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@primalpoly - Geoffrey Miller

A little rant about American universities, in the light on the recent Congressional testimony debacle: Today I learned that Harvard President Claudine Gay seems to have published only 11 peer-reviewed journal papers in her entire academic career. 'So what?', you might ask. Well, that's about the number you'd normally need to get hired as a first-year tenure-track assistant professor at a decent state university. It's the number I published in the 12 months before I got tenure. It's about the number that my more workaholic colleagues publish every year, decade after decade, throughout their careers. And it's less than 1% as many papers as get published by outstanding researchers like behavior geneticist Nick Martin (with over 1,500 journal papers). The situation at Harvard is not unusual. The leaders of academia are not typically leading academics, in the sense of highly productive researchers or widely respected teachers. One might say they are career bureaucrats - but that would misunderstand their crucial ideological function. The American people need to understand that in modern universities, both public and private, administrators function more like party political officers in communist Russian or Chinese universities. They are selected, throughour their careers, largely for their political commitments, and their willingness to enforce them. Like Cold War commissars, their allegiance is to the party, not to academia where they happen to work. I mean 'party' quite literally: the Democratic party. Most American university administrators are loyal Democrats, and can't really imagine why anyone wouldn't be. Very few are Republicans or Libertarians. And an increasing proportion of them are fully woke identitarian Leftists: they often launched their careers with a short series of papers on woke topics, using woke ideological frameworks, published in woke journals - before turning to the administrative track that offers much more political power to propagandize, indoctrinate, and control. 'So what?', you're might ask. I've seen many calls for university administrators to enforce the rules of classical liberalism and free speech more fairly. This is like asking a Soviet-era commissar to abandon their Communist party allegiance, and to develop an entirely new identity and ethos grounded in an ideology that they have spent their entire career fighting. It will not happen. Political animals do not change their spots. University presidents who have prioritized amassing ideological power over producing academic research will not suddenly rediscover the merits of open inquiry. They need to be fired, and replaced with academic leaders who are actually leading academics - rather than party political officers. https://mindingthecampus.org/2022/12/16/the-president-has-no-clothes/

The President Has No Clothes — Minding The Campus In 2001, Harvard President Larry Summers rebuked University Professor Cornel West for scholarship that did not meet Harvard’s standards. According to the Globe, Summers “rebuked West for recording a rap CD, for leading a political committee for the Rev. Al Sharpton’s possible presidential campaign, and for writing books more likely to be reviewed in The […] mindingthecampus.org

@primalpoly - Geoffrey Miller

PS hat tip to @DavidRandallNAS for writing the article I linked.