US Authoritarianism

What about the recent treatment by educational institutions of pro Palestinian protestors then? Pressures of research funding by big businesses? Direct and indirect connections with military contractors? You don't have to look at this from a right wing perspective to see it. Impartiality is a worthwhile ideal, but bias is unavoidable, even if just in the selection of topics deemed worth studying. Universities are obviously enmeshed with the political and economic elite and serve the role of instilling the values and worldview of that community.

This is a long video lecture, but I think it lays it out really well, albeit from a perspective of an instrumental look at what people need to do to have a career in academia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFwVf5a3pZM

The core idea is that the most important factor in the success of a piece of academic writing is whether the relevant people find it valuable, and the top priority of that writing should be catering to the values and interests of these people. One of the top comments on the video reads:

While writing my doctoral dissertation, I discovered that 90% of what mattered to my committee (and the university) was my ability it weave other peoples ideas with my own grammar and sentence structure to make it look like I had discovered brilliant nuggets of information no one else knew while CLEARLY (based on a seven page bibliography) filling the paper with other people’s ideas. Madness!!! But it got me a degree!!

None of this is to say that the people who want everyone to take on faith that evolution isn't real and climate change is a hoax have more of a claim to intellectual authority than researchers. But it's really silly to try to say higher education doesn't involve indoctrination into a particular set of biases.