Very nice graphs, but here are some additional points to consider:
- Is there going to be "Freedom of Inquiry" under the new external regime? It doesn't seem like that's the case. If honest "truth-seeking" leads someone to, say, do research that goes against a Trump admin policy, is that going to bring potential sanctions or punishments?
- Would things have been worse but for HxA? I agree that HxA has been mostly ineffective at reversing radical DEI, but it might have helped slow or stop some of these changes at some schools.
- It seems like the new right's approach to oversight is to require schools to add/boost Title IV offices and staff...which doesn't seem to really solve the over-bureaucratization issue and might actually make it worse.
In short, I agree with much of the critique. I'm not sure that this new approach is going to solve many of those issues and has plenty of new ones of its own, especially additional overreach.
Honestly this is one of the most important articles I’ve read in a long time. The influence of academia over virtually every corner of life is staggering, so the extreme bias described should sound warning sirens for an F5 tornado. I’ve known this anecdotally, but this is a brilliant consolidation of supporting data that everyone should read. The only people who wouldn’t be alarmed by this are the very progressives who count on these totalitarian tendencies to advance their societal goals. They have no incentive to reform and every incentive to discredit articles like this. Thank you for this outstanding and important piece.
From personal experience I wouldn't underestimate the belief that the telos of academia has emerged via a process of intellectually accessing universal moral truths. This is the root of the claim that students are taught how to, rather than what to, think.
What honest impartial observer would possibly believe American academia has the courage to commit to any type of "internal reform"? What action taken by any university (not in Fla) in the past decade would lead anyone to believe that academia has any ability or desire to reform itself?
The reason we're here in the first place, watching the MAGA axe carve up sacred cows, is simple and clear (at least to those of us outside the ivy walls): America's liberal class (more or less the profs, scholars, curators, writers etc who are lauded and well-compensated for maintaining and transmitting our cultural, political and religious patrimony) have completely abdicated all responsibility, become conscious Leftist political actors, taken the knee to any and every social movement (regardless of how spurious) as long as it was aligned with the Crit Theory victim cult and refused to protect basic civil and human rights (free speech, thought and expression), if not explicitly revoking them from anyone not on Team Social Justice. You can either support DEI loyalty oaths and litmus tests, speech codes and bias-response teams, stand with the mob and denounce your university, specialty, predecessors and the entire country as the moral equivalent of a slave ship OR you can be a scholar with integrity and wisdom. But you can't be both!
This empirical approach is exactly correct. The measured change of characteristics over time offers a view of reality, devoid of opinion and emotion. The data reveal trends and hint at causal consequences. Another example is the policy of "helping" Blacks as victims of societal oppression since the early 1970's. After 6 decades, with more racial anger and disparities, we should be assessing the usefulness of that "helpful" policy.
Here's another way of thinking about the ideological tilt of academia: it's not unique. Over the past 40 years, all of the professions have become more left-leaning:
This is part and parcel with the GOP becoming a low-education party. The polarization is stronger in higher ed than in most other professions, but it's not unique.
Perhaps this is why Haque has a ludicrous view of what transpires in the social sciences at research universities (I can't speak for the humanities). We continue to do social science, not CRT or DEI or activism. He'd know this if he'd taken the time to look at the CVs of some actual social science.
I agree that the ideological homogeneity isn't good for us, but come on. This is just culture war with some graphs.
Dear Nicolas, Thank you for your reply. I agree there are some places where rigorous ideology-orthogonal social science happens (indeed, I have enjoyed and admired your writings in the Institute for Family Studies! thanks.) and sadly much that is not so rigorous, fair, unpredictable, etc. My view is that whole disciplines and departments have been captured. It isn’t pockets. Social Psychology is an example, as documented by Lee Jussim, Jon Haidt, and others (many have resigned for related reasons from the main social psychology organization). Sociology, which you would know better than us, I think has similar problems. Take as one data point the American Sociology Association's (not a fringe representation of the field by any means!) theme for its annual meeting in 2024 was “Intersectional Solidarities”, “emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles”. If this is true, it would suggest Boshko's characterization in his quote is what is actually fringe.
