Censorship is Primarily a Problem of Institutional Selection

College plays a big role in shaping the culture of the symbolic professions... but not for the reasons most think.

In “The Discourse” there is a widespread implicit (and sometimes explicit) narrative that young people enter colleges and universities as bright, optimistic, open-minded and freedom-loving people with beliefs and dispositions that are broadly representative of most others in society. But then, colleges and universities – armchair ‘radical’ academics acting in concert with overbearing ‘woke’ administrators – get their hands on these innocent youths and warp their souls, leading them to emerge from college as far-left, intolerant and illiberal scolds who look down on everyone else in society, and try to micromanage, shame or coerce others into the “correct” views and behaviors.

This was, roughly, the assumption that my mentor Jon Haidt was working from when he started the research for his bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind. However, as he and co-author Greg Lukianoff dug into the evidence, it became increasingly obvious and undeniable that young people were arriving to colleges and universities (especially elite colleges and universities) having already internalized niche moral and political views, already mobilizing “woke” discourses,¹ and already disposed towards looking down on “others.” Students arrived on campus already oriented towards safetyism and censorship.² Their sense of entitlement was already quite strong: they expected staff and faculty to cater to their personal preferences and expectations and readily “called the manager” when institutions didn’t automatically and rapidly bend to their will.

Universities may be too quick to indulge these impulses. They may exacerbate and reinforce many of these patterns of thinking and behavior rather than pushing students to think and behave differently. However, college education was clearly not the core driver of many unfortunate tendencies that dominate elite culture. Instead, they argued, the primary issue seemed to be antecedent enculturation that children receive from the families, institutions and communities that most typically feed young people into universities.³

While granting Haidt and Lukianoff’s basic premise, I’ll argue here that universities do, in fact, play a big role in driving unfortunate dynamics within the symbolic professions. This is not because they successfully “indoctrinate” students en masse but, rather, because they serve an important gatekeeping role for deciding who gets to become a symbolic capitalist (and who does not) — and the attributes and dispositions higher ed institutions select for and cultivate, I will argue, are broadly incompatible with risk taking, dissent and pluralism.

But before getting into that, let’s start by putting the “indoctrination” thesis to bed.

No One Reads Marcuse

Within symbolic capitalist spaces there is a widespread narrative that society cannot be tolerant towards those who are, themselves, intolerant or they’ll end up dominating otherwise liberal institutions and cultures and transform them into vehicles of oppression. Therefore, and somewhat paradoxically, to create or preserve the conditions for genuine openness, diversity, freedom, inclusion and civility, it is necessary censor, marginalize, or expel those who are insufficiently committed to pluralism and equality. Or so the argument goes.

This narrative was first advanced by Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies. However, many right-leaning and anti-woke folks tend to be fans of Popper in the abstract. So, rather than blaming Popper for “indoctrinating” people into trying to censor insufficiently liberal views, most try to blame Herbert Marcuse instead – specifically, his essay on “repressive tolerance.” One glaring problem with this move is that, in fact, basically none of the erstwhile censors they’re pointing to will have read, or ever will read, Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” essay (or anything else he wrote, for that matter).

To illustrate this point, we can turn to the Open Syllabus (OS) project. OS has a database of 27.6 million syllabi from Anglophone educational institutions in the U.S. and abroad and from courses taught between 2008 through 2020. According to OS estimates, half of these syllabi (or roughly 13.8 million entries) contain full course readings.

Their data allows us to see what works and thinkers are assigned the most, which universities, courses and fields assigned them, who various thinkers are assigned alongside, and how these trends evolved over the course of the “Great Awokening.” Their database doesn’t have literally all syllabi, but we can use this resource to observe broad trends in higher ed assigned readings in recent decades.

So, out of the 13.8 million syllabi in the OS database with full course readings, how often does Marcuse’s “repressive tolerance” essay turn up? A total of 149 times.⁴ Another way of saying this is, statistically speaking, the essay is basically never assigned (it was assigned in one one-thousandth of one percent of all syllabi in the dataset).⁵

And, of the miniscule share of students assigned this essay, a much smaller subset of students will actually read it — as any professor will tell you. Reading rates are low across the board, but they are probably worse in the most “woke” institutions.

