Obviously racists support racial discrimination. That doesn't mean you in particular are a racist. Intentions are important. There's a difference between someone being ignorant and someone being racist. You can support a "bad" policy for either reason. Personally I think race based decision making is a net negative.

I've asked you twice before (and posed a smilar question itt that went unanswered/avoided)and I don't expect anything different this time, but here goes....

How do you determine the qualifying races? What are they? How do you rank/prioritize them? It seems very strange to me that people support race based discrimination but avoid the most obvious and basic question as to how it would work
You are deeply concerned with "bad faith" posting... but somehow you missed the fact I wasn't banned for "racist posting"
Yeah I didn't think there was even a debate about colleges being completely left biased. Are people actually denying that? It seems as silly of an argument as questioning the claim that the NRA is conservative

This type of lunacy isn't rare, it was all predicted by those that understand the roots of the ideology. These are certainly perpetuated by left wing students and professors
https://twitter.com/NAChristakis/sta...13320450662400

Here's the thing about colleges and universities having a so-called left bias. The right has now adopted things like alternative facts, climate denial, etc. Things that are not based in an objective reality. Most higher education institutions strive to expand their students understanding of objective reality. So yeah, colleges are left biased in the respect that 'reason' is completely left biased.

They are left bias because their main customer base is exceedingly left

You guys just shooting the breeze or do you have some numbers on these extremes? Sounds a little biased without any support.

https://www.people-press.org/2018/03...raphic-groups/

I am somewhat ambivalent to Universities denying speakers.

If a controversial speaker is going to enrich themselves on campus grounds, I think it is reasonable to make the stance that a university wont support them gaining financially off the student body because of moralistic reasons. I don't know about political, but I am at least open for debate on that front.

I think it becomes fairly fuzzy when liberal groups shut down conservative speakers who booked an open forum and aren't gaining financially directly.

I'm pretty damn liberal and the loony toons lefty stuff on colleges consistently freaks me out.

But it's always been this way. My uncle used to rail about it in the 80s. Do I think it's a significant threat? No. Not anymore than I think Contemporary Literary Criticism is a significant literary force outside the incestuous pedagogical world of academia. It's just their way of justifying their own existence.

99% of kids come out of college, hit the real world, and form their own world-view.

Even the AC-ists that used to dominate this forum (or Politics I guess, R.I.P.) - I think were largely influenced by the Koch's making massive contributions to universities in exchange for them pushing Hayek front and center in Econ 101 classes. But they got over it after a few years in the real world, just like kids have awlays done.

Turning Point USA provides a useful alternative viewpoint to left wing bias on campus with their blog Campus Reform





Seems to happen a lot though

How do you link a site like this and believe people will take you seriously? It's an inch above 8chan.

Which one is it though?

Are you denying a bias or justifying it?

Which one is it, do you walk to work or do you take a lunch?


Not really interested in arguing with you about what left and right are. The similar gaslighting discussion in the trump thread is enough for now. But, hey, if you've got numbers or whatever instead of your feels, fire away.

I'm curious what are some possible solutions to this left wing bias in academia?

This is incredibly complicated but imo a good start would be to recognize and stand up to ridiculous ideology and behavior. IMO it has spun out of control especially where the professors are far left and conservatives are nowhere to be seen. Fat studies people. Fat studies. This exists.

I don't think the solution is to control or regulate. It should be for people to stand up, show some courage, and speak out. People should also support those speaking up and it shouldn't cost you your job to defend completely mainstream science or a differing pov. You shouldn't even be worried about it. Kind of like a sunlight is the best disinfectant approach. Every time people speak up they have to worry that a mob of loons will successfully go after their career

The video below highlights some of the academic fraud and lunacy. Instead of this being a wake up call, they are targeting Bogosian and going after his job. The peer reviewed journals are an academic fraud. They re-wrote a section of mein kampf and replaced jews with white men. It was approved.



The reason I point to left vs right here is because it's clear that these are far leftists producing this ideologically. There is nobody even remotely conservative around to offer any sort of resistance or pump the brakes. I think this has created an echo chamber producing completely loony (never mind angry and spiteful) ideology

So basically nothing?

