"Power All the Way Down"

"Already during his lifetime some scholars complained that, as the historian Lawrence Stone put it, Foucault's 'dominance and control' model 'reduces the actors in history to two, the controllers and the controlled.' In a recent book, 'Left Is Not Woke,' Neiman goes further. For the political left, she argues, Foucault's legacy has been disastrous: a reflexive distrust of Enlightenment ideals—including tolerance, universalism and progress itself—which are viewed as cynical ploys by European states to justify imperialist ambitions. His theory does not allow for a human collective bound by shared values and fighting for the common good, she writes, only for 'a bunch of tribes jockeying for power.'"

At The New York Times, Emily Eakin marks the 100th birthday of Michel Foucault.

And at Slate, Laura Miller reviews Eakin's The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory.

"These Changes Have Already Begun"

"And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn't mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn't illiterate. It's postliterate."

Rose Horowitch at The Atlantic declares that "The End of Reading Is Here."

"To Better Understand How Gender Norms Underlay Social and Political Organization"

"Until this week's latest dump of the Epstein files by Trump's justice department, I hadn't seen the connection between the two. But now it's as clear as day. The abolition of gender studies is a way of further guaranteeing impunity to the elite men whose contempt for and exploitation of women and girls apparently knew no bounds, whether they actually slept with the women on offer or simply shared Epstein's fantasies in order to gain influence or funding."

Joan Wallach Scott at The Guardian argues that gender studies is "a critical tool for examining–in the case of Trump and Epstein–the predations of toxic masculinity."

"Welcome to the Death of Higher Education"

"The real tragedy isn't that students use ChatGPT to do their course work. It's that universities are teaching everyone—students, faculty, administrators—to stop thinking. We're outsourcing discernment. Students graduate fluent in prompting, but illiterate in judgment; faculty teach but aren't allowed the freedom to educate; and universities, eager to appear innovative, dismantle the very practices that made them worthy of the name. We are approaching educational bankruptcy: degrees without learning, teaching without understanding, institutions without purpose."

Ronald Purser at Current Affairs says that "AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself."

"The Role of a Humanist Is to Preserve Knowledge, Safeguard Learning From the Market and the Tides of Popular Interest, and Ward Off Coarse Appeals to Economic Utility"

"Depending on whom I asked, the move to scale back humanities doctoral programs is either a prudent acknowledgment of the cratered job market for tenure-track professorships and a wise attempt to protect the university's humanities division from looming financial and political risks, or it is a cynical effort, under cover of the Trump administration's assaults, to transfer resources away from 'impractical,' unprofitable, and largely jobless fields (such as, say, comparative literature) and toward areas that the university's senior leadership seems to care about (such as, say, STEM and 'innovation'). One faculty member I spoke with mentioned a consulting firm that was brought on to help Chicago as it considers changes to its humanities division, including possibly consolidating the departments from 15 down to eight. Many professors worried that the move to impose uneven changes—reducing admissions in some while halting them in others—may be an attempt to create circumstances that will ultimately make it easier to dissolve the paused programs. 'Let no good crisis go unleveraged,' Holly Shissler, an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies department, said with a dark laugh. 'You engineer a situation in which there are no students, and then you turn around and say, "Why are we supporting all these departments and faculty when they have no students?"'"

Tyler Austin Harper at The Atlantic asks, "If the University of Chicago Won't Defend the Humanities, Who Will?"

Demeritocracy

"If we sort people only by superior intelligence, we're sorting people by a quality few possess; we’re inevitably creating a stratified, elitist society. We want a society run by people who are smart, yes, but who are also wise, perceptive, curious, caring, resilient, and committed to the common good. If we can figure out how to select for people's motivation to grow and learn across their whole lifespan, then we are sorting people by a quality that is more democratically distributed, a quality that people can control and develop, and we will end up with a fairer and more mobile society."

In a 2024 Atlantic article, David Brooks writes about "How the Ivy League Broke America."

