So great to read this. I think you’re hitting on some super important ground around the way the far right are positioning academia as partisan, when in fact the point of education and research is to broaden and deepen understanding, and that leads to greater ability to work with the complexity of the world (diversity being fundamental to that). The fact that right-leaning voices are finding their views at odds with the direction of academia is a natural outcome of the evolution of knowledge towards greater understanding of complexity and therefore greater ability to work with the ecological nature of our world. Exclusionary discourses, that work against interdependence, relationality, and diversity, are not compatible with an ecological view of the world (ie reality). What the far right call “partisanship” is actually “global collective intelligence”; and the far right want to constrain that back to something they can understand and master (in all senses of the word). It is so tiresome. They are literally trying to stop evolution. I love where you talk about the “neoliberal gravy train”! A brilliant use of their own weaponisation of that term (as someone who has been accused of being on the gravy train by the TPU because of conducting anti-racism and Te Tiriti education). I think sending their arrows back to them is a good idea. And really exposing the manipulative framing of terms that appear universal. Love your work!!!
Thank you for your comment — it’s helpful to hear from someone within te tiriti education/research as I’m noticing all these things as an outsider. I imagine it must be frustrating for you!
I’ve noticed that “every accusation is a confession” is a philosophy that just ALWAYS seems to apply, so when they’re throwing around rhetoric about how the left is profiting off of certain things — they’re not wrong per se, but they’ve taken this twist of semi-true logic from the criticism that is directed at THEM, and it’s their actions that are being taken deliberately for profit. “They’re suppressing freedom of speech/expression” is ultra effective when the main right they are seeking to suppress of others is trans people’s right to express themselves as any gender. “Academics are creating a shadowing network of influence where they produce calculated research to give credit to deliberately biased ideas for their own financial gain” is literally describing the ATLAS network. “Attempting to expand or promote the tertiary sector/an academic’s own field” becomes about academics securing funding for themselves/their subjects/their schools in the same way neoliberal concepts ensure greater flow of money for private enterprise, which is why private enterprise invests itself in this debate in the first place.
This might be unintentional or just a method of deflecting existing criticism rather than a calculated means of controlling the direction of the conversation — but the theory behind it feels bigger.
I.e. Luxon’s “run the government as a business” is using the same strategy of rhetoric, really, which is to conflate the purposes of government or public spending/research/work/etc with that of private enterprise. Now on the surface this seems like an election slogan, but as Ganesh Ahirao keeps pointing out, it’s also being used to entirely dumb down the concept of economics so that the public do not grasp WHY government budgets are not the same as household budgets (willis) or company budgets (luxon).
In a world where the right retain their grasp on power due to the average voter not understanding how ineffective their economic policies really are, this slides under the radar because all left-wing opposition parties are also tacitly on board with neoliberalism, and so this rhetoric does such a good job of masking the right’s poor economics I can’t help but wonder if the much greater (deliberately calculated) purpose isn’t actually the suppression of public economic awareness.
ATLAS publishes research and policy publicly, but 100% there’s stuff they don’t release, that they talk about at their invitation-only economic forums and disseminate via high level the right wing politicians and business leaders who have fully bought into these self-serving economic theories. Telling a politician “this specific spin helps deepen general right wing sympathies” (which I’m sure they know and have some level of empirical research on, as they’ve been playing this game in every major country for fifty years now) is a very good use the combined political strategies the global right are demonstrating.
I completely agree that the rhetorical manipulation that is at play is more than simply skin deep. It has been going on for decades and has been intended to shape and constrain our view of the world and what is possible. The right has been working at the paradigm level of the system - to frame the way we understand reality. The limiting of our economic and political imaginaries through this process continues. I really think it is where we need to be working—exposing what is sitting underneath the surface level conversations. It’s what I’m trying to do in my work too, though from a slightly different angle.
I also think there is something in your use of the accusations the right wing uses against the left “gravy train”, “grift, “woke”…. almost as openings to draw attention to their hypocrisy. I want people to start asking questions like “when you say ‘woke’, what do you mean by that?” Or “how do you define ‘gravy train’”. Because at present they are such throw away lines that are doing a lot of work for the right without them being held accountable for what they even mean. A friend of mine said it’s almost like when someone tells a racist joke, asking them to explain why it’s funny.
