This is an exceptional and outstanding article on what is happening in our institutions. I will want to reference this many times in the future so it warrants a blog.
Excerpt:
- Direct pressure on dissenters. Members are under pressure not to express arguments against any of the group’s views.
- Self-censorship. Doubts and deviations from the perceived group consensus are not expressed.
- Illusion of unanimity. The majority view and judgments are assumed to be unanimous.
- “Mind guards” are appointed. Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group ’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions. This is confirmatory bias writ large.5
Each of these symptoms can be observed in many different departments across universities in the UK, the USA, Canada, and Australia. As the Heterodox Academy has noted, between 1995 and 2010 viewpoint diversity practically collapsed in most of our higher educational institutions.6 According to arguably the best-designed survey of American faculty beliefs since the early 1970s, which was carried out in the mid-00s, only 3.6% of humanities faculty members and only 4.9% in the social sciences self-identified as conservatives. In this same report, ‘not a single instructor reported voting for President Bush in 2004’, with that stunning figure of zero in the humanities rising to only 20.4% across all disciplines.7 READ MORE --->>>>