There’s tons of data showing that elite school students tend to be the most “woke” and are most likely to have major blowups related to moral and political issues. This matters because, generally, the more elite the school, the lighter the workload, demands, and expectations (these schools are simultaneously very hard to get into and very hard to flunk out of). A committee at Harvard recently found that students regularly get “A’s” despite neglecting the readings and regularly skipping class. An incoming Harvard junior put it this way to The Atlantic, “For all the hand-wringing about student self-censorship… peers mostly don’t read texts closely enough to form opinions in the first place.”

As the old joke goes: Indoctrinate students? I can’t even get them to read the syllabus!

Of the (ever-shrinking) subset of who actually read assigned essays, fewer still are likely to understand them. Of those who were assigned, read, and understood an essay, fewer still will agree with it. And of those who are assigned the essay, and read it, understood it, and agreed with it (we’re already into hyper-marginal territory here) – it will be a much smaller share who will commit themselves to “radical praxis” on the basis of this reading (i.e. they behave in ways they otherwise would not have had they not read the essay — trying to bring their own and others’ behavior into compliance with the theorists’ arguments).

All said, only a vanishingly small share of students in the 0.001 percent of classes that ever assign Marcuse’s essay to begin with are likely to be “radicalized” by it. We can understand precisely nothing about higher ed by focusing on phenomena that are this marginal.

Here, you might object, “okay, maybe the influence of Marcuse is overstated, but what about the other ‘radical’ scholars?”

Well, consider Michel Foucault. Although he is the #1 cited individual author in the dataset, he appears in only 43k syllabi. That is, he appears in just over three tenths of one percent of courses. You can choose any other ‘radical’ author you want – Marx, Adorno, Judith Butler, Edward Said, Kimberle Crenshaw – and they’re all cited even less than that (often significantly less). Individually and collectively, they do not play a central role in most courses – even in humanities and social science fields.

Right-leaning and anti-woke culture warriors seem vastly underestimate how banal and heterogeneous assigned readings typically are within and across fields and institutions and, as a consequence, radically overestimate student exposure to “radical” texts and thinkers.

Many also seem to dramatically overestimate the share of students who actually read their assigned texts — and with the kind of depth and seriousness that could lead them to shift their worldviews on the basis of encountering “radical” thought. In reality, most students are not at university because they’re deeply interested in ideas for their own sake. They’re in college to secure a piece of paper that will allow them to get good jobs and earn enough money to support their families and pursue their aspirations. They do the minimum level of work they have to in order to achieve those goals.⁶ This has been the case as far back as the empirical record goes. Of the small share of students assigned “radical” texts, most skate by skimming the text for the content they need to complete their assignments, assuming they read them at all.

All said, students absolutely can, and an overwhelming majority of students probably do, graduate with BAs or even advanced degrees having never read a single work from any of the bugbears of the political right.

Among people who don’t graduate from college, basically no one ever reads any of these texts either. It’s not like there are huge swaths of Americans without college degrees consuming “radical” social theory for fun (again, vanishingly few Americans with college degrees ever read social theory in college, let alone when they are no longer enrolled in classes).

The median American reads 2 books per year. 19 percent of Americans read 82 percent of all books consumed in a given year. Academic or political texts are especially unlikely to be consumed by Americans who did not graduate from college. (and are not particularly popular among any readers)

All said, few college graduates ever read anything by these folks and almost no one else does either. Anyone trying to explain broad-based social trends by appeal to “radical” academic theories is selling a bill of goods.

Karl Marx et al. Have Never Been Woke

The near-complete lack of deep engagement with these texts is a shame. If only more stakeholders had read more works by these “radical” authors, they would have encountered strong refutations of popular “woke” views.

For instance, many symbolic capitalists make appeals to “equality of outcomes.” Those who haven’t read much of anything by Karl Marx often characterize this as a “Marxist” position. In reality, Karl Marx wrote whole treatises denouncing “equality of outcomes” as an absurd political goal that could only be plausibly pursued by morally and logistically intolerable means.

