Prominent American Scholar Calls U.S. Academia ‘Orwellian’

22 December 2024, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Stephen Haber teaches at Stanford University, and is one of America’s leading  economists, political scientists, and historians, authoring important papers such as “The Rise And Fall Of The Resource Curse”, and “The Political Economy of the Middle Income Trap”. Shortly after the 7 October 2023 Hamas attack which killed 1,200 Israelis and took 200 others as hostages, Haber headlined a five-minute youtube speech against universities’ suppression of the free-speech rights of student protesters, “The Threat to Freedom of Expression at American Universities with Stephen Haber | Policy Stories”, in which he said,

There is a broad consensus that something has gone terribly wrong at America’s universities. Faculty report that they walk on eggshells in their classrooms; invited speakers are heckled. Students denounce one another, fearing one another, they keep their ideas to themselves.

A necessary first step in fixing something that is broken is to diagnose the problem. Let us therefore start with the fundamentals. Universities play a crucial role in democratic societies. Their task is twofold, to conduct research that sorts out what is true from what is not, and to teach future generations the critical thinking skills necessary to perform this analysis on their own. There is an inherent tension baked into sorting out what is true from what is not. The reason is simple: when people disagree, it generates feelings of discomfort. That is especially the case when they realize that what they thought was true is shown to be false.

Threats to the freedom to follow logic, reason, and evidence wherever it takes faculty or students, historically tended to come from outside universities. Today, and for the last 20 years or so, threats to academic freedom have tended to come from inside universities. What has changed? The short answer is the growth of immense bureaucracies composed of non faculty administrators. University bureaucrats are not in the business of sorting out what is true from what is not, they are in the business of growing their bureaucracies. It would not take lengthy argumentation to show that many university bureaucrats are also in the business of social engineering. The most generous interpretation of the motivation for social engineering by university bureaucrats is that they see their task as minimizing feelings of discomfort among students. To that end, university bureaucracies have redefined a word in common usage, “harm.” Harm in common usage has multiple meanings, such as material harm or bodily harm. But what all those meanings have in common is that harm can be objectively established. Harm has now been redefined by university bureaucrats as feelings of discomfort, which means that it cannot be objectively established. It is a subjective state of mind. Their goal is to keep students safe from those feelings. The implications of this change are many, but first and foremost, it means that the goals of the bureaucrats, the duties of the faculty, and the aspirations of students, are not aligned with one another. The bureaucrats, in fact, often come to see the faculty and the students as a problem that the bureaucracy has to fix.

My team and I wanted to get a sense of how widespread these anti-intellectual social engineering initiatives are, so we did a study of the top 100 ranked colleges in the United States. If harm means feelings of discomfort, and discomfort can be caused by a written or spoken word, then the bureaucratic solution is to deem certain words harmful and purge them. 14 of the 100 colleges and universities we looked at have or had a such lists of harmful words. Here is just a small selection of the harmful words in need of purging: “American immigrant,” “survivor,” and “man made”. If harm can be caused by ideas, even those that might be implicit in a comment by a professor or an offhand remark by another student, then the bureaucratic solution is to police comments or offhand remarks. University bureaucrats have therefore set up online bias reporting systems that allow students to report on one another, on staff, and on the faculty. These systems are Orwellian, they exist to make complaints about something that someone might have said. 84 of the 100 colleges we sampled have such bias reporting systems in place. Shockingly, among those 84, 82% allowed students to file reports on one-another and on the faculty, anonymously. The consequences of these assaults on academic freedom are still being played out. In the short term, faculty and students are the losers. In the long run, it’s American society that will bear the brunt of the damage, as free expression is suppressed and the ability to discern truth and falsehood withers amongst its citizens and policymakers. Academic freedom, and freedom of expression, are pillars of American society. Their survival is crucial to a flourishing democracy.

When he said “Today, and for the last 20 years or so, threats to academic freedom have tended to come from inside universities,” he was implying that George W. Bush (and his lies about 9/11 and about ‘Saddam’s WMD’ — and the bipartisan congressional endorsement of those lies) caused this “Orwellian” America to start.* But when he asked “What has changed? The short answer is the growth of immense [university] bureaucracies,” he was obviously heading off-course from that as the blame, into a logical ditch. It had no clear connection to Bush, etc. (Haber’s alleged hypothesis). Why did he DO that, since It was so obviously illogical?

Either he believed it (in which case his logical ability is poor), or else he wants to be acceptable to the people who actually fund his appointment and career: his university’s megadonors, the individuals who endow his seat, and his department, and his university.

Since he is a political “scientist” at least on some topics, I would assume that this ditch was chosen because it led to his blaming “university bureaucracies” so that the people who ultimately hire those — the megadonors — won’t be offended.

Self-censorship is produced when an individual seeks to avoid being offensive to that person’s (one’s own) ultimate sponsors.

When Haber said, “University bureaucrats are not in the business of sorting out what is true from what is not, they are in the business of growing their bureaucracies,” he avoided the question of why they are doing this. Of course, they wouldn’t be doing it unless the megadonors were making their donations conditional upon certain demands — such as to create some new entity at the university and maybe name it after oneself. Someone in Haber’s positon knows all about this. So, even from him, it remains an unspoken truth. Everyone know the adage “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”

The more corrupt that America becomes, the more censorship it has. This is inevitable, and has already caused the decline of America; and so it is leading inexorably to the fall of America. Nothing will be able to stop it. Once the super-rich control a country — become its aristocracy — its fall is inevitable.

Perhaps you’ll want to file this article, so that you will have ready access to its argument and linked-to sources, since it truthfully explains so much that the richest people want you not to know — and which, without your knowing, you might err (because you then won’t understand the society in which you live).

* If you think that Haber was referring to something different from that ‘Saddam’s WMD’ lie by the U.S. Government, in his crucial-to-his argument sentence that “Today, and for the last 20 years or so, threats to academic freedom have tended to come from inside universities,” then I address that question here.   

PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.