This is really thoughtful and interesting. I especially appreciate the question of "what comes next?" watching what's happening at Columbia right now (where I work). While I'm fundamentally concerned with the Trump administration's attempt at control, it's the muddled and clueless response of academics that has me worried about how this will play out. They seem blind to the flaws that have made university culture an easy target.
For example, from this morning's NYT: “Today, the administration is going after pro-Palestinian speech, but tomorrow it can go after speech criticizing fossil fuels, speech promoting D.E.I. or speech defending gender-affirming care,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, which is representing the professors in the lawsuit.
This quote shows a lack of understanding of legitimate reasons why people don’t like academic/liberal/left culture. Two of her three examples, DEI and youth gender medicine, are topics where the critics of mainstream opinion are marginalized and no one on the left rises to their defense.
I keep thinking of that line after 9/11 when a commentator (I can't remember who) wrote ’they hate us for not knowing why they hate us.’
Wait. Why are you complaining? Minorities are under attack, you’re winning right now. We have a govt who scrubbed mention of DEI guy Jackie Robinson (admittedly there was a minor uproar). Enjoy the moment.
Patrick is clearly opposed to these attacks. He is saying that he wants the resistance to them to succeed -- and he's arguing for the resistance to be more effective at mustering widespread support.
I miss Firing Line format: somber people, hand on their chins, having an in-depth conversation without interruption and posturing. More and more I find this format on random YouTube channels (after failing to find anything to watch on Netflix or HBO). And btw, those videos have millions of views. People want to watch an hour-long video on, like, Kierkegaard. This is an untapped market.
Very interesting remarks, thanks for posting! I find myself torn -- on one hand a big part of the reason I started my Substack was to try to air awful truths about elite institutions to help encourage them to reform themselves, but on the other I've seen precious little capacity for reform, very little interest in acknowledging legitimate critiques, and a broad lack of intellectual curiosity and seriousness. So I love to hear about Carl Van Doren or the postwar managerial elites at NASA, but as types they seem about as extinct as the brontosaurus in this day and age. They were substantive well-rounded people in a way that a lot of cosseted academics and public intellectuals today simply aren't.
And I'm not sure how much role elite universities play in maintaining high culture anymore. When I was a student at Brown the only class on Melville was all about presenting him as a pioneering LGBTQ writer rather than surveying the larger arc of his work. I took a class on social movements wanting to learn about the history of organized labor and instead the majority of the course was on minor marginal radicals the professor happened to have done part of his thesis on. These days I could do much better learning about those topics in watching a Youtube series from armchair enthusiasts than taking a college course from a hyperspecialized academic busy publishing or perishing.
Society needs cultural elites, there will always be cultural elites in some form, I'm just not so sure if universities will continue to play as large a role in that as they have over the past couple of centuries vs. the flame being kept by people who love the material but make their career in other areas. The libraries, probably, but maybe not the faculty so much anymore.
I hear you, but it's a lot harder to generalize colleges and universities than it seems. If Columbia appears to be rotting, or Brown, what about UChicago? The various state schools? What about the scholars and researchers who are still doing essential research in the humanities and hard sciences? I love YouTube - I wrote a Substack piece called "Bet on YouTube - but YouTube can't replace higher education. YouTube can't subsidize a Johns Hopkins-style research lab, it can't perform intensive economics study, it can't give an academic years to write a groundbreaking work on a text.
You present a beautifully succint analysis of our current landscape and a captivating argument for what we need to consider and do. Personally you literally take me back home with my now long gone father. The man who dropped out of high school in Chicago, fought in WWII, returned to Chicago and tested into a Masters Degree program at the U of C and got a PhD in Political Science studying with Leo Strauss. He formed my way of thinking. I always tell people that I was “home schooled”. Thank you for your writing and giving me a moment. Fantástic!
"The left wants to rip Socrates and Shakespeare from the classroom."
