Podcast
Podcast #270: ‘The Politics of the Academy Have Been Defeated’
Quillette podcast host Jonathan Kay speaks with Yale English professor-turned-essayist William Deresiewicz, who argues that Americans—many Democrats included—are fed up with campus-style progressive radicalism.
Jonathan Kay: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Quillette Podcast, hosted on alternate weeks by me, Jonathan Kay, and by Iona Italia. Quillette is where free thought lives. We are an independent, grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary. You are about to hear a free preview of this week’s episode. To hear the full episode, and to get access to all our podcasts and articles, visit us at Quillette.com and click the Subscribe button.
And this week, my guest is former Yale English professor turned author and essayist, William Deresiewicz, who will talk to me about his recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, titled Academe’s Divorce from Reality: Americans are Fed Up and Not Just People Who Voted for Trump.
[00:00:49] In his much discussed article, Bill, as he is widely known, argues that one of the effects of the 2024 election was a decisive repudiation of radical, progressive ideas that are popular on campuses, but not really anywhere else. Ideas such as abolishing the police, letting female-identified men into women’s sports, and opening America’s borders to undocumented immigrants.
[00:01:15] Please enjoy my interview with author and essayist William Deresiewicz. Thanks so much for joining the Quillette Podcast.
William Deresiewicz: Sure. Thanks for having me on.
Jonathan Kay: Okay, first sentence in your article, which I’ve described in the introduction… “The politics of the academy have been defeated.” So, what are the politics of the academy?
William Deresiewicz: [00:01:36] Right, obviously, that’s a phrase that requires explanation, and inevitably, the idea is going to be an overgeneralisation. But, as I go on, I think in the next sentence, to particularise it, it doesn’t mean the politics of every single academic. It does mean the predominant politics of most academics, but also the expressed politics in various ways of academic institutions, whether that’s the public statements that they were making between George Floyd and October 7th.
[00:02:10] Initiatives of all different kinds that I’m sure your listeners are aware of, DEI, et cetera, et cetera. Requirements for various kinds of statements and affirmations from faculty or prospective faculty.
Jonathan Kay: Your title is The Politics of the Academy Have Been Defeated…and Not Just Among Trump Voters. You’re making it clear that it wasn’t like politics of the academy were up for election and just by 51 to 49 they lost.
[00:02:37] You make it clear that this is a phenomenon taking place in very blue parts of the country, including Portland, Oregon. Now I’m used to seeing Portland, Oregon in the context of Antifa lunatics trying to burn down federal courthouses and stuff like that.
William Deresiewicz: We don’t all do that.
Jonathan Kay: Tell me about the election in Portland, Oregon.
[00:02:57] I want to make clear that I’m not simply basing this on Trump’s victory over Harris. Most of the evidence that I cite is district attorney races, ballot initiatives, so on and so forth. Portland obviously is still an extremely blue, extremely liberal place. I don’t know what the figures were in the presidential election—undoubtedly a supermajority for Harris.
[00:03:17] Lots of progressive people in city government. But there were several elections this year, whether it’s the Democratic primary, which is tantamount to [the overall] election in Portland, or the mayoral race, where we had non-partisan, ranked-choice voting, where people clearly chose candidates who presented themselves as alternative to the most progressive things, that before this we had been voting in routinely, and we see this trend up and down the west coast, if not elsewhere.
[00:03:43] Seattle, as I pointed out, elected a Republican city attorney, I think two years ago. Seattle, as blue as Portland, but the Democrat they were running against, I don’t remember her exact positions, whether she called for the abolition of police. I know she was proudly filmed next to a burning police station.
Jonathan Kay: [00:04:03] That’s a tough photo op to organise.
William Deresiewicz: Not that hard in Seattle, you just pick your burning police station. So in other words, a real far left candidate. And at a certain point, people said enough. Seattle had that autonomous zone. The police station had been set on fire. And she made a point of, she was already some kind of public figure. She made a point of being seen to be celebrating.
Jonathan Kay: In terms of the federal election, you do cite something very interesting. I hadn’t seen this elsewhere. I’m going to read it.
[00:04:36] “A post election survey from Blueprint”—this is a democratic polling firm—“discovered that among reasons not to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee”—and here you’re quoting—quote… “Harris is focused more on cultural issues, like transgender issues, than helping the middle class,” end quote. That ranked third after only inflation and illegal immigration.
[00:04:58] And here’s the kicker. Among swing voters, it ranked first. Which invites the question: If it weren’t for some of these cultural issues, and again, the trans issue is front and centre here, would we be talking about the incoming president, Kamala Harris?
William Deresiewicz: Of course, it’s impossible to know. I’m not a pundit or a consultant anyway and again, it’s impossible to know because there’s so many different factors, but probably the reason that they asked that question is that, as I think has been more widely reported, the Trump campaign’s most effective ad was, “She’s for they/them, He’s for you.”
I think it’s fair to say that there is some transphobia, probably predominantly on the right.