Marx was also (in)famously hostile towards “intersectional” activism. As detailed in We Have Never Been Woke (pp. 110-119), during his lifetime, he supported a purge of feminists, antiracists and sexual liberationists from the International Workingmen’s Association – viewing these other “social justice” causes as dangerous distractions from class struggle.

In a similar vein, the book shows, most of the foundational critical theorists were very outspoken in their disdain of the New Left. They explicitly and repeatedly stressed that these movements did not well-embody their theories.

For his part, Michel Foucault would have obviously hated the growing “sex bureaucracies” regulating interactions between consenting adults (he infamously cared little about consent nor about interactions being restricted to adults). He would’ve hated the sacralization of minority groups and would’ve been unlikely to respect taboos on contentious social issues. He would have been highly critical of pressures put on individuals to “perform” their trauma, victimhood and (highly-constrained) identity – or pledge their allegiance to diversity, equity and inclusion -- in order to gain access to institutions and institutional resources. Foucault’s work provides ample ammunition for critiquing all of these trends (see here, here, here).

Chapter 5 of my book shows that, within symbolic capitalist spaces, there is a widespread assumption that women and minorities are more moral than “privileged” cisgender heterosexual white men. Minoritized populations are also assumed to see the world more clearly and speak about issues more truthfully. Many trace these assumptions to thinkers like Patricia Hill-Collins (creator of the “Matrix of Oppression” framework and a champion of intersectional analysis).⁷ But, in fact, Hill-Collins spends a lot of time dismantling these very assumptions in Black Feminist Thought (the book that introduced frameworks in question). She stresses that folks who are non-white, queer, disabled, female and so on are, in fact, no more moral than anyone else, nor do they have special access to “the truth,” nor are they any more truthful than anyone else. We’re all just people with partial and situated knowledge, whose thinking is deeply informed by our perceived interests and enculturated worldviews (see pp. 52-53 of WHNBW for receipts).

Likewise, academia is rife with calls to bury works by “dead white men” in favor of amplifying texts by women and minorities. Many on the right trace these ideas to Edward Said, and his landmark book Orientalism.⁸ Here, again, we see a deep irony: Edward Said taught literature at Columbia University. He loved the books by the dead white men. They shaped him. They formed him. Teaching these texts was also the main source of his livelihood.

Said argued that you can’t understand everything there is to know about life and society by only looking at the works of dead white men. He argued that Orientalist work about the Middle East often had important insights, but it also had significant oversights and distortions that were practically consequential. He argued that we should read and try to understand Orientalist work for its value while recognizing its profound limitations. He argued that to understand Western society and its global impacts you needed to put the dominant narratives into conversation with subaltern perspectives. However, the “conversation” Said envisioned between these discourses explicitly assumes both subaltern and the dominant narratives being studied together, not simply substituting one for the other.

Put simply: to the extent that people support tightly governing and punishing sexual interactions, they are not showing you that they’ve read, internalized and agree with Foucault, they’re telling the opposite. To the extent that people champion equality of outcomes, this isn’t a sign they’ve been converted by Marx, it’s a sign that they don’t know about or disagree with Marx’s position on this issue. To the extent that people suggest that minoritized populations are morally and epistemically superior to whites, and that we should therefore favor works by women, queer people and minorities and bury work by “regressive” dead white men – this isn’t because they’ve understood and embraced the work of Said or Patricia Hill-Collins. They’re showing you they haven’t read those authors, didn’t understand their central points or, in any case, didn’t agree with them (for more on these points see pp. 52-57 & 291-301 of WHNBW).

One thing that really messes up public discussion of these phenomena is that neither “woke” symbolic capitalists nor their right-aligned and anti-woke critics have actually read much, if anything, from the scholars they’re evoking.

One group tries to grant more intellectual heft to their position by appealing to scholars and works they’ve never read or understood.⁹ Their critics are in no position to highlight this ignorance because they haven’t read anything by these thinkers either – and so, if the people they’re arguing with make claims in the name of “Marx” or “Foucault” they just take it for granted that this is what Marx and Foucault actually believed. Consequently, they set out to debunk or refute views attributed to Marx that Marx, himself, has already decisively refuted at length.¹⁰ And so we end up with these cultural debates about “Marx” or “Foucault” that have almost nothing to with anything these authors actually put to the page because no one on any side of the discussion has actually read the work in question.