As a Socialist and an educator I take issue with this statement. It is not the left who have tried to strip the humanities from education. It is technocratic privatizers focused on STEM.
Obviously not all the left - it's a rhetorical flourish - but many of the protests against the canon (white men!) over the last 15 years came from the left
But the energy, even there, is not so much anti-Shakespeare as pro-other voices. It's proposing that instead of reading the whole Decameron, you understand the 14th century literary world by also reading some of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Did the Yale students vote against your side and pick the winner? Easy for them to say “reject elite institutions” when they have an all-access pass to those institutions
The most successful oligarchs right now -- like, say, J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel -- are those who are squarely (aggressively!) elite, and who use elite institutions (SCOTUS, the Senate, ICE, lawsuits against Gawker) to exercise power over the less powerful, but who have mastered the ability to play at appearing to be populists angry at the elite.
As Lampedusa writes in The Leopard, "things will have to change, if we want things to stay as they are".
So the members of the Yale Political Union voted to reject the cultural elite. Then what happened? Did they all drop out of Yale and get jobs in retail?
Such debates are often set up so as to perpetuate a kind of intellectual fraud. The Yale Political Union, a culturally elite institution, voted to "reject our cultural elites." Note the possessive. Arguably, a culturally elite phrasing. The elites worth rejecting - whether cultural, political, or economic - often come out of Yale and Harvard and the like, or are aligned with those bastions of establishment power.
Would those who voted to "reject our cultural elites" then vote to forever disband the culturally elite Yale Political Union? Would they decide to unenroll from the culturally elite Yale University? Would they vote to silence themselves? Would they vote to reject the economic and political elite and call for many of these elite figures to be subjected to war crimes trials for their institutionally elite Yale and Harvard trained depredations through the decades?
Or did they entice a liberal writer to defend the "elite" in a vigorous new age of populism - aka, anti-elitism? And did they succeed in having the writer conflate the elite with the intellectual? Was "elite" even ever defined? Or "cultural"?
Often, the bashers of cultural elites will not focus, unless profitable, on rejecting the professional elite liars and plutocrats and apologists for pillaging. Often, bashing culture is used to advance brutal economic and political power. Often, the intellectuals (elite or otherwise) who are typically rejected or sanctioned are those who tell the truth, to the right people in the right place at the right time - the prophetic, who can be made to pay dearly for it.
A more relevant discussion would have been should the culturally elite Yale Political Union at the economically elite Yale University reject plutocracy and other forms of economic elitism or tyranny - that is the corporate-state elite and plutarchy. Plenty of pillaging partisans are willing to defend blatant plutocracy. Such a debate might or might not prove too embarrassing to the Yale Political Union.
Of course, much of the cultural elite is actually pernicious or vacuous, by definition, as it is tightly aligned with the undemocratic corporate-state elite. This can be taken as a definition of "elite" culture - and might be thought of as the shadow of "politics" that is "the shadow cast by big business."
Not everyone who attends Yale and Harvard and the like are bandits and pillagers. Far from it. But they all are culturally elite, some of them quite suddenly so. There is no defending the oppressive elite, culturally or otherwise. Should we reject elite scientists? Depends what is meant by "elite." If elite is meant as "great" then of course not. However if elite is meant as "brilliant but sociopathic" then of course we reject such virulent "elitism" in all its forms. The cultural elite can be great and humane. It can also be brilliant and sociopathic. These are not the same things, obvious opposites, and should not be conflated any more than the free-thinking and honest intellectual should be conflated with dazzling deceit.
Fake, sociopathic "populism" loves to weaponize "cultural elitism" and culture wars about cultural elitism toward its brutal profiteering ends.
A humane progressive and revolutionary populism needs to have its day, soonest, before it is too late. There is a vital role for cultural greatness in that, whether those cultural elements are exactingly studied or practiced, and produced so as to be select, that is, elite, or spontaneous, instinctive, or crafted so as to be more omnipresent and familiar. Of course, the two types of cultural greatness often feed into and influence one another - sometimes not necessarily in obvious ways. Rejecting one, especially for fraudulent and predatory reasons, hurts the other, and vice versa. And hurts the culture and society in general.
