An Interesting Point

While it is an article of faith that higher education is is a profoundly left wing endeavor, the reality is that in the ways that really matter, higher education is a profoundly conservative enterprise.

The virtue signaling that people generally associate with higher education doesn't really mean anything, hence the, "Signaling," bit. 

In reality these are people who have done quite well by the status quo, and who zealously preserve their prerogatives.

Perhaps the stupidest idea that everyone takes for granted is that higher education in the United States is left-wing.

If "left" and "right" have any meaning at all, "right" describes a worldview under which civilized society depends upon legitimate hierarchy, and a key object of politics is properly defining and protecting that hierarchy.

"Left", on the other hand, is animated by antipathy to hierarchy, by an egalitarianism of dignity. While left-wing movements recognize that effective institutions must place people in different roles — sometimes hierarchical, sometimes associated with unequal rewards — these are contingent, often problematic, overlays upon a foundational assertion that every human being has equal dignity and equal claim to the fundamental goods of human life.

Whatever else colleges and universities do in the United States, they define and police our most consequential social hierarchy, the dividing line between a prosperous if precarious professional class and a larger, often immiserated, working class. The credentials universities provide are no guarantee of escape from paycheck-to-paycheck living, but statistically they are a near prerequisite.

In fact, when one looks at colleges, particularly elite ones, their mission is to protect the hierarchy, so, for example, going to Harvard, or Yale, or Princeton, etc. is primarily a way to create, "Made Men," in the way the term was used in the Scorsese film Goodfellas.

The academy itself is incredibly hierarchical. Within a university, distinctions reign between a graduate student or postdoc, an adjunct, an assistant professor on tenure track, an associate versus full professor. These ranks are salient and consequential, treated as legitimate and earnestly policed.

Nothing is spared hierarchy in academia. Institutions are organized into pecking orders. Harvard University and Towson University are not the same. Everyone understands their relative rank, the social consequences of which are very real.

………

Universities become bastions of an ostentatious "leftism" even while these same leftists perform the workaday labor of sorting and excluding upon which our stratified society depends. I'm not a fan of psychological explanations for political difference, but it does seem a touch neurotic.

Read the rest.of it, it's really worth the  minutes or so that it would take.