Fascinating post. It's curious to see the collapse of trust in the institution of higher education treated (in part) as something of a tactical problem, where "education is caught in the middle of this [partisan] war." I very much look forward to Part Two, which will consider the "various reform programs" aimed at the partisanship of the academy itself.
The treatment is curious because it implies that the threat to the legitimacy of modern American higher education (and primary and secondary education for that matter) lacks a basis in the reality of the state of education today. I certainly concede that "the manner [in which] [t]hese fields are being presented to non-progressives...is triggering social identity threat mechanisms" but I'm not clear what that has to do with the accuracy of the representation? When the Klan marches in Skokie it certainly triggers "social identity threat" amongst the Jewish population there, but that seems rather beside the point. Is there some way to talk about the Klan marching in Skokie that doesn't "trigger social identity threat"? Or the Iranian mullahs executing women who remove their hijab? Or Alex Jones lying about gun control advocates? Or right-to-life activists demonstrating outside of abortion clinics?
The pertinent thing about these examples - or any other, and you can see that it would be trivial to come up with dozens more - is simply sidestepped by addressing their effect on "social identity." The important issues are:
(1) Are the representations factual?
(2) Are the inferences drawn from the representations valid?
Very much to the Dr. Bork's credit, he writes here as an honest broker with respect to (1). Also, I'm impressed that he appears to be genuinely committed to as objectively truthful an answer to the second as is possible. On the second item, however, we're on much more subjective ground, and his frustration shows with respect to ideologically driven attitudes ("Partisan Motivated Reasoning") on the right, perhaps especially as it pertains to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
I'm not an academic, I haven't read Dr. Bork's dissertation, and it's been decades since I've been a university student, but I'm going to walk out on a limb here by responding to what strikes me as the not-quite-but-almost-explicit claim in this essay, especially in Section 5. Dr. Bork sounds like he is claiming that conservatives are engaged in delusional thinking when they believe that the universities are abandoning their traditional roles as defenders of free speech, open inquiry and the pursuit of objective truth in the social sciences, and falsifiable claims in the natural sciences.
I really do appreciate the commitment here. It's an intellectual abdication of responsibility to grasp only shallowly the manner in which the world occurs to people with whom you do not agree. That takes real work, and of course a person risks changing his mind in the process because he will have to allow himself to consider the actual strength of views written off earlier as venal, ill-informed, self-serving or lazy.
Universities today may or may not be transforming in a deep way. To find out which it is we will have to look deeply into what - if anything - is actually happening in them. It is not enough to notice that a partisan industry exists to take changes or rumors of changes and turn them into marketable conspiracies. We will need to dig deeper than that. As I said above, I look forward to Part Two.
When someone calls whoever a progressive they are saying that person is an elitist. When whoever calls themself a progressive they're saying I'm an elitist.
P.S. I just discovered that Dr. Bork's dissertation is online! Very cool. Here's the link:
https://mountainscholar.org/bitstream/handle/10217/235312/Bork_colostate_0053A_17106.pdf
Fascinating post. It's curious to see the collapse of trust in the institution of higher education treated (in part) as something of a tactical problem, where "education is caught in the middle of this [partisan] war." I very much look forward to Part Two, which will consider the "various reform programs" aimed at the partisanship of the academy itself.
The treatment is curious because it implies that the threat to the legitimacy of modern American higher education (and primary and secondary education for that matter) lacks a basis in the reality of the state of education today. I certainly concede that "the manner [in which] [t]hese fields are being presented to non-progressives...is triggering social identity threat mechanisms" but I'm not clear what that has to do with the accuracy of the representation? When the Klan marches in Skokie it certainly triggers "social identity threat" amongst the Jewish population there, but that seems rather beside the point. Is there some way to talk about the Klan marching in Skokie that doesn't "trigger social identity threat"? Or the Iranian mullahs executing women who remove their hijab? Or Alex Jones lying about gun control advocates? Or right-to-life activists demonstrating outside of abortion clinics?
The pertinent thing about these examples - or any other, and you can see that it would be trivial to come up with dozens more - is simply sidestepped by addressing their effect on "social identity." The important issues are:
(1) Are the representations factual?
(2) Are the inferences drawn from the representations valid?
Very much to the Dr. Bork's credit, he writes here as an honest broker with respect to (1). Also, I'm impressed that he appears to be genuinely committed to as objectively truthful an answer to the second as is possible. On the second item, however, we're on much more subjective ground, and his frustration shows with respect to ideologically driven attitudes ("Partisan Motivated Reasoning") on the right, perhaps especially as it pertains to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
I'm not an academic, I haven't read Dr. Bork's dissertation, and it's been decades since I've been a university student, but I'm going to walk out on a limb here by responding to what strikes me as the not-quite-but-almost-explicit claim in this essay, especially in Section 5. Dr. Bork sounds like he is claiming that conservatives are engaged in delusional thinking when they believe that the universities are abandoning their traditional roles as defenders of free speech, open inquiry and the pursuit of objective truth in the social sciences, and falsifiable claims in the natural sciences.
I really do appreciate the commitment here. It's an intellectual abdication of responsibility to grasp only shallowly the manner in which the world occurs to people with whom you do not agree. That takes real work, and of course a person risks changing his mind in the process because he will have to allow himself to consider the actual strength of views written off earlier as venal, ill-informed, self-serving or lazy.
Universities today may or may not be transforming in a deep way. To find out which it is we will have to look deeply into what - if anything - is actually happening in them. It is not enough to notice that a partisan industry exists to take changes or rumors of changes and turn them into marketable conspiracies. We will need to dig deeper than that. As I said above, I look forward to Part Two.
When someone calls whoever a progressive they are saying that person is an elitist. When whoever calls themself a progressive they're saying I'm an elitist.