Again, if mainstream symbolic capitalists actually were being indoctrinated by the likes of Marx or Foucault, then many of the ideas and norms that dominate symbolic capitalist spaces today would never have taken hold to begin with. But, in fact, higher ed indoctrination is not a thing.

College Changes Little

Many elite private colleges and universities in the U.S. were founded to indoctrinate — literally. They were religious institutions intended to train religious leaders and monks, and to cultivate the children of elites into the correct moral and spiritual virtues. It’s not just elite private schools that operated this way: the expansion of public education in the U.S. and abroad (both K-12 and college) was has been consistently and explicitly oriented towards correcting presumed moral and political deficiencies of the masses.

Professors do, and always have, hoped that their teaching would affect young people: change their lives, expand their horizons, push them towards being more thoughtful, render them more ethical (with “more ethical” always implicitly meaning “embracing moral and political views and behaviors that better accord with my own tastes”). The problem is and always has been that we’ve never been particularly good at actually achieving these goals. But, to be fair, this failure has less to do with deficiencies of classroom instruction (abundant as those deficiencies may be) than with human nature writ large.

As the work of Hugo Mercier and others shows, it’s really hard to change people’s minds. State propaganda efforts overwhelmingly fail.¹¹ Efforts to sway voters from supporting one party to another typically amount to naught. The ROI on advertising (and how, specifically, it benefits companies) is highly uncertain. The efficacy of psychological targeting seems empirically dubious. Initiatives like diversity training are not just ineffective, they’re often counterproductive.

With respect to colleges and universities, as I detailed in a previous essay for Heterodox Academy, empirical research consistently finds that students’ values, worldviews and political alignments typically change very little over the course of their college education (and, for that matter, research has found that students on balance don’t seem to learn much from college with respect to useful knowledge or skills either.¹² Classroom pedagogy changes very little about students overall). To the limited extent that student views do shift during college, the changes seem to have much more to do with fitting in with peers than being shaped by their professors or the books they read.

It’s not just the students whose views gradually shift to more closely approximate the views of their peers -- the same is true of professors, and for the very same reasons (and as a result of the very same processes). The views and behaviors of scholars come to approximate those of the majority in their chosen fields. After students and faculty, themselves, opt into an intellectual community, they take on characteristics of that community.

In general, people tend to become more like the people they’re surrounded by: either one’s community members shift to being more similar to oneself or (more likely) an individual shifts to become closer to others in their community. This is why universities tend to shift general attitudes in the regions they're embedded in to the left: it’s not just the attitudes of students and professors that are affected, but others in the area too. Meanwhile, military bases have the opposite effect, shifting regional views to the right, and not just among soldiers, veterans and their families.

To the extent that people have views that are out of step with most others in their community, they often seek to minimize or conceal these differences. A recent study found that an overwhelming majority of students attempt to conceal normie views from their peers because they incorrectly believe that most of their peers actually subscribe to far-left cultural views on contentious social issues (when, in fact, they typically don’t). This trend is just as common among professors. As political scientists Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn illustrated, professors regularly conceal non-left views from peers in pursuit of their colleagues’ esteem.

But, as Noam Chomsky noted, those who start falsifying their views eventually rationalize their way to embracing them sincerely. Meanwhile, views that are never expressed for social reasons gradually come to be held less strongly. People’s views shift in these institutions not because they’ve been indoctrinated by reading core texts, but because they’re eager to bring their explicit social positioning into harmony with their internal convictions. The ability to achieve this parity may be one of the main capacities the symbolic professions select for:¹³

“It’s very hard to live with cognitive dissonance: only a real cynic can believe one thing and say another. So whether it’s a totalitarian system or a free system, the people who are mostly useful to the system of power are the ones who actually believe what they say, and they’re the ones who will typically make it through. So take Tom Wicker at the New York Times: when you talk to him about this kind of stuff, he gets very irate and says, ‘Nobody tells me what to write.’ And that’s perfectly true, nobody tells him what to write – but if he didn’t already know what to write, he wouldn’t be a columnist for the New York Times… you think the wrong thoughts, you’re just not in the system.”

