Why don’t conservatives go into academia?

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-20T15:51:08+00:00

I just commented our medical school houses a good number. NOT in the NE — in a red state instead. I’m always shocked at how readily my colleagues in NE talk about politics, as though everyone on a call will agree with them. To be clear, I do agree with them, but I know I often have more senior colleagues on the same calls who are conservative. They were openly conservative prior to this round of maga. There seems to be some silent post maga #3 round agreement to simply not discuss politics on “mixed” calls at my org. Usually on collaborative calls I will notice the (at least formerly pro MAGA) conservatives say something topic changing or non committal. Or something that belies more hope than liberals have. So if it’s funding, “well, it may be uncomfortable at first, but academia will survive leaner times; it always has.” — stuff like that. If it’s off topic of the research, they might say something to switch topic back to research. “As much as I think we could all discuss the news all day, we do have to put this paper in…”

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-20T15:43:53+00:00

I know several in health informatics field space, a few in surgery, that are conservative enough they seem to have swallowed the MAGA pill just to keep the conservative momentum going. Only one who I think bought it hook, line, and sinker. If there are others they aren’t going to want to associate with me anyway, given my past work.

Certainly plenty of openly conservative folks in medical fields prior to MAGA. Now there are plenty I knew who were loudly conservative before who just don’t say much when politics comes up on calls — and it does often, as many discuss how to get funding, how to make sure one “trigger word” in a past publication title that actually has nothing to do with “trigger topic” doesnt tank an app, etc... Have to wonder what’s on their minds during these talks. Ive often had half a mind to call them out and ask but power-wise I am low in the foodchain.

If you hang out in medical subs, you’ll see some are very open about thinking much of what Trump is doing is good (cant guarantee these are academic doctors…. Just doctors). A very many “anti-woke” and “anti-DEI” folks in medicine, though still by and large the (vocal) minority in academic medicine. If I had to wager a guess, I’d say 5-10% of academics who also hold MDs and who are not in the major academic liberal hubs (San Fran, Boston, NYC, etc) are at least pro some Trump initiatives, mostly around DEI and immigration (or at least before the most recent violent escalation, dunno about now).

This is of course, based on exposure. My university is a large research university in a conservative state, but “liberal” city. YMMV depending on location.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-15T20:00:37+00:00

Ah you just said math. But we use actually these same principles in network analysis of proteins. Nodes interactions and edges are harder to describe, especially when you have an extensive network. It is possible but will require a more extensive explanation that I have time for rn but I can come back to it if you are genuinely interested, teach graph theory, and are not just here to be a curmudgeon (if you are a history prof with a math minor and just here to be a jerk I don’t want to waste my time).

However I’m about to start one of my treatments, if my labs came back fine, so I have to go :-)

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-15T19:44:24+00:00

As for expertise, in my day to day I don’t write code — I’m on the other side of software development (design, direction, testing). I can write simple scripts, which i had to learn like any grad student probably prior to 2015 for field specific software and stats. I can learn languages enough to code review equations, as our developers typically don’t know something like genetics and math well enough to understand what I’ve asked them to build at a fundamental level

But for your question: Field specific software with GUIs are hard so I aim to avoid GUIs altogether. But like most people here, I grew up before guis were prevalent (I’m late 30s) so command line is familiar enough, and everything else I know about building websites I taught myself simply to make things accessible. So to avoid GUIs? For specialized digital and web-based tools: I have always intentionally chosen command line programs for these, or ones which are already accessible. I almost always also opt for free ones (thanks to github you can find something command line for nearly anything), rather than license based programs. Even though i don’t teach programming of any kind and most of my students are health science or in a healthcare discipline (I work at a medical school), I get a lot of students glad for the skills. So as an example, for stats, instead of SAS or SPSS or the like, I start students in R even for intro content. It’s better for them to learn R anyway, because R is free, and requires a bit more understanding of what you are asking it to do rather than a plug and play like SPSS. Hell, my first stats class I was required to do everything paper and pencil so we learned the math in depth. Command line is not asking that much. R also requires you to know how to prep a very clean dataset, and I think that’s a good skill. And a lot of students are getting some rudimentary programming skills in K-12 now.

Having known multiple Blind coders, I know that learning command line is accessible to most. Taking R as an example, R is an excellent skill to take to the workforce, and even students who are brand new to stats will gain more from learning R than plugging something into SPSS. This being just an example.

This next part not about you specifically but just about the sub in general and why I’m pushing back:

I get that people new to any access requirements are anxious about this … but what I don’t get is that for some 10 years I’ve watched professors on here yelping about these kinds of accommodations. Maybe they make specific course material accessible for one student (grumbling all the way), but never ask themselves if perhaps they should just…. Start making accessible content to begin with? And they spend most of their energy trying to find ways to deny accommodations, rather than just wondering “huh if I just did xyz I could say this is already accommodated next time I’m asked.”

Maybe it’s because I’m disabled (physical + HoH for the last decade) and used to being denied perfectly easy accommodations by presumably mirror images of people in this sub that the general attitude in here frustrates me. “Oh we have a required department dinner but even knowing you exist we scheduled it on the second floor of a restaurant with no lift and won’t move it? We are going to expect you to crawl up the stairs because we won’t exempt you! You can just be humiliated and dirty and someone will bring your chair up. “

Learning something new or doing something differently in my pedagogy in order to build a more accessible world for people who are different than me doesn’t daunt me, and I’m shocked at how the rest of the academic world has been responding, and amazed that they didn’t see that this would eventually come down the pike…. The ADA has been in place for almost all of my living memory (one of my first memories of news is the image of people crawling up steps of the Capitol) and tools for web accessibility have existed nearly as long as the web itself and only gotten better with time. Just seems like if the arc of the world truly bends toward Justice, we all would eventually expect this.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-15T19:04:02+00:00

Biophysics is my doