Diversity of Everything but Thought

Foxfyre wrote:

And since I'm in a posting mind-numbingly long articles mode tonight, I might as well post the following as a more scholarly rebuttal of Krugman's article:

The Science Haters
Why Paul Krugman is Wrong Again

By James D. Miller Published 04/06/2005

Republicans are too anti-science to become good professors. That's the essence of Paul Krugman's recent New York Times column explaining why there are so few Republican college professors.

Of course, recent events at Harvard indicate that it's the academic left that rejects science. Harvard's President Larry Summers was castigated for suggesting that politically incorrect science be conducted. Dr. Summers infamously suggested that researchers consider the possibility that biology partially explains the dearth of female science professors. For this comment, his Arts and Science faculty passed a resolution expressing lack of confidence in him, nope, more to it than that and the presidents of Stanford, MIT and Princeton published a letter saying that "speculation that 'innate differences' may be a significant cause of under representation by women in science and engineering may rejuvenate old myths and reinforce negative stereotypes and biases." So acting with the approval of their leftist faculties, the presidents of Stanford, MIT and Princeton have condemned Larry Summers for the crime of politically incorrect speculation. Nothing could possibly be more anti-scientific then rejecting speculation.
Are Jews inherently greedy? Are Christians genetically pre-disposed to delusion? Are Africans more prone, due to genetic factors, towards violence and drug use? Are whites intellectually superior?

Larry Summers hinted that women on average might not be as qualified as men to be science professors. Paul Krugman wrote that Republicans en masse are categorically not as qualified as everyone else to be professors. Of course, he said no such thing Larry Summers was almost universally condemned by academia for his comments, not because they were necessarily wrong, but because it was considered wrong for him to make negative generalizations about an under-represented group. Yes. "Wrong" in the manner of the other examples I've just given. That is, quite aside from any scientific question involved, there are social dangers involved. Why not begin a massive study to find out if Christians are more susceptible to delusions? It's a pure science question. Or is it? In academia, Republicans are far more under-represented than women are. So are Green Party members. So are fascists. So are white supremicists. So are child molesters. So if Paul Krugman is not widely condemned by academics it will constitute pretty strong evidence that academia is biased against Republicans. No, it won't. No more than a survey of business principals would demonstrate business is biased against liberals or that a survey of Pentacostal ministers would demonstrate that Pentacostalism is biased against plumbers or engineers.

Many college leftists want more women but fewer Republicans in their ranks. He knows this how? And note how he shifted earlier from conservative to Republican. They cite diversity as the reason for desiring more women, but this creates a problem since this diversity rationale would seem to indicate that they should also seek to hire more Republicans. The victim claim. Note key word 'intolerance' in his next sentence. More on that in a bit. Krugman, therefore, is aiding the intolerant college left by claiming that Republicans are so anti-science that colleges would suffer by having more of them around. Fortunately for Republicans, much of the college left is so hostile to science falsehood - at the very least, a claim without any hint of evidentiary support that even few college professors will accept Krugman's arguments. same again

Much of the left in humanities departments doesn't believe in science. And again. That you consider this 'scholarly', fox, tells us more than you know regarding your familiarity with scholarship They feel that it's wrong to privilege scientific over other types of knowledge. Leftists have been known to use literary theory to demonstrate flaws in science. Such anti-scientific silliness lead to the Social Text hoax.

New York University professor of physics Alan Sokal, himself an "unabashed Old Leftist," was bothered by the anti-scientific viewpoints of many left-wing humanities professors. These professors often used their French literary theories to attack science. Love the 'french' bit To prove that these humanities professors actually knew nothing about real science he wrote an article titled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" agreeing with the leftists' view of science. But as the author himself wrote, his article contained a "mélange of truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs, and syntactically correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever." The article was, however, published in 1996 by the academic journal Social Text as a serious piece criticizing the scientific method. Only after it appeared did Professor Sokal reveal that his article was a parody. That such an article could get published would surprise few Republican college professors as we well understand how many leftist humanities professors both hate science and are ignorant of its workings.
I've read Sokal's piece. You finn? Baldimo? Foxfyre? He addresses something quite real and problematic in terms of science, humanities fads, and epistemology generally and I'd be happy to have that discussion except that neither of the three of you are up to it.

Krugman correctly points out that self-selection is part of the reason there are so few Republicans in academia. But much of this self-selection is because of leftist bias. For example, consider the academic field of Women's Studies. True, few Republicans will self-select to become Women Studies professors, but only because this field is totally defined in left-wing terms. False. Similarly, the fields of African-American Studies, History, English and Sociology are increasingly devoted to left-wing topics. What the hell is a left wing topic? What is a right wing topic? A smart undergraduate who tells her academic advisor that she wants to get a Ph.D. focusing on military history will likely be told to go to law school instead because few colleges will consider hiring a military historian. Or a cooking historian. In contrast, if this same undergraduate announced her desire to study how capitalism has promoted environmental racism she would be told of the rich academic job market that will await her after she completes her Ph.D. Some scholarly claim, that one.

