Is there a simple explanation for why so many academics have fallen for this?

[resistingreality]

Hi all, this is a bit of a woolly question but I am trying it anyway. I am an academic in the broad area of equality and diversity (not specifically sex-based inequalities). I am aware of many other academics, people far senior to me and much more 'successful,' and who I admire for their work, who are fully behind gender ideology. Some are advocates of queer theory and work in this area, but not all. Most are feminists, and one very prominent example posted on twitter this week saying that anybody who called themselves gender critical was not (a feminist, that is). It sent a shiver down my spine partly because I simply cannot understand this. I can sort of understand how people not immersed in these debates could be swayed by the 'be kind' thing and not see how trans rights and women's rights might clash. But these are intelligent, well-read, people who are supposedly (as academics) led by evidence. I simply can't understand how they can't see the very active harms caused by gender ideology. Or ... perhaps they can, and they don't care? But this requires a shift in my thinking to accept that women (and some men) who profess to stand for other women and have often built a career on this ... simply don't. I'll also admit to not knowing what to do. I want to stand up for my beliefs and I absolutely hate this conspiracy of silence but I am also aware that these more prominent academics could damage my own career and I don't feel brave. Help!

I'm not even sure it is that complex. I think that some just don't want to think. They just want an easy degree. In the old days, for better or for worse, they would not have had to finish school or aspire to university, but now there is little option. As a result, universities have shifted in purpose and ethos.

Students are customers, and so we have to give them what they want.

And what they want largely aligns with what managers want - less power for the faculty.

Which I think answers the question above - "How did management become so beholden to clueless young ones?"

I think their interests are just aligning. The management may not care about the Woke stuff per se, but it is a means of control. It stops the university being about "truth", and hence the academics having primacy. The DEI or whatever infrastructure is in their area, not the academics, so if Woke/social justice becomes what the university is about, the academics are sidelined, and the bureaucracy takes over.

And the individual students come and go, so the power they have is not as strong as the long-term management. Management is really pulling the strings here.

When I was a student (cue Hovis ad music) there were fewer than 5000 students in the entire university. Now that same institution has five times that number. Graduate courses were incredibly selective but now, in some subjects, if you can pay for it you can study it. The valued staff aren't necessarily the brilliant teachers or academics but the ones whose research attracts money or those who organise attention-grabbing conferences. It's all money.

In the days when learning dates, facts and formulae off by heart was seen as old-hat, they used to say, 'Teach children how to think, not what to think.' Now they don't teach dates, facts and formulae but neither do they teach how to think. It's all about standardised education and passing exams. Children are taught exactly what to think and given stock phrases to use that will gain them marks. It's a thought-killing form of rote-learning.

Some branches of academia have been taken over by professional contrarianism. Basically, some academics pride themselves on the process of arguing a point, regardless of the validity of the point or the ramifications for society. There's a huge amount of snobbery involved. If you think, for example, that men have an advantage over women in weightlifting, then you're just too embarrassingly stupid to understand the argument. Of course, these arguments cannot survive exposure to objective material reality.

The "management" are academics. Vice Chancellor, Provosts, Deans, Heads of Schools and departments, all academics.

They don't like managing.

It's worse than "students are customers we have to give them what they want" it's we have to give them what central admin think students want. These are different things

Students at from the LGBT group at the Uni I work at met with the most senior academic manager to ask for toilets for trans people. The result was the academic agreed and the estate management were told to convert some, not all, toilets in each building to gender neutral.

No central admin involved in that decision.

Children are taught exactly what to think and given stock phrases to use that will gain them marks. It's a thought-killing form of rote-learning.

It is awful. And when combined with a digits for learning any actual ‘facts’ (because you could just Google dates and things) it encourages a complete disregard for evidence.

It’s hard to teach a room full of people
who are desperate for you to tell the ‘the answer’ (right down to what each sentence should be in the structure) but at the same time are totally resistant to the content of that answer having any impact on their existing opinions and thought processes. The instrumentalism of it all means they just care about the (carefully directed and directly assessed) performance but without engaging with any of the content.

