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The right's skepticism is a response to academia becoming two things: 1. monolithically leftist and 2. activist in nature. Nobody is arguing with basic researc

The right's skepticism is a response to academia becoming two things: 1. monolithically leftist and 2. activist in nature. Nobody is arguing with basic research. But when a peer reviewed gender studies journal publishes a rewriting of Mein Kampf, I think it's fair to suspect that a lot of non-science masquerading as real science is indeed pouring out of Universities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affa...

scarmig 7y ago
> Nobody is arguing with basic research See: basic research on climate change. Republicans don't so much argue with it as dismiss it outright.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- nostromo 7y ago
  There is indeed a lot of magical thinking going around. The political left calls GMO crops dangerous and fear mongers without a shred of scientific evidence. Or they spread fear about the pharmaceutical industry -- and how those evil drug researchers are trying to get people addicted to their drugs for profit. Then when regular people decide not to trust any drugs at all -- including vaccines -- people wonder how that could have possibly happened, after demonizing the entire field of research for decades. And on the political right we of course have wilful disinformation about climate change.
  - neaden 7y ago
    Can you name some prominent elected officials on the left who fear monger about vaccines? I assure you that I can provide quite a long list of elected republicans who've said some bananas things about climate change for instance.
GuiA 7y ago
Gender studies is not science so I’m not sure how that fits into the discourse. Not to mention that it’s not even that good an example to prove anything about academia - it’s a minuscule subfield with little funding in comparison to any other academic discipline. None of the major public universities I attended even had a gender studies department - at best it was a specialty within sociology/anthropology with a dozen grad students or so. The only thing in which gender studies has a disproportionate representation is as the favorite example in the rhetoric of anti-academics. Please show how physics/biology/math/geology/climate science/etc is “monothically leftist and activist in nature”.
- nostromo 7y ago
  Gender studies is considered a social science in most universities. And professors of all majors are almost monolithically left-leaning, compared to the population. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-dramatic-shift-among-college-professors-thats-hurting-students-education/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-d...
  - zajio1am 7y ago
    Aren't gender studies generally considered humanities and not social sciences?
  - umeshunni 7y ago
    "social science", "political science" etc are not science. They are liberal arts masquerading as science to claim legitimacy. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-science-an-oxymoron-will-that-ever-change/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s...
AlexandrB 7y ago
This analysis confuses cause and effect. Science became "leftist" because the right rejected the findings of science in areas like climatology in favour of its own pseudoscientific nonsense. Consider how the Evangelical right decided to even reject bedrock ideas like evolution because it conflicted with ideology. Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities.
- fromthestart 7y ago
  >This analysis confuses cause and effect. Science became "leftist" because the right rejected the findings of science in areas like climatology in favour of its own pseudoscientific nonsense. Academic institutions have leaned left since at least the 60s, back when leftism was an actual counterculture movement. This has nothing to do with climate science. >Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities. Gender studies is fully related to the discussion, because it is an exclusively leftist pursuit, intrinsically linked to modern "liberal" policymaking, and respected institutions tacitly enforce their pseudoscientific, sexist, racist, and classist drivel by allowing them space and funding, while making no such allowances to anything related to right wing politics. Right leaning ideas are effectively forbidden at the majority of so called elite universities in the U.S. How can you expect scientific departments to be unbiased when their administration and sources of funding are openly and strongly politically leaning and active? Further, and most importantly, do you really believe that climate science is immune to dogma and the statistical abuses that are responsible for the replication crisis evident in other empirical disciplines? Even asking such a question is career suicide - which unfortunately justifies some degree of right wing scepticism of modern academia due to politicization.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    The majority of academic scientists identified as Republicans, up through the 80s. The conspiracy you imagine of academic administrators shutting down research that undermines climate change because of gender studies is inane.
ncallaway 7y ago
> Nobody is arguing with basic research This is patently false. Maybe you aren't arguing with basic research, but people absolutely are.
euroPoor 7y ago
I’m just waiting for someone to throw in ‘cultural marxism’ in this thread. Sure, you may believe that some departments at university skew left but I still need to see evidence that this is a fact for all universities across the board and that it’s systematically introducing bias into research.
- traverseda 7y ago
  I think that "all universities across the board" is a bit of a high standard. Even something as low as 30% would be enough to be a big problem. I think there's evidence of a fairly significant amount of bias being introduced.
  - euroPoor 7y ago
    Then let’s see the evidence for bias, for bad science being done by mostly leftwing or leftist people.
    - traverseda 7y ago
      I can do both of those things separately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis offers the best evidence I can offer for bad science being done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_ac... Goes over the issues related to politics, conservatives aren't as under-represented when you include STEM fields, but pay special attention to the disciplinary variance. >Focusing specifically on social psychology academics, a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1. Also note what fields are facing the most obvious replication crisis. I expect you'll want to do your own research, but that should get you started.
