>So you believe that while these departments have shrinking budgets, are the subject of continual staff cuts, and its not possible to use the degrees they give to make any money, that they still have influence over university administrations?

Administrators don't enjoy staff and budget cuts, they work to prevent them. That's a big part of their jobs, actually. If anything, the sinking of the (as another commenter called it) "wokeness" ship is driving an even larger fraction of that group of people into administration, as their prospects elsewhere dwindle.

So you feel like these people control the university administrations, while their fields drop in importance, funding and staffing?

I'm claiming that the university administrations are beholden to external forces, and the external forces are to blame for the decline of the humanities. The university administration would rather not have any part of their university decline, obviously.

Sure, but to claim that a group looking to push an agenda, a group that wields, in the right-wing imagination, inordinate power, can't even increase recruitment into their ranks, seems counter-intuitive.

>can't even increase recruitment into their ranks

The part of the story that I'm trying to emphasize is that the "ranks," although heavily embedded in academia to the point of controlling it, are perceived enemies of the public at large. They hold power within the academic world but are disliked outside of it, and the outside forces are responsible for the declines of enrollment, and so on. True or not it's self-consistent. You could compare it to the executives at a corporation that was notorious for polluting and hiding scientific evidence: they hold power within their company, and even if the public found out what they were doing and started to react it would still be very dangerous for an employee within the company to speak out against them. You can't say, for example, "Kim Jong Un isn't really powerful because the US is sanctioning his country, so you should try to usurp his position" because although he has little power outside of his country, he has a lot of power inside of it.

To further cement the point, imagine a kidnapper defending themselves by saying, "I could not have exerted force on the victim because I am not powerful, and I can prove that I am not powerful because if I was powerful I would not be in court."

That last example is beautiful. Imagine someone in court saying "I am not strong enough to do thing x, which is easier than thing y". It sounds like in this case the judge's (your) response is "but you did y".

I have been a postgraduate in the humanities and I can honestly say I've never seen the conspiracy you seem to be alluding to.

>I have been a postgraduate in the humanities and I can honestly say I've never seen the conspiracy you seem to be alluding to.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that it is happening, I'm just defending its logical consistency.

Although, I will point out that I have never seen a university where ex-science administrators outnumber ex-humanities administrators. It's quite believable that, as a result, humanities culture would be more common among administrators than science culture. As a result of that, a humanities student might think that the admins have "no culture in particular," because they have humanities culture and that's like water for a humanities student. At the same time, the scientists will be thinking, "nobody around here thinks like a scientist."

> If anything, the sinking of the (as another commenter called it) "wokeness" ship is driving an even larger fraction of that group of people into administration, as their prospects elsewhere dwindle.

>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.

Lets be entirely honest here. You do think this conspiracy is happening.

It is just name calling and dog whistling. The reason "grievance studies" is used is that just like "sjw" and "politically correct" its an evasive term designed to be loosely defined, so people can read what they want into it.

If you say to someone "you're engaging in grievance studies" they'll say "no". That's the limit of the debate you'll have with them, by your own design.

No amount of "university cringe compilations" or videos on prageru will get anyone close to the truth of what happens on university campuses. To claim that university students in particular, the people that are most likely to be exposed to different disciplines, are broadly unable to recognize their own academic "cultures" is absurd.

Funny how some people's enemies are stupid and weak while being powerful and threatening at the same time. A superposition! Beware the fearsome Eigenliberal!

The people who control the university administration are not academics in these fields, but disproportionally graduates of these fields.

Ok so they simultaneously have an inordinate effect on other disciplines, like science, but can't hold it together enough to keep their own boat afloat?

I think you are assuming that the graduates of grevience studies have some sort of loyalty to their old professors. My personal experience is they don't.

I think you're assuming that your personal experience is representative and unbiased. Is there a particular reason you'd consider yourself an expert on "grievance studies"? Is there a comprehensive list of areas of study you'd consider members? Could we perhaps figure out what level of knowledge you have in those fields, and with the academics within them?

I used to be a STEM academic and so dealt a great deal with university administrators and to a lesser extent academics within the grievance fields. Neither I enjoyed.

I also used to sit on the university wide committee that allocated PhD scholarships. Part of our job was to try and work out some sort of ranking of candidates between different fields. This wasn’t too hard for most fields, but I can tell you when we got to the grievance field candidates and their proposed projects we would all scratch our heads. In the end we just set aside a faction of the scholarships for these areas and accepted the ranking the departments provided.

So you sat on a panel with no experts in a particular field, and so deferred to experts from that field, and also had bad experiences with university administrators, and this lead you to believe you were an expert in the field where you deferred away your authority. If there's a good case for being suspect of scientists who claim authoritatively that other disciplines are bad, it is being made by you, right now.

No that is totally wrong. It is amazing how you can read something like that into what I wrote.

What's amazing is that you can scratch your head when confronted by the thesis proposal of someone who just got out of honours/masters in a field but simultaneously anoint yourself an expert in that field.

Did you read the word "we" in my comment? I was not alone in being unable to rank these students and I have never anointed myself an expert in these fields.

Oh so multiple people were not experts in the subjects. Cool.

Also isn't it strange that while administrations are supposedly stuffed with these "grievance studies" people - not one person on your board was qualified to properly evaluate those fields.

It is just the nature of university wide committees that you won’t always have experts in every field on the committee.

We certainly had people for outside the STEM fields on this committee and they were in no better position than the scientists trying to rank these grievance study students and projects.

So at the time you and your colleagues chose to defer to experts in those fields, but currently you assume you are an expert in the content and character of the fields. What changed?

Nothing because I am not claiming to be an expert in these fields.

Great:

> I think you are assuming that the graduates of grevience [sic] studies have some sort of loyalty to their old professors. My personal experience is they don't.

Dismissed due to lack of expertise.

> They know a degree in some grievance study is not going to help them pay off their massive student loans.

Dismissed (and stop listening to so much american commentary, arts degrees don't cost much here).