Suchergebnisse

Are elite MBA programs producing morally bankrupt administrators? Duff McDonald, author of "The Golden Passport," tries to convince Luigi & Kate that conflicts of interest and flawed case studies amount to an unethical education that harms society.

In "Educational Theory" (vol. 73, no. 2): Discourse Ethical Perspectives on Education in Polarized Political Cultures* Christopher Martin – "Symposium Introduction: Discourse EthicalPerspectives on Education in Polarized Political Cultures" (open access)* Julian Culp – "Democratic Citizenship Education in Digitized Societies: A Habermasian Approach"* Christopher Martin – "Educational Institutions and Indoctrination" (open access)* Anniina Leiviskä – "Truth, Moral Rightness, and Justification: AHabermasian Perspective on Decolonizing the University" (open access)* Krassimir Stojanov – "Inclusive Universalism as a Normative Principleof Education" (open access)* Darron Kelly – "Conceptualizing a Practical Discourse Survey Instrument for Assessing Communicative Agency and Rational Trust in Educational Policymaking"* Gertrud Nunner-Winkler – "Discourse Ethics: A Pedagogical Policy for Promoting Democratic Virtues"

Mustafa Akyol and Neal McCluskey


America's culture wars are sometimes perceived as conflict between "conservatives," who defend the values of white Christians, and "progressives," who defend the rights of minorities. But there is something new these days complicating this always too‐​simple dichotomy: Some minorities are also quite conservative in their moral standards, and they are raising their voices against impositions from the progressive side.
This is evident in ongoing protests by Muslim and Christian families, among others, from Maryland to Los Angeles, against public schools pushing lessons about gender and sexuality that contradict religious values. "Protect our children" these families have called together, adding, "Protect religious freedom."
On June 24, in National Review, we highlighted this new development in a co‐​authored article: "Defuse the Culture War with Liberated Education."
First, we argued that the newly emerging Muslim‐​Christian alliance for traditional values offers interesting lessons:
There are lessons for both political camps. America's assertive progressives should realize that theirs is a counterproductive campaign. By advancing their ideals through assertion and coercion, instead of persuasion, they are alienating many people, including some minorities they claim to defend. Among Muslims, they are also giving ammunition to hardliners, who preach that Western freedom is a lie, that it only means freedom from religion and tradition, and thus Muslims should reject it everywhere.

On the other hand, America's conservatives should reconsider their distance from minorities, including a rigid stance against immigration, symbolized by Donald Trump's famous "Build the Wall" campaign. Those on the political right should realize that they may well share values with some of the people that they want to push behind that wall.

Then, we also proposed a solution to these increasingly intense culture wars in American education:
We believe that the best strategy is to keep government out of decisions about values and culture whenever possible, including — perhaps especially — in education, which is about nothing less than shaping human minds. This requires allowing more choice, so families can decide for themselves what their kids will learn. Instead of diverse people being forced to fight, they can freely pursue what they think is right.

The solution, in other words, was in going back to the classical liberal foundations of America:
Government should not discriminate against LGBTQ individuals, nor should it discriminate against people with traditional values. The only way to treat all equally, while advancing genuine tolerance, is the good old American value of limited government.

Read the whole article here in National Review. Read more about School Choice here. And see our catalogue of culture war in public schools – the Public Schooling Battle Map – here.

Perhaps the most important bill under the radar in
this year's regular session of the Louisiana Legislature would rein
in excesses against free expression in the state's higher education system.

SB 486 by
Republican state Sen. Alan Seabaugh
would prohibit preferential treatment based upon race, color, ethnicity,
national origin, political affiliation, or sex; discrimination in the
recruitment or admission of students or in the recruitment or employment of
employees; requiring as a condition of admission or employment that the
applicant submit an ideological statement; promoting instruction that the moral
character, racial attitudes, and responsibility or guilt for past group actions
of an individual is determined by race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or sex;
and would ban compelled expression contrary to a student's personal political
ideas or affiliation.

During a Senate
Education Committee hearing last week, Seabaugh noted behaviors the bill
would prevent at present occur at state institutions. Several examples he drew
from Louisiana State University, despite
a fake pullback from formal diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucracies
and information dissemination, moves publicized in leftist media. He emphasized
that bureaucratic name changes and public removal of media that glorified what
the bill would make illegal hadn't stopped these practices behind the scenes.

For example, he said LSU from at least some job applicants
still required a diversity,
equity, and inclusion statement, a pledge that invites a prospective or
current employee to demonstrate commitment to DEI, often through a written
statement that factors into hiring or retention or promotion. He also accused
the school of differentially enforcing regulations on expression depending upon
the content of the political messages involved, as related to him by eyewitnesses.

He stated the behavior occurred at other
institutions as well. At Northwestern State University, those involved in
student governance had to pledge fealty to a "land acknowledgement statement,"
which recognize indigenous communities' "rights" to territories seized by "colonial"
powers. He distributed at the meeting documentation demonstrating these and
other practices that the bill would nullify.

It didn't come to a vote because of some last-minute
amendments Seabaugh wanted to make and others he couldn't because some schools
wanted these appended to which he was amenable but they hadn't delivered these to
him yet. He extracted a promise from the committee chairman GOP state Sen. Rick
Edmonds that the bill would receive a vote this week with whatever amendments Seabaugh
deemed necessary.

