[smallnamespace]

Just as an anecdote, met a recent state school grad who said he arrived on campus as a dyed-in-the-wool liberal, tried to get into campus activism, and his fellow activists and teachers scared him so much that he's now not sure where he stands politically.

Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all immigration policies of any sort are illegitimate and harmful.

France was brought up as a particular example. Also, this view point was not up for classroom debate -- you would get a bad grade if you deviated from this in homework essays.

I think true liberalism is not just having a general set of 'progressive' values, but also being open to dissenting opinions and facing them honestly and openly. That doesn't mean agreeing with those opinions, but it does mean being exposed to them and debating them.

What we see on campuses today doesn't sound like liberalism to me, but a reactionary movement that aims to protect an orthodoxy composed of generally liberal viewpoints not by engaging in debate, but by preemptively shaming and denouncing anyone who disagrees.

Even if you believe liberal viewpoints are generally correct, nobody has a total monopoly on Truth.

[amarkov]

> Obviously I can't verify this, but for example he had a professor who actively taught that nations are a completely artificial social construct, and as such all immigration policies of any sort are illegitimate and harmful.

But that's a very mainstream position in economics, with much stronger arguments behind it than ideological purity. And it's typically supported by libertarians more than progressives, since the arguments are weakened by strong government-provided social services.

This is what I worry about, when I hear people complain that their views aren't tolerated on campus. Are they really being shut down by intolerant professors who won't accept dissent? Or are they dismissing ideas they don't immediately find reasonable as far-left propaganda and refusing to listen?

[smallnamespace]

This was hearsay from a secondhand source so I can't opine as to whether the interpretation was accurate.

However there are obviously large cultural, economic, security and other logistical issues that would be caused by completely opening up national borders -- we're certainly no longer in the era before WWI when nobody needed a passport. The classroom certainly sounds like a legitimate place to bring up these rather mainstream viewpoints.

Did some research and it does seem like there are both student- and teacher-led protests that are crossing the line into unreasonableness (from my perspective), e.g. protests against a humanities class for being too Eurocentric [1], or student demands for a Jewish professor to be fired because he publicly disagrees with a 'Day of Absence' event that asks for white students and faculty to stay off campus [2].

Then there's the promulgation of microaggression theory on campuses, which seems perfectly tailored to encourage all students to view every statement in the least charitable light[3] and to search for possible racism, sexism, or other possible -isms.

The fact that some people on the left are acting in a way where any disagreement with some interpretation of 'progressive' ideals automatically leads to accusations of racism is alarming, and is exactly the sort of prejudice (in the literal definition of the word) that I think fellow liberals should rally against.

[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/09/11/reed-college-...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/05/30/escalating-de... -

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-ris...

[aaron-lebo]

But that's a very mainstream position in economics, with much stronger arguments behind it than ideological purity.

What mainstream economists believe all immigration policies are illegitimate and harmful? Not being snarky.

That would be considered a fairly ideological stance in most other fields. I've never heard that expressed in political science (some overlap with economics) from anyone but people on HN and Reddit.

[michaelbuckbee]

Yeah, it's just impossible to know how biased this interpretation or the initial statements from the professor were.

Lots of things like these are discussed in the same way as physics professors say: "Imagine an infinite frictionless plane" - that it's a model for thinking about concepts and not a policy plan.

Imagine a completely borderless world where the only goal is literally economic efficiency - capital and labor are able to migrate freely anywhere and anything less is harmful in a strictly economic sense.

Practically, that's a bad idea for lots of reasons (like it might be economically efficient for someone to murder me, but I'd find it rather inconvenient) - so maybe some rules about passage of criminals and you can go on from there.

[amarkov]

The standard example is Michael Clemens, who argues the total cost of closed borders to the world is in the trillions of dollars. If you want an article reviewing more views: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/14/why-e...

The basic argument is just the standard free market argument. if A would like to sell their labor and B would like to buy it, and the government intervenes to stop them, that destroys whatever value they could have gotten from the exchange. The fact that there are some border markers between A and B doesn't change that value, although it may introduce externalities.

[camgunz]

It's essentially a weird labor market protectionism policy, and really no economist argues protectionism is good.

[m00g00]

Libertarians support open borders as a means to free movement of labor. As you alluded to, they also do not believe in taxpayer funded social services, much less granting rights of citizenship to not-naturalized immigrants.

This combination of ideas is not at all what is being espoused in liberal universities. They are pushing for both open borders (or at least amnesty and much less restrictive immigration laws) and guaranteed social services for immigrants.

Libertarians certainly don't view nations as "completely artificial illegitimate social construct" and I seriously doubt most college professors are teaching from that ideology's point of view. Libertarians are often as demonized as Republicans at universities.

[klank]

> nations are a completely artificial social construct

But if nations aren't simply social constructs, what are they? Is it the word "artificial" that is so surprising?

Maybe I have more fringe beliefs than I thought I did.

[defen]

> if nations aren't simply social constructs, what are they?

A Schelling point for coordinated actions by large groups of people, organized around ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic grounds?

[klank]

Had to look up "Schelling point", so apologies if I'm not fully grasping what you mean by it.

