Whether the origin of social justice in universities comes from students or the faculty is irrelative. Fact is that elite universities in the US stand strongly for social justice, and expressing those values in your essay and interview does increase your chances of admission - especially in comparison to expressing contrary values. Thus, if your only goal is to get in, you are better off emulating the values the university has chosen for itself, regardless of your actual personal beliefs.

Only if they really “stand strongly” and give higher scores to such views and it's not just marketing. If they advertise about social justice, but the admission process is in fact pretty conservatives, this posture will not have a dramatic effect.

But anyway, even if this is true, that doesn't mean that it's the current Elite's views, just likely to be the future Elite's views (assuming that higher education pays a significantly higher role than the set of other Elite's beliefs they'll encounter later in their lives and that they'll mimic too in order to be successful later, since the process you're describing occurs over and over and over in someone's life).

I think the only thing where we differ is that I consider elite university faculty (and the institution as a whole) to be part of the elite and you don't. I'm not saying either is correct, it's just where you draw the line.

There's a difference between “being part of the elite” and “being representative of the Elite as a whole”. I'm not arguing that university members aren't part of the Elite, but I'd argue that they are a narrow part of a much broader Elite and they are commonly more progressive than the rest of the Elite.

That we can agree on.

Replace "social justice" by "performative social justice" and you have a much more accurate description.

> But “social justice” is definitely not a foundational belief of the elite

The selection committees at universities certainly believes in social justice or they wouldn't consider race so heavily for admissions.

It’s mostly an excuse to accept fewer Asians, just as personality and interviews used to be one to not accept Jews.

So they care about social justice, which is bad, and they are only pretending to care about social justice, which is bad, and they use it as cover to do the opposite of social justice, which is also bad.

So, higher education is definately bad, and whether social justice is bad or not depends on whether you open the box and find out if the cat is a Republican or a Democrat?

> So they care about social justice, which is bad, and they are only pretending to care about social justice, which is bad

That's P ^ !P, which is a contradiction. Your reading doesn't make any sense.

I'm pointing out the contradiction in this ongoing "political correctness/woke" backlash.

They're complaining about people doing the right thing. And they know that. So they have to complain they're doing the right thing wrong, or doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Or the right thing is only a cover for a nefarious plot.

Which only re-inforces that it's the right thing, even before you examine the decades long track record of people arguing against it.

It's not hard to make the argument that it's a cover for a nefarious plot. Given the timing of when these ideas rose to prominence, that it was a reaction to the 'occupy wall street' movement and the prospect of an underclass uniting against the ruling class is a parsimonious explanation. The US ruling class very effectively prevented poor white and poor black citizens from making common cause in the early twentieth century by telling one of them they were better than the other. It's no great leap of the imagination to suppose they'd try the same in the twenty-first.

I don't personally subscribe to that narrative - dividing the losers of the new economic reality might have been an incidental goal, but the idea that social justice is a solution to elite overproduction[1] makes more sense to me. And as a means of curbing elite overproduction I actually like it - just as Edwardian scandal culture selected for self-control, cancel culture selects for a lot of the qualities we'd want in a successful elite. But I've yet to hear a good argument why it's not a cynical play by the elite to divide the poorest citizens against each other. Most who subscribe to the tenets of the system refuse to acknowledge the argument at all.

It's very hard to argue that social justice isn't designed to divide the poorest people against each other, since intended or not that's an effect it has[2]. I imagine the best counterargument to the belief I put forth in my first paragraph would be an alternate explanation for why these ideas arose when they did - does anyone who doesn't believe it's a cover for a nefarious plot have one?

[1] as argued very eloquently by, I believe, Charles Eisenstein in an essay I wish I could locate.

[2] and it puts one in the position of arguing that Yale isn't a racist institution, which is a losing position from the outset.