Thanks so much for your writing. It’s such a relief to read!
I have a (vague) theory that there may a whole body of political psychology work that is studied but not accessible to the public because it is partisan. Idk who controls this body but I’m willing to bet it’s where oil companies sourced their campaigns from. similar to how there is “supermarket psychology” and now problematically “algorithm psychology” — the knowledge kept in the public domain is quite clearly not the same body that corporations are sourcing from.
I do think the FSU has a valuable role to play. I think politics is best assisted by a contest of ideas. It’s easy to get complacent when the things you know to be true are confirmed by others. Its why liberal democracy values the loyal opposition. When the loyal opposition is limping that is not good; it is not just a great opportunity to make hay while the sun shines.
Similarly that is why the FSU needs people like Sapphi to keep a beady and critical eye on them (I am a member) so that they don’t believe their own propaganda without challenge. Its easy to drink the kool-aid in an echo chamber.
Please explain what "the collective right" is. I notice you state they have a problem. Is it just one? How does it rate on a scale of 1 to 10 with the problems (and they seem to be many) of the collective left? This will help me avoid the obvious catastrophe of voting for ACT which is what I did last time.
Trolls are much less annoying on a platform where you can moderate them yourself! Several years on NZ Reddit accidentally gave me a very thick skin for right-wing trolls.
Yeah, I let him keep up a few comments on each post so he feels he is contributing to the conversation. i hear telling the right their ideas are too shit to count makes them feel like they’re being censored, so I better let him have some say.
He comments like four times on my posts when he weighs in. A mark of the quality of conversation from the right that these are the comments that “contribute” the most.
Great piece. I would suggest that the user pays/student loans aspect of university is another tactic to narrow academic thought, run in parallel with this 'free' speech nonsense.
(The hounding out of heterodox economic theory from most economics departments, the dumping of economic history, and the shifting of economics from social science faculties to business schools is another example of the neoliberal attack on diversity of thought.)
Absolutely, the user pays aspect of education does A LOT to suppress education. I could write pages and pages about that — you have to remember that the socialist ideal of education was that it was within the reach of EVERY PERSON, and it wasn’t as job training. The idea coming out of the twenties and forties was that my working class uncle who performed blue-collar labour at a printing press his whole life but loved history and would talk your ear off *can just go and study history at university* if that’s what he wanted to do with his time. The idea that education is so valuable and so much a public service that it should be something explored not just as a career, not just as a professional skill, but as a common pursuit of humanity. The division between ‘labour’ and ‘your life’ is a barrier to education and to societal enlightenment, and adding ‘user pays’ onto that is only attempting to add to the barrier to prevent this from becoming a reality (for university to be truly accessible it needs to evolve beyond just this basic full-time study form — keeping university as vocational supports that).
However I gotta say that I don’t think this was deliberate in the same way that the concerted attacks on academia are deliberate. I think paid university was just the easiest cost-saving method for the west to implement because a) the people most affected are the youth and b) the idea of a universal university education leading to greater career opportunities for those who pursue it disenfranchises the non-professional class whose financials or worse education have prevented them from personally benefitting from the university system. As such, user pays university was the first thing most nations implemented and left wing parties have been trying to minimise the damage of this system ever since. Unfortunately they do so within the neoliberal framework that assumes user pays universities are necessary, and this leaves it open to being rolled back by the right, as we can see with Labour’s fees free which was a “fiscally responsible” method of gradually making university free.
This is why Labour’s methods of politics aren’t working. The neoliberal paradigm renders their changes ineffective.
If someone doesn’t convince Hipkins of this before the next election I’m gonna break into his house and convince him myself, like the guy who tried to tell the Queen the tories were fucking over her people under the mistaken belief she’d care, could do something about it, and wasn’t one of the people more powerful and rich because of it.
So, are you saying that Universities no longer have economics courses within their ss faculties? If so then that's bullshit and if not then why shouldn't business schools run economics courses? You can study economics online for godsake All of a sudden freedom to provide various pathways to aneducation is classed as neoliberalism. Maybe the opposite is Marxism.
