Preliminary List of Articles that Attempted to Warn Academics and Other Scientists that their Politicization of Scholarship, Teaching, Funding, Hiring and Promotions Was a Slow-Moving Train Wreck
(referenced to investigative journalist Matt Taibbi a few years ago)
Just for purposes of documenting the chronology of the earlier attacks by the previous version of the "woke" "left" (Frankfurters/Marcuse) on rational thinking about objective facts, and the subsequent substitution of emotive-subjective cult narratives:
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
Political rallying takes precedence over science, at least as far as academic sociology is concerned. The 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) was themed, “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy”. It was not themed for researching, learning, or overturning an existing scientific paradigm. Instead, it was for building solidarity; it was basically a political rally.
fantastic post, Lee. Yes, we tried and tried and tried. It's been a tragic pleasure trying with you since 2012. Please do
The Coddling of the American Mind, the atlantic article and the book.
Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2018) The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. New York: Penguin Press.
Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2015) The coddling of the American mind. Atlantic.
and also my original 2011 SPSP talk, which was entirely a warning about us becoming a "tribal moral community"
But in reality, we are a tribal moral community. In support of that claim, I made three arguments. I said that, because we have sacred values other than truth, we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don’t share those sacred values. If these statements are true, then I think we must begin some serious discussions about how to turn off the magnet.
If we can do so, I think the benefits to our field and our science will be enormous. One obvious benefit of post-partisan social psychology will be more credibility in Washington and with the general public. It will be easier to claim that psychology should be treated and funded like the hard sciences if legislators in both parties feel they can trust our research.
I didn’t vote for Trump or the idiot (and please why can’t people admit that she is an idiot?), but there are several things that he has done in his first month that I agree with.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
I look forward to this list making it to the various regulatory and accrediting bodies for psychology in Australia, which seem to have collectively agreed the mission is to instantiate a generation of activist-researcher-clinicians.
Only an academic could possibly believe one would be friends with another solely bc that person is white. A regular Joe would never believe anything this foolish.
Often missing from these kinds of discussions is the collegial voice of mainstream professionalism. See for example Hollinger, "The Wedge Driving Academe's Two Families
I dislike left-wing academia nearly as much as you, but just like every other liberal you want to avoid blaming people for their own decisions. Left-wing academia forced Americans to vote for Trump? The world doesn't revolve around academia, us outsiders barely notice you (no offense). Far-left ideas about racism, colonialism, etc. should be argued against because they are bad ideas, not because people don't like them. The goal of academia isn't to make people happy, it's to seek the truth. Liberals abandoned the search for truth because they didn't like when the truth made people feel bad. You want them to abandon it because it makes voters angry. What's the difference?
I want academics to courageously stand by evidence, regardless of outcomes. Whether it's to a woke mob or to Emperor Trump, Copernicus states his theory and accepts what comes next. Academia became a place for silencing dissent. Fight against that. Don't tell them that they can somehow control what choice voters make. They can't, and it would be just as bad for academia if they tried.
"Caused" and "forced" are not the same thing. Trump et al are absolutely 100% responsible for their own actions. However, understanding why and how we have gotten to this point seems to me to be a worthwhile endeavor, because it can give insights into how we dig ourselves out. I recommend this article along those lines:
"If academics want to preserve federal funding, they must first restore credibility. That means recommitting to intellectual diversity, resisting ideological conformity, and acknowledging our role in fostering the polarisation that led to this crisis of confidence. Until then, no amount of protesting will stop the political forces now reshaping higher education.:
You are trying to convince people to make a good moral decision because someone is standing behind them with a gun. Is that a good way to get people to behave morally? Why stop with "intellectual diversity"? Just tell them to put on MAGA hats and produce studies proving that welfare makes people lazy. Kiss Trump's ass and he will make sure the money flows again. Problem solved.
The problem with your theory here is that the MAGA movement doesn't want facts and they absolutely love ideological conformity, as long as it's the right kind. Simply moving to the middle won't get you back in their good graces, they will continue to hate every academic who gets results they don't like. So not only is your argument a bad reason to change behavior, it would ultimately be futile.
I know you want these assholes to be punished for their woke witch hunts, I agree with you there. But harboring resentment won't help you solve the problem. It's a poison you take hoping someone else gets sick. Academia should absolutely reform itself, because partisan ideological beliefs prevent us from reaching true conclusions. Sometimes the facts turn out to be unpleasant, sometimes they go against the way we thought the world worked. An academic can only endure such pain by being zealots for the truth. You can shame someone into being a conformist, you can't shame them into being a zealot.
The fever swamp won't last forever, but it's the fate of every movement that diverts too far from the center. Saying "today, we move back to a world where intellectual merit governs, rather than political bias" won't eliminate the backlash, but it will put you in a good position for the future.
