways and means of elite universities stand as a metaphor for the road the academic-left has traveled away from the rest of America. Here’s the New Yorker’s Louis Menand on academic freedom:

In the public square, you can say or publish ignorant things, hateful things, in many cases false things, and the state cannot touch you. Academic freedom doesn’t work that way. Academic discourse is rigorously policed. It’s just that the police are professors.

Faculty members pass judgment on the work that their colleagues produce, and they decide whom to hire, whom to fire, and what to teach. They see that the norms of academic inquiry are observed. Those norms derive from the first great battle over academic freedom in the nineteenth century—science versus religion. The model of inquiry in the modern research university is secular and scientific. All views and all hypotheses must be fairly tested, and their success depends entirely on their ability to persuade by evidence and by rational argument. No a-priori judgments are permitted, and there is no appeal to a higher authority.

There are, therefore, all kinds of professional constraints on academic expression. The scholarship that academics publish has to be approved by their peers. The protocols of citation must be observed, ad-hominem arguments are not tolerated, unsubstantiated claims are dismissed, and so on. [Italics mine.]

Say what? I search for a note of irony in this, but bump up against a wall of hopeless earnestness. Well, I guess that’s the way academic freedom is supposed to work and maybe it once did—and one hopes it still does, in the real sciences—but the current campuses have been populated by Baby Boom faculty ideologues who have corrupted the liberal arts. Robust intellectual debate has been trashed in the service of political correctness. Indoctrination too often supplants education; peer pressure makes a mockery of peer review. Virtue is signaled; there are trigger warnings, lest the terminally twee contemplate something…uncomfortable. The horror stories abound. Franklin Foer dipped into the faculty’s intimidation tactics at Columbia in The Atlantic a few months ago. Today, in the Wall Street Journal, Walter Russell Mead produces a depressing litany of the inaccuracies and foolishness our prize students are peddling:

Many of Hamas’s most passionate campus supporters believe that the organization wants to establish a secular Palestinian state. They also believe that Israeli Jews are European immigrants displacing an indigenous population—white settlers who should go home to Poland. [Note: Hamas is part of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood…and most Israelis are Mizrahi refugees from Arab oppression.]

They think that Israel survives only because America supports it and that an American president who “gets serious” with Israel can make it do almost anything he wants. They see Hamas as part of a global coalition of “progressive” movements advancing causes such as climate change, democracy and LGBTQ rights against global capitalism. People who share these perceptions can organize a march or build an encampment, but the wisest heads in the world all working together couldn’t craft a feasible diplomatic strategy based on such an incoherent and unrealistic view of the world.

Hardball politics is the art of creative conflation, and it’s only a short step from here to the argument—sure to be raised by Trump et al—that Joe Biden is wiping out student debt for red diaper anti-semites. Indeed, on Fox News last night, Brett Baier repeatedly, inaccurately, referred to the campus demonstrations as “anti-Semitic.” Some of the participants undoubtedly are Jew haters, and others are surely useful idiots, but most are legitimately aggrieved by the Israeli tactics in Gaza. Such complexities are well beyond the reach of public discourse, especially in a populist era befouled by social media.

So, one wonders about the political consequences of the massive debt relief giveaway to the college-educated. As my podcast partner John Ellis reports in News Items today:

Including the Biden Administration’s new student debt cancellation plan, we estimate all recent student debt cancellation policies will cost a combined $870 billion to $1.4 trillion. That’s more than all federal spending on higher education over the nation’s entire history. The vast majority of this debt cancellation was put in place through executive actions under President Biden.

$620 billion of debt cancellation has already been implemented, including $275 billion from President Biden’s new Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) program known as SAVE, $195 billion from cancelling interest as part of nearly 41 months of repayment pauses since March of 2020, and roughly $150 billion from a variety of more targeted actions such as discharging debt for those who attended closing schools and making it easier to cancel debt under existing loan forgiveness programs. The President’s newest debt cancellation scheme could cost an additional $250 to $750 billion based on our preliminary estimates.

