Episode 398: John Ellis
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Navigating the Ideological Shift in Academia
How did higher education come to be dominated by academics on the ideological left, and what are the potential consequences of this monoculture on diverse fields such as literature and engineering? What’s the mechanism behind this shift, and where did it originate?
John Ellis is Chairman of the Board of the California Association of Scholars, a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of several books. His most recent work is titled, The Breakdown of Higher Education: How It Happened, the Damage It Does, and What Can Be Done.
John and Greg discuss the transformative changes happening in higher education. John questions the sustainability of the ideological shift towards political correctness and identity politics within humanities departments. Together they examine the impact of the marginalization of traditional scholarly perspectives and the wider implications for society's dialogue.
*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*
Episode Quotes:
What happens when one political ideology dominates the campus
1:00:01 The more you get a group of people in one room that agree with each other, the more you ban from that room any contrary opinion, the more those people will descend into stupidity because there's nothing to check them. What keeps people like you and me alive intellectually is that if we say something that has a flaw in it, someone is going to see those, spot the flaw. And in a thriving university, there are enough bright people around you, that if you say something with a weakness in it, there'll be someone who'll point it out to you, and you'll be better off. Because now, when you have a group of people that all agree with each other, that discipline, self-correction is gone. And so you'll descend into greater and greater irrationality and stupidity, and that process is still ongoing.
Do universities only appoint people like themselves
58:48 The universities will not change. They are, at the moment, peopled by a sect, a minority sect, a political sect that is extraordinarily tenacious and unwilling to compromise. Extraordinarily intolerant and intemperate, and they will go on appointing people like themselves. And we're still seeing the grip on this. The grip of the radical left is growing ever tighter, day by day. People don't seem to grasp this, but it is true.
The idea of objectivity in sciences and engineering
40:25 There is definitely an assault on the idea of objectivity in sciences and engineering. I mean, you've heard about black mathematics and so on, which is a nonsense ideal. My favorite saying is, "Only an engineer can build a bridge that will stand up. It will only just stand up. anyone can build a bridge that is overbuilt." These standards are seriously under assault now. No one quite knows how far they'll go. Certainly, there's some good work still being done in the sciences.
DEI as a reflection of the values of a radical faculty
56:14 The reach of the radical faculty, its grip on American academia, is extensive. It is pervasive. It is everywhere. And one of the things that I've found is very odd. What I don't understand is the fact that what was happening on one campus was replicated on almost every other campus, and yet it seemed so, you know, irrational to me, and yet the whole country, the universities in the whole country were exhibiting the same kind of directionality. And I still marvel at this. That there weren't more holdouts, but, no, the DEI is a reflection of the values of the radical faculty.