By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, May 01, 2024
“If you’re afraid of getting a rotten apple, don’t
go to the barrel. Get it off the tree.”
That’s Sean Connery’s advice to Elliot Ness in The
Untouchables. I should say it’s the character named Jim Malone’s advice,
but let’s face it, Sean Connery always played himself regardless of the
role.
This is a bit of a strained analogy because, well, kids
don’t grow on trees among other things. But it gets at what I think is a big
part of the problem bedeviling schools like UCLA and Columbia: These are the
kinds of kids they wanted.
I’ll get back to that point in a second, but let’s first
review some of the events from yesterday and today that inspired me, against
all my plans, to write once again about the campus protests. Yesterday
afternoon social media went kind of bonkers—me included—about Johannah
King-Slutzky, a
graduate student at Columbia, who demanded “basic humanitarian aid” for
students illegally occupying Hamilton Hall. The confidence she displays
defending her ridiculous demands is truly impressive:
King-Slutzky is a professional “digital activist” and
leader of the graduate student unionization movement. Indeed, she is a member
of the United Auto Workers. (Fun fact: 1
in 4 members of the United Auto Workers union are actually in
academia. One has to wonder what your average auto plant worker in Ohio would
make of her academic pursuits.) This is from her Columbia web page, now taken
down:
My dissertation is on fantasies of
limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760-1860. My
goal is to write a prehistory of metabolic rift, Marx’s term for the disruption
of energy circuits caused by industrialization under capitalism. I am
particularly interested in theories of the imagination and poetry as
interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an
alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination.
Prior to joining Columbia, I worked as a political strategist for leftist and
progressive causes and remain active in the higher education labor movement.”
Now, a few things. First of all, I am not an expert on “metabolic
rift,” but I had encountered the term before. It’s part of Marx’s theory of
alienation fostered by capitalism. But I’m pretty sure that it’s not Marx’s
term, but John Bellamy Foster’s paraphrasing of what he thinks is Marx’s idea.
Bellamy defines metabolic rift as “the material estrangement of
human beings within capitalist society from the natural conditions which formed
the basis for their existence.” I’ve done a good deal of searching to confirm
this and went down quite a rabbit hole: The term “metabolic” doesn’t even
appear in Das Kapital—the supposed source of this idea. At least
not in the several versions I’ve searched. Also, her use of the term
“prehistory” is a little strange. Prehistory typically
means the stuff humans did before we wrote stuff down. Also, it’s a little
intriguing that she wants to use a Marxist lens to provide an alternative to
historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination, since Marx was a
historicist and, I would argue, a Romantic. But, as Marx wrote in his Theses
on Feuerbach, whatever dude.
Still, even if I’m wrong on all that—totally possible—I’d
love to ask one of those actual autoworkers in Ohio, or really anywhere,
whether they think their tax dollars should go to paying off her student loans
(assuming she has any).
But back to the issue at hand. The notion that the school
has a moral obligation to feed students illegally occupying a campus building
is so cringey, so parodically perfect in its tidy summation of what’s wrong
with these protesters and schools, I struggle to find the words. As Jodie
Foster says in Contact upon seeing the staggering beauty of an
alien realm, “They should have sent a poet.”
I mean, talk about “the
material estrangement of human beings within capitalist society from
the natural conditions which formed the basis for their existence!” We all know
that in pre-capitalist societies, digital activists and unionized grad students
who unlawfully seized buildings from the crown or church or whoever in order to
show solidarity with terrorist enemies had an irrefutable right to as much
quinoa and avocado toast as they needed to sustain their defiance of
authority.
But let’s get back to my point.
Elite schools have more
qualified applicants than they can admit. Harvard admits 3 percent of
applicants. Columbia, MIT, and Stanford take 4 percent. All of the political
and cultural fights over affirmative action, legacy admissions, etc. stem from
this basic fact of math. The demand for enrollment wildly exceeds the supply.
That is obviously by design for all sorts of reasons, good and bad. These
schools are basically massive tax-free hedge funds that offer classes on the
side; they could easily admit more students if they wanted to. But they could
never accommodate everybody. So they have to choose who gets to go there and
who doesn’t.
