The last time I looked at social trends here, I was urged in the comment section to look at third-wave feminism as a disruptive force in the SFF community. However, I’m thinking the issue is broader than that, as the New Left also seems to incorporate elements of race and class in its platform.
Checking around for other thoughts on this, I came up with a couple of interesting articles. The first is “The Big Uneasy” by Nathan Heller and published in the New Yorker. Heller investigates at Oberlin College, an elite school where student demands were recently rejected by the college president and ridiculed by alumni. He does a good job of covering both sides of the issue, interviewing both students and administrators.
Heller notes that this group of activists has come of age during the Obama administration with expectations that we have achieved social and racial equality in the US. However, when you look around, it’s easy to see this hasn’t happened, so students are now making demands that reality match the ideal they’ve been raised to expect. This, of course, leads to social conflict. That’s the easy part—Heller’s interviews also expose something else that’s harder to reconcile, which is that these students have badly misconceived how power and wealth really work. Running up against this has left them disillusioned, where one interviewee has already dropped out of school and another says she will leave the US when she graduates because she thinks it is “a sinking ship.”
Oberlin is an elite school. Graduating from this college is expected to open doors, giving students the background and contacts to join the elite in the power and wealth structure—all they have to do is absorb the values and conform to what’s expected. Like many universities, the school has tried to encourage diversity, pursuing bright and talented students from disadvantaged backgrounds. However, the most interesting thing that comes out of this article is that the interviewed students have rejected this privilege, apparently finding that “capitalism” doesn’t fit their worldview.
This is a paradox. How can you diversity the elite if minorities reject the worldview?
Lela E. Buis 
Jun 08, 2016 @ 01:41:44
Interesting article. The line “You know, we’re paying for a service. We’re paying for our attendance here. We need to be able to get what we need in a way that we can actually consume it” struck me in particular. There’s no sense that education is a public good, or has any purpose except individual fee-for-service. Wholly sensible given the cost of US university education, but it changes the relationship between student and society. In short, you pay for university education like paying for a latte, and you get to choose whether you have soy milk and caramel sauce, right?
Claire Fox, meanwhile, blames campus identity politics on a combination of the self-esteem movement and therapy culture (http://www.spectator.co.uk/2016/06/generation-snowflake-how-we-train-our-kids-to-be-censorious-cry-babies/).
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Jun 08, 2016 @ 02:15:22
You’re right that US secondary education is now heavily driven by a consumer culture that degrades the quality of what’s offered, tailoring it to the tastes of the paying customers. Students also expect the fee-for-service degree to be a sure ticket to a good job.
Thanks for the link. This seems to be a common reaction to the new political movement. On the one side, you have the expectation of safety and coddling, and on the other you have entitlement. Most analysts are predicting a collision course with reality. No amount of activism can make getting drunk out of your mind a safe thing to do, for example. There are always going to be consequences.
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Jun 12, 2016 @ 14:37:17
This is what has come from turning a university education into something bought and consumed rather than something earned by hard work. It becomes devalued in the consumers’ minds, as does the setting and the people providing it. Once it is devalued, it is nothing to be proud of, and disillusioned former students seek value elsewhere, wondering what went wrong.
In a separate issue: “How can you diversity the elite if minorities reject the worldview?” I doubt that any elite is ever diversified. Elites remain so by maintaining a cohesive subculture that benefits themselves. A veneer of diversity may be presented by including those of various races, religions, origins, orientations, etc., but the overarching theme is of “conform or you get thrown out of the club.” Reform will be gradual, if it ever comes to pass, or the structure of the elites must be torn down in some form of revolution or social upheaval.
However, every example of this in history has merely replaced the old elite with a new elite, which then standardizes and imposes its new form of subculture.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
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Jun 12, 2016 @ 16:14:59
That’s true. It doesn’t really matter what people look like, as long as they conform to the same values and work through those. The issue of worldview is a huge one, though. This means the usual progressive plan to diversify the elite through a university education won’t happen. It might produce a diversity of professionals, but not of billionaires. The value system is wrong.
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Jun 12, 2016 @ 16:39:10
Yes, though I would add to billionaires, “…and their associated power brokers in government.” One route to the elite club is through political ambition, which is converted by networks of favors into cash later on – or the currency of cash is converted into favors, which generates more cash and power.
As you point out, no amount of education-for-hire will change this worldview and ambition. Only true education, which means an absorption of a variety of classical and modern philosophical and economic principles, history, sociology, literature, etc. (usually referred to as a liberal arts education, something often lacking in American universities today) can help mold the character of the “renaissance people” that could conceivably bring about reform from the inside, by becoming statesmen instead of politicians, or responsible billionaire-philanthropists rather than billionaire-exploiters.