Actually, the bill is less far-reaching than those
that have become law in five other states, with around 20 others considering
similar laws. It doesn't demand
dismantling DEI bureaucracies, regardless of their appellations, nor limits
the kinds of programs delivered or dollars
spent on these. It does prohibit teaching "woke" precepts of racial guilt and
neo-racist disguised as anti-racist interpretations of social and economic
policy, which some states' present and forthcoming regulations don't address
and others limit to just general education coursework that all students must
take, and it would not be inconsistent with the bill's purpose to prohibit that
instruction only for general educational requirements and/or to require that
any teaching of those precepts occur in a balanced fashion genuinely critiquing
the many scholastic warts of that approach.

While outreach efforts to encourage in higher
education greater participation and success of students and employees from
disadvantaged backgrounds serve a legitimate purpose, these have become warped
into a self-righteous defense and propagation of policies privileging such individuals
at the expense of the rights of all others, a subversion based upon an ideological
imperative inimical to the purpose of the university as a place that fosters
critical thinking and free inquiry. SB 486 minimizes that possibility and therefore
must be advanced into law.

If you make a promise (and haven't been released from it), then you're obliged to keep your promise.  The obligation is, in a sense, conditional. Note that you've no moral reason to go around making extra promises just so that you can keep them.  Keeping promises isn't a good to be promoted in this way.  (We might instead think that keeping a promise is neutral, while breaking one is bad.)It's natural to think that obligations that are in this way "conditional" should mimic this axiological structure: being bad to violate, but neutral between complying and cancelling. For if they were positively good to comply with, that reason would seem to transmit up the conditional and yield us an unconditional reason to get yourself into a position where the obligation (applies and) can be met.With this in mind, the following putatively conditional obligations begin to look puzzling:(1) The obligation of the rich to donate significant amounts of money to charity.Giving to charity is straightforwardly good.  So there's just as much reason to become rich in order to give more to charity, as there is to give to charity once already rich. (I think Peter Unger was the first to make this point?)  For a concrete illustration, suppose a talented young person is choosing between two life paths: (i) a struggling artist earning $40k and donating 10% of it, or (ii) a financial trader earning $500k per year and donating just 1% of it.  People in general will be more likely to condemn the person for "selfishness" if they choose the second path, when in fact it's the more generous of the two. (Suppose that, even as a struggling artist, they could at any time switch to trading and earning vastly more, but simply prefer not so.)The upshot: we focus overly much on actual income, and not enough on potential income, when it's really the latter that's morally significant.(2) The supposed obligation of (well-off) parents to send their kids to public school (so as to incentivize themselves to better support public education).Again, if there's really moral reason to do this, it's to achieve a good not avoid a bad.  So it would equally seem a moral reason to become a parent (so you can send them to public school, and thereby incentivize yourself to better support public education).  Parents who home-school or send their kids to private school are not doing any worse by public schools than are other adults who remain childless by choice (and so are similarly uninvested, on a personal level, in public education).  But it doesn't seem remotely plausible to suggest that well-off people are obliged to have kids for this reason, so I think we should be similarly skeptical of claims that well-off parents are obliged to choose (what they believe to be) a worse education for their kids for this reason.In general, I think, when people focus on those in a position to achieve some good, we should re-focus the moral question more broadly on those who could get into a position to achieve that same good.

Born in California to immigrant parents, Scott Galloway says that he's the product of an America willing to invest in unremarkable people. While Scott has made a name for himself as an entrepreneur, author, professor, and outspoken podcast host, he's endeared himself to audiences through his candor and vulnerability. Scott joined David to talk about what makes America unique, higher education and its moral short fallings, the benefits of immigration, the dangers of social media, problems with the tax code, and his belief that Donald Trump will drop out of the presidential race and make a plea deal.To learn more about how CNN protects listener privacy, visit cnn.com/privacy

Jeffrey Miron


This article appeared on Substack on June 29, 2023.
Later today, or next week at the latest, the Supreme Court will announce its decision in two cases that challenge the Biden administration's cancellation of $400 billion in federal student loan debt.
The legal issues are beyond my expertise. Regardless of the Court's decision, however, loan forgiveness is deeply misguided as a matter of policy.
Those who took out loans did so willingly. Presidential cancellation, at taxpayer expense, undermines the rule of law and makes a mockery of people who honor their commitments, or accept the consequences of failing to do so, even when that is difficult.
If this forgiveness stands, future borrowers will take out even more debt, believing that future presidents will likely cancel some of it. They will probably be right.
This moral hazard increases the cost of the loan program; more and more is paid out, and less and less is re‐​paid.
Worse, subsidizing education loans, and especially forgiving them ex post, discourages potential borrowers from using common sense to decide how much education to acquire and whether borrowing to pay for it is sensible.
Some amount of, and certain kinds of, education are beneficial for almost anyone.
Yet more and more education is almost never the right choice. Any decision to acquire education should balance the benefits against the costs (including explicit costs, like tuition, and the opportunity costs of foregone income). By making costs artificially low, loan forgiveness encourages excessive or poorly chosen kinds of education.
Students loan forgiveness, moreover, mainly helps higher income borrowers, since they take out disproportionately larger loans. Thus Biden's proposal is regressive.
Last, loan forgiveness by executive action is ripe for political abuse; politicians will do so in ways that benefit voters they can "bribe" into staying or becoming their supporters.
In Libertarian Land, governments would not subsidize student loans. Such a policy, however, at least has good intentions. Presidential loan forgiveness is just politically motivated theft.

Louisiana's local education agencies should heed State
Superintendent of Education Cade Brumley's advice
to disregard new and radical rulemaking from the federal Department of
Education that likely is unconstitutional that conflicts with present and
likely Louisiana law.

Last week, the Democrat Pres. Joe Biden
Administration released its recodification of Title IX of the Education Amendments
of 1972, which lays down rules to which state-regulated (because the U.S. Constitution
grants states the power to regulate education provision) education provision must
adhere in order tor receive federal grants. The sweeping and unprecedented changes
it had telegraphed with its initial filing last year and reinvented Title IX
only four years after substantial revision had occurred.

