Timothy Birdnow

I agree.

A big part of it was the infiltration of the universities by communists and other radical leftists who subverted science and research to the service of their ideology. But there is a systemic problem with it too.

Every academic wants to make a splash. They want a Nobel Prize, or a MacArthur award. They want to be noticed, feted, have their names in the news. You don't get that with solid research most times. If your research does not cross a line it is just one pebble on a very large beach.

So everyone in academia is pushing the envelope. The guy who studies human sexuality and says there are just two sexes will at best be ignored and possibly wind up being blackballed. The guy who says there are seventy two of them gets noticed. So a clever academic will work up a ridiculous theory and "prove" it by messaging data and using dubious statistical analysis.

And since that guy succeeded the next guy will have to go further. It reaches a point where you are just doing works of fantasy.

That's academia for you. It has reached the point where it is no longer grounded in reality.

Frederich Nietzche saw this coming. He said science would eventually fall of it's own weight because it would begin questioning it's own fundamental assumptions, that the universe is knowable, that there is a reality that cannot be dismissed, that the scientific method works, etc. Nietzche was right and we have passed that point now.

It is part of why physics has produced nothing new in decades; it has gone off the rails and is chasing the will-o-the wisps of things largely unprovable like string theory or dark matter.

And every study, no matter of ridiculous, gets trumpeted by the media as certain, a major breakthrough, unless, of curse, it supports the old way of thinking, tradition, what have you. Those studies die in darkness because nobody hears about them.

Few academics will throw away their careers by doing a study that shows the old way was right. If you are an economist you won't defend capitalism. If you are a physicist you won't dare say the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Physics is wrong. It would be the end of your career.

So everybody is racing for the craziest re-interpretation of everything.

And because papers have become insane, it has become impossible to do peer review. Nowadays papers are retracted as fast as they are published. There are things called paper mills, which are computer systems that generate bogus papers, often full of absolute gibberish. They always pass peer review because the reviewer does not want to admit he doesn't understand what the paper is saying. Nobody wants to be the guy to reject Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity. (Nobody understood it then and few do now). So these gibberish papers get published in prestigious journals.

That is, of course, the kindest interpretation of what we are seeing in academia these days.

A big part of the problem was and remains government and NGO funding of research. Everyone wants their slice of that pie, and to do that one would logically give the government or the NGo or the Foundation what they want. We see that in the climate change issue; government wants it, Green NGO's want it, big foundations want it, Silicon valley wants it. So is it any surprise few are doing solid research to rebut the theory? The models have never worked but most papers, even those that hurt the theory, kowtow to climate change in order to keep the funding. Then the Gang Green crows about how 97 percent of scientists agree when in fact most are just afraid of losing funding, or of pissing off their bosses who are afraid of losing funding.

It's a deep-seated corruption that infests the entirety of science and academia.

And the professional organizations have all been taken over by radical leftists. My brother is a history professor and he was a member of several professional historian organizations. He has since quit them all as they have all made sharp left turns. And he has pretty much been blackballed by them; his most recent submissions to their journals have been rejected for no good reason. He's retiring soon so he doesn't care but it is still infuriating. We will have an altered history in the future as those whose task is to preserve knowledge of history are twisting the truth with revisionism.

The crazy left is advancing on all fronts and now control all institutions involving research or education.

In the end the only way to reform this is for it to collapse. The special interests are too entrenched.

And even conservative universities will eventually fall as they hire liberals for "balance" and that is like hiring smallpox to balance good health. There are liberals at Hillsdale and Ave Maria. They hire them because they have this idea that academia needs "balance" and that they have to succumb tot he spirit of the age. But liberals are like a disease and if you let them in they will quickly overrun your antibodies. Get just one of them in the chairmanship of a university department and she'll hire all leftists to fill any vacancies.

My brother discusses that. He taught at McKendree College in Illinois for some time. They wouldn't give him a tenure track position because they said they needed "diversity" and they wanted a woman. Hired a woman to be department chair. My brother left (and they lied about his credentials to justify not hiring him - he saw their file) Now there is not one single man in the department. Not one. Yeah; that's "diversity"!

Leftists operate that way; they are all for diversity until they are not. Traditional thinkers need not apply!

So we have all of the universities now completely controlled by the Progressive Left and there is no alternate views allowed (which is true diversity). That means no papers will be submitted that do not comport with the leftist worldview being foisted off on everyone. In academia it's publish or perish and you can't publish if you will lose your job. So the few conservatives who are left have to tiptoe around, hoping some innocuous paper makes it past peer review into journals without promoting radicalism too much.

Nobody who worked for years to get their doctoral degrees is going to risk that.

We need to completely eliminate the universities. We have the tools now; there are online universities, and trade schools. But they lack the prestige and they lack the social life, the college experience. We need to find a way to make these alternatives more viable in both regards. The only way for us to succeed is to come out of Babylon.

Posted by: Preeyaa Aroraa at September 24, 2026 02:31 AM (51el8)

Posted by: Preeyaa Aroraa at September 24, 2026 02:32 AM (51el8)

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