‘Go to Berkeley’: Ron DeSantis said students seeking ‘woke’ classes should study elsewhere

[durangodawood]

This isn't meant to be snarky, this is an honest question. If universities are really the 90/10...

What do you think would be the driving factors behind these trends?

View attachment 331224

(and it's an even more of a stark shift when you look at it just for people who were already democrat-leaning going in)
View attachment 331226

If not for the subject matter itself, then what would be the driver behind this?



This is something I acknowledged back in my previous post where I cited the first graph. The example I used was climate change. That's a subject that's polarized, but one where the evidence and facts definitively back up one side's position.

But I don't think that's the case for every issue. For instance, economic issues.

Almost 80 Percent of Philosophy Majors Favor Socialism, Poll Finds

Accounting and finance majors were least likely to view socialism favorably.

www.newsweek.com

When compared to the baseline numbers, certain college education programs are producing quite a jump in favoring certain left-leaning economic systems over others.

Philosophy majors: nearly 80% support socialism
English majors: 58%
Music majors: 57%

My hunch is that part of it can be attributed to the fact that there's a growing culture of people making "going against the status quo" synonymous with "intellectualism"

Quick answer is: The 10% (my estimate) of U work thats activism based is almost entirely on the "progressive" side in most public U's.

Meanwhile, the biggest, less flashy, activity of grinding away at learning or discovering stuff carries on.

(As an aside, "socialism" means different things to different people. For some it means the Soviet state. For others it means Norway. For others it means lets just have a non market alternative for health care. Many conservatives see social security and Medicare as "socialism" - and they might be right! I'd be wary of drawing conclusions from questions asked in terms of "socialism".)

 

[Say it aint so]

‘Go to Berkeley’: Ron DeSantis said students seeking ‘woke’ classes should study elsewhere

'We want to focus on the classical mission of what a university is supposed to be.'

floridapolitics.com

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/15/politics/desantis-signs-dei-defunding-bill/index.html

“If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to (the University of California) Berkeley,” DeSantis added. “There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but for us with our tax dollars, we want to focus on the classical mission of what a university is supposed to be.”

“What this does is reorient our universities back to their traditional mission and part of that traditional mission is to treat people as individuals, not to try to divvy them up based on any type of superficial characteristics,” DeSantis said.

The law also demands that general education courses “may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics”


Some media outlets are framing this in a negative way, but I actually don't have a problem with this one. I say let the various states set their policies on taxpayer funding at universities, and we can all see the results in 4-8 years and judge for ourselves which ones are producing the most productive members of society.

Rather than the red states and the blue states all trying to "export their values" and foist them upon the other states, I think it'd be a good social experiment to leave them all to their own devices in terms of education policies, and see which one produces the best results and best members of society.

My hunch on this is that the "winning combination" on this would be a combination of some right leaning values and some left leaning ones (like I do on most things as something of a "radical centrist" defined by the JFK quote of "idealism without illusions"), but I'd be happy to see it play out in a real-world application.

If you ignore some groups as if they don't exist in the world, isn't that based on "superficial characteristics" devoid of reality?

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Some people are not interested in their personal understanding of the world being challenged (and some within that group had parents who misinformed their understanding). Some groups of people are not interested in being called a poster child for Dunning Kruger and are happy to listen and learn from experts.
Some people are so hyperindividualistic, learning from someone else is an affront.

In this case, the numbers are showing that more people are clearly adopting the views of others, and not fewer, and it all seems to be moving in one direction.

The shift from 1994 until now it pretty steep.

In 1994, if you got a post graduate degree, the betting odds are that you'd come out moderate or with mixed viewpoints. If you look at the 94 numbers: 38% moderate, 24% slightly left, 22% slightly right, and less than 10% coming out staunchly on one side or the other. So people weren't radically shifting in one direction or the other. At most, some centrists moved a little left, and some conservatives moved more toward the middle.

2015, the largest piece of the pie is the "Consistently Liberal" category (with very people coming out with moderate viewpoints). Clearly something's changed within college culture between 1994 and 2015.

And something I noted before, not all things coming from professors/instructors should be equally regarded as "learning" in an objective academic sense. Conveying facts and information is quite different from "exporting opinions" (despite the fact that both may come in the form of a person with PhD in their title talking in a classroom setting.

So for the hard sciences, yes, the bulk of what's being conveyed is facts and representative of actual objective learning. For the "soft sciences", quite a bit of that is just subjective and a professor simply conflating their own opinions with "information".

I've described this sort of litmus test before...but if I were to ask 100 biologists or 100 MDs about the effects of smoking and the pulmonary system, I'm likely to get overwhelmingly similar (if not identical) answers.

