Thread by @EmmaJanePettit on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "There’s been a burst of debate around viewpoint diversity (an always controversial topic) in our pages and elsewhere. Will thread and describe the key arguments below… First, writing for the @AAUP's magazine, Lisa Siraganian at Johns Hopkins outlined seven theses against viewpoint diversity. She argues it's incoherent, a partisan Trojan horse, and antithetical to academia's truth-seeking mission.
@AAUP Siraganian's essay was met with lots of criticism - from @TheFIREorg, @AEI, and Michael Clune in @chronicle, among others. Their critiques varied. But essentially, they argued that Siraganian had lost the plot: Public trust in college has cratered. Entire disciplines have Strayed far from their fact-finding mission. Expanding the Overton Window of acceptable views is necessary to take higher ed off life support, they argue. A few links:
Siraganian responded, arguing that her critics were dismissing the broader political project at play: "Contriving a smashup between 'viewpoint diversity' and academic freedom has been part of the right’s political project for a very long time."
But @asymmetricinfo isn't buying it. She highlights the fundamental agreement between higher ed and the public that many professors arguably ignore: The public gives them money. They expect something in return - something other than ideological siloing.
My 2 cents, as someone who covers academic culture, is that I've made this point (less bluntly) to professors I interview, who are sometimes surprised they have this reputation. Or they insist higher ed isn't actually that left-leaning. (To which I say...let's look at the data.) When you work in any industry dominated by certain political assumptions and convictions, it can lead to a fishbowl effect. You stop seeing how others see you, and you start seeing the outside world through specific distortions. (Journalism is no different, of course.) But anecdotally, since the election, I've certainly heard more people I interview express the opinion that viewpoint diversity is needed in the academy. It seems - again, anecdotally - that at least some profs are rethinking where and how higher ed went off-track"
Meme - American Assoc...: "Fascism generally doesn't do great under peer review, but perhaps it's the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, that may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview."
Meme - Steve McGuire @simcguire79: "After Charlie Kirk was assassinated, the AAUP published a statement condemning the wave of cancellations that ensued but saying nothing about the assassination itself. Then their president was caught on social media claiming Charlie's killer was a "right-wing kid." Now they mock Greg because FIRE is willing to defend the free speech rights of TPUSA chapters. Partisanship has eaten the AAUP alive."
Greg Lukianoff on X - "The self-congratulating fantasy in which a guild that exists to defend a trillion-dollar industry represents the forces of light against any critic—who by the way would have to be a fascist to see the obvious and systemic problems in higher ed—is not only deeply anti-intellectual, it's childish."
American Association of Univers... @AAUP: "Oh Greg, there's got to be right wing ideologue, Young Americans for Liberty, or Turning Point USA chapter out there that needs your urgent support..."
Tim Carney on X - "This is a memo to all Republicans: Please make sure universities get no federal funding, because the people who run them not only hate you, but reject you as legitimate players in our democracy."
University Professors' Union Backs Ideological Conformity in Higher Education | National Review - "Academics have long tried to have it both ways in claiming to support diversity and robust debate while excluding views that challenge left-wing orthodoxy. Now an influential academic publication is abandoning all pretense. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a major union of academic professionals, states that it aims to “champion academic freedom, advance shared governance, [and] organize all faculty to promote education for the common good.” And yet, AAUP’s magazine published an article titled “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” by Lisa Siraganian, a professor at Johns Hopkins University and the president of her university’s AAUP chapter. It became the subject of some heated criticism, and a Chronicle reporter wrote a Twitter/X thread that fairly described some flaws in the article, particularly by pointing out that the broader public accurately perceives academia as leaning left... It is difficult to identify what is most wrong in the AAUP’s post. By arguing that academia skews left because “fascism” doesn’t survive intellectual scrutiny, the AAUP suggests that anyone who isn’t sufficiently progressive is a Nazi who needs to be ejected from higher education. Could there be a more stark confirmation of the public’s perception of universities as ideological hubs unaware of their own internal hegemony? Still, the AAUP applauds itself, its affiliates, and university culture as practicing “critical inquiry.” It isn’t clear what the “intellectual values of academia” mean anymore given the affirmative action policies that undermine meritocracy, and the proliferation of pseudo-disciplines like “gender studies.” And while the AAUP believes that “peer review” is a rigorous process, it now functions as a mechanism to enforce a