Bias against Republicans in academia is an intensely personal issue for me. Smith College recently tried to fire me by denying me tenure. I believe that I was denied tenure for being a conservative. Fortunately, Smith's five person faculty Grievance Committee found that my academic freedom had been violated during my tenure review. How exactly, we would like to know, but he's not saying. As a result I came up for tenure again and this time succeeded. (My story is well told here.) Based on my experience and knowledge of academia, however, I have advised other Republicans to be wary of academic careers.
http://www.techcentralstation.com/040605B.html

You three have a fixed idea on this issue but with little or no experience to support your ideas. All three of you read the same sort of rightwing publications which have great regard for a particular agenda and almost none for careful scholarship.

You likely think Horowitz a great fellow, out only for the good of all through a noble attempt to ammeliorate the imbalance of ideas at universities. In fact, he is a Republican party strategist and operative who has worked for Republican candidates and causes since Nixon. Here's some things he has written and said:

Quote:

"Don't forget that a soundbite is all you have...keep it short - a slogan is always better. Repeat it often. Put it on television...In politics, television is reality."

Quote:

Republicans have to be "repositioned" as the "party of the underdog" (You'll recall my 'victim' note earlier. This is a strategy initially developed by a Republican lawyer who clerked under Thomas, specifically using the rhetoric of the civil rights movement to, a bit of irony here, dismantle affirmative action)

Quote:

"PBS programs regularly attack whites"

Etc etc. He's been caught up in enough lies and racist comments to allow his credibility to remain intact only for true believers, and that's you three. Much of his funding has been and continues to be from the typical sources: Olin, Scaife etc.

The agenda is to disempower perceived centers of democratic or liberal power so as to gain further Republican control of governance. Intellectual integrity is the very last of Horowitz's real concerns.

And it is decidely NOT to further discourse and ideas, but to stifle them, as Krugman states.

finn

It was a bit high-handed, wasn't it. Sorry, I'll extract your name from the list and put it on "probatory" status. You're only moderately nuts on this one and your reputation suffers damage from the company you keep.

This is a fight I won't let pass. Academic freedom and indeed, freedom of ideas will not be advanced through overt or covert manipulation by operatives from a political party. If anything might be clear, that ought to be.

ps...my response to the critique of Krugman is within what you've just quoted above (in red)

Pre-Reagan, talk radio in today's sense simply didn't exist. What station could risk it? But people listen to conservative talk because they want to, not because the post-Fairness Doctrine regulatory regime forces them to. To claim that "diversity of view" is lacking in the era of blogs and cable news, moreover, is downright silly. Complaints about fairness are really about driving out conservative viewpoints.

blatham wrote:

finn

It was a bit high-handed, wasn't it. Sorry, I'll extract your name from the list and put it on "probatory" status. You're only moderately nuts on this one and your reputation suffers damage from the company you keep.

This is a fight I won't let pass. Academic freedom and indeed, freedom of ideas will not be advanced through overt or covert manipulation by operatives from a political party. If anything might be clear, that ought to be.

ps...my response to the critique of Krugman is within what you've just quoted above (in red)

High handed indeed, but no less to suggest that Foxfyre and Baldimo are some sort of intellectual neanderthals.

Don't pass on the fight, but don't resort to the intellectually low device of ad hominem attacks.
"Neanderthalism" wasn't the charge. Fixed ideas, unammenable to revision is the charge. Foxfyre and Baldimo will likely go to their graves believing what they believe on this issue, quite unmoved by any glimmer of a notion that their perceptions/ideas are formed not in some objective, valid and careful manner as through personal experience and open-minded study, but instead through their daily turn to information sources which feed them certainty and simplicity and a desired conclusion.

As to the Sokal incident...the best accounting of this to my mind was a piece by Stephen Weinberg in the NY Review of Books (now archived). I read it while having dinner at an outdoor restaurant and laughed so hard the folks at neighboring tables were likely alarmed I might splatter them with half-chewed linguini. Sokal, a physicist, had submitted a hoax piece to a publication called Social Text. His title will give you a flavor... "Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity". Though completely nonsense, it was published. When word of the hoax got out, it produced an enormous amount of commentary (check google with "Sokal's Hoax") within academia and outside as well. His target was a an influential 'movement' within the social sciences which had gone quite fruitcake (abstract beyond belief and without any means by which to test theses, and with a nomenclature such as you see in his title). The influence of this stuff was broad (literary studies, feminist studies, and to a much lesser degree, political studies as well). Adherents tended to fit the 'true believer' mold. It was in full bloom when I was studying and these were one of two groups of folks with whom I found myself in pretty constant and heated argument (one friendship terminated unhappily). The other group, by the way, was the campus crusade for christ evangelicals. But what is important to understand here is that this wasn't a manifestation of a political group/agenda nor of 'liberalism', even while the soft-headed on the left commonly bought into the nonsense. The problem was soft-headedness...buying into Authority for the easy answers, lack of care and rigor in thinking/reading/talking/writing. What is also important to understand here is that this movement has been taken to task, and greatly undermined, by voices from within academia itself...not from outside.

