Is their a Leftist Agenda in Academia?

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Whether or not actual paper says what the article in your link claims, I don't know. The journal wants over $200 for full access to the paper, so it's contents will remain a mystery. However, remember that academics have to keep publishing papers to stay relevant and advance their career. The papers are part of their product line, and it costs money to do very in depth, ground breaking research, that most academics just don't have, so they churn mountains from molehills, make things horribly complex, and hope they can fly on pretentiousness.

However, it's true that many fields of study have a male bias. This is not misogyny, but a product of cultures long past.

Take physical anthropology for example. Surely most of our non-human ancestors were not males. Surely the sex rations were roughly balanced, yet the artist depictions of them are almost always male, and the terms for them, "homo" is related to the Latin word for man, which is male, and "cavemen" is the general rather than "cavewoman", and phrases such as "The history of man", "primitive man", "modern man" abound. Even this newly discovered hominid Denisovan is called "Denisovan man".

Surely, you have seen this....



More often than this...



Or this...



If an alien were to come here and start investigating the evolution of human kind using our data, they might assume that females were a recent development.

Why are males so thoroughly over represented in the field of physical anthropology? Because until recently, most anthropologists were men, who grew up in what we would call a patriarchal society and would not reasonably think to draw a cavewoman or describe humanity in female terms.

It's not misogyny but rather being an innocent product of one's society. You will notice that most of the renderings of modern humans are also caucasian even though Asians comprise the largest single human "racial" demographic. Why not draw an Asian? Because most of the people who made the drawings were caucasian and likely grew up in predominantly caucasian societies.

More news from the Junior Totalitarian League:

Black Lives Matter Students Shut Down the ACLU's Campus Free Speech Event Because 'Liberalism Is White Supremacy'

Students affiliated with the Black Lives Matter movement crashed an event at the College of William & Mary, rushed the stage, and prevented the invited guest—the American Civil Liberties Union's Claire Gastañaga, a W & M alum—from speaking.

Ironically, Gastañaga had intended to speak on the subject, "Students and the First Amendment."

The disruption was livestreamed on BLM at W&M's Facebook page. Students took to the stage just a few moments after Gastañaga began her remarks. At first, she attempted to spin the demonstration as a welcome example of the kind of thing she had come to campus to discuss, commenting "Good, I like this," as they lined up and raised their signs. "I'm going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I'm going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience."

It was the last remark she was able to make before protesters drowned her out with cries of, "ACLU, you protect Hitler, too." They also chanted, "the oppressed are not impressed," "shame, shame, shame, shame," ... "blood on your hands," "the revolution will not uphold the Constitution," and, uh, "liberalism is white supremacy."

http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/04/black ... ut-down-th

An instructor at the University of Pennsylvania:

Arguing a leftist agenda and arguing that academia (especially the humanities these days) is chock full of far-left loons seem to be two distinctly different claims. On a college-by-college basis there might be something to it, like the president of Evergreen using leftist groups as a whip to his own ends, but past a few other anomalies like Soros money or whatever else we'd have to see evidence that there's really some type of organization, at the head of the colleges around the US, trumpeting this from the top down.

I think the reality is closer to what Jonathan Haidt has been suggesting - ie. that when left-wing progressives became a majority in humanities departments of the major liberal arts schools they created a hostile work environment, conservatives increasingly left, they created an increasingly wild echo chamber, and the standards went straight down hill in that respect. That probably describes an organic system failure more than it describes an agenda.

Are all university instructors like this or is this just cherry picking one of the worst ones?

White inventor of ‘white fragility’ tells University of Texas: Whites must stop becoming teachers

Don’t clap for whites

AUSTIN, Texas – The white professor who quit her full-time position to tour the country, leading seminars on “white fragility,” asked for whites in the room to come forward.

About 15 people walked to the stage and each one read a quote from the projection screen that addressed their “internalized superiority,” “racial privilege” and other deficiencies as whites.

When they finished reading, the professor told the audience to “not clap” for the white people as they returned to their seats. She announced there would be no question-and-answer session.

http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/39048/

Her gag is like a S&M dominatrix ...

1. White men get to the front!
2. White men tells us how naughty you've been.
3. White men: "We've been very naughty mistress".
4. Don't clap; they should be humiliated.

That professor could have been providing education to minority and disadvantaged students, thereby shrinking the privilege gap. Instead she's doing this.

By the same token, if whites stopped becoming teachers, there'd be a major teacher shortage, further disadvantaging minority kids.

Not that anyone is going to listen to her, she has no authority over teachers.

I guess since she resigned as a professor that means academia is now a little bit less left wing.

Unfortunately, it's just the opposite. Now she's writing books that are being used to train teachers, and lecturing at education schools across the country to promote these ideas. She has more influence than she would have if she had stayed teaching mainly on one campus.

The moral of the story seems like it's pretty simple - we, on both sides and in the center need to hold the counterproductive idiots of our group's feet to the fire. Otherwise what we all have gets worse regardless of whose scoring the points.

Apparently that isn't happening. On both sides when you criticise the counterproductive idiots, they just act offended and make a lot of noise until the criticism stops.

We're in an awkward position in general because on one side you do have idiots, of all stripes, trying to market one thing or another that doesn't line up with reality but does scratch a neurological itch for them and people like them. It's probably always been like this. The result seemed to be that some dominant structure, whether church or government, rose to organize it all and both include and exclude opinions around certain parameters. One of the challenges with what Styx666 often calls the 'legacy media' is that they were just a mouthpiece for the government and while that could rally a lot of patriotrism and tribal inspiration it was increasingly toward obsolete purposes - especially considering the age of atomic weapons and the like or post cold war era scenarios where war would eventually come down to people flying drones off to pick off enemies at a distance.

It seems like we need a much more complex vetting process for ideas and it has to be something that everyone trusts the integrity of. Leaving the marketplace of ideas wide open seems like it's the default option for those who don't believe a safer option has been proposed yet but I think it's just a matter of time before we figure this one out. We have to because with the availability of information these days more people can be rational actors, we need them to be because they'll each have increasing technical leverage over society and a lot more of the worlds welfare to be responsible for (or to say perhaps that we'll be about as strong as our weakest links). If we keep people uninformed, detached, and let the government think for it - even with the best of bureaucratic intention (wow is that a pill to swallow) the best ideas will always have to be farmed out and it seems like 8 billion lightbulbs, glowing with varying intensity, glow brighter than just a few of varying intensity.

I think the idea is we may have to pursue something like a philosophy of knowledge, innovation, etc., see what it tells us that we need to stabilize our societies, what's needed in childhood development to populate the world with the adults tomorrow needs - both ethically and intellectually, etc..

Legacy media is the least of our problems. Just look at all the idiots on the internet.

Closeted racists can be openly racist on the internet.

There's so much confirmation bias on the internet because the internet.

The internet contains a massive amount of information and most of it's untrue. The crazies can prove anything using Internet sources. 

In 1917 every school child new the Earth is round. In 2017 flatearthers are becoming more common. Such idiocy can only propagate through the Internet. 

No s---, the legacy media's barely keeping relevance.

It sounds like you don't want New Channel 4Chan to replace it - that's good perhaps.

So the point is having an apparatus for sorting truth, bringing it to the top, and only resorting to assembling that truth into narratives when and if it's absolutely necessary. Until we figure that out the internet will be the unchained guerrilla in the room.

The trouble with the internet is debates soon descend into epistemology.