[00:05:52] But I think most people who responded to that ad understood that it meant exactly what the survey question asked. Not, are you against trans people? But, are Harris and the Democrats spending too much time on those issues and those narrow constituencies, and too little time on the basic bread and butter issues that affect, I don’t like to say the middle class, because it’s a lot more than just the middle, everybody below the upper middle class.
[00:06:17] That’s what that ad meant, I think, for most people, and that’s what that survey question meant. And that, to me, is the real poison of the Democrats’ focus on cultural issues. They seem to care to be caring about not the things that are important to people that are going to affect most people’s lives.
Jonathan Kay: A lot of what you say resonates with me as a Canadian, you know, I’m pretty socially liberal across the board.
[00:06:40] I’m fine with abortion, gay marriage, all that stuff. My problem with Justin Trudeau, who by the way, just resigned. He rankled Canadians not because they’re transphobic or homophobic, but because he just wouldn’t shut up about it. He turned Pride Week into Pride Season, drag queens literally parading through parliament… You talk about the people who do tend to focus on this kind of issue, and you cast it, at least implicitly, as an issue of siloing.
[00:07:08] So you talk about somebody who’s a university professor, who’s married to a university professor, who goes to dinner parties with university professors, who’s on university professor Reddit groups, and, and it’s this old story of, well, how could Trump get elected? None of my friends voted for him.
[00:07:21] Is that a little bit of what’s going on here?
William Deresiewicz: I think it’s a lot of what’s going on in the specific focus of my piece. We’re talking about the broader sort of progressive elite, and I think that’s appropriate. I was asked by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which, as the name implies…
Jonathan Kay: They came to you to do this piece?
William Deresiewicz: [00:07:36] They did.
Jonathan Kay: I was going to ask you, how the hell did you get this pitch past their editor? It’s a great piece you wrote, but the amazing thing is that they ran it.
William Deresiewicz: That’s what everybody said, and I didn’t want to blow their cover, the Chronicle’s cover…
Jonathan Kay: Too late.
William Deresiewicz: [00:07:50] I’ve written for them before. It’s actually been a while, but they come to me every once in a while. Same editor I’ve been working with for many years, and he said, would you like to write a piece about what this says, what the election says about the politics of the academy?
[00:08:05] And I thought this is a great opportunity to vent my spleen about the politics of the progressive elite in general, but I also focused on the academy. First of all, I think it’s the source of the progressive ideology, right? It’s like the animals have escaped the zoo in recent years, but also becauseI wanted to talk about specific reasons why I think academia…
[00:08:26] …the denizens of academia have become so divorced from pretty much everybody else. I mean, everybody beyond the progressive elite, including, again, and I want to underscore this, most Democratic voters, even people who voted for Harris for various reasons, they would never vote for a Republican, they hate Trump, whatever. I voted for Harris.
[00:08:47] Most people who voted for Harris also don’t like this, also don’t share this. And that’s especially true of non-white voters, right? The median black voter, the median black Democrat, is significantly to the right of the median white democrat.
Jonathan Kay: I’ve covered political campaigns. New Hampshire is a border state. I didn’t do it this time around because it wasn’t a competitive election cycle, but when it’s a competitive primary, I go down to New Hampshire, and I end up in the company of a lot of twenty-something political aides.
[00:09:16] These are the people who do everything from write speeches to get coffee. They all look the same, they all look like they went to Oberlin, and those people tend to be drawn from a pool of people who are very dogmatic when it comes to letting biological men into women’s sports and a lot of the dogmas you talk about in this piece.
[00:09:36] Is it the case that someone like Kamala Harris, she’s relying on thousands and thousands and thousands of volunteers, many of whom she’ll never meet, they’re just people, local state apparatus. She has to take positions that are consistent with Oberlin College initiation procedures. Is part of it just aligning your values with people who aren’t academics, but are the people who run your campaign every four years?
William Deresiewicz: [00:09:58] Yes, but it’s much more than this. So first of all, why have these ideas escaped the academy in recent years? What’s been carrying them out? Two things, the Internet and the production of mainly elite college graduates. You mentioned Oberlin, the Ivy League and so on.
[00:10:17] You may know I wrote a whole book about elite education ten years ago called Excellent Sheep. I was a Yale professor for ten years. So I’ve been following this and I’ve been writing about the increasingly hermetic bubble of selective colleges, the people they produce. Okay, so the Academy is getting farther and farther to the left which means the education has gone farther and farther to the left and ultimately becomes indoctrination because there are no countervailing voices. They’ve been producing for years now graduates that, and again, because all of the elite institutions of American liberalism, the media, Democratic Party politics, the foundations, the think tanks, the nonprofits, they are drawing their personnel from a limited set of institutions, these same elite institutions.
[00:11:05] So they’re now staffed by people, especially their young staffers, who all have absorbed this ideology, all think the same. And because of the internet, especially Twitter, pre-Elon, they’ve figured out how to leverage, they have a new power they didn’t have before. They have the power to pressure their older bosses—whether it’s Kamala Harris, or David Remnick, or whomever—to toe the line.
[00:11:32] So it’s not just her staffers that she has to please. It’s the foundations, the donor class, the whole thing.
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Sam Rapaport
