Note in my posting “Is the Academy Really “Reformable?” that Professor Mitchell Langbert absolves the sciences from his hard-edged critique of academic institutions as well as of various reforms which he deems useless.

Professor Frank Tipler, a physicist at Tulane University, objects , writing to Langbert that “the physics departments at the ‘leading’ American universities have become hostile to the fundamental laws of physics” and that it appears “that most technological advance during the past two decades has come, not from university science…but from private individuals, and researchers at industrial labs.”

Tipler reinforces this grave indictment by observing “that most science articles paid for by NSF were never even cited by anyone except the author” and “that the…probability theory [used by social scientists] is designed to tend to confirm whatever the experimenter wishes to be true.”

Now who would have thought Langbert had erred on the side of optimism?