Is their a Leftist Agenda in Academia?

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Truthfully I haven't been reading this thread from end to end so I don't think you'll get much of an accurate readout of what I'm thinking by hermeneutics.

What's bothered me is a thread flowing through it, lapping up occasionally, that seems to read in favor of the notion that anyone whose suggesting the colleges are tipping perniciously left are uneducated bumpkins, or asserting in tandem with this that reality itself tips far enough left that anyone with eyes to see should be able to tell that this is a self-delivered indictment on one's own intelligence to claim that its a bad thing. Watching the current politics play out it seems like there are fewer and fewer people, even within academia, who are pure enough in their ideology to make the grade and you even get long-time respected faculty getting vitriolic demands for their resignation over even saying, in the most polite and abstract way you could, 'lighten up - it's Halloween' in the face of cultural appropriation claims. I think there are enough very credible center-left professors, interestingly enough at least a few of the most noteworthy in psychology, standing up and calling the situation out and trying to suggest solutions to the social dilemma. What I will give most of the professors - what the radical activists are doing (those generated on campus who are trying to bully the administration with outlandish demands) seem to be getting riled up by professors who are in fields that would mean very little if activism weren't still in business and in full swing. I wouldn't apply that to psychology or things like that in the formal sense, it does apply more to offices such as race and gender studies and groups similar to where the article I shared came from.

I think Liberals tend more towards academia than Conservatives, so it is not surprising that they are more represented there.

Conservatives don't value learning, their moral center is around personal success and acquisitions; learning can get in the way of these things.

Any empirical evidence to back up that claim? America's system of public education, in fact, seems to contradict your assertion.

I'm conservative, and I value personal responsibility and the pursuit of excellence, and the acquisition of knowledge helps in their attainment.

What are your thoughts on Trump's behavior with regard to personal responsibility? I don't think he has shown any.

The topic gets challenging because what gets classed as more conservative, too conservative, or anywhere right of center seems like its a moving target.

I do think there's good evidence for a lot of more purely social conservatives, whether they vote republican or democrat (think of the south before Reagan for the later) and you have people who you'd classify simply by being more small town and rustic thus the group sizes they're used to dealing with and the types of social norms that their environment has run well on tends to disincline them from perceived over-complication of life. There are also conservatives who are something more the bulwark against progressives moving too fast and are more of the motto 'make haste slowly' because they want to see self-organizing and self-balancing systems and society keep up with the changes (the lack of them can be a danger if things move too fast). You also have neocons/neolibs and various types of libertarians and even liberal libertarians are starting to look more and more like the new center of debate.

I think what's happened at the colleges in terms of racing to the left-pole is that people like to work in places where they find like minds. The downside to this is that if most people feel like they're in a place where their of a minority opinion they'll either hunker down and not say much or they'll simply leave, or - if the reputation or social flavor of a sphere hits them early - they may curb their aspirations to become a professor and work in business instead. I think that acceleration is mostly this, and the more it accelerates the more caricatured the residual environment becomes. I really don't think this has a whole lot more to do with the superiority of progressive or left-leaning thought than the superiority of Christian conservative thought that dominated the divinity schools. I would argue, perhaps on behalf of the center-left, that rights and good will between all kinds of groups and incorporating them into the fabric of society gainfully makes their lives better and it's a net good, at the same time it also means that they assimilate into society in terms of having a niche, having a role, a good they deliver and the responsibilities to go with those rights. I won't harp too much on the later because I think more people than not get it, but I do see where in the public mass movement memeosphere there's not much discussion of the later and it seems like something that the center and right are more likely to bring up.

I think knowledge scares people sometimes; sometimes people want to live in an illusion rather than confront the reality of their environment.

Exactly. That explains college millennials perfectly.

And quite a few of their professors.

This is part of why I really love Jordan Peterson's take on Nietzsche and Jung. My first concern usually when people wheel out some kind of Manichean boogeyman to blame all their problems and the pain of living on is that they're throwing a scapegoat between themselves and the possibility of facing the that life is just hard and meaningless period or even facing their own past and current behavior in the cold light of day. In other cases fear of knowledge or education might be the fear that education will lead them to the blank emptiness of a universe without a creator or without a purpose.