If schools relied solely on some relatively objective
metric, like standardized tests, the student body would “look” different from
what administrators want. I put “look” in scare quotes because I mean this in a
bunch of different ways. Yes, the share of Asian kids would grow and the share
of African American and Latino kids would shrink. But there would also be fewer
exceptional athletes and more nerds. The student body would probably get richer
in the aggregate, not because poor kids can’t be qualified, but because rich
kids have more educational resources available to them. This obviously includes
SAT tutors, but it also includes the more controversial fact that such
kids—statistically speaking—are more likely to come from households with two
parents who put a lot of emphasis on educational attainment.
But these schools don’t just rely on SAT scores—or
grades, or extracurricular activities. They prioritize all sorts of things, and
not just race or sexual orientation or athletic prowess. A lot of schools
privilege applicants who are the first in their family to go to college. Being
the child of an alumnus or a donor can matter, at the margins. Being the child
of a faculty member can matter even more. Geographical diversity is a factor.
Recommendations, essays, etc. play a role, too. Interviews can be important as
well. If you drop a lot of f-bombs and pick your nose during your interview,
odds are good it will be held against you. All of these factors are defensible
to one degree or another, in no small part because they’re unavoidable.
But even with all of these factors at play, the
admissions bureaucrats still have a lot of leeway. And one of the things they
value is whether you have a social conscience and share the kinds of values the
school values.
This, too, is defensible, but the devil is in the
details. Being a proven “activist” helps. Ziad Ahmad got into Stanford
by answering the question, “What matters to you, and why?” with a Twitter
hashtag #BlackLivesMatter 100 times. Now, you could say this is dumb because
it’s just an unthinking, even Maoist, recitation of slogan over and over again.
But, obviously, it was brilliant because the kid knew it was the kind of thing
Stanford wanted to hear. A kid with even better grades and test scores who
wrote about how the carried interest deduction or medical innovations during
the Civil War matter to him would be signaling he didn’t know his audience.
Sometimes schools are not subtle about what they’re looking for. Barnard
College—Columbia’s sister school, from which Rep. Ilhan Omar’s daughter was
recently suspended—asks:
Barnard’s Diversity, Equity and
Inclusion mission statement says “Our commitment to diversity, inclusion, and
equity has the potential to disrupt and transform entrenched practices and
thinking.” In what ways have you challenged ideas, practices, or spaces? What
did you learn from these experiences?
(When she was kicked off campus for unlawfully refusing
to leave a tent encampment, Isra Hirsi spoke truth to power to that radical
organ of the masses, Teen
Vogue, and complained yet again of her material estrangement, “There
was no food support, no nothing.”)
When Students for Fair Admissions sued Harvard
over its admissions policies, we learned that the school emphasizes “effervescent”
students. William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions, testified that, “One
thing we always want is humanists,” but, sadly, there were fewer and fewer of
them. This premium on humanist effervescence resulted in Asian American
applicants scoring lower than other groups on their personality ratings.
Fitzsimmons also claimed that white students get better recommendations from
high schools than Asian kids do. Maybe that’s true, but that just shows how the
dynamic I’m getting at starts in high school.
And what is that dynamic? That the elite education system
is geared toward a very specific understanding of what “[insert fancy school
name here] material” is and it leans very much to the left. I’ve long argued
that Asian students aren’t discriminated against because of anti-Asian fears of
some modern “Yellow Peril,” but because they disproportionately come from the
ranks of immigrant families who come to this country and educate the crap out
of their kids for the old-fashioned goal of achieving the American dream. For
them, the dream isn’t to get a Ph.D. in “metabolic rift” theory, but to make a
decent living as a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or banker. That’s boring. Creating
cadres of elite investment bankers or successful knee surgeons isn’t why people
go to work as education bureaucrats.
Instead, creating cadres of educated activists,
journalists, and academics committed to social justice is why they’re
there. It’s not the only reason, and it’s not true of all of them, but at the
margins it’s a huge factor, and the decision of who to admit and who to turn
down is made at the margins. And the Asian kids are, at the margins, worse at
speaking the language of that tribe.
