I was denied admission to a PhD program because of my perceived political views

I once sat in on an academic research meeting where the PI of the group stated "If there are any Republicans in the room, leave, you are fired." They felt comfortable enough saying this even though there were obviously people there from outside the group and nothing like that could be kept secret.

I was blocked by a large mass of people with a shared Twitter block list including a number of comedy feeds I used to like to follow, because one of them disliked my political affiliation I had listed on my Twitter page. The person told me as much before blocking me. I've since removed it to prevent future discrimination, but I shouldn't have to and I don't much care for this brave new world.

The fourth one was great. I grew up in D.C. visiting some of the greatest museums in the world until I was bored of them. But some of the strongest experiences I've had are attending church services with my wife and daughter and listening to sermons.

As someone who grew up in a strongly red area and with beliefs in that vein, I know EXACTLY the kind of exclusion that the author is talking about to a painful degree. For anyone who wants to experience it, walk into any Reddit discussion and tell everyone you&#x27;re a devout Christian and watch the pseudo intellectuals exercise their &quot;openness.&quot;<p>And yes it&#x27;s true I&#x27;m far from the most religious person there is, and I strongly believe in birth control, women&#x27;s rights, on and on, I am constantly assumed to be some Bible-thumping redneck by anyone who doesn&#x27;t know me. It also doesn&#x27;t help that I regularly enjoy working with my hands, building things, fixing things, which mind you when it comes to many things to fix there&#x27;s a great deal of intelligence required, but because it&#x27;s not the fancy coastal intelligence that gets you six figure jobs I&#x27;m assumed to be an idiot.<p>And then people wonder why Middle America has such a disdain for the cultures and intellectual achievement, after they&#x27;ve spent their entire learning lives being told how dumb they are by the snobs, most of whom can&#x27;t even swap a tire for a donut without calling AAA.<p>&lt;&#x2F;rant&gt;

What school denied him? Because if was a public institution, bad on them.<p>But if it was a private university, then that&#x27;s their right. Feel free to disagree with them, but a private university is allowed to have political views and admit folks to their programs based political views [1].<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;education-law.lawyers.com&#x2F;school-law&#x2F;can-private-schools-discriminate-against-students.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;education-law.lawyers.com&#x2F;school-law&#x2F;can-private-scho...</a>

Ideological homogeneity isn&#x27;t the starting condition it&#x27;s the ending condition, the achieved goal. How could you see that homogeneity and then say &quot;this could be an issue only in an incredibly tribal ideological environment&quot; and not realize that&#x27;s exactly what academia is and has been for a long time? Have you not read your Saul Alinsky? There&#x27;s a reason his devotee is the top prez nominee (Clinton). Climate conferences, academia, these are pure political spheres; you CANNOT rock the boat before tenure. With the net now, nothing is under the radar, so you will have to resign yourself to a lower tier placement, but it might be a great spot for you since politics determines school ranking.

Anyone else notice, that an article about assumptions made based on political views immediately stirred up religious arguments. Why does one have to be religious to be on the right and non-religious to be on the left?<p>(I&#x27;m not from the USA so maybe this is an American thing?)