And this is the thanks Joe Biden gets! Campuses seething with disingenuous academic intolerance, student “leaders” who want to “kill the zionists.” Sorry, Dr. Menand, but the notion of academic freedom at places like Harvard and Columbia has melted into left-authoritarian onanism. The various attempts by right-opportunists like Ron DeSantis to demagogue the issue notwithstanding, the academic elite has become diseased…and simplistic, a direct reflection of their coddled aversion to real life experience. Their straitened attempt to impose an oppressors v. oppressed matrix on history wouldn’t survive a rigorous peer review. I read Frantz Fanon like most other young liberals of my generation and his anti-colonialist point of view was valuable, but part of a much larger story. (Somehow the o v. o faddists neglect a vast human history of tribal warfare and exploitation that didn’t involve European colonists.) The lionization of critical race theories like spurious “anti-racism” inject a poisonous artlessness into complicated arguments; nuances become hard to come by. This has infected the Biden Administration, too. It has given far too much credence, and too many jobs, to the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity patrol.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Joe Biden shouldn’t want to have any part of those fools—and he should be making sure the public knows it. He doesn’t want to be seen giving vast financial breaks to the college-educated elite, especially without asking anything—like national service—in return, especially from those who financed advanced degrees on the public dime. He should want to find an appropriate balance between support for free speech and real outrage over obnoxious speech, a distinction his hapless press secretary had trouble making clear yesterday. He should celebrate programs like Seeds of Peace, which brings Israeli and Palestinian teens together; he might consider attending a sabbath dinner at Columbia’s Hillel Society, or having those beleaguered kids over for a shabbas at the White House. In an era of gestural politics, gestures matter. As much as he may “need” the youth vote, pandering to the over-privileged has real consequences. It falls too easily into stereotypes that the working class, of all shades, has about the Democratic Party. As NYT correspondent Jennifer Medina put it in an interview with David Leonhardt today, part of the reason why Latinos are drifting away from the Democratic Party is:

For a lot of these voters, there is a gut sense that the economy was better before the pandemic — and a perception that Trump has business acumen. Some are also repulsed by anything that they believe approaches socialism, like universal health care or college loan forgiveness. [Italics mine.]

For others, it is about religious values, including opposition to abortion. Then there is immigration: Many children and grandchildren of immigrants are repelled by what they see as the current chaos — people crossing illegally and being allowed to stay, people they believe are unfairly seeking asylum and so on.

Some voters simply delight in Trump’s willingness to skewer liberals and view him as the most entertaining politician in their lifetime. There is a kind of rebel factor: Many of these voters are the children of lifelong Democrats. They find Trump’s anti-establishment energy subversive and appealing.

Some people think this shift is about assimilation — that these voters are moving toward Republicans because they are becoming part of the white, non-Hispanic mainstream. Based on conversations with hundreds of these voters, I do not think it’s that simple.

When the Irish ran the Democratic machines that controlled urban politics a century ago, a great many Italians found their way into the Republican Party for similar reasons. As Michael Barone has written, Italian and Latino assimilation patterns track each other. But at least, back in the day, politics was about real life things like jobs; now it’s mostly about sensitivities. Which is why Biden’s splendid record of job creation has had so little impact. Which is why Biden’s subtle and creative diplomatic policy in the Middle East is lambasted from left and right.

Elite academia has played a disproportionate role in this. It should be—as Menand fantasizes—a force for rigorous liberal inquiry; instead, it has all too often become a theater of illiberality. I fear that the feckless Baby Boomer faculty-ideologues are paving the road toward a Trumpist authoritarianism.

Pitch

I’m trying to stay away from silliness like Governor Kristi Noem’s dogicide, which seems to have infected the news today. In this space, I’m trying to think through the more complicated stuff that will affect our politics and culture. I won’t always be right, of course, and I welcome your participation in the debate, especially your wise comments. You can subscribe to Sanity Clause for free, but paid subscribers get to fire back at me. If you think the exercise is valuable, punch this button: