How will it kill academia? Will it suck up all the funding, starving other fields? If not, what damage can it do, any more than, say, topology could kill classics?

This is a serious question, not a sarcastic one. Is this study area somehow affecting other academic disciplines? I'm long out of academia so this is all invisible to me.

The concern, as I have often heard it repeated, is that by being so capricious, unbearable and aggressive, the personality type associated with "grievance studies" will ruin any social goodwill held towards academics, along with their reputation for being more right than the average person. If that were to happen, nobody would want to send their kids, tax money, or endowment fund donations to any universities, and the whole system would go away.

I actually don't think this is a new phenomenon, but an old one with evolving names and players. When I was a student 3+ decades ago, we called them "fluff courses." And my parents remember taking fluff courses too.

We may have rolled our eyes, but in reality we were in on the game and had a vested interest in it, because the fluff courses were known to be an easy A. For one thing, a course that everybody in the college had to take, everybody had to pass. For another, teachers with a strong ideological agenda tended to be easy graders, because they wanted to be liked. So we sucked it up in those courses and were thankful for the boost to our GPA's.

If you make every subject as rigorous as math or physics, the resulting workload will be crushing. And not everybody who gets a degree needs to be such a rigorous thinker, to make a valuable contribution to society.

>If you make every subject as rigorous as math or physics, the resulting workload will be crushing. And not everybody who gets a degree needs to be such a rigorous thinker, to make a valuable contribution to society.

You could have a course that was neither rigorous nor ideologically biased, in fact every department could have them. I dream of an alternate universe (which one day could be ours) where instead of "You get an A but you have to pretend to agree with the professor 101," we could have, "the X department runs through their favorite material, but skips all of the really tedious parts that you would have to learn if you wanted to contribute, but as a spectator could go without."

A lot of colleges have an option to "audit" a course. My own experience was that in spectator mode, I didn't really learn anything, because courses had a "learn by doing" aspect that was pretty valuable for me. Also, courses I was taking for a grade always got priority for study time.

At Drexel, they had “physics for designers”, which is roughly what you describe.

>The concern, as I have often heard it repeated, is that by being so capricious, unbearable and aggressive, the personality type associated with "grievance studies" will ruin any social goodwill held towards academics, along with their reputation for being more right than the average person.

This was William Buckley's theory in God and Man at Yale. Has the gangrene managed to advance since the 1940s without ever killing the patient?

Political support of universities is decreasing due to it, Pew has studied it.

That is quite interesting, and thanks for referencing Pew. The closest I could find was the one below [1] that says that Republican support for universities in the US is declining, and that the reasons were (in order) cost, "professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom" and "too much concern about protecting students from views they might find offensive" (the latter being closest). However study [2] suggests the difference might be more nuanced.

Also, (though I am not in academia, my gf is and I spend a lot of time on campus): I'm not sure how much is really being "shut down" via complaints from so-called "grievance studies" faculty. The few cases that make the news seem so cause célèbre that I feel their very rarity is what makes them newsworthy. But then again I'm not a close observer.

[1] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/07/26/most-america...

[2] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/07/20/republicans-...

Interesting that the belief the professors are bringing their ideology into the classroom just shoots up as Republicans get older. Are they remembering their time in college? Maybe it was a bigger real thing in the 70s...

I think it largely has to do with decades of anti-intellectual propaganda masquerading as news. Listen to Rush Limbaugh every day for a few years, and you start to believe him.

Some older people become isolated from real-world social groups and get sucked into worrying about whatever radio or facebook feeds them. Which these days includes a lot of scary stories about universities coddling the next generation.

These graphs all turn markedly during/after the 2016 election, when political discussion and dueling tribalist/ideological messaging has dominated media, a great deal of money and effort has gone into targeting online communities, etc.

It won’t kill academia but it may eventually lead to a large cut in academic funding or a determined effort to make a degree unnecessary for respectable middle class careers or both. Gender/Queer/Ethnic studies, cultural anthropology and sociology are overwhelmingly left wing. They are a branch of the academy and at the same time a sinecure for people who produce ideas useful to one side of the culture war. There’s no right wing equivalent, no department that is over 90% conservative where politics trumps the search for truth. And this isn’t something these people are trying to hide. They’re quite open about the primacy of their political mission. And the students who major on these subjects don’t learn any particularly useful skills. Eventually some Republican will run on turning state colleges into STEM, education and business places and gutting the humanities and social sciences. Once it happens one place it’ll be repeated. If half of the population sees universities as hostile to their beliefs and life why should they vote to continue funding them?

https://newrepublic.com/article/143844/liberals-cant-ignore-...

> A Pew Research poll released this week found that 58 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believe higher education has “a negative effect on the way things are going in the country,” versus just 19 percent of those on the left who say the same. While opinion on the left has remained fairly steady, on the right it has become decidedly more pessimistic over the past two years (in the accompanying graph, note the drastic shift after the poll taken in September 2015).

> a determined effort to make a degree unnecessary for respectable middle class careers

This would be welcome, frankly. There are so many careers for which a degree requirement is a gatekeeper, nothing else. Hell, many jobs advertise a requirement for any degree, with no particular preference, which tells you exactly how pertinent the content of the degree is to the job.

As a society we've hyper-focussed on the desirability of university degrees at the expense of every other type of learning or training, and at immense cost. I'd welcome an honest re-appraisal of our priorities and an end to the creeping domination of credentialism.

>If half of the population sees universities as hostile to their beliefs and life why should they vote to continue funding them?

Because it's the academically educated professionals (and upwards in income) who are actually paying most of the taxes?

That’s true but it’s not necessarily true. It’s easy enough to conceive of alternative ways of structuring education, and especially job training. MBAs and JDs are both of astonishingly little value compared to their cost except insofar as they enable you to get certain kinds of jobs that would be impossible or very difficult otherwise. Law schools are quite adamant that they’re not trade schools. We have an existence proof of trade schools of some kinds being sufficient to substitute for a Bachelor’s in at least one area too. Lambda School is teaching people to be web developers in well under a year. I’m sure there are other well paid jobs they or someone like them could do the same in. College isn’t necessary for work training and there are large parts where it’s currentky necessary if you want a job but it needn’t be.