As for the event itself, it sounds like it was not a debate but two people talking about different things - making any debate vote ridiculous. A simple discussion with well defined terms would be more reasonable. As would a discussion about defining the term, "cultural elites" or "cultural elite," and its implications.
Interesting. Am I a cultural elite? I graduated from the inner city HS in Portland, Oregon; won a scholarship to Vassar; started two businesses; and went to Rutgers as a graduate student in City and Regional Planning. I ended up in Texas and began my public service career at the Texas Water Commission. Water has been my thing since then and now I work for the City of Poteet. As Public Works Administrator, I handle regulatory matters amongst other duties. I am not rich but I have always loved my work. The smaller the place, the more interesting the work. Helping people has been the common thread through all. So, am I a cultural elite? :D
Will our cultural elites reform themselves? It's a good question. I certainly hope so, but I have my doubts, given what we've all witnessed in the 21st century.
Put's me in mind of a long passage in one of Owell's essays, if memory serves, The Lion and the Unicorn, where Orwell goes on what could be described today as an epic rant about the ruling class of Britain. Of course he was writing about the specific conditions of England in the first half of the 20th century. But still, when I read Orwell's essay it makes me think quite a lot about our own ruling class.
This is really thoughtful and interesting. I especially appreciate the question of "what comes next?" watching what's happening at Columbia right now (where I work). While I'm fundamentally concerned with the Trump administration's attempt at control, it's the muddled and clueless response of academics that has me worried about how this will play out. They seem blind to the flaws that have made university culture an easy target.
For example, from this morning's NYT: “Today, the administration is going after pro-Palestinian speech, but tomorrow it can go after speech criticizing fossil fuels, speech promoting D.E.I. or speech defending gender-affirming care,” said Ramya Krishnan, a senior staff attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia, which is representing the professors in the lawsuit.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/25/nyregion/professors-sue-trump.html
This quote shows a lack of understanding of legitimate reasons why people don’t like academic/liberal/left culture. Two of her three examples, DEI and youth gender medicine, are topics where the critics of mainstream opinion are marginalized and no one on the left rises to their defense.
I keep thinking of that line after 9/11 when a commentator (I can't remember who) wrote ’they hate us for not knowing why they hate us.’
Wait. Why are you complaining? Minorities are under attack, you’re winning right now. We have a govt who scrubbed mention of DEI guy Jackie Robinson (admittedly there was a minor uproar). Enjoy the moment.
Patrick is clearly opposed to these attacks. He is saying that he wants the resistance to them to succeed -- and he's arguing for the resistance to be more effective at mustering widespread support.
No idea what the other person said but how did this not win??
I miss Firing Line format: somber people, hand on their chins, having an in-depth conversation without interruption and posturing. More and more I find this format on random YouTube channels (after failing to find anything to watch on Netflix or HBO). And btw, those videos have millions of views. People want to watch an hour-long video on, like, Kierkegaard. This is an untapped market.
Fantastic essay. You've nailed so much about what I'm feeling in this weird cultural moment we're in.
This is one of my favorite things that you've published--thanks for this.
Very interesting remarks, thanks for posting! I find myself torn -- on one hand a big part of the reason I started my Substack was to try to air awful truths about elite institutions to help encourage them to reform themselves, but on the other I've seen precious little capacity for reform, very little interest in acknowledging legitimate critiques, and a broad lack of intellectual curiosity and seriousness. So I love to hear about Carl Van Doren or the postwar managerial elites at NASA, but as types they seem about as extinct as the brontosaurus in this day and age. They were substantive well-rounded people in a way that a lot of cosseted academics and public intellectuals today simply aren't.
