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My inclination is to be someone who respects science and experts, but I find this difficult to adhere to when it comes to academia. Academics have historically occupied a very important place in society as those who have devoted their lives to understanding the world around us and, as a result, were key in forming how people actually understand the world around us. They are supposed to be the trusted and truth-oriented intellectuals, but I just don’t think that is the case and I have grown increasingly skeptical of academia.
I simply don’t think it has a descriptive orientation anymore, nor do think it is any longer the realm of truth-seeking. It seems to have either a normative orientation or a quais-descriptive orientation in which the endeavor is regarded as truth-seeking and it actually does have some descriptive value, but it’s done by people who a. Got into academia because they were passionate about one side of an issue b. Have a similar set of values and thus perspective c. Ask a question from a common and loaded perspective d. Focus on questions that are important to the structural integrity of a specific line of reasoning
Probably intertwined with 1, academia appears to be pretty ideologically homogenous, and that homogeneity exists reasonably far to the left. Even if they are trying to be unbiased, it’s exceptionally difficult to recognize ones own bias as bias; it’s just regarded as normal. And I think a unique element of progressivism is, I’m not sure whether it’s dogmatism but I think there is a relatively unique tendency to not distinguish between values/opinions and fact. i just don’t find progressives often framing their convictions as opinions. So if someone like that is conducting academic research, if they do not regard their opinions as opinions, they do not regard their bias as bias, and thus they do not perceive themselves as having a bias to control for. As a result academic research which is normative in nature is being presented and absorbed as if it is descriptive in nature. I think an example of this relates to the DEI space, in which I think most people would agree that that issue does not appear to allow much room for disagreement, despite the fact that it is exceptionally complex, deals with ambiguous and nebulous structures (not saying they don’t exist, but they aren’t exactly things you can reach out and touch and describe in unambiguous terms)
As drmanhattan16 below notes, academia is broad and should not be lumped in all together. In the hard sciences ,particularly math and physics, academia can be taken seriously, because it's generally agreed upon what is right or wrong based on unfailing axions of the physical or mathematical world, although still it's not prefect (like, is string theory even wrong?). For other subjects, who knows. The replication crisis exists for this reason.
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I keep thinking about the rot, and I keep coming back to the idea that the reason that academies were so good at descriptive inquiry is simply that up until academia was ideologically captured in the 1960s and 1970s the idea of being an activist while being an academic was frowned upon. In essence, you have to choose between having academies full of academics who live as cloistered communities with less interaction with the political class and activism, or activist academies full of ideologically motivated people using their skills to justify the agendas they want.
If you want my two cents about a fix, just make political activism forbidden by the institution. You protest, you teach kids an ideology and tell them to protest? You’re out.
Forbidden eh? Who will enforce it? Quid custodied ipsos custodes?
That horse has left the barn anyways, now that we have entire disciplines that are premised on teaching ideology. No such change is possible without a coup.
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I can't imagine this criticism applies meaningfully to the hard sciences. Have all the physicists abandoned truth seeking in favour of identity politics?
The soft sciences hide behind the hard sciences. The hard sciences let them. That makes the hard sciences part of the problem too. This problem is having increasingly serious effects over time, as more and more serious violations are conducted under the aegis of "Science". Scientists as a class don't seem capable of policing this problem, so it's going to have to be handled by outsiders.
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It seems there is a loud minority of people familiar with professional physicists that believe this to be the case. They make a compelling argument from what I’ve seen. That Sabine woman from Germany is a good example. I think there are others
You can make the case that string theorists ahve abandoned truth seeking (though they would certainly disagree), but this is completely unrelated to wokeness. And there are plenty of other branches of physics, chemistry and biology which are very practical (like condensed matter physics), who are pretty much untouched.
I was doing my PhD back when the "Science Wars" (i.e. the application to the sciences of the 1990's era PC which had completely taken over most non-econ social sciences and a substantial minority of the humanities) were living memory. The pushback from professional physicists was organised, effective, and in the case of the Sokal hoax, hilarious. The biological establishment ended up getting involved in a classic Illuminati megaturn, where Big Pharma used the Orbital Mind Control Lasers to turn the Revolutionary Communist Party into a Libertarian-aligned card, giving them a +4 bonus to take control over it. They then used the Revolutionary Communist Party to take control of the Science Communicators.
