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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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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.

  1. List the fields you include in academia.

  2. 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).

  3. 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.

  4. Demonstrate on a per-field basis that the narrative is wrong (This is an implication from the OP).

  5. 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

I'm not totally sold on that, in particular because I know of fields dominated by progressives where studies are frequently put out that don't support the progressive line. I would agree on Crit studies, sociology, education, and journalism, but not necessarily the others. My intuition is weakly in your favor though on those others.

Regardless, notice what you didn't include - STEM, which makes up a big part of academia. Economics as well. This fits my point fairly well, that it's too strong a claim that all of academia is tainted.

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