Progressivism Madness: Marxism Lite for Campus Radicals?
NEWSLETTER CONTENTS:
Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice
Why Are Young People Growing More Sympathetic to Socialism?
'Hypersensitivity' as a Cause of Violence on American Campuses
Campus Administrators’ Bias and the Attack on Free Speech
Progressivism Isn’t Progressive: It’s Recycled Marxism
Why Today’s Students Are Less Tolerant Than Before
Marxism and Progressivism: A Play in Two Acts
Progressivism as the New Marxism
On the Heterodox Academy website, Dr. Jonathan Haidt explains eloquently why universities must choose one telos: truth or social justice. Furthermore, he elaborates that Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos”–its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. The telos of a physician is health or healing. What is the telos of university?
The most obvious answer is “truth”–-the word appears on so many university crests. But increasingly, many of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as their telos, or as a second and equal telos. But can any institution or profession have two teloses (or teloi)? What happens if they conflict?
Haidt believes that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable. Universities will have to choose, and be explicit about their choice, so that potential students and faculty recruits can make an informed choice. Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.
To further illuminate his point, consider two quotations:
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.–Karl Marx, 1845
He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion…–John Stuart Mill, 1859
As Haidt puts it: Marx is the patron saint of what he calls “Social Justice U,” which is oriented around changing the world in part by overthrowing power structures and privilege. It sees political diversity as an obstacle to action. Mill is the patron saint of what he calls “Truth U,” which sees truth as a process in which flawed individuals challenge each other’s biased and incomplete reasoning. In this process, all become smarter. However, Truth U dies when it becomes intellectually uniform or politically orthodox.
Universities Must Choose One Telos: Truth or Social Justice
Truth is paramount to sapience, and the antithesis to sapience is modern progressivism. Not only does progressivism deny commonly held truths across all cultures of the world, today’s progressivism has evolved to many degrees into a twentieth century version of Marxism lite—without the horrific calories of human sacrifice, failed regimes, and economic ruin.
When progressivism madness is incubated in the right condition on campus, illiberalism will follow, and when illiberalism follows, so do social justice warriors and campus radicals. Put simply enough by Haidt, “no university can have Truth and Social Justice as dual teloses. Each university must pick one. He shows that Brown University has staked out the leadership position for Social Justice University (SJU), and the University of Chicago has staked out the leadership position for Truth U.
Throughout The SAPIENT Being I sometimes use the phrase “so called” progressive. The reason is because so many of the left’s and “current” liberal platforms, policies, and agendas are actually regressive in regards to developing sapience. They are the antithesis to sapience! Please note this and the important distinction between progressive vs. progressivism as follows:
Progressive: One favoring or advocating progress, change, improvement, or reform, as opposed to wishing to maintain things as they are, especially in political matters. Today, a conservative or Republican can be just as progressive as a liberal or a Democrat because they both advocate progress, change, improvement, or reform as well, but they have vastly different agendas and ideologies in this regard.
Progressivism: A political philosophy in support of social reform based on the idea of progress in which advancements in science, technology, economic development, and social organization are vital to improve the human condition. It would be safe to say conservatives and Republicans favor addressing political matters vs. social ones so most who favor and/or part of the progressivism movement will be liberals and Democrats.
Furthermore, there’s also a misconception that professors are leading their student disciples towards a path of Marxist indoctrination. That’s partially true and a lessor of two influences. But if professors are not swaying student opinions in the classroom, and the lessor of two influencers, what is making them more sympathetic to socialism and less tolerant of conservative views about free markets and limited government?
Unknown to many, the greater influence is from college administrators which will be discussed later in this chapter. It’s demonstrably true as the previous chapter has pointed out that professors are overwhelmingly liberal and have become more so in the past three decades. Some observers blame leftist professors for the socialist connection. This makes sense on the surface because the renewed sympathy for socialism seems most pronounced among recent college graduates.
