Every time I post a new study showing that university indoctrination does not happen (and there's usually one every 2-3 months), I get the same stubbornly dismissive range of responses. People just don't want to believe it. They refuse.
I don't have a long thread on this. I'm just very frustrated by the phenomenon, especially since it typically comes from people who've built their online personas around being fact-driven, hyper rational skeptics.
Most of them just say "Well, that wasn't my experience," or "Oh, academic proves academics are great, how persuasive! HAHA", which I get. A few also make vague science-esque sounds about sample size, constructs, control groups, etc. But there's never any substance to it.
My charitable interpretation is that these people are coming to the topic from a place of great hurt and anger. That they felt personally bullied or alienated at university. And so I try not to take it too personally. But I wonder how to get through to them. Is it even possible?
And given the sorry state of public opinion, the widespread belief that brainwashing happens and professors are monsters, I worry. I worry a lot. If the very best evidence available can't change a person's mind, I don't know what to do. It's scary.
In the spirit of conciliation, let me also just say that the *theory* of indoctrination makes total sense. Just look at the bare facts: Profs are overwhelmingly liberal; their job is to persuade you of certain facts and ideas; grads are more liberal than the general pop. It fits.
So I don't begrudge anyone not acquainted with the data for believing it. It's a totally plausible argument. It just happens to not be true, and I suspect the reason people can't accept that is because they don't appreciate how incredibly hard it is to change a person's politics.
Anyway, if you're interested, here's my level best to explain the social science on the topic.

arcdigital.media/no-professors-…
And here's the new study that prompted these ruminations.

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More from @JeffreyASachs

11 Dec
New from me: Drawing on a survey of 20K+ students from 55 universities, @RealClearEd and @TheFIREorg have ranked schools according to how healthy the free speech climate is on campus. Unfortunately, its design has a strong anti-liberal bias.

realcleareducation.com/articles/2020/…
Quick summary: In the survey, students are assigned a Tolerance Score, which is supposed to measure how tolerant they are of controversial speakers. And one of the major findings is that conservatives score much higher on Tolerance than liberals.

But there's a problem.
Here's the question used to measure tolerance. See if you can spot where things go wrong.
Read 8 tweets
10 Dec
The Lincoln Project and the IDW were the two highest profile projects launched by centrists during the Trump years. The first tried to rescue conservatism from Trump. The second tried (ostensibly) to tamp down the Culture War. Both have failed. Why?

thedailybeast.com/the-hottest-ca…
Lots of reasons, obviously! But for myself, I keep coming back to tribalism. Not as a causal factor, but as an analytic framework. More than any other, tribalism has been the frame used by centrists to make sense of US politics. An atavistic flight from rationality.
I think this frame has served them very poorly, for two reasons. First, it permits them to shift the debate from matters of pressing political concern to one about the right and proper way to talk about those matters of pressing political concern.
Read 9 tweets
8 Oct
The number of attempts by the GOP in recent years to pack or shrink the size of state supreme courts is incredible.

scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewconten…
2016: Along a party line vote and over the objections of the Chief Justice, the Arizona GOP adds two seats to the state supreme court.

tucson.com/news/local/gov…
2016: Again over the objections of its own justices, the Georgia GOP expands the court from 7 to 9. This represents something of a compromise for state Republicans, as they had previously sought to expand the court to 13.

ajc.com/news/state--re…
Read 9 tweets
14 Aug
I have a theory about takes like this. @olivertraldi and @DouthatNYT, I'd love some feedback.

Basically, it's a story of elite overproduction. The job market for journalists and writers has collapsed, even as J Schools and MFA programs churn out grads at a record clip.
Meanwhile, many of the most important stories of the day require in-depth knowledge of a specialized field (e.g. public health, climate science, global finance) that few have the patience or ability to master.
Lastly, up until quite recently, ours was an extraordinary period of relative peace and prosperity, at least in North America. No Cold War to report, a terrorist threat in retreat. So what's an aspiring journalist to do? What crusade can he join? What mission can he make his own?
Read 7 tweets
10 Aug
Let's talk about academic freedom and the police.

There are all sorts of third rails in academic discourse. The kinds of topics where if a prof says the wrong thing, his or her reputation, job, or even physical safety might be at risk.

The police is one of those third rails.
Nathan Jun is a prof at Midwestern State. Shortly after George Floyd's death, Jun changed his Facebook cover photo to a black "Abolish the Police" banner.

Ever since, the death threats have been pouring in.

(h/t @EmmaJanePettit & @MeganZahneis)

chronicle.com/article/these-…
Local far right activists disseminated Jun's personal information (phone #, address, etc), as well as that of his family. His house has been vandalized four times in the last two months. A swastika and racial epithet were spray painted in his garage.
Read 16 tweets
21 Jul
@Noahpinion⁩ seems to have deleted this tweet, which is a shame, because I think he’s right. But scrolling through his replies, it looks like he’s getting two types of objections. 1/n
Objection #1: It won't make a difference. The Right has always hated academia and nothing we do will change that.

Maybe, but consider. Yes, there has always been suspicion on the Right about higher ed, going right back through Buckley to the interwar years. It's not new. 2/n
But it's also gotten much, much worse. Another way of putting it is that this general complaint, one mainly held by a small percentage of conservatives, has suddenly gone mainstream. And I do mean *suddenly*. 3/n

pewsocialtrends.org/essay/the-grow…
Read 16 tweets

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