If were to ask 100 Philosophy PhD's "what's causes human jealousy" or asked 100 Music professors "who's the best guitar player", chances are I'm going to get a wide variety of answers. Yet, in the world of academia, all are regarded as "experts" by virtue of having an advanced degree.

lol. WATCH OUT! The philosophy majors are socialists. They're gonna take over the world as soon as they get their head out of the clouds!

...a lot of people who get degrees in Philosophy and English end up being teachers, which means that many will be the people who the next generation ends up learning from.

 

[durangodawood]

...
I've described this sort of litmus test before...but if I were to ask 100 biologists or 100 MDs about the effects of smoking and the pulmonary system, I'm likely to get overwhelmingly similar (if not identical) answers.

If were to ask 100 Philosophy PhD's "what's causes human jealousy" or asked 100 Music professors "who's the best guitar player", chances are I'm going to get a wide variety of answers. Yet, in the world of academia, all are regarded as "experts" by virtue of having an advanced degree.
....

Do you really think that a music PhD's recognized expertise is (or should be) about what player or composer is "best"??

I think you have the totally wrong end of the stick here and its degrading your understanding about the kind of work academic musicians (and philosophers etc) actually do, and the kind of knowledge theyve accumulated.

 

[zippy2006]

Good post. Not that I agree with all of it. But theres something to think about.

Okay, thanks.

I really have to contest this truth / change dichotomy. If people are using Berkeley as emblematic of a "change" U, they have to ignore all its stellar programs in sciences, engineering, math, heck even a lot of its rigorous humanities programs where lots of basic ideology neutral research gets done. Honestly its absurd. Reality seems more like typical state U's are 90% truth and 10% change. Maybe Berkeley is 80/20 instead, The change side gets exaggerated because its culture wars fodder and get better ratings than some discovery about insect morphology or whatever.

Well I think it really does occur at a university level, and Haidt has identified instances where universities explicitly try to identify themselves with one or the other in their mission statements, but your point here really doesn't affect my argument. We can apply the truth/change labels to majors and conceive of universities as conglomerates. It makes no difference to my argument, or to DeSantis'.

As for gender studies, sometimes truth is partisan in a given political climate. This cuts both ways tho. And I certainly dont want to see conservative truths ignored or diminished just because "the times" make their true positions seem partisan in the moment. I would prefer to see more really thoughtful conservatives in the academy.

Here you are trying to deny the distinction between truth and change, and I don't think it will work (although you haven't provided any arguments or examples of why the distinction would fail).

"Truth" is descriptive, "change" is prescriptive. That's the essential difference, and the distinction holds because these are contradictory concepts.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Do you really think that a music PhD's recognized expertise is (or should be) about what player or composer is "best"??

I think you have the totally wrong end of the stick here and its degrading your understanding about the kind of work academic musicians (and philosophers etc) actually do, and the kind of knowledge theyve accumulated.

Expertise has to be anchored to something other than memorization and opinions, correct? It would have to involve either knowing something or proficiency at "doing something"

That's not to say that experts can't have opinions on things, but there has to be some sort of objective premises in place, and the information provided can't be almost exclusively in the realm of things that are neither provable nor disprovable.

How does one become in expert in something that's largely comprised of unanswerable questions or that's subject to opinions, and doesn't confer any skills?

And how does one become "educated" in something, for which, it's nearly impossible for a consensus to be reached among the people who achieve the label of "expert"?

And it should always be a red flag if it's rather easy for every person (no matter their opinions) to find an "expert" that happens to agree with them.

Ludwig von Mises and Karl Marx were both "philosophers" in a sense... The former advocated for more libertarian and individualist ideas, the latter for more collectivist ideas. However, they both can't be right. Since none of their ideas were provable nor disprovable (but largely just theories and thoughts), it's hard to make a case that learning their ideas (by way of a teacher parroting them back based on which one they like more) is actually creating any sort of expertise or is actually "educating" anyone (apart from maybe just the historical value of learning of a person you hadn't heard of)...but I think Philosophy courses aren't as much rooted in the historical aspect of learning new names for the Pub Quiz, as much as they are trying to "teach people who to think" based on the rationales of whichever philosopher the professor happens to be a fan of.

 

[jayem]

But the issue here is not ideology, it is the fact that things like "Gender Studies" aren't part of the liberal arts at all. It's the fact that these "special interest" degrees are ideology, lol. All DeSantis is trying to do is get rid of the ideology in education, and this is badly needed.

