Is their a Leftist Agenda in Academia?

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Yeah, in high school we were taught the "right to bear arms" in the 2nd amendment of the US Constitution, meant ships could bear their armaments.

I don't think this necessarily invalidates your experience. I went to a city university in the mid 2000's, mostly a four year and masters but a commuter school, and I didn't see any of it either.

I think the only disappointment I have with the version of the video I shared a couple posts ago is that it doesn't have the Q&A. I remember posting this one before and there were one or two really good moments in that which even surpassed his speech. Jonathan has admitted a couple times that even through the 90's and 2000's he was on the left, started reading books by conservatives hoping to destroy their logic and instead found himself drifting a bit more toward the center. I offer his thoughts because of how well he articulates the situation, here and in other lectures he makes, clarifying both what it is and what it isn't.

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.