He finds former UCSC German Professor John Ellis with “just bald-faced lies”.
He finds former UCSC German Professor John Ellis with “just bald-faced lies”. Drezner calls Ellis’s claims that Marxist indoctrination on campus explains why socialist candidates are now winning elections “the single-dumbest op-ed about higher education” theJournalhas ever published. Drezner reduces Ellis’s argument to: the faculty moved left → “?????” → socialists win. And asks for more evidence. Which is not offered: https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-op-eds-about-higher-education https://danieldrezner.substack.com Last week was a long one on the road for me — it started in Toronto and ended in New York. There were definitely some highlights - take a gander of some of these views I caught in both cities: For the New York leg I accompanied a variety of faculty, students, and staff of the Fletcher School so our students could explore various career opportunities in the private sector, nonprofit sector, international organizations, and maybe the occasional U.S. government position if they were still hiring. My point is that it was a long week and I was looking forward to coming home and blobbing out. My brain needed a break. Instead I readthe single-dumbest op-ed about higher education theWall Street Journalhas ever published— which is saying something. And my brain refused to ignore the pseudo-intellectual claptrap and demanded the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World craft a response. Drezner’s World is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The op-ed, by UC-Santa Cruz emeritus professor John Ellis, is entitled, “Radical Professors Have Poisoned the Electorate.” The subhed reads, “Socialists have started winning because young voters were indoctrinated rather than educated.” The terms of the controversy over higher education hardly changed for three or four decades. Conservatives complained of political activism freezing out serious scholarship. Liberals rejected that criticism as politically motivated and argued that Marxist professors do little harm because students see through and laugh at their ideas. But the recent spate of electoral wins by socialists has confirmed the conservative camp’s worst fears. Those ineffective Marxist professors, it seems, have changed the educated electorate so profoundly that hitherto unelectable socialists can now prevail across the country. Liberals are paying the price for their complacency. Radicals have begun to attack the center-left as intensely as the right, trashing the legacy of Western civilization on which both major parties previously rested. The values they invoke to denounce the West—democracy, equality, human rights—are very much part of that tradition. These aren’t the well-meaning youthful idealists they were claimed to be, but hard-core revolutionaries who go beyond calling for abolition of capitalism and private property and advocate measures that even Stalin and Mao would have thought lunacy: abolishing police and prisons, dismantling the military, opening the borders. Get ready for lawless mob rule. But as we contemplate academia’s degradation of the electorate, we must not forget the rest of the far-reaching damage it does. Education departments that instill poisonous ideologies in schoolteachers have depressed children’s test scores in reading and math to historic lows. Journalism, law and medical schools put woke indoctrination ahead of competent professional training. Virtually our entire educational system has been captured by destructive political radicals, and it is madness for an advanced society to know this is happening and do nothing to stop it. Optimists who think the foolishness will blow over are mistaken. We’re now seeing the effects of one generation indoctrinated by Marxist-dominated campuses. A second is on the way. As the last cohort that had a real college education begins to vanish, our constitutional order will go with it. There aresomany things wrong with this op-ed. But let’s focus on the two most obvious ones. First, correlation does not equal causation. Ellis was a professor of German literature at UC-Santa Cruz. He was clearly not a social science or science professor, because our branches of the academy really stress causation in making arguments like this one — and Ellis does not provide a scintilla of causal evidence to advance his argument. His logic is simple: The political affiliation of the academy has shifted left Ellis is correct on point one, as almost every scholar who has looked at this phenomenon would acknowledge. Ellis knows nothing about point two.Scholarly researcherslooking into this question do not find any evidence supporting it. Even sympathetic organizations likethe Manhattan InstituteandHeterodox Academyacknowledge this point. Writing inThe Hill, Tom Mockaitisarticulates the basic points that falsify Ellis’ assertions: Most courses cannot be taught from an ideological perspective — left, right or center. Is there a “woke” way to teach chemistry, biology, physics, music or geology? There may be Marxist mathematicians, but there is no such thing as Marxist calculus. A2023 surveyidentified the top 10 majors based on percentage of students: business, nursing, psychology, education, biology, criminal justice, computer science, health professions, accounting and engineering. Courses in most of these fields are highly technical and not amenable to ideological interpretation.Business,1which attracts the most majors, has a higher percentage of conservative faculty than universities and colleges do in general. Second, even the best version of this argument is seven years out of date. The notion that “virtually our entire educational system has been captured by destructive political radicals” requires a genuine deafness tohow the political winds have blown over the last decade. Universities are too busy scrapping diversity statements, funding centers for conservative thought, andappeasing conservative trusteesto be able to indoctrinate anyone into Marxist ideology. Conservative activists havenot gotten everything that they wanted. Nevertheless the result is mostly affirmative action for mediocre conservatives, and as a result theright-wing political correctness has gotten out of control. The point, however, is that Ellis is acting like it’s 2016 all over again. There is more I could say but there is little point devoting more words to deconstructing this kind of claptrap than Ellis devoted to it. InaPepperdine Beaconinterviewthat Ellis gave in April 2025, he stated, “The public [must believe] something is really so wrong that it’s got to be changed. I think that is a requirement. We’re getting there on that one. Even so, it still needs to keep going. I mean, we still need to have that perception sink deeper and deeper into the public. But then the question arises: What levels do you have? What steps can you actually take?” For Ellis, I guess the final step is just bald-faced lies. This is fine; he can rant to his heart’s content. I just wish that theWall Street Journal’s op-ed page would stop publishing steaming piles of horseshit until they figure out what is actually going on. https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/the-op-eds-about-higher-education https://danieldrezner.substack.com Brad DeLong here: Three years ago I thwumped my friend Matt Yglesias. I thwumped him for giving too much credence to that line of argument that Drezner rejects here: Matt Yglesias(2023): Thankful Mailbag https://www.slowboring.com/p/thankful-mailbag>: ‘The current trends on campus are toward an atmosphere where the radical criticism predominates…. The critical theories themselves would tell you, there’s no way Anglo-American liberal capitalist society is going to sustain generous financial support for institutions whose self-ascribed mission is to undermine faith in the main underpinnings of society… I wrote <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/successful-future-humanities-progr