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Comment by reilly3000 | Hacker News Reader

I would like to call this man’s bluff: he was not fired or censured by the university. He found it uncomfy and left. His crusade to publish 20 fake papers to prove a point about what journals will accept shows a pre-existing contempt. His prominent media tour, and subsequent complaints about lack of coverage by ‘liberal media’ continues that provocateur ethos. Let him make his points, but I refuse to believe in the stereotype that ideological homogeneity is some kind of crisis in academia. I’ll pay attention when they start purging the Keynesian economics professors and disallowing Christians from matriculation without denouncing their faith. I’ll fight back when those professors who disagree with Inclusion culture are fired for their beliefs. Until then this feels much like the rest of the conservative persecution tropes and I’m just not biting.

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You've twisted it all up:

>> I would like to call this man’s bluff: he was not fired or censured by the university. He found it uncomfy and left. His crusade to publish 20 fake papers to prove a point about what journals will accept shows a pre-existing contempt.

That's right, he never claimed he was fired - he quit. He does find it uncomfy and absolutely seems to have contempt for what "education" has become. That's not a bluff - you're trying to call him out on something, but there's nothing to call out. You're claim of what's really going on is pretty much what he said.

I know a tenured, well-published economics professor struggling to keep his job for not towing the party line at a major state university.

Which party line is that, exactly?

(Economics is rather noted for hostility to heterodoxy, though more typically enforced by right-establishment rather than left-opposition.)

98% of professors who register a party register democrat. Which party do you think given that data?

The Democratic party doesn't have a single party line and includes political left and right ideologies. Socialists and progressives are a minority, and much of the party still supports right-wing neoliberalism.

If your point is that professional truth-seekers (what scientists and academics are supposed to be) avoid the Republican party in its current state, I'd say it should be pretty obvious why that is.

I would like to point out the underlying thought behind your comment - that truth is more on the left then right. If a professor doesn't tow the line, they will lose their funding, reputation, and job.

As someone who was a chemistry professor with great reviews for the majority of a decade, and left after being told by the dean of science that "it's not advantageous that you are a white scientist" and "you came from a well educated family right?" (I didn't). This came after years of increasing discomfort with the state of college education.

I wasn't and still am not a republican - I see myself much more comfortable as critical of the left. The political left in college environments is now super unhealthy since it's the vast majority of the professorate - to the point that ideas that can be associated with the right are simply wrong if not morally repugnant.

Do you agree that any disparity is evidence of racism, and that policies either increase disparity (and are racist) or decrease disparity (and therefore anti-racist)? That was the current discussion when I left the field. For example I'll pull from the nytimes discussion (not a right leaning news source) https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/12/nyregion/covid-vaccine-bl... https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/world/boston-mayor-janey-... Are new york vaccine mandates racist since they disproportionately effect BIPOC? This type of discussion was so far removed from science and so deeply held that anything other than full acceptance of that was career suicide.

At the college I worked at, the 80%+ of the faculty I worked at was female, 80%+ of the department heads were female, 80%+ of the deans were female, 80%+ of the VPs were female, the college president was female, and the majority of the students were female. Female was considered diverse in hiring and diversity was considered very important.

To your comment, I was trying to be a truth-seeker as a scientist and academic, and I left the academia because it stopped seeking truth in an honest way.

> I would like to point out the underlying thought behind your comment - that truth is more on the left then right.

At the moment, in the US? Absolutely. Have you seen the kind of things that people on the right are saying? And not just some nutjobs (they always exist as part of any group), but their political leadership and political commentators. They have completely embraced lies as a point of policy.

That is of course a completely different issue from what's going on in American universities, and I'm not arguing that there's nothing wrong is wrong there. I'm just saying that this:

> it's not advantageous that you are a white scientist"

Is not a party line of the Democratic Party, it's not a traditionally left-wing position either. And excluding people for their skin colour is also not exactly a left-wing thing. Many, many people on the left will disagree with silencing professors for any reason, especially merely for being white.

> to the point that ideas that can be associated with the right are simply wrong if not morally repugnant.

It depends on what those ideas are. Racism? Yes, that is absolutely morally repugnant. Low taxes? Well, I think extreme economic inequality is harmful, but it's not something I'd call "morally repugnant".

> Do you agree that any disparity is evidence of racism

Obviously not. Though racism can obviously be an important cause of disparity, but it's one of many.

> and that policies either increase disparity (and are racist) or decrease disparity (and therefore anti-racist)?

If we're talking racial disparity, then knowingly enacting policies that increase that disparity would be racist. The policies themselves might be totally fine in a different context. Context matters a lot.