You're assuming that education is equivalent to indoctrination. That's not necessarily true. And anyway, what's wrong with having your values challenged? Learning and understanding the arguments offered by your ideological opponents informs and prepares you to effectively defend your opinions. I was a psychology major as an undergrad. Even at 18/19 years old, I was very skeptical of religion. But in college, I did some elective study in Biblical hermeneutics and world religions. It didn't make me a Christian. But I was better informed in regards to how religion influences human behavior.

The "Gender Studies" department of a university is essentially a political special interest group, or a partisan think tank. In the American scheme such institutions are necessarily private, and this is because public funding aims to further things which are non-partisan. And we do have private colleges and universities which devote themselves entirely to critical studies or women's studies, and that's fine. They are functioning as a sort of private think tank and special interest group. The problem is when the government itself begins endorsing and funding such partisan initiatives.


* Think of Marx's famous quote, "The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."

Public universities are still not cheap. An undergrad--or his/her family--still pays many $1000s for his tuition and living expenses. Students should be able to study current events no matter what politicians say. What looks like ideology today, may well be reality in the future. Remember what Victor Hugo said:

“No army can stop an idea whose time has come”​

 

[ThatRobGuy]

And anyway, what's wrong with having your values challenged?

Nothing at all...that's why I participate in a number of online forums...I like the challenge of debating people.

However, are any left-leaning people going into the college arena having their values challenged (apart from whatever centrist or slightly right values they may hold going in)? Or is it only going in one direction? The graphics/stats I posted earlier would indicate that liberal leaning folks aren't having their values challenged at all in college...in fact they're coming out of college more liberal than when they came in.

People can accurately identify the fact that when people are thrust into an evangelical environment (with people in positions of leadership they're told they're supposed to trust) that it can inculcate them with certain beliefs and values they wouldn't have had otherwise...I'm not sure why it's so hard for some folks to acknowledge that the same thing can occur with progressive beliefs like it can with conservative ones...

A preacher telling people (when they're at an age where they're impressionable) that "ABC is evil, and XYZ is good" is widely recognized as indoctrination. The same is true for professors, yet, that's often viewed as "expanding one's horizons" and "becoming more well-rounded"

Conservative parents sending kids to a Berkeley philosophy program "to have their values challenged" is tantamount Liberal parents sending their kids to a Southern Baptist Church in Kentucky "to have their values challenged"...would any progressive parents in Cali be cool with doing the latter?

 

[Ana the Ist]

You don't need to have FL people going to CA and vice versa in order to see the results.

They can both try out what they see as "ideal curriculums", and we can see which is producing more "hirable" people in 8 years.

Indeed.

My hunch is that the FL kids would be lacking some "societal acumen" (in knowing how to be well-balanced and deal with a variety of people) and would be lacking in some of the areas of "soft sciences",

Is that what you think is gained there?

and the CA kids would be lacking in some areas of prudence and pragmatism and would let their idealism trump practicality (and elevate sensitivity over truth on a number of facets) and have unreasonable expectations.

I don't think you genuinely believe this.

But, as I said, I'd like to see the experiment play out in terms of which type of person is more employable at the end.

We're already seeing people who put their "preferred pronouns" in resumes getting those resumes thrown out.

 

[zippy2006]

You're assuming that education is equivalent to indoctrination.

No, I am not assuming that at all. It is obvious that you did not read my post.

 

[USincognito]

Here are a few articles from left-leaning sources that give a more balanced take on the dispute regarding the historians that signed a letter and were asking for corrections to be made (as opposed to the right wing critiques that simply use the letter from the historians as a means of trying to "dunk on the left").

I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me.

The paper’s series on slavery made avoidable mistakes. But the attacks from its critics are much more dangerous.

www.politico.com

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/

The reaction to the project was not universally enthusiastic. Several weeks ago, the Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who had criticized the 1619 Project’s “cynicism” in a lecture in November, began quietly circulating a letter objecting to the project, and some of Hannah-Jones’s work in particular. The letter acquired four signatories—James McPherson, Gordon Wood, Victoria Bynum, and James Oakes, all leading scholars in their field. They sent their letter to three top Times editors and the publisher, A. G. Sulzberger, on December 4.

The letter sent to the Times says, “We applaud all efforts to address the foundational centrality of slavery and racism to our history,” but then veers into harsh criticism of the 1619 Project. The letter refers to “matters of verifiable fact” that “cannot be described as interpretation or ‘framing’” and says the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding by ideology.” Wilentz and his fellow signatories didn’t just dispute the Times Magazine’s interpretation of past events, but demanded corrections.