The symbolic professions ultimately select for folks who already do, say, and think the “correct” things, and who, in the event of an apparent divergence, can rapidly bring their sincere beliefs into compliance with the institutionally dominant view.

College is where those selected as candidates for the symbolic professions learn, if they don’t already know, which types of expressed beliefs will enhance their status, social connections and professional opportunities. And they learn this mostly through socialization with peers and prospective employers rather than deep reading of academic texts or being persuaded by their professors’ lectures (this is also how they learn which jobs they are “supposed” to aim for post-graduation, if they do not already know).

Degrees of Separation

The possession of a degree, and from where, largely determines who gets to be symbolic capitalist and what their career trajectory looks like.

Consider journalism: although most journalists in 1970 had college degrees, a large minority did not. Those who did have college education graduated from a wide range of institutions from a wide range of majors. People took many paths into and through the profession. Today, however, virtually all journalists have college degrees. Most contemporary journalists studied journalism and communication in college, and went to journalism straight out of college, leaving them with little substantive knowledge about anything beyond the field of journalism itself.

Source: The American Journalist Study 2022

Moreover, as a higher share of the population has attained college degrees, where one gets their degree from has mattered more and more. Studies have found that flagship outlets like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal now have higher concentrations of elite school graduates than Congress, the federal judiciary, Fortune 500 CEOs, or top military brass.

Source: Wai et al. 2024

Media outlets are increasingly consolidated in a small number of media hubs, with reporters drawn from a smaller range of communities, and stories reflecting an increasingly narrow slice of society (see pp. 170-182 of WHNBW for more on the implications of these shifts for the field of journalism).

The same holds for scholarship. In previous eras, there were many pathways to becoming a scientist, and many institutions that produced science. Today, science is done primarily within universities and by people with advanced degrees. The professoriate is increasingly stratified, with 80 percent of tenure-line professors hailing from the top 20 percent of programs — and the professoriate being broadly and, in some ways, increasingly unrepresentative of American society writ large (see pp. 206-213 of WHNBW for more on the implications of these shifts for the scientific enterprise):

Source: al-Gharbi 2023.

Trends like these are evident across the symbolic professions. Almost all contemporary symbolic capitalist jobs require a college degree, and the vast majority of college graduates move into the symbolic professions upon graduation. Moreover, if you want to be at a top firm or in a top position after you graduate, you don’t just need any BA, you need a credential from an elite school (and possibly a graduate degree from an elite school).

Consequently, who and what colleges and universities select for is very important for shaping dynamics in the symbolic professions. Elite schools play a particularly important role in defining institutional norms and aspirations within the symbolic professions – in no small part because other institutions emulate them (everyone wants to be like Harvard). And so, we can gain ideal leverage on this point by asking, for instance, how does one get into Harvard?

It helps, of course, to be rich. But lots of rich kids also don’t get into Harvard while some people of modest means do gain admission. No matter their socioeconomic standing, those who get into highly-selective schools tend to:

• Perform well on standardized tests

• Show up to class, every day, prepared, and on time.

• Complete all assignments, on time, and in accordance with the specifications of the instructor (or go above and beyond the specified requirements).

• Care what adults think of them and ingratiate themselves with authority figures (a source of strong letters of recommendation and other interventions on their behalf vis a vis gatekeepers).

• Lack disciplinary records – although they do have strong records of the “correct” extracurricular activities

That is, what universities select for in general, and what elite schools select for in particular, are folks who are highly capable (they perform well on standardized tests; they have a lot of accomplishments), conscientious (they make sure to earn good grades and attendance records), and conformist (they ingratiate themselves to authority figures; they avoid disciplinary or criminal offenses).

Although students and faculty at these schools often put on a show of nonconformance, it’s important to remember at all times that the “edgy” folks at Ivy League schools are almost uniformly folks who were valedictorians, teachers’ pets, club presidents and/or star athletes. They’re people who learned the “correct” hoops to jump through, and jumped through them all with flying colors and in a highly-conspicuous way. Most of them were born on third base (or mere inches from the home plate). Few know genuine loss, risk, privation or hardship – nor are they willing to subject themselves to these things -- “radical” airs notwithstanding. “Disobedience” is often carefully planned and executed to help make sure they preserve or enhance their standing with elite gatekeepers and within elite institutions (see pp. 43-50, pp. 270-276, and Chapter 2 of WHNBW for more on these points).

