The trillion dollar 'underdogs'

Today’s ‘Canceling’ excerpt in The Free Press

Today, The Free Press featured an excerpt from my new book, “The Canceling of the American Mind.” It covers a lot of ground, including the origins of the First Amendment and how, contrary to misrepresentation, it protects minority points of view; the legacy of Herbert Marcuse; and the weird freakout that happened when The New York Times argued that Cancel Culture is, of course, real.

Rikki and I also discuss the sheer size of the higher education industry to make the point that one of the reasons it’s become popular to claim that “free speech is the tool of the powerful” is because higher ed institutions don’t like to admit that they possess unparalleled wealth and influence. Simply, higher ed would much rather think of itself as “speaking truth to power” than “rationalizing its influence from a position of power.”

Just for some perspective, the market size of the U.S. higher education industry is just over $1 trillion. That’s more than three times larger than the U.S. food and beverage industry and over two times the size of the U.S. electricity industry. For more context, Canada’s GDP in 2021 was $1.9 trillion, Mexico’s $1.3 trillion, and the global pharmaceuticals industry rang in around $1.4 trillion in that same year.

Meanwhile, the collective endowment of U.S. public and private nonprofit universities—which represents just one element of their total assets—sits at $932 billion, according to their 2021 reports. That’s nearly as much as all of Apple’s, Microsoft’s, and Amazon’s total assets. (Plus, you can add in higher education’s $711 billion in tangible assets.)

Read the entire piece.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

Today marks three weeks since the release of “The Canceling of the American Mind,” and we’ve received a lot of great coverage — from The Wall Street Journal to The New York Times to the “Lex Fridman Podcast” — but we could really use your help spreading the word about the book. So please consider telling your friends about the book, purchasing a copy for yourself (or for a friend), and please consider giving us a good review on Amazon or Goodreads.