The five historians’ letter says it “applauds all efforts to address the enduring centrality of slavery and racism to our history.” The best-known of those letter-writers, however, built their careers on an older style of American history—one that largely ignored the new currents that had begun to bubble up among their contemporaries. By the time Gordon Wood and Sean Wilentz were publishing their first, highly acclaimed books on pre-Civil War America, in the early 1970s and mid-1980s, respectively, academic historians had begun, finally, to acknowledge African American history and slavery as a critical theme in American history. But Wood and Wilentz paid little attention to such matters in their first works on early America.

In Wood’s exhaustive and foundational The Creation of the American Republic (1969), which details the development of republican ideology in the new nation, there is only one index listing for “Negroes,” and none for slavery. In his first book, Chants Democratic (1984), Wilentz sought to explain how New York’s antebellum-era working class took up republican ideals, which had been used by some Founding Fathers to limit citizenship, and rewrote the tenets to include themselves as full-fledged citizens. Yet Wilentz’s work largely ignored issues of race and black workers, even though New York had the largest population of enslaved black people in the Colonial North, the second-largest population of free black people in the antebellum urban North, and was the site of the most violent race riots of the 19th century. As I wrote in my own 2003 book, Wilentz created “a white hegemony more powerful than that which existed” during the era he was studying.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Is that what you think is gained there?

Yes.

Speaking as someone who grew up in a strict southern Baptist home, where it was basically verboten to even have friends that were non-Christian (and forget about the concept of having gay friends... I had to tell my one friend from high school to hide the fact that he was gay in front of my parents in order for him to be allowed to come over), there's a lot of societal acumen (learning how to get along with people from all walks) that can be gained through a liberal education that can't be if one's living and learning in a bubble.

I don't think you genuinely believe this.

So you don't think that kids from liberal homes in CA, who end up attending liberal universities, don't lack some prudence and pragmatism at the end of their journey?



Living in a bubble causes certain blind spots. (that goes for liberal and conservative bubbles)

However, in the world of post-1994 academia, it's only side's bubble that's getting burst. You can be far-left, and you can go most colleges, and there's a good chance you'll never have your views challenged. However if you're Right/Center-Right/Center, there's a good chance they'll be challenging your views on a pretty regular basis.

The data doesn't lie...post 1994, the general trend has been "the longer you stay in college, the more liberal you become". Indicating that there is at least some measure of leftist indoctrination happening on campuses.

 

[durangodawood]

The data doesn't lie...post 1994, the general trend has been "the longer you stay in college, the more liberal you become". Indicating that there is at least some measure of leftist indoctrination happening on campuses.

Your conclusion does not automatically follow from the data. There's other possible (and I think plausible) explanations youve failed to discount.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Your conclusion does not automatically follow from the data. There's other possible (and I think plausible) explanations youve failed to discount.

There's plausible alternate explanations for some of the social topics, but not all of them. And I don't feel that they completely cover the gaps seen between the 1994 data and the 2015 data.

Topics like gay marriage and marijuana...polling data would suggest that even republicans have "made peace" with those two topics to a degree, as you're more likely to find a republican who supports those things in 2023 than would've been to find a democrat who supported them in 1994.

But I feel like that highlights my point even more. The overton window has shifted left. Meaning what was considered "center/center-right" today would've been considered liberal back in the 90's.

Despite that, you have 31% of people leaving college identifying as "consistency liberal" by today's standards, vs. 7% back in 1994 (by '94 standards, which were more right-leaning than today's standards)...most people in '94 left college as somewhat moderate.

Do you think that even 31% of Berkeley post-grads back in the 90's would've been on board with things like "allowing biological males to play on women's sports teams" and "administering hormone blockers to people under 18"?


We don't even have to go that far back to see how much the Overton window has shifted and expanded...I could go dig up some posts from 2012 on here where people used to think that voting for Mitt Romney was "radically right wing"

 

[zippy2006]

You can be far-left, and you can go most colleges, and there's a good chance you'll never have your views challenged. However if you're Right/Center-Right/Center, there's a good chance they'll be challenging your views on a pretty regular basis.

Those who swim against the zeitgeist have a much better sense of diversity of opinions than those who sail on its winds, and it is the left that sails on the winds of the zeitgeist. This means, in part, that echo chambers are more accessible on the left. But then the election of 2020 happened, shattering the left's geocentrism and transmuting overconfidence into bitter reactionism. Things are getting topsy-turvy now, and who knows what the future will bring?