You point to a disjuncture in sociology that's long fascinated me. I totally agree that the national organization is, in a word, fucked--it's ideological captured, has ludicrous themes for its annual meetings, and no longer helmed by top scholars. But then you open one of the top journals, and they're filled with rigorous science. Indeed, it's getting to the point where there's very little overlap between the top elected officers of the ASA and the scholars who publish in its journals. This is a strange and lamentable state of affairs.
Thank you for the kind words about my work. But I'm hardly the only one.
And Lee, I agree that a lot of social science is bad, but a lot is bad just for non-ideological reasons. There are a lot of poorly specified and under-identified regression models out there.
Here's a thesis: American higher ed is too big. The bipartisan ideal of universal four-year college led to excessive expansion. This meant a decline in mean faculty quality.
Heh. I do think some of his sweeping dismissals of social science go too far, but I also think your dismissal of his dismissal is ... too dismissive.
Be that as it may, there is a great irony here that I think you will appreciate. He relies heavily on social science research to document his points. So while he explicitly condemns most of it as hopelessly politicized, he treats quite a lot as credible and serious. So, regardless of his explicit condemnations, implicitly but clearly, he presumes the broad swaths he reported here are credible.
Now, he might say something like, "of course there is *some* social sci that is quite good and that's what I relied on, even though a lot is nonsense."
Personally, I think the truth here is in between. I do not think most of my own stuff is nonsense. And in my own research, I routinely cite and refer to articles that I think are valuable and credible -- as if there is a good amount of valuable and credible social science out there -- which I think is true.
OTOH, the social sciences produce a lot of nonsense that is not political or politicized because of bad methods and stat practices and bad interpretations of even reasonable methods and stat practices, and also because of all sorts of bad norms around social science publishing, as I described here:
I'm not quite in tune with this response, which seems rather strange to me. I appreciate I do not have Mr Wolfinger's personal academic experience. But "this is just culture war with some graphs" is unfairly and childishly dismissive, as if nothing important or dangerous has happened in the last fifteen years, and as if no important psychological insights are in the article. "All of the professions have become more left leaning" - well, of course they have if they've come up through an intellectually corrupted (by post-modernist philosophies) educational system, still seething with Marxists and pseudo-Marxists despite the blatant historical evidence of what an economic, social, personal and political disaster Marxism has repeatedly proven itself to be. "Part and parcel with the GOP becoming a low-education party" is so blatantly anti-right wing, and an inadequate insulting generalisation, and clearly biased towards left wing thinking, it just yells its own prejudice at us, surely. The implication is that conservative thinking, rather than requiring proper examination and discussion and application where appropriate, can be dismissed as "stupid". That isn't "thinking". Everyone who doesn't Vote Democrat, or Labour in the UK where I am, isn't a survivalist in a MAGA hat. They might read Roger Scruton, Thomas Sowell and Edmund Burke. Or Nigel Biggar. Or have been another victim of cancellation.
Allow me to quote you: "... well, of course they have if they've come up through an intellectually corrupted (by post-modernist philosophies) educational system, still seething with Marxists and pseudo-Marxists"
This just isn't true, and you'd know it if you talked to some students and faculty and/or attended some classes. Why do you think it's true? Because this is how conservative media and MAGA public intellectuals depict Western education. They make their case by relying on "nut picking" the craziest faculty and students. Allow me to quote historian David Boshko:
They find something really dumb a fringe wackjob college professor said and share it all around and have a bunch of people freak out about how evil liberals are how they are about to bring in a reign of darkness upon the land and blah blah blah
But I will agree with you that Communism is a disaster.
