[ExI] jarring change

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 5:50 PM William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
> From here it looks like the Southern Baptist Church would take the honors:  dogma is set in stone; lots of members.  Take away "in Adam's fall we sinned all" and the whole thing comes down flat.
>
> As for colleges I'd say it depends on what department you are talking about.  Art, for instance.  Even thinking about art is art, so they are wide open.  Music accepts total silence as music (Cage).  Sciences are flexible if they are following the data well.  Psy. too.  Sociology is hopeless 10 until they give way on genetics (small numbers though, since some colleges are eliminating the department).  Education changes their dogma constantly, always for the wrong reasons, but at least you can say they are flexible.  English I have not kept up with, though they too are apt to embrace new and wild and wooly theories, only to be dumped after a few thousands get tenure for papers written on the new theory.  Part of the English dept. is in favor of words meaning whatever people want them to mean, and the others what they used to mean.  History I have no idea.
>
> So you see, I have little experience outside the ivory tower.  I am anxious to see what people think about economics.   bill w

There's also the issue that many people see higher education,
especially from an ideological perspective, as very influential. Many
tend to think ideologues inside the university somehow control society
-- much more so than political or corporate elites. In other words,
good wholesome American kids go to uni and get brainwashed into
American-bashing, man-hating, gender-denying ideologies. The mantra
today is, of course, 'cultural Marxism,' which tends to mean anything
the critic of higher education wants it to mean.

To me, this seems so out of touch with the actual influence of the
schools. In fact, the ideological influence seems to go the other way:
students tend to not experience as much ideological change in the
schools -- at least if the data is correct here. Peers and the
zeitgeist have far more influence.

Regards,

Dan
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