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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12383 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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Academia will not reform itself and will not stop trying to overthrow the government, constitution and society that produces and funds it. They will at some point be brought to heel, either by the government or the people. Some president sooner or later will realize all the money and land being sucked up by organizations of useless traitors and fake "scientists", and just take it. That is, if the people don't turn up with pitchforks first.

Whenever and however that happens, exactly nothing of value will be lost. Academia is underwater morally, politically and scientifically. It is fundamentally compromised and incapable of even describing the problem. The above report is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

No, whatever is done about academia will cause lots of collateral damage to things like medical and engineering research.

Doubtful - things that provide real value will be continued elsewhere, in corporate R&D labs if needed. The real losers would be expensive but legitimate research with no practical application, like particle physics or astronomy.

What constitutes 'real value ' and 'legitimate' research to you in this statement? Presumably not poetry or history.

Poetry and history can certainly have real value and legitimate research. I am not confident that academia is outputting any appreciable quantity of real value and legitimate research on these subjects, relative to the value it consumes to "study" them. Then again, Poetry and History are not my direct area of expertise.

I am an artist. I am very interested in encouraging my kids and their numerous cousins and young people I encounter generally to pursue art as a skill and even potentially a career, because I find it very rewarding and think they might as well. I would never, ever encourage them to engage with the academic art world in any way, and will actively discourage them from "studying" art at conventional educational institutions, and certainly not to pay those institutions to teach them how to be an artist. My personal experience with those institutions was woeful, and I've seen no evidence since that my experience does not generalize.

I'll admit mild surprise at your very seemingly visceral hatred of academia (see "Nuke and pave.") This could be based on your own bitter experience, or on reading articles such as the one in the OP. I'm not sure. I personally doubt stats on how many academics are conservatives if we're relying on self-reports, for a variety of reasons. (I do not contest the assertion that at least in the US academia is largely ideologically captive to left-wing sensibilities--smugly so. This is one reason I doubt the self-reports. I don't think this is necessarily true worldwide.) I have to assume some hyperbole here, though I am aware that a lot of people who did not themselves attend university feel like we could just raze them all to the ground and so what. I have friends back home who I suspect think this. The law of unintended consequences seems to loom large in such a scenario.

In the UK it's exactly the same. I'm pretty sure I was one of exactly two conservatives in my cohort, and the other one 'came out' as Christian to me after four years of working with him every day. And that was in STEM.

I was thinking outside an Anglo or European context actually. I'm not surprised about the UK.

Ah, there I'm less sure. We had a lot of European academics and they were pretty much all left-wing or communist. Outside the Anglo countries and Europe I'm less sure, but does it matter? There's not many good universities left except the Asian ones and potentially the Indian Institute of Technology.

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