lol what a load of stupid horseshit
A poll conducted in the run up to the referendum suggested 90 per cent of academics intended to vote Remain. We now know that the academics who took to social media to declare ‘I don’t know anyone who is voting Leave’ were not exaggerating. In the days since the referendum result was announced, this unfamiliarity with the strange Other – that is, the 52 per cent of the electorate who voted Leave – has brought many academics’ barely concealed contempt for the masses out into the open.
so what about the 48% (almost 32 million) who voted remain? are those not "the masses"? the article keeps harping on this, mentioning "ordinary people" and etc. so i guess that means the UK consists of 32 millions of ordinary people and another 32 mil of un-ordinary people?
Post-referendum, the outrage scholars have directed at those who voted to leave the EU has sent a very definite message about who is and is not welcome in academia.
in my country, academia and its many conservative and nationalistic fraternities are one of the major recruiting grounds for the far right party. also im in communication studies (one of those dreaded "irrational" humanities!!!) which is overwhelmingly neoliberal rather than any sort of progressive, but ok.
But, for the most part, this newfound love of knowledge, evidence and the truth is coming from the very same people who have made academic careers out of asserting that there is no truth – that, at best, we can have multiple truths, and that knowledge is dependent on the perspective and identity of the originator. Such is their love of knowledge, they readily ditched the canon in a bid to turn the curriculum into relativistic homage to identity politics.
The current demand to ‘fight back against Brexit anti-intellectualism’ unwittingly reveals how little academics understand about what knowledge means. Yes, scholars may have greater access to information and data sets. But there is no one correct way to understand and interpret facts. Information and data may be useful for pub quizzes – as desperate educationalists have often been quick to point out – but knowledge involves an understanding of how people interpret data in relation to their experiences and prior learning.
uh-huh
anyway, this piece is just typical right wing whining that "academia" is "too far left" complete with the usual caricature of academia as some sort of indoctrination camp, plus the completely ridiculous assertion that academics disagreeing with non-academics on things is proof of some sort of corruption. the whole point of academia is to develop new ideas, even (and especially) if those ideas are not commonly accepted. when those evil, out of touch !!REGRESSIVE LEFT!! academics first started developing the ideas that lead to the enlightenment in the mid 18th century, the "average ordinary person" would probably have thought they were crazy. also, certain ideas being more well received than other ideas is totally normal. or is it only a "free marketplace of ideas" when your ideas are popular and otherwise it's an "echo chamber"?
also yes, people tend to stick to their own circles and fear the "other". this is one of the reasons "ordinary" white people who live in fairly isolated rural or suburban communities are the biggest xenophobes and not the ones who actually live with immigrants.
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