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TRADEOFFS DO EXIST Several things are true at the same time. (1) First, woke is cancer, and US universities are one of the primary sources of this cancer. They are the furthest left organizations in the world, and still radically out of sync with the people who fund them. This just came out in Nature: (2) So, the use of state power against wokeness is probably the only way to course correct, because academic wokeness is funded by the state. State power could be like chemotherapy against the cancer. (3) However, just as it is possible for the Western university to die from cancer, it is also possible for the university to die from chemotherapy. Particularly if no distinction is made between healthy and unhealthy tissue. (4) And the recent academic budget cuts are hitting the relatively healthy STEM part of academia, as opposed to the completely unhealthy humanities part. (5) That’s not to say that STEM hasn’t been corrupted by woke too. It has, particularly in medicine. But there was still some residual healthy tissue, some very smart people doing good things. (6) One of the world’s greatest living mathematicians (Terry Tao) was among that healthy tissue. If you read his blog, he really isn’t a far leftist. True, he posted against Trump once in 2016 (but so did much of the current admin). And yes, Tao did sign a letter during the BLM riots of 2020 (but even Trump at the time felt compelled to “honor the memory of George Floyd"). (7) Remember, the social pressure to fit in at UCLA during BLM was even greater than society at large. Wokes, like communists, demand public pledges of fealty to stop harassing you. That doesn’t mean those public pledges are always deeply felt or sincere. Indeed, it is the relatively apolitical STEM guys like Tao who often go along to get along. (8) Anyway, if one can’t or won’t make distinctions between a Terry Tao and a genuinely far left humanities prof, you will lose all the healthy tissue. The chemotherapy will kill the host. And four hundred years of Harvard's rise will come to an end. (9) That said, to steelman the MAGA side, one can actually make the case that the end of Harvard (and the Western university system writ broadly) actually is net good for the world! After all, US universities exported many bad ideas globally, particularly recently. From the claim that XX/XY chromosomes have no relevance in medicine, to the idea that prestigious citations count for more than independent replication, to the decades of attacks on white people simply for being white. (10) And, to further steelman the right, it is of course hard and time-consuming to separate the innocent from the guilty among the faculty. Indeed it may not even be possible in the time available, given that MAGA may lose political power in a few years. So perhaps it’s now or never. (11) Fine. But nature abhors a vacuum. And if you leave a smoking crater where Harvard was, that vacuum will currently get filled by China (with certainty) and perhaps the Internet (if we’re lucky). For example: (12) Anyway, I’m sympathetic to both the argument that woke is cancer and needed treatment and the reality that many talented individuals are becoming collateral damage here. (13) We’ve seen something similar before. In the early 1900s, Europe was the unquestioned leader in science. But then, after all the fighting between right and left, science left for the stable terrain of America. The graph below quantifies this for the physics Nobel: (14) History may repeat. In the early 2000s, America was similarly the unquestioned global leader in science. But after all the fighting between right and left, science is digitally decentralizing to the Internet (with professors becoming tech founders) and physically recentralizing in Asia (with China taking over traditional academia): (15) In other words, tradeoffs do exist. It might still be worth it for MAGA to wreck US academia, to break the source of woke in the few years they have power, regardless of what collateral damage occurs. It'd be an immensely altruistic move, like throwing the one ring into the fires of Mount Doom. MAGA would essentially be saving the world from Western leftism by shutting down all sources of blue power, like the universities and the US dollar, and thereby ending the empire. (16) It'd be like Gorbachev and the Russians shutting down the USSR, thereby ending the careers of many brilliant Soviet scientists (and Russia's own predominance on the world stage) in the process of shutting down a far left empire. Gorbachev saved the world from communism at the expense of Russian power. MAGA may similarly save the world from wokism at the expense of American power. That may not be what they intend to do, but it is arguably what they're actually doing.

balajis ↗