As per Kate...
University!
A must read about a modern witch hunt.
"But something bigger is at stake: The very integrity of the
social-science research process is threatened by the public smearing and
vigilante media attacks we have seen in this case. Sociology's
progressive orthodoxy and the semicovert activism it prompts threaten
the intellectual vitality of the discipline, the quality of
undergraduate education, and public trust in academe. Reasonable people
cannot allow social-science scholarship to be policed and selectively
punished by the forces of activist ideology and politics, from any
political quarter. University leaders must resist the manipulation of
research review committees by nonacademic culture warriors who happen
not to like certain findings."
"Science already has its own ways to deal with controversial research
results. Studies should be replicated. Data sets should be made public
and reanalyzed. And new and better studies should be conducted.
Eventually the truth comes out. By those means, Regnerus might be shown
to have been wrong or perhaps be vindicated. That is how science is
supposed to work."
"By contrast, political attacks like those on Regnerus are
contemptible and hurt everyone in the long run, including progressives.
Everybody—especially officials at the University of Texas at
Austin—needs to be vigilant in protecting scholars and their research
against those inside and outside of academe who seek to silence scholars
whose research runs counter to the current orthodoxy."
Thank you, Christian Smith for having the moral fortitude and courage to discuss this.