Okay. But there is nothing "untrue" about the impact of cancel culture, or the ridiculousness of omnipresent "trigger warnings" in front of unbelievably innocent older TV programmes or films, or the real lives that have been transformed by cultural fads. And there is of course real psychology in getting kickback from anyone in any line of work - lecturers, police, politicians - who feel threatened by the concept of being policed by "outsiders", independent bodies who will not see things the same way and who will be seen as a "danger" because they will "change things" and everyone prefers to remain "in charge", even if they are themselves deluded. Read "Colonialism" - I hardly think the honesty and experience and qualifications of Nigel Biggar put him anywhere near some further dismissive comment about "fringe wackjob college professors". Look at the ridiculous unfairness resulting from widespread DEI policies, or at all the surgically and psychologically damaged children as a result of people convinced that their ideology is all about compassion rather than being a serious awful horrible series of steps towards a "reign of darkness" in absolute defiance of evolution and history and biology. Sanity is needed, not exaggrated arguments on either side.
One issue is left out here: As bad as internal reform seems to be, is external reform likely to be better. On this day, the current administration has cut funding for mRNA vaccines on purely ideological grounds. It therefore seems likely that internal reform may be the lesser of two evils.
Most European countries now employ a targeted approach, only recommending mRNA vaccines for the over 65s, the medically at risk, or in some cases only the over 80s. My point would be why spend the money on a treatment approach which is overwhelmingly likely to be of greatest benefit to the geriatric when that money should be specifically targeted to solve dozens of known low cost ways of helping children, the young and the physically fit.
Plus, there is a real debate as to whether trained immunity is superior to specific immunity from mRNA.
Finally, it's become increasingly clear that developing specific immunity approaches relies heavily upon prior research in labs doing research dangerously close to gain of function. In all probability, we've now had two major outbreaks as a result of gain of function at labs, one at Wuhan, and one at the generally far less publicised VHFC at Kenema and its likely link to the Ebola outbreak.
And yes, I know that it's generally de rigueur to frame such concerns as 'conspiracy theories', but there are many noteworthy well-educated African journalists like Chernoh Bah who put paid to the notion that these suspicions are unwarranted or purely speculative, even if their suspicions fall far short of offering definitive proof.
Here's the problem. Both the initial research proposal by EcoHealth alliance and the specific immune response designed by Pfiser and Moderna involve a modified furin cleavage site. Critics to this 'theory' argue that the research didn't go forward and that Covid occurred naturally, but the evidence now proves there is likely at least an 80% chance that is was a lab leak. In other words, regardless of the funding source, the modification of the furin cleavage site went forward at Wuhan with disastrous results, and this modification also happened to be key to the mRNA vaccine ultimately produced.
This doesn't mean that there was a conspiracy to release the virus, but it does mean that when they realised that they had created the biggest public health fuck up in human history, they probably found some seemingly innocuous way to pass the results of their lab research to the researchers at Pfizer and Moderna to speed up the development of a vaccine.
For years we thought that the risks of a rogue state developing a zoonotic virus as a bioweapon justified the smaller risk of gain of function, even if convention prevented us from openly admitting we were engaged in the venture. We've now proven that human nature and our capacity for error in biolab environments is far more dangerous than a potential rogue state.
My point would be that for mRNA to be effective as a technology, forward research of potential threats is required, and the chances of that research posing a danger is higher than the chances of a naturally occurring zoonotic species transmission.
Don't get me wrong there is one strong exception and few other plausible candidates. Small Pox. Ebola, Nipah and Marburg might fall into the same category, but not Lassa or H5N1 due to their transmissibility being manageable through shielding.
But you see my point? To make mRNA research justifiable requires forward research of potential threats, and the research entailed makes the whole thing completely unjustifiable.
You seem to be have triggered by vaccines, and you missed the main point. The current administration is not in the slightest interesting in truth-seeking. If you want another example, take the firing of a commissioner who simply reported labor statistics which did not fit the narrative. This again indicates that this administration is unfit to reform academia, much more than academia itself.
I agree with on the commissioner on labor statistics, although a more nuanced view would be that under Biden there was significant job growth in public sector employment, which is inherently inflationary and ultimately reduces prosperity. Trump is taking a hit on jobs because he’s been removing a significant amount of bureaucracy, even though most American bureaucracy is actually buried at the state and local level. As a heterodox with an anarchic streak, it’s a bit like when the Tories increased tertiary education tuition fees and then found inflation jumped by a huge amount in the same year!