While at The Hill, Jenna Robinson argues that "[i]t's well past time to bring back standardized testing" in college admissions.

"Frustrated and Underemployed Elites Are Uniquely Well-Positioned to Disrupt Society"

"The day after The New York Times posted Mack's op-ed, Smith re-posted a 2022 piece about Turchin's theory of elite overproduction. It noted that demand for lawyers and government employees (the bulk of whom work for state and local governments) levelled off after 2008; that employment in publishing crashed in 2001 and never recovered; and that university job postings in the humanities crashed during the 2008 financial crash and never recovered. (If there's a poster child for elite overproduction, it's the humble university adjunct.) In the 21st century the professional-managerial class has experienced a loss of economic power that's analogous to (though of course much more muted than, and conducted at a much higher level than) the working class's loss of economic power starting in the late 1970s."

Timothy Noah at The New Republic considers "the rage of what Barbara and John Ehrenreich once labelled the professional-managerial class."

"Political Education Is Going to Take Place Mostly Outside of Universities Now"

"The term white privilege was invented in the 1960s by leftists, by Ted Allen and Noel Ignatiev. I was very sympathetic to that term. But then as it got into the universities and got to be spoken mostly in the universities, I think we forgot that it only really made sense inside of a social movement, that otherwise if you just go up and tell a poor white person you're privileged, that's not organizing, that's just labeling. It had to be part of a social movement. And even now I'm trying to say 'white advantage' instead of 'white privilege' for that very reason. But the main thing that your question points to is that over the long haul, we on the left in social movements lost out to a more therapeutic and individualistic approach to diversity training." 

Olivia Weeks at The Daily Yonder interviews historian David Roediger.

And at The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch writes about "The Elite University Presidents Who Despise One Another."

"A Defunct Canon"

"It's not surprising that these authors found their way to so many teenage readers. Many, after all, were bestsellers. Perhaps even more important, a good number were key figures in the postwar U.S. counterculture. Certain titles, like Heller's Catch-22, Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, were practically required reading for participants in the antiwar movement and the generational upheaval of which it was a part. Even Hesse's novels, published in the early twentieth century, came to be, according to critic Adam Kirsch, 'literary gateway drugs' and hippie talismans for young people, with Timothy Leary recommending them as good preparation for trying LSD. Even after the counterculture dissipated, these authors remained ubiquitous, as baby boomers passed them on to the next generation of readers. Telling adolescents not to trust grownups is apparently an evergreen rhetorical move, even when it takes the form of a book recommendation by a parent or teacher."

Timothy Aubry at The Point discusses "the gateway books" for late-twenieth-century high-school students.

"De-Brahminizing a Profoundly Brahmin Left Party"

"In short, Democrats need a class traitor—a politician who's not afraid to ask Democrats who the social justice they prize so highly is really for. Is it really for the poor and working class who have the short end of the stick in our society or is it to make Democrats feel righteous and onside with Team Progressive? Are Democrats' social justice commitments and priorities what the poor and working class actually want? Does the language Democrats speak on these issues even make sense to them?"

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot gives more advice to Democrats.

Trump U

Various writers discuss Donald Trump's attacks on higher education:

Jonathan V. Last does so at The Bulwark.

As Owen Jones does at The Guardian.

As Jonathan Chait, Edith Olmsted, Jonathan W. Gray, and Felipe De La Hoz do at The New Republic.

"WWWCS?"

"The 'what-would-the-working-class-say' test can tell you a lot about whether Democrats are on track with their approach. If the test indicates that Democrats are advocating or saying something that is likely unpopular, off-putting and/or just lacks salience with working-class people, that policy or rhetoric is probably on the wrong track. Conversely, if the test indicates that working-class people are likely to view what Democrats are advocating/saying as desirable, in tune with their values and actually important to their everyday lives, that is a very good sign."

Ruy Teixeira at The Liberal Patriot gives advice to Democrats.

