Comment by lurk2
> The main examples seem to be Creationists and Alex Jones and similar inflammatory content creators having paid speaker invitations rescinded due to student pressure, which is an radically different topic than what I thought the thread was about.
I’m pointing you towards the trends; you aren’t going to find documentary evidence stating: “We didn’t hire this guy because of his voting history” because a) it’s illegal and b) it’s very unlikely these biases are coordinated between institutions. The Long March article is instructive because the departments where the bias is strongest are all frequent washout degrees for critical theorists.
> It's always very attractive to believe that there's some shadowy cabal explicitly and deliberately controlling the strings to the outcomes that you don't like, when in reality it essentially is never the case.
I never made any assertion as to the existence of a “shadowy cabal” nor any other organized concert. This is an inane attempt to make my claims look ridiculous because you can’t refute them on their own merits. To wit:
> I think it is a conspiracy theory level claim that the explanation is that the FBI is deliberately keeping out mainstream-left-leaning people from being agents.
If you found out 100% of agents were not left-leaning, would you still consider this a fanciful, tin-foil hat style conspiracy? Because that’s what we are talking about here. Note that you have not accurately represented my claim: There is no FBI-style organization in my model that is coordinating the exclusion; it’s intentional, but happening at a local level, not as part of a centralized effort.
I may have misinterpreted "explicit roadmap", to be that implied a directing/organizing entity that is coordinating the exclusion of right-leaning people from professorships, versus your reply here clarifying you mean something different.
> If you found out 100% of agents were not left-leaning, would you still consider this a fanciful, tin-foil hat style conspiracy
Yep, I would. I think we are in the world where FBI agents are skewed as dramatically to the right as university professors are skewed left (which is to say: very). I don't believe either one as the deliberate exclusion of interested individuals from those positions based on their voting records, but instead more likely that both are self-selection and direct correlation to political views effects even when it's too such an extreme degree.
It's the same effect as theater having way more queer people in it than football, which is also not due to any conspiracy.