> Are new york vaccine mandates racist since they disproportionately effect BIPOC?

Not as long as vaccines are easily available to them. (What does "BIPOC" mean? I know PoC means people of colour.)

> Female was considered diverse in hiring and diversity was considered very important.

Not if 80% of the people are women. Then focusing on hiring more women is anti-diversity. Again, there's nothing left-wing about intentionally trying to exclude entire demographic groups, and I don't think trying to exclude men completely has ever been the party line of the Democratic Party, which is the specific claim I was addressing.

> To your comment, I was trying to be a truth-seeker as a scientist and academic, and I left the academia because it stopped seeking truth in an honest way.

And I applaud you for doing so. I'd probably have done the same in your situation. I'm just arguing that there's nothing traditionally left-wing about this. It's just archconservatism with the roles swapped.

I guess it's a form of extremism hijacking what were originally good ideas and taking them to unhealthy extremes. It's like the difference between real feminism that wants equality for men and women, versus the man-hating parody of feminism that wants to replace the patriarchy with an identical matriarchy and not actually solve anything (and I know those people exist, and they might well be a big part of the problem at your university).

thanks for the polite and engaging discussion

BIPOC = Black, Indigenous, People of Color

Anyways, one final thought. What I presented above isn't a fringe and extremist thought on college campuses anymore. It's what has to be openly accepted as full truth. It's hard to communicate to people who aren't in the thick of it how crazy it has become. Admittedly, I'm in a more "progressive" city, but this is almost unbelievably pervasive at this point. The "good" liberals are often not aware the extent of how crazy this is and how much capture there is to this mindset in colleges.

If you have 1.5 minutes at 2x speed and are interested in some shock and awe around this discussion at harvard discussing the moral choses of whites, check out https://youtu.be/Ei-d83i5PNg?t=3433

To answer your question it is the leftist party line he is refusing to tow.

Thanks.

> Let him make his points, but I refuse to believe in the stereotype that ideological homogeneity is some kind of crisis in academia. I’ll pay attention when they start purging the Keynesian economics professors and disallowing Christians from matriculation without denouncing their faith.

Liberal faculty outnumber conservatives on average 10 to 1, and are openly hostile to them [1]. UC-Berkeley has an official requirement for job candidates to have specific plans on how to increase diversity [2], and won't hire anyone that won't champion diversity. But neither of that is purging Keynesians or making Christians denounce their faith, so you're safe in continuing to not pay attention.

[1] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2017/02/study_liberalto...

[2] "eight different departments affiliated with the life sciences used a diversity rubric to weed out applicants for positions. This was the first step: In one example, of a pool of 894 candidates was narrowed down to 214 based solely on how convincing their plans to spread diversity were." - https://reason.com/2020/02/03/university-of-california-diver...

Okay you’ve piqued my attention.

what is the adage... that once something becomes a performance metric (or something like that) it is no longer useful?

I like that I disagree with this. The thing about conservatives is they have an inbuilt notion of individual dignity that often precludes letting it get to the point where they are fired, or more plausibly, set up for some title IX slander campaign and a purge. (Sometimes I think Quillette doesn't publish anything else) The whole progressive ontology is centered on the continuity of a narrative and avoiding personal accountability, so nobody would actually fire him, they would contrive circumstances where they "had no choice," and that like them, he is merely subject to the inevitable forces of history and progress.

I can't defend all reactionaries, but there is no doubt that the logic of the idea behind inclusion is predicated on the very victim identity that an education is supposed to liberate students from. It's not intended to improve the lives of people in our respective nations, it's designed to subvert and dissolve our civilization and subordinate it to directed chaos, the same way it did to Cambodia, China, and Russia, among others. These countries did not have rules for denouncing faith before graduation, instead, people were "free" to visit churches that were watched by secret police, and they would be added to a list so that the bureaucracy could get back at them invisibly. Keynesians won't be purged because they are used to justify MMT, and so they are necessary to sustain the current narrative. They can be replaced with party members in the next purge anyway.

The mistake I think he made was believing the system he came out of still had any integrity or was rules based. The universities have been converted into a single party system of rule without accountability, and they have diminishingly little to do with education at all. This is what he didn't get, and what everyone tacitly acknowledges, and it appears he thought they still sent memos about when the rules were nullified.

it's designed to subvert and dissolve our civilization and subordinate it to directed chaos

I don't know if calling it a foreign-initiated conspiracy theory is going too far, but I'm sure China and friends are laughing at the slow wokeness-driven self-destruction of the West. It's sad to see for sure.

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