Patrick J Michaels, via Judith Curry,
In the academy the free interchange of competing ideas creates knowledge through cooperation, disagreement, debate, and dissent. Kaufmann’s landmark study proves that the last three in that list are severely suppressed and punished. The pervasiveness of such repression may be a death sentence for science, free inquiry, and the advancement of knowledge in our universities.
I am led to that dire conclusion because the universities appear to have no way to prevent this fate. No solution can arise from within the academy because it selects its own lifetime faculty, which is largely left wing—increasingly so—and makes the promotion of dissenters highly unlikely. Kaufmann demonstrates profoundly systemic discrimination by leftist faculty against colleagues they find disagreeable. […]
Kaufmann’s study is shocking in its depth, even to academics (like me) who experienced for decades what he describes. He documents all aspects of an academic career, from advanced graduate study to landing a faculty position, research funding, publication, and promotion. That normal career progression is all but derailed if a person expresses a scintilla of non-left views in casual conversations, faculty meetings, public discourse, teaching, grant applications, submitted publications, or the promotion process.
Academic Freedom in Crisis: Punishment, Political Discrimination, and Self-Censorship
So shorter article: socialism is a suicide pact.
Author Alan Bloom sounded the alarm in 1987 with his book The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students
He noted the embrace of relativism and nihilism by academia and a very discernible aversion to freedom of thought among other things, like how rock music hasn’t exactly been a positive force for young minds.
Anyways, after reading Kaufman’s data you can’t help but conclude we’re most certainly in the punishment or purge phase now.
The “political correctness” bar chart was particularly depressing.
Burton,
I read Bloom’s book when it came out in the late 1980s.
He sure was right.
Bloom was a “Great Books” proponent. I wonder how many of the great books are still promoted in the humanities these days?
Camille Paglia called Bloom’s book “the first shot in the culture wars.” Not surprisingly, Noam Chomsky thought the book was stupid. (I looked up those quotes. My memory isn’t what it used to be).
Ok, back to a great book that I am reading by Graham Greene.
Stevie: Thumbs up.
“Liberty is not for these slaves; I do not advocate inflicting it against their conscience. On the contrary, I am strongly in favor of letting them crawl and grovel all they please before whatever fraud or combination of frauds they choose to venerate…. Our whole practical government is grounded in mob psychology and the Boobus Americanus will follow any command that promises to make him safer.”—H.L. Mencken
It’s easy to do this because of those who get a PhD only 0.2% ever land a professor type position. 0.2%! That means a lot of competition for very few places and it is ridiculously easy to fall off the ladder.
Yup. Many with doctorates find themselves in the hell of being a research assistant (“So near and yet so far.”) or adjunct faculty. The result is no job security, long hours, and lousy pay.
Then there are people like me who went out on our own and broke free of that circus.
One of my early grad school buddies got his master’s degree and did some engineering-related work for a few years. The last I heard, he’s now an investment advisor in the Los Angeles area. I sometimes think he was the smart one for doing just that.
“I am led to that dire conclusion because the universities appear to have no way to prevent this fate.”
There are institutions and there are customers. I am a customer. I look at the 3500 US colleges and universities and see that 50 to 100 of them still allow for academic debate and freedom. I won’t list them. This group of readers know these schools. I will make a a wager. Those 50 to 100 schools will gain students and the Gleichschaltung fascist/communist schools will lose students.
I watched how the quality of the education offered by my former employer, Armpit College, went down while I was there. Once it instituted the “student as customer” approach, there was no turning back. The slope had been well-greased and the administration gave it a good push by adopting that idiotic ideology.
Customers have to look out for themselves. That is a simple fact. With every purchase and choice you make, you can push for more quality, more durability, longer warranty, more fuel efficiency, … , or something else.
If all the hammers you buy always break after 30 nails, but you just keep buying the same hammer; whose fault is that.
“The result is a systematic poisoning of the peer-reviewed literature, which society accepts as its canon of knowledge.”
That was yesterday…
Given the government – academic symbiosis which exists, the problem is one of academic fascism in similar structure to economic fascism. The academic institutions have been leftist breeding grounds for at least a century. The concept of tenure and academic self-governance is essentially echo chamber mob rule. Such institutions are irreformable and should rather be demolished. All research, education, and accreditation should be privatized. Teachers unions and tenured leftists control the existing declining educational morass and deserve unemployment or re-employment as employees under private management. Most of what passes for schooling could be accomplished online and at a fraction of today’s cost. The rest can be accomplished with private competing unregulated educational ventures.
The rest can be accomplished with private competing unregulated educational ventures.
I know that dentistry students, once they have their clinics, are often supervised by experienced practitioners and, I assume, the same happens in medicine.
Many years ago, engineering courses were also taught by practicing engineers, but, with the academic bloat of recent decades, that’s largely come to an end. I heard that in the department where I did my Ph. D., the head dictated that only those with doctorates are allowed to teach there. That meant that a lot of good industry-based talent that used to run courses for the students were given the heave-ho. Along with that, the practical knowledge that those engineers could have passed on to those same students was taken away.
Like my father used to say in his German-accented English, “Ja, real schmart, huh?”
I believe that everything is cyclical and we are currently on a downward spiral that will end in a reset that most will not want to see happen. That includes all socialist/communists, all green freaks, all whu who flu worshippers, all those who wish to control their fellow man will be at the very bottom of the coming reset, they cannot survive their level of evil.
I see three things at play here:
1. The lefting of institutes of higher learning – turning them into propoganda machines. Their goal is to create clones of themselves from the young. The result is that they are turning uneducated, unprepared, self-important snowflakes out into an increasingly complex jobs market.
2. The stratospheric rises in tuition for ‘Students’. This has become ridiculous.
:
“BALANCE SHEET
Investments and Endowment
In fscal year 2020, the return on the endowment was
7.3% and its value (after the net impact of distributions
from the endowment for operations, and the addition
of new gifts to the endowment during the year)
increased from $40.9 billion at the end of fscal year
2019 to $41.9 billion at the end of fscal year 2020. ”
Source: https://finance.harvard.edu/files/fad/files/fy20_harvard_financial_report.pdf
3. As a result of the poor quality of university graduates many business leaders like Elon Musk do not choose to hire them.
I believe this will lead young people away from institutes of ‘Higher Learning’. Patrick Michaels and others are seeing just this. The tenured professors are largely sixties radicals which means they are past retirement age. The schhols endowment funds should be able to cover their pensions nicely.