Peter Wood's New Campus Anti-Americanism

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has a great piece in Minding the Campus on the decline and fall of higher education, which he attributes to the "new camps anti-Americanism." Wood notes that a Pew poll "showed 58 percent of Republicans saying that they now view American higher education as having negative effects on the country." (The other 42 percent are uninformed.) He adds, "Then a Gallup poll in August offered the even more troubling picture that 67 percent of Republicans and Republican “leaders” had only some or very little “confidence on colleges and universities.” The figure for 'all adults' regardless of political affiliation was 56 percent." Wood says that administrators have been complacent, and their anti-Americanism will result in further declining public support for higher education. Wood is optimistic that the public will insist on reform.

I'm not so sure. The Republicans need to wake up to the partisanship of elite academia. The left ideology prevalent on campus is a market signal, i.e., a selection device that provides a screen, for Democratic Party affiliation. I know that sounds strange, but which party funds universities? May we not expect the party that funds universities to expect the institutions that they fund to support them? Which party are leftists most likely to support?

This claim is supported by the following: There is a strong tendency for academics to be left wing in ideology, but there is an even stronger tendency for academics to be Democratic in party affiliation. In many elite colleges the proportion of Republicans is not significantly different from zero. In contrast, Pew finds that about 38% of the highly educated are now Republican--and that number is endogenous because it follows a generation of campus indoctrination of the highly educated.

Since the New Deal, the Democrats have relied on universities to propagandize on behalf of their programs. The Republicans have been slow to recognize that universities have been playing a partisan role, and if the faculty is predominantly left and entirely Democratic while elite young are turned into US-hating, Gramscian transgender activists, how nice for the Democratic Party.  The Democrats have funded the universities; the Democrats will benefit from a youth indoctrinated into left ideology at those universities.

The solution is ending government subsidization and cartelization of higher education.

That can be done by ending tax exemptions for the social sciences and humanities and using the tax revenues to provide tax credits to students who pursue STEM-related subjects either in universities or in proprietary colleges. As well, business and professional education should be treated as proprietary and put on an even playing field with proprietary training.

Libertarian Professors Walk a Fine Line

The concept of a libertarian professor is oxymoronic. Higher education would not exist without state support, for it isn't value producing. It is, moreover, a special interest whose justification is inherently ideological and statist. Hence, to be a libertarian academic the professor needs to protest the statist system from which he benefits.

If a professor overtly favors the state-provided benefits he receives, then he is like any other industrialist who claims to favor free enterprise while lobbying for tariffs or bailouts. Such hypocrisy is damaging to professors, part of whose job is to exemplify integrity. Libertarian academics who lobby for public support and curry to their statist colleagues are hypocrites.

Parsing the 11:1 Democratic-to-Republican Ratio in Elite Colleges

The Democratic-to-Republican ratio in elite social science departments is 11:1. Some thoughts about the lopsidedness:

(1) Partisan lopsidedness drives ideological lopsidedness, not the other way around. Professors tend to be left because they are virtually all Democrats; that has been increasingly true since the New Deal. In the 1920s elite professors were beginning to become Democratic in response to funding mandates of John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The New Deal cemented that trend. With the radicalization of the Democratic Party after the Vietnam War, universities increasingly moved to the left.

(2) There is an association between left ideology and Democratic affiliation. Conservatives are no longer an important force in the Democratic Party, but they have become an increasingly important force in the Republican Party. Professors, especially elite ones in the Northeast, became more radical and more intolerant as Democrats in the Democratic Party became more radical and more intolerant.

(3) The Democratic Party moved further to the left in tandem with professors' moving to the left, and the causal direction has to be hypothesized that DP-->professors, not the other way around; professors are only one of many interest groups that influence the Democrats.

(4) The faculty Democratic affiliation rate is highest in states with the greatest degree of state Democratic control.  A grater share of SUNY than Ohio State professors are Democratic.  That may be because professors who would otherwise live in a state become professors in that state (Ohio has more Republicans than New York), or it might be because the professors respond to incentives from the state capitals, or both.

If there is in-state hiring, that raises the question as to  why domestic hiring is local, but a large share of elite universities' faculties, as much as 25%, is foreign born. In other words, universities hire internationally before they hire Republicans. The ratio of foreign born professors to Republicans is probably also about 10:1.

(5) The D:R gap in party affiliation among the educated is about 1.6:1, roughly the same as for engineering professors in liberal arts colleges. The gap in party affiliation among history professors among elite research institutions is 35:1. The ratio among studies (gender studies, women's studies, Black studies, LGBTQ studies, and so on) professors in elite liberal arts colleges is 100:0. Few differences in the social sciences are of this magnitude, 35:1.6 or 22 times,or 35:0. These are apartheid rates.

How Progressivism Destroyed Utica

 Below is a picture of the population trend in Utica, NY from 1850 to the present. Unlike Buffalo, whose population peaked in 1950, right after passage of the urban renewal act, the population of Utica peaked in the 1930s, about 15 years before urban renewal and about 20 years after an expansion of workplace legislation in 1911 to 1913, during New York's Progressive era.

The 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in New York City had led to the passage of dozens of labor laws in the mid 1910s. According to Wikipedia's entry on Al Smith (who was the speaker of the New York State Assembly and a member of the New York State Factory Investigating Commission, which proposed the laws):

 
New laws mandated better building access and egress, fireproofing requirements, the availability of fire extinguishers, the installation of alarm systems and automatic sprinklers, better eating and toilet facilities for workers, and limited the number of hours that women and children could work. In the years from 1911 to 1913, sixty of the sixty-four new laws recommended by the Commission were legislated with the support of Governor William Sulzer.

Other sources say that there were 36 laws, but whatever the precise number, there was a lot of new regulation.

The stagnation in the Utica population began about six or seven years after Smith's State Assembly (and Robert Wagner's State Senate) passed the Progressive-era laws, and the decline in the Utica population began about 15 years after.

According to Wikipedia, "Utica's economy centered around the manufacture of furniture, heavy machinery, textiles, and lumber." All of these are subject to factory regulation, which in effect raises wages. Employers contemplate the cost of regulation in their relocation decisions.

As well, the 1913 founding of the Federal Reserve Bank, also in the Progressive period, led to increased availability of credit. Easy credit meant reduced costs of relocation. There may have been early relocations of plants away from the city of Utica into surrounding suburban areas and into the South.


The combination of easing credit and increasing workplace and other regulation--the policy mix of both parties, but especially the Democrats--has been deadly to American manufacturing.


Instead of thinking about underlying causes of Trump's popularity, the American media has fixated on ad hominem attacks and shrill rhetoric.


Wikipedia's entry on Utica says that suburbanization began occurring in earnest in Utica in the 1940s, but there may have been an earlier trend as credit became available. The suburbanization of the pre- and post-war eras anticipated the broader globalization that followed the easing of credit and further expansion of regulation before and after the abolition of the international gold standard in 1971.


The post-1971 world has been brutal for those who create value. Those who live off the state as commercial or investment bankers, government contractors, government employees, and welfare recipients have fared well.


Unlike Syracuse, Utica does not have a nationally ranked university. Hence, it has not as easily participated in the state-subsidized education industry. Unlike Albany, it isn't a seat of an ever-expanding state bureaucracy. Unlike New York, the city that has benefited most from expanding credit, it is not a seat of global finance and bailout funding.


Utica actually produced goods of value like furniture. It was not a center of financial or political power, which produce nothing. Such production has been  punished in the credit-based economy, which supports a limited degree of innovation and instead favors low-risk investments such as plant relocations.

Historical Population of Utica, NY

  

How Urban Renewal Destroyed Buffalo, NY

    
Below is a picture of the population of Buffalo, New York from 1830 to 2017. In 1949, Congress passed the American Housing Act. According to Wikipedia, "It was a landmark, sweeping expansion of the federal role in mortgage insurance and issuance and the construction of public housing."

The Housing act was supposed to be a support to cities. It was the chief "urban renewal" law.  Encyclopedia.com adds:

Sites were acquired through eminent domain, the right of the government to take over privately owned real estate for public purposes, in exchange for "just compensation." After the land was cleared, local governments sold it to private real estate developers at below-market prices. Developers, however, had no incentives to supply housing for the poor. In return for the subsidy and certain tax abatements, they built commercial projects and housing for the upper-middle class.

Robert Moses was a leader in eminent domain actions going back to the 1930s. The sponsor of the law was Moses's friend and fellow Yale graduate, Senator Robert Taft. Taft had alerted Moses as to the passage of the law, and Moses saw a state law passed that increased his own power to oversee the urban renewal programs in New York.

The year before urban renewal went into law, signaling increased federal government involvement in the economy, Buffalo's population peaked. Its population, along with most other upstate New York cities, has declined ever since the law went into effect.

The Racism of John R. Commons--And What It Says about Columbus Day

Two guys on Facebook , Jeremy Horpedahl of the University of Central Arkansas and Phillip W. Magness of Berry College, sent me material that documents the racism of John R. Commons. Commons was the chief founder of institutional economics in the United States.

Commons can be fairly called the creator or conceptualizer of the current American industrial relations system and the innovator of much of the New Deal.

Hence, if we are to tear down statutes of Columbus, Jefferson, and Lee because they were racists, so should be consider tearing down the New Deal, which also was the product of racists, conceptualized by racists, and put into place by racists.  Commons, for instance, designed the first workmen's compensation law, in Wisconsin, and discussed social insurance reforms and unionization.

Just how racist was John R. Commons? 

In his "Racial Composition of the American People: The Negro" Commons writes of the western coast of Africa:

The torrid heat and the excessive humidity...produce a race indolent, improvident, and contented...Sexual purity is unknown...Formerly cannibalism prevailed, but it has now been largely stamped out by European governments...The people are unstable, indifferent to suffering, and  easily aroused to ferocity by the sight of blood or under great fear...They exhibit in Africa certain qualities  which are associated with their descendants in this country, namely, aversion to silence and solitude, love of rhythm, excitability, and lack of reserve.  All travelers speak of their impulsiveness, strong sexual passion, and lack of will power.

Donald Trump is fairly criticized for calling African countries "crappy," but what are we to make of an American New Deal, social insurance and welfare system designed by people who made similar remarks?

Commons adds:

slavery tended to transform the savage by eliminating those those who were self-willed, ambitious, and possessed of individual initiative...Other races of immigrants, by contact with our institutions, have been civilized--the Negro has been only domesticated...The very qualities of intelligence and manliness which are essential for citizenship in a democracy were systematically expunged from the Negro race through two hundred years of slavery.

Commons goes on to call "the war of emancipation" one of "dogmatism" and "partizanship" [sic] because equality and inalienable rights took the place of education and slow evolution of moral character. 

He adds: "Self-government means intelligence, self-control, and capacity for cooperation.  If these are lacking, the ballot only makes way for the 'boss,' the corruptionist, and the oligarchy under the cloak of democracy."

In discussing how African Americans can be educated in order to be "prepared" for "citizenship" Commons claims that African Americans lack the ability to be trained to use steam cleaners or to paint ceilings.

He says that the majority of African American mechanics are "careless, slovenly, and ill trained." As well, he adds:

the improvidence of the Negro is notorious. His neglect of his horse, his mule, his machinery, his eagerness to spend his earnings on finery, his reckless purchase of watermelons...these and other incidents of improvidence expalin the constant dependence of the Negro upon his employer and his creditot.

When African Americans did become wealthy due to property ownership, Commons attributes this to "unearned increment" rather than intelligent investing.  He adds, "Negro bosses and foremen are more despotic than white bosses." As well, "the Negro trade unionist has not as yet shown the organizing capacity of other races,"  and "when the Negro demands the same wages as white men, his industrial inferiority leads the employer to take white men in his place."

In response to the list of ways that African Americans were supposedly inferior to whites, Commons proposes "an honest educational test" for voting "enforced on both whites and blacks."

In a closing fit of racism, Commons attributes higher death rates among African Americans to moral rather than environmental and social causes.

In New York City, Mayor de Blasio and his left-wing supporters  have proposed to tear down statues of Columbus and Theodore Roosevelt. Why shouldn't the New Deal, a legal system designed by a racist, should be treated the same way?

All Science Is Politically Influenced; Social Science Is More So

Are the natural sciences as ideologically driven as the social sciences? No, but the extent that the natural sciences are politicized is understated by almost everyone, including many scientists.

Sociologists of science depict the natural sciences as heavily political. See, for instance, Bruno Latour, Science in Action, and Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Shapin and Schaffer.

However, the premise of Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Karl Popper in the Logic of Scientific Discovery is fundamentally right: Natural science does engage in falsification, and their tests are relatively value free, although I do not doubt that the direction in which they go and the subjects that they study are ideologically and governmentally influenced.

The social sciences are primarily ideological. They are not science. Economists are especially narcissistic in this regard. Microeconomic theory is value free, but the rest of economics is to a large degree ideological, especially in the fields of macroeconomics, labor economics, and monetary economics.

The other social sciences are often if not mostly ideological. 

The tax exemption that universities enjoy for social science and humanities instruction should be eliminated unless the same tax exemptions are given to Republican advocacy organizations. That universities are primarily political organizations is seen in the adoption by the humanities, which should be involved in the transmission of our great Western culture, of politicized, social science approaches.