Another important factor: The faculty is dominated by
similar people, with similar visions of the anointed (Thomas Sowell’s phrase),
and so the demand for kids who will be interested in what they teach informs
the decision-making process, too. I mean, King-Slutzky isn’t going to teach a
class on Melville. Heck, there’s actually an opportunity for an interesting
analysis, through a Marxian lens no less, of how the educational ruling classes
and academic industrial complex structures society for its own
self-perpetuation. Maybe another time.
Meanwhile, type “protest” into Columbia’s course
catalog and you’ll get 45 hits. Some of the classes are utterly
defensible and legitimate. Others are defensible and legitimate—and
telling. Like the institutionally self-congratulatory undergraduate
seminar “Columbia
‘68.” As I wrote in my
column this week, these institutions are high on their own mythology of,
and nostalgia for, protest.
Or consider “Activism, Performance, Social Movements.”
Here’s the description:
This seminar examines how
activism shapes the political process through performance, and how social
movements often spread by theatrical means. We start our exploration with
the notion of “the publics” as introduced by the twentieth-century German
philosopher Jürgen Habermas and then expand our view of this concept to the
contemporary political setting. We look at both how elected
representatives use theatrical tropes to shape their public personas, and also
how popular protests stage large-scale public interventions. How might
performance as a series of citational strategies allow us to think about the
political process? How do we assess the success or failure of a tactic in
a social movement?
We will draw heavily on the works
of feminist scholars like bell hooks, Judith Butler, Kimberle Crenshaw, and
Peggy Phelan, to discuss movements such as ACT UP, Occupy Wall Street, Black
Lives Matter, #MeToo. Equally, we will look at histories of student activism
such as the 1968 Morningside Park gym construction, campus anti-apartheid
actions, Carry That Weight at Columbia and Barnard, and Friday School Climate
Strike and March for our Lives. Students reflect on their own histories or
experiences with activism, as personal involvement and/or politics of the
places they come from. Through the semester students are exposed to various
techniques of protest performance including zines, podcasts, art campaigns and
poetry circles. Based on shared interests and affinities, students work in
groups to class devise activist performances as a final project.
Judith
Butler is the godmother—godperson?—of gender theory. (She also rejects the
idea that Hamas should be called a terrorist organization.) Kimberlé Crenshaw is
the inventor of “intersectional theory” and a professor at Columbia Law
School. Peggy Phelan is
a pioneer of “performance studies.” And bell hooks is, well, bell hooks. Put aside there
are plenty of other scholars with very divergent points of view and expertise
who might have something interesting to say that conflicts with the narratives
and theories these women peddle. Just look at what counts as activism and social
movements. There’s no mention of, say, the Tea Parties or the National Union of
Social Justice. It’s all movements the left considers to be noble, heroic, and
committed to their vision of social justice. Imagine being a relatively normal
right-of-center kid taking this class. Either you’d have to accept the premises
of these movements—in which case the line between indoctrination and education
becomes very thin—or you’d have to choose between silence and becoming a
pariah.
Type “gender” into the course catalog and you get 490
classes. By no means are they all left-wing. Some are totally fine, even
essential (stuff on gender disparities in medicine for instance). But type
“Constitution” and you get 50 results (the same amount as you get for LGBTQ)
and most of them are in the law school.
Military
history has been shrinking as
an academic discipline for decades, but I would argue it’s more important for
understanding, you know, history than a lot of other subjects involving
metabolic rift and similar concepts. It’s also a subject that normal
book-reading Americans are interested in. But universities are embarrassed by
it. I get that you’d be a fool to type #MilitaryHistoryMatters 100 times on a
college application. But the reasons it would be foolish tell
you a lot.
The crisis besetting these schools is one of their own making. It’s Aesopian. They went looking for scorpions eager to wage transgressive war on “institutions of power” and to question the fundamental assumptions of America, education, liberalism, gender, whatever. They were encouraged at every stage to cosplay sticking it to the Man. And now the people in charge are ill-equipped to do their actual jobs, because they thought their job was sticking it to the Man, too. But they are the Man, whether they like it or not.