The purpose was to expand coverage, despite
the clear wording of statute denying that, of nondiscriminatory classes,
redefining "sex" to, among other things, "sexual orientation" and "gender
identity." It tried
to justify this deviance by referring to a U.S. Supreme Court decision in an unrelated
area of law, and almost certainly is unconstitutional for that overreach.
Any attempt to deny funding for not following the rule if challenged would lead
to the regulation's overturn by the judiciary.

In contrast, Brumley's letter noted that to accept
the demands of the rule at face value could open up LEAs to legal liability by
conflicting with Louisiana law. It could run counter to the Fairness in Women's
Sports Act as well as other
legislation currently making its way through the Legislature that almost certainly
will become law within months. In particular, Brumley pointed out that the
nature of this oncoming legislation – forms of which passed last year but
vetoed by culture warrior and past governor Democrat John Bel Edwards – also could
put schools at risk of violating the First Amendment if after these law's enactments
they followed the rule.

He's not alone in this warning. A number of state
school chiefs after release of preliminary versions of the rule levied similar criticisms
and concerns. And in
nearby Oklahoma, its top school official said it would make school
districts adhere to state law mandating that bathroom usage align to the physical
sex of the individual, contrary to the rule. Louisiana's Legislature is
considering a similar law the enabling bill of which
already has passed the House of Representatives.

That's not picayunish. Policy in Loudoun County, VA
schools allowed any student claiming a gender identity to use the restroom of
that, which played a part with one
male teenage twice assaulting females (the second attack occurring after
the policy's implementation) in women's restrooms about which the school system
did little except to prosecute the complaining father of one victim.
Eventually, as a result of its decisions the district's superintendent was
fired and the district now faces an expensive lawsuit from the victims. While
an extreme example, the new regulation would present greater opportunities such
as in that incident for assaulters and create huge potential liabilities for
schools if something like that happened.

The letter didn't outright order school systems to disregard the rule,
which Brumley couldn't do, but he made clear that they should ignore it. Perversely,
he pointed out, by the privileging of students who declare themselves possessors
of a particular sexual identity – perhaps as part of a psychological condition
that research shows that the majority grows out of – it subverts
the very intent of Title IX by making females second-class citizens. For
both legal and moral reasons, Louisiana schools need to heed his counsel.

If nothing else, SB 262 by
Republican state Sen. Valarie
Hodges would inhibit in Louisiana racial division and hatred.

The bill, currently
passed out of the Senate into the House of Representatives, would add to
the state's Parental Bill of Rights that schools "shall not discriminate
against their child by teaching the child that the child is currently or
destined to be oppressed or to be an oppressor based on the child's race or
national origin." This addresses the use of critical race theory, or the idea
that racism is pervasive in all societal institutions shaped historically by,
if not currently dominated by, people of Caucasian ancestry, as the
foundational tool by which to shape instruction.

Similar
to Marxism, CRT bases itself on a series of unfalsifiable, if not empirically
unverifiable or logically suspect, propositions that if questioned
automatically connotes racist actions (or, if the analyzer is non-white,
axiomatic of a false consciousness), making the whole enterprise intellectually
lazy and devoid of true scholarship. It increasingly has become a tool by
those ideologically compatible with its policy aims – strong government action
to level differences in outcomes of resource allocations – for instruction from
the academy on down.

As an approach to understanding the distribution of
political power in a society, it warrants scrutiny and study as long as this
occurs in a critical and comparative fashion in the instructional environment.
When made foundational in instruction, however, it subverts the entire process
of education as a search for truth by elevating faith over skeptical inquiry
and becomes nothing more than neo-racism posing as anti-racism.

That by itself disserves children by depriving
them of the opportunity to learn factual knowledge and then engage in critical
thinking using it. And, quite ironically, applying the policy preferences of
CRT actually would
undermine the very institutions that are essential to addressing poverty and
inequality across all racial groups, providing another reason to ban its
use as a foundational instruction strategy.

But the bill's language probes to a deeper and
more sinister implication of using CRT foundationally: it spawns divisiveness, leading
to hatred, then into violence. We
only need review recent history not among non-whites, but central Europeans,
to see a demonstration of how the principles of CRT produce this perversion. In
the 1990s, ethnic conflict largely but not exclusively driven by Serbian
nationalists operating under an ideology of victimization brought war and
strife to the Balkans.

This nationalism, spawned over a century, had
mutated into a blanket indictment of certain non-Serbian ethnic groups. Identically
to tenets of CRT, it taught that a certain ethnic group, Serbs, had faced systemic
discrimination that culminated over the years that granted them special
victimhood status awarding moral status to their claims of group oppression.
Indeed, movement leaders invoked imagery and symbolism from past American
racist policy outcomes when explicating their ideology.

Shared tenets aren't difficult to ascertain: glorifying
the year of enslavement as the beginning of a national narrative (the 1619
Project), attributing sinister ethnically-based motivations and ideologies
to political opponents (the refusal of whites to become "woke" and the denigration
of non-whites on that side of the debate as captured), and calling opposition
and criticism "violence," in order to legitimize future actual violence (propagating
policies such as defunding the police as a reaction to alleged brutality and
disproportionate detainment specifically aimed at non-whites). Sadly, these
tenets constructed a narrative that inspired many to engage in sustained,
violent ethnic conflict that cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

Regrettably, at its core CRT promotes tribal
hatreds. To teach children fundamentally that their race or national origins
automatically set them at odds with those who are different – unless, of
course, racial preferencing is instituted to redress (under the theory that "[t]he
only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy
to present discrimination is future discrimination") – not only perverts the
idea of education, but fuels a dangerous powder keg if allowed to expand and
persist. SB 262 does its part to prevent this.