&quot;Why would they?<p>There&#x27;s been lots of noise lately about how conservatives don&#x27;t respect science or the intellectual sphere. Why would they? They know we&#x27;re politically biased.&quot;<p>This is where it took a turn for me. I&#x27;m basically in agreement with everything else, and it&#x27;s personally eye opening to gain a greater understanding of these kinds of biases, but when you take a few bad apples in the social sciences (literally what? five? six?) and extrapolate that out to justify distrust of all of science, it becomes problematic.<p>The leftists I know (not including myself, though I share similar views) don&#x27;t dislike conservative attitudes towards social science or other &quot;soft&quot; sciences, in fact most of them take it as a foregone conclusion that conservatives won&#x27;t like them. They dislike point blank denial of facts such as that of human-caused climate change perpetuated mostly by conservative think tanks and consumed by an undereducated population of people who legitimately don&#x27;t know better.<p>The problem is really that we live in a culture that does not value education very highly, nor does it enable good forms of it for the majority of our nation.<p>And just for fun, let&#x27;s take the opposites of this so-called &quot;urban intellectualism&quot; that is expressed with these characteristics:<p>&quot;... is ingenious, a deep thinker.&quot; vs. is dumb, a shallow thinker.<p>&quot;... values artistic, esthetic experiences.&quot; vs. values uncreative, ugly experiences<p>&quot;... is inventive.&quot; vs is uninventive<p>&quot;... is sophisticated in art, music, and literature.&quot; vs. knows nothing of art, music, or literature<p>&quot;... likes to reflect, play with ideas&quot; vs likes to avoid introspection, take things at face value, and move on.<p>Pardon me if a few of those don&#x27;t seem obviously better to more than just liberals than their alternatives. I know a lot of conservatives who would be exceptionally proud to call themselves inventive, sophisticated, deep thinkers with passions in art and literature.<p>You&#x27;re doing intellectual conservatism a disservice by acting like these are all things conservatives would be offended to see described as &quot;openness.&quot; If being an intellectual, sophisticated person is synonymous with being a blinkered bourgeois intellectual liberal then I&#x27;m friends with an awful lot of blinkered bourgeois liberals who are also big fans of Austrian economics.

Is there any evidence that someone rejected him on that basis? I didn&#x27;t read the whole article in detail, but it seems like a suspicion with nothing to substantiate it, and a lot of hearsay about what some people told him about the risks.

This is the same old tired schtick: you must be a member of the Party to progress in your career, and reactionary views are incompatible with holding certain jobs.<p>It reminds me of Gad Saad talking on Joe Rogan&#x27;s podcast about being denied professorship at various universities for not being Christian enough. I believe at one point he was asked to write a short essay on his relationship with Jesus as his saviour (at which point he realized that job offer wasn&#x27;t probably going to work out). [I don&#x27;t have a link at this time]

I offer as a hypothesis the belief that graduate study programs, even in hard sciences such as physics, aren&#x27;t looking for scholars, but disciples.

Welcome to life. The only thing that matters is what is perceived.

Uh, although &#x27;crowded&#x27; is leading the witness, &quot;The earth is like a crowded spaceship with limited room and resources&quot; IS an observable fact.

I don&#x27;t understand why Republicans automatically deserve respect from the &#x27;liberal&#x27; intellectuals? If I disagree with someone on basic axioms of our society (climate change is real, xenophobia is bad, etc.) I&#x27;m not going to get much traction in other topics.<p>I agree with his other points though: liberal bias in science is a great danger and needs to be removed.

Does &#x27;rationalisation&#x27; have some strange meaning in this context that I&#x27;m unfamiliar with?<p>As far as I&#x27;m concerned any view justifying the matter is a rationalisation, left or right wing politically; agree or disagree it&#x27;s certainly nothing to be upset about being called a rationalisation.

I grew up in a red state, too, and as an atheist, I got tired of being told I was going to hell by peers and forced to pray at school events.<p>As such, I have a lot of Christian friends but, it is understandable that some &quot;intellectuals&quot; are hostile to those with strong religious beliefs given that many with similar beliefs deny scientific concepts like evolution, advocate teaching creationism in schools, and deny the existence of global warming.

If everyone in a research group thinks the same way and agrees on everything, why do you need a whole group?

Well, at least they weren&#x27;t being politically correct, right?<p>Personally, I look down on people who are members of any political party. I truly try not to be biased, but it&#x27;s pretty hard not to generalize. People who seek out association with amorphous groups just seem intellectually weak, lazy, or worse.<p>The irony is that I&#x27;ll probably be down-voted for stating my opinion (the way things are these days).<p>Edit: Actually you guys are even cooler than that. You&#x27;re down-voting my old posts, too. I admire your commitment to group-think!