Category: Academia

Anyone who is both honest and paying attention has known for a long time that higher education in the United States is tilted sharply leftward, and the bias has only gotten worse over the years. Two recent studies confirm how bad it has gotten.

Jon Shields and Yuval Avnur have an op-ed in the WSJ with the unfortunate title, Evidence Backs Trump on Higher Ed’s Bias: A massive database shows college courses dealing with race and the Middle East lean sharply left. I say unfortunate because any mention of President Trump triggers vehement reactions among people with TDS, and the issue is not about him. It existed long before he was President, and any solution will take time well beyond his departure.

The study uses a database that scrapes college syllabi from the web, including the assigned reading. The authors look particularly at the issue of race in the criminal justice system, and the result confirms what I have observed over years of hiring recent graduates. Continue reading . . .

Roland Fryer, professor of economics at Harvard, has this article in the WSJ with the above title. The subtitle is “Scholars need incentives to tell the truth, not to hide it and promote socially acceptable ideas.”

Both academic journals and campus discussions are cramped by the mandate to conform to the political and social ideas that are presently dominant in academia.

A decade ago, I still interacted with dozens of undergraduates and doctoral students who were asking important and provocative questions about race and sex in America. But now students invite me to lunch and ask if their research idea is too risky; they wonder out loud what they are allowed to “say in public,” as though they are in the situation room discussing nuclear launch strategy rather than pondering the economics of policing in an overpriced cafe. Continue reading . . .

One thing opponents of sober law enforcement and sentencing constantly tell us  is that they are guided  —  but we aren’t  —  by “science” and “evidence-based solutions.”  If you follow their views, you’re not merely “compassionate,” but, perhaps more importantly, “smart.”  This is why “smart on crime” always turns out, if and when you can decipher all the razzle-dazzle language, to be merely soft on crime,  —  which of course is the point from the get-go but needs to be hidden.

But dizzy with all their blood-soaked success of late,  academia is getting less careful about hiding the pro-criminal nuttiness they try to pass off as “science.”  Hence today’s entry.

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Two university psychologists have retracted their study published last year in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), because its politically-incorrect findings have been cited in some pro-law enforcement articles.  The  study:  Officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,  by Joseph Cesario of Michigan State and David Johnson of the University of Maryland, analyzed 917 fatal police shootings in 2015 to determine if racial bias played a role in who got shot.  The study concluded that it did not.

Continue reading . . .

The witch-hunt atmosphere in American academia continues to get worse. Hans Bader has this post at Liberty Unyielding noting the recent ouster of Stephen Hsu as vice president for research at Michigan State University. Hsu’s crime was publicizing research done at his university, which is exactly what you would expect a VP of research to do. But the particular piece of research reached a Forbidden Conclusion.

Continue reading . . .