Intellectual Desegregation: What Heterodox Thought Requires from Academics

James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal ^ | January 1, 2020 | Fabio Rojas

[karpov]

A few years ago, Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, realized that most of his colleagues were on the Left. This is not necessarily a bad thing. People are allowed to have differing political views. It is also wrong to judge the quality of scientific research on political beliefs.

However, the uniformity of opinion presents institutional challenges. The academy is a church of skeptics. Progress is made when people are allowed to disagree. In the humanities and social sciences, a dominant mainstream may prevent questions that will deepen inquiry and identify errors and biases.

The solution, for Haidt, is not a new orthodoxy. One does not improve the academy by forming a conservative orthodoxy to balance a liberal blockade. As they say on the schoolyard, “two wrongs don’t make a right.” Instead, one needs a new academic mindset, one that makes it possible to move beyond conformity and groupthink. Haidt called this mindset “heterodoxy.” In this essay, I will argue for a habit of mind that heterodoxy should include: intellectual desegregation.

The very first step toward a genuinely heterodox mindset is intellectual desegregation. In other words, most academics find themselves in relative “safe spaces” where they encounter people like themselves.

There is an old joke about Richard Nixon that makes this point. A professor in a very liberal enclave, such as Cambridge, says, “I don’t understand how Nixon could have won—none of my friends voted for him!” Many professors and educators live similar lives. They live politically homogeneous lives. I don’t merely refer to the neighborhoods in which they reside. I also mean their intellectual lives.

For example, Inside Higher Education ran an article by a sociologist who critiqued conservatives. I was very curious to read the essay, but I shook my head as I read it.

[BobL]

All good and fine, but don’t expect much from the Left, considering that their ultimate goal is to jail (or worse) those who disagree with them, at least based on the history of these people.

[CharlesOConnell]

A cultural holdover from the Cold War, is that you can discuss race (all the while holding to Mrs. Justice RBG’s concern about “people we don’t want to have too many children”), but you can’t discuss class. “Educated” elites are a distinct class. What you can’t say, is that people of different races want to desegregate. (I ran a family charity that gave baby showers to 275 primarily minority Moms who didn’t abort their children.) You find that Black people want to live in black-majority neighborhoods because they feel saver and more culturally comfortable—hence, the African-American “Barbershop” movie genre. This is the geographic basis for the desegregated ethnic distribution of all of Los Angeles—people self-segregate by ethnicity in areas bounded by freeways. (I who grew up in a heavily Jewish area, Long Beach/Lakewood, was deeply offended as a a young person when I saw an elderly, East-Coast Jewish man say on camera, “we just want to be with our own people”.)

[Da Coyote]

” It is also wrong to judge the quality of scientific research on political beliefs.”

This is the 21st century - that sentence is sooooooo wrong now.

[Macoozie]

Article is piss poor in so many ways.

The CTRL-Lft chooses to suppprt the murder of unborn children.
There is no “discussion” to be had.

Men can become women? No they cant.

Anthropogenic global warming?
10,000 years ago, Buffalo, NY was under a mile of ice. Industrialization didnt melt it.

Educated? Like the saying goes, its not what they dont know, its what they do know that simply isnt true.

[DPMD]

When everyone thinks the same, nobody thinks. This, of course, doesn’t matter to the left as long as people seem cosmetically different. That’s liberal diversity.