Don’t Grieve about the Grievance Studies Affair By James Reed

     This is a fantastic paper that brings together perhaps the last sane voices in the academy to talk about the “Grievance Studies Affair,” where a group of academics wrote politically correct absurd papers, submitted them to Leftist journals and got many of them accepted, and published. There are some juicy quotes made by the largely philosophical critics about how postmodernism, the name given to the core destructive philosophy behind modern Leftism, has moved to dominate university culture, and even is making a move into the STEM areas of science. I think that disciplines like biology and medicine have been taken over decades ago, and it is only fields like mathematics, physics and chemistry, have yet to fall:
  https://quillette.com/2018/10/01/the-grievance-studies-scandal-five-academics-respond/

     The philosopher, Jonathan Anomaly, a good name for a philosopher, says in his piece, “The Grievance University”:

“The authors have pulled off a modern Sokal hoax. The sequel is rarely as good as the original, but in this case it was more comprehensive and more fun than Sokal’s mockery of postmodernist scholarship … The project exposes some of the cultish ideas shared by faculty who have created fake subjects and staffed their departments with political activists. Many faculty in these departments seem alarmingly eager to hijack for their own ends the emotional circuitry of teenagers who arrive on campus in search of a tribe to join and a dragon to slay. If this were the extent of the problem, we could laugh it off as a strange new sport that occurs on college quads rather than in football stadiums. But it is much worse than this. The main problem is not the rise of trendy disciplines with names that end with the word “studies,” or the opportunity cost of spending taxpayer money on bogus scholarship and bad education rather than medical research and space exploration. The problem is that many students are required to take these classes as part of a “diversity” requirement at universities, and that when students graduate, these ideas influence leaders of corporations like Google, which can manipulate its search engine to alter elections and change our epistemic environment in subtle ways.

To take an example, many students in universities and employees at Google take bias training courses that tell them “white privilege” and “systemic racism” explain disparities in outcomes between groups, despite the fact that—to take one example—Asian Americans from China and India (‘people of color’) make more money and are incarcerated at lower rates than whites. According to the conspiratorial worldview of many faculty in grievance studies departments, citing statistics and making arguments that go against the privilege narrative proves that you have an unconscious bias against minorities, and that you’re probably a white supremacist. Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose did not publish their articles in the top journals of core fields like economics or psychology, so some skeptics might dismiss the project as a waste of time. But their articles did pass peer review in journals from fields whose basic assumptions are shared by mainstream subjects like literature, sociology, and (increasingly) philosophy.

Some of the most insidious dogmas many faculty in these fields defend include the idea that evolutionary biology can explain animal behavior but isn’t relevant to people; that differences in personality and intelligence can only be explained by education and parenting (not genes); that IQ tests don’t predict anything useful; that differences in outcomes for different groups can only be explained by oppression or systemic racism/sexism; and that five decades of behavioral genetics research can be safely ignored when it threatens environmental explanations. These are the dangers of our time. It is worth reminding those who subsidize this circus that we’re not in Las Vegas. What happens on campus doesn’t stay on campus.”

     Yes, so given the levels of contamination that have occurred in the universities, I see no other solution but to shut them down, and declare that these exercises in universalism, and anti-nationalism, have been grand failures, that are now a danger to the nation.