Why did higher education become left leaning...

Suppose a person has just finished a graduate-level degree program. He's got a Masters or a Doctorate or whatever. Now, he has two choices. He can stay at the university and become an academic, basically doing very little and achieving very little in a very safe environment where he can express himself freely. Or he can go out into the professional world and make lots of money in a more stressful and regimented environment that requires a willingness to put real effort to succeed.

Which of these two do you think is going to appeal more to a progressive/leftist, and which would a conservative choose?

Quints of truth

>achieving very little
Or sometimes too much

People who read and study tend to be more left-wing. Has to do with intelligence.

When the right wing became bible thumping, it rejected all academic subjects, leaving academia right wing by default.

*left wing by default, I mean

Bezmenov was a propagandist that switched allegiance. Everything he said should be taken with a grain of salt.

He is not the only soviet defector that generated pretty unfounded theories.
youtube.com/watch?v=facg5prt6uM

The government education system with its re-distributed un earned income is the moistest most filth ridden paradise for the Marxist cancer to propogate within.
Weak-minded individuals will always be drawn towards this occupation and it is precisely these parasites given the monopoly on the education of our malleable children. Its a recipe for subversion.

bezmenov is prescient, but the sad act of the matter is that universities have been left wing for 300 years in america, relative to thought at any given period in time

harvard profs were always more leftist than the general population

when the american model gained international influence, we turned other universities left wing.

every decade is more left wing than the last, and so the sickness progresses as leftists keep trying to outdo each other in bravado (but of course no substance.)

OP should read mencius moldbug

Exactly. Go to an elite business school and you'll see that their economic views are abstract and right-leaning. Or compare most public universities with private universities.

not history

saged reported and hidden

Based

Proof? This is a very serious claim to be making.

>over 25 years ago
>has to do with the humanities
>has to do with the cold war and aftermath of ww2

Try again faggot

>Why did higher education become left leaning?
It didn't, for the most part. You'll have a hard time finding a distinct political bias outside of political sciences departments and related studies (unless your country is significatively different from mine, mind you). The problem is that those guys make up an exceedingly vocal minority, and the actual majority is absolutely silent on all issues not relating to department budgets and infrastructures.

Why wasn't it like this in the past then? "Learned" people only started leaning left when higher education became available to the masses, ie the retards. Much easier to feed feels based drivel to idiots than to smart people.

Zeitgeist.

It didn't. If you disagree, you're pushing an agenda, which makes you a hypocrite. Good luck proving to me otherwise, you have zero evidence that isn't subjective and emotion/feel-based.

that's bullshit. only 10% of the total faculty staff is right leaning and almost all of it is in economics and finance.

people widely acknowledge that conservatives are intentionally not admitted into departments

I actually work in my uni's history department and the political makeup is basically the same as the rest of society tho. It's actually kind of eery to hear people with a PhD showing the same exact level of understanding of politics and economics as the people at my part time workplace when I was still a student (mostly not college educated at all).

I don't have to prove it to you. If worse comes to worse, you could think of it as a 'if the left had infiltrated academia, how might it have occurred' and remove (or at least blunt) the precived bias

wider polls would disagree with you assesment that there is balance. the wider profession is horribly skewed., especially considering that among that socioeconomic band, republicans skew some 2:1 vs democrats

>I don't have to prove it to you.

Then I have no reason to believe anything you say.

Draft dodging caused it. Students could avoid the draft, but once they graduated they were the army's boytois. No shit they wanted an end to the war in Nam.

Because "right wingers" are usually uneducated idiots that go along with whatever Bill O'Reilly or Alex Jones spews out of their retard mouths.

because you learn traditional conservative values from childhood so its useless to rehearse already known knowledge.

left doesn't mean gommies user

Take this board. There's clearly a much larger left-leaning population here than, say, /pol/, which is just a huge pit of uneducated imbeciles spouting misinformation and pepe kek memes at each other like some reddit-tier nonpeople.

Veeky Forums is really not any more left leaning than the Veeky Forums average tho. Lefties here actually complain constantly about how right leaning the board is.
You talk about /pol/, but /pol/ is a /b/ tier board, it's not really representative of anything whatsoever, plus /leftiepol/ is a very big part of the board.

I'm a leftie who posts here, and I don't think its too right wing. There is certainly a prevalence, maybe a majority, but the discussion is usually pretty decent so I don't mind. /pol/ is absolute garbage for discussion. I think they just need a hug.

Because Veeky Forums is center-right while /pol/ is far right neo nazis and /b/tard teenagers who don't care about politics. There can be retards and intelligent people on both sides.

lefties complain that everything is right wing, even the media

kek

they're idiots. they want a safe space

Do you not understand the irony of what you're saying? At all?

