Via @delong, an ugly story from Stanford. But I think Brad gets only a small piece of the issue when he talks about Stanford's intellectual quality control problem 1/ stanforddaily.com/2018/05/31/ema…
This is also part of a much bigger issue: the sorry state -- ethical as well as cognitive -- of conservative intellectuals in the 21st century. Remember, these are the people liberal intellectuals are supposed to listen to and learn from 2/
I've written about this before: media organizations and others are under constant pressure to give voice to "serious, honest, conservative intellectuals with real influence"; except those unicorns no longer exist 3/ nytimes.com/2018/04/08/opi…
And it's not just the absence of any new ideas for three or four decades; it's not just the inability to admit mistakes when predictions (like predictions of soaring inflation and interest rates from efforts to rescue the economy) end up being completely wrong 4/
There's also just a combination of mean-spiritedness and unwillingness to abide by even the most basic rules of decent behavior separating having political views from being a pure apparatchik. 5/
Ferguson is as good as the modern intellectual right gets -- he's done actual work as a historian, has received plenty of intellectual gongs, could do fine by playing by the rules -- in fact would and does benefit from political affirmative action on behalf of conservatives 6/
And here he is conspiring to mess up the lives of *students* whose political ideas he doesn't like. And unfortunately, from what I've seen he's not actually worse than a number of his right-wing peers 7/ lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/06/pity-n…
