CROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER: The Op-Eds About Higher Education Need to Stop Until We Figure Out What the Hell Is Going On With the Op-Ed Contributors
A plea from Dan Drezner for the Wall Street Journal to stop publishing “steaming piles of horseshit untul they figure out what is actually going on”. But, Dan, as my father told me back in the 1960s, that is what they do: they chose as their lane that they would be the comics page for people who think Herbert Hoover was a great president and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a communist. They have ridden all their horses down that lane to great profit for near unto a century…
He finds former UCSC German Professor John Ellis with “just bald-faced lies”.
Drezner calls Ellis’s claims that Marxist indoctrination on campus explains why socialist candidates are now winning elections “the single-dumbest op-ed about higher education” the Journal has ever published.
That’s a high bar to clear!
Drezner reduces Ellis’s argument to: the faculty moved left → “?????” → socialists win. And asks for more evidence. Which is not offered:
CROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER: The Op-Eds About Higher Education Need to Stop Until We Figure Out What the Hell Is Going On With the Op-Ed Contributors
<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-op-eds-about-higher-education> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com>
A modest proposal....
4 hours ago
Last week was a long one on the road for me — it started in Toronto and ended in New York. There were definitely some highlights - take a gander of some of these views I caught in both cities:
For the New York leg I accompanied a variety of faculty, students, and staff of the Fletcher School so our students could explore various career opportunities in the private sector, nonprofit sector, international organizations, and maybe the occasional U.S. government position if they were still hiring.
My point is that it was a long week and I was looking forward to coming home and blobbing out. My brain needed a break.
Instead I read the single-dumbest op-ed about higher education the Wall Street Journal has ever published — which is saying something. And my brain refused to ignore the pseudo-intellectual claptrap and demanded the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World craft a response.
Drezner’s World is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
The op-ed, by UC-Santa Cruz emeritus professor John Ellis, is entitled, “Radical Professors Have Poisoned the Electorate.” The subhed reads, “Socialists have started winning because young voters were indoctrinated rather than educated.”
It goes downhill from there:
The terms of the controversy over higher education hardly changed for three or four decades. Conservatives complained of political activism freezing out serious scholarship. Liberals rejected that criticism as politically motivated and argued that Marxist professors do little harm because students see through and laugh at their ideas. But the recent spate of electoral wins by socialists has confirmed the conservative camp’s worst fears. Those ineffective Marxist professors, it seems, have changed the educated electorate so profoundly that hitherto unelectable socialists can now prevail across the country.
Liberals are paying the price for their complacency. Radicals have begun to attack the center-left as intensely as the right, trashing the legacy of Western civilization on which both major parties previously rested. The values they invoke to denounce the West—democracy, equality, human rights—are very much part of that tradition. These aren’t the well-meaning youthful idealists they were claimed to be, but hard-core revolutionaries who go beyond calling for abolition of capitalism and private property and advocate measures that even Stalin and Mao would have thought lunacy: abolishing police and prisons, dismantling the military, opening the borders. Get ready for lawless mob rule.
But as we contemplate academia’s degradation of the electorate, we must not forget the rest of the far-reaching damage it does. Education departments that instill poisonous ideologies in schoolteachers have depressed children’s test scores in reading and math to historic lows. Journalism, law and medical schools put woke indoctrination ahead of competent professional training.
Virtually our entire educational system has been captured by destructive political radicals, and it is madness for an advanced society to know this is happening and do nothing to stop it. Optimists who think the foolishness will blow over are mistaken. We’re now seeing the effects of one generation indoctrinated by Marxist-dominated campuses. A second is on the way. As the last cohort that had a real college education begins to vanish, our constitutional order will go with it.
There are so many things wrong with this op-ed. But let’s focus on the two most obvious ones.
First, correlation does not equal causation. Ellis was a professor of German literature at UC-Santa Cruz. He was clearly not a social science or science professor, because our branches of the academy really stress causation in making arguments like this one — and Ellis does not provide a scintilla of causal evidence to advance his argument. His logic is simple:
The political affiliation of the academy has shifted left
Socialist candidates winning everything!
Ellis is correct on point one, as almost every scholar who has looked at this phenomenon would acknowledge.
Ellis knows nothing about point two. Scholarly researchers looking into this question do not find any evidence supporting it. Even sympathetic organizations like the Manhattan Institute and Heterodox Academy acknowledge this point.
Writing in The Hill, Tom Mockaitis articulates the basic points that falsify Ellis’ assertions:
Most courses cannot be taught from an ideological perspective — left, right or center. Is there a “woke” way to teach chemistry, biology, physics, music or geology? There may be Marxist mathematicians, but there is no such thing as Marxist calculus.
A 2023 survey identified the top 10 majors based on percentage of students: business, nursing, psychology, education, biology, criminal justice, computer science, health professions, accounting and engineering.
Courses in most of these fields are highly technical and not amenable to ideological interpretation. Business,1 which attracts the most majors, has a higher percentage of conservative faculty than universities and colleges do in general.
Second, even the best version of this argument is seven years out of date. The notion that “virtually our entire educational system has been captured by destructive political radicals” requires a genuine deafness to how the political winds have blown over the last decade. Universities are too busy scrapping diversity statements, funding centers for conservative thought, and appeasing conservative trustees to be able to indoctrinate anyone into Marxist ideology. Conservative activists have not gotten everything that they wanted. Nevertheless the result is mostly affirmative action for mediocre conservatives, and as a result the right-wing political correctness has gotten out of control. The point, however, is that Ellis is acting like it’s 2016 all over again.