So great to read this. I think you’re hitting on some super important ground around the way the far right are positioning academia as partisan, when in fact the point of education and research is to broaden and deepen understanding, and that leads to greater ability to work with the complexity of the world (diversity being fundamental to that). The fact that right-leaning voices are finding their views at odds with the direction of academia is a natural outcome of the evolution of knowledge towards greater understanding of complexity and therefore greater ability to work with the ecological nature of our world. Exclusionary discourses, that work against interdependence, relationality, and diversity, are not compatible with an ecological view of the world (ie reality). What the far right call “partisanship” is actually “global collective intelligence”; and the far right want to constrain that back to something they can understand and master (in all senses of the word). It is so tiresome. They are literally trying to stop evolution. I love where you talk about the “neoliberal gravy train”! A brilliant use of their own weaponisation of that term (as someone who has been accused of being on the gravy train by the TPU because of conducting anti-racism and Te Tiriti education). I think sending their arrows back to them is a good idea. And really exposing the manipulative framing of terms that appear universal. Love your work!!!
Thank you for your comment — it’s helpful to hear from someone within te tiriti education/research as I’m noticing all these things as an outsider. I imagine it must be frustrating for you!
I’ve noticed that “every accusation is a confession” is a philosophy that just ALWAYS seems to apply, so when they’re throwing around rhetoric about how the left is profiting off of certain things — they’re not wrong per se, but they’ve taken this twist of semi-true logic from the criticism that is directed at THEM, and it’s their actions that are being taken deliberately for profit. “They’re suppressing freedom of speech/expression” is ultra effective when the main right they are seeking to suppress of others is trans people’s right to express themselves as any gender. “Academics are creating a shadowing network of influence where they produce calculated research to give credit to deliberately biased ideas for their own financial gain” is literally describing the ATLAS network. “Attempting to expand or promote the tertiary sector/an academic’s own field” becomes about academics securing funding for themselves/their subjects/their schools in the same way neoliberal concepts ensure greater flow of money for private enterprise, which is why private enterprise invests itself in this debate in the first place.
This might be unintentional or just a method of deflecting existing criticism rather than a calculated means of controlling the direction of the conversation — but the theory behind it feels bigger.
I.e. Luxon’s “run the government as a business” is using the same strategy of rhetoric, really, which is to conflate the purposes of government or public spending/research/work/etc with that of private enterprise. Now on the surface this seems like an election slogan, but as Ganesh Ahirao keeps pointing out, it’s also being used to entirely dumb down the concept of economics so that the public do not grasp WHY government budgets are not the same as household budgets (willis) or company budgets (luxon).
In a world where the right retain their grasp on power due to the average voter not understanding how ineffective their economic policies really are, this slides under the radar because all left-wing opposition parties are also tacitly on board with neoliberalism, and so this rhetoric does such a good job of masking the right’s poor economics I can’t help but wonder if the much greater (deliberately calculated) purpose isn’t actually the suppression of public economic awareness.
ATLAS publishes research and policy publicly, but 100% there’s stuff they don’t release, that they talk about at their invitation-only economic forums and disseminate via high level the right wing politicians and business leaders who have fully bought into these self-serving economic theories. Telling a politician “this specific spin helps deepen general right wing sympathies” (which I’m sure they know and have some level of empirical research on, as they’ve been playing this game in every major country for fifty years now) is a very good use the combined political strategies the global right are demonstrating.
I completely agree that the rhetorical manipulation that is at play is more than simply skin deep. It has been going on for decades and has been intended to shape and constrain our view of the world and what is possible. The right has been working at the paradigm level of the system - to frame the way we understand reality. The limiting of our economic and political imaginaries through this process continues. I really think it is where we need to be working—exposing what is sitting underneath the surface level conversations. It’s what I’m trying to do in my work too, though from a slightly different angle.
I also think there is something in your use of the accusations the right wing uses against the left “gravy train”, “grift, “woke”…. almost as openings to draw attention to their hypocrisy. I want people to start asking questions like “when you say ‘woke’, what do you mean by that?” Or “how do you define ‘gravy train’”. Because at present they are such throw away lines that are doing a lot of work for the right without them being held accountable for what they even mean. A friend of mine said it’s almost like when someone tells a racist joke, asking them to explain why it’s funny.
Thanks so much for your writing. It’s such a relief to read!