However, it’s far from conclusive that this kind of classroom and dormitory indoctrination is driving students to the far left. If it’s not—what is?
Why Are Young People Growing More Sympathetic to Socialism?
A new study finds that “Millennials are most likely to view socialism and communism favorably.” Whereas 54 per cent of Baby Boomers and 71 per cent of mature adults hold a positive view of capitalism, only 42 percent of Millennials are favorably disposed toward it. We see from this study that, with each new generation, hypersensitivity to capitalism’s perceived injustices grows.
According to a survey conducted recently by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a third of Americans and as many as 44% of Millennials would prefer to live under a socialist system than a capitalist one. This is more than a little puzzling at a time when socialism has proved a catastrophic failure in its remaining strongholds in Venezuela, North Korea, and Cuba. China is now a market based communist system that owes its economic success to a large dose of capitalism.
In a study published in 2009 of 7,000 students at 38 institutions across the U.S., professors Matthew Woessner and Dr. April Kelly-Woessner found that students’ political beliefs did not change much during their college years. Even in cases where students’ opinions changed, there was little correlation between the direction of the change and the political leanings of their professors. When contacted about these conclusions, Woessner confirmed that although campuses today might seem more radical, his current research suggests that those earlier conclusions are still true that students’ political beliefs did not change much during their college years.
Oddly enough, author Lenore Skenazy has suggested that students’ upbringings are a large part of today’s overprotective parenting; which may make them have more acceptance of socialism and the nanny state, particularly on campus.
In her book Free-Range Kids, she argued that parents who try to protect their children from every possible threat or danger deprive them of the freedom to grow up. Naturally, when they arrive on campus as 18-year- olds, they look to professors and administrators to take over the parental role of protecting them from life’s challenges. Thus, “helicopter parenting” yields “snowflake” students unable to tolerate uncomfortable opinions.
Extracurricular Activities on Campus as Opposed to Classroom Studies
While this may be true, there are nevertheless organizations and constituencies on the contemporary campus that are in position to gain from protest and unrest. In response to perceived slights, however artificial or exaggerated they may be, activists demand and often receive compensation: greater funding for their programs, promises to hire more members of victimized groups, the creation of programs and courses to promote diversity and multiculturalism on campus, and other concessions of tangible kinds.
In these efforts, there seems to be a synergy of students, diversity administrators and faculty members representing multicultural programs. These alliances are rarely formed in the classroom or in the traditional research disciplines. The growing radicalism on campus seems to originate instead in the broad category of student life that takes place outside the classroom.
A 2014 study, for instance, found that students who spent a greater number of hours on extracurricular activities on campus (as opposed to classroom studies) were more likely to see their politics move toward one extreme or the other, in most cases toward the far left.
Kyle Dodson, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Merced, looked at data from the UCLA’s Freshman Survey and the College Senior Survey. He found that time spent in academic pursuits has a moderating influence on students’ political views. Students who are occupied with classroom studies are less likely to engage in disruptive or illiberal activities on campus.
This is an encouraging conclusion as it suggests that students who are more serious about their academic work are more likely to think for themselves and less likely to be drawn into disruptive political activities.
College Students Spend Less Time in Classrooms and Academic Study
But there is a catch: College students are spending less and less time in classrooms and academic study. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzed by the Heritage Foundation in 2014, college students spend fewer than three hours per day on classroom-related activities.
Therefore, it’s not surprising to find that professors have little influence on student political beliefs compared with the enormous sway of peers, “student life” administrators and activists who are in charge of campus extracurricular activities.
This should be a wake-up call for faculty and administrators who still believe that a college education should involve classroom learning and the exposure of students to important ideas. As faculty have stepped back from their roles as the primary intellectual guides for students—teaching fewer hours, spending more time on research and publishing for their colleagues in the field, requiring students to take fewer general education requirements—other adults and peers have stepped in to fill the void, much to the detriment of academic learning and liberal ideals on campus.
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