Highlights 7: Political Education; U.S. Disaster in Infant and Maternal Death Rates; Trump to Crush Student Debt Cancellation; Cancel Culture Panics; Trumper (Non) Thinking; New Housing Affordability Crisis?; Hofstader on Scapegoating Experts; University Research vs. Social Impact

POLITICAL EDUCATION FAILS UNLESS IT’S CONTINUOUS

 

‘The Democrats don't campaign year round in the same way that Republicans do on key issues and they do have a massive communication problem. That could potentially be solved by having a more robust ecosystem and more collaboration with even the likes of yourself and maybe even someone like myself as well.

 

‘And they need to always be on. They need to always be counter messaging against the anti-immigration sentiment. I went back and looked at my commentary from February of 2021, when the story of the Customs and Border Patrol Haitian migrants getting whipped by horseback, Customs and Border Patrol people, officers was in the news.

 

‘And I remember talking about how the Republicans are going to keep hitting the immigrants are doing crime note over and over again, because that's the one thing that they have. And it's built around a complete falsehood that undocumented migrants are responsible for incredible amounts of crime. It's not correct.

 

‘There is no data to suggest this. The data actually shows the exact opposite. Undocumented migrants are your neighbors, they contribute to the economy in very meaningful ways, and they very rarely take anything in return.

 

‘Why is the Democratic Party not pushing this counter-narrative? And they never did. Instead of pushing that counter-narrative, which is based in truth and talk about how undocumented migrants are responsible for less crime per capita than natural born US citizens are, or that fentanyl being trafficked across the US borders are actually not coming in the knapsack of an otherwise law-abiding abuela, but instead, it's coming from regular points of entry trafficked by American citizens.

 

‘90% of the people that are being apprehended for chemical compounds necessary for fentanyl or direct drugs that they're trafficking across the border are American citizens. This does not track with the narrative that people believe, because the narrative is dominated by the right on this issue. They should have been counter-messaging against that.’

 

SOURCE: Hasan Piker, Pod Save America

UNITED STATES’S DISASTROUS INFANT AND MATERNAL DEATH RATES

 

 

SOURCE: Commonwealth Fund via Adam Tooze, Chartbook

 

STUDENT DEBTORS COULD SEE HOPES VANISH UNDER TRUMP

 

'While DeVos isn’t returning in the second term, Trump’s new selection for education secretary, former Small Business Administration head and WWE executive Linda McMahon, is a Trump loyalist who could be expected to carry out his wishes.

“Trump’s campaign rhetoric on higher education and subsequent pick for secretary of education serves as a massive threat to working-class student debtors trying to make ends meet every month,” said Brewington. “But most borrowers don’t need to speculate what will come—they remember the systemic failures of the first Trump administration, from sweeping improper PSLF and IDR denials to resisting court-mandated relief for defrauded borrowers.”

 

‘Around 45 million Americans owe some amount of student loan debt, with a national average balance of $35,210. With 50 percent of student loan debt coming from grad school, there’s an assumption that debt relief would primarily benefit higher-income graduates. But a 2022 report from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that women and people of color are more likely to owe student loan debt and at higher balances, with Black women owing the highest average balance at $11,000.

 

‘The average loan balance also varies by state or territory, with Washington, D.C., having the highest average balance at over $54,000. During the 2019-2020 school year, 17 percent of Black students had to borrow at least $50,000 to complete their undergraduate studies, compared to 10 percent of white students and 7 percent of Hispanic students. . . .’

 

‘Republicans have opposed multiple attempts by the Biden administration to expand student debt relief, going well beyond the mass debt relief program that the Supreme Court struck down in 2023. Earlier this year, Republican attorneys general filed lawsuits challenging the legality of programs like the SAVE (Saving on a Valuable Education) Plan, an income-driven repayment (IDR) plan meant to lower monthly payments and offer loan forgiveness after at least ten years of repayment (or more depending on the loan type and amount).

 

'Project 2025 also calls for the elimination of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which offers complete debt forgiveness for borrowers who have worked for the government or a nonprofit organization for at least ten years. The authors of the document argue that PSLF unfairly favors public-sector over private-sector employment. 

 

‘PSLF, signed into law in 2007, was dysfunctional prior to the Biden administration, with Trump’s first-term education secretary Betsy DeVos approving just a tiny sliver of those who applied for debt forgiveness. The Biden administration fixed the program, and by this October, over one million borrowers had PSLF loans canceled.

‘But Trump’s return could mean that promises made on PSLF could simply be broken, with government or nonprofit workers who played by the rules on the expectation of debt relief denied cancellation and thrown into chaos. Meanwhile, Congress and the White House could attempt to end PSLF for new entrants.’