Absolutely brilliant and maybe my biggest fear. I had feared that every paper that was factual yet didn’t line up with far left ideology would be suppressed to the point where academics would say “where is your evidence to support that claim?” And there won’t be any because it was all suppressed or removed.
Hatemi research scandal
(contains links to relevant academic papers)
Research scandal about leftist professor's use of bad data in an attempt to link genetically determined personality traits to conservatives:
https://www.thecut.com/2016/07/why-it-took-social-science-years-to-correct-a-simple-error-about-psychoticism.html
www. thecut. com /2016/07/why-it-took-social-science-years-to-correct-a-simple-error-about-psychoticism.html
---> the corrected data shows that leftism correlates to "psychoticism" (neurotic/authoritarian personality)
Leftist "blank slate" ideology and leftist attacks, including physical attacks, on E.O. Wilson (sociobiology), late 1970s:
https://www.razibkhan.com/p/setting-the-record-straight-open
---
(referenced to investigative journalist Matt Taibbi a few years ago)
Just for purposes of documenting the chronology of the earlier attacks by the previous version of the "woke" "left" (Frankfurters/Marcuse) on rational thinking about objective facts, and the subsequent substitution of emotive-subjective cult narratives:
https://nonsite.org/the-first-privilege-walk/
The First Privilege Walk
Christian Parenti
November 18, 2021
How Herbert Marcuse’s widow used a Scientology-linked cult’s methodology to gamify Identity Politics and thus helped steer the U.S. Left down the dead-end path of identitarian psychobabble.
Political rallying takes precedence over science, at least as far as academic sociology is concerned. The 2024 Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association (ASA) was themed, “Intersectional Solidarities: Building Communities of Hope, Justice, and Joy”. It was not themed for researching, learning, or overturning an existing scientific paradigm. Instead, it was for building solidarity; it was basically a political rally.
fantastic post, Lee. Yes, we tried and tried and tried. It's been a tragic pleasure trying with you since 2012. Please do
The Coddling of the American Mind, the atlantic article and the book.
Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2018) The coddling of the American mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting up a generation for failure. New York: Penguin Press.
Lukianoff, G., & Haidt, J. (2015) The coddling of the American mind. Atlantic.
and also my original 2011 SPSP talk, which was entirely a warning about us becoming a "tribal moral community"
https://www.edge.org/conversation/jonathan_haidt-the-bright-future-of-post-partisan-social-psychology
here's a section from near the end:
But in reality, we are a tribal moral community. In support of that claim, I made three arguments. I said that, because we have sacred values other than truth, we have taboos that constrain our thinking; we have almost no moral/political diversity; and we have created a hostile climate for graduate students who don’t share those sacred values. If these statements are true, then I think we must begin some serious discussions about how to turn off the magnet.
If we can do so, I think the benefits to our field and our science will be enormous. One obvious benefit of post-partisan social psychology will be more credibility in Washington and with the general public. It will be easier to claim that psychology should be treated and funded like the hard sciences if legislators in both parties feel they can trust our research.
Attributing anything Trump does to reason is an exercise in futility.
I didn’t vote for Trump or the idiot (and please why can’t people admit that she is an idiot?), but there are several things that he has done in his first month that I agree with.
There are three executive orders (EO’s) that Trump has signed that are worthy of support by everyone across the moderate political spectrum
The first of these EO’s recognizes that open borders are politically unacceptable and that the age of mass migration is over. Importing millions of people who will work for next to nothing just to be here destroys the wages of working class Americans and drives up housing costs when we can't house our own citizens. People cannot overpopulate their home country and just expect to move to greener pastures. There are no more green pastures. They need to voluntarily reduce their own country's population to an environmentally sustainable level, stay home and work there to improve their living conditions.
His second important EO addresses the insanity of gender identity which denies the reality of human sexuality and results in men invading women’s sports, restrooms, locker rooms and prisons. Women need and are entitled to privacy from men. Even more diabolical is the mutilation of innocent children (many who would grow up gay) in pursuit of the impossible because you can’t change your birth sex.
Finally his EO that corrects the craziness of DEI which discriminates against whites, Asians and men in attempting to cure past discrimination against others is absolutely the correct approach. Who could believe that creating a new privileged class and a new discriminated against class would provide a solution to the problem? Not to mention that it’s clearly unconstitutional.
It would well serve both Democrats and independents to get behind these changes even as they choose to vigorously oppose other aspects of his agenda.
I look forward to this list making it to the various regulatory and accrediting bodies for psychology in Australia, which seem to have collectively agreed the mission is to instantiate a generation of activist-researcher-clinicians.