However, "organized around ethnic, cultural, and/or linguistic grounds" seems like another way of saying "social construct".

If you were to compare and contrast what you suggest with a social construct how would they be different?

[defen]

Too often I see people argue "X is a social construct" as a way of arguing that X "doesn't exist", or that people who believe in it have a kind of false consciousness.

I'm trying to show why people believe in it. Yes, it's a social construct; but that doesn't mean it's worthless - "money" is also a social construct: it only has value because other people think it has value.

The nation appears to be the largest stable unit of organization humans are capable of, at present at least. The history of the world has shown that Empires don't last too long these days.

[sbmassey]

I don't think anyone disputes that nations are social constructs, it is the "and as such all immigration policies of any sort are illegitimate and harmful." part that is controversial.

[CJefferson]

I think you have to continue to the second part of that sentence.

[mnglkhn2]

Is there something in our societies that is not a social construct?!

Everything is a social construct if we live in a society. The alternative would be to leave in an animalic state.

These arguments that "such-and-such is a social construct" are akin to "water is wet." Just a statement of fact with no obvious implications.

[ashark]

It's not very useful to stress that they're "artificial" unless you're trying to introduce the term for rhetorical effect, say, edging it into the discussion on narrow or technical but not especially useful or broad applicability, relying on implications of the word or other, far less relevant meanings or shades of meaning to have an effect on listeners/readers. This happens a lot, especially in political discussion. It's sloppy as hell and should put you on high alert if you catch someone doing it, especially if they should know better.

[carry_bit]

Nations are the extended family writ large. They are no more social constructs than the family is a social construct.

You might be confusing 'nation' with 'nation-state'; not all states are nation-states.

[infinite8s]

There is a major difference - you likely don't share blood relations with every member of a nation. So they aren't quite like a giant extended family.

[NPV_Computers]

Yes, the problem is with the "artificial" part. Lots of things are social constructs but that does not that mean that you can dismiss them as automatically illegitimate.

[chowchowchow]

Who said illegitimate? I take artificial in this context to mean not inherent, so like if you ran history over again the nations people have organized into over the centuries would be different.

[sbmassey]

The second part of the statement was "and as such all immigration policies of any sort are illegitimate and harmful.", which seems to be being ignored by those who want to claim that the fellow was unreasonably complaining about nations being considered as social constructs.

[ZoeZoeBee]

Tribalism is a lot more inherent than many people on this site give credence to

[the-dude]

It is not so much interesting in what nations actually 'are'.

What would the alternative be?

[jrjririr828283]

That’s a lot of description about campuses in general based upon one anecdote

As a counter anecdote, a small campus I worked at in rural Pacific Northwest, a liberal bastion right?

This campus was swarming with traditional values students who want to strike down gay marriage and cut all taxes

And I found them much less open to being reasoned with than extreme liberals who think nation states are social constructs (since they don’t exist in physics, they kind of are human social constructs? Not judging them, just pointing out a potential point of reference for viewing them that seems valid)

[SamReidHughes]

If something's morally wrong, you can't "reason" for or against it.

Like, God says so, end of discussion. The only way to attack that stance is to break their faith.

[dsfyu404ed]

>France was brought up as a particular example. Also, this view point was not up for classroom debate -- you would get a bad grade if you deviated from this in homework essays.

Where I went to school there were classes that counted for a good number of gen-eds but didn't have onerous pre-reqs. They were all terrible classes were like this. It was like they were daring all the engineering students to take a class on extremist feminism and not argue.

[pavlov]

At least in the case of France, the point seems valid, and it's perhaps opposite of what you're assuming.

The modern French nation is actually a left-wing construct -- an intentional product of the French Revolution. The Kingdom of France was not really a unified nation-state as we understand them today. There were multiple languages and a rich spectrum of local identities. French subjects were not necessarily French-speaking: their native tongue could just as well be Provençal, Italian or something else, and the King didn't really care.

The Revolution triggered local counter-revolutions of people who didn't necessarily think themselves as French in the sense that the new government in Paris wanted them to. (The War in the Vendée was a particularly bloody local war even by Revolution standards: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_the_Vendée)

To counter the insurgencies and establish their new order, the Revolutionary authorities set about to explicitly design what a French citizen should be. The predominance of the French language was one element of this.

[aaron-lebo]

Napoleon (whose political views were across the board, but fairly right-wing) had more say about establishing the French state than any of the revolutionaries that had power before him. The Code Napoleon, for example.

[seanmcdirmid]

Nations are artificial constructs, I’m not sure how anyone could argue against that. Immigration controls are part of a “got mine, screw you” tribalism mentality that, in contrast, is quite natural. Even chimps in the wild have been observed to take anti immigration stances.

[matthewowen]

Liberal != left. The hard left (for want of a better term) don't describe themselves as liberals and are generally critical of liberalism. Liberal is largely a term of the soft left / centrists.

[jeffrom]

Perhaps a more reasonable explanation is that the student signed up for a class which covered political theories including a critique of national borders, and the student dismissed it, and therefore got a bad grade.

Anecdotally, I was a political science major and there are always a few loud people who came to argue and not learn.

[AndrewDucker]

What else could nations be other than an artificial construct.

I'm baffled as to what else they could be.