Academic Freedom

Here is his report. If his testimony is accurate (and we expect it is), American taxpayers are funding the equivalent of a prison riot: No wonder Weinstein is suing. So where are the science organizations that should be supporting him? Communing with their shoes? Added: Note: Crash course for sci nerds: How political correctness morphed into a monster. Don’t look at me. Look at yourselves. You let this happen. Take note that the new approach to intellectual freedom does not permit anyone to just mind their own business. Even silence can be violence. Bari Weiss quotes social psychologist Jonathan Haidt at the Wall Street Journal: “People older than 30 think that ‘violence’ generally involves some sort of physical threat or Read More ›

Oh, look, everybody’s got a haunt, right? But they are not equally damning. From David Klinghoffer at Evolution News & Views: On the story about evolutionary atheist Richard Dawkins getting disinvited as an event speaker by a progressive Berkeley radio station (see here and here), Discovery Institute chairman of the board Bruce Chapman points out the best irony. While Dawkins protests his “de-platforming” over past comments on Islam, in 2009 he helped get Ben Stein de-platformed as a commencement speaker at the University of Vermont over — you guessed it — Stein’s take on evolution and his role in the film Expelled. More. Of course. Dawkins thought he would be eaten last on the progressive menu but he was really Read More ›

From Nikita Vladimirov at Campus Reform: Bret Weinstein, the Evergreen State College [biology] professor who was driven from campus by a mob of students earlier this year, is preparing to file a $3.8 million claim against the public institution. The claim accuses Evergreen State of “fostering a racially hostile work and retaliatory environment” by encouraging the student protests that forced Weinstein to flee campus for his own safety. The students were upset with Weinstein for objecting to a “Day of Absence” event that called for white students and faculty to leave campus for a day of diversity programming.More. Good for him! No more Mr. Nice Scientist. One can’t teach and run for cover at the same time. If campuses really Read More ›

The critical problem is that rejection of competing ideas is not necessarily based on the correctness of the mainstream idea. Often, it is based on control of money, status, and power, rampant egos, and endless politics. This animated short tells the story of Alfred Wegener, a German astronomer and atmospheric scientist, who came up with the idea that continents once formed a single landmass and had drifted apart. Continental drift explained why continents’ shapes fit together like pieces of a puzzle and why distant continents had the same fossils . During Wegener’s time, the idea was met with hostility but after his death a large body of evidence showed that continents do indeed move. Today the theory of plate tectonics Read More ›

Here: Notice how the shriveling of free expression smoothly proceeds to the next diminished staging post: Once upon a time, Berkeley professed to believe in free speech. Then it believed in free speech except for “hate speech”. Now it supports “serious” free speech, but not “hurtful” speech. Well, we live in a world of hurt. Personally, I’m hurt by people who say they don’t like my cat album, or by the director’s decision to give me purple hair in this video. But what’s really hurtful is that KPFA and Berkeley can’t even be bothered to pretend to a principled defense of free speech. What is “serious” free speech? Not so long ago, arguments for same-sex marriage or tampons for menstruating Read More ›

Further to Dawkins dumped from Berkeley due to “hurtful words,” neurosurgeon Michael Egnor and editor David Klinghoffer weigh in: Egnor: Dawkins gets expelled: You’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh Why, one asks, is it fine to criticize Islam, but not Darwin? Dawkins has fought mightily to “de-platform” intelligent design scientists and anyone who harbors even a shimmer of doubt about Darwinian theology. But now he’s shocked — shocked — that defenders of another religion get to silence heretics too. Atheism and its Darwinian creation myth have gained ascendancy in the Western world over the past century, and in several unfortunate nations, have grasped state power. It’s been an ugly ascent, complete with gulags and holocausts Read More ›

Just like Coulter and Yiannopoulos? From Hemant Mehta at Friendly Atheist: Richard Dawkins has a new collection of essays coming out next month in a book called Science in the Soul. Naturally, he’ll be visiting the U.S. on a book tour. One of the stops was going to be in Berkeley, California on August 9. It was sponsored by KPFA, a progressive radio station in the area, in a city known for being the hotbed of liberal activism. But that talk has now been canceled. More. Jerry Coyne quotes the cancellation notice: We had booked this event based entirely on his excellent new book on science, when we didn’t know he had offended and hurt – in his tweets and Read More ›