This seems an absurd claim. It seems obvious that the customer base of higher education is more wealthy than not and that this is truer at the more elite institutions than at the lesser institutions, whereas is the most elite institutions that are most frequently accused of being left biased. On the other hand, richer people are less likely to be left leaning.

Put another way: I just don't believe the claim that Harvard's customer base is left wing.

What are they teaching in fat studies that we should all be concerned about?

Do nothing because it has as much impact on the real world as a naval-gazing post-modern criticism of King Lear.

Random selection:

Clearly academia is this close to capturing the cultural zeitgeist and must be stopped.

I had to read this **** in college and quickly realized these people were just cranking out mindless psycho-babble to justify their own existence. Same as it ever was. Jordan Peterson's babble reminds me of this - he's just found a sympathetic crowd and run with it.

Academia is like dinosaur rock waiting for the Sex Pistols to come along and just blow it all out of the water - except if that never happened - and all modern rock bands were still just some variation on Styx or Blue Oyster Cult.

The core of "academia" are scientists and engineers who crank out something very much more serious and very much more useful than the stuff you mention. The stuff you mention is there (in the US) to attract the paying customers who want a degree without having to learn anything; it serves as a way of acrediting who belongs to the upper middle class.

Sorry I mean non-hard-science academia. Soft-sciences have some place as well.

I just hold up literary criticism as an example of academia going so far up its own butt it can't find its way out. Which is also how I look at some of the off-the-rails lefty stuff that right-wing media is so happy to trumpet.

While I wouldn't impune the motives of any particular post on 2+2, I think the movements about left wing bias in media and academia are similar in that they're not about identifying a problem and coming to the table with solution but rather about delegitimization.

I think there's a fair amount of truth to that, but at the same time I don't think it's worth worrying about very much. Higher education isn't going away. It's probably mostly a concern with regard to the politics of science research funding. That's worth fighting about of course, but I doubt that any of the usual consternation (e.g. about Evergreen, or "grievance studies", or ...) has much real impact on anything important. And for the most part the more radical goings-on which provide fodder for that consternation aren't very important either, AFAICT.

And this post is itself admitted conjecture meant to delegiitmize an argument against your own admitted bias. Shocking!

I believe there is a real issue with left groups shutting down right speakers. There absolutely is an issue with left shame culture on campuses across the country.

As conjectures go, it's a pretty reasonable one. It's also a fair point that a lot of political arguments on all sides involve attempts aimed at challenging the legitimacy of various institutions/policies/authorities/whatever. This is one reason why I'm fascinated by the sociology of knowledge and the role that "legitimacy" plays in it. So that's at least one good reason to keep higher education: The social sciences have some interesting things to say about all that

Its also a pretty reasonable conjecture to assume left media is biased, but that is being casually dismissed as unreasonable because it doesn't fit with a personal narrative.

I thought that debate was about whether "mainstream media" (however defined) was left-leaning, rather than about whether "left media" (however defined) was biased?

I think it's certainly reasonable to expect that media outfits with explicitly left/liberal viewpoints would have a kind of "bias", at least in the sense that the viewpoint informs what topics they cover and some of the background assumptions. Although I don't think it follows from the fact of having a viewpoint that one will be "biased" in the sense of "dishonest" or "misleading", if that makes sense. The word bias probably also needs careful definition.

It's less clear to me that the media as some kind of overarching institution is left-leaning in any really meaningful way, but I also feel like my media consumption habits are idiosyncratic enough that I don't really care either way. At least once in the past I saw a study that argued that there was no measurable liberal bias among some set of major news outlets, but I imagine there's plenty of room to argue about methods for studying something like that.

It has indeed always been this way, and students gonna student. In February 1933, a month after Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, the Oxford Union Society -- the university's elite debating club -- passed the motion 'This House will under no circumstances fight for its King and Country' by 275 to 153, just because pacifism was fashionable after the Great War.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ki...Country_debate

In Churchill's view, this idiotic vote, reported around the world, affected and encouraged Nazi thinking. It is obviously true that popular pacifism in Britain and the US brought about the Second World War and killed some sixty million people.

On the other hand, those 275 Oxford idiots probably did in fact join the colours a few years later, when they were still liable to conscription and stuff got serious. Bit late to be sorry by then, of course.