Readers will be aware of the philosophy journal poll I have been hosting here. The poll was comprehensive in that it covered over 140 philosophy journals, most of them suggestions by readers. These journals cover the full spectrum of the discipline. There have been more than 36,000 votes cast already and I believe we can draw some initial findings. Journals are each assigned a score: this is the percent (%) chance that voters will select this journal as their favourite if asked to choose between this journal and a second journal chosen at random.

The first finding is that there appears to be a top tier of philosophy journals -- this is not controversial -- that is relatively small -- this latter part may be more controversial.

From the poll, the top tier of philosophy journals appears to consist of the following publications:

1. Journal of Philosophy 87

2. Philosophical Review 84
3. Philosophy & Phenomenological Research 83
3. Nous 83 
5. Mind 82 
6. Ethics 80

I say that these appear to be the top tier as each were no. 1 or 2 at some point during the voting (unlike other journals). Each would be selected at least 80% of the time if paired with a second journal chosen at random.

A further finding is that the second tier of journals -- which we might classify as chosen at least 60-79% of the time when paired with a second journal chosen at random -- is perhaps surprsingly large. This second tier might consist of the following journals:

7. Philosophical Studies 79
8. Synthese 77
8. Philosophy & Public Affairs 77
10. Analysis 76
10. Philosophical Quarterly 76
10. American Philosophical Quarterly 76
10. Philosophers' Imprint 76
10. Monist 76
10. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 76
16. Journal of the History of Philosophy 75
16. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 75
16. Midwest Studies in Philosophy 75
16. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 75
20. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74
21. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 73
21. European Journal of Philosophy 73
23. Erkenntnis 72
24. Philosophy of Science 71
25. Philosophy 70
25. History of Philosophy Quarterly 70
25. Ratio 70
28. Journal of Moral Philosophy 69
29. Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 68
30. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 67
31. Philosophical Papers 67
32. Journal of Philosophical Logic 67
33. Journal of Philosophical Research 66
33. British Journal for the History of Philosophy 66
33. Utilitas 66
33. Mind and Language 66
33. Journal of Ethics 66
38. Southern Journal of Philosophy 65
39. Review of Metaphysics 64
39. Philosophical Investigations 64
39. Kant-Studien 64
42. Metaphilosophy 62
42. Philosophy Compass 62
42. Journal of Political Philosophy 62
42. Philosophical Topics 62
42. Philosophia 62
47. Hume Studies 61
47. Linguistics and Philosophy 61
49. Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy 60

The next third tier of journals are those chosen about 50% of the time (from 40-60%)  where paired with a second journal chosen at random:

50. Phronesis 59 
51. Journal of the History of Ideas 58

51. Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58
53. Ethical Theory & Moral Practice 57
53. Philosophical Forum 57
53. Inquiry 57
56. Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 56
57. Political Theory 55
57. Social Theory & Practice 55
57. Philosophical Explorations 55
57. Journal of Social Philosophy 55
57. Economics & Philosophy 55
62. Law & Philosophy 54
62. dialectica 54
62. Public Affairs Quarterly 54
62. Acta Analytica 54
66. Social Philosophy & Policy 53
66. Theoria 53
66. Journal of Applied Philosophy 53
69. Faith and Philosophy 52
70. Political Studies 51
71. Journal of Value Inquiry 51
72. Harvard Law Review 50
73. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 49
73. Philosophy & Public Policy Quarterly 49
73. Philosophical Psychology 49
76. Bioethics 48
76. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 48
78. Politics, Philosophy, Economics 47
78. Kantian Studies 47
79. History of Political Thought 44
80. Legal Theory 43
81. Hypatia 42
82. Philosophical Writings 41
82. southwest philosophy review 41
84. Apeiron 40
84. European Journal of Political Theory 40
84. American Journal of Bioethics 40

The remaining results for other journals are as follows:

87. Environmental Ethics 39
87. Logique et Analyse 39
87. Philosophy Today 39
90. Ratio Juris 38
90. Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 38
90. Business Ethics Quarterly 38
93. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 37
93. Ethical Perspectives 37
93. Public Reason 37
96. Hegel-Studien 36
97. Philosophy & Social Criticism 35
97. Res Publica 35
97. Philosophy in Review 35
97. Philo 35

101. Neuroethics 34
101. Ethics and Justice 34
103. Philosophy and Theology 33
104. International Journal of Applied Philosophy 32
105. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 32
106. Review of Politics 31
106. Jurisprudence 31
106. Research in Phenomenology 31
109. Journal of Philosophy of Education 30
109. Review Journal of Political Philosophy 30
109. Philosophy East and West 30
112. South African Journal of Philosophy 29
112. Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal 29
114. Teaching Philosophy 28
114. Review Journal of Philosophy & Social Science 28
114. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 28
117. Journal of Global Ethics 27
117. APA Newsletters 27
119. Transactions of the C. S. Peirce Society 26
120. Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 25
121. Adam Smith Review 23
121. Archiv fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie 23
121. Imprints: Egalitarian Theory and Practice 23
124, Theory and Research in Education 22
125. Polish Journal of Philosophy 21
125. Epoche 21
125. Fichte Studien 21
125. Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 21
125. Asian Philosophy 21
130. Think 20
131. Archives de Philosophie du Droit 18
131. Collingwood & British Idealism Studies 18
131. Owl of Minerva 18
131. New Criminal Law Review 18
135. Journal of Indian Philosophy 17
136. Continental Philosophy Review 17
136. The European Legacy 17
138. Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice 15
139. Reason Papers 14
139. Associations 14
139. Journal of Indian Philosophy and Religion 14
142. Studia Philosophica Estonica 13
143. Derrida Today 5

Some further reflections. While there are several exceptions, it would be interesting to analyze any correlation between the age of a journal and its position in the rankings. There are several surprises on the list, this list does not correspond to my own opinions (I would have ranked many journals differently), and I do not believe that there is much difference between journals ranked closely together.

