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There's a strong anti-academia sentiment even among highly educated tech professionals. We have youtube to serve the needs of undergraduate education. And as for research, they assume that 99% of it is bullshit, and the 1% of it that isn't bullshit can be carried out under the auspices of private corporations.
I've always been a staunch defender of academia, so I'm sympathetic to your position. But after enduring decades of the total ideological capture of the academy by the left, I can't say that I'm disappointed or surprised that the right is pushing back and taking action.
Tangential: the 'total ideological capture of the academy' by the left is in significant part a product of right-wing anti-intellectualism. If you're going to adopt the position that anything but business, finance, and engineering are parasitic and quite possibly degenerate, it will not be surprising that a) existing academics shift away from you b) smart conservatives avoid academia* in favor of business, finance, and engineering and new academics overwhelmingly lean left c) a feedback loop emerges where conservatives and academics increasingly view each other with hostility because the former (largely correctly) believe the latter don't share their values and the latter (largely correctly) believe the former want to destroy them.
*(This is also why American conservatism is intellectually bankrupt and relies on Catholics, a small number of converts, and borrowing critiques from woke-critical centrists for basically all of their intellectual firepower)
This might be a story you could have told my grandpa or something in the 60s. The academy has been so left-captured and exclusionary of right of center thought for my entire life that being "anti-intellectual" is just not wanting to heap billions of dollars of state funding on communists, terrorists, and sympathizers thereof.
It isn't like there aren't academic fields outside of science that haven't appealed to conservatives. History is an example. But Universities have long limited history departments, and conservative takes meant you didn't get tenure or even considered for tenure track.
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The right has plenty of intellectuals; they have simply been systematically excluded from academia, so they publish their work in blogs instead of journals and get funded by subscriptions instead of taxes.
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Why would anyone think that's surprising? I suppose a few people might believe that professional ethics and impartiality beats human nature and relationships, but I can't see that being a very common view.
I think it's bad that those supposedly-neutral institutions have taken up partisanship.
You think it's thoughts that the conservatives are opposed to? What happened to "parasitic and quite possibly degenerate" from earlier in the paragraph?
Where are the bulldozers? As far as I can tell, American conservative goals stop at tightening the public purse strings. If private donors want to fund it they can go right ahead.
I agree. I think it would have been better for everyone if scientists had steeled themselves against the slings and arrows of the resentfully ignorant. Alas, the scientists are only human, and after decades of being told "you're an enemy", they took it to heart.
You know what? Yes, actually.
Again and again, the American right has proven itself to be distrustful of thoughtfulness. Many are quite proud of not being effete intellectuals who think too much. The business gentry that comprises a large share of the conservative elite resent academics and think education is solely for training new workers, nationalists can't stand critical examination of cherished patriotic myths, and religious conservatives have concluded that science is an existential threat. A large part of why they're liable to view academia as parasitic is that it doesn't sit well with their cult of action.
(This is also why they've largely been reduced to begging liberals to make conservative art for them - it's not some fundamental inability of the conservative mind to produce art, but that modern American conservatism holds artists in contempt).
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This would be a lot more credible if it weren't for feminist vulcanology.
That is to say, there is very good evidence that quite a few fields are in fact entirely fraudulent. Nothing about right-wing anti-intellectualism created or could create or sustain these fields. This makes it far more likely that the right wing is merely correct about the total ideological capture of the academy, than for the capture to have been caused by the withdrawal of the right wing.
Unsurprisingly, when you completely abdicate a domain to your ideological opponents, it becomes dominated by your ideological opponents. Things like "Feminist vulcanology" exists because American conservatives decided the only way they were interested in engaging with intellectualism was by standing outside and throwing rocks.
No, feminist vulcanology exists either because those with leftist ideology in science put their ideology over their scientific integrity, or because those without integrity were more powerful within science than those with it. It should not require right-wing intellectuals to keep ideology out of science; if the left-wing intellectuals have integrity, they would do it.
I decided to google feminist vulcanology, and tbh everything I see looks like incredibly pedestrian efforts to encourage women to study vulcanology. This may be triggering to misogynists, but this does not look like some anthropologist rambling about other ways of knowing. If this is what's corrupting science, then I withdraw my previous statement and chalk this up as another instance of American right-wingers demanding slavish submission to their beliefs. Acquiescing to that would be pretty much the opposite of integrity.
If conservatives want to contest ideas, they should throw their hat into the ring, not demand liberals think conservative thoughts on their behalf.
The specific issue was actually feminist glaciology, but you are being deliberately obtuse by pretending to not know what he means.
"I cannot fail by now to recognize the tactic of wholly emptying out one's head when put on the defensive" really stuck with me because of how often you see it.
"I don't remember, I've never seen that, I don't know what you could possibly be talking about, why do you keep causing Culture War by bringing up examples?"
I in fact did not know that, because I don't keep a comprehensive list of petty far-right bugbears in my head.
Whenever I see people going off about ridiculousness in academia, I am unavoidably reminded of Twitter Smell Lady, who was held up as an example of silly research only to be repeatedly vindicated. The core problem here is that most of the would-be critics of academia are fundamentally incurious, which is why about half the time their cherry-picked examples turn out to be totally reasonable and only sound "dumb" either because the reader lacks the education to understand what they're talking about or has an ideological blindspot.
Quite.
Was she? How?
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And yet who exactly laughed at Alex Jones for saying chemicals in the water turned the frogs gay?
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I've been saying it since we were on reddit - the left's primary argument tactic is pretending to be retarded.
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It probably was glaciology I was thinking of, but similar volcano-related things are around too, e.g.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/earth-science/articles/10.3389/feart.2023.1172867/full
...this paper seems entirely unobjectionable. I'm genuinely baffled as to what the problem is here.
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I am one of those people against the treatment Matt Taylor was given in 2014, and even so, I don't think "reduce obnoxious wokeishness in science" is worth a lazily-indiscriminate defunding campaign.
You're buying into it being lazily-indiscriminate, but the case in the OP was literally about "we will use this federal money to exclude white boys from internships for the crime of other white men being a lot of scientists."
That's not indiscriminate, that's a precision guided bomb lobbed through a window at the enemy general smoking a cigar.
All they have to do to stop it is stop trying to kick white boys out of the science career pipeline, but they won't ever stop because for some reason it's the most important thing in the world.
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