 

SOURCE: Jane Ekere, The American Prospect

 

THE NEW DEMOCRATIC ALLEGIANCE OF AFFLUENT AMERICANS

 

SOURCE: Sam Zacker, Perspectives on Politics

 

HOW CANCEL CULTURE PANICS ATE THE WORLD

 

‘The gambit of Stanford literature professor Adrian Daub’s clarifying new book, The Cancel Culture Panic: How an American Obsession Went Global, is the contention that, in fact, we don’t really know what “cancel culture” is. Moreover, the very fact that we think we do sustains it. Like every moral panic, cancel culture skirmishes thrive on contradictory impulses: incuriosity regarding accuracy coupled with intense, even prurient interest in perceived violations of norms; presumptive familiarity cut with historical amnesia. Before we have even read the latest cancel culture narrative, we already know the roles, the sides, and where we stand. Yet still we find ourselves consuming each one as the baleful harbinger of something new, strange, and profoundly threatening to the integrity of the polity.

 

‘What is cancel culture? Daub offers a working definition with three main elements: (1) the actual existence of new social practices, especially online, that some commentators find scary or confusing; (2) the claim that these practices are “part of a broad cultural shift”; (3) the notion that a “culture of left-wing censoriousness actively drives social fracture.”

 

‘Only (1) designates a “culture” in the sense of a set of signifying social practices, whereas (2) and (3) do not designate things people say and do not constitute “cancellation” so much as the way other people talk about those things. Daub’s critical intervention is to shift our attention from (1), the substance of the anecdotes, to (2) and (3), the ways these anecdotes are narrated, circulated, and put to political work. From cancel culture, to cancel culture discourse, to cancel culture panic. Or: from a complaint about a sandwich, to the mass media that amplifies it, to the political projects that make use of it.

 

‘Daub’s book, then, is not another entry in a series of sober critiques of cancel culture such as Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap, Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s The Canceling of the American Mind, or Susan Neiman’s Left Is Not Woke. Rather, these books are themselves artifacts of the discourse Daub examines. . . .

 

‘While plenty of cancel culture anecdotes are drawn from the media, the entertainment industry, and from the publishing world, most are set “on campus.” The “Morality Gap” speech helps us understand why: Reagan demonstrated canny insight into the peculiar capacity of the imagined campus to organize collective political anxieties. For one thing, youth alone makes college students effective avatars for the imminent future of the polity. For another, higher education is an important organ for class reproduction and class mobility. When told in a way that taps both of these connotations, an anecdote about the ostensibly degraded social mores at a flagship state school like Berkeley can be transformed into a foreboding glimpse at not just a university in turmoil, but an America careening toward disaster. At a moment of greatly expanded access to higher education by women, minorities, and the working class, Reagan projected anxieties about generational transfer and demographic changes onto campus life, casting college students as available objects of concern and condescension from adults whose very seniority guaranteed their relative maturity, sobriety, rationality, and pragmatism. . . .’

 

‘In France, the rising population of immigrants from former French colonies in the Middle East and North Africa since at least 1989 has been framed in the media as a direct threat to the social cohesion and cultural integrity of the secularist republic. Those who criticize this reaction to postcolonial demographic change as racist or Islamophobic are, according to many French commentators, speaking a distinctively American language of “le wokisme.” Thus, cancel culture discourse serves a distinctively French political project by yoking one French majoritarian panic (about Muslims) to a separate claim that French debate is being distorted by socially “fractious” ideas about race and colonialism from without. These ideas originate, supposedly, not from Francophone intellectuals like Frantz Fanon or Aimé Césaire, but rather from American campuses.

 

‘Caring overmuch about what American college students are supposedly doing and saying—and even more importantly, what they are allegedly not allowing to be done or said—is, Daub finds, a global pastime.’

 

THEY SHOULD HAVE THOUGHT A LITTLE HARDER AND MORE CLEARLY

 

'They played the victims, and it was easy to have no sympathy for them because they had little sympathy for anyone else. When I listened to Trump fans talk about “them” and “they”—how “they” wanted something for nothing nowadays—the subtext, the code, was lazy people of color and immigrants who wanted everything for free. Yet we were supposed to have sympathy for white men who weren’t changing with the times. They wanted to work, didn’t want handouts, were hungry for the meritocracy, in their parlance. But that was bullshit. They were nostalgic for privilege, the days when an uneducated white man got a job over a better-educated Black man; they wanted to be let go by police for traffic violations in a world when Black men were too often gunned down for the same; they longed for a world in which a thousand small barriers existed that boosted them and blocked everyone else. They wanted massive farming subsidies and all kinds of handouts and preferential treatment. They pined for a time when billions of Indians and Chinese, Brazilians and Indonesians—the whole rest of the world—were living in abject poverty with scant education and Americans and Europeans were the only people who designed things and built them. But the world wasn’t like that anymore. China was no longer peasants in Mao suits harvesting night soil, but hundreds of millions of hypereducated, focused people living in vast cities of steel and glass. Ditto Mumbai and Saigon and Jakarta and Bangkok. Men like James Mayhall and Gale Roberts and Rick Frazier had stiff competition; now they were the peasants. I liked to imagine the shocking slap of taking them through Shanghai or Gurgaon near Delhi or for a ride on Bangkok’s sleek Skytrain. If they wanted urban Black people to lift themselves out of the ghetto by their clichéd American bootstraps, why couldn’t they do the same? Instead of just watching their towns get destroyed by highway bypasses and chain stores, they should have stood up and done something about it. They should have finished high school and they should have found some way to further their education. They should have thought a little harder and more clearly about their Unions and voting for Republicans who wanted to break them, and they should have understood that the Affordable Care Act was a step toward giving them more access to health care. They should have voted against people who promised to lower their taxes and weakened the public institutions—the schools, the libraries, the infrastructure, the preparedness for pandemics—that made their lives better and offered them a social safety net. They should have read the damn newspaper every day. If they could afford cable TV, they could afford a digital subscription to a newspaper and keep up with the news. The real news. The truth. And they should have been offended and even insulted listening to people like Rush Limbaugh. There was really no excuse for the way millions of people had lost their basic critical-thinking skills and couldn’t separate the fake from the real. But they [couldn’t], and they hadn’t known any better and now they could feel the effects, a malaise, and when that big man in his blue suit stood up and said he alone could fix it, they bought it all.'

