Here’s one of the new rules in the academic world: If you dispute the work of a black radical, you will face an angry mob calling for your head.
That’s what happened to Klaus Fiedler, who until very recently was the editor of a journal named Perspectives on Psychological Science. He made the mistake of thinking that there should be a debate over a paper written by a black psychologist, Steven Roberts. Read all about it in this Washington Free Beacon article.
Poor Fiedler, a German, didn’t understand how woke most of the psychological profession has become. He thought a paper making controversial claims like “color-blind leadership leads to structural inequality” could be rationally critiqued. Nope — that would run contrary to the “diversity and inclusion” policies of the Association for Psychological Science.
No matter that Roberts would have had the opportunity to reply to his critics. Roberts claims that such a debate would somehow be “rigged” against him.
This is not the first time something like this has occurred. The WFB article continues:
Fiedler is not the first editor of a scientific journal to lose his job for flouting progressive pieties. In 2019, Anne McCammon, an editor at Neurology, resigned after she published a piece that critics claimed included racist tropes. And in 2021, Howard Bauchner, the editor in chief of JAMA, was fired because he promoted a podcast in which another editor suggested that poverty—not racism—was the main obstacle facing black America.
Here’s the new normal in academe — if you make outlandish claims that fit into the “America is hopelessly racist” narrative, you’ll never have to defend them, but if you argue against such claims, you’re apt to get the axe.