Only an academic could possibly believe one would be friends with another solely bc that person is white. A regular Joe would never believe anything this foolish.
What a terrible tragedy, and everyone here should receive due credit for their Cassandra-esque warnings.
But how can you not cite Robert Conquest / Kingsley Amis??
["I am quoted as having suggested, for a title for a new edition of The Great Terror, “How about I Told You So, You Fucking Fools?”...
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/04/12/kingsley-amis-and-the-great-terror/ ]
“Dreger, A. (2016). Galileo's middle finger: Heretics, activists, and one scholar's search for justice. Penguin books.”
If I ever have trouble thinking of a good title for something, I’ll try to hire Prof. Dreger.
I'm so happy that Trump won. That is all
Often missing from these kinds of discussions is the collegial voice of mainstream professionalism. See for example Hollinger, "The Wedge Driving Academe's Two Families
Apart" https://history.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/2013_wedge_hollinger.pdf
I dislike left-wing academia nearly as much as you, but just like every other liberal you want to avoid blaming people for their own decisions. Left-wing academia forced Americans to vote for Trump? The world doesn't revolve around academia, us outsiders barely notice you (no offense). Far-left ideas about racism, colonialism, etc. should be argued against because they are bad ideas, not because people don't like them. The goal of academia isn't to make people happy, it's to seek the truth. Liberals abandoned the search for truth because they didn't like when the truth made people feel bad. You want them to abandon it because it makes voters angry. What's the difference?
I want academics to courageously stand by evidence, regardless of outcomes. Whether it's to a woke mob or to Emperor Trump, Copernicus states his theory and accepts what comes next. Academia became a place for silencing dissent. Fight against that. Don't tell them that they can somehow control what choice voters make. They can't, and it would be just as bad for academia if they tried.
"Caused" and "forced" are not the same thing. Trump et al are absolutely 100% responsible for their own actions. However, understanding why and how we have gotten to this point seems to me to be a worthwhile endeavor, because it can give insights into how we dig ourselves out. I recommend this article along those lines:
https://unherd.com/newsroom/trumps-science-research-cuts-were-a-long-time-coming/
Concluding paragraph:
"If academics want to preserve federal funding, they must first restore credibility. That means recommitting to intellectual diversity, resisting ideological conformity, and acknowledging our role in fostering the polarisation that led to this crisis of confidence. Until then, no amount of protesting will stop the political forces now reshaping higher education.:
You are trying to convince people to make a good moral decision because someone is standing behind them with a gun. Is that a good way to get people to behave morally? Why stop with "intellectual diversity"? Just tell them to put on MAGA hats and produce studies proving that welfare makes people lazy. Kiss Trump's ass and he will make sure the money flows again. Problem solved.
The problem with your theory here is that the MAGA movement doesn't want facts and they absolutely love ideological conformity, as long as it's the right kind. Simply moving to the middle won't get you back in their good graces, they will continue to hate every academic who gets results they don't like. So not only is your argument a bad reason to change behavior, it would ultimately be futile.
I know you want these assholes to be punished for their woke witch hunts, I agree with you there. But harboring resentment won't help you solve the problem. It's a poison you take hoping someone else gets sick. Academia should absolutely reform itself, because partisan ideological beliefs prevent us from reaching true conclusions. Sometimes the facts turn out to be unpleasant, sometimes they go against the way we thought the world worked. An academic can only endure such pain by being zealots for the truth. You can shame someone into being a conformist, you can't shame them into being a zealot.
The fever swamp won't last forever, but it's the fate of every movement that diverts too far from the center. Saying "today, we move back to a world where intellectual merit governs, rather than political bias" won't eliminate the backlash, but it will put you in a good position for the future.
You sound like a zealot
Absolutely brilliant and maybe my biggest fear. I had feared that every paper that was factual yet didn’t line up with far left ideology would be suppressed to the point where academics would say “where is your evidence to support that claim?” And there won’t be any because it was all suppressed or removed.
You are so right, Lee. Here's a piece that I wrote when stepping down after 17 years as Stanford's provost: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/02/the-threat-from-within. It was later reprinted in expanded form in the Chronicle of Higher Education: https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-threat-from-within/
Thanks, John. I will add it. You certainly called the dangers. A bit more optimistic than things turned out, but, hey, so was I at that time...
Dan Sarewitz was on this early as well
See:
https://slate.com/technology/2010/12/most-scientists-in-this-country-are-democrats-that-s-a-problem.html
https://www.nature.com/articles/493007a
https://issues.org/sarewitz-2/
https://issues.org/br_sarewitz/
https://www.nature.com/articles/516009a
I've mostly stopped adding blogs, essays and op-eds, mainly because there are just too many, but I will add the two Nature articles. Thanks!