Educational Polarization Doesn't Work How You Think

There isn't much cancellation but many features of college campuses serve to reinforce certain values.

I was recently listening to the best podcast on the internet, Blocked and Reported.

TracingWoodgrains

, one of the people who produces the show, is tragically leaving. In his final episode, he provided quite a good description of what it’s like not to be a progressive in law school. In it, he described that there wasn’t much censorship—if you express a conservative view in class, no one will hurl eggs at you or call you mean names. But much of the way law school functions serves to make it something of a left-wing echo chamber.

He described that the Federalist Society was effectively defunct. In its place were half a dozen different left-wing organizations, each competing to outleft the others, each describing, in their messaging, that they’re not one of those old-school boring progressive groups that just supports Biden—no, they’re one of the cool, radical ones that supports prison abolitionism and such. The speakers that came to law school were often prison abolitionists, and they’d discuss how to use your law degree in radical left-wing ways.

This has very much matched my experience on a liberal college campus. Now, I’m a liberal, but I have lots of weird, heterodox views that are unpopular among liberals, and I’m very against echochambers. Colleges are overwhelmingly staffed by liberals—who outnumber conservatives in teaching positions by a factor of 6:1 and in administrative positions by a factor of 12:1. The students are also overwhelmingly liberal—at Ivy leagues, for example, only 12% of the student body is conservative.

Given this, it’s no surprise that colleges have, in various ways, a clear ideological slant, just as it’s no surprise that Brigham Young University has a Mormon slant. But I think conservatives often get wrong exactly how that happens. It’s mostly subtle things, cases where you have to be a bit disagreeable to voice right-wing views or offhand remarks from teachers and students.

The most obvious sign of the left-wing slant was, for the last several months, the encampment on the diag—the central place where people generally go to table. There were people sleeping in tents on the diag, chanting about freeing Palestine from the river to the sea. There were some administrators and teachers who went there, but it was mostly student-run.

No conspiracy was needed. No shouting down of right-wing speakers. All that was needed was a bunch of left-wing people, supportive of Palestine, to set up an encampment and start chanting about it. Unsurprisingly, there was never a right-wing encampment, nor could there be. There wouldn’t be enough conservatives to do such a thing, and it would get shut down immediately, with overwhelming support from the overwhelmingly liberal class.

The conservative clubs at my college are effectively defunct, unable to consistently draw more than half a dozen people. Again, no nefarious left-wing actions were needed, just overwhelmingly liberal demographics. This is the general trend; because most people are left-wing, they do left-wing things, making it so that there’s a bit of social pressure to conform to left-wing views.

What is most common, however, is just the offhand comments in classes and in social life that make it clear that everyone is liberal. In many classes, everyone starts by sharing their pronouns. Whatever one thinks about the merits of pronoun sharing, it is something that has never been done by a conservative, in the history of the world. As Huemer writes:

It’s increasingly common among woke elites to introduce yourself with your name and “your pronouns”. At a high school Ethics Bowl event that I witnessed recently, all ten of the students from the two opposing teams introduced themselves at the beginning of the round. Every single one of them included “my pronouns are …” or “I use … pronouns”.* Every one listed the obvious pronouns that you would have assumed immediately upon seeing them – the males (who all looked obviously male) said “he/him”; the females (who all looked obviously female) said “she/her”.

[*Only in one of the rounds. In the other rounds I saw, pronoun-reports were less unanimous. But all appeared to be from binary cisgender people.]

What were they doing? On the surface, they were helpfully informing the audience about their genders. But they weren’t in fact doing that, since their genders were visually obvious, and none of them was transgender or non-binary. Their genders were also irrelevant in any case, and no one had asked them about that.

Oh, but they were informing us about another group-membership characteristic. They were signaling their woke political orientation. Again, this is an approximately 100% reliable signal; no non-woke person introduces themselves with “my pronouns are …”.

…

Say you’re a liberal democrat. Say you show up at a new job, and every single coworker in your office has “Make America Great Again” bumper stickers. When they talk to you, they ask you questions that presuppose that of course you must be an alt-right republican, like, “Can you believe that Biden speech last night?” You would probably feel that you don’t belong there.

That’s probably how conservatives feel in nearly every classroom in nearly every university. And in the Ethics Bowl. And speech and debate. And the whole field of education. And every other area that woke ideologues have taken over. Because the ideologues will not stop constantly repeating left-wing shibboleths.

In classrooms, whenever something political came up, people almost exclusively repeated left-wing points of view. You weren’t barred from saying anything conservative, it just made you that one conservative guy. Most agreeable people don’t want everyone to think of them as “the one guy who has views of type X.”

For example, I took a class about North Africa. The class almost exclusively discussed colonialism, treating the notion that Colonialism is wholly responsible for African poverty as essentially an article of faith. At one point, we discussed whether it would be racist for a black person not to go into a bar because it had lots of white people. Everyone who spoke agreed it would not be. Everyone—with one exception—also agreed that if a white person didn’t go into a black bar because it had too many black people, that would be deeply racist. People wildly contorted themselves to explain this divergence in judgments, adding epicycle after epicycle to their theory.

Could one have disagreed with the consensus? Sure. In fact, I did. But doing so gets you some weird looks. Lots of people are very, very put off by weird looks.

In that class, at a later point, a guest lecturer came in to talk about lots of things. Among other things, he talked about right-wing anti-intellectualism, making various wildly crazy claims like that Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson are deeply anti-intellectual. No one batted an eye. These people had clearly not spent any time listening to either figure—for if they had, they’d know Shapiro is a giant politics nerd. He may be wrong, but he’s definitely an intellectual. In one of his interviews, he cited Derek Parfit, for heaven’s sake! This is atypical anti-intellectuals who hate education! Much of Jordan Peterson’s allure comes from the fact that he says things that his fans like, all while having significant ethos as a professor.

One could, of course, disagree with the professor. But the default narrative discussed by professors is very clearly left-wing. Unless a student disagrees, all that one will hear is a left-wing point of view.

It’s not just in classrooms. In general life in college, people just don’t really say conservative things. If they do, they say them sort of apologetically and in hushed tones. When people say things that even hint at being conservative, they’ll try to wrap it up in left-wing language. For example, they’ll say things like “obviously Trump sucks and is very old, but it is pretty funny how old and senile Biden is.” If people complain about harmful messages spread by feminists, they feel the need to first voice their support for feminism, saying, for example, “obviously feminism is very important, but it’s kind of weird how a lot of people say #killallmen.”

The movie God’s Not Dead (he’s surely alive, he’s living on the inside roaring like, etc) shows the way that many conservatives seem to think the left-wing slant on college campuses takes place. In it, the main character is asked, along with the rest of the class to sign a waiver saying that God is dead. But he won’t do that—he’s a Christian—and so he has to debate in front of the entire class against the professor! I want to cite this movie as the best example of what the left-wing slant on campus does NOT look like, but what people think it does.

There are no dramatic displays of force, no yelling at random people. Mostly it’s just people sharing their views, with casual sarcastic remarks about conservative views. Just as if everyone had a MAGA hat on campus, progressives would feel unwelcome, the fact that people are constantly signaling their left-wing political affiliation makes people quite afraid to diverge from the party line. It’s no surprise that 83% of people self-censor, given this climate.