The other thing is that there was always going to be contraction due to the loss of undocumented workers, and there is probably more yet to come. But improvements to American lives don’t necessarily get captured at the statistical layer. A million more Americans are now in work, and blue collar wages have begun to rise above the rate of inflation for the first time since 2019.
I do agree with you. Accurate statistical information is important. But Trump and his team should be doing more to explain the nuance of what’s actually happening, rather than denying the validity of the data itself.
As a counter point, the Biden team weren’t any better, and even had major online sources trying to change the textbook definition of recession. They would have preserved their credibility more if they had simply argued that it was a very strange type of recession which had some unusual features, some positive- like job vacancies. The worst thing was adjusting the FBI crime figures for 2022 downwards as a means of pretending that violent crime had reduced going into election season. That really was bad, because it destroyed institutional credibility.
The 2024 figures were back to being honest, but only because DNC panicked when they realised that their reform efforts were misjudged and leading to a structural rise in violent crime. By 2024, police officers were back to using often discretionary data-driven proactive policing to interdict inter-gang violence, using techniques like Hot Spot policing. Liberal criminologists tend to like Hot Spot more, as it’s more community friendly than other more controversial approaches.
Jeff Asher is the go to guy on X, although I don’t seem to be able to find him here in the UK, due to the Online Safety Act.
I also agree with you about government trying to intervene in academia. Government is always heavy-handed in its approach, not fit for purpose when it comes to a fine-tuned environment like academia. But the problem is that academia has already effectively broken science all by itself. DEI statements aren’t just about trying to counter discrimination or help people from different backgrounds these days. Any research proposal which takes that tack in its DEI statement is going to get rejected out of hand. Instead it has to be about interrogating whiteness and exploring other (unfalsifiable) ways of knowing. It’s why glaciology now commissions native art by indigenous people as a means of scientifically studying icebergs.
Don’t get me wrong. The article in Scientific American The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong raises some valid points about social construction, discrimination, and cultural gender norms, but ultimately it indulges in purely ideological claims like ‘Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.’ That’s not science, it’s ideology. One of the Venus sisters tried playing a male player. She lost to a French player seeded around 200th.
This doesn’t mean that there weren’t female hunters in our ancestral hunter gatherer groups, simply that they would have been considerably outnumbered by the males. Sure, I might have picked out the most egregious cases, but we’ve seen what happens when fields lack viewpoint diversity. The only areas still producing anything of worth in the social sciences are the econometric approaches which look at big data, and aren’t subject to researchers motivational biases, and psychology has been beset by a series of replication crises, with once widely held and cited beliefs like stereotype threat now consigned to the waste bin of history.
I agree. The problem is so severe that universities are incapable of internal reform. Further, since universities are essentially a reflection of their faculty, the only hope for universities, in my opinion, is a complete dismissal of the existing faculty and replacement drawn from the reformers and those who have been cancelled out of academia in the past.
Thank you Sadredin for your insights! I think there would be a long waiting list of the cancelled who would be ready to research and teach with a sacredness towards truth-seeking over social conformity.
Very true. I suspect given time to get back up to speed and appropriate transfer of research support, you would see a blossoming in teaching and science across the academy with this new faculty from exile!
Massive defunding is essential.
Very nice graphs, but here are some additional points to consider:
- Is there going to be "Freedom of Inquiry" under the new external regime? It doesn't seem like that's the case. If honest "truth-seeking" leads someone to, say, do research that goes against a Trump admin policy, is that going to bring potential sanctions or punishments?
- Would things have been worse but for HxA? I agree that HxA has been mostly ineffective at reversing radical DEI, but it might have helped slow or stop some of these changes at some schools.
- It seems like the new right's approach to oversight is to require schools to add/boost Title IV offices and staff...which doesn't seem to really solve the over-bureaucratization issue and might actually make it worse.
