auditing academia
what have the professors been professing? the real fun is about to begin
as many of you likely saw, bill ackman is going scorched earth on academia. after some folks at MIT came after his wife’s dissertation, he decided to take a look at the publications of every professor and leader at the school.
popcorn futures were limit up.
you can read his (quite long) discourse on this HERE.
to be sure, bill is a formidable foe. he’s also arguably unhinged. but whatever your take on him, but he’s certainly one who relishes a fight and who has a legions of smart, obsessive analysts working for him to bring to bear and a set of new AI tools to fuel them.
this is just the tip of the iceberg.
but it’s also ancillary.
consider:
overton windows are funny things.
you just cannot get a conversation going about certain topics or ideas until the world is ready, but once it is, it happens like a torrent.
slowly, slowly, then all at once.
ackman is not nemesis but a symptom of nemesis. the time had come for this to happen. he happened to be front and center when it did.
and that’s a VERY important distinction because it means he is not alone.
he’s part of a tide that sweeps clean and once in motion, the tide does not stop.
a fun and perhaps less considered aspect of the impending rummage through academic publication:
plagiarism is going to be the least of it.
this has been an incredibly isolated and unaccountable ivory tower.
small groups of hyper-politicized and fetishistically tribal hyper-partisans took over entire fields of endeavor. they took over the journals. they took over the grant giving. all of it.
this has made a lysenko level mess out of entire fields for decades. it has turned peer review into an ideological commissariat whose primary purpose has been to speak power to truth and to prevent truth from being spoken at all.
and now, suddenly, these obscure journals and dissertations, previously read only by other like minded members of "the club" who cared about nothing save ideological purity are going to be read widely.
propensity for plagiarism will be the least of the revelations.
the content is going to horrify.
have you ever actually read any of these papers about gender as social construct but race as immutable signifier of oppression or the whole intersectional aggrievement matrix of post modern pabulum?
it’s SO much worse than people suspect.
this isn’t even the outrageous stuff
and none of this is new.
this charming missive was “calling the shot” over 20 years ago.
it’s just that no one was paying attention because who cares what the current iteration of “how many angels can dance upon the head of a pin” happens to be?
it was a parlor game for tweedy irrelevancies.
but people are interested now. this spilled out into politics and economics and regulation and child rearing. it filled elementary schools and boardrooms alike.
and that crosses a rubicon.
and now comes the pushback.
academia is open for audit.
have you seen the dissertations of university professors, presidents, and elected officials and realized what they are actually about?
half of it is not even scholarship, it’s just diatribe.
have you ever seen how bad the science and the data behind whole fields like "climate science" or increasingly “medicine” is or what passes for ethics or even law?
have you seen how awful the study design in social (and hard) science has become and how laughably unable to replicate it is?
you will.
it's coming.
and when the world gets a look at what has been passing for academia, it's going to get very, very interesting for the academics because these people are so corrupt, so self-absorbed, so out of step, and so detached from reality that they have not only destroyed but actually inverted the whole system of “higher education” and turned the university into a self-serving fallacy factory for deranged doctrine.
and enough is enough.
occult academia has thrived and festered in obscurity.
it's going to be amazing what a little sunshine can disinfect.
I cannot say this enough times:
Replace male, man, white, caucasian, western, christian with jew and see what they really are, the woke and the PC and the feminists and the multiculturalists.
They are nazis. They just swapped "jew" for "white".
By their own arguements, they are justifying the most extreme response because they constitute an existential and terminal active and immediate threat against anyone fitting any of the descriptors of:
"male, man, white, caucasian, western, christian".
You cannot debate with them. You cannot reason with them.
If you are any one of the listed terms, they want you dead, they want your history erased, and they want your children to never be.
There is something counter-productive - however tempting - about all the conservative focus on this Harvard scandal blow-up. Why?....because it fosters the illusion of the feasibility of a quick fix and avoids facing up to the big picture here.
The big picture is that academia, as a whole, has been a ROTTEN EMPIRE of Lefty groupthink for 50 years and more. This has done immense damage to the fabric of Western civilisation but few have wanted to notice until recently. Why?..... because mainstream political discourse has been obsessed with the comforting delusion that political power is something that changes hands at election time......meanwhile the future (humanities and social science) elite, sheep-dipped in their university 'education' have quietly assumed the reins of each and every institution of Western society.