"This Literally Breaks Everything"

"Scientists, locked away in labs doing research and scrabbling for grants, may not have been prepared to hear this. The climate and data scientist, for one, simply couldn't believe that Americans wouldn't want the research that she and others perform. 'I just can't understand how so many people don't understand that this is valuable, needed work,' she said."

Ian Bogost at The Atlantic wonders if Donald Trump threatens the contemporary research university.

"The Earliest Neoconservative"

"Banfield did not abandon altogether the possibility of policy interventions, although it’s true he thought policymakers' room to maneuver was severely constrained. Likewise, Kristol remarked in his 1985 retrospective that 'the failure (or at least non-success) of so much of social policy in the past twenty years can be exaggerated. Not every program failed and there are a few important ones that represent positive achievements.' Indeed, 'The Public Interest has always emphasized the modestly positive along with the skeptical.' Yet on the right writ large there has been a clear decline from skepticism toward nihilism—toward a belief that policy interventions fail so often and character is so intractable that it is almost never worth it to attempt to solve social problems through policy."

Joshua Tait at The Bulwark recalls political scientist Edward C. Banfield.

And David Klion at The Nation looks at varying definitions of "neoconservatism."

Nice Work

"He graduated with a first from University College London before entering national service for two years. 'After about three weeks of basic training… I was quite sure that I wanted to go back to the academic life,' he said."

Ella Creamer at The Guardian writes an obit for author David Lodge.

"Using Art to Explain Cultural History, Rather Than the Other Way Around"

"Wonderful art objects get demoted to the status of illustrations. Both exhibitions are a big jumble of things brought to bear on cultural history, a subject better handled through texts. That's what illustrations are for--as adjuncts to writing.
"And, yes, both shows tuck some contemporary works into their historical displays, downgrading them as well. The artists will survive, and who can blame them for taking the opportunity? But it's a waste."

Christopher Knight at the Los Angeles Times reviews exhibits at the Getty Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

At The Reading Experience, Daniel Green offers a similar view regarding literature.

"Less Interested in the Truth of the Past Than in Constructing an Alternative Future"

"It is no accident that the ideology of settler colonialism is flourishing today at the same time as right-wing populism. Both see our turbulent political moment as an opportunity to permanently change the way Americans think about their country. And as is often the case, the extremes of right and left are united in disparaging the compromises of liberalism, which they see as weakly evasive. In the case of settler colonialism, this means rejecting the understanding of American history that has been mainstream since the mid-20th century—that it is a story of slow progress toward fulfilling the nation's founding promise of freedom for all."

The Wall Street Journal publishes an essay by Adam Kirsch, based on his new book, On Settler Colonialism.

"A Seminal Moment in the History of Higher Education"

"In the years after Ross's dismissal, Lovejoy—one of the professors who had resigned from Stanford and ultimately went to Johns Hopkins University—teamed with John Dewey of Columbia University to establish an organization aimed at ensuring academic freedom for faculty. In 1915 the newly formed American Association of University Professors released its 'Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure.' Among other things, the declaration noted: 'Official action relating to reappointments and refusals of reappointment should be taken only with the advice and consent of some board or committee representative of the faculty.'"

In a 2015 Stanford Magazine article, Brian Eule recounts the story of Professor Edward Alsworth Ross.

"A Growing Sense of the Chickens Coming Home to Roost"

"But here's the catch. Le wokisme, which the French love to hate, isn't as foreign as its critics would have you believe. It actually traces its intellectual genealogy, at least in part, back to 1960s French intellectuals who analyzed and 'deconstructed' the language and the symbolism of power, kickstarting a global campus movement."

At Politico, Nicholas Vinocur notes that "France laid the foundations for campus 'woke' ideology."

The Yuppie Candidate

"Though they were a minority in the country, the well-educated baby boomers who had come to the fore in the first half of the '80s effectively became America’s ruling class. Their basic political philosophy—liberal on social issues, conservative on economic ones—dominated for decades, with support for gay marriage and abortion rights growing at the same time that taxes continued to be cut and globalization increased."

Tom McGrath at Politico describes Gary Hart as the proto-Bill Clinton.