left-wing consensus. After all, purportedly “academic” articles that have been published in peer-reviewed or refereed journals include “Unsettling SpongeBob and the Legacies of Violence on Bikini Bottom,” “Refusal to forgive: Indigenous women’s love and rage,” “Queering Queer Conversations,” and “A decolonized mental health framework for black women and birthing people.” Supposedly serious “intellectual” institutions in the academic orbit are corrupted by progressive politics. For example, the American Psychological Association — which develops the APA style that is used in some universities, journals, and a range of scholarly works — issued an “apology to people of color” in 2021 for its “role in promoting, perpetuating, and failing to challenge racism, racial discrimination, and human hierarchy in U.S.” The APA encourages scholars to use “bias-free language” and follow its “inclusive language guide.” It also published an “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Toolkit for Journal Editors” this year that instructs editors to “promote citation justice” by “including citations from underrepresented scholars to address citation bias” for the sake of fostering “equity and diversity in scholarly discourse.” Similarly, as an effort to counteract the Trump administration’s anti-DEI initiatives, Nature Reviews Psychology recently declared that “scientists can demonstrate their commitment to DEI through actions that are not mandated by institutions,” therefore it explicitly advised authors to begin “diversifying citation practices.” In other words, purported scholarship should pick sources based on an author’s identity traits as opposed to the quality of argument or evidence. In sum, the AAUP’s self-regard was unjustified and its insult was a confession that confirmed what conservatives have long said: Academia lacks ideological diversity, in part because its left-leaning members gleefully define any right-leaning individuals as moral dangers and systematically purge them from the institutions — be it through the admissions process, the peer-review system, the employment search, or the tenure track. The AAUP was right about only one thing: academics do in fact “challenge traditional norms,” but only insofar as they are attempting to coerce everyone to subscribe to progressive beliefs."
The Review: The AAUP’s revised concept of academic freedom - "the AAUP has in the last two years come to emphasize the corporate over the individual aspects of academic freedom, as in Committee A’s 2024 pronouncement that an “appropriate larger group, such as a faculty senate or a department,” can require DEI statements from faculty members for hiring or promotion. In a similar vein, the AAUP now believes that individual faculty members can be forced to conform to the terms of an academic boycott so long as “there was a democratic process followed” — or at least so Rana Jaleel, the chair of the AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom, told me in 2024. In both cases, academic freedom as an individual right is subordinated to one or another vision of social justice, so long as that vision has some kind of majority support."
Geoffrey Miller on X - "Your periodic reminder that the leading American academic guild, @AAUP, has been entirely captured by leftist ideologues who view anyone to their right as a 'fascist'. 100% bubble, 0% self-awareness."
Megan McArdle on X - "I get a version of this response every time I write about viewpoint diversity, and it is mind-boggling to watch people simultaneously insisting that academia is super-open-minded and empirical and in no way a progressive bubble, and also that conservatives are all fascists."
Opinion | Two Champions of Academic Freedom Go to War - "Not for the first time, the AAUP — or at least its X account — has accused FIRE of mainly supporting right-wing causes, defending the token liberal here or there to keep up appearances. Lukianoff, by the same token, implied that the AAUP avoids defending conservatives. Is there any merit in either charge? FIRE told me that they don’t track data about the political affiliations of the professors they defend. But even a cursory glance at their record confirms that they have very often stepped in on behalf of faculty members associated with the left, and not just since the second Trump administration. In 2017, they intervened at Drexel University in the case of George Ciccariello-Maher, a left-wing faculty member accused of anti-white racist speech. In 2022, they sued Florida over the Stop WOKE Act’s restrictions on teaching about race and sex. More recently, they have chastised colleges for punishing or threatening to punish faculty members accused of making tasteless comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk; for banning teaching about “transgender topics”; for prohibiting a Black student group from hosting a “Black 2 Class Block Party”; for canceling drag performances, and so on. They filed an amicus brief in Mahdawi v. Trump, arguing that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents’ detention of a Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian protester was unlawful, and joined Stanford University’s student paper in a lawsuit against the secretary of state, Marco Rubio. The AAUP’s construal of FIRE as primarily devoted to right-wing causes is difficult to square with the evidence. For its part, the AAUP seems to have declined involvement in any number of high-profile speech furors over the