@conor64 Greater financial support for grad students with families, creation of part-time tracks for PhDs, etc.
@conor64 Though I’m generally not very optimistic about any solution. This is a global trend across all liberal democracies. Hard to see it reversing very easily.
@conor64 I forgot to mention the obvious: faculty unionization.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I see that many people are already responding to this comment with suggestions from the poli sci literature, but I'd be a poor student indeed of @jtlevy if I didn't highlight some work from the epistemic turn in deliberative democracy.
First, Helene Landemore's "Democratic Reason". Rule by a philosopher king might sound nice, but there are all kinds of barriers and drawbacks. Landemore makes the case for inclusive decision-making and majority rule over rule by experts.
I feel like people are finally starting to take the Right's assault on academic freedom. That's very gratifying. If you're a journalist looking to fill some column inches, here are some stories I'd love to see getting more attention:
A North Dakota bill (close now to passage) would prohibit universities that partner with abortion providers from accessing key state grants and would penalize them under a popular funding formula.
The bill is widely understood to be targeting Professor Molly Secor-Turner, a North Dakota State sex ed scholar who uses Planned Parenthood for help distributing her research instruments to members of the community.
I don't really have anything to add to this thread. Despite what they say, it's obvious that legislators would use this survey to inform how they budget decisions, allocating different levels of support to schools or universities based on their politics.
Not to get too snotty about it, but one of the reasons that my own views on campus politics is so different from others working that beat is because my twitter timeline isn't exclusively filled with Lefties Run Amok. It's also filled with things like this.
Can't remember if I've mentioned this before, but I have half a dozen google alerts set up for buzzwords like "professor fired" or "course cancelled". Every day at 10:00am, I get a list of 20-30 incidents. Of those, roughly eighty percent involve allegations of sexual misconduct.
I guess what I'm saying is that depending on where you're sitting or how you get your news, things on campus can look very, very different.
This proposed ban on "divisive concepts" in Louisiana is by far the most sweeping bill to date. Everything is included. Public AND private, K-12 AND higher ed. It's all targeted for censorship.
With one exception: charter schools. Here you can really see the synergy between the anti-CRT/Woke crowd and the charter school movement. It's an increasingly common partnership.
As for the "divisive concepts" themselves, they're largely the same as the other bills floating around (and before that, Trump's EO), but there are few interesting additions I haven't come across before.
A group of Jewish students at Butler have written a letter on Angela Davis's deplatforming. Crucially, they insist that no Jewish student played any role in the decision to postpone the event. Not sure how they can know that, but it's what they say.
HOWEVER, they do seem to imply that they, the authors, complained to the student government about its decision to co-sponsor and fund the event. Since those complaints could easily have been the cause of the postponement, I'm not sure how their initial claim makes sense.
So there are still some outstanding questions about what happened.
The rest of the letter is a kind of special pleading we often see when national media targets students for snowflakery. "I'm being mocked online, I'm being bombarded with verbal abuse, this is hate speech," etc.