The Oldiesfreak Deluge of Absurdity, Ignorance, and Bad Posts III

[ZuWo]

My experiences in academia are limited to the German-speaking world and what I have seen and heard from certain faculties. However, even if I leave aside all issues related to the political one-sidedness at many universities I would say that Hagrid raises a valid point. Apart from the fact that petty intrigues and power struggles are widespread, there are professors who act and are treated like little kings; their assistants and students follow them like a herd of sheep. In academic fields like Indo-European studies (!) researchers are openly ridiculed for subscribing to differing schools of thought or working within certain theoretical frameworks. There are many people at university who live in the often-quoted ivory tower who have little or no interest in explaining to non-academic people why they do research in their particular fields and what the value of their studies is; on the contrary, I have overheard several conversations where students made fun of "narrow-minded" people who dared to ask them what they would do with their degrees once they had finished their studies.
I don't claim that academics are worse people than the rest of society but it would be naive to assume that they are better or less flawless than your average "redneck"; the well-educated aren't any less prone to bigotry than your average "redneck".

[ZuWo]

The comment is not only disgusting but also intellectually lazy and slanderous in that it implies that men who oppose abortion do so in an attempt to control women's bodies. A misleading argument doesn't get better when it is repeated a hundred times.