While I was an academic, I dealt with an increasing number of students who, on being challenged about whether a statement they’d made was true, told me that I had no right to question or challenge their opinions. A group of students who I’d tried to offer some different perspectives to and had the temerity to ask about the evidence for their (genuinely at odds with the evidence) opinions made a complaint to the programme director. And she told me off and made me apologise to them!

Turns out that if a student is insisting that black is white in front of you, then it’s not ok to refer to something like the light spectrum and to invite them to assess the evidence available about the colour of the thing they’re very obviously wrong about. Nope you just have to accept that their opinion that black is white is completely sacred and must be respected.

That same programme director told me off for commenting on a student assignment to correct the statement ‘Most X do Y.’ Which was followed up the quantification of ‘most’ as 43%. Apparently explaining the basic statistical error (in essay feedback) is humiliating. 🤷🏻‍♀️

That very much tallies with the teaching I've seen in schools. And I hate to say it, but in part it comes out of an increased emphasis on schools teaching kids social justice topics.Because the way they do that is not to teach it as a controversial issue where you learn to argue different perspectives. You can't question social justice!

I'd also add, there is an element with the increase in numbers of university students where administrators have made a bit of a devil's bargain. Back in the 60s and 70s when the idea of increasing the number of people with degrees started to really take off, administrators and academics were really salivating at the prospect of so much more access to funding. And they built all kinds of infrastructure to accommodate these students. Well - you cannot easily downsize when you have doubled the size of your material holdings. You need to fill classrooms to pay for them.

Children are taught exactly what to think and given stock phrases to use that will gain them marks. It's a thought-killing form of rote-learning.

I find this amazing too. My kids' high school (Scotland) is pretty good and though there are a few duff teachers, there's a culture of thoughtful teaching and encouraging engagement and critical thinking. But to pass exams, they have to be taught stock phrases. You will actually lose a point in a national exam (I'm not talking about internal school exams) for saying the right thing if it's not in the right stock phrase. It's appalling.

And agree re social justice teaching. You're allowed to ask questions... except about those things that are sacred and asking questions is a crime.

Saw this the other day, going to chuck it in. Could it be a recent influx of women?

quillette.com/2022/10/08/sex-and-the-academy/

Even if the analysis is debatable, there's some scary data there - one chart attached.

That's a really interesting article, and some very worrying stats.

From my own anecdotal experiences, there seems some truth in those observations, not just in academia but in many female dominated groups.

I started noticing the gender stuff years ago when plenty of women's groups on Facebook were throwing out members for criticising or questioning stuff. And the women admin would post a loooong list of rules of how we all had to be nice, kind, sensitive to hurt feelings, support any and every cause and underdog etc.

Women dominated professions like HR, are very big on pushing all kinds of initiatives under the D&I banner, and are more likely to do the whole pronouns in emails thing.

The men who do like scolding only scold women. They don't tend to do it to other men - mostly because many men will just ignore them.
So you get women policing other women and men who get a kick from policing women.

There does seem to be an inclination that when there's a conflict between being brutally honest about something or 'being kind' or nice, then women on average prefer to not rock the boat and smooth things over to keep the peace, even if it might be detrimental in the long run. I've seen this with men being allowed into women's online groups even when it makes other women feel uncomfortable.
There is a pragmatism in this mindset, given that men can and do respond very aggressively in retaliation.

Social interactions can also be different between women and men. Men tend to take the piss out of each other, lots of off colour and offensive jokes, rude banter - some of it seems unnecessarily cruel but maybe it does build a tolerance to feeling offended or upset. Women tend not to make jokes like that with each other or might chide others for being mean.

I suspect lots of factors feed into these issues, but I don't think you can have large swings in demographics and sex ratios without some (unintended) effects.

OP here, just to say still reading and finding the answers fascinating. I went to a Webinar earlier this week. The speaker was an eminent US academic and the Webinar was run in a very inclusive way. It was great. Except the academic speaker started talking at one point about cis-women and trans identity in a way that I couldn't see was relevant to the content of her talk and which left me feeling completely alienated. So there's all this emphasis on inclusivity but on the other hand there's a willingness to tolerate the kind of language that causes many women to feel totally overlooked. And I am way too scared to raise my voice, which is quite shaming in itself.

