Category Archives: Social Commentary

The Problems On Campus

Judith Curry’s thoughts on Michael Shermer’s thoughts:

Beyond Georgia Tech, I have visited many campuses over the past several years, and I was invited to talk in most instances to present an alternative perspective on climate change. One of the universities was Oberlin, which featured prominently in Shermer’s article. There is a club of young republicans and libertarians, which receives contributions from a donor to invite speakers on a range of topics to add diversity. Apparently I was sufficiently tame or insufficiently known to have instigated much of a backlash.

Apart from the social issues that are of primary concern in Shermer’s article, I am particularly concerned about all this promoting groupthink in terms of actual research in the social and natural sciences. I don’t see a near term solution, but I think that heterodox academy.org and the blogosphere are making a difference.

It’s an ongoing battle for freedom.

David Brooks

A shorter @Instapundit: “Eff you“:

The Tea Party movement — which you also failed to understand, and thus mostly despised — was a bourgeois, well-mannered effort (remember how Tea Party protests left the Mall cleaner than before they arrived?) to fix America. It was treated with contempt, smeared as racist, and blocked by a bipartisan coalition of business-as-usual elites. So now you have Trump, who’s not so well-mannered, and his followers, who are not so well-mannered, and you don’t like it.

They brought this on themselves.

[Saturday update]

More Brooks links.