And I'm not sure how much role elite universities play in maintaining high culture anymore. When I was a student at Brown the only class on Melville was all about presenting him as a pioneering LGBTQ writer rather than surveying the larger arc of his work. I took a class on social movements wanting to learn about the history of organized labor and instead the majority of the course was on minor marginal radicals the professor happened to have done part of his thesis on. These days I could do much better learning about those topics in watching a Youtube series from armchair enthusiasts than taking a college course from a hyperspecialized academic busy publishing or perishing.
Society needs cultural elites, there will always be cultural elites in some form, I'm just not so sure if universities will continue to play as large a role in that as they have over the past couple of centuries vs. the flame being kept by people who love the material but make their career in other areas. The libraries, probably, but maybe not the faculty so much anymore.
I hear you, but it's a lot harder to generalize colleges and universities than it seems. If Columbia appears to be rotting, or Brown, what about UChicago? The various state schools? What about the scholars and researchers who are still doing essential research in the humanities and hard sciences? I love YouTube - I wrote a Substack piece called "Bet on YouTube - but YouTube can't replace higher education. YouTube can't subsidize a Johns Hopkins-style research lab, it can't perform intensive economics study, it can't give an academic years to write a groundbreaking work on a text.
You present a beautifully succint analysis of our current landscape and a captivating argument for what we need to consider and do. Personally you literally take me back home with my now long gone father. The man who dropped out of high school in Chicago, fought in WWII, returned to Chicago and tested into a Masters Degree program at the U of C and got a PhD in Political Science studying with Leo Strauss. He formed my way of thinking. I always tell people that I was “home schooled”. Thank you for your writing and giving me a moment. Fantástic!
That town still is a great alternative to NYC
Dang Ross Barkan! You could have not said it better. Brill. Thank you.
"The left wants to rip Socrates and Shakespeare from the classroom."
As a Socialist and an educator I take issue with this statement. It is not the left who have tried to strip the humanities from education. It is technocratic privatizers focused on STEM.
Obviously not all the left - it's a rhetorical flourish - but many of the protests against the canon (white men!) over the last 15 years came from the left
But the energy, even there, is not so much anti-Shakespeare as pro-other voices. It's proposing that instead of reading the whole Decameron, you understand the 14th century literary world by also reading some of Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
Did the Yale students vote against your side and pick the winner? Easy for them to say “reject elite institutions” when they have an all-access pass to those institutions
The most successful oligarchs right now -- like, say, J.D. Vance and Peter Thiel -- are those who are squarely (aggressively!) elite, and who use elite institutions (SCOTUS, the Senate, ICE, lawsuits against Gawker) to exercise power over the less powerful, but who have mastered the ability to play at appearing to be populists angry at the elite.
As Lampedusa writes in The Leopard, "things will have to change, if we want things to stay as they are".
So the members of the Yale Political Union voted to reject the cultural elite. Then what happened? Did they all drop out of Yale and get jobs in retail?
Yes but not at forever 21 clearly 😆
"Reject our cultural elites"?
Such debates are often set up so as to perpetuate a kind of intellectual fraud. The Yale Political Union, a culturally elite institution, voted to "reject our cultural elites." Note the possessive. Arguably, a culturally elite phrasing. The elites worth rejecting - whether cultural, political, or economic - often come out of Yale and Harvard and the like, or are aligned with those bastions of establishment power.
Would those who voted to "reject our cultural elites" then vote to forever disband the culturally elite Yale Political Union? Would they decide to unenroll from the culturally elite Yale University? Would they vote to silence themselves? Would they vote to reject the economic and political elite and call for many of these elite figures to be subjected to war crimes trials for their institutionally elite Yale and Harvard trained depredations through the decades?
Or did they entice a liberal writer to defend the "elite" in a vigorous new age of populism - aka, anti-elitism? And did they succeed in having the writer conflate the elite with the intellectual? Was "elite" even ever defined? Or "cultural"?