      - euroPoor 7y ago
        I was not talking about bad science in general. I could say that in general, science seems to be in crisis [1] and pinning it down to people whose political affiliation does not suit your needs is reductive. Also, because there’s some different distributions does not mean leftwing = bad. Another interpretation could be: the GOP platform is highly anti-science and most scientists wouldn’t want to be associated to such a horrendous organization which doubts scientific consensus regarding an issue that’s threatening the whole of civilization. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-hitting-a-wall-part-1/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-...
en-us 7y ago
Conflating gender studies with climate study is absurd. Pretty telling microcosm here of the validity of the Right's criticism of academia.
- dnissley 7y ago
  Can you tell me why it's absurd? I'm not even on the right, but I certainly take issue with a lot of the ideas coming out of gender studies (and similar) departments and how easily they are accepted as truth and how quickly they spread. Many of those ideas, if taken seriously, seem to have the possibility to rearrange society in a pretty awful way. In fact, anecdotally, they already seem to be having a pretty negative effect on our world and their influence seems to be on the rise. Now, I'm not quite as concerned about this as climate change, but it's still a real issue. Do you not see this as a real issue?
  - en-us 7y ago
    I am not saying that criticism of gender studies is absurd, I am saying that conflating climate science with gender studies is absurd. The validity of the social sciences as "real science" has long been in question, long before the concerns of modern day politics. This problem is inherent to these fields, because instead of studying the objective physical world they study literature, history, politics, art, etc. Many social sciences are more accurately called liberal arts in my opinion, and they co-opted the word "science" to lend themselves credibility. Then on the other hand you have climate science, which does study the objective physical world. The science around this involves collecting data and building models to describe the physical world instead of speculating about the nature of mankind. It is an apples to oranges comparison. Just to illustrate, forget about climate science and gender studies because they are politically charged. If the above poster had criticized something like the study of French medieval literature and used that to argue that particle physics is a systemically flawed and biased field, I would also call that comparison absurd.
    - username90 7y ago
      You are mixing up arguments. The argument is not: Social science is nut trustworthy so no science is trustworthy. The argument is: Social scientists pushed to be put on the same level as natural scientists, but then they pushed a bunch of politicized bullshit and tarnished the reputation of all scientists in the public's eye. It doesn't matter what is true or not, people in general are stupid. The masses on the left trust scientists, since they feel that these bullshit pushers are pushing bullshit in the right direction (Not related to climate change). The masses on the right doesn't trust scientists for the same reason. The solution is not to teach people to properly evaluate the validity of different scientific claims, that is impossible, the solution is to build up the trust of scientists in everyone's eyes as much as possible by kicking out all the bullshit. Good arguments actually works, but if you try to feed them 50% bullshit they will refuse to swallow even the good parts since they stopped trusting you.
falcrist 7y ago
Academia is neither monolithically leftist, nor is it activist by nature. You have only to spend 5 minutes in a typical economics class to understand that that field favors neoliberal ideas. If you sit down and have a conversation with an actual leftist (particularly a marxist) professor, you'll hear something that nobody outside of the system seems to discuss. Marxism is very uncommon in most departments. > Nobody is arguing with basic research. Are you kidding me? There are places in the US where powerful organizations and even state legislatures are actively trying to prevent schools from teaching evolution. Look at this development from two years ago: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/316487-new-wave-of-anti-evolution-bills-hit-states https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/316487-new-wave-of-... At the federal level, we have congresspeople carrying snow into session so they can deny that climate change is occurring. I regularly see arguments online include discussion of how NASA and NOAA are doctoring the evidence. I wonder where they're getting THAT idea from... So yea. People absolutely ARE arguing with basic research. Large numbers of people. Significant fractions of the population. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affa... From your link: Affilia: _"Journal of Women and Social Work is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers social work practice(s) and feminist analysis of gender inequality."_ How is this related to science (much less basic scientific research)? Even if it WERE a scientific journal, an anecdote about being fooled by a hoax doesn't invalidate the scientific research being done today.
- kebman 7y ago
  I should think that attending any school of economics would give you that idea, but enter just about any faculty of the humanities or the social sciences, and the picture quickly becomes quite different.
  - falcrist 7y ago
    I happened to go back to school fairly recently. I was required to take some humanities and social science classes. I'd say there's a lot more diversity of opinion in the rest of the departments than there is in econ. I didn't get any sense of political agenda in the history department, and the sociology department seemed to be deliberately avoiding it. I actually started university under the assumption that professors would be dogmatically pushing their agenda. I was wrong.