Tbf it's ironical regardless of which side voices the complaint.

The problem is that the "Veeky Forums average" has been tremendously skewed because of /pol/. So a board with a diverse group of opinions like Veeky Forums will naturally appear to be more "left-wing". It's not some Marxist conspiracy, it's just that people are allowed to have more nuanced opinions on Veeky Forums, there's no echo chamber.

Because at the end of the day in politics only persuasion matters

>The problem is that the "Veeky Forums average" has been tremendously skewed because of /pol/.
For all the complaints I hear about this board, in truth it's really not anymore right leaning that my country's average. If anything, you'd be called edgy on boards like /int/ for stating very common viewpoints.
Veeky Forums is no extremist hideout buddy, it's just a group of average fags spouting pub tier political garbage.

Depends upon your company I suppose.

Bezmenov's model literally requires near everyone involved in the university system of the USA to self-propagate Cultural Marxism with no agency to question what they are being taught, or somehow only being programmed to question things the Cultural Marxist way; the way Bezmenov has it, it is basically a conspiracy only for autists that think everybody else are sheeple that completely and utterly lack agency of any sort. Both sides of politics would be corrupted under the Bezmenov model.

He was either a complete nutter, or actually just a Soviet stooge with the aim of implanting suspicion of US institutions and agencies, and the education system. I'd think his aim would be to but for the fact that one needs a robot or schizo-tier lack of understanding of other people to think that the education system could be so completely corrupted in a self-propagating fashion.

He's nothing without the French revolution

Who is?

Academics began to place more importance on criticism and questioning of social values than the pursuit of knowledge.

Then how come the countries with highest average IQ are governed by right-wing parties?

statisticbrain.com/countries-with-the-highest-lowest-average-iq/

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ruling_political_parties_by_country

1. Hong Kong
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Alliance_for_the_Betterment_and_Progress_of_Hong_Kong
>Political position: Centre to centre-right

2. South Korea
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saenuri_Party
>Political position: Centre-right to Right-wing

3. Japan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Democratic_Party_(Japan)
>Political position: Centre-right to Right-wing

4. Taiwan
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Progressive_Party
>Political position: Centre-left

5. Singapore
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Action_Party
>Political position: Centre-right

6. Austria
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_People's_Party
>Political position: Centre-right

6. Germany
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Democratic_Union_of_Germany
>Political position: Centre-right

6. Italy
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Party_(Italy)
>Political position: Centre-left

6. Netherlands
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Party_for_Freedom_and_Democracy
>Political position: Centre-right

10. Sweden
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_Social_Democratic_Party
>Political position: Centre-left

10. Switzerland
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Democratic_People's_Party_of_Switzerland
>Political position: Centre-right

Only Taiwan, Italy and Sweden have left-wing governments, really, you would believe that, with such high IQs, these countries would be communists right now, but this is not what's happening.

The reason why intellectuals are left-leaning is simple: left-wing policies are good for intellectuals. Who do you think is going to staff all those new bureaucracies? If the government is Marxist that's even better. Marxism is a hard philosophy with little application in daily life, so the intellectual is called to interpret the writings of Marx and his followers and adapt them to contemporary circumstances, he basically becomes the priestly class!

It wasn't like this in the past because university education was much more limited. Anyone who graduated from university found a job either at the private sphere or in the government. Nowadays we have a mass of university-educated people with no prospects in life. What are they going to do? Wish for a larger government that can employ them, of course!

>"Probably the intellectual has more difficulty than the common man in freeing himself from this ideology which, like the State which derives from it, is his especial handiwork. The Soviet government rules in the name of a doctrine elaborated by an intellectual whose life was spent in libraries and interpreted for the past century by countless other intellectuals. Under a Communist régime the intellectuals, sophists rather than philosophers, rule the roost. The examining magistrates who unmask deviations, the writers coerced into socialist realism, the engineers and managers who are supposed to execute the plans and to interpret the ambiguous orders of the central authority — all must be dialecticians. The Secretary-General of the Party, master and arbiter over the lives of millions of men, is also an intellectual: at the end of a triumphal career he offers to the faithful a theory of capitalism and socialism — as though a book represented the highest accomplishment. The emperors of old were often poets or thinkers; for the first time the emperor actually reigns qua dialectician, interpreter of the doctrine and of history."

Raymond Aron, The Opium of Intellectuals

Eric Hoffer has some interesting quotes about this issue too.

>The explosive component in the contemporary scene is not the clamor of the masses but the self-righteous claims of a multitude of graduates from schools and universities. This army of scribes is clamoring for a society in which planning, regulation, and supervision are paramount and the prerogative of the educated. They hanker for the scribe's golden age, for a return to something like the scribe-dominated societies of ancient Egypt, China, and Europe of the Middle Ages. There is little doubt that the present trend in the new and renovated countries toward social regimentation stems partly from the need to create adequate employment for a large number of scribes. And since the tempo of the production of the literate is continually increasing, the prospect is of ever-swelling bureaucracies.