Little changes in any of these regards when these folks graduate and get jobs in the symbolic professions.

Symbolic capitalist workplaces are often lightly structured, work arrangements are flexible, and people have a lot of discretion and autonomy in how they carry out their work.

A Silicon Valley office. Notice the recreational activities are being assiduously neglected. Lots of games available, but everyone is tightly focused on productivity.

Our preferred narrative to explain these arrangements is that we simply cannot be managed like other employees – it’d be like herding cats. In reality, the reason our workplaces are structured this way is because we don’t have to be managed like other employees. We aggressively manage ourselves -- and police our colleagues too. We don’t need to have additional work coerced out of us like normie workers, we willfully allow our jobs to encroach on all other aspects of our lives (see pp. 206-213 of WHNBW for more on these points).

What college degrees (and especially elite school degrees) signal to employers is not that someone is a critical thinker but, rather, that they’re a disciplined thinker, a team player, a rule-abider, and a standards-upholder. This is what universities select for, and these are the dispositions that are cultivated therein.

In the process of selecting for people who are especially good at “studenting,” colleges and universities (and therefore, symbolic capitalist employers) also end up filtering for people who possess highly-unusual cultural and cognitive dispositions — as explored previously on this Substack:

Compared to the typical American, symbolic capitalists tend to be more ideological, more ideologically extreme, more biased and more dogmatic in their thinking. They tend to be more intolerant of moral and ideological disagreement. They tend to be more status-oriented and risk averse than others.

Moreover, because their social position and livelihood turn on the production and manipulation of symbols, the people folded into these institutions tend to take symbols very seriously. We obsess over things like representation, symbolic gestures, and arguments over abstractions and hypotheticals – leading to modes of activism and political engagement that most others find bizarre and off-putting.

This is who universities select for.

People who do not fit this bill end up getting filtered out prior to admission into elite universities (or universities more broadly), or end up getting washed out before graduation. The folks who do end up graduating from college and getting a job in the symbolic professions were generally quite unusual before they ever stepped foot on campus. Compared to most others in society, they were already especially dogmatic, conformist, risk averse, status-obsessed, etc. And they become more this way the longer they stay in universities and the symbolic professions, and the higher they go therein.

Simply put, universities do play an important role in the story of how and why the symbolic professions are so censorious and strange: who they select and what they select for is a core driver of the dynamics under examination. For the most part, higher ed institutions are not indoctrinating people into becoming weirdos. Instead, they stock themselves with people who are already strange – who are already oriented towards extremism, managerialism, symbolic politics, and so on – and then encourage them to let their freak flags fly.

Understanding that, as a result of ubiquitous degree requirements for symbolic capitalist jobs and the selection criteria that colleges and universities rely on, these institutions are dominated by people who are smart, conscientious, conformist, risk (and conflict) averse, status-focused, and ideologues — this makes it much easier to understand a number of apparent paradoxes in the symbolic professions, as my next post will illustrate.

1. Most typically, young people aren’t adopting “woke” discourses after and because they went to Harvard; they model their fluency in their application materials – before they even step foot on campus -- to demonstrate to gatekeepers that they’re “Harvard material.” Elite K-12 schools work hard to ensure their pupils will be able to differentiate themselves from the masses in this way. See pp. 271-276 of my own book for more on these points.

2. We can see this in proclivity towards censorship among aspiring academics as well: PhD students are not being shaped into supporting censorship as a result of being “indoctrinated” by their professors in grad school — contemporary PhD students already support censorship at significantly higher rates than their professors do. Grad school isn’t making people into censors, it selects for people who (among other features) are especially oriented towards censorship to begin with, for reasons to be discussed shortly.

