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Academia and enforced conformity
Prof. Brian Anse Patrick has thoughts and experiences there.
"Perhaps I was and remain naïve in expecting free and respectful discourse, but one of my chief intellectual interests is the informational sociology of what I have described elsewhere as the new American Gun Culture. It soon became apparent this was a forbidden topic. For my dissertation work I examined the role of negative media coverage in mobilizing NRA membership, discovering that the more negative coverage NRA received over a ten-year period, the more its membership increased. My dissertation findings became my first book. But in graduate seminars at UM a senior professor would make curdled milk expressions when my research topic came up. He would say things like, "I don't let my children even play with toy guns," obviously disgusted, as if this absolutely refuted the findings. When I was nearing the end, at the dissertation writing stage, Professor Curdled Milk attempted to divert away from me a crucial dissertation writing fellowship that had so far gone to all other members of my graduate program to help them finish in a timely fashion. I called him on this and got the fellowship, but he never looked at or talked to me again."
I've encountered much the same. Folks who talk of "improving diversity" but don't want to think of improving intellectual diversity (which you'd think would be the most important kind, for a teaching institution). My late friend Prof. Bill Bailey, probably the most brilliant man I have ever known, couldn't get articles published (and thus was denied tenure) because the academic editors would say they were "politically naive" (code for "insufficiently Marxist," and I mean that literally). He was also in the communications field, where you'd think a person could contribute thought without worrying whether it was Marxist, Hegelian, of faithful to Freud.
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I prohibit my children from playing with toy guns but encourage them to utilize their practice firearms for pursuits of mock hunting and safe muzzle discipline. Guns are not a toy yet I played with "toy" guns as a child and feel like I still managed to be a responsible firearm owner. I am torn between letting what seems to be an inevitable boyhood rite transpire, and what modern societal norms dictate. Firearms have an acute danger but are not nearly as deadly as more common apparati.
Publishing in peer reviewed periodicals is not a measure of any quality of the work. As a retired prof, I know the problems that occur. During my time, I worked to get my society to use double blind reviews where the reviewers had no idea of who they were reviewing and the authors did not know the reviewer. Most journals only require that the reviewer remain unknown to the author and in those situations, the authors can be shot down based on reputation.
For the greatest part of academia, there is no such thing as an honest, unbiased evaluation of any kind.
Also being in academia, I find that part of the problem is reviewers can often/usually tell you the author is by the topic area. I have been a reviewer and have friends running tracts that tell me finding reviewers who know the subject area is difficult because of their probably knowing the authors.
Other key is already know reputations are like the elephant in the room, nobody wants to mention that they get an almost automatic pass on real reviews so they same old same old just keeps rolling along
Higher education insists on being racially diverse but ideologically uniform. They have the luxury of doing that because ultimately they don't produce anything concrete, and they perpetually deal with, for the most part, young and impressionable people who are willing to believe what they are told. If as a student you regurgitate what they tell you to regurgitate, for a period of time, they will give you your degree so you can move on in life.