In any case, the argument that universities are governed by a liberal bias is hardly an attack on academic freedom or the freedom of ideas.
No, it is not, in and of itself. But of course Horowitz et al seek 'remedies' far more invasive, dogmatic and dangerous than merely tossing out the idea for debate.

You, like Krugman, have chosen to characterize the entire argument against the liberal university bias as a retrogression to the theological hoodoo of the Dark Ages.
Actually, you have this wrong in an important way. I have seen no evidence that Horowitz, for example, is motivated by some or any religious ideas at all. And there are others pushing in the same direction who, although they might profess faith membership and motivation, are not necessarily telling us the truth. On the other hand, there clearly is a push from the more radical edges of christian theology (mainly protestant but not entirely) to push back the 'tide of godless secularism' in society through activism in education. So, the forces pushing in this particular direction are a mixed bag. Certainly there are idiots out there whose objection to academia is based on the almost cartoonish campaign against evolution, but this is hardly the common thread among those concerned with academic freedom and the freedom of ideas as they may be imperilled by the Left. As much as you may despise Horowitz (the dirty traitor!), the foundation of his argument is not theological.
Right. But that doesn't necessarily make his argument valid in the same manner that we cannot say a theological argument isn't, necessarily, invalid. He is a Republican Party operative and that rings a different bell. As to academic freedom being "imperilled by the Left"...the Sokal case is a pretty good example of how the academic community, in its diversity, gets around to correcting itself, if too slowly often. But when you allow in an academic 'corrective' agency which is an arm of a political party or political ideology, then you are heading towards something potentially much much worse. Consider if Putin made an announcement tomorrow that one half of all university professors ought to be Marxists. For the sake of fairness and freedom of thought, of course.

What I find most offensive about your argument is the implied assertion that conservatives are the agents of Ignorance and Superstition and only liberals can be relied upon to champion Reason and Enlightenment.

This is a prejudice that ill serves you.
But it's not my assertion. Not explicitly nor implicitly. And it's not my belief. As I said earlier, in almost no cases at all did I know the political affiliations of my professors. That was completely irrelevant. Conservative plate tectonics? Liberal Beowulf or Chaucer? Green Party formal logic? Libertarian archaeology? Even the polical science courses were marked by, for example, a reading on JS Mill or Isaiah Berlin or John Rawls paired with a critique or oppositional position paper. Professors, in almost all cases (and I mean 9 out of 10) delighted in arguments from students, so long as they were thoughtful and studied. They didn't want to hear agreement...they wanted to hear thinking going on.

Conservatives are not more or less agents of reason and enlightenment than liberals. If we can make any sensible generality here it is that conservatives tend to opt for tradition moreso than do liberals. But as we don't know for sure whether the old or the new might be better, neither position can be given a pass.

But what is also true in all of this is that right now, in the US, there is a movement comprised of political elements on the right and religious elements on the right which are seeking to gain greater control of curricula and teaching personnel in order to further both political and dogmatic ends.


Now that I'm through scolding you, let me entreat you to engage, as only you can, in a reasoned and eloquent debate on the subject, and to cease trafficing on the fringes.

Your friend and admirer; always,

Finn Agonistes

I know your type. You just wish to get me naked.[/[/color]quote]

NOTE to CYCLOP:

And yes, I have poked around the PNAC site quite a bit

PNAC is just another think tank that is a little more politically activist than both. That they would recruit the big names/influential types that are also attractive as political appointees is neither unusual nor sinister. A close look will find the same kind of phenomenon when you have a Democrat in power; i.e. it is the often the same folks who are involved in Democrat-issue-oriented groups and organizations who get tapped for political appointments.

DTOM, surely you jest? That the GOP big shots are invited to speak at conservative organization dinners/meetings/conventions etc. is surely quite normal

Okay, I haven't caught up on everything on this thread yet cuz it's so long and I just found it, so maybe this isn't relevant at this point: but i'd like to say that I'm in college now and I haven't seen any evidence of liberal profs indoctrinating students, AT ALL. If politics are discussed, it is always in such an even-handed manner that I can't tell if my teachers are liberal, conservative, or right in the middle. Many of them mentioned voting prior to the election, but ALL of them emphasized that they weren't advocating any candidate, just asking us to participate in the democratic process (is it still okay to call it the "democratic" process, or is that indoctrination? ). Because it's a small school, I know many of my professors well enough from private meetings to know that they are mostly liberal, but I wouldn't have been able to tell that in class.