I also purposively put some selections in to see how they might play out. For example, I added Harvard Law Review out of curiosity and I was surprised to see of all journals exclusively publishing law and legal philosophy journals it appears to come second to the Oxford Journal of Legal Studies and above other choices. (I was surprised legal philosophy journals did not score much better.) I added several journals edited by political scientists, such as Political Studies, and was surprised to see they did not score as highly as I had thought. Roughly speaking, journals with a wider remit performed much better than journals with a more specific audience. I also added at least one journal, Ethics and Justice, that I believe is no longer in print. (Can readers correct me on this? I hope I am in error.) It scored 34% and came in at 101st.

What I will do shortly is create a new poll that will only have the top 50 philosophy journals from this poll roughly speaking. Expect to see this new link widely advertised shortly.

In the meantime, what do readers think we can take away from the results thus far? Have I missed anything?

On this day in 1740, no doubt full of trepidation and excitement, Adam Smith set off from his home in Kirkcaldy, on the east coast of Scotland, to take up the 'Snell Exhibition' scholarship in Balliol College, Oxford. His time in Oxford would teach him much — though it would by no means enhance the reputation of Oxford in general and Balliol College in particular.At school in Kirkcaldy, Smith's passion for books and learning, along with his extraordinary memory, became apparent. He went on to Glasgow University at the age of 14, and studied under the great moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson – libertarian, rationalist, utilitarian, plain speaker and thorn in the side of authority. Hutcheson seems to have infected Smith with some of the same.Oxford and incentivesSmith excelled, as he had done at school, and won the scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. In 1740, now just 17, he saddled up for the month-long horseback journey. If thriving, commercial Glasgow had been an eye-opener to a boy from backward Kirkcaldy, England seemed quite a different world again. He wrote of the grandness of its architecture and the fatness of its cattle, quite unlike the poor specimens of his native Scotland. But the English university education system did not impress him. Indeed, it gave him an important lesson on the power of incentives, which he would catalogue acidly in his great 1776 work of economics, The Wealth Of Nations.Oxford teachers were paid directly from large college endowments, not from students' fees as they were in Glasgow. It hardly encouraged their interest in their students. "In the University of Oxford," wrote Smith later, "the greater part of the public professors have, for these many years, given up altogether even the pretence of teaching."Ouch. But it got worse.College life, he observed was contrived "for the interest, or more properly speaking, for the ease of the masters." There were disciplines aplenty on the students, but not on the teachers. In his words, "Where the masters, however, rarely perform their duty, there are no examples, I believe, that the greater part of the students ever neglect theirs. No discipline is ever requisite to force attendance upon lectures which are really worth the attending, as it well known wherever any such lectures are given."From this experience, Smith drew out a general principle of economics: "It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as he can; and if his emoluments are to be precisely the same, whether he does, or does not perform some very laborious duty, it is certainly his interest, at least as interest is vulgarly understood, either to neglect it altogether, or, if he is subject to some authority which will not suffer him to do this, to perform it in as careless and slovenly a manner as that authority will permit."And institutes like a university, he noted, indulge each other's laziness. They "are likely to make a common cause, to be all very indulgent to one another, and every man to consent that his neighbour may neglect his duty, provided he himself is allowed to neglect his own."Smith, then, learnt little from his Oxford teachers. Yet, thanks to Balliol's world-class library and his own love of reading and learning, Smith was able to educate himself in the classics, literature, and other subjects. He left Oxford in 1746, before the expiry of his scholarship, to return to Kirkcaldy, where he began to write essays and articles that would make his reputation and launch his academic career — a career that would culminate with these insights on economic incentives and the cutting rebuke of the system that had so let him down.

That crash you heard was Republican Gov. Jeff Landry
throwing a brick through the plate glass window of business-as-usual leftist
populism infecting Louisiana public policy. And not a moment too soon.

Landry gave the state a head start in knowing some
of his policy priorities of when projected inclement weather bumped up his
inauguration a day early (although he would not officially take the reins for
another 19 hours). In his subsequent speech,
he made clear he would come after certain orthodoxies underpinning policy of
his predecessor Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards and allies.

His overall theme – Louisiana as home, but
welcoming back those who had departed it for presumably greener pastures –
pulled back the curtain on what was to come: leaving implied things were wrong
with the state that could be fixed. He gave in the first part a paean to
Louisianans, interspersed with hints of what was to come with assertions that government
was not to "disenfranchise" people nor to be driven by divisive elite interests,
and spoke of a need to "repair and reform" government.

Around this time, the camera gave a glance at
Edwards, who looked like he had swallowed a sour mouse. Then Landry stopped
pulling punches.

He spoke of a people's agenda where "children be
afforded an education that reflects those wholesome principles, and not an
indoctrination behind their mother's back" that would "honor our teachers by
letting them teach and safeguard our schools from the toxicity of unsuitable
subject matter." He empathized with "the victims of crime whose compelling
voices have gone un-heard for far too long, squelched by the misguided noise of
those who had rather coddle criminals than live in peace."