In short, I agree with much of the critique. I'm not sure that this new approach is going to solve many of those issues and has plenty of new ones of its own, especially additional overreach.
Honestly this is one of the most important articles I’ve read in a long time. The influence of academia over virtually every corner of life is staggering, so the extreme bias described should sound warning sirens for an F5 tornado. I’ve known this anecdotally, but this is a brilliant consolidation of supporting data that everyone should read. The only people who wouldn’t be alarmed by this are the very progressives who count on these totalitarian tendencies to advance their societal goals. They have no incentive to reform and every incentive to discredit articles like this. Thank you for this outstanding and important piece.
From personal experience I wouldn't underestimate the belief that the telos of academia has emerged via a process of intellectually accessing universal moral truths. This is the root of the claim that students are taught how to, rather than what to, think.
Wonderful well-written essay. Would it be possible to get a PDF copy of this...?
Wouldn't you just print it to PDF, creating a shareable file?
When I have tried this in the past, it has failed - both on my iPhone and my desktop. I’m not a computer neophyte, but I’m not a skilled as I’d like…
I just hit 'Print' on my browser (Chrome) chose PDF instead of my printer as the destination and I've now got a perfect 27 page PDF of the article.
Unfortunately, neither my iPhone nor my Lenovo tablet allow me to do this, and when the tablet offers ‘download’, only the URL path is captured.
Oh well… thanks for your help anyway!
Ah, I was only assuming it would work - I've never tried it myself. I'll give it a go
A pleasure to read this rational and well supported essay.
It seems to me that this post is extremely important and insightful.
What honest impartial observer would possibly believe American academia has the courage to commit to any type of "internal reform"? What action taken by any university (not in Fla) in the past decade would lead anyone to believe that academia has any ability or desire to reform itself?
The reason we're here in the first place, watching the MAGA axe carve up sacred cows, is simple and clear (at least to those of us outside the ivy walls): America's liberal class (more or less the profs, scholars, curators, writers etc who are lauded and well-compensated for maintaining and transmitting our cultural, political and religious patrimony) have completely abdicated all responsibility, become conscious Leftist political actors, taken the knee to any and every social movement (regardless of how spurious) as long as it was aligned with the Crit Theory victim cult and refused to protect basic civil and human rights (free speech, thought and expression), if not explicitly revoking them from anyone not on Team Social Justice. You can either support DEI loyalty oaths and litmus tests, speech codes and bias-response teams, stand with the mob and denounce your university, specialty, predecessors and the entire country as the moral equivalent of a slave ship OR you can be a scholar with integrity and wisdom. But you can't be both!
This empirical approach is exactly correct. The measured change of characteristics over time offers a view of reality, devoid of opinion and emotion. The data reveal trends and hint at causal consequences. Another example is the policy of "helping" Blacks as victims of societal oppression since the early 1970's. After 6 decades, with more racial anger and disparities, we should be assessing the usefulness of that "helpful" policy.
Here's another way of thinking about the ideological tilt of academia: it's not unique. Over the past 40 years, all of the professions have become more left-leaning:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210928215217/https://twitter.com/adam_bonica/status/1174536380329803776
This is part and parcel with the GOP becoming a low-education party. The polarization is stronger in higher ed than in most other professions, but it's not unique.
Perhaps this is why Haque has a ludicrous view of what transpires in the social sciences at research universities (I can't speak for the humanities). We continue to do social science, not CRT or DEI or activism. He'd know this if he'd taken the time to look at the CVs of some actual social science.
I agree that the ideological homogeneity isn't good for us, but come on. This is just culture war with some graphs.
