An Interesting Parallel

“… the universities are a rich prize, which is a dangerous thing to be when you are simultaneously obsolete, unsympathetic to the people, and hostile to the king.”

A thought-provoking parallel, between the downfall of the medieval monastic establishments and the possible coming collapse of the university system – here, at Postcards from Barsoom.

A Plague of Credentialed Terrorists?

The WSJ has an article titled The Alienated ‘Knowledge Class’ Could Turn Violent, subtitled: Societies that exile their intellectuals risk turning them into revolutionaries. It happened in the 1970s.

The author cites the Weather Underground  in the United States, the Red Army Faction in Germany, and  the Red Brigades in Italy, and notes that many members of these organizations were highly educated, middle- or upper-middle-class young people. These weren’t the oppressed proletariat of Marxist theory, but the disillusioned children of privilege and university lecture halls.  He goes on to assert that:

A similar dynamic could take root in the U.S. As the Trump administration downsizes public agencies, dismantles DEI programs and slashes academic research funding, it risks producing a new class of people who are highly educated but institutionally excluded. History suggests this group may become a source of unrest—and possibly violence.

He is certainly correct that highly educated people have played a leading part in many revolutionary and terrorist movements…he could also have cited the example of Russian revolutionaries between the mid-1800s and the early 1900s, and many of the terrorist leaders in today’s Middle East…not to mention the Khmer Rouge.   And yes, it’s the educated (or at least credentialed) people who don’t obtain the positions to which they aspire, and that they think they deserve, who are most likely to become involved in such movements.  Speaking of the causes of sedition in a kingdom, more than four hundred years ago, Francis Bacon said one such cause could arise when more are bred scholars, than preferments can take off. (extended quote)  A modern translation of the preceding might be when more people get PhDs than have any hope of getting tenure.

Eric Hoffer, in the late 1950s or early 1960s, speaking about the ‘underdeveloped countries’, as they were then called, said:

Nothing is so unsettling to a social order as the presence of a mass of scribes without suitable employment and an acknowledged status…The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe’s golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and the Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes…Obviously, a high ratio between the supervisory and the productive force spells economic inefficiency. Yet where social stability is an overriding need the economic waste involved in providing suitable positions for the educated might be an element of social efficiency.

It has often been stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability…For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle. In an adequate society, the untalented should be able to acquire a sense of usefulness and of growth without interfering with the development of talent around them. This requires, first, an abundance of opportunities for purposeful action and self-advancement. Secondly, a wide diffusion of technical and social skills so that people will be able to work and manage their affairs with a minimum of tutelage. The scribe mentality is best neutralized by canalizing energies into purposeful and useful pursuits, and by raising the cultural level of the whole population so as to blur the dividing line between the educated and the uneducated…We do not know enough to suit a social pattern to the realization of all the creative potentialities inherent in a population. But we do know that a scribe-dominated society is not optimal for the full unfolding of the creative mind.

(from The Ordeal of Change)

And in 2020, the Assistant Village Idiot linked an article from The Economist, titled Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?, and said:

People with advanced degrees who are not prospering are often deeply resentful, certain that something must be wrong with “The System”*. I have worked with them for years, MSWs who believe that in a just world they would be  entitled  to the salaries that other people with their number of years of education get.   Other measurements, such as relative value to society, difficulty of the task, level of risk, and the like do not factor in…That they may have been lied to by the educational establishment or their upper-middle-class expectations (“For a good job, get a good education”), that they may have made poor economic decisions due to Following Their Dreams,  or that they may have chosen one of the easiest of Master’s degrees to pursue does not occur to them. It is largely political, cultural, and attitude training.  

In my post linking the above, Advanced Degrees and Deep Resentments, I said:  I don’t like the title of the Economist piece…“Can too many brainy people be a dangerous thing?”…which confuses intelligence with credentialism, but I think the point about highly-degreed and resentful people is spot-on.

In the WSJ article, the author goes on to say:

Today, a similar form of status frustration is building. The postwar expansion of higher education has created a surplus of advanced degree holders. People with doctorates far outnumber tenure-track positions. Many members of the American intelligentsia face precarious employment, rising debt and declining institutional pathways. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s agenda has disproportionately harmed the “knowledge class”: policy analysts, researchers, educators and civil servants who once found stability in public institutions.

