> Would you argue that a cult that loses members as they gain knowledge and alternative mental models should be protected from the savagery of educated minds due to its loss of adherents?
Are you arguing that sociology and anthropology and other more conservative hostile departments are in some way more educated than economists? Or that academia is not a hostile environment for conservatives? I think the pursuit of truth is a great idea and wish more academics believed in it.
> John's (and I'd probably be on firm footing to assume your) presumption here is that political affiliation automatically means discriminatory bias and inherent exercises in partisanship.
I’m not presuming anything. There’s ample research on this. I wouldn’t say there’s automatic discriminatory bias or exercise of partisanship but it exists and it’s not state. See for example https://www.cspicenter.com/p/academicfreedom “Across three Anglophone countries, a significant portion of academics discriminate against conservatives in hiring, promotion, grants and publications. Over 4 in 10 US and Canadian academics would not hire a Trump supporter, and 1 in 3 British academics would not hire a Brexit supporter.”
> I wouldn't call it a universally bad assumption, but it's also likely not a terribly consistent one across the universe of universities and colleges.
Who cares if it’s consistent? If it consistently holds in a subset of schools that’s bad. As it happens one sees open displays of hostility to convervatives across academia, from when Larry Summers was fired as Harvard President to the witch hunt for Josh Katz at Princeton or the hunt for Eric Weinstein at Evergreen College. It’s not rare.
> I'm glad you recognize that Economics has a more even partisan distribution than some other fields in social science. Many fields are.
None in the social sciences. None in the humanities. If you’re arguing that a more even partisan distribution in economics is in some sense good or makes it more trustworthy that says the opposite about other fields.
> [T]he academy has been attacked before, many times. No matter. Ultimately it converges back to the form of a tenured faculty supported be benefactors in the pursuit of knowledge, even and especially when that goes against their benefactors' preferred version of reality.
The research university is not 200 years old. The original academy was closed and Greek academic life lost all vigour at roughly the same time, turning away from anything like production of new knowledge. Universities as producers of knowledge are a new thing and their social role could be usurped by others. Or it could just be lost, for centuries. Good things sometimes just end and are not replaced. Probably not as finishing schools: they’re genuinely good at that.