I still like the site and visit it a couple times a week. But has anybody noticed how it’s sort of been sliding to the left? I admit that I first started to notice this out of self-interest. I used to get links there from time to time. Now, almost never. A few times when I’ve written a more egg-heady piece I’ve sent it along for a link and gotten nada. That’s fine in general. I turn down similar requests around here all the time. Most recently, I passed along that that column about pragmatism and got a nice note back saying it didn’t make the cut. Again, fine. Nature of the beast. But the more I scrutinize the sort of stuff that does make the cut, the more I get the sense that ALD is becoming more of a mirror of academic liberal-left haughty sensibilities and less of the quirky eclectic enterprise it was before the Chronicle of Higher Ed. took it over. They still do good work, and you can still find great stuff there, some of it conservative. But I increasingly go there to find the predictable, not the unpredictable.