scarmig 7y ago

> Nobody is arguing with basic research See: basic research on climate change. Republicans don't so much argue with it as dismiss it outright.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
nostromo 7y ago
There is indeed a lot of magical thinking going around. The political left calls GMO crops dangerous and fear mongers without a shred of scientific evidence. Or they spread fear about the pharmaceutical industry -- and how those evil drug researchers are trying to get people addicted to their drugs for profit. Then when regular people decide not to trust any drugs at all -- including vaccines -- people wonder how that could have possibly happened, after demonizing the entire field of research for decades. And on the political right we of course have wilful disinformation about climate change.
- neaden 7y ago
  Can you name some prominent elected officials on the left who fear monger about vaccines? I assure you that I can provide quite a long list of elected republicans who've said some bananas things about climate change for instance.

GuiA 7y ago

Gender studies is not science so I’m not sure how that fits into the discourse. Not to mention that it’s not even that good an example to prove anything about academia - it’s a minuscule subfield with little funding in comparison to any other academic discipline. None of the major public universities I attended even had a gender studies department - at best it was a specialty within sociology/anthropology with a dozen grad students or so. The only thing in which gender studies has a disproportionate representation is as the favorite example in the rhetoric of anti-academics. Please show how physics/biology/math/geology/climate science/etc is “monothically leftist and activist in nature”.

nostromo 7y ago
Gender studies is considered a social science in most universities. And professors of all majors are almost monolithically left-leaning, compared to the population. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-dramatic-shift-among-college-professors-thats-hurting-students-education/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/11/the-d...
- zajio1am 7y ago
  Aren't gender studies generally considered humanities and not social sciences?
- umeshunni 7y ago
  "social science", "political science" etc are not science. They are liberal arts masquerading as science to claim legitimacy. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-science-an-oxymoron-will-that-ever-change/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-social-s...

AlexandrB 7y ago

This analysis confuses cause and effect. Science became "leftist" because the right rejected the findings of science in areas like climatology in favour of its own pseudoscientific nonsense. Consider how the Evangelical right decided to even reject bedrock ideas like evolution because it conflicted with ideology. Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities.

fromthestart 7y ago
>This analysis confuses cause and effect. Science became "leftist" because the right rejected the findings of science in areas like climatology in favour of its own pseudoscientific nonsense. Academic institutions have leaned left since at least the 60s, back when leftism was an actual counterculture movement. This has nothing to do with climate science. >Complaints about "gender studies" are mostly a red herring. Social sciences are not the same as geology, climatology, or biology and don't inhabit the same departments in most universities. Gender studies is fully related to the discussion, because it is an exclusively leftist pursuit, intrinsically linked to modern "liberal" policymaking, and respected institutions tacitly enforce their pseudoscientific, sexist, racist, and classist drivel by allowing them space and funding, while making no such allowances to anything related to right wing politics. Right leaning ideas are effectively forbidden at the majority of so called elite universities in the U.S. How can you expect scientific departments to be unbiased when their administration and sources of funding are openly and strongly politically leaning and active? Further, and most importantly, do you really believe that climate science is immune to dogma and the statistical abuses that are responsible for the replication crisis evident in other empirical disciplines? Even asking such a question is career suicide - which unfortunately justifies some degree of right wing scepticism of modern academia due to politicization.
- scarmig 7y ago
  The majority of academic scientists identified as Republicans, up through the 80s. The conspiracy you imagine of academic administrators shutting down research that undermines climate change because of gender studies is inane.

ncallaway 7y ago

> Nobody is arguing with basic research This is patently false. Maybe you aren't arguing with basic research, but people absolutely are.

euroPoor 7y ago

I’m just waiting for someone to throw in ‘cultural marxism’ in this thread. Sure, you may believe that some departments at university skew left but I still need to see evidence that this is a fact for all universities across the board and that it’s systematically introducing bias into research.

traverseda 7y ago
I think that "all universities across the board" is a bit of a high standard. Even something as low as 30% would be enough to be a big problem. I think there's evidence of a fairly significant amount of bias being introduced.
- euroPoor 7y ago
  Then let’s see the evidence for bias, for bad science being done by mostly leftwing or leftist people.
  - traverseda 7y ago
    I can do both of those things separately. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis offers the best evidence I can offer for bad science being done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_ac... Goes over the issues related to politics, conservatives aren't as under-represented when you include STEM fields, but pay special attention to the disciplinary variance. >Focusing specifically on social psychology academics, a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1. Also note what fields are facing the most obvious replication crisis. I expect you'll want to do your own research, but that should get you started.
    - euroPoor 7y ago
      I was not talking about bad science in general. I could say that in general, science seems to be in crisis [1] and pinning it down to people whose political affiliation does not suit your needs is reductive. Also, because there’s some different distributions does not mean leftwing = bad. Another interpretation could be: the GOP platform is highly anti-science and most scientists wouldn’t want to be associated to such a horrendous organization which doubts scientific consensus regarding an issue that’s threatening the whole of civilization. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-hitting-a-wall-part-1/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/is-science-...

