Reason.com39%
"Academics Spent Years Lending Their Institutional Credibility to Various Political Projects" 97%
By Eugene Volokh6%
7/19/2026, 8:42:57 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 26 faulty reasoning types, including Negativity Bias, Biased Writer Voice, and False Dilemma, with Framing Effect as the most egregious example at 51.3% saturation with 99 hits. Analysis detected 921 faulty-reasoning hits from 193 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 95% and a BS Rank of 97% (654 of 18,668 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 96.50% of the article peer group.
Now they are reputationally bankrupt.
If they don't repair the damage, and convince people to keep writing the checks, many institutions will eventually be financially bankrupt as well.
Wise words from Megan McArdle (Washington Post).
A bit more from the same column:
Academics need to sell the public on the value of their project.
They must convince people that the radical pronouncements of the Great Awokening were a terrible mistake, now corrected, and that they are pursuing truth, not political agendas.
Many people in academia do understand this, including the administrators who commissioned {the "Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences," commissioned by Vanderbilt and Washington University in St.
Louis}.
But many others are still clueless.
Even if they grasp, dimly, that something is seriously amiss, they do not understand what it will take to fix the problem.
Their idea of a solution is to imperiously inform Americans they are wrong: wrong that academia has let politics infect its work, wrong that reform is needed, and wrong that there are two sexes, male and female.
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.