Some academics are just not very bright.

Lots of them thought that when the transcendental signified got lost it meant meanings also went away, whereas of course the lack of transcendental signified just means meanings don't depend on signifieds; your modus ponens is my modus tollens and so on.

Spell this out? - If a condition of the possibility of sense lies in signification and there is no signified, it may seem to follow there is no sense. However, and contrariwise, if there is sense without any apparent signified, it may well just follow that signification is not a condition of the possibility of sense. Huh? (Go read some Wittgenstein.)

I know it's mainly lit crit people who get mixed up about this. But really the queering of anything, based as it is on post-structuralism's soi-disant discovery of the said lack of transcendental signified, is just arrant nonsense (in a different way from the claimed non-sense of queer crit, of course; more down-to-earth.)

Oh, and Judith Butler just never managed to understand John Langshaw Austin, and so didn't really got started on doing things with words - she still hasn't learned how to, despite her protestations. Gender (and 'gender') is still suffering from this.

As for the rest of academia, well queer shit sounds clever and no-one understands it, so they all turn out to praise the Emperor's shiny new trans(-cendental, -gender) clothes funding proposal. Of course many of them do suspect it's shit, but there we are.

The men who do like scolding only scold women. They don't tend to do it to other men - mostly because many men will just ignore them.
So you get women policing other women and men who get a kick from policing women.

Isn't this also perhaps affected by the way that people get angry with victims as a form of denial? Rage/blame at rape victims, type of thing?

Yep, I agree Orwell nailed it with some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them. Queer theory definitely fits that remit.

Wut?

I must admit not sure about transcendental signifiers - although I am probably one of those academics who are not that bright!

But to pass exams, they have to be taught stock phrases. You will actually lose a point in a national exam (I'm not talking about internal school exams) for saying the right thing if it's not in the right stock phrase.

That was the same for my daughter in Higher and AH History, and again now with ds for Nat5s. So bloody annoying.

No, I think you are probably one of the smart ones in that you don't pretend to understand the essentially incomprehensible.

Those who do pretend so to understand are the ones engaged in our present-day trahison des clercs. Bad cess to them, as my grandma used to say.

Wut?

I think I love you @MsRosley 😃

Now transcendental numbers are wonderful and fun.

www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/transcendental-numbers.html

But that stuff I just read sounds like nonsense.

One of the big differences I have noticed between somewhat older vs younger academics, and also the ones that are more rather than less rigorous, is that the former are well read in a broad way, and the latter are not. I'm speaking here mainly of the humanities.

I agree with this. I have a friend who is a professor of french literature in a very respected university. he literally never reads outside of his subject matter. reads all the time on that - whatever academic paper he is writing or paper being delivered to a symposium or chapter in a book - he reads for those - generally other academic critiques. But I am better read in general than he is,including french authors because I read for pleasure. I don't think he has read Annie Ernaux (he can talk about her of course but hasn't actually read her) or Slimani - he probably hasn't read a poem since school. He told me once quite seriously that he was too busy to read.

The thing about Foucaul or Deleuze and Guattari, is their work was supposed to make us think a different way or look at concepts differently. It wasn't supposed to change physical reality - just as well because it couldn't. What bothers me deeply about this whole movement is that swathes of people seem to believe that transpeople actually change their biological sex. It is baffling. Like the poster upthread who thought in 50 years time we'd be baffled that we ever segregated by sex. Leaving aside the fact that we'll have a more existential crisis on our hands in 50 years, the idea that sex won't matter is bizarre? How will we reproduce in this brave new world?

Thank you for this discussion. it is fascinating.

The thing about Foucaul or Deleuze and Guattari, is their work was supposed to make us think a different way or look at concepts differently.

Which is fair enough, but it's only worth looking at concepts differently when you've already looked at them conventionally in start with.

What with the conventional way usually being the most generally useful and correct!

So starting primary school off on the postmodernism/deconstruction before they even understand the construction of standard models is bonkers. To put it mildly.

I agree Necessary.