There is more I could say but there is little point devoting more words to deconstructing this kind of claptrap than Ellis devoted to it.
In a Pepperdine Beacon interview that Ellis gave in April 2025, he stated, “The public [must believe] something is really so wrong that it’s got to be changed. I think that is a requirement. We’re getting there on that one. Even so, it still needs to keep going. I mean, we still need to have that perception sink deeper and deeper into the public. But then the question arises: What levels do you have? What steps can you actually take?”
For Ellis, I guess the final step is just bald-faced lies.
This is fine; he can rant to his heart’s content. I just wish that the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page would stop publishing steaming piles of horseshit until they figure out what is actually going on.
<https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-op-eds-about-higher-education> <https://danieldrezner.substack.com>
Brad DeLong here: Three years ago I thwumped my friend Matt Yglesias.
I thwumped him for giving too much credence to that line of argument that Drezner rejects here:
Matt Yglesias (2023): Thankful Mailbag <[www.slowboring.com/p/thankfu...](https://www.slowboring.com/p/thankful-mailbag>)>: ‘The current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates…. The critical theories themselves would tell you, there’s no way Anglo-American liberal capitalist society is going to sustain generous financial support for institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society…
I wrote <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/successful-future-humanities-programs>
that this appeared to me to be horseshit: Let’s collect a little data here…. Here at the University of California at Berkeley, I ought to be in the Belly of the WOKE BEAST if anyone is. What do I see if I look around? Here, from a file near the top of my “Downloads” folder, is a page from a Berkeley history-department current-semester syllabus:
What do I think?…. “Radical criticism” does not predominate. Indeed, radical criticism is only presented here by Harvey—which, I admit, I would never assign: I do not find him wise, or widely read outside of his narrow personal bubble, and I find it very difficult to read him with a hermaneutics of charity: I find myself thinking “this cannot be written in good faith” every other page. But taking the entire course to be part of a “self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society”? Definitely not.
I concluded that I had found:
A somewhat excessive mindshare given to Marx and his epigones—Frankfurt School, and, cough, Harvey—in Legal Studies and Media Studies…
A little too much drinking of the old-fashioned “WESTERN CIV” koolaid in Classics…
A [single] History course that I would put under the aegis of Matt’s “instructors who endorse the radical critiques…”—although I would add that what disturbs me is not the instructor’s position, but rather the narrowness of the reading list. But that is perhaps (probably?) offset in lecture. I do not know, and rather than presume I should find out…
By “narrowness of the reading list” I meant that the readings on World War II consisted of one reading on the bombing of Hiroshima and a second on the Japanese-American internment camp at Manzanar. Do the readings, and you would not know that the fact that the big WWII story is defeating Nazis (and imperial Japanese colonialism) Yes, the internment of Japanese-Americans was a hideous and cruel error. Yes, Truman probably was not happy afterwards with his decision to barbecue more Japanese civilians with atomic weapons… but, still, if this is Hamlet, shouldn’t the Prince of Denmark appear as the protagonist of even one scene? And when I gave this course another chance, well: “World Trade Organization, Apartheid, Nelson Mandela, Genocide” are not adequate keywords for the topic of “Globalization”.
But, as I said, I should have looked at the lecture notes to get a full sense of the course, and I did not.
However, even taking in that, what I saw was lots of smart people—many of whom I have profound disagreements with—teaching a lot of different things. I did and do not see any collective “self-ascribed mission… to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society”. I did not see any group unwillingness “to do what society wants them to do and expound on the greatness of our civilization”.
Thus I line up with Dan Drezner here.
Now you can line up with Nils Gilman here:
Nils Gilman (2025): How Did Academia Not See It Coming <https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/how-did-academia-not-see-it-coming>: ‘Because to see it coming would have required a direct confrontation several decades ago along the central ideological dividing line within academia…. Liberals have been the predominant force, certainly within the administrations, but also within the faculty as a whole. At… Berkeley… the radical faculty probably never have amount to more than ten or fifteen percent… but… tended to be very noisy, thinking of themselves in many cases as “activist-scholars,” for whom criticizing the fecklessness of their liberal colleagues and resisting the neoliberal administration of their universities is a core part of the public identities…. These people, it should be noted, are generally loathed (or sometimes pitied) by the mainline liberals….
In the 1990s… a standard normie liberal critique of poststructuralism was that the anti-Enlightenment epistemic radicalism of the left, while overtly trained against the complacencies of small-l liberalism, would eventually “make space” for right wing critiques of liberalism. This was a point that Jurgen Habermas made over and over again in his many debates with the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, and others…. Abandoning discourse ethics and embracing epistemic relativism, cynicism, or even nihilism… [was] sapping the epistemic foundations of democratic practice, which depended on the “regulative ideal” of reasoned, good faith discourse as a mechanism for achieving a “fusion of horizons.”… They won’t be the first or the last radicals to be consumed by their own politics…
Point.
And if there is a bigger point it is that liberals’ avoidance of conflict within the academia in the interest of academic comity and being left to do your own work has been a mistake. And that bullshit should be called out—as Dan Drezner does here with bullshit from the “right”.
Which means that my next piece should be a crosspost I have been thinking about calling out bullshit from the “left”, although it is not any real left in any sense that I recognize.