Quote:
Originally Posted by PepsiFree
If depending on the argument from ignorance fallacy is all you have, then sure, Cliff is right until someone proves him wrong, I guess. But that’s poor logic. If you’d like to use google, you’ll find a large range of evidence detailing academic suppression, from the tobacco industry, to climate change, to the events of hurricane Katrina. All large, very prominent issues over the past 20-30 years that have been subject to academic suppression.
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I'm aware of exactly no academic papers on the effect of climate change, tobacco or hurricane Katrina that were suppressed by the field, nor any instance where publishing on those topics resulted in a moral outrage by other academics, threats against the authors' and editors' livelihoods, or demands to retract the paper and apologize for publishing it in the first place. The efforts you're referring to, as far as I know, were more a "baffle them with bull####" strategy of attempting to muddy the waters by creating a false lack of consensus (see the documentary "Merchants of Doubt"). Which is obviously a huge problem in itself, but an entirely different one from what's being talked about here.
Good timing - Harris and Haidt just released a podcast, which you could call a "state of the issue" on the University atmosphere generally.
https://samharris.org/podcasts/137-safe-space/
Note the limitations that Haidt places on the scope of the problem: only since 2013, only involving people born after roughly 1995 ("not a millenial problem generally"), mostly confined to liberal arts colleges in the northeast and on the west coast, and not an issue where students are commuters (rather than living together on campus). The comments about prestige-seeking behaviour and the change to incentives in that area in the past handful of years is particularly on point.
That being said, I think my favourite person talking about the issue from the perspective of faculty, rather than focusing on students, is Alice Dreger.