 

[Pommer]

Those who swim against the zeitgeist have a much better sense of diversity of opinions than those who sail on its winds, and it is the left that sails on the winds of the zeitgeist. This means, in part, that echo chambers are more accessible on the left. But then the election of 2020 happened, shattering the left's geocentrism and transmuting overconfidence into bitter reactionism. Things are getting topsy-turvy now, and who knows what the future will bring?

Wait…the left is”reactionary”?

 

[DaisyDay]

‘Go to Berkeley’: Ron DeSantis said students seeking ‘woke’ classes should study elsewhere

'We want to focus on the classical mission of what a university is supposed to be.'

floridapolitics.com

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/15/politics/desantis-signs-dei-defunding-bill/index.html

“If you want to do things like gender ideology, go to (the University of California) Berkeley,” DeSantis added. “There’s nothing wrong with that, per se, but for us with our tax dollars, we want to focus on the classical mission of what a university is supposed to be.”

“What this does is reorient our universities back to their traditional mission and part of that traditional mission is to treat people as individuals, not to try to divvy them up based on any type of superficial characteristics,” DeSantis said.

The law also demands that general education courses “may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics”


Some media outlets are framing this in a negative way, but I actually don't have a problem with this one. I say let the various states set their policies on taxpayer funding at universities, and we can all see the results in 4-8 years and judge for ourselves which ones are producing the most productive members of society.

Rather than the red states and the blue states all trying to "export their values" and foist them upon the other states, I think it'd be a good social experiment to leave them all to their own devices in terms of education policies, and see which one produces the best results and best members of society.

My hunch on this is that the "winning combination" on this would be a combination of some right leaning values and some left leaning ones (like I do on most things as something of a "radical centrist" defined by the JFK quote of "idealism without illusions"), but I'd be happy to see it play out in a real-world application.

Letting the states and municipalities use their own methods was what the Core Curriculum was all about. That would have made comparisons of methods to be made but it was seen as federal interference, even though it was the states working together that came up with it.

 

[ThatRobGuy]

Letting the states and municipalities use their own methods was what the Core Curriculum was all about. That would have made comparisons of methods to be made but it was seen as federal interference, even though it was the states working together that came up with it.

Although wasn't the Core Curriculum (which, I can't recall if that was the predecessor to common core or something entirely different?) mainly aimed at Elementary and High Schools (and not so much for colleges), and wasn't it mainly geared toward the basic/standard subjects like reading, writing, math, and science?

While something like that could be emulated to a degree in a college setting, I could see that being a little more challenging given the breadth of fields of study.

For instance, a 9th grade math curriculum in a city in PA isn't likely to be drastically different from a 9th grade math curriculum in a city in Massachusetts.

When it comes to the subject matter that could be viewed as "indoctrinating", apart from some facets of history courses, most of those would be "non-core" classes so having core standards may not be terribly impactful with regards to this (especially when talking about the college level)


Especially when you factor in that certain colleges pride themselves in being "specialists" in one field over another.

For instance, Harvard Law and Medicine degrees carry a certain prestige, as to where an MIT or Stanford degree would likely carry more prestige in the Engineering realm.

 

[DaisyDay]

Although wasn't the Core Curriculum (which, I can't recall if that was the predecessor to common core or something entirely different?) mainly aimed at Elementary and High Schools (and not so much for colleges), and wasn't it mainly geared toward the basic/standard subjects like reading, writing, math, and science?

While something like that could be emulated to a degree in a college setting, I could see that being a little more challenging given the breadth of fields of study.

For instance, a 9th grade math curriculum in a city in PA isn't likely to be drastically different from a 9th grade math curriculum in a city in Massachusetts.

When it comes to the subject matter that could be viewed as "indoctrinating", apart from some facets of history courses, most of those would be "non-core" classes so having core standards may not be terribly impactful with regards to this (especially when talking about the college level)


Especially when you factor in that certain colleges pride themselves in being "specialists" in one field over another.

For instance, Harvard Law and Medicine degrees carry a certain prestige, as to where an MIT or Stanford degree would likely carry more prestige in the Engineering realm.

Yes, Common Core - I couldn’t think of the right phrase. This was for elementary and high schools - what should be taught at each grade so the results could be compared to understand which teaching methods are most effective. What’s being taught can vary enough to make pedagogical comparisons difficult or invalid.

Apparently studying ancient history, anthropology and geology can be, um not so much indoctrinating as de-indoctrinating. Bart Ehrman is a good example.

 

[Ana the Ist]

Eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion is certainly classical sectarianism. Who said this was a good thing? This man aims to bring back ignorance.
Blessings.

Eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion is certainly classical sectarianism. Who said this was a good thing? This man aims to bring back ignorance.
Blessings.

I would have considered DEI to be sectarianism.