Read in the Substack app here.

Colin recently found another great post from Professor Steven James Lawrence. Colin had the opportunity to talk through it with the author and has just received this personal comment after they talked it over:

“Thank you so much for reading this post and especially for conversation. I really appreciate your obvious moral clarity and rigorous inquiry process. Top notch new friend!”

The point here is not that social change should not happen – it’s the way it is being applied in many American colleges that is of concern if it is leading to these results for many very good, caring academics.

Why I’m Reluctant to get a Doctorate Degree. Ideology over Truth is not an Option, copied with permission by Steven James Lawrence

In 2016, a person of influence in the academia world I travel in connected me with the opportunity to meet the director of a Ph.D program in a well-regarded university.

During the interview, the primary question on my mind was:

Will I be allowed to pursue truth, understanding, and new discoveries without being forced to do so through a predetermined almost-religious-like ideological lens?

It was weird. He was sitting there looking away from me, pondering how to answer my queries.

One thing was clear.

He was reluctant to be forthright. He indicated in subtle ways that this place was a cauldron of spiteful ideology—cancel culture in the extreme. After all, he was a “white male”, a perverted category of human existence in the eyes of a large number of students and professors who were (and are) hell-bent on proselytizing the world towards a vision of so-called “social justice” that can rightfully be called a vision of outright discrimination, dehumanization, and cruelty.

Though I have been producing a fair amount of writing over the past few years that can reasonably be said to be somewhere close to along the lines of a dissertation, I feel I don’t have a choice but to go the route of the “para-academic”—striving to meet high standards of evidence-based scholarship with credible sources, but remaining un-affiliated with formally recognized colleges and universities (many of which have been ideologically captured).

I don’t want to pay money for an expensive indoctrination into reductionist, anti-thoughtful ideologies that reject the very idea of objective truth and that rely on fashionable narratives rather than the pursuit of truth. I don’t want to spend my time frustrated and/or scared due to the incursion of hatefulness disguised by social science-sounding big words that serve only to divide rather than to illuminate.

This program director struck me as a person who was scared.

Sure, he was obviously intelligent and accomplished, but it was clear to me that he felt he was too old and too far deep into his career to consider the alternative path of bailing out of this enterprise. Didn’t want that for myself.

Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t.

Have been thinking about this for a long time. If a director of a Ph.D program was too scared to encourage truth-seeking, then what the hell was the point of applying for the program?

I respect people with Ph.D’s who want to be called “doctor” and know full well the rigors involved in all that reading, researching, and writing. But, since around 2014, some, if not many, of these doctorate degrees—depending on the place from which these degrees were earned—have become a kind of theology certificate.

To me, a degree from a highly ideology-focused institution communicates the message that:

Such and such person has bought lock, stock, and barrel, all of our claims about all of reality and has learned not to color outside the lines. Therefore, our institution has conferred upon such and such person a piece of paper that says this degree-earner thinks the right thoughts, knows the right knowledge, and tows the right line for what we as an institution have determined to be not only the Greater Good, but the Only Good.

Not for me. Not for me. Not for me.