I have a (vague) theory that there may a whole body of political psychology work that is studied but not accessible to the public because it is partisan. Idk who controls this body but I’m willing to bet it’s where oil companies sourced their campaigns from. similar to how there is “supermarket psychology” and now problematically “algorithm psychology” — the knowledge kept in the public domain is quite clearly not the same body that corporations are sourcing from.
Partisan political psychology studied but not available to the public. You should write to the FSU about that. Ask for their help.
Jesus. Really? A vague theory? We're rooted!
I do think the FSU has a valuable role to play. I think politics is best assisted by a contest of ideas. It’s easy to get complacent when the things you know to be true are confirmed by others. Its why liberal democracy values the loyal opposition. When the loyal opposition is limping that is not good; it is not just a great opportunity to make hay while the sun shines.
Similarly that is why the FSU needs people like Sapphi to keep a beady and critical eye on them (I am a member) so that they don’t believe their own propaganda without challenge. Its easy to drink the kool-aid in an echo chamber.
Please explain what "the collective right" is. I notice you state they have a problem. Is it just one? How does it rate on a scale of 1 to 10 with the problems (and they seem to be many) of the collective left? This will help me avoid the obvious catastrophe of voting for ACT which is what I did last time.
It’s “the right”. Not hard.
Mobley is a troll. Has nothing to contribute
Trolls are much less annoying on a platform where you can moderate them yourself! Several years on NZ Reddit accidentally gave me a very thick skin for right-wing trolls.
Yeah, I let him keep up a few comments on each post so he feels he is contributing to the conversation. i hear telling the right their ideas are too shit to count makes them feel like they’re being censored, so I better let him have some say.
He comments like four times on my posts when he weighs in. A mark of the quality of conversation from the right that these are the comments that “contribute” the most.
You're not worth anything more.
I am having difficulty finding something useful that you've contributed, Mr Morton.
Your first 4 words say it all.
Try and write a Substack column yourself and learn what "contribution" means
Great piece. I would suggest that the user pays/student loans aspect of university is another tactic to narrow academic thought, run in parallel with this 'free' speech nonsense.
(The hounding out of heterodox economic theory from most economics departments, the dumping of economic history, and the shifting of economics from social science faculties to business schools is another example of the neoliberal attack on diversity of thought.)
Absolutely, the user pays aspect of education does A LOT to suppress education. I could write pages and pages about that — you have to remember that the socialist ideal of education was that it was within the reach of EVERY PERSON, and it wasn’t as job training. The idea coming out of the twenties and forties was that my working class uncle who performed blue-collar labour at a printing press his whole life but loved history and would talk your ear off *can just go and study history at university* if that’s what he wanted to do with his time. The idea that education is so valuable and so much a public service that it should be something explored not just as a career, not just as a professional skill, but as a common pursuit of humanity. The division between ‘labour’ and ‘your life’ is a barrier to education and to societal enlightenment, and adding ‘user pays’ onto that is only attempting to add to the barrier to prevent this from becoming a reality (for university to be truly accessible it needs to evolve beyond just this basic full-time study form — keeping university as vocational supports that).
However I gotta say that I don’t think this was deliberate in the same way that the concerted attacks on academia are deliberate. I think paid university was just the easiest cost-saving method for the west to implement because a) the people most affected are the youth and b) the idea of a universal university education leading to greater career opportunities for those who pursue it disenfranchises the non-professional class whose financials or worse education have prevented them from personally benefitting from the university system. As such, user pays university was the first thing most nations implemented and left wing parties have been trying to minimise the damage of this system ever since. Unfortunately they do so within the neoliberal framework that assumes user pays universities are necessary, and this leaves it open to being rolled back by the right, as we can see with Labour’s fees free which was a “fiscally responsible” method of gradually making university free.
This is why Labour’s methods of politics aren’t working. The neoliberal paradigm renders their changes ineffective.
If someone doesn’t convince Hipkins of this before the next election I’m gonna break into his house and convince him myself, like the guy who tried to tell the Queen the tories were fucking over her people under the mistaken belief she’d care, could do something about it, and wasn’t one of the people more powerful and rich because of it.
So, are you saying that Universities no longer have economics courses within their ss faculties? If so then that's bullshit and if not then why shouldn't business schools run economics courses? You can study economics online for godsake All of a sudden freedom to provide various pathways to aneducation is classed as neoliberalism. Maybe the opposite is Marxism.
“economic history”