He pledged to heed "all of the science, not just
the selective slices spoon-fed to us by those seeking to profit, in many cases,
from the taxpayer funded subsidies that disregard the health, the safety, and
the employment security of our citizens; hiding the truth about the real
environmental footprints created by the lust for wealth by a chosen few and
their reckless proposals." And, he vowed, while praising those directly serving
in the industry, to correct the health and welfare of our families from being "politicized
to the point of endangerment and disregard for the dignity of our elderly and
our suffering."

Translation: measures on the way to excise neo-racism
posing as anti-racism in instruction as foundational principles and the steering
of children towards faddish ideas about their identities, even without parental
knowledge, whether in the classroom or elsewhere, in the state's educational
institutions from kindergarten through the university.

Translation: significant reversal of Edwards' criminal
justice changes and installing other reforms to ensure accountability is brought
not just for criminal behavior but also to the justice system to have it protect
first and foremost the law-abiding citizenry.

Translation: sweeping away Edwards' policies and government
infrastructure built around those based on the junk science of climate alarmism
to take an informed and balanced approach towards upkeeping and burnishing the
environment.

Translation: stop leaders from measuring success
in health care delivery by how many people they can put on government insurance
rather than seeking efficiency and giving priority to the most needy and vulnerable,
and instead start concentrating on making sure those in genuine need have meaningful
access to health care with the most vulnerable receiving priority, by spending  more wisely while sidelining special interests
trying to distort the system, whether those be ideologically and/or
economically motivated.

At the ceremony's conclusion, fireworks erupted,
auguring what will come over the next four years on the policy front as Landry
and like-minded legislators try to reverse finally a century of misguided agendas
that veered even more off course over the past eight years. Only that, as the
speech suggested, will bring home Louisianans separated from both state soil physically
by or in morale attitudinally over the wages of that history. Not a moment too
soon, it's morning in Louisiana again.

A group of faculty at Penn have written A Vision for a New Future of the University of Pennsylvania at https://pennforward.com/.  They encourage signatures, even if you're not associated with Penn. I signed. Big picture: Universities stand at a crossroads. Do universities choose pursuit of knowledge, the robust open and uncomfortable debate that requires; excellence and meritocracy, even if as in the past that has meant admitting socially disfavored groups? Or do universities exist to advance, advocate for, and inculcate a particular political agenda? Choose.  Returning to the former will require structural changes, and founding documents are an important part of that rebuilding effort.  For example, Penn and Stanford are searching for new presidents. A joint statement by board and president that this document will guide rebuilding efforts could be quite useful in guiding that search and the new Presidents' house-cleaning. There is some danger in excerpting such a document, but here are a few tasty morsels: Principles:Penn's sole aim going forward will be to foster excellence in research and education.Specifics:Intellectual diversity and openness of thought.  The University of Pennsylvania's core mission is the pursuit, enhancement, and dissemination of knowledge and of the free exchange of ideas that is necessary to that goal.....Civil discourse.  The University of Pennsylvania ... acknowledges that no party possesses the moral authority to monopolize the truth or censor opponents and that incorrect hypotheses are rejected only by argument and persuasion, logic and evidence, not suppression or ad-hominen attacks. Political neutrality at the level of administration.  ... In their capacity as university representatives, administrators will abstain from commenting on societal and political events...The University must remain neutral to scientific investigation, respect the scientific method, and strive to include many and varied approaches in its research orientation.Admissions, hiring, promotion ... No factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered over merit in any decision related to the appointment, advancement, or reappointment of academic, administrative, or support staff at any level. Excellence in research, teaching, and service shall drive every appointment, advancement, reappointment, or hiring decision.no factor such as gender, ethnicity, nationality, political views, sexual orientation, or religious associations shall be considered in any decision related to student admission and aid. Faculty committed to academic excellence must have a supervisory role in the admission process of undergraduate, graduate, and professional students. Admission policies should prioritize the fair treatment of each individual applicant, and criteria must be objective, transparent, and clearly communicated to all community members. Faculty have outsourced admissions to bureaucrats. While the cats are away, the mice play. Faculty complain the students are dumb snowflakes. Well, read some files. And no more "bad personality" scores for asians. Education:A central goal of education is to train students to be critical thinkers, virtuous citizens, and ethical participants in free and open but civilized and respectful debate that produces, refines, and transmits knowledge. Competition:as Penn's competitors struggle to define their mission and lose their focus on this manner of excellence, Penn has a unique opportunity to emerge as a globally leading academic institution in an ever more competitive international landscape....An unconditional commitment to academic excellence will become Penn's key comparative advantage in the decades to come. As many other universities in Europe and the U.S. compromise their hiring decisions by including other non-academic criteria, Penn will be able to hire outstanding talent that otherwise would have been hard to attract. I have been puzzled that the self-immolation of (formerly) elite universities has not led to a dash for quality in the second ranks. There is a lot of great talent for sale cheap. But many second rank schools seem to have bought in to The Agenda even more strongly than the elite. I guess they used to copy the elite desire for research, and now they copy the elite desire for fashionable politics. Or perhaps donors government, alumni or whatever it is that universities compete for  also are more interested in the size of the DEI bureaucracy than the research accomplishments and teaching quality of the faculty or the competence of the students. Clearly, the writers of this document think in the long run competition will return to the production and dissemination of knowledge, and that universities that reform first will win.  

 

After the arrival of ChatGPT and its competitors, panic ensued.
Some people predict mass unemployment, the bankruptcy of education, the
dominance of fake news, the collapse of democracy, and the end of human
history. I think these augurs have seen too many movies. If calls for a
moratorium are heeded, it would be the first time in history that a new
technological invention has been suspended or canceled.

