Fact This Is Not

As Ron DeSantis is paving his role at the killer of wokeism, does that make him the enemy of education? Paul Krugman says yes, and that the bigger picture is that the right has become the enemy of higher education writ large.

What’s going on here? It’s easy to get drawn into debating accusations about particular courses or institutions, but that’s missing the fundamental context: the extraordinary rise in right-wing hostility to higher education in general.

To prove this point, Krugman contends that the fact that the educated elite are progressive (he mistaken characterizes them as “liberal,” which they most assuredly are not) is not a matter of conspiracy, but natural selection.

It is true that college faculty members are much more likely to identify themselves as liberal and vote Democratic than the public at large. But this needn’t be evidence of anti-conservative bias. Much of it surely reflects self-selection: What kind of person decides to pursue academics as a career? To make a comparison: The police skew Republican, but I presume that everyone accepts that this mainly involves who wants to be a police officer.

So what’s really driving the attacks on higher education?

In other words, the problem isn’t that higher education is owned by the woke, but that smarter, better educated people recognize “the facts” that the right wing refuses to accept.

Thus, when one points out that schools don’t actually teach critical race theory, the response tends to be that while they may not use the term, they do teach students that racism was long a major force in America, and its effects linger to this day. I don’t know how you teach our nation’s history honestly without mentioning these facts — but in the eyes of a substantial number of voters, teaching uncomfortable facts is indeed a form of liberal propaganda.

But this begs the question: Are these the facts? John McWhorter answers Krugman’s assumed question.

I imagine that to people of this mind-set, incorporating these views into an A.P. course on African American studies is seen as a natural step, via which we help get America woken by appealing to its brightest young minds. But for all the emotional resonance, the savory intonation of key buzzwords and phrases and the impassioned support of people with advanced degrees and prize-awarded media status, views of this kind remain views.

To dismiss those in disagreement as either naïve or malevolent is unsophisticated, suggesting that racial enlightenment requires comfort with a take-no-prisoners approach and facile reasoning. Not even the tragedies of America’s record on race justify saying “I’m just right, dammit!” as if the matter were as settled as the operations of gravity.

DeSantis may well be the anti-woke demagogue as portrayed by Krugman and others, his Yale undergrad and Harvard law education notwithstanding, but his using education as a springboard to his political aspirations doesn’t mean education is without problems.

Some think that despite the injustices of the past, people in the present should achieve via their own efforts. Others contest the causal link between past discrimination and Black America’s current problems — a key plank in today’s reparations arguments. Some observe that Blackness alone is too ambiguous a concept in our endlessly hybridized society, i.e., they acknowledge what almost all believe, which is that our concept of race is a messy, contingent fiction. I think the Great Society programs, affirmative action, the loosening of welfare programs in the late 1960s, the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 and other significant policies have already been conceived of as a form of reparations, if not under the name itself. Reparations advocates have some answers to those objections, but even they fail to establish reparations as a moral absolute. The issue remains a controversy.

That racism today is worse than its ever been is a tenet of progressivism. Is it? There’s invariably discussion of Jim Crow, but what of the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Even if it was inadequate to remedy the legacy of slavery, did it not happen? The former is opinion. The latter is fact. Distinguishing between the two what academics, that smarter, better educated elite, seems unable to do.

But this perspective, called standpoint epistemology, while intended as social justice, also questions empiricism and logic. Who really thinks that its absence from an A.P. course constitutes denying that slavery happened or that racism exists? C.R.T. advocates too often discuss white people as an undifferentiated mass, as in claims that white people resist letting go of their power, a view memorably promulgated by the legal scholar Derrick Bell.

To pretend that where Blackness is concerned, certain views must be treated as truth despite intelligent and sustained critique is to give in to the illogic of standpoint epistemology: “That which rubs me the wrong way is indisputably immoral.”

This is by no means a defense of either DeSantis or the anti-woke right wing. On the other hand, the acceptance of controversial opinion by the academy as indisputable truth is an issue independent of DeSantis and, as McWhorter demonstrates through a litany of examples, it is no more than a view held by an insular elite that goes unquestioned and unchallenged, reducing it to ideological dogma that takes on the gloss of what the intelligentsia choose to believe to be fact.

There is a rhetorical power in this sociological shorthand, but it also encourages a shallow classification of American individuals as bad white people and good everybody else. Fact this is not.

What is fact has nothing to do with Ron DeSantis or anyone else. And hate DeSantis all you want. It’s still not fact, and that’s still a problem.