In its 15 months of publishing, Persuasion has given its readers extensive coverage of the democracy recession happening around the world, and of the threats to liberal democracy coming from within the United States. Some of those threats come from the far right and some from the far left. Within the category of threats from the far left, there are many reports about rapid change in specific professions. For example, we’ve read reports on The New York Times, the CDC, psychotherapy, medicine, documentary filmmaking, corporate America, Kindergarten teaching, elementary school teaching, math teaching, literature teaching, K-12 teaching, and the transformation of American universities as they have strayed from their previous telos—their ultimate purpose—of truth.
In the last few years, I have had dozens of conversations with leaders of companies and nonprofit organizations about the illiberalism that is making their work so much harder. Or rather, I should say I’ve had one conversation—the same conversation—dozens of times, because the internal dynamics are so similar across organizations. I think I can explain what is now happening in nearly all of the industries that are creative or politically progressive by telling you about what happened to American universities in the mid-2010s. And I can best illustrate this change by recounting the weirdest week I ever had in my 26 years as a professor.
Read Full Article »