I am out of academia now, but my impression is that this time round:
The attack is less dangerous - the 1990's science warriors wanted to demolish physics' claim to intellectual authority whereas the 2010's wokists just want us to take on a few token diversity hires. And this is something physics is very used to dealing with - the rows between physicists and women-in-STEM advocates over the number of women in physics are an ongoing nuisance that never went away even during the 2000's lull in the culture war.
The pushback, to the extent there is one, is much quieter. I can't tell whether or not this is because the threat is perceived as less dangerous, or because in today's campus climate it is not possible to organise against PC crap.
The response of working physicists to this sort of thing is basically "Bend over here it comes again" - it is annoying, but it doesn't stop you doing science the way having your lab burned down by anti-GMO protesters did.
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“Why would you say something so controversial, yet so brave?”
The bulk of your criticisms are generic. Are plumbers ideologically homogeneous? Are social workers? Such groups are not assumed to be “trusted and truth-oriented,” to which I reply: neither are academics.
Skepticism of philosophers and political theorists is not new. Just ask Trotsky.
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You should be careful to not talk broadly about academia unless you actually mean it in its entirety. If you have a problem with specific fields, then you should say that instead. To tar all of academia would require a great deal of evidence, of which you haven't posted any.
I think it would be easier to list the places where it isn't a problem than list the bad eggs.
That might be your null hypothesis, it isn't mine. I want to see evidence of the problem permeating all of academia if that's the claim the OP wants to make.
Sure. State the way I would demonstrate the evidence.
List the fields you include in academia.
Demonstrate on the per-field basis that the field is mostly ideologically homogenous in favor of the left (I would tentatively accept the conflation of liberals and progressives in this context, but not liberalism and progressivism).
Demonstrate on a per-field basis that the field's mainstream or dominant narrative/consensus about it's own subject is progressive-coded or aligned.
Demonstrate on a per-field basis that the narrative is wrong (This is an implication from the OP).
Demonstrate on a per-field basis that a person is subject to more than just scholarly ostracism for questioning the mainstream narrative.
That is an extreme amount of work and it is stacked against the person making the very non-extraordinary claim. Particularly part 4 is, because if the hypothesis is correct, publishing counter narratives will be difficult/impossible.
More importantly, shouldn't academic fields have to continually prove that they are credible? It seems silly to assume credibility, otherwise I can start a pet psychiatry field, and under your system, this is a credible academic field until someone does lots of work to prove 2-5 on your list.
The claim is that all of academia is tainted by progressives. I warned the OP against claiming such a thing and made it clear they would have to provide a great deal of evidence to demonstrate it. This is why I suggested sticking to specific fields to make that complaint about, because the work is already done in many cases. If they had talked about it, I would agree with the OP that a field like CRT (or would it be Critical Race Studies?) is hopelessly captured by social progressives. But just because I agree in this case doesn't mean I'll let a bad argument slide.
Critical studies. Education. Sociology. Psychology. Journalism/Communication. Business. Law. Those are pretty much the large departments (for most universities) where publishing something related to race/sex would be relevant. You'd be hard pressed to get a paper published in any of the major journals in those fields if your conclusion was "race discrimination against URMs (or whatever the popular phrase is now) is an illusion." If your career was largely oriented to publishing such papers, I don't think you'd get a tenure track position at a place equaling the quality and relevancy of your publication. See, for example, https://twitter.com/ProfDBernstein/status/1642600739489849344
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I think you really need to back this up in some way, if you're going to claim that progressives are unique (or uniquely bad) at this. I'm sure most people would make this claim about those they disagree with.
No doubt progressives and reactionaries both have significant biases. The danger would stem from important institutions being controlled by one faction or the other and then using their control to filter new members. I think modern academia passes this test.
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