The hard sciences have better justification for public funding, but if government money is to be used for science, Republicans are advised to ensure that Democrats, who dominate universities, are not using the funds for politicized science.  One way to do this is to focus on chemistry, mathematics, molecular biology, medicine, and physics, and to limit (or at least carefully balance) funding for geology, environmental studies, and environmental biology. 

Higher Education Is Drowning in BS

There's a good piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education by someone who says he's independent and unaffiliated but who seems to me to lean somewhat left.  He blames what he calls the BS in higher education for the deterioration of American politics. 

A good example of the deterioration is Trump's recent claim that Africa and Haiti are "shit holes" and that America needs immigrants from Norway. Trump misses that Norway is richer than the US (Norway GDP per capita, $71,000; US GDP per capita, $56,000) and that most Americans would be better off immigrating to Norway rather than the other way around. 

After 47 years of Fed-led wealth redistribution to the wealthy and stagnant real wages, Americans are falling behind economically, and Trump is not the cure. Although he's better than redistributionists like Obama and Clinton, he is part of the problem; he is not part of the solution.

The author, Notre Dame professor Christian Smith's, assault on academic commercialization, the culture of offense, and publish or perish is a well-taken step in the right direction for the usually educationist Chronicle. 

Rural Sectionalism and the Election of Donald Trump

A December 29  Wall Street Journal piece shows 20 charts that indicate how badly rural Americans have fared. The election of Donald Trump, mostly by rural voters, can be interpreted to be a reaction, and the campaign to eliminate the Electoral College a counterreaction.

Inflation-adjusted household income has declined since 2000, and it has declined the most in rural areas. Much of the decline occurred during the Obama years. That contrasts with the stock market, which has received massive public subsidization. 

Those who foot the bill for "too-big-to-fail" banks are the same people who are dying at increasing rates.

Where I live, Olive, NY, New York City has long played an imperialistic role similar to that of any Roman-style power. It has done so to procure virtually free water; it chose to go the imperial route rather than purchase water ethically back in the 19th century.

In his book Empire of Water, David Soll outlines the 100-year history of theft, exploitation, and regulatory caprice that deprived the ancestors of many people I see each day of their homes and businesses, forcing many who had owned family businesses into becoming day laborers.

Environmentalists, dominant in the Democratic Party, have learned from New York City and since the 1990s have systematically attacked rural areas. This occurred most aggressively during the Obama years.

Not satisfied with increasing death rates in rural areas, Robert Reich, the American media, and their fellow Democrats campaign for more political power to be concentrated in urban centers by abolishing the Electoral College.  The end of the Electoral College would mean even more extreme depredation of rural America than has already occurred. 

Trumponomics = Obamonomics

The Society for Human Resource Management reports the Hay Group's forecast of declining real wage increases for 2018. This is a global phenomenon, not limited to the US. Central banks are expanding credit globally, resulting in escalating stock and real estate markets coupled with stagnant real wages due to what Keynes called "money illusion."

Phil Magness on Facebook has mentioned that Keynes was a leading eugenicist. The coupling of declining real wages for the average worker, especially in rural areas, with increasing subsidization of elite, urban financial and real estate investors is consistent with social Darwinism. 

The strongest proponents of absolute equality, the Democrats, are most closely related with Keynesian economics and social Darwinist redistribution from rural blue collar workers to urban banking interests--although the Republicans are a close second.  

In effect, there is little difference among the econmic policies of the Democrats and the Republicans:  Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Trump have all overseen expansive stock and real estate markets with stagnant or declining real wages. 

One clue as to how this has proceeded is in the declining number of commercial banks. Expanding credit facilitates takeovers, which means that urban-centered banks consolidate rural banks. In turn, credit is less likely to flow to rural areas because rural investments are too small for the consolidated banks.  Hence, stagnant real wages have accompanied economic declines in rural areas, a point the Wall Street Journal recently emphasized. 

Lynch's Doppelganger

Last November Adam Thirlwell wrote a brilliant review of Twin Peaks: The Return for the New York Review of Books. I'm going to have to reread it to digest Thirlwell's references, but one I noticed as I researched his review is that the song "My Prayer" by the Platters, which appears twice in the series--in Parts 8 and 18--reflects the recurring Doppelganger theme in the series.

One of the singers on the Platters was named "David Lynch." David Lynch of the Platters died in 1981. In other words, the double use of "My Prayer" involves a reference to Lynch's own Doppelganger, just as Cooper has a Doppelganger and Cooper's Doppelganger has one.