For whatever reason, I have been receiving a spate of journal articles written by high-maintenance academic welfare recipients on how to Really Fix the people who doubt Darwin. David Klinghoffer, editor at Evolution News and Views, noticed something I wrote here at UD and offers: Skeptics are now social deviants. The journal Sociological Perspectives offers this from Joshua C. Tom of the University of Virginia: Scientific communities maintain respected authority on matters related to the natural world; however, there are instances where significant portions of the population hold beliefs contrary to the scientific consensus. These beliefs have generally been studied as the product of scientific illiteracy. This project reframes the issue as one of social deviance from the consensus of scientific Read More ›

From Carie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation matters: mobilizing the politics of citation toward a practice of ‘conscientious engagement’” at Journal Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography: Abstract: An increasing amount of scholarship in critical, feminist, and anti-racist geographies has recently focused self-reflexively on the topics of exclusion and discrimination within the discipline itself. In this article we contribute to this literature by considering citation as a problematic technology that contributes to the reproduction of the white heteromasculinity of geographical thought and scholarship, despite advances toward more inclusivity in the discipline in recent decades. Yet we also suggest, against citation counting and other related neoliberal technologies that imprecisely approximate measures of impact, influence, and academic excellence, citation Read More ›

ID is not absurd, unless, of course, thinking is absurd From Raymond Bergner at Academia: Let me say from the outset that this is not an essay arguing for intelligent design. Rather, it is a protest against a certain attitude. Everywhere I turn today, I hear voices, with varying degrees of smugness and contempt, telling me that intelligent design — the position that there is some ordering intelligence behind the whole cosmic shooting match — is straightforwardly ridiculous. “No intelligent person believes such a thing.” ” How unscientific!c ” “It’s always a cover for a religiously based, evolution-denying creationism, trying to sneak in the back door in the guise of science.” Highly visible, scientifically informed public intellectuals such as Richard Read More ›

These clips are taken from a video that was recently pointed to by CY and which I (with help of UD) embedded here. We need to ponder what is happening with our civilisation under the impact of evolutionary materialism and its fellow travellers up to and including cultural marxist agendas (also cf. here), so pardon some painful reading: How have we come to a pass such as this? Schaeffer (suitably modified) has a suggestion or two: Where also the seven mopuntains of influence perspective championed by Wallnau et al (again as adapted) may also help us see how the community is shaped by influences such as this branch of cultural marxism, aka “critical studies”: What should we then do? This Read More ›

Someone gave the link, I think we need to watch a comparison of real vs fake papers on gender: I ask us to ponder: Where have we now reached, why? END

From William Hicks on Evergreen at Heat Street: The campus erupted in protest a two weeks ago when biology professor Bret Weinstein emailed a student criticizing their plans for the “Day of Absence.” Usually the event is conducted by students of color leaving the campus for the day, but this year they wanted to coerce all white students and faculty to leave instead. Weinstein called this an act of oppression of its own, and was pilloried by hundreds of students who in effect took over the campus in Olympia, Washington. Since then the school’s administration and faculty have capitulated to almost all the protesters demands and are completely humiliated on a regular basis. It’s all filmed and uploaded to YouTube. Read More ›

Bill Whittle, an “an American conservative blogger, political commentator, director, screenwriter, editor, pilot, author and the voice of The Common Sense Resistance” offers some entertaining thoughts on the gap between Bill Nye and science as an intellectual enterprise: See also: The war on reality will be waged street by street and Marchin’, marchin’ for Science (Hint: the problems are back at your desk, not out in the streets)

From Denyse O’Leary at MercatorNet: Here are five suggestions for reclaiming our right to think for ourselves: … 2. Stop giving to your alma mater just because you graduated there. It may not be the U you knew any longer. Some problems over the years originated in excellent intentions such as helping as many people attend college as possible. But we all tend to make an underlying assumption: that any given student would thrive in the world of ideas if only he were offered an opportunity. Money was poured into universities by private and government sources but much of it has resulted in administrative bloat, sometimes marketing nebulous “studies” programs that will not prepare a student for life in say, Read More ›