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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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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.

STEM is still in the entryist phase. The current academics are being constantly bombarded from the rest of the school, particularly the DIE deans. Some major STEM journols are at least partially captured at this point. See, for example, Science: https://www.science.org/content/article/how-astrophysics-helped-me-embrace-my-nonbinary-gender-identity-in-all-its-complexity

Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01522-z

If you know any STEM professors they will tell you how much this is being foisted upon their departments from inside and outside the university. They don't particularly like it, they want to do their physics. But they are being made to care.

The first article is about a person who connected to the idea of "we don't know everything" in physics because it was relatable in some way to their gender. It's hardly a sign of ideological capture, unless you would also agree that if someone were to post an article about how they found more meaning in their faith by the revelations of physics to be a sign of religious capture?

The second is still not the same as what the OP is getting at. It's not enough to show that a field is progressive, you have to show that the actual consensus on the subject matter is progressive-aligned and wrong. That was the OP's claim, that people were doing academia without being truth-seekers.

It should not concern you that physicists are overwhelmingly progressive unless their political ideology is suspected in changing what they say. But as far as I can tell, we're not close to, for example, ditching the Standard Model or anything.

That's not to say we don't have any reason to be concerned, I'm very worried about the peddling of superstitious nonsense sourced from indigenous mythology as equal to science in any way. But until it happens, you shouldn't say it is happening, only that it is a risk to be concerned about.

I think that attitude is how we got Sociology and Psychology in the position we are in right now. The ideal time to have armed engineering an physics departments with powerful tools to fire any DEI entrist (even not in there departments) meddling with their work was 10 years ago. Maybe 15. The next best time is now. If there isn't strong action now, in 10 years Science and Nature will look like today's Scientific American.

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