Adam Chapnik

I’m excited to announce I'll be joining the @Yale Political Science dept as a PhD student this fall! I plan to focus on American politics: local accountability, the pol econ of campaigns and party orgs, and housing politics.

@PhilWMagness Right, but even though that controls for some unobserved change in the meanings of the terms, it doesn't help anyone to say anything about what self-ID'd Marxists meant by that or how it varied cross-sectionally

The surveys only cover 2 dates: 2006 and 2022. There's not much room to use-change in that period, nor is there much of a compelling theory to believe that academics in 2006 were thinking of a vastly different application of Marxism than in 2022. There are other distinct historical phases in the term's meaning, to be sure: - Bolshevik phase from 1917-WW2 - McCarthy era/Red Scare phase of the early 50s - New Left/Crit Theory phase of the mid-60s-70s

I think if Magness were really such the empirical researcher he claims to be, he would settle this by doing some NLP to categorize references to Marx in actual published work. But in reality he's just addicted to Twitter.

@BTRBT_ @PhilWMagness "NLP to *categorize references* to Marx in actual published work" is not met by doing an ngram but it is met by "do analysis of sentences and paragraphs, PCA and the like"

@alsosortofadam @PhilWMagness I'm not even heavily invested in the subject matter, personally—I'm just kind of a lurking observer in the Marxism in academia discussion—and I can see that "do some NLP" very rapidly shifted into to "do analysis of sentences and paragraphs, PCA and the like" once it was met.

@Pan_Dread (please excuse my typo if that's the source of your confusion, but it's still unreasonable to expect someone to defend a random person they never engaged with)

@Pan_Dread "this conversation" means *this* conversation i'm having with magness. you're doing the pancakes vs waffles meme

@Pan_Dread No one in the coversation is talking about "secret Marxists"

@alsosortofadam I posit academics aligned to ideologies relevant to their professional work where they prefer to keep that alignment hidden is categorically bad. Therefore you chiding Phil's techniques to uncover them as not Scooby-Doo enough is missing the target.

@PhilWMagness Like, yes, you're right that some will say "that's not Marxism" about Marxism, but that's not a useful nor relevant test. You should just accept there is no single umbrella category, you will only be able to partially ID the effect anyone is interested in.

@PhilWMagness Almost reasonable except that your first paragraph is making two contradictory claims. Maybe got lost in the thread but my contention is that surveys don't give a measure that addresses the actual question: How has the *use* Marxist theory changed? x.com/alsosortofadam…

@Pan_Dread I'm not sure if you're asking a sincere q, but I think it's based on a misunderstanding of what I'm saying

@alsosortofadam Why do you think Marxists aren't proudly volunteering that they are Marxists? Why do you think non-Marxists (not sure if anyone in this sclerotic credentialist cesspool falls in this category) are not volunteering the same?

@PhilWMagness Regardless, it would be great if you took on the broader project, beyond your ngram analysis, because I don't think anyone else is going to do it and it would actually be a contribution. The ngram stuff just feels like a footnote.

@alsosortofadam 1. Your points are noted. They're simply suited to more ideal measures than we currently have. 2. Creating better measures is time-intensive. 3. I didn't start this particular argument.

@PhilWMagness I think analysis of texts would be plenty sufficient. That said, the observation of a general leftward shift is reasonable, but the heterogeneity here is extremely important and the fact that you are ignoring that, even in this reply, explains most of the pushback you're getting.

One of the main issues in this debate is the need for more (and more detailed) surveying of faculty. It's improving, but slowly. That said, the evidence we have right now strongly points to a sharp leftward ideological shift among faculty over the past 20 years. Combined with a few specific datapoints on Marxist self-identification, a resurgence of Marxism (along with other adjacent leftwing positions) since the 1990s emerges as the most plausible explanation for what's happening in academia. By contrast, the claim that Marxism peaked in the 1950s and then dwindled away to almost nothing - as Burns contends - has practically no evidence to support it whatsoever.

@PhilWMagness I mean you have the resources and time to make the better measures yourself before starting arguments online. But it's not clear to me you understand the point that the social connotations of language are not constant nor exogenous (see my other replies)

@alsosortofadam Sometimes you have to work with the measures that exist - not the measures you wish you had. But there's something even more fundamental here in that the other side (a) has no measures at all and (b) just gratuitously dismisses any measure that chafes with its a priori beliefs.

@PhilWMagness parallel research on "conservative" self-ID (academic.oup.com/poq/article-ab…) — there's a lot of heterogeneity! You get this even with racial ID. Which is to say you'd be hard pressed to get any definitive definition: ultimately, you need to work with soft "categories of Marxisms."

@PhilWMagness The reason I suggest PCA is because (1) the hard question is about the use of the theory and (2) the definition of Marxist theory are dynamic and constantly contested by "Marxists", requiring analysis very similar to how you'd track a word's meaning over time. Consider for e.g...

To be clear, Marxism is a type of social theorizing AND a label with cultural connotations. Distinguishing the use of the two comes up with trying to measure e.g. the proportion of "conservatives" and "liberals." Measuring each answers different questions. x.com/PhilWMagness/s…

("obviously" as in it's selecting on the DV — it's up for debate whether someone is a Marxist because they say they are or because of the content of their work, but most would lean towards the latter determination)

@PhilWMagness Goalpost shifting is how Twitter debate works, but it's unrelated to whether you are asking and answering the questions that actually get to the heart of your main assertions. Most of us disagreeing would prefer to wait for some strong evidence that isn't driven by scoring points

@PhilWMagness I think if you're being honest your evidence so far is mostly only sufficient for getting a lot of attention. It's a reasonably hard question and the amount of existing scholarly debate on the topic is no accident. Not to say you can't settle the question

@PhilWMagness Disagree about your evidence but glad to see you're doing the work behind the scenes

@alsosortofadam The debate with Burns concerns his specific claims about the decline of Marxists among college faculty. I've provided ample evidence that he's completely misdiagnosed that situation.

@PhilWMagness Good, I'd be interested to see you go deeper. I would actually like to see you do something like PCA on uses of Marxisms and then track those categories over time and the career trajectories of the various authors

@alsosortofadam The chart is just a quick representation of raw data that I'm still scraping. It isn't meant to make any "case" in this format.