Fear is always of the unknown and
is cured with more information. When one climbs to the top of a mountain and
approaches the edge of the cliff, one's legs shake. But if one takes one more
step forward and sees a landing just below where one can step over,
the shaking stops. The more information, the less fear.

It must be taken into
account that the power of Artificial Intelligence is enormous but limited.
Chatbots access large amounts of data accumulated on the Internet by Wikipedia,
some newspapers, patent sites and other online publications, and select the most
likely results. It is like a search engine like Google or Bing but multiplied.
The basic operation is the same as that of mobile phones when we are texting and it suggests the next word of the message. But what's the most
probable, that is, the most common, is usually also trivial,
superficial, and doubtful. In the language of the chatbot, clichés and
bureaucratic verbiage abound.

My modest experience includes
posing to ChatGPT the questions and exercises from my The Science of
Politics textbook. The answers tend to be correct when it comes to, for
example, applying data to a mathematical formula. But when the student is asked
to research an election or analyze a document, the chat response is something
like: "I'm sorry, I don't have access to current events or real-time data", "I'm
sorry, it is possible that may this term refer to a specific field or context
that is not within my knowledge or outside my training."

Chatbots know what is on the
Internet, that is, they know a lot of what is known, but they do not know what is
not known nor can they guess. They give probable answers, but they don't
understand, they don't think, and they can't discover anything that hasn't
already been discovered. They reproduce descriptions of how things are, but
they do not give causal explanations of why they are so. They are the denial of
creativity. Also, they have been restricted from contributing to anything new
that might be controversial. A typical answer may be: "... depends on a range of contextual factors, including historical legacies, political institutions, economic structures, and cultural norms."

The AI is also incapable of
reasoning from moral principles. A chatbot lacks emotions or feelings, is
unconscious, incapable of forming opinions or beliefs. It is, therefore,
useless for making decisions that imply value options or for establishing norms of
behavior. When faced with intriguing questions, it is ambidextrous: "on the one
hand, this; on the other hand, the other", "some say this, but others say
something else"…

The biggest question that has
caused so much panic is whether artificial intelligence can learn on its own
and successfully compete with natural human intelligence. But AI learns statistical
patterns from the available data, including errors and misrepresentations. For
now, "hallucinations" abound, as absurd and crazy responses are
called. It will only be able to improve if it receives feedback through
evaluations of its results, corrections, and suggestions. In such a case, humans
will maintain direction.

Handled well by humans, AI can
generate immense benefits. Allow me a little anecdote. Two weeks ago, I
participated in an international Colloquium at the National Autonomous University
of Mexico. During my presentation, there were 400 people in the room and, I was
told, 2,600 connected online from ten other universities in the country.
Through a small black and white square called a QR code, 56 questions arrived
that, in half a minute, an AI device collapsed into four thematic blocks,
making them viable to answer.

As soon as this type of practices becomes widespread, assistants, secretaries, accountants, translators, a lot of
mechanical, repetitive and servile work will gradually disappear. They will
follow the path of phone operators, bus and subway ticket clerks, gas station
employees, typists with carbon paper, travel agencies, road maps, or queues at
bank windows to get a few bills. Welcome the time and energy gained for complexity, inventiveness, discovery, and creativity.

The increase in well-being that
AI can enable is enormous. Some estimate that labor productivity in certain sectors is already multiplying. There are already tremendous advances in medicine, both
for diagnosis and for new drugs; there will be soon others to deal with the
climate crisis, the scarcity of natural resources, and food. We will learn how to
discriminate against fake news, just as we learned to distrust advertising and
electoral campaigns. And while some traditional exams may become obsolete,
nothing will be able to replace the personal exchange with students in the classroom.

John Keynes predicted that his
grandchildren would work only 15 hours a week; it was a correct calculation to
live like in his time, but we have continued working many hours to live much
better. When the computers came out, some asked: "do you work less now?" The
answer was: no, I work the same hours, but the result is superior. The same
will happen with Artificial Intelligence.In Spanish and Catalan in La Vanguardia: CLICK

