> "Younger, more left-leaning, and female faculty were generally more opposed to controversial scholarship."
That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's true.
That's so counterintuitive, I simply cannot believe it's true.
Anecdotally, this is true in my circle.
Left leaning people around me think they are more open minded, but really they just have a different set of things they accept. They have the same number of icks, just not at the same place.
The big gap is in how they behave when in contact with things they don't like.
And right leaning people have been so far more capable of cooperating with those who don't match their values.
Also, on paper, left leaning have expressed more humane values, espacially when very general or abstract. But in the day to day, when it comes to the mondain or practical, I've seen the sexist or racist guys help more my muslim or girl friends that the ones saying every body is equal.
It weirds me out.
Although you could make an argument that it still leans left on the public side, with more of a focus on private death threats and harassment on the right. They don't approach the problem of crushing dissent with exactly the same strategy.
women tend to be more left leaning than men.
https://www.economist.com/cdn-cgi/image/width=360,quality=80...
This site proves you can be pretty smart and damn hard to colaborate with :)
Also I would argue that being a communist is not the same distance from the center as being a maga.
But more importantly, this is irrelevant.
Cause I'm not american.
But I do have communists, anarchists on one side, and royalists (people in favor or a king) and pro putin on the other. I have anti-vax and phd in physics, millionaires and state help seekers, cops and people making their own amphetamin, people going to all protests and those telling off illegal immigrants to the police.
It's like saying it's both hot and cold. You can argue I don't live in the sahara or in the north pole, but I live in France.
Don't follow US federal politics much, I take it?
And of course, I specifically states it's an anecdotate about people around me.
I don't even disagree with the goals of these people, but I think there is such ridged ideological conformity, that the quality of the thinking suffers. In other words, I am very skeptical of the solutions that they propose because I don't think they have the freedom to really consider these problems from every angle.
Applying a 1950's sense of the word would indeed be hard to square with the rest of the statement. But a 2020's sense of the word completely aligns with my own experience both as a student and as someone with several minority professors as close family.
The most vocal and internally-conformist group, by far, are white female grad students and professors under 40 or 35 or so. Change any single parameter and the population of anti-controversial (in the current sense) voices drops sharply.
Also familiar is a general undercurrent of sentiment among departmental and field-adjacent colleagues that the behavior of this group is noxious and counterproductive, even among those who broadly sympathize with them. Along with a resigned and quiet dread that nothing can be done about it.
Science, ladies and gentlemen.