Often, the bashers of cultural elites will not focus, unless profitable, on rejecting the professional elite liars and plutocrats and apologists for pillaging. Often, bashing culture is used to advance brutal economic and political power. Often, the intellectuals (elite or otherwise) who are typically rejected or sanctioned are those who tell the truth, to the right people in the right place at the right time - the prophetic, who can be made to pay dearly for it.
A more relevant discussion would have been should the culturally elite Yale Political Union at the economically elite Yale University reject plutocracy and other forms of economic elitism or tyranny - that is the corporate-state elite and plutarchy. Plenty of pillaging partisans are willing to defend blatant plutocracy. Such a debate might or might not prove too embarrassing to the Yale Political Union.
Of course, much of the cultural elite is actually pernicious or vacuous, by definition, as it is tightly aligned with the undemocratic corporate-state elite. This can be taken as a definition of "elite" culture - and might be thought of as the shadow of "politics" that is "the shadow cast by big business."
Not everyone who attends Yale and Harvard and the like are bandits and pillagers. Far from it. But they all are culturally elite, some of them quite suddenly so. There is no defending the oppressive elite, culturally or otherwise. Should we reject elite scientists? Depends what is meant by "elite." If elite is meant as "great" then of course not. However if elite is meant as "brilliant but sociopathic" then of course we reject such virulent "elitism" in all its forms. The cultural elite can be great and humane. It can also be brilliant and sociopathic. These are not the same things, obvious opposites, and should not be conflated any more than the free-thinking and honest intellectual should be conflated with dazzling deceit.
Fake, sociopathic "populism" loves to weaponize "cultural elitism" and culture wars about cultural elitism toward its brutal profiteering ends.
A humane progressive and revolutionary populism needs to have its day, soonest, before it is too late. There is a vital role for cultural greatness in that, whether those cultural elements are exactingly studied or practiced, and produced so as to be select, that is, elite, or spontaneous, instinctive, or crafted so as to be more omnipresent and familiar. Of course, the two types of cultural greatness often feed into and influence one another - sometimes not necessarily in obvious ways. Rejecting one, especially for fraudulent and predatory reasons, hurts the other, and vice versa. And hurts the culture and society in general.
As for the event itself, it sounds like it was not a debate but two people talking about different things - making any debate vote ridiculous. A simple discussion with well defined terms would be more reasonable. As would a discussion about defining the term, "cultural elites" or "cultural elite," and its implications.
Also, it probably should be noted that when it comes to Shakespeare, no one has fumbled the ball more than "cultural elites": https://fictiongutted.substack.com/p/orwells-problem-and-ai-meet-the-shakespeare
Interesting. Am I a cultural elite? I graduated from the inner city HS in Portland, Oregon; won a scholarship to Vassar; started two businesses; and went to Rutgers as a graduate student in City and Regional Planning. I ended up in Texas and began my public service career at the Texas Water Commission. Water has been my thing since then and now I work for the City of Poteet. As Public Works Administrator, I handle regulatory matters amongst other duties. I am not rich but I have always loved my work. The smaller the place, the more interesting the work. Helping people has been the common thread through all. So, am I a cultural elite? :D
My sense is that you are a managerial elite, not a cultural elite.
Why are you so worried about what someone else would call you? Just keep up the good work that you love
Great piece, Ross.
Excellent argument-- A glimmer of hope amid the slop.
Hoping @ted gioia gets a chance to read this.
Will our cultural elites reform themselves? It's a good question. I certainly hope so, but I have my doubts, given what we've all witnessed in the 21st century.
Put's me in mind of a long passage in one of Owell's essays, if memory serves, The Lion and the Unicorn, where Orwell goes on what could be described today as an epic rant about the ruling class of Britain. Of course he was writing about the specific conditions of England in the first half of the 20th century. But still, when I read Orwell's essay it makes me think quite a lot about our own ruling class.