 Sometime awhile ago I came up with the idea of doing a trilogy of posts on conspiracy theory, or modern conspiracy thought, read through Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx. I am not exactly sure why the idea appealed to me, in part because I increasingly consider Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx to be the cornerstones of my philosophical thought, even if these cornerstones come through the mediations of Tosel, Jameson, and Althusser (to name a few), but in this case, more specifically it seemed worth asking what would three critics of the mystifications of their day make of our modern mystifications.After writing the pieces on Spinoza and Hegel it took me a long time to even consider writing a piece on Marx. The intersection of Marx and conspiracy theory just seems too big to take on in a blogpost. This is  in part because for many in the US, Marxism is both the name of an actual conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. It has become increasingly so in terms of the former, the right has dealt with decline of the Soviet Union not by giving up on red scares, but by making the object of such ghost stories more and more diffuse and conspiratorial.  Marxism, or communism, are not to just to be found in open appeals to revolution, or organizing workers instead everything from Critical Race Theory to the casting of a Disney film can now be seen to be the work of Marxism in its more diffuse cultural form, a plot that becomes more insidious the more indirect its connection discernible political goals become. At the same time that Marxism is seen as conspiracy it is argued that its understanding of history and politics which sees the interest of the ruling class behind everything is fundamentally a conspiracy theory, if not the fundamental conspiracy theory. As is often the case, I would argue that this idea that Marxism is a conspiracy theory gets things wrong and upside down. To gesture to a much larger argument, I would argue that Marx's fundamental theoretical innovation is to present an understanding of economic, social, and political relations that breaks with every conspiracy theory in that its primary mode of explanation is not individual intentions, or collective strategies, but the economic and social conditions that exceed any intention or conspiracy. The actions of capitalist with respect to wages and working conditions are, to use the parlance of our times, dictated by the demands of the market, by the demand to be competitive, etc., what Marx would perhaps more simply call the extraction of surplus value. Marx stresses that this structure is absolutely indifferent to the conscious intentions of not only the workers, who must conform to it in selling their labor or risk losing their jobs, but to the capitalist as well. As Marx puts it, in the mouth of the worker addressing the capitalist,  "You may be a model citizen, perhaps a member of the R.S.P.C.A. [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], and you may be in the odour of sanctity as well; but the thing you represent when you come face to face with me has no heart in its breast." As I argued with respect to Spinoza (see the link above), if the defining characteristic of most conspiracy theories is understanding the world in terms of ends, of deducing the conspiracy from effects, (if talking about race makes white people feel bad that must be the reason behind such teaching, and so on, Marx's fundamental argument is how little ends and intentions mean in understanding social and political life. Marx's criticism is not one of "capitalist greed" as a moral failing, but of the structural conditions that cause capitalists to seek cheaper workers, to demand more of workers, and so on regardless of their moral character. This is the real meaning of Marx's invocation of vampires and werewolves, not to call the capitalist a monster, but to claim that there is something monstrous in capital that exceeds intentions and is found not in the hearts of human beings but in the social relations that produce and reproduce them. As something of an aside, I will suggest that part of Marx's legacy on critical theory, for lack of a better term, is this demand to think in terms of structures that exceed and situate consciousness, this, as I have argued awhile ago, is partly what is at stake in the concept of the mode of production. This legacy goes beyond those who are explicitly Marxist. What Foucault called a dispositif, or apparatus, what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as assemblages or machines, were also an attempt to think the structural over and above the intentional. They are in some sense an attempt to articulate a concept that could displace the mode of production understood as the articulation of material practices and ideas, what Marx called base and superstructure. In Foucault this becomes the relation of power and knowledge, while in Deleuze and Guattari it becomes that of machinic assemblages of bodies and collective assemblages of enunciation. Both of which could be understood as an attempt to expand the explanatory framework beyond the putatively economic to encompass the production of knowledge and desire.  Closer to home, the insistence on the term "structural" in "structural racism," as well as similar attempts to think patriarchy as a social and political structure, are all attempts to theorize racism, sexism, or misogyny without reducing it to individual prejudices, biases, or attitudes. I would then say, summing this up all too quickly, not only is Marx's thought not a conspiracy theory, Marx's fundamental move of thinking relations, structures, and institution in excess of intentions and understandings is the antechamber or all theories that want to be more than conspiracy theories that want to understand the structural conditions and not the individual attitudes as the basis for exploitation and domination. Such a point is beyond the focus of a blogpost, and, moreover, it was not what I intend to get at here. My question is what does Marx offer for thinking the conspiratorial turn in contemporary politics. The first point, which I have already more or less uttered, is that a great deal of what we call conspiracy theories are really just anti-communism, and that these theories have become more baroque and oblique as communism as a political force retreats into historical memory. They are in some sense a kind of anti-communism without communism, as Seymour argues. It is the decline of Marxism as a political force that leads to the demand to find it everywhere; everything that challenges the existing order, not just the economic order but its racial and gender aspects as well, from teaching about the history of slavery to non-binary gender identity can be labelled "Marxist." (The irony of this is that actually existing Marxism, especially in its more official state varieties, has had a spotty at best record when it comes to understanding race and gender as sites of domination and exploitation. Many Marxists of an old school variety are perhaps surprised to learn that anti-racist education is secretly Marxist and that Marxists are behind the demand to respect individual's choice of pronouns). Second, Marxism is integral to understanding the real conditions of social and political life which are in some sense experienced as a vast conspiracy. As I have alluded to above, Marx explains, better than any conspiracy theory the way in which prevailing economic and political relations produce the feeling of helplessness and lack of control that is, as Marcus Gilroy-Ware argues, the raw material for most conspiracy theories. Of course the fundamental question is if it is in some sense the relations of capitalism that create the conditions of alienation and powerlessness which in turn create the condition for conspiracy theorizing, why do such theories name everything but capital, or the ruling class, as the agent of this conspiracy. This is part because the demands of capital are too open, too disclosed to be the object of a conspiracy theory. There is no riddle to solve in saying that capital is driven by the extraction of surplus value, or, as they say, the pursuit of profit. It is openly declared in every newspaper, website, and news broadcast. Without a secret, without the ability to be in the know, there is no affective appeal to a conspiracy theory. We are stuck in a kind of perpetual purloined letter situation in which it is because the existing goals of the ruling class are so out in the open that there is a need to create a kind of bizarro world inversion of this world in order to believe in the conspiracy that must exist. While it is fairly clear to anyone paying attention that the established position on COVID for example is to declare it over again and again in order to be able to get people back to work and to end any state spending on aid, testing, or vaccines, such a goal is too open to muster any theorizing, too public to generate any critique, so we get a bizarro inversion where the powers want to keep the pandemic going, want lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines for some vague reason of control. At the same time, it could be argued that the fact that conspiracy theories generally leave capitalism untouched, approaching it only obliquely through the antisemitic fear of global elites, demonstrates to what extent the demands of capitalism have become, as Marx writes, self-evident natural laws, wage labor as a mode of existence and commodification as the realization of pleasures remain unexamined by conspiracy theories. Thus to butcher a phrase, is easier to imagine the world controlled by lizard people than it is to question the existence of wage labor and the commodity form.