3. One element of Haidt & Lukianoff’s argument that is consistently (and conveniently) overlooked was the class narrative they told. Their story wasn’t about “young people” writ large. They were very explicitly focused on the children of highly-educated, relatively affluent, urban and suburban, secular whites – i.e. the kind of folks who dominate the professions and are also especially likely to send their kids to universities (especially elite universities) – who even ‘helicopter parent’ their pets. Other Americans do not want to raise their kids in the unusual and highly intensive ways that elite families do – as Annette Lareau and others pointed out previously. And even to the extent that some of these tendencies have “trickled down” to lower class folks such that they’d like to coddle their children, they simply don’t have the resources and bandwidth to do this type of intensive cultivation.

Incidentally, Haidt and I discussed the inverse class stories of CoTAM and The Anxious Generation at the 2024 Heterodox Academy conference – you can check out our conversation here.

Another important (but widely overlooked or misunderstood) aspect of Haidt and Lukianoff’s argument: they weren’t blaming “kids these days” for destroying institutions. They were blaming families, communities and institutions for harming contemporary young people in the name of helping them. The main agents in their story were not “kids these days” but, rather, well-intentioned yet misguided adults. As interested, my own exploration of why we get very little mileage on understanding institutional dynamics by blaming “kids these days” is here.

4. The OS data also show that, in the extremely rare case that Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” essay is assigned, it’s regularly paired with readings by classical liberals like J.S. Mill, Robert Nozick, John Rawls, FA Hayek and/or Milton Friedman. Professors don’t seem to be promoting Marcuse’s views in an uncomplicated way but, rather, presenting a diversity of perspectives on the questions of liberty and tolerance… which seems to be exactly what they should be doing (Popper and Marcuse’s arguments to the contrary aside).

5. As a matter of fact, Popper’s Open Society is assigned much more frequently than Marcuse’s essay (although neither is assigned much at all).

6. Students across the board are having an increasingly tough time reading, focusing, and retaining information. Schools have largely responded by reducing workloads and expectations while inflating grades. Rather than trying to stem the decline in cognitive capacities, K-12 schools and universities are accelerating the fall. The fact that students can now secure the main thing they care about in every level of schooling (securing the pieces of paper that open up doors to their next chapter) without cultivating or pushing themselves hard leads most to never grow or develop or push themselves hard: people broadly avoid needless exertion, and our capacities atrophy, unless we actively and willfully work against these tendencies.

7. Patricia Hill-Collins’ work appears 6927 times in the database — or in five one-hundredths of one percent of syllabi that include assigned readings. Black Feminist Thought in particular appears in 2.5k syllabi (less than two one-hundredths of one percent of relevant records).

8. For the reference, Edward Said is the 16th most-cited author in the database, cited roughly 20k times all said. Orientalism, specifically, appears in 10.6k syllabi, or in eight one-hundredths of one percent of courses.

9. Readers may be tempted to think that this is a tendency common among students, culture warriors and rubes, but not among scholars. In fact, scholars also regularly cite work they haven’t read. One can tell that the work was never read, because often the claims they attribute to cited authors, in fact, appear nowhere in the cited work. It’s possible to trace the pathways of these misinformation cascades: one scholar attributes a view or claim to a scholar or work because of a simple error of record keeping, misunderstanding/ misreading, or outright confabulation. Other scholars encounter that claim and find it useful for their project — and rather than reading the original source to verify the claim and learn more, they often simply copy the reference and drop it into their own work… sometimes taking additional liberties in summarizing the position ascribed to the cited author. You end up with a terrible game of telephone: works can amass tons of citations for claims that the author never made or, in some cases, explicitly argued against. This is a distressingly widespread practice. As Stuart MacDonald put it:

“The average social science paper today has more than five times as many references as its equivalent in the 1960s. This is modern gaming, and it has nothing to do with the creation of knowledge. Roughly a quarter of citations in top journals turn out to be wrong. Even when citations aren’t clearly incorrect, authors are unfamiliar with about half of the works they cite.”

Increasingly, folks are not reading or writing on their own, but using LLM systems like ChatGPT for research and sourcing, leading to a proliferation of “hallucinated” references that are getting cited in published peer review journal articles — included by authors who not only decline to read the works they’re citing, but who can’t even be bothered to verify their existence. And for the reasons discussed above, many of these non-existent works are likely to enjoy further citations by scholars who just copy and paste sources they encounter in other papers, without bothering to read them or verify that they actually substantiate the claims being made.