 

SOURCE: Carl Hoffman, Liar’s Circus: A Strange and Terrifying Journey Into the Upside-Down World of Trump's MAGA Rallies  (2020), pp 222-24. 

 

A NEW HOUSING AFFORDABILITY CRISIS NEXT YEAR?

 

 

SOURCE: Peter Berezin, Twitter

 

THE TRADITION OF SCAPEGOATING EXPERTS 

 

‘The advice of experts in the physical sciences, however suspect many of these experts may be, is accepted as indispensable.  Expertise in the social sciences, on the other hand, may be rejected as gratuitous and foolish, if not ominous. One Congressman objected in these words to including the social sciences in the National Science Foundation:  . . . ‘The average American does not want some expert running round prying into his life and his personal affairs and deciding for him how he should live.’ . . .[E]xperts were irritating enough in the time of F.D.R., when they seemed to have free access to the White House while the President kept the politicians at arm’s length.  The situation has grown worse in the age of the cold war, when matters of the highest public interest are susceptible to judgment only by specialists. All this is the more maddening, as Edward Shils, has pointed out, in a populistic culture which has always set a premium on government by the common man and through the common judgment and which believes deeply in the sacred character of publicity.  The citizen cannot cease to need or to be at the mercy of experts, but he can achieve a kind of revenge by ridiculing the wild-eyed professor. . . and by applauding the politicians as they pursue the subversive teacher, the suspect scientist, or the allegedly treacherous foreign-policy advisor.’

 

SOURCE: Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Random House, 1963), 36-37.

 

 

THE GAP BETWEEN UNIVERSITY RESEARCH AND SOCIAL IMPACT

 

‘Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, at different paces in different parts of the world, universities went from being purely institutions of instruction to institutions that also engaged in advanced research. In the United States, where this process went the furthest, the fastest, it was shaped substantially by one man: Vannevar Bush, President of MIT and special scientific advisor to President Roosevelt during WWII. Bush was appropriately excited by the strides made by American science during the war, and wanted the party to continue after the war was over only with one difference: instead of giving scientists untold billions and placing them under military control as was the case for the Manhattan Project, Bush thought the correct path forward was for the government to give scientists untold billions and then leave them alone to make their own decisions about how the money should be spent. That’s not quite how things panned out, but there is no question that the system of curiosity-driven research that emerged gave an awful lot of power to individual researchers and left universities as mere intermediaries for funding. Or, as a colleague sometimes puts it, with respect to research missions, universities are simply holding companies for the research agendas of individual professors.

 

‘And let’s face it, this worked well for many decades. The scientific output of universities working under this model has been amazing (see my interview with David Baker on global science from a few weeks ago). And it didn’t require universities to take on a particularly dirigiste role with respect to the faculty. In some ways, quite the opposite. It was during this period after all that a professor challenged then-Columbia President Eisenhower with the immortal words: “we faculty are not employees of the university…we are the university.” So as far as anyone could tell, the public could just dump money on scholars working in hubs and good things would happen.

 

‘Somewhere over the past few decades, though, the mission of universities changed. Instead of being asked to provide research, they were asked to promote local economic growth, or provide solutions to “grand challenges” or sustainable development goals. And these were challenges that universities took on—gladly for the most part. “Look!” they said to themselves, “Society wants our knowledge/help/advice, we get to show how useful we are, and then people will love us and give us even more money.” And trust me, this is happening All. Over. The. World. Oh sure, the details vary a bit by place in terms of whether the push is more on institutions to push local economic growth or to help deliver social progress, and the extent to which this obligation is imposed on institutions and to what extent they embrace it on their own…but the trend is universal, unmistakable. 

 

‘Except (how can I put this?) I am fairly sure that the lessons institutions learned with respect to growing research outputs do not translate well into these new missions. . . .’

 

‘None of this has escaped the notice of governments. They were mostly quite enthusiastic about the idea of universities as community resources, places that in effect apply brain power on-demand to various types of social and economic problems and are getting frustrated that jazz-based universities can’t deliver. Despite promises to the contrary, old-style universities simply aren’t set up to deliver the promised results, leaving an expectations gap that is souring relations with that subset of governments that don’t view higher education as the enemy in the first place.

 

‘And this, in turn, is contributing to a widespread recession in vibes around universities: simply put, they are not liked and admired the way they used to be.’

 

SOURCE: Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates