Measuring Self-Awareness in Negative Numbers

An opinion piece from the professoriate in the Chronicle of Higher Education today:

The Right-Wing Attempt to Control Higher Ed

Demolishing independent expertise is a central goal of the Republican Party.

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to live a sealed life, fully protected from the possibility that people who disagree with you about anything might ever have a point at all, here it is in a single paragraph:

The contemporary Republican approach to higher education is part of a broader partisan campaign to undermine independent expertise. Anti-intellectualism has deep roots in American political life, and contemporary conservative suspicion of expertise and nonpartisan institutions has been brewing for a while. It’s based on ideological skepticism of government and regulation. Fox News, social media, and conspiracy theories fuel mistrust in independent expertise. Indeed, the conservative movement has worked to degrade Americans’ trust in just about any institution that is not explicitly aligned with the Republican Party — be it government agencies, corporations, health-care providers, the media, or colleges.

By the way, their link to a discussion of anti-intellectualism is a link to an essay at Salon.com, so you can see the exceptional depth of academic rigor at work here.

As the experts at Daily Kos have found….

According to research by the Huffington Post….

It’s been about twenty hours since I posted an argument that the American left has completely embraced state power, entirely abandoning any degree of traditional liberal willingness to limit the scope of authority — what I called Gideon’s Trumpet liberalism — and here are two professors warning against “ideological skepticism of government and regulation.” Government good, regulation positive, end of story. Stop resisting state power, you authoritarians!

But the really glorious piece of this paragraph, a chunk of prose that packs in unexamined assumptions like sardines in a can, is the bit about “independent expertise” and “nonpartisan institutions.” What the right fears about academia, you see, is the absolutely relentless commitment of the academic mind to an ideologically neutral expertise, following the facts wherever they go. A professor is like an umpire, calling balls and strikes the same way for every team. Academia is wholly nonpartisan, and Republicans hate that. Meanwhile:

Yes, Republicans fear the independent, nonpartisan expertise embodied by the literature and sociology faculty, who play it straight down the middle. Here are the key findings from a 2020 paper on academic political affiliation:

At least four consistent findings have emerged from this work: First, although the ratio of faculty who identify as or are registered as Democratic versus Republican (henceforth the D:R registration ratio) varies across departments, it almost always favors the Democratic Party. Second, the D:R registration ratio is typically higher among disciplines in the humanities and social sciences compared to those in the natural sciences and engineering. Third, the D:R registration ratio has increased over time, from roughly 4.5:1 in 1999 (Rothman et al, 2005) to 10:1 among elite liberal arts colleges and social science departments now (Langbert et al, 2016; Langbert, 2018). Fourth, the partisan slant is most extreme in the most highly rated institutions.

Realistically, I didn’t need to tell you any of this, and you already knew that a pair of professors claiming neutral expertise as the prevailing value in academic life were really high on their own supply.

Taking another sardine out of the can, what does it take in 2022 to write that “the conservative movement has worked to degrade Americans’ trust” in institutions like the media and health care? It’s a right-wing conspiracy to make you doubt the integrity of the institutions that told you about Nick Sandmann’s vicious attack on that Native American elder, you fools. Why have you been tricked into not trusting the media? And why have you allowed right-wing conspiracy theories to sow doubt about the mRNA injections that deliver 99% effectiveness against Covid-19 infection? Institutions can’t possibly merit any degree of skepticism, ever, so if any public skepticism exists, it must be because someone is ideologically confused by deliberate partisan lies.

What color is the sky on this planet?