Seems like anytime you see shoot-the-messenger behavior going on there's a deeper sacred metaphysical object or shared belief that's being attacked by that message along with a subconscious (or conscious) understanding by the people acting that way that the message is for the most part true and that whatever game was in play would be up for dissolution if that message won out.

Gad Saad had some very interesting things here to say about the internal cohesiveness or lack of it across the social sciences.

Bay Area college professor used U-shaped bike lock in beating, police say
Alleged Antifa bike lock attacker Eric Clanton held in Berkeley jail

BERKELEY — A former Diablo Valley College professor was arrested Wednesday in connection with the use of a bike lock in the beating of three people during a rally for President Donald Trump last month, police said Thursday.

Eric Clanton remained in custody in lieu of $200,000 bail at Berkeley Jail on Thursday and is scheduled to be arraigned at 9 a.m. Friday at Oakland’s Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse. He was arrested on three counts of suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon that isn’t a firearm and assault causing great bodily injury.

http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/05/24/ ... t-suspect/

So, he's not wrong when he says that social sciences are sciences because the people who study them use the scientific method in order to find objective truth...


There's the thing, psychology, sociology, etc. are soft sciences because we simply cannot boil them down to the cold equations, yet. I firmly believe that all human behavior, thought processes, emotional states, etc. correspond to physical brain states. Unfortunately, we simply do not have the technology to measure these brain states at this time. Therefore, social science remains soft and slippery and depends on a lot of theory and supposition that we can only test indirectly.


That being said, the best theoretical frames do build on the things we know about the brain's "firmware" that all humans seem to possess. For example, humans seem to be hardwired for antipathy toward those they consider different and affinity toward those they consider similar. Humans also have a strong survival drive, they seem to be hardwired for religion, etc.

But, that's about as far as we can go toward internal cohesiveness at this point. Because the social sciences are so soft slippery and theory dependent, there are a lot of fringe/nutty theories out there (like the one you linked to previously). However, that's not representative of main stream social science. When people point to that kind of "social science", it's basically just a bunch of strawman nonsense, put out by anti-intellectual cultural warriors trying to gin up the sort of hysterical reactions we see in this thread.

I wouldn't at all cast aspersion on anyone who is, as you say, trying to do science and keep the noise out of their office.

OTOH I do think, with the theory of evolution, there's a strong case to be made for where we came from and for what purpose our initial apparatus was built for (or what kind of conditional bludgeoning it survived - however you want to look at it). From there we see increasingly complex interactions of instinct with structures and it gets messy enough that it's difficult to follow. It sounds like the big five personality types might be a way to repel back in because they give some type of grid to organize the field of research into.

At the same time I won't lie - I don't know everything that's going on the field, just that I do think it would be less wild-west if there could be one major dedicated project to flesh out in further details , in the same way that the physicists have General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics to explore for congruencies.

There are fields, such as human behavior in the social environment--basically a mash up of psychology and sociology-- that do try to flesh out details and provide a better foundation to social sciences in general. The problem is, as stated before, the subject is just really soft and slippery, because beyond some very basic firmware, human psychology is too plastic and varied.

We know that humans tend to favor those who are similar to them and dislike those who are different. But what we define as similar and different is highly variable from person to person and culture to culture.

We also know that survival drives are strong in humans and greatly affect behavior, but survival strategies employed depend greatly on the nature and size of social units.

Communal economics dominate human societies at a tribal level, but beyond that economics become much more individualistic and market based as a natural progression, etc.

The more complex human societies get, the harder it is to pick out those basic drivers of human behavior and understand how they manifest and drive social forces.

We've only been studying human societies for about a hundred years or so. It will take more time to develop a General Relativity and/or Quantum theory for social sciences, but people are working on it.

Unfortunately even that spoof probably would be the top choice of uni if it were real to some people.