This is more than a mere bureaucratic shake-up. When large numbers of educated, politically engaged people lose access to institutional influence, they often seek alternatives. For now, most are channeling their frustration through protests, digital activism and ideological writing. But under certain conditions—state repression, widespread disillusionment or charismatic leadership—radicalism can escalate. We already see hints in environmental sabotage, anarchist organizing and violent clashes involving Antifa and far-right groups. These remain on the fringe, but so were the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction in their early days.

President Trump’s policies could intensify this dynamic. By hollowing out state infrastructure and devaluing educational institutions, the administration risks creating a surplus of ideologically driven people with no outlet for their talents. Many are trained in critique, moral reasoning, and systems thinking—the very profile of earlier generations of radicals. Most won’t resort to violence, but history shows that a small, committed vanguard can inflict enormous damage.

and

The question is whether political leaders will mitigate or exacerbate the risks. Defunding and demonizing higher education may offer short-term political gains, but doing so carries long-term dangers. By targeting perceived left-wing strongholds, some on the political right may cultivate the very radicalism they fear.

This sound to me perilously close to blackmail…give these credentialed people their desired jobs, or they will destroy our society.

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My Name is Academe, and I’m a Failure.

I have been calling attention for years, and don’t mind at all when people with bigger platforms than mine recognize that the first step in correcting failure is to admit failure.  The refreshingly solid Republican victories in national election might be the sort of evidence that would encourage academicians to revise their priors.  Let’s start with Michael Clune, professor of English at Case Western, with “We Asked for It” in the house organ for business as usual.

Over the past 10 years, I have watched in horror as academe set itself up for the existential crisis that has now arrived. Starting around 2014, many disciplines — including my own, English — changed their mission. Professors began to see the traditional values and methods of their fields — such as the careful weighing of evidence and the commitment to shared standards of reasoned argument — as complicit in histories of oppression. As a result, many professors and fields began to reframe their work as a kind of political activism.

In reading articles and book manuscripts for peer review, or in reviewing files when conducting faculty job searches, I found that nearly every scholar now justifies their work in political terms. This interpretation of a novel or poem, that historical intervention, is valuable because it will contribute to the achievement of progressive political goals. Nor was this change limited to the humanities. Venerable scientific journals — such as Nature — now explicitly endorse political candidates; computer-science and math departments present their work as advancing social justice. Claims in academic arguments are routinely judged in terms of their likely political effects.

The costs of explicitly tying the academic enterprise to partisan politics in a democracy were eminently foreseeable and are now coming into sharp focus.

Democracy is about emergence in government. The academic enterprise is about emergence in understanding.  It sounds like I got out just before the real nonsense took over.  Or perhaps higher education reverted to its roots in the seminary.  (Is it any accident, dear reader, that Joe Stalin was a seminarian at one time?)

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With Dread and Foreboding

So, how do I regard Election Day, looming up in two weeks? With dread and foreboding, to be absolutely frank – no matter who is declared victorious. It’s absolutely guaranteed that all flaming hell will break out in either case; either within hours/minutes, or in days/weeks.

If the Trump/Vance ticket sweeps to an unmistakable, unarguable landslide well beyond any means of the Democrat Party to fraud – the anti-Trumpists will be insane with baffled fury. The national media establishment will look like Wily Coyote after one of his Acme gadgets explodes – and the entrenched bureaucracy crusted like layers and barnacles all over the various federal government departments … they will see the end of their comfortable gravy train. Ruin, disgrace, impoverishment, possibly criminal charges. The Deity knoweth and the various conservative-sympathetic bloggers and commenters, to include many fellow Chicagoboyz essayists and frequent commenters, remember very well how blatantly they played dirty pool the last time around. What would they venture this time against the Great Orange One, the avatar of their doom … Political assassination? Of him, or any of his allies? At the height of what some commenters have termed a second civil war? Like Lincoln, at the hands of an angry partisan of the losing side? Sadly. I wouldn’t put it beyond the realm of possibility. This will be bad. Very bad.

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Dedicated Followers of Fashion

It’s kind of depressing, reading the various stories linked here and there by various blogs and social media about pro-Palestinian/pro-terrorist orgies of protest on the grounds of various colleges and universities, and in the streets of certain big cities. This reminds me of the anti-war demos of the Vietnam War era. Massive turnout, lots of signs, lots of free-floating rhetoric … which turned out to mean absolutely nothing at all, in the long run. Much of the ruckus wasn’t motivated by sincere conviction about the welfare of the South Vietnamese, or the lives of our military troops. It was all just the followers of fashion, making a show of their fashionable conviction.

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