last several years in which the targets of censorship were on the right or were accused of racism. In 2022, the Georgetown University law professor Ilya Shapiro was investigated for several months by his employer for a tweet deemed racist. In another case, the University of Michigan music professor Bright Sheng was penalized by his employer for showing a 1965 film version of Othello featuring Laurence Olivier in blackface. These were open-and-shut violations of academic freedom. FIRE intervened in both cases; the AAUP in neither. In fact, the AAUP’s Academe blog published an open letter condemning Sheng... the AAUP’s repeated response to questions about political bias in academe — “fascist ideology does not do very well in a peer-reviewed process,” in Todd Wolfson’s words, or “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review,” in the words of the AAUP’s X account — certainly give the impression that something like an official AAUP position is emerging. That position has two planks. First, it refuses to grant any legitimacy to the notion that some disciplines might be afflicted by a disabling degree of political homogeneity; after all, those complaining about being kept out are “fascists,” who by definition have no place. Second, it insists that if conservative ideas are underrepresented, that is only the result of good epistemic hygiene, as enforced by peer review. Ideas are not rejected for being conservative, but for being wrong. This is a convenient theory for defenders of the status quo, but it’s almost certainly incorrect. In fact, there is good evidence that political homogeneity and a commitment to activist politics has impaired the truth-seeking mission of some fields. The question of how ideological diversity, or its lack, affects knowledge production in fields like political science, social psychology, and sociology is a live and important one; Wolfson and the AAUP X account’s dismissiveness is unwarranted. That said, the more incendiary part of the AAUP’s rhetoric — the accusation of fascism — in fact names a sticky problem for the viewpoint-diversity movement. As Nicolas Langlitz explains in our pages, since “the quest for diversity was inherently limitless,” it “would eventually have to include even the most extreme positions.” He quotes a group of German social psychologists: “We do not know how much diversity would be necessary to reduce these [liberal] biases. Would it be enough to include liberals and conservatives? Or should communists, fascists, and even terrorists also be included?”"
Steven N. Durlauf on X - "This statement is disgraceful, hardly unique, and indicates why the AAUP has nothing to offer in fighting the unprecedented threats to academic freedom that are occurring. Make no mistake, issuing statements such as this indicates the AAUP does not intrinsically give a damn about academic freedom. To suggest that conservatives are somehow as less committed to the values of the academy is to define conservative scholars as suspect. As the author knows full well, such statements are evidence in support of claims that universities are ideologically biased against conservatives. And on the merits, the claim is as idiotic as one that says Leninism generally doesn’t do great under peer review, but perhaps the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, make it inherently more appealing to those with a more liberal worldview.
"Come down off the cross, we can use the wood"-Tom Waits"
Jack Goldsmith on X - "perfect, and perfectly revealing, in every detail"
Stephen R. C. Hicks on X - "What an (a) odd and (b) disturbing response to a criticism of AAUP's ideological biases.
(a) Fascism has done well under peer review, as Heidegger, Schmitt and other fascists have generated whole industries of academic literature by current-generation sympathizers and critics.
(b) Note the slide in a single sentence from Fascism to conservative, as though those are substitutable labels. Could be sloppiness by the sentence's author, but more likely is the usual rhetorical trick of package-dealing.
(I'm a liberal, and AAUP's anti-conservative bias is obvious to me.)"
Itai Sher on X - "The AAUP responds to a thread on viewpoint diversity & whether academia skews left with “fascism doesn’t do great under peer review” and an attack on the conservative worldview generally I think the AAUP needs new leadership; at least someone else to run its social media account"
Anna Su (theannasu@bsky.social) on X - "With friends like this academics don't need enemies. A very big disservice to the profession when it's at its most precarious"
David Decosimo on X - "The AAUP is crashing out. What was once a storied organization for defending the principles essential for truth-seeking & knowledge-production has become a tired embodiment of the bigoted, ignorant, partisan, self-deluded, anti-intellectual grift currently wrecking academia. Sad."is
Steve McGuire on X - "Talk about saying the quiet part out loud. What a disastrous position for the faculty union to take. And then people will deny that there’s significant discrimination against conservatives in higher ed."
Once again, "this is not happening, and it's good that it is"
Jay Bhattacharya on X - "This is as pure a distillation of academic bigotry as one could ever expect to see openly expressed. The bigotry undermines science. Academic group think supported unscientific ideas like lockdowns, mask mandates, immunity denial, vax mandates and so much covid era nonsense."
