Comments by "L.W. Paradis" (@l.w.paradis2108) on "Zaid Jilani: New Research Reveals Authoritarian Impulses Of Young Academics" video.

This mirrors corporate culture. A private-sector boss can fire you for expressing your opinions. The demand was to make school more like a business, and to train everyone for jobs. Well? In the corporation, only a tiny number have First Amendment rights.
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@RebornLegacy Lauren Paer made perfect sense. Here, 'directionally accurate' means that if the study has revealed an actual trend, then there will be fewer and fewer checks on true bias in the future. People will look at conclusions of a study or paper, and agree or disagree, rather than examining its methods, or addressing methodologies at all. Astute observation.
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@RebornLegacy How ironic that in criticizing the post for overstating the issue, you call it "hysterical rambling." I read it again carefully. Not hysterical, and certainly not rambling. Ideological intolerance is a huge problem, but I think most people do not see how or why it arose. A phenomenally tight labor market, a wildly competitive and expensive system of higher education, with far too few scholarships or opportunities for tuition waivers on the basis of need or merit, an anti-intellectual bent to American society, and . . . the drive to make school "more like a business." Well, there's no First Amendment freedom of speech or expression in most businesses. Most business instead seek to instill "corporate culture," and get rid of whoever doesn't fit in. Once you make university the same, there will be a big fight to see who gets to define the university's corporate culture. See the documentary "Inside Job" for a clearer picture of the result of these trends. Or consider that Business has been the most popular major for 30 years, and that something called "Financial Engineering" is a hot field. What is true is that the new neoliberals of government and academe, and their IP cousins, got nothin' on Joe McCarthy.
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Why do you think this is what it is? This attitude is what mirrors the Human Resources Departments of Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., etc., etc. Those who must be served, or else. Turn college into a business, lose academic freedom. Businesses don't have it. If your (private-sector corporate) boss does not like what you have to say, he can fire you.
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@navinvent I don't understand what you mean. I mean that "making universities more like businesses," which seemed to get support from nearly everyone at one point, resulted in trashing the universities. Now they are like businesses -- where you better not express your views if you want to get ahead. It's not a matter of courtesy, but censorship.
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This attitude mirrors the Human Resources Departments of Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, etc., etc., etc. -- those who must be served, or else. Turn college into a business, lose academic freedom. Businesses don't have it. If your (private-sector corporate) boss does not like what you have to say, he can fire you. This is news?
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@Scott Covert The point was to make the university more like a business, rather than the unique institution it once was, taking its inspiration from Plato and Aristotle. Well, now we're there. The most common major BY FAR is Business Administration, and has been for at least 30 years. The next most common is, broadly, the Health Sciences, with Nursing in first place. Students graduate with serious debt, so of course most treat university primarily as a trade school. Academic freedom has been dumped in favor of Tone Policing, and the new Advertising/Marketing landscape of Facebook/Twitter. To get a job, students learn to massage their image and stay on the good side of HR departments. So, the schools are giving the kids what they need to make money. A lot of people wanted university to be a business. Well, what's wrong now? There's no free speech at a business.
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@RebornLegacy Academia does not demand trust for particular conclusions. It needs to earn trust for methods, IRB ethics in research, honesty in reporting actual, empirical findings, modesty in drawing broad conclusions, etc. It never just says, "this is true. Trust us."
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@Scott Covert Western Chauvinism is made up? Someone introduce this guy to Adam Curtis documentaries -- any segment that treats of, say, the chaos in Thailand and Indonesia, and the waves of ethnic war in parts of Africa formerly controlled by Belgium, all wrought by the West. When insatiability is treated like a virtue, chaos is never far behind. One crazy scheme after another to grab more, more, more, and a bizarre new cover-story to justify it -- until the world blows up. You have to be a chauvinist to support it.
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@Scott Covert No interest.
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@Scott Covert Hmm, let's see: should I watch Adam Curtis, the renowned and eccentric BBC documentarian, who has made all of his work freely available, or should I consult The Proud Boys? Decisions, decisions.
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@Scott Covert Whom to trust? That's not hard. Trust no one. Who can inform me about the history of Western imperialism? An American founder of some dubious magazine? Or social media platform, etc.? What would his incentive be? Adam Curtis is in his 60s, though you'd never guess. He is British, and well-read.
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@minagray8574 In the immortal words of Francoise Dorleac, "nobody asked your opinion."
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@apethae1 I have worked in both as well, and you may not realize it, but you just proved my point. Of course people are pushed out of their jobs -- in academia, and in the private corporation, in precisely the way you've just described. It's practically a human algorithm by now, and it works like a charm. Of course certain people are protected -- in business and in politics. (Harvey Weinstein sure lasted a LONG time and had many, many friends, until the winds changed and his films started flopping.) The central point is, in business, no one has First Amendment rights. You can get fired for expressing your views, even outside the workplace, and it is legal to do so in the private sector. In academia, this, too, is more and more the case, and the reason comes down to a very similar mindset. (I will bet that the tenured faculty in the fistfight was either a political animal extraordinaire, or a "star," with lots of publications and name recognition. He was not a run-of-the-mill tenured prof.)
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@HandleUnclear Well, Christians did excommunicate people, which was a death sentence. I never thought that mentality died out, frankly.
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@jaybefaulky4902 Even that much shouldn't be the role of college. Criteria that can be gamed by any group of people, so that anyone can be labeled a "good person" or "helpful," or "bad" and "unhelpful," should have no bearing on a university career. Case in point: Cuomo's reputation for "goodness," last year compared with now. I don't mean some made-up moral goodness, but whether he objectively managed the coronavirus crisis well as governor. IOW, whether he did his job as promised.
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@Honest Avatar 95% of all grads have never heard of Bertrand Russell or David Hume, never mind an ideologue and political player like Popper. It's not the profs that don't want to teach this. The students don't want to learn it because they don't see how it could be relevant to career climbing and image tending.
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@chubsley2000 You should read some cognitive science research. You should also check out what the Symbolic Systems major at Stanford is about.
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@latinomifune4700 Totally right. In fact, some of the currently available social science research is applied to some pretty nefarious ends. For example, the new social media designers look for ways to make it "sticky," resulting in behavior awfully close to what psychiatrists see in addicts. Another obvious example is targeted advertising, and obtaining participation in consumer-generated advertising. The information they use comes straight out of the social sciences. We're swimming in it now, with results that are predictable to high degrees of confidence. Ironic, huh?
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@chubsley2000 In the furthest reaches of science and mathematics, the line between the so-called "hard sciences" and the human sciences becomes blurred -- which is not to say that you can approach these fields without first laying a foundation in methodologies specific to the objects of their study. It is after you study them in some depth that you can start to talk about how they dovetail, and why, and what it means -- especially practically. Anyway, Symbolic Systems majors take quite a lot of psychology, linguistics, and philosophy to complete their degrees.
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@chubsley2000 Just the opposite. I have an idea what questions to ask.
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@chubsley2000 Never heard of it. You a fan?
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@chubsley2000 Is it good?
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You think that's what it is? This is corporate culture, where there is no freedom of speech. It is the corporation that will "invite" you to work elsewhere if you don't "fit in." The universities serve the corporation, not vice versa. Anyone who suggest otherwise isn't being candid.
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