Dear Nicolas, Thank you for your reply. I agree there are some places where rigorous ideology-orthogonal social science happens (indeed, I have enjoyed and admired your writings in the Institute for Family Studies! thanks.) and sadly much that is not so rigorous, fair, unpredictable, etc. My view is that whole disciplines and departments have been captured. It isn’t pockets. Social Psychology is an example, as documented by Lee Jussim, Jon Haidt, and others (many have resigned for related reasons from the main social psychology organization). Sociology, which you would know better than us, I think has similar problems. Take as one data point the American Sociology Association's (not a fringe representation of the field by any means!) theme for its annual meeting in 2024 was “Intersectional Solidarities”, “emphasizes sociology as a form of liberatory praxis: an effort to not only understand structural inequities, but to intervene in socio-political struggles”. If this is true, it would suggest Boshko's characterization in his quote is what is actually fringe.
Hi Omar:
You point to a disjuncture in sociology that's long fascinated me. I totally agree that the national organization is, in a word, fucked--it's ideological captured, has ludicrous themes for its annual meetings, and no longer helmed by top scholars. But then you open one of the top journals, and they're filled with rigorous science. Indeed, it's getting to the point where there's very little overlap between the top elected officers of the ASA and the scholars who publish in its journals. This is a strange and lamentable state of affairs.
Thank you for the kind words about my work. But I'm hardly the only one.
And Lee, I agree that a lot of social science is bad, but a lot is bad just for non-ideological reasons. There are a lot of poorly specified and under-identified regression models out there.
Here's a thesis: American higher ed is too big. The bipartisan ideal of universal four-year college led to excessive expansion. This meant a decline in mean faculty quality.
Heh. I do think some of his sweeping dismissals of social science go too far, but I also think your dismissal of his dismissal is ... too dismissive.
Be that as it may, there is a great irony here that I think you will appreciate. He relies heavily on social science research to document his points. So while he explicitly condemns most of it as hopelessly politicized, he treats quite a lot as credible and serious. So, regardless of his explicit condemnations, implicitly but clearly, he presumes the broad swaths he reported here are credible.
Now, he might say something like, "of course there is *some* social sci that is quite good and that's what I relied on, even though a lot is nonsense."
Personally, I think the truth here is in between. I do not think most of my own stuff is nonsense. And in my own research, I routinely cite and refer to articles that I think are valuable and credible -- as if there is a good amount of valuable and credible social science out there -- which I think is true.
OTOH, the social sciences produce a lot of nonsense that is not political or politicized because of bad methods and stat practices and bad interpretations of even reasonable methods and stat practices, and also because of all sorts of bad norms around social science publishing, as I described here:
https://unsafescience.substack.com/p/75-of-psychology-claims-are-false
I focused on psych, but I am pretty sure it is about as bad, often worse, in other social sciences.
And then, for claims, norms, and practices around anything politicized, it gets even worse.
I'm not quite in tune with this response, which seems rather strange to me. I appreciate I do not have Mr Wolfinger's personal academic experience. But "this is just culture war with some graphs" is unfairly and childishly dismissive, as if nothing important or dangerous has happened in the last fifteen years, and as if no important psychological insights are in the article. "All of the professions have become more left leaning" - well, of course they have if they've come up through an intellectually corrupted (by post-modernist philosophies) educational system, still seething with Marxists and pseudo-Marxists despite the blatant historical evidence of what an economic, social, personal and political disaster Marxism has repeatedly proven itself to be. "Part and parcel with the GOP becoming a low-education party" is so blatantly anti-right wing, and an inadequate insulting generalisation, and clearly biased towards left wing thinking, it just yells its own prejudice at us, surely. The implication is that conservative thinking, rather than requiring proper examination and discussion and application where appropriate, can be dismissed as "stupid". That isn't "thinking". Everyone who doesn't Vote Democrat, or Labour in the UK where I am, isn't a survivalist in a MAGA hat. They might read Roger Scruton, Thomas Sowell and Edmund Burke. Or Nigel Biggar. Or have been another victim of cancellation.
Allow me to quote you: "... well, of course they have if they've come up through an intellectually corrupted (by post-modernist philosophies) educational system, still seething with Marxists and pseudo-Marxists"
This just isn't true, and you'd know it if you talked to some students and faculty and/or attended some classes. Why do you think it's true? Because this is how conservative media and MAGA public intellectuals depict Western education. They make their case by relying on "nut picking" the craziest faculty and students. Allow me to quote historian David Boshko:
They find something really dumb a fringe wackjob college professor said and share it all around and have a bunch of people freak out about how evil liberals are how they are about to bring in a reign of darkness upon the land and blah blah blah
But I will agree with you that Communism is a disaster.
