I think a lot of the complaints of wokeness that you read, many of these are diagnoses I agree with, or the basic set of problems, like, yes, I agree those are problems. They're idealistic in nature, by which I mean they start from the presupposition that there were bad ideas, aka wokeness, safetyism, political correctness, et cetera. The bad ideas won in these elite universities, and we just need to restore the good ideas and then things would go back to normal. And I'm a materialist, right? I'm a person of the left, and I reject those kind of battle of ideas explanations. In fact, I think the ideas that govern society are downstream from political, economic, and material conditions. And so I think one of my goals in writing this piece is to try to correct the argument I see unfolding, which is just that like, okay, we just need to get back to the better ideas. We need more conservatives. We need more viewpoint diversity, et cetera. It's not that I disagree with any of that. I would love to see more viewpoint diversity in the American Academy. But I think the response we have seen post, let's say, the election of Donald Trump, the corrections we've seen have been, okay, let's hire some conservatives. Let's start some civic centers. Let's do some free thinking task forces, et cetera. And my view is that this leaves the fundamental problem, which is the business model intact. And you are just substituting a different kind of political program, right? For another kind of political program I didn't particularly like, which was wokeness, but leaving this festering issue untouched. I mean, if I can be permitted a brief Marxist digression, the French Marxist Louis Authorsaire has this really interesting observation where he says institutions, or as he calls them apparatuses, but I won't to avoid confusion. He says institutions have primary ideologies and secondary ideologies. The primary ideology comes from the society at large, and that's what determines how the institution is organized, its labor practices, what it looks like as a bureaucracy. The secondary ideology are the ideas that emerge from the institution itself organically. These are the stories an institution tells about itself, its values, its mission statements, its culture, and so on and so forth. I think the mistake conservatives and sort of center left critics of the university have made and libertarians have made is that they think the primary ideology of universities is wokeness, right? And if you just correct that, things will be fine. My view is that the primary ideology is rapacious corporate capitalism, right? The secondary ideology is wokeness, which was a way to try to obscure some of the problems caused by the primary ideology. And that has basically failed. But the thing that I think folks on the left don't always like about my particular critique is I think a lot of professors, quote unquote, woke professors, see themselves as the kind of Zapatista territories in Mexico, where you have these like places on campus like the English department that are places where there is progressivism and good things happening. And yes, the university is this rapacious corporate structure, but wokeness or progressivism or whatever you want to call it, right, is like a countervailing pressure within that corporate ecosystem. And my argument's the exact opposite, is that the progressivism is in a symbiotic relationship with the corporate university model, right? That these two things are hand in glove because the progressivism allows the public, at least did for a while, to be distracted from these simmering labor crises that are crises that are festering within the university. So I really just, I really think the debate we're having right now is solely about these sort of superficial problems of what ideas do we want on campus without solving what is, in my mind, a labor crisis, a tuition crisis, an exploitation crisis.

And you are on-ramping right into my next question, which is, I think, the necessary follow-up. What are the symptoms of... Rapacious corporate ideology as you see it within higher education. We're talking tuition, debt, adjunct pay levels, decline in tenure professors. Unpack this one for us.

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Yeah, I think social media certainly turbocharged it, right? And I would include technological change as a Marxist under the set of like material conditions that are changing in society, right? And I think that the rise of social media creates an atmosphere in which not only, yes, can the marginalized plead their case, but we're also online mobs can be assembled, right? Sometimes for very good reasons, it should be noted, right? Like in the Me Too moment when you did have an extraordinary amount of tension put on really, really bad behavior that needed to see the light of day, right? So the online mobs aren't always a bad thing, right? Sometimes they address problems that have long simmered, but sometimes you also have online mobs that get way over their skis, right? And I think this bleeds back into the problem I'm mentioning on college campuses about you have a labor force that is casualized and the equivalent of the academic equivalent of Uber drivers, right? Because not only do you have to worry that your administration might be upset if you say, disagree with a requirement they want to pass, right? You also have to be worried, is this going to end up on social media, right? Just to give you an example, one thing I describe in the piece is the final meeting where this vote was passed, right? Students were brought in apparently as sort of props to cheer for the requirement. It seems to be what was going on. Faculty previously had been somewhat lukewarm on this requirement. In fact, in a faculty poll a year earlier, actually most faculty opposed the RPPC legislation. But you have these students in the room, and then magically, all of the sudden, 73% of faculty at Bates, I think that's the correct number, end up voting in favor of passing the legislation, right? And would those people have passed the legislation? Were they not worried about one, losing my job, but two, am I going to vote this down? Are we going to vote this down in front of students? And then this ends up on social media. And then we're being pilloried from both the left and the right for what we did, right? And so I think the technological change creates an additional layer of paranoia on top of like, now not only do I have to worry about ramifications within my institution, I also have to be deeply paranoid about things happening without my institution, that I will become one of these professors who's quote unquote heterodox or who is anti-woke or who gets yelled at all the time. And I think it's worth noting just very briefly, it is not only non-tenure track faculty who are not speaking up. It is also tenured faculty, right? I cannot tell you how many times I would oppose something on campus or make a comment and someone would approach me later and say, I'm so glad you said something. I've been thinking this. I'm so glad you said it. And my response in my head, at least, I usually didn't say this to the person was, you have tenure. You could have said it. Why do I have to say it? I'm just on the tenure track. You have tenure. You could speak up. And the reality is that are they afraid of losing their jobs? Probably not. They can't lose their jobs, but they are afraid of getting yelled at, right? And I think they're afraid of getting yelled at at their institution. But I also think in some cases, they're afraid of getting yelled at online. So I do think the social media piece of this has exacerbated the problems caused by the labor crisis. But I would argue that it's not social media alone that is the point of the spear in terms of the problems within academia and why this kind of progressive extremism prevailed.