Andrew Hartz and Eric Kaufmann write,
When Manhattan Institute senior fellow James Manzi used AI to classify some 600,000 social-science abstracts from 1960 to 2024, he found that roughly 90 percent of politically relevant research leaned left. In the top four sociology journals, the share of papers focusing on inequality has risen to about 75 percent, on average….
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) allocated $35.3 billion in total grants in 2025, and its initiative on “Health Disparities and Racial or Ethnic Minority Health Research” received over $5 billion in 2024. Significant bias could be corrected if just one-half of 1 percent of the NIH’s budget were directed toward heterodox research. The same is true for the National Science Foundation and every other government organization that allocates research grant funding.
I would argue for blowing up the whole system. Government funding controls research, and progressives control government funding.
I am a brokenist on this one. Don’t try to mend it. End it.
if a teenager asked me why they should bother to learn to write in the age of AI, I would tell them this: writing is thinking. Writing still matters because it’s one of the best tools in the world for clarifying ideas, deepening understanding, and generating original thought. AI can produce text. It cannot create connections in your mind between disparate topics, use your personal experience to come up with examples or reasoning, or figure out for you how new knowledge fits into your existing knowledge map.
She explains the learning science behind this.
Michigan’s administrators say they have the students’ best interests in mind. The no-grades policy, they add, will allow freshmen to “acclimate to the demands of college and allow intrinsic motivations to guide personally meaningful academic journeys.”
My goodness. How can freshmen “acclimate to the demands of college” when a college makes no demands? And since when are “intrinsic motivations” enough for good work? A few students may be intrinsically motivated to attend every class, complete every assignment and meet with professors during office hours. They’re the exception. And they should be rewarded for their effort with an exceptional grade.
When I was a freshman at Swarthmore College, the first semester was all pass-fail. This allows you to take risks as you are exploring the curriculum. I also came in with a semester’s worth of AP credits, and my last two years I was in the Honors Program which is pass-fail until you have outside examiners at the end. So I had only two semesters of grades on my transcript.
Swarthmore had self-motivated students, like me. And it had small seminars, where a professor knew the students.
I don’t see grades as a necessary way to toughen up students. At Michigan, the problem is giant classes where students are anonymous. In higher education in general, the problem is too many students being shoved through the system who don’t belong there in the first place.
My specific focus was the role of political considerations in the production and reception of sociological research.
…The field is heterogeneous (and good, high-quality work is produced), but at the same time there are serious problems, and they have become institutionalized. I identify three major categories:
deep and long-standing contestation over the mission of the field and standards and criteria that should drive research production and reception
topical skews and blindspots making us less than the systematic study of society
both hidden and high-profile episodes of informal and formal social control of scholarly production based on political considerations
Her essay describes, in an apologetic tone, a report on sociology for the Vanderbilt-WashU commission on scholarly standards. She remarks,
my optimism about sociology declined over the course of the project.
And I have been saying for years that economics is on the road to sociology.
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In the spring of senior year in high school, I noticed in the bookstore where I worked 16 hrs/wk a big book of addresses, basically, to apply for government or adjacent jobs (no internet) and so wrote away to one of the concessionaires of the Western national parks, for an application. I sent it back and received a job offer, and a date on which to report.
My parents hadn’t observed this correspondence, and when I told them I was leaving after graduation to take this job cleaning motel rooms or whatever - they were upset and said no: I must go to college. It was much the done thing at the time, in that milieu.
I was not quite strong-willed enough to overrule them, and ambivalent enough to have also filled out and sent the 📑 for State U - so instead of going off to work, I reported to college. With a bundle of scholarships lol.
I was a pretty terrible college student, especially as a freshman though basically my whole college career was a joke; all that really changed was I learned to be in on the joke and to not fail out. To do better than fail out on paper, but in fact, I imbibed almost nothing except for my botany class, in which I learned a lot despite getting a C.
So the irony is I feel I would’ve been a much better and more earnest student if I had followed my original plan, and put college off for awhile.
It’s true that in my case, I would’ve discovered that I prefer manual, physical labor, to classroom work and I probably never would’ve gone back. But that would’ve been for the best.
Some of the friends I met in the dorm were a year older than me, having done a rotary club year in another country. While not a job, even that seemed to have given them some preparation, some seriousness of purpose.
Re: "I would argue for blowing up the whole system. Government funding controls research, and progressives control government funding."
The rot extends to private funding of research. For example, the Mellon Foundation plays a massive role in funding of research in the humanities.