Okay. But there is nothing "untrue" about the impact of cancel culture, or the ridiculousness of omnipresent "trigger warnings" in front of unbelievably innocent older TV programmes or films, or the real lives that have been transformed by cultural fads. And there is of course real psychology in getting kickback from anyone in any line of work - lecturers, police, politicians - who feel threatened by the concept of being policed by "outsiders", independent bodies who will not see things the same way and who will be seen as a "danger" because they will "change things" and everyone prefers to remain "in charge", even if they are themselves deluded. Read "Colonialism" - I hardly think the honesty and experience and qualifications of Nigel Biggar put him anywhere near some further dismissive comment about "fringe wackjob college professors". Look at the ridiculous unfairness resulting from widespread DEI policies, or at all the surgically and psychologically damaged children as a result of people convinced that their ideology is all about compassion rather than being a serious awful horrible series of steps towards a "reign of darkness" in absolute defiance of evolution and history and biology. Sanity is needed, not exaggrated arguments on either side.
One issue is left out here: As bad as internal reform seems to be, is external reform likely to be better. On this day, the current administration has cut funding for mRNA vaccines on purely ideological grounds. It therefore seems likely that internal reform may be the lesser of two evils.
Most European countries now employ a targeted approach, only recommending mRNA vaccines for the over 65s, the medically at risk, or in some cases only the over 80s. My point would be why spend the money on a treatment approach which is overwhelmingly likely to be of greatest benefit to the geriatric when that money should be specifically targeted to solve dozens of known low cost ways of helping children, the young and the physically fit.
Plus, there is a real debate as to whether trained immunity is superior to specific immunity from mRNA.
Finally, it's become increasingly clear that developing specific immunity approaches relies heavily upon prior research in labs doing research dangerously close to gain of function. In all probability, we've now had two major outbreaks as a result of gain of function at labs, one at Wuhan, and one at the generally far less publicised VHFC at Kenema and its likely link to the Ebola outbreak.
And yes, I know that it's generally de rigueur to frame such concerns as 'conspiracy theories', but there are many noteworthy well-educated African journalists like Chernoh Bah who put paid to the notion that these suspicions are unwarranted or purely speculative, even if their suspicions fall far short of offering definitive proof.
Here's the problem. Both the initial research proposal by EcoHealth alliance and the specific immune response designed by Pfiser and Moderna involve a modified furin cleavage site. Critics to this 'theory' argue that the research didn't go forward and that Covid occurred naturally, but the evidence now proves there is likely at least an 80% chance that is was a lab leak. In other words, regardless of the funding source, the modification of the furin cleavage site went forward at Wuhan with disastrous results, and this modification also happened to be key to the mRNA vaccine ultimately produced.
This doesn't mean that there was a conspiracy to release the virus, but it does mean that when they realised that they had created the biggest public health fuck up in human history, they probably found some seemingly innocuous way to pass the results of their lab research to the researchers at Pfizer and Moderna to speed up the development of a vaccine.
For years we thought that the risks of a rogue state developing a zoonotic virus as a bioweapon justified the smaller risk of gain of function, even if convention prevented us from openly admitting we were engaged in the venture. We've now proven that human nature and our capacity for error in biolab environments is far more dangerous than a potential rogue state.
My point would be that for mRNA to be effective as a technology, forward research of potential threats is required, and the chances of that research posing a danger is higher than the chances of a naturally occurring zoonotic species transmission.
Don't get me wrong there is one strong exception and few other plausible candidates. Small Pox. Ebola, Nipah and Marburg might fall into the same category, but not Lassa or H5N1 due to their transmissibility being manageable through shielding.
But you see my point? To make mRNA research justifiable requires forward research of potential threats, and the research entailed makes the whole thing completely unjustifiable.