James Surowiecki on X - "I have many problems with MAGA, obviously. But one of the biggest problems with it is that it's essentially incurious and intellectually lazy, which is how you end up with mindless tweets like this."
i/o on X - "I'm not going to disagree with this, but I am going to "both-sides" it: One of my complaints during the Great Awokening was about how intellectually lazy and incurious the wokes are. Most of their online discourse could be reduced to a few dozen stock ideas, phrases and bullet points. I remember once watching this YouTube lecture by a morbidly obese Chicanx assistant professor at some Cali state school and after about 20 minutes of it suddenly realizing that the entirety of what I had just listened to was nothing more than boilerplate — a repetition of the most vapid woketarded articles of faith you could imagine. It occurred to me that this woman had probably never possessed a single original idea in her entire academic career, and, as an affirmative action mediocrity, there was probably no incentive for her to develop that ability. After all, her exalted station on the intersectional pyramid rendered her nearly immune from the possibility of criticism (or, as she would put it, "violence"). As retarded as much of MAGA is, I would be the first to acknowledge that at least that their retardation isn't propped up and rewarded and subsidized by our most esteemed institutions. For this reason, I doubt I'll ever despise them the way that I despise the wokes."
Meme - Matt Van Swol @matt_vanswol: "This is me as a liberal in 2020. This is me as a conservative in 2025. What do you notice? *Scrawny, with mask with words: 'it hasn't been great'* *Smiling and muscular*"
Meme -
"A random cashier *pretty girl*"
"What some dweeb on Facebook will insist is an "average" woman before calling you an "incel" *Ugly woman from Fable*"
Andy on X - "White guy options;
- Be right wing
- Hate yourself, your culture, your history"
Most Trekkies Are Republicans, Star Trek Can Embrace It Or Die - "A solid five to ten percent of Star Trek’s audience is female. That’s great, but 5% is not enough to fuel an entire franchise... In the past, Star Trek often explored ideas outside mainstream thought. For instance, the first officer on Deep Space Nine is a former terrorist, in a time when America was hyper-sensitive to terrorist violence. That worked for the show because even though Kira’s past might have seemed edgy and unacceptable to older male audience members, it appealed to younger ones willing to consider the consequences of living a life of violence. Kira’s past as a terrorist was never glorified or endorsed, only explored. It allowed Trekkies with more flexible minds to consider the world from a point of view they’d never seen before. That made it relevant in the current time but also timeless since there’s nothing about Kira’s past that’s specific to the real world in which her character was written. That’s not what Star Trek is doing now. Pronoun culture is not counter-culture, and it’s definitely not timeless. It’s of the moment and the prevailing message in most mainstream entertainment. If you’re being pressured to add pronouns to your LinkedIn profile, that’s as mainstream as it gets. Adding a non-binary teen to Star Trek: Discovery and lecturing the audience on gender pronouns probably appealed to a couple of aging hippy Boomers on their way out to a No Kings protest, but it caused most men to switch off. The mistake people make when talking about this subject is in assuming Star Trek started out with a progressive bent, just because it considered liberal views. That’s wrong. Star Trek was above liberalism, conservatism, and all types of isms. That was the point of the series, and that’s why it has had such enduring and broad appeal. Early Trek would never have lowered itself to subscribing to any sort of limiting set of modern ideologies. Instead, the show’s beating heart was its willingness to explore ideas outside the mainstream, whatever they might be, and then let its audience decide for itself if those were ideas worth having... In the 1960s, an interracial kiss was outside the mainstream. Now that it’s so mainstream, it’s no longer interesting. If Star Trek had made an episode where it lectured the audience on the importance of interracial mating, it would now be cringey and irrelevant. Trek was much too smart for that. Or it used to be. Now, Star Trek seems to think that espousing the views shared by the late-night talk shows watched by your grandma is edgy rock and roll. Where Trek once examined complex ideas outside the mainstream, it now demands its audience adhere to ideas from the mainstream. Ideas that its core audience, men, hates. They’ve accelerated that male audience alienation strategy with the upcoming series Starfleet Academy, a spinoff of Discovery. Star Trek’s new series has commercials featuring Klingons wearing skirts, lectures about climate change, and plenty of the current-year political jargon your average Karen soaks up from CNN.
Fan Replacement Theory In Action
Most other modern, male-audience franchises have the same problem, and they’ve all tried to solve it not by making stories that reflect the values of modern men, but rather by trying to replace their male viewers with female ones who will think the right thoughts. It doesn’t work. It never has, not even once. The best example of this is Star Wars, which has been obsessively focused on attracting female viewers for years now... Star Wars has proven you can’t convince women who share your politics to take over the viewing spots once held by men. That means Star Trek is stuck with males as its only significant demographic at the same time it’s doing everything it can to make men hate it."