Journalists are no different. As Stuart Ritchie and others show, journalists often write articles about papers they’ve never read based on press releases etc. that often overhype and misrepresent the findings. Scholars and journalists who encounter a summary of the paper in prominent media outlets and who operate on the assumption that the work was accurately characterized, may go on to themselves cite the paper as erroneously described without ever personally reading it — giving rise to a misinformation cascade because everyone involved is too lazy to actually check their sources and do primary reading.

This has implications for studying the influence of Marcuse et al. too. An astute reader may think, “Well, even if students aren’t regularly assigned to read Marcuse’s essay, they may be assigned to read texts by other authors who are influenced by his arguments.” It may be tempting to look at secondary and tertiary literatures to argue that the influence of these authors is bigger than they may appear from direct references.

While this is almost certainly directionally true, it’s difficult to actually quantify, because insofar as students’ are assigned authors that claim to be channeling the ideas, arguments, or findings of Marx et al. when, in fact, they are simply misrepresenting the arguments of Marx — then students cannot actually be rightly said to have their thinking shaped by anything Marx himself actually said — as I detail at length in WHNBW.

And this is setting aside the fact that, for secondary or tertiary literatures too, only a small subset of students will actually do the assigned readings, fewer still will understand what they read, only a subset of these will agree with the claims as presented, and a tiny subset of them will be influenced towards “praxis.”

No matter how one slices it, the influence of these “radical” thinkers is much less pronounced than many assume — not just among students, but among scholars too (many of whom haven’t read much, if anything, from these authors either — let alone understanding that work, agreeing with it, and accurately conveying it to others). There’s a big "conversation” around many thinkers that is largely disconnected from anything they ever put to the page — in public discourse, mass media and academic literatures alike.

This was hammered home to me clearly in the aftermath of WHNBW’s publication. Although warmly received on balance, I had multiple reviews where people made claims about the book and its argument that seemed to strongly indicate they never actually read it. I don’t say this lightly — I mean it literally. This is, apparently, a thing that happens, and it’s likely to grow worse because of AI. There was a scandal recently when a major content provider for national newspapers offered a summer reading list that turned out to be primarily descriptions of fake titles that were hallucinated by LLMs. The journalist, who obviously never read any of these (nonexistent) books couldn’t even be troubled to verify that the books literally exist — let alone that they’d been summarized correctly — and the editors didn’t catch this obvious problem either.

As a sociologist of knowledge, I find this a very distressing state of affairs (including and especially when my own work is falsely characterized by folks who clearly never read it).

10. Marx is the #4 most cited author in the database. This sounds impressive until you look at the actual numbers: he’s cited in roughly 29 thousand out of 13.8 million syllabi that include assigned readings. In other words, he appears in two-tenths of one percent of courses on record. His “Critique of the Gotha Programme” (the essay I linked to above where he argues against trying to impose equality of outcomes) appears on only 341 syllabi — which is another way of saying that, statistically, it’s basically never assigned.

11. Regimes often successfully coerce folks into saying the “correct” thing. But insofar as folks are just professing what will get them ahead (or avoid falling into anyone’s crosshairs) while falsifying their actual beliefs and preferences, regimes see lots of behavioral non-compliance and are prone to rapid collapse if and when the lack of widespread internalization becomes known.

This matters because “normie” people often have a much harder time rationalizing themselves into false views, or views that run against their priors. They’re also much less likely to consume cultural outputs produced by ruling elites. As WHNBW illustrates, the primary consumers of these products, and the people most likely to be persuaded by them, are primarily and increasingly the same band of society that produces the content in question. Symbolic capitalists are simultaneously the primary producers and consumers of propaganda, and they’re the folks most capable of, and inclined towards, bringing their thoughts and behaviors into compliance with institutionally dominant positions.

12. Two good books on this by sociologists Richard Arum and Josipa Roska (both published by University of Chicago Press):

• Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses (2011)

• Aspiring Adults Adrift: Tentative Transitions of College Graduates (2014)

13. See p. 21 of WHNBW for the full reference for this quote.