You’ve probably read, or at least heard about, John Tierney’s surprisingly impressive (considering where it was published) recent article in the New York Times that favorably portrays UVa psychology professor Jonathan Haidt’s provocative presentation at the recent convention of social psychologists in San Antonio (he, politely, demonstrates their bias).
If you’re familiar with the article (or even, maybe especially, if you’re not), you may be interested in what I have to say about it on Minding The Campus, along with my comments there about a major new National Academy of Sciences publication, “Understanding current causes of women’s underrepresentation in science.”
UPDATE: The Orthodox Strike Back
If you have access to yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, don’t miss James Taranto’s devastating report of how some New York Times readers responded to John Tierney’s article.
He notes, for example, that an “Adam Bevelacqua of Brooklyn, N.Y,” took issue with Jonathan Haidt’s analysis by observing that the absence of conservatives from social science fields
highlights how far to the right the contemporary conservative movement has traveled and how out of sync it is with evidence-based reality. Since most conservative social policy revolves around religious belief or long-disproven ideas — the most obvious to point out would be the anti-gay rhetoric about curability, recruitment, etc. — it makes perfect sense that conservatives gravitate away from the social sciences and Academia in general….
Bevelacqua, Taranto points out, “is engaging in exactly the sort of stereotyping of which he accuses conservatives.” But “the interesting point,” he continues,
arises from one further fact: Bevelacqua’s comment is the most “recommended” by readers on the Times site. The second-place comment asserts that “closed-minded conservatives don’t make very good scientists.” No. 4: “Most thinking people are not very likely to be what you call ‘conservative.’”
As we write, the top five comments are all hostile to conservatives, and the top six are unsympathetic to Haidt’s argument. It seems Haidt’s description of the world of academic psychology as a liberal political monoculture also fits the New York Times’s readership.
Why are we not surprised?