Dan Eriksson on X - "So today, a socialist mayor in Germany was stabbed and is now fighting for her life. The media chorus was instant: Nazis are back. Hate is rising. Democracy under attack. Then reality arrived. Her 15-year-old adopted black son was taken away in handcuffs. Earlier this year, police were called to the same address when her 17-year-old adopted daughter threatened her with a knife, according to Die Welt. This isn’t a story about “right-wing violence.” It’s a story about a society so obsessed with its own moral performance that it can’t even see the blade coming from within its own narrative."
NDP leadership rivals at odds over 'purity test' framing - "A schism opened between two of the top contenders in the NDP leadership race on Wednesday night, as Avi Lewis jabbed rival Heather McPherson over her use of a term he says has right-wing roots. Lewis said in a media scrum that he wasn’t a fan of McPherson’s repeated use of the term “purity test” to frame the party’s recent struggles in growing its appeal... McPherson said on Wednesday evening that she wasn’t going to drop “purity test” from her campaign lexicon. “There has been a problem where we’ve made politics small, we’ve excluded people from our party … and every single part of me wants to make that bigger party so that people see themselves there. And that means everybody,” said McPherson. McPherson had previously said at her late September campaign launch that the party needed to be less exclusionary as it embarked on a rebuild... Gazan, who is of mixed Indigenous, Chinese and Jewish ancestry, said that McPherson’s use of the term was a not too subtle call to put “white, male and able-bodied workers” at the forefront of the party. She added that the language disempowers minorities by “framing their calls for justice as ‘ideological purity’ instead of principled resistance.”"
If you use the term "purity test", you've failed a purity test
The NDP is debating building a big tent orreturning to labour roots - "“From knocking on around 10,000 doors myself … I can tell you that Canadians, at least in Vancouver, were super confused. Jagmeet seemed so angry at Justin all the time, and yet he was still supporting him and keeping his government in place,” said Lewis... Lewis has come out of the gate swinging, promising to break up major grocery, telecom and banking oligopolies, and slap a wealth tax on high-net-worth Canadians. He says that the revenue accrued from making those at the top pay their fair share will help fund big-ticket social policies like a national rent cap, public option for groceries, and expanded national prescription and mental health care coverage... Clement Nocos, director of policy and engagement at the Broadbent Institute, says that image does matter in social democratic politics, as shown by the frequent criticisms Singh received for wearing expensive suits and toting luxury items... Nocos said this criticism was unfair, as Singh has explained that he dressed meticulously to overcome implicit racial bias. He nevertheless conceded that Singh’s sartorial choices weren’t always “communicated properly” to the public and ended up becoming a distraction."
"Building a big tent" just means identity politics on steroids and the opposite of what it pretends to say
Toronto kids’ agency has own anti-racism group – no whites allowed - "The group, called the CABR (confronting anti-Black racism) strategic advisory circle, differs from City Hall’s dedicated CABR unit, made up of a handful of staff at Toronto’s social development division. (There is a third body, the CABR advisory committee, which meets every few months and reports to council.) A document says membership is limited to no more than 20 “Black staff within children’s services,” a municipal division based out of Metro Hall that helps place kids in child care, assists agencies with programming and services, and also oversees the dozens of Toronto Early Learning and Child Care Services centres, or TELCCS, run by City Hall. That “terms of reference” document, which the Sun obtained in a freedom-of-information request, says the advisory circle’s role is to provide “advice on the development, implementation and evaluation of initiatives, policies and programs” for children’s services. The group “employs an anti-oppression framework,” the document adds."
Non-black racial groups need to lobby for their own racially segregated groups too
Dr. Sydney Watson on X - "Now that Twitter is showing me so much more leftist content, I'm starting to understand why so many of these people are horrifically ill-informed. All the big accounts just lie. Restlessly. And it's usually about issues people can spend 5 seconds Googling. 😭"
CBS News on X - "EXCLUSIVE: The Navy is considering renaming naval ships named for Harriet Tubman, Harvey Milk, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and others."
Peachy Keenan on X - "Harvey Milk was a notorious San Francisco pedophile who preyed on young teen boys, and who also helped his close confidante and con man Jim Jones to swindle and lure hundreds of poor black families to move to Jonestown, where Harvey's friend Jim killed them all after subjecting them to months of sexual abuse and child torture."
Meme - "When you make a joke mocking Mexicans
Mexicans *laughing Giancarlo Esposito*
Blue-haired land whales *upset Giancarlo Esposito*"
Meme - "The "white" gang:
American Italian Spaniard *relatively different*
The "person of color" gang:
Afghan Tajik lranian *all white-passing*"
