In the early 2010s, there was a lot of pushback from up-and-coming left media figures like Owen Jones and Laurie Penny to criticisms of their PMC and educational backgrounds.

"So what if we went to Oxford, or if our parents were solicitors?", the line of defence went. "Our hearts are in the right place. We fight for the many, not the few."
Ten years on, seeing where PMC domination of the left has taken the movement, we can revisit those criticisms and see the importance of the original pushback.
What a PMC parental background and a prep-school and Oxbridge education tend to provide their beneficiaries with is a high degree of entitlement, verbal polish and presentation, and an often unshakeable personal confidence.
Combined with the utopian and improvement- and uplift-focused aspects of left thought, this prior socialisation tends to produce a highly authoritarian form of left-managerialism, one in which the PMC left appoint themselves both moral spokespeople and moral technicians.
It's not so much that these left representatives are "out of touch with the working class" (though they certainly are), it's that they are "in touch" with others of their class, producing an intense degree of PMC class solidarity within the erstwhile left.
Ideas spread easily from Stanford and Harvard to Oxford, Cambridge and Copenhagen because members of the international PMC are primed to pick them up and assimilate them, regardless of nationality. https://t.co/iTJapCPTAZ
Graduates of the same universities, in managerial positions in the educational and GLAM sectors, assume the same ideological positions and impose uniform blanket policies as though all acting in unison.
PMC socialisation in elite schools and universities expresses itself in other ways as well. Social media mobbing and ostracism among the LARPing left reflect the networking and social skills learned in elite school and university common rooms.
The aim of the PMC left isn't the creation of a broad and successful political movement. Instead, it is to imbue the PMC with a new sense of moral authority (and moral mission) and to create career opportunities for highly educated moral technicians in institutions.

More from Education

When the university starts sending out teaching evaluation reminders, I tell all my classes about bias in teaching evals, with links to the evidence. Here's a version of the email I send, in case anyone else wants to poach from it.

1/16


When I say "anyone": needless to say, the people who are benefitting from the bias (like me) are the ones who should helping to correct it. Men in math, this is your job! Of course, it should also be dealt with at the institutional level, not just ad hoc.
OK, on to my email:
2/16

"You may have received automated reminders about course evals this fall. I encourage you to fill the evals out. I'd be particularly grateful for written feedback about what worked for you in the class, what was difficult, & how you ultimately spent your time for this class.

3/16

However, I don't feel comfortable just sending you an email saying: "please take the time to evaluate me". I do think student evaluations of teachers can be valuable: I have made changes to my teaching style as a direct result of comments from student teaching evaluations.
4/16

But teaching evaluations have a weakness: they are not an unbiased estimator of teaching quality. There is strong evidence that teaching evals tend to favour men over women, and that teaching evals tend to favour white instructors over non-white instructors.
5/16
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