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Jun 13, 2016 @ 00:27:43
People have to be willing to absorb the principles of capitalism and power-brokerage; otherwise no amount of education will turn them into the 1% elite. Plus, I’m not sure there are any billionaires that are not exploiters, regardless of how well this is disguised by philanthropy. You have to be willing to use other people in order to succeed in business. Therefore, I can’t see any reform coming from the inside–everyone is too involved with their offshore accounts. However, if the gap between rich and poor gets to the point of revolution (see Marx), then reform is a forced issue. We have history to refer to, after all.
Regarding the Oberlin kids, they may go on to become successful in politics as activists. That appears to be their goal.
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Jun 13, 2016 @ 00:49:27
There’s a difference between “use,” “employ,” and “exploit.” I don’t see guys like Elon Musk as exploiters (broadly and generally – I’m sure there are individual exceptions, just as there are individual exceptions within even the best nonprofit charity). People can become wealthy through ethical means, though there is obviously a strong correlation between great wealth and a deterioration of ethics.
“People have to be willing to absorb the principles of capitalism and power-brokerage; otherwise no amount of education will turn them into the 1% elite.”
People can’t avoid absorbing principles of capitalism. Capitalism is the engine of every successful economy, and permeates our society, for good or for ill; its powerful example does not need to be willingly absorbed; it would have to be actively resisted not to be absorbed.
Power-brokerage is also amply demonstrated by the top-down power structures we grow up in. Our schools are largely state-mandated and authoritarian, disempowering children and teaching them as they develop that compliance with the existing powers is the only way to gain power.
“Therefore, I can’t see any reform coming from the inside–everyone is too involved with their offshore accounts. However, if the gap between rich and poor gets to the point of revolution (see Marx), then reform is a forced issue.”
Quite so. Reform is unlikely from the inside because it goes against the self-interest of the individuals involved. Reform usually has to come from outside, from an organization with enough power to make it stick. That usually means by a government, or at least a piece of it that still has ethics and principles, often led by one good person.
When the desire to reform leads to revolution, though, it seldom results in true reform. Normally it results in razing the current power structure, and then putting another, equally unethical power structure in its place (or far worse – see the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Maoist Revolution, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, the current mess in Venezuela, etc.) That’s why we really need to address the widening income and wealth gap, before things get so bad some form of radical social upheaval becomes likely.
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Jun 13, 2016 @ 02:04:01
Slightly flippant, but the exchange of services for money/goods isn’t a feature exclusive to modern ‘capitalist’ elites. Even dogs understand barter and blackmail. The modern Western power elite is brutally meritocratic and that’s unappealing to people from cultures that measure human value beyond ‘winners/losers’.
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Jun 13, 2016 @ 09:09:59
Vivienne, I’m not downgrading the values of these students. The traditional split in human values (at least in Western society) is between givers and takers. This has been framed differently in different eras–this is what WWII was about, for example. It just jumped out of the interviews that this is why the students felt uncomfortable at the elite Oberlin. This isn’t about racism or classism, as it’s been represented in a number of articles. This is about the students’ value systems. The school is geared toward funnelling people into the elite power structure, and I don’t see that any number of protests are going to turn it into a place that doesn’t do that. There are misconceptions on both sides.
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Jun 15, 2016 @ 03:52:52
Ah, should have phrased my reply more clearly… Agree the students are protesting that they’re being educated to join an elite. It’s almost as though they’re trying to change the value system of the next generation of elites by demanding their education changes to reflect their values, without understanding that they’re not yet in the elite themselves. Guess that students are always impatient.
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Jun 15, 2016 @ 10:26:06
Right. If their education changes to fit their values, then they’re no longer being educated to fit into the elite. If they’re looking for an education to become activists for social causes, then they are learning that through their student activities, but it won’t necessarily admit them to the power structure. Obama is their role model, I expect. He’s done well as an activist, but he’s got that Ivy League law school education behind him. Even with that, I think he struggled to deal with the power structure when he first started as President. He wasn’t used to being in a powerful position, and had trouble fitting his value system around it.
Whew. I had to tidy up my post above, too. Comes from working on a laptop on the road.
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Jun 13, 2016 @ 09:01:07
David, the gap between rich and poor is likely to only get worse in the next few years as rising minimum wages pushes companies faster into automation. Too much socialism stagnates an economy. We’re in need of creative solutions to the employment issue.
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