#207 - Eric Kaufmann - How 'Cultural Socialism' Destroyed Our Universities

**Eric Kaufmann** (0:00)
This represents the corruption of academia and of the wider culture. The equal outcome emotional harm protection for minorities ideology trumps everything else, standards, merit, reason. It's the dominant value, and you have to bow down to it. 80% of 18 to 20 year olds have heard at least one of six critical race and gender terms from an adult at school in 70% of cases without a counter argument. I mean, that's happening at scale in British schools now. There was a AI-based meta-analysis looking at all papers in the social sciences. Only about 5% were political of the academic papers in 1960 It was 50% by 2025
And the left-right slant, it was 90% left, 2 to 6% right. And we're now talking about in the social sciences, about 14 to 1 left to right. A place like Harvard, it's about 96 to 3, I think is the ratio between Democrat and Republican. The kind of skew we're talking about is so extreme that it creates a kind of bubble. And within that bubble, radicalism thrives.

**Peter McCormack** (1:15)
Here we go, straight in, no missing around. Right, look, good to see you again.

**Eric Kaufmann** (1:18)
Yeah, good to see you too. And you're doing well.

**Peter McCormack** (1:22)
I'm doing okay, I'm doing okay. I think about things at the moment a lot, where we're going with things. But look, it's pretty obvious that there's one topic I have to talk to you about. It might not be obvious to you, but I haven't really talked too much about this, but I feel like I need to talk about Jason Ardé and what happened.
Because the conservative in me sees the results of a problem that you've talked about that's created. But also at the same time, I don't like the media storm around it, I'm finding troubling.

**Eric Kaufmann** (2:04)
I think that the amount of coverage is appropriate, actually. It's nothing to do with Jason Ardé, he is simply the symptom of a massive problem.
It's only because he was so outrageous that he got the attention of the wider world. But you have to understand what he represents is the system-wide accesses of what I'll call cultural socialism, you can call EDI, which is an ideology that says, the highest aspiration of human society is to have equal outcomes and emotional harm protection for historically marginalized race, gender, sexual identity groups. So that ideology, it's not equality, equalizing everybody, which is the economic socialism. We have to have perfect equality by race, by sex, so it's more of a cultural socialism. Within that ideological context, it made complete sense to hire somebody purely on the basis of race. I want to stress that this is, the story seems to be about Cambridge.

**Peter McCormack** (3:12)
But was he employed based on his race or was he employed based on his work, which was accused of being plagiarism?

**Eric Kaufmann** (3:23)
So it's race plus ideology. Right. And the race only makes sense within the rubric of the ideology. So the race is sacred because of the ideology, because it's a historically marginalized group, top arguably of the victim, maybe with indigenous, top of the victim hierarchy, and therefore extremely valuable within this idea system. But if he'd been a black conservative, he probably would have been persecuted, like Roland Fryer at Harvard. So it's not being black actually that matters. It's sort of the ideology behind it. But he's black and he's a critical race theory type of scholar. He's basically a scholar activist. And he looks the part too. Plus he's presentable, he's well-spoken, he's on television. So he's combining a lot of social capital within the woke value system, within the progressive academic ecosystem. And part of the point of Arde is that he didn't just sort of get allowed in by Cambridge. I mean, he got allowed in by his PhD with Liverpool John Moores. He was at, oh, where was it? Roehampton University. He was in Glasgow University.
All of these institutions all gave him a pass.
Why? For the same reason that a lot of the scholar activist papers in the Sokol squared hoax that Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and Peter Rogozian did, why did they all get waved through and get published? Well, because they ticked the right ideological boxes. So all this is, is if you tick the right ideological boxes or if you're symbolizing the ideology, you're waved through because no one can resist. And if you were to say this person is a problem, they're no good, then all of a sudden, the charge of racism or sexism or being a conservative, would that sort of cloud would drift over to you and you'd be a bit toxic. So no one's going to voice their complaints.