Academic peer pressure

What Professors Ought to Tell Students

We professors should transmit to our students three simple but ancient truths: (1) in many important matters in our fields, the ignorance of experts vastly exceeds our knowledge. (2) Much of what we think we know is hard to verify and may well be wrong. (3) We, and the materials that we will assign and […]

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The Pressure of Group Thought

Academic “consensus” is in the news. Stetson University professor of psychology Christopher Ferguson, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education,recently gave a run-down on how the American Psychological Association supposedly compromised itself by manipulating a task force into endorsing harsh interrogations of prisoners.  Ferguson says the APA “crafted a corrupted ‘consensus’ by excluding those who […]

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