This is very true, but I’d add from experience that paring meetings down to the bare minimum pares down collective decision-making to (and sometimes below) the bare minimum. It fosters a sense that a few people can run things as long as an email follows. That’s a very mixed bag.
COVID exacerbates this; outside meetings I have none of the contact with people in the university that I normally would. But meanwhile all the same administrative agendas and questions about resources and workload are getting hashed out and signed off on, with less consultation.
This is more speculative, but I also think that just as the Zoom format makes some aspects of interaction easier, it also makes a certain disregard of surroundings (audience, mood, gesture) easier than it is when those surroundings are present rather than virtual or out of frame.
Rather than a conversation wherein various contributions get enmeshed in a sense of what the group thinks, what results can come off as a series of statements and counter-statements, like a comments thread, with no evident collective conclusion. Except the decision still follows.
I should say that even before COVID I was a big believer in minimizing meetings and emails, and when the pandemic hit this seemed initially to work very well at some levels, notwithstanding alarming silences from the admin and union leadership on pressing issues.
But as the forced flexibility and uncertainty of the early crisis recede somewhat, all the old agendas and issues return, but with none of the spaces for contesting or dealing with them, or for building responses to them collectively between the few formal meetings that remain.
It is of course true that email is there. But when what’s missing is a way of sorting out where people you *don’t* know personally but work with stand, what concerns they might have but might not want to spell out publicly or in writing, a cold email is a very blunt instrument.
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If you spend decades demonizing universities, dismissing academic research, and attacking professors as threats to their country and/or civilization, you should expect to find that your views are not well represented in academia.
Their absence there is a mark of your success.
If you tell your fans and followers that academic work is worthless or harmful, they will not pursue it. If you make disdain for academics a core part of your message, people who believe your message will share that disdain. This should surprise nobody.
There's been no actual campaign to rid academia of "conservatives" -- unlike the very real and quite explicit campaigns to get rid of various putatively leftist academics (see Turning Point, for instance).
There has been a "conservative" campaign to devalue academia. It worked.
Setting the content aside, the position that "most people know more about X by simple observation/common sense" than people who study X in depth is a core commitment of the IDW.
It is, by definition, anti-intellectual, and it lends itself to fascistic censorship of universities.
Which is why it was utterly predictable that the IDW would in fact support fascistic censorship of universities -- whether it be Peterson's praise for Orban, the entire Turning Point phenomenon, or Lindsay et al's campaign to get "woke" academic work banned by law in the US.
Actual "liberals" who gave this the time of day have begun to back away, but not so honestly as to own their role in promoting it.
Meanwhile, more of the fanbase -- and more and more conservative politicians -- are comfortable talking about academics in openly fascist terms.