On False Beliefs in Academia

Le résumé fourni par la source

In recent years, universities have suffered a serious decline in their reputation and public support for their work. This paper suggests that this decline was largely caused by the spread of false beliefs among many academics and administrators that now see the mission of universities as social activism, rather than the open-minded search for truth. It will be argued that three interconnected sets of false beliefs are largely responsible for this parlous state of affairs: (1) the blank slate delusion (denying the role of evolutionary and biological variables in determining human outcomes), (2) the nominalist fallacy , or social constructionism (the false belief that all reality is socially constructed and words and ‘theory’ correspond to reality), and (3) the myth of group equality (the false belief that equal outcomes for different identity groups, however defined, are possible and desirable). The assumptions and origins of these three sets of false beliefs are discussed, and their common roots in neo-Marxist theorising are identified. The reasons why highly educated academics should so readily succumb to these false and indeed, delusional beliefs are discussed, and the dangerous consequences of these collectivist ideologies for the future of liberal democracies are considered.

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