>It has been often stated that a social order is likely to be stable so long as it gives scope to talent. Actually, it is the ability to give scope to the untalented that is most vital in maintaining social stability. For not only are the untalented more numerous but, since they cannot transmute their grievances into a creative effort, their disaffection will be more pronounced and explosive. Thus the most troublesome problem which confronts social engineering is how to provide for the untalented and, what is equally important, how to provide against them. For there is a tendency in the untalented to divert their energies from their own development into the management, manipulation, and probably frustration of others. They want to police, instruct, guide, and meddle.

The Ordeal of Change

Colleges & Universities realised that they needed more students to make money so they created degrees that anyone with half a brain could get. The best way to go about this was to create more social science and humanitites degrees because all you need to do is regurgitate dogma and know that X author said Y about Z. And all of this happened just as conservatives lost prestige during the Bush Jr. presidency so it naturally spawned lots of lefties that hated the evil empire that invaded the poor arabs.

>German CDU
>centre-right

Wew lad.

Fall of the USSR and the end of the active persecution of left leaning academics within the US?

Well, the people who voted for it in 2013 thought it was.

No, see Allan Bloom.
Yes it came out of Europe but it wasn't the Marxists or the intellectuals, it was the thought of Europe that shifted to the U.S.
Where European philosophy saw an issue (Nietzsche) the Americans saw a solution (a vindication of freedom) -Life is all about taking what's yours and becoming powerful-
All at once our secular systems defending religious ideals became vindicated and freedom, equality, etc. became defensible and explicable from a secular viewpoint (at least in the minds of the American intellectuals)

It was Nietzsche who cursed our people with relativism, Marx was just the nearest book at hand that was easily applicable, Marx has very very little influence, he was just the right man in the right place and he swept his field.
Nietzsche laid the groundwork which made it possible to legitimately be a Marxist or a modern leftist without being insane.
No, Lefties are not insane, their ideas are however not defensible from any historical or analytical position.
"Left" meaning the modern left or the "Marxist" left. Not in the classical liberal, non-monarchical Left.

>Why did higher education become left leaning?
It was easy, the intellectuals were already heading towards being more left leaning, and of course function follows form, it was only a matter of time before all 'educational' institutions became Leftist or Left leaning.

Don't blame Leftists for being Leftists, however you should throw them out of a helicopter for not changing, anyone who says otherwise didn't understand, Bloom, Nietzsche, Marx, or the Russian Revolutions.

because colledge students are young optimistic people, often idealistic and naive

In actuality, the collapse of a number of more radically left and violent movements that took precedence among the left during the 1970's led to a major restructuring of the active (participatory) left from a more romanticist notion that actively pursued radical or violent disobedience, and instead shifted into something new.

This "new incarnation" of the left became the identity politics and postmodern cynical ideology of privilege theory which has resonated so strongly in the younger generations which are facing serious contradictions between their material reality and that which was promised or offered them.

This led to the rejection of traditional Marxism, which rationalizes that all discourse is a matter of the context and history of relations among different (and, in theory, opposing) classes; however, still maintaining some of the traditional methods of the left. Thus, the emphasis of "leftist" politics has shifted to emphasize subjective experience, psycho-cultural phenomenon, and the idea of intersectionalism.

The majority of the theorists behind this transition are respected intellectuals and were already involved in the education system, which helped loan traction to their ideas in the university system. Thus, the discontent of the youth stemming from their inability to effectively reconcile their personhood in the era of the prevalence of global capital, met with the discontent intelligentsia of the postmodernist era, and effectively established a means of discourse which also has led, as a reaction, to the revival of more reactionary ideals (such as the alt-right)

For anyone interested, I'd recommend the Choonara/Prasad article on privilege theory - examines the distaste the left has with the "new wave"

The thing is universities are liberal in concept but conservative in practice. Liberal in the sense that we're talking about places where people are able to learn and seize knowledge for themselves, challenge the accepted order, and create new ideas; but conservative in the obvious sense that not everyone can go to university so they actually create a hierarchical order in society. We aren't talking about fucking Sarah Palin here.

Around the turn of the century universities were still very exclusive, and most people attending were middle or upper class so naturally universities had an upper-class conservative character even if they taught liberal ways of thinking. In fact, I think that's about right, universities were places where conservatives were taught to think like liberals. As the modern post-agricultural world required more educated workers, colleges became the new high schools and conservatism was flushed out with the exclusivity.

It's not hard to understand.