You seem to be have triggered by vaccines, and you missed the main point. The current administration is not in the slightest interesting in truth-seeking. If you want another example, take the firing of a commissioner who simply reported labor statistics which did not fit the narrative. This again indicates that this administration is unfit to reform academia, much more than academia itself.
I agree with on the commissioner on labor statistics, although a more nuanced view would be that under Biden there was significant job growth in public sector employment, which is inherently inflationary and ultimately reduces prosperity. Trump is taking a hit on jobs because he’s been removing a significant amount of bureaucracy, even though most American bureaucracy is actually buried at the state and local level. As a heterodox with an anarchic streak, it’s a bit like when the Tories increased tertiary education tuition fees and then found inflation jumped by a huge amount in the same year!
The other thing is that there was always going to be contraction due to the loss of undocumented workers, and there is probably more yet to come. But improvements to American lives don’t necessarily get captured at the statistical layer. A million more Americans are now in work, and blue collar wages have begun to rise above the rate of inflation for the first time since 2019.
I do agree with you. Accurate statistical information is important. But Trump and his team should be doing more to explain the nuance of what’s actually happening, rather than denying the validity of the data itself.
As a counter point, the Biden team weren’t any better, and even had major online sources trying to change the textbook definition of recession. They would have preserved their credibility more if they had simply argued that it was a very strange type of recession which had some unusual features, some positive- like job vacancies. The worst thing was adjusting the FBI crime figures for 2022 downwards as a means of pretending that violent crime had reduced going into election season. That really was bad, because it destroyed institutional credibility.
The 2024 figures were back to being honest, but only because DNC panicked when they realised that their reform efforts were misjudged and leading to a structural rise in violent crime. By 2024, police officers were back to using often discretionary data-driven proactive policing to interdict inter-gang violence, using techniques like Hot Spot policing. Liberal criminologists tend to like Hot Spot more, as it’s more community friendly than other more controversial approaches.
Jeff Asher is the go to guy on X, although I don’t seem to be able to find him here in the UK, due to the Online Safety Act.
I also agree with you about government trying to intervene in academia. Government is always heavy-handed in its approach, not fit for purpose when it comes to a fine-tuned environment like academia. But the problem is that academia has already effectively broken science all by itself. DEI statements aren’t just about trying to counter discrimination or help people from different backgrounds these days. Any research proposal which takes that tack in its DEI statement is going to get rejected out of hand. Instead it has to be about interrogating whiteness and exploring other (unfalsifiable) ways of knowing. It’s why glaciology now commissions native art by indigenous people as a means of scientifically studying icebergs.
Don’t get me wrong. The article in Scientific American The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong raises some valid points about social construction, discrimination, and cultural gender norms, but ultimately it indulges in purely ideological claims like ‘Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports.’ That’s not science, it’s ideology. One of the Venus sisters tried playing a male player. She lost to a French player seeded around 200th.
This doesn’t mean that there weren’t female hunters in our ancestral hunter gatherer groups, simply that they would have been considerably outnumbered by the males. Sure, I might have picked out the most egregious cases, but we’ve seen what happens when fields lack viewpoint diversity. The only areas still producing anything of worth in the social sciences are the econometric approaches which look at big data, and aren’t subject to researchers motivational biases, and psychology has been beset by a series of replication crises, with once widely held and cited beliefs like stereotype threat now consigned to the waste bin of history.
I agree. The problem is so severe that universities are incapable of internal reform. Further, since universities are essentially a reflection of their faculty, the only hope for universities, in my opinion, is a complete dismissal of the existing faculty and replacement drawn from the reformers and those who have been cancelled out of academia in the past.
and obviously massive defunding.
Thank you Sadredin for your insights! I think there would be a long waiting list of the cancelled who would be ready to research and teach with a sacredness towards truth-seeking over social conformity.
Very true. I suspect given time to get back up to speed and appropriate transfer of research support, you would see a blossoming in teaching and science across the academy with this new faculty from exile!