Is their a Leftist Agenda in Academia?

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Here's a good essay on the subject. The author notes that the problem isn't simply leftist bias. It's also the idea that everything, from poems to paintings, has to be analyzed in political terms. Aesthetics, or history, or biography, or philosophy are all rejected approaches -- all there is is politics.

Conservatives Aren’t the Only Voices Silenced by Academia’s Intellectual Orthodoxy

Imagining the lack of intellectual diversity as an exclusively political problem—a mere injustice to conservatives—fails to grasp the real stultifying effect on our collective intellectual life. The consequences of the hyper-politicization of the humanities go much further than the silencing of opposing voices. The understanding of criticism and interpretation as a primarily political act—one that should “unmask” the structural machinations of power or inform activism—also precludes readings and perspectives from a much wider spectrum of human experience, most of which (despite the protestations of certain critics) is not inherently political. Some approaches to art and culture, such as the contemplation of a work’s aesthetic qualities independent of its political or social content, seem to have been retired along with their tweed-clad exponents. Other paradigms, such as an analysis of literature informed by the current scholarship coming from the cognitive sciences, are aborted before they see the light of day.

One definition of fundamentalism is the tyranny of a single interpretation—the insistence upon the exclusive veracity of a single reading of a text, of one lens through which to view the world, or of one way of existing in it. Much of the humanities have entered into a new theocratic age, unable to imagine an intellectual life outside of a narrow set of political concepts. Far from achieving human and artistic emancipation, the fallout of this political turn has resulted in a new captive mind lingering behind the bars of its own ideological commitments, bound by its own lack of curiosity.

http://quillette.com/2017/04/04/conserv ... orthodoxy/

One of the challenges with this topic, if someone isn't up on it they'll easily default to thinking it's educated agnostics and atheists (therefore leftist Commies) vs. Jayzus and the Bobble and that most of the support for this notion is coming from Christian apologists. It's increasingly liberals who are speaking out against this because they're really getting concerned that progressive liberalism, in the John Stewart Mill sense, is facing a putsch from the authoritarian left.

The revolutionary Left always ends up killing its own people.

Old joke:

Let me explain our revolution to you, comrade. First we find a man with two houses and we take away one of his houses and give it to someone with no house.

Yes! Yes!

Then we find a man with two cars and we take away one of his cars and give it to someone with no car.

Yes! Yes!

Then we find a man with two chickens and we take away one of his chickens and give it to someone with no chickens.

No! No!

Comrade, I thought you understood our revolution.

I do, I do, but ... I have two chickens!

(I.e., we want to encourage radical students to destroy the university power structure, but that doesn't mean they should be protesting against me!)

They really aren't its own people unless you'd consider Sargon of Akkad, Computing Forever, Douglas Murray, Jordan Peterson, etc. in that light.

I feel leftist agenda is politically correct in western country nowadays. It is everywhere.

Really good interview with Gad Saad:

Not anymore. He moved to Washington DC.

Political orientation of law professors at universities in the US -- since the country overall is about 50/50, this doesn't look like the country, does it:



http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog ... -2013.html

Gad Saad in a Q & A about this:

I think there are a few isolated incidents of that but that it's definitely not a trend. The main problem is reality tends to support liberal beliefs so teaching facts comes off as liberal bias to some conservatives.

You'd be surprised how many conservatively-oriented people there are in Staten Island and (especially) northeastern Queens. They definitely make up the majority of the residents of these places.

As for the bar graph, one should obtain a graph showing the political ideologies of business professors even in "liberal" universities.

Exactly. Every room of higher education I ever entered was only concerned with 2 things: 1. did I do the work and 2. did I validate the work with evidence. The "alternate facts"/"fact free" conservatism that's been growing since the turn of the century is obviously not going to play well if you're in an institution that values evidence over opinion. It's not that conservatism doesn't have merits, it's that they don't want to engage in logical discussion anymore. TBH, the last conservative that I read that would even wade into logical merits for conservative arguments was William F. Buckley and he's been dead a decade.

I really have to think that people who put this argument forward and who are agreeing with it haven't done their homework. Liberals and leftist utopians are completely different things. Leftist utopians are kindred antiscience spirits to young earth creationists. The colleges are filling up with leftist utopians in the social sciences, they're coercing the other leftists and even the liberals into silence, and in particular center-left liberals are really getting miserable in the current environment.


I'd love for someone to show me the alt-right alternative facts that Jonathan Haidt, Gad Saad, Jordan Peterson, and Sam Harris are spewing.

Academics who teach in the pseudo sciences -- "political science", sociology, economics, psychology often have a leftward political bias in their overall world view. These folks accept as axiomatic that the state or government leads the way for society and that state or government intervention and redistribution is necessary for the society to function at all.

Their methods are questionable at best.
"We compare the ideological balance of the legal academy to the ideological balance of the legal profession. To do so, we match professors listed in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Law Teachers and lawyers listed in the Martindale-Hubbell directory to a measure of political ideology based on political donations. We find that 15% of law professors, compared to 35% of lawyers, are conservative. After controlling for individual characteristics, however, this 20 percentage point ideological gap narrows to around 13 percentage points. We argue that this ideological uniformity marginalizes law professors, but that it may not be possible to improve the ideological balance of the legal academy without sacrificing other values."

It does not take into account professors who did not make political donations or who's political donations were unknown, and how do they determine whether or not a professor has made political donations, and to whom anyway? Also, how do the researchers determine the political orientation of a particular organization in instances where stereotyping exists? For example, many conservatives consider the ACLU liberal when the mission of the ACLU is to uphold civil liberties, and ensure the law is followed as it is written. It's perceived as liberal due to a tendency among many conservatives to view that which they don't agree with as liberal. To these conservatives, the ACLU might represent a liberal agenda, but to a law professor, the ACLU might represent an organization that advocates for the proper following and application of the law.

You might be aware that the former NFL player who is now dead, Aaron Hernandez, was recently acquitted of murder while serving time for another murder. His attorney released a statement "Justice was served." A conservative with no legal background may think Aaron Hernandez should have been found guilty of this murder on the basis of the fact that he's a bad guy. But to a lawyer/law professor, finding someone guilty of a crime when the evidence does not support that guilt (regardless of whether or not the person is actually guilty), is a miscarriage of justice.

My university is very left-leaning. However, it's not as bad as the SJW horror stories coming from the US where people have been silenced and even suspended just for criticising certain far-left beliefs (even the extremely racist and sexist beliefs- yes, the left is capable of these things too). I've heard tutors here spouting off things that would lead to complaints in the US- and these people do generally lean left. I'm left-wing too, very vocal about my socialism, but I believe that the US university trend of silencing "uncomfortable" and "triggering" (this is a term that is being disgustingly overused outside the MH contexts it originated in) speech is dangerous.