The ongoing attack on the American university, Indiana division

The Indiana state legislature voted in literally the middle of the night to attach a series of quasi-secret riders to a budget bill, for the purposes of smashing even the possibility of having actually independent public research universities:

“It’s hard to imagine anything that could possibly be more nontransparent, opaque,” said Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at IU. “This is a complete takeover of universities by the governor and state legislature.”

Colleges will be required to adopt a post-tenure review policy that includes certain productivity based quotas: the faculty member’s class load, the number of students who they graduate, their time spent instructing and the amount of research they put out.

Guess what’s going to happen to the quality of the signal if you use a purely quantitative measure for successful pedagogy and research?

Turns out you don’t need to be one of them Noble Prize winners to figure that out:

Rep. Ed Delaney, D-Indianapolis, posited that this could lead to “diploma creep” ― an inflated number of students attaining diplomas who perhaps aren’t ready simply because their professors are incentivized to increase their numbers or meet a quota.

“You can’t use Stalinist techniques to run an educational system,” he said. “It will lead to distortion.”

The idea that academic research should be evaluated on the basis of how much research is being published is if anything even more absurd, for what should be obvious reasons. Still, if you think of a university as a business then naturally it makes sense to think that producing more of what the business is supposed to be producing, whether in the form of graduates or “scholarly output,” is automatically better (To be fair, countless upper university administrators think exactly in these terms, in no small part because they’ve ceased being actual academics, to thee extent they ever were in the first place. On a completely unrelated note, here’s the resume of the current president of the University of Colorado, which in case you pondering is designated an R-1 institution).

A key point here is that genuine intellectual inquiry is fundamentally inimical to reactionary ideology in general, and its fascistic variants in particular:

Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.

Demanding “intellectual diversity” in universities under current political and cultural conditions in America is tantamount to demanding “intellectual diversity” in ethnography, by requiring that universities meet a certain publication quota in regard to producing both honest and fraudulent ethnographies.

The Republican party in its present incarnation is an existential threat to the American university, among many other things worth preserving in this country that it is fanatically committed to destroying.