en-us 7y ago

Conflating gender studies with climate study is absurd. Pretty telling microcosm here of the validity of the Right's criticism of academia.

dnissley 7y ago
Can you tell me why it's absurd? I'm not even on the right, but I certainly take issue with a lot of the ideas coming out of gender studies (and similar) departments and how easily they are accepted as truth and how quickly they spread. Many of those ideas, if taken seriously, seem to have the possibility to rearrange society in a pretty awful way. In fact, anecdotally, they already seem to be having a pretty negative effect on our world and their influence seems to be on the rise. Now, I'm not quite as concerned about this as climate change, but it's still a real issue. Do you not see this as a real issue?
- en-us 7y ago
  I am not saying that criticism of gender studies is absurd, I am saying that conflating climate science with gender studies is absurd. The validity of the social sciences as "real science" has long been in question, long before the concerns of modern day politics. This problem is inherent to these fields, because instead of studying the objective physical world they study literature, history, politics, art, etc. Many social sciences are more accurately called liberal arts in my opinion, and they co-opted the word "science" to lend themselves credibility. Then on the other hand you have climate science, which does study the objective physical world. The science around this involves collecting data and building models to describe the physical world instead of speculating about the nature of mankind. It is an apples to oranges comparison. Just to illustrate, forget about climate science and gender studies because they are politically charged. If the above poster had criticized something like the study of French medieval literature and used that to argue that particle physics is a systemically flawed and biased field, I would also call that comparison absurd.
  - username90 7y ago
    You are mixing up arguments. The argument is not: Social science is nut trustworthy so no science is trustworthy. The argument is: Social scientists pushed to be put on the same level as natural scientists, but then they pushed a bunch of politicized bullshit and tarnished the reputation of all scientists in the public's eye. It doesn't matter what is true or not, people in general are stupid. The masses on the left trust scientists, since they feel that these bullshit pushers are pushing bullshit in the right direction (Not related to climate change). The masses on the right doesn't trust scientists for the same reason. The solution is not to teach people to properly evaluate the validity of different scientific claims, that is impossible, the solution is to build up the trust of scientists in everyone's eyes as much as possible by kicking out all the bullshit. Good arguments actually works, but if you try to feed them 50% bullshit they will refuse to swallow even the good parts since they stopped trusting you.

falcrist 7y ago

Academia is neither monolithically leftist, nor is it activist by nature. You have only to spend 5 minutes in a typical economics class to understand that that field favors neoliberal ideas. If you sit down and have a conversation with an actual leftist (particularly a marxist) professor, you'll hear something that nobody outside of the system seems to discuss. Marxism is very uncommon in most departments. > Nobody is arguing with basic research. Are you kidding me? There are places in the US where powerful organizations and even state legislatures are actively trying to prevent schools from teaching evolution. Look at this development from two years ago: https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/316487-new-wave-of-anti-evolution-bills-hit-states https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/316487-new-wave-of-... At the federal level, we have congresspeople carrying snow into session so they can deny that climate change is occurring. I regularly see arguments online include discussion of how NASA and NOAA are doctoring the evidence. I wonder where they're getting THAT idea from... So yea. People absolutely ARE arguing with basic research. Large numbers of people. Significant fractions of the population. > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affilia#Grievance_Studies_affa... From your link: Affilia: _"Journal of Women and Social Work is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that covers social work practice(s) and feminist analysis of gender inequality."_ How is this related to science (much less basic scientific research)? Even if it WERE a scientific journal, an anecdote about being fooled by a hoax doesn't invalidate the scientific research being done today.

kebman 7y ago
I should think that attending any school of economics would give you that idea, but enter just about any faculty of the humanities or the social sciences, and the picture quickly becomes quite different.
- falcrist 7y ago
  I happened to go back to school fairly recently. I was required to take some humanities and social science classes. I'd say there's a lot more diversity of opinion in the rest of the departments than there is in econ. I didn't get any sense of political agenda in the history department, and the sociology department seemed to be deliberately avoiding it. I actually started university under the assumption that professors would be dogmatically pushing their agenda. I was wrong.