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August 09, 2014

Comments

Karl

The commenter you refer to seems to me to have a point. The widest range of views is not represented by academia. But nonetheless, if the point of academia, as you say above, is not to bother with a range of views but rather to protect the process of producing opinion, and if as your commenter implies, that there is no real range of opinion in academia (assuming with your commenter that the "range" from center-left to far-left hardly represents a wide range, especially when they agree on policy matters) then the process is either failing or biased or somehow managed to hit on a correct answer that (the conservative) half of the country just doesn't get. If either of the first two is true, then why protect a failing or biased institution? If the latter is true, then academia is failing at its one true goal, to compellingly convey their ideas to the public. Therefore, academia's status quo hardly seems worth protecting as it is.

(((The fact that there are institutions that once a year are more one-sided than academia is irrelevant. (Analogously, as we are constantly lectured by the left, the fact that there are many institutions orders of magnitude more violent and oppressive than modern Israel, for example, does not mean that we should stop talking about how murderous Israel is.) We are told not to look at such things relatively.)))

John Protevi

"The commenter you refer to seems to me to have a point. The widest range of views is not represented by academia."

What studies can you adduce to support this claim?

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