Tag: professors

Leftist Academics Flee as Musk’s X Ends Their Censorship Reign: How Free Speech Sent the Ivory Tower Packing

Good riddance. They were the poison on both social media and at their schools.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, or X as it’s now called, has brought an abrupt shift in the dynamics of the platform. For years, X functioned as an echo chamber where progressive academics freely exchanged ideas, often without much opposition. It was an exclusive club, and Musk’s open-door policy shattered it. With censorship dialed back and banned accounts reinstated, Musk’s version of free speech drove many academics away, leading to a marked decrease in engagement among their ranks.

An article titled The Vibes Are Off: Did Elon Musk Push Academics Off Twitter ? documents this retreat. It shows a significant drop in activity, especially among verified users, following Musk’s acquisition. Emphasis below is mine.

This article addresses a narrower empirical question: What did Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform mean for this academic ecosystem? Using a snowball sample of more than 15,700 academic accounts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology, and psychology, we show that academics in these fields reduced their “engagement” with the platform, measured by either the number of active accounts (i.e., those registering any behavior on a given day) or the number of tweets written (including original tweets, replies, retweets, and quote tweets). We further tested whether this decrease in engagement differed by account type; we found that verified users were significantly more likely to reduce their production of content (i.e., writing new tweets and quoting others’ tweets) but not their engagement with the platform writ large (i.e., retweeting and replying to others’ content).

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ps-political-science-and-politics/article/vibes-are-off-did-elon-musk-push-academics-off-twitter/28F45D508BE8F50C95F0F2BBEC48BB10

The data points to a familiar pattern: when left-leaning narratives lose control of the conversation, proponents either cry foul or flee​. Now, if you combine this exodus with the insights from Mitchell Langbert’s 2018 study on the political affiliations of elite liberal arts college faculty, the story becomes even clearer.

Langbert’s study from 2018, Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty, reveals a staggering imbalance: liberal arts faculties are overwhelmingly Democratic, with many departments having zero registered Republicans. Across 51 colleges, the average Democratic-to-Republican ratio was 10.4:1. Excluding the two military colleges in the sample (West Point and Annapolis), the ratio jumped to 12.7:1. In the most ideologically driven fields, like gender and peace studies, there were no Republicans to be found​.

Why Political Homogeneity Is Troubling

Political homogeneity is problematic because it biases research and teaching and reduces academic credibility. In a recent book on social psychology, The Politics of Social Psychology edited by Jarret T. Crawford and Lee Jussim, Mark J. Brandt and Anna Katarina Spälti, show that because of left-wing bias, psychologists are far more likely to study the character and evolution of individuals on the Right than individuals on the Left.2 Inevitably affecting the quality of this research, though, George Yancey found that sociologists prefer not to work with fundamentalists, evangelicals, National Rifle Association members, and Republicans.3 Even though more Americans are conservative than liberal, academic psychologists’ biases cause them to believe that conservatism is deviant. In the study of gender, Charlotta Stern finds that the ideological presumptions in sociology prevent any but the no-differences-between-genders assumptions of left-leaning sociologists from making serious research inroads. So pervasive is the lack of balance in academia that more than 1,000 professors and graduate students have started Heterodox Academy, an organization committed to increasing “viewpoint diversity” in higher education.4 The end result is that objective science becomes problematic, and where research is problematic, teaching is more so.

https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/31/2/homogenous_the_political_affiliations_of_elite_liberal_arts_college_faculty

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The Most Dangerous People in America: College Professors

American college campuses are permeated with corrupted professors who themselves corrupt students. Without a doubt, college professors are the most dangerous people in America.

They’re not dangerous because they challenge the status quo or encourage their students to think critically. On the contrary, they are dangerous because they encourage impressionable young college students to adhere to the doctrines of the professors they choose without giving them the chance to meaningfully challenge those doctrines.

During the recent pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas protests on elite college campuses, thousands of students put up tents on private property, commandeered university-owned buildings, defaced private property, and chanted disturbing, antisemitic rhetoric. But while we constantly talk about the actions of the students, we fail to recognize that these students aren’t alone but instead are educated and cheered on by their college professors.

At Columbia University, many of the university’s professors joined the protests, donning orange reflective vests and standing alongside students in protest of Israel and—apparently—in support of the students’ right to free speech. Of course, these professors, like their students, are not constitutional scholars, yet they teach their students that what they’re doing is protected.

The First Amendment does not protect the right to vandalize or trespass on private property, which is what these students were doing, or even make terroristic threats or aid a terrorist organization, which arguably many of these students did. The very idea that there were professors aiding the students in their illegal takeover of the university should sound alarm bells.

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They are poisoning the mush heads they are teaching and getting them to believe in and act on wrong assumptions and positions.