One morning in late October of 2018, professor Samuel Abrams arrived to his office to find that pictures of his family, which he normally kept on his office door, had been torn down. In their place were dozens of notes stuck to the door and lying on the floor.
QUIT
QUIT QUIQUIT QUIT QUITITQUITQUIT
QUQUIT QUITTIT QUIT
QUIT
A few of the notes offered more detail:
“Our right to exist is not ‘idealogical,’ asshole”
“QUIT go teach somewhere else you racist asshat (maybe Charlottesville?)”
A few days earlier, Abrams had published an editorial in the New York Times, titled “Think Professors Are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” The editorial reported the results of his own research.
Among first-year college students, Abrams said, there was a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives. Among university professors, that ratio jumped to six-to-one. But all of that was dwarfed by the ratio of liberals to conservatives among university administration: 12-to-one.
This was incendiary enough to prompt an emergency student senate meeting at Abrams’s university. Abrams said the result of this meeting a declaration calling for him to be stripped of tenure and dismissed from the college.
I got on the spoor of this through an article in the Economist, which looked at the spread of wokeness from universities to the mainstream.
The Economist claimed it took a few key ingredients. The one that caught my sparrow eye was the role of university of administrators.
It turns university bureaucrats have been mushrooming in recent decades, outpacing both student and professor growth. For example, administrator numbers at the University of California, where I went to college, doubled since 2000.
Yesterday, I promised to tell you how to get other people to fight for you. One way of course is to have money and to use that to buy yourself an army. That’s what I talked about yesterday.
But if you don’t have money or power, well, you can still have an army. Or, rather, a cavalry.
Ideal recruits are to be found among newly arrived, low-grade influencers. People who have some power at the moment, but who are very insecure about their position and their future. Like university administrators.
If you can offer these people a new way to shore up and legitimize their position by championing you or your product or idea… well, they will do it, even if you don’t pay them.
“Uhhh… I really don’t get what the hell you’re talking about,” you say. “How exactly would I use this to get other people to promote me or to make money?”
Ok, let me give you a sketch that might help. It’s based on my vague memories of a story told to me by a friend who is active in the crypto space.
My friend was telling me there is some fraction of the crypto world, filled with new businesses and investors. Let’s call it Segment X. People in Segment X are invested in some new crypto approach, and they are flush with cash.
But they also have a ton of anxiety about where their sliver of the crypto market is going, and if any of them will be around in a year.
My friend had started a podcast around crypto. At the start, it didn’t have too much reach or audience.
But he occasionally turned the focus of his podcast to Segment X.
And as a result, all those people, and all their resources, latched onto his podcast and helped push it and promote it.
That’s basically what I’m telling you with all that wokeness stuff above. Find yourself a stable of nervy and twitching parvenus. And then get your saddle ready. Because, in the words of Al Ries and Jack Trout:
“The truth is the road to fame and fortune is rarely found within yourself. The only sure way to success is to find yourself a horse to ride. It may be difficult for the ego to accept, but success in life is based more on what others can do for you than on what you can do for yourself.”
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