by corimaith on 6/6/25, 11:11 PM with 23 comments
by JohnDeHope on 6/7/25, 12:03 AM
I've never heard anyone describe left and right this way, and I don't think anybody but the author thinks like this.
by gruez on 6/6/25, 11:47 PM
by alphazard on 6/6/25, 11:55 PM
The sentiment of most professors and new grads is left leaning. It's been that way for decades, maybe forever. Numerous polls show this to be the case. Anyone who's been on the internet or on a college campus knows this is true.
Higher education is funded by public dollars, which means taking them away from taxpayers (socialism, a leftist idea).
In order to offer something of value to the students, the professors have to be legitimate. They need to know what they are talking about. It wouldn't work as well for everyone in town to take turns being a professor, or to vote who is a professor, or some other egalitarian leftist method. And so by absolute necessity, a market is allowed to function, in which the school chooses the best professors, so it can attract paying students.
Apparently that single point justifies the title.
by nunez on 6/7/25, 5:04 PM
While that is definitely true, and I, too, would like to see some slack implemented in that system, I think the author will reconsider their position after realizing what being "right-wing" in 2025 really means.
(It should not be a de facto requirement to have a PhD to become a full-time faculty professor in university, but removing that requirement will rug-pull all of the PhD candidates for whom tenured professorship is their most viable career choice.)
In my opinion, modern right-wing ideologies are _deeply_ seeped in anti-intellectualism. From book bans to school waivers, the right-wing groupthink believes that education by way of personal responsibility, conservative values and individuaulism.
In their eyes, public education is a failed experiment which can only be remedied by private schools, homeschooling and increased parental involvement in curriculum planning. This works within communities that are well-founded and have involved and well-educated parents but introduces massive risks in literally any other environment (like the underfunded and under-resourced rural and ex-urban communities that push these values so hard).
We're already seeing the effects of this in Houston ISD. The state of Texas took over this school system two years ago because of "low performance" due to "wokism", amongst other things (in my opinion). They've implemented severely regressive policies, like book bans and timers, but one particularly egregious thing they're apparently vibing with is AI-generated worksheets. If you want your kid learning about the Harlem Renaissance from diffusion-generated art badly resembling art from the period, look no further than HISD. [^0]
What makes this especially egregious to me is that the state of Texas and our federal government spent so much energy banning things that looked too DEI...like books on the Harlem Renaissance, history articles about Black people doing cool things, or, shit, straight up banning the word Black in journal articles. Banning real knowledge and replacing it with wildly-wrong AI generated garbage is unspeakable, but educators speaking up on this apparently makes them "left-wing".
Education is supposed to be non-partisan, but educators, by and large, being extremely opposed to these developments forces their hand.
[^0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/his...
by dmurray on 6/6/25, 11:51 PM
Or to accept that political discourse has moved on. For the first 2500 years of democracy, the dominant topic of discussion was economic - how to distribute society's material resources - so it made sense for 18th century French journalists to categorize politicians based on their policies on that topic. Now we have a post-economic democracy where the dominant topics are along the lines of what bathrooms trans people should use, so we've repurposed "left" and "right" to categorize people based on their opinions on that topic.
by nosefurhairdo on 6/7/25, 12:05 AM
- Democrats have a more positive view of how colleges impact the country
- Democrats have higher confidence that professors act in the public interest
- Republicans are more likely to view higher education as moving in the wrong direction
- Democrats are relatively unconcerned about professors bringing political/social views into the classroom, compared to republicans who are very concerned
Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/08/19/the-gro...
> If "left" and "right" have any meaning at all, "right" describes a worldview under which civilized society depends upon legitimate hierarchy, and a key object of politics is properly defining and protecting that hierarchy.
Hierarchy is a natural consequence of variation in skills, experience, and work ethic. Meanwhile, the author's definition provided for "left" is so squiggly as to be nearly meaningless. It almost sounds like the mythical, non-totalitarian brand of communism that just hasn't quite worked yet:
> "Left", on the other hand, is animated by antipathy to hierarchy, by an egalitarianism of dignity. While left-wing movements recognize that effective institutions must place people in different roles — sometimes hierarchical, sometimes associated with unequal rewards — these are contingent, often problematic, overlays upon a foundational assertion that every human being has equal dignity and equal claim to the fundamental goods of human life.
In other words, "left" has hierarchy, but only begrudgingly, and other than that we're very virtuous.
It's truly difficult to get past this opening argument. If you're going to make a shocking claim (higher ed is right wing), you can't start with such a shaky foundation. What would a non-hierarchical University system even look like? Harvard being more prestigious than my local community college does not make higher education right wing.