Could someone explain to me how Marc Andreesen has so much clout? Everything I’ve ever read by him says he’s a flaming goofball and wanna-be fascist. Here he is expounding on academia.
“The combination of DEI and immigration is politically lethal,” Andreessen wrote. “When these two forms of discrimination combine, as they have for the last 60 years and on hyperdrive for the last decade, they systematically cut most of the children of the Trump voter base out of any realistic prospect of access to higher education and corporate America.”
So he is afraid that the white children of Trump voters, a notoriously ignorant group that hates education (especially secular education), is being displaced from educational opportunities by ambitious immigrants and go-getter minorities. This is a non-issue. We’re supposed to prioritize lazy students (or to be fair, students who have been deprived of a good basic education by America’s fucked-up public education policy) over students who are willing to work hard because their parents voted for Trump? What an insane proposal.
As usual, this the dream of freaked out conservatives who think student radicals are dictating the course of higher education. Somehow these kooks get all kinds of mainstream coverage, despite the fact that their beliefs are entirely counter to facts and reason. As Henry Farrell says
…most mainstream American commentary about free speech in the modern American university labors under a misconception. It regularly suggests that out of control students and crazy professors are running the place. There is an entire intellectual industry of centrist and conservative commentary driving this narrative, including people like Bari Weiss, the proprietor of the Free Press, who made her bones by working with The David Project to attack Columbia professors for purported anti-Semitism. Marc Andreessen claims that “politically radical institutions” are driving a leftward shift by teaching students “how to be America-hating communists.”
Anyone who has day-to-day experience with actual American students knows that these claims are complete horseshit. Some students are left, some moderate, some conservative. Most are more interested in getting jobs than burning flags. America-Hating Communism 101 is not, actually, a required course on most campuses. Econ 101 often is. And those who are protesting what Israel is doing in Gaza? They have something to protest.
I know my students, and they’re diverse and you can’t pigeonhole them into the caricatures Weiss and Andreesen have fabricated. These students are here to learn — or to get certified for a better job — and they definitely do not sign up for a buttload of debt and years of work so they can tear down the establishment. What happens is they get into an environment where they are expected to pay attention to the world, and history, and politics, and they are outraged, honestly and righteously. You can’t change this, unless you think the university should be a propaganda mill that refuses to represent reality. It’s also the case that even if the student body was full of bomb-throwing radicals, it wouldn’t matter, because they don’t control our curriculum, and they don’t even control our big money investments, or the appointments of our faculty and administrators.
Ideally, I consider the students to be the voice of the university’s conscience, which is all too often ignored.
If you think students and a radical faculty are in charge, look at this news from Duke University.
Duke University School of Medicine (SOM) plans to implement new faculty productivity guidelines that would tie tenured professors’ salaries to external research funding, according to documents reviewed by The Chronicle.
Set to go in effect in 2026, the proposed policy would apply to the school’s basic science units, which include departments ranging from biochemistry to neurobiology and various centers and institutes such as the Duke Cancer Institute and the Duke Human Vaccine Institute. These units rely heavily on grants from the National Institutes of Health, which have been increasingly difficult to come by due to slowdowns in grant review processes, an uptick in terminations and a lack of new funding opportunities since President Donald Trump assumed office.
Under the guidelines, each department must establish a minimum expectation for external grant funding. Tenured faculty members who do not meet the threshold — measured as a three-year average — would be given the option to either enter a 12-month “Safe Harbor” period, after which further inability to meet productivity standards will result in salary reductions, or consider career transition alternatives.
I guarantee you that the faculty did not approve massive salary cuts, tied to getting grants at a time when the government is destroying the apparatus of grant disbursement. This was a decision made in contradiction to faculty interests.
Farrell also made this lovely table that compares the perceived hierarchy of power within academia to the actual, little known (to the public, or to asshole pundits like Andreesen and Weiss) hierarchy.
I guess I’m at about level 4 in the distribution of power at the university, and even that’s misleading. If we were to plot the influence quantitatively, we’d have to use a power law distribution. Everything is in the hands of the board of trustees. Even where we faculty have some say in decisions, we can be overruled by the Board. Tenure, for instance, is proposed by faculty, but then has to be approved by the president, who then passes on the nomination to the Board, who can kill the idea without anything like a hearing or a discussion from the affected parties.
And students? Hah. Sorry. If students want to affect the administration of the university, they have to SCREAM and take over buildings and do all the things conservative hate, because they have no other options.
He’s very, very rich.
They clearly and unambiguously do think that universities should be such propaganda mills unrepresentative of reality xor glorified job-training programs, if permitted to exist at all.
There’s also the elephant in the room here, in that if we want to seriously talk about access to higher education it immediately raises the question of financial barriers, most notably how much tuition and university fees are – which anyone who has been paying the slightest attention knows are generally incredibly high, and have been growing substantially faster than inflation for about 50 years now.
There you go, stating the obvious again… that’s exactly what they think. To them it’s just that it should be their propaganda instead of “woke” propaganda
I’d rather like to take a course in America-Hating Communism 101. Though I could probably teach one well enough.
Of course you would, you’re not American.
I haven’t taught that course myself, but I have taught a course in “Corporate America is poisoning you and destroying the environment and killing your unborn children”.
(OT)
Hulk Hogan, wrestling star and actor, dies aged 71
.https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2025/jul/24/hulk-hogan-terry-bollea-wwe-dead
Among other things, he sabotaged the initiative of wossname, the wrestler who later became a governor, to set up some kind of union/interest organisation for wrestlers.
Fuck him.
You can’t change this, unless you think the university should be a propaganda mill that refuses to represent reality.
That’s what the “Chicago School [of Economics]” is.
The joke is, the more successful the regressives are, the fewer foreign students will want to study in US universities. EU and Asia will take up the slack.
PZ – “Somehow these kooks get all kinds of mainstream coverage, despite the fact that their beliefs are entirely counter to facts and reason.”
Yes, all the American media outlets are turning into The National Enquirer. This is what Americans are demanding from there information stream(s). Feed us garbage, not robust pertinent stories. Trump and the eccentric right wing are capitalizing on it.
@birgerjohansson #7
you mean Jesse Ventura? he was governor of minnesota.
In the US, White ethnicity is overrepresented in both the corporate workforce and university graduates. Andreesen is just plain lying here.
If anyone is blocking “kids of Trump voters” from corpo jobs and uni degrees, it’s the pro-nepotism, anti-education Trumpists, not DEI.
My second full time job was at a university pretty much at the bottom of the food chain as a research assistant to three professors and associate professors. There were some rare professors with a Mercedes or similar but most staff drove beaten up old jalopies. Then there was the Vice-Chancellor with their stratospherically obscene salary and perks. While about half the students were not from what you would call a privileged background, typically newly single mothers upgrading their qualifications to return to the workforce and teachers upgrading theirs the majority of full-timers were from wealthy families and the Mercedes, Porsches, BMWs and other tokens of wealth belonged mostly to students. They were hardly radical left wing communists although I do remember one rather long occupation of the vice-chancellors offices when the uni decided to charge fees for parking. It was truly radical. The management called on its security staff to remove them but they, being good union members refused to cross the student union picket line. Even the police retreated after the students staged a spontaneous park-in which blocked all the access roads forcing them to walk about a mile to the VC’s office. Yes they still protest but protesting against an ongoing genocide in Gaza is hardly radical.
My own experience studying history in academia didn’t teach me to hate my own country (the USA), but it did make me more aware of the extent of the “dark side” of its history. On the other hand, it also made me more aware of the bad side of the history of lots of other countries, so I came to the conclusion that while the USA has often done bad things, it is hardly unusual in this, and it seems misguided to single out any one country for condemnation.
I see Duke is continuing to live up to it’s motto, “Duke Sucks!”
@ springa73
Who exactly is “singling out” the US for condemnation? Do you mean perhaps the people who are living inside the US and are directly affected by it’s policies? I have to wonder why people might criticize a country that has always claimed high ideals, but has never actually met those ideals?
Artor @17
I was thinking mainly of the people who condemn only the USA, who act like the USA practically invented slavery and genocide, and is uniquely evil. It’s sort of an inverted kind of American exceptionalism, and it just bothers me.
It’s not about me, but I think my comment on infin. thread bears repeating. It’s just ‘one more brick in the wall’:
was 348 shermanj 22 July 2025 at 11:30 am
In my personal experience, in the past, universities were places where open factual discussion of difficult topics occurred. Now, they are sellouts to bigotry and ignorance to protect themselves from the knuckle-dragging forces of murderous plutocracy.
https://www.juancole.com/2025/07/protesting-georgetown-sanctioning.html
@10 stuffin wrote: Yes, all the American media outlets are turning into The National Enquirer. This is what Americans are demanding from there information stream(s). Feed us garbage, not robust pertinent stories. Trump and the eccentric right wing are capitalizing on it.
I reply: YES! I see that every single day in the main slime media outlets. They post incomplete snippets of important stories and spend most of the time on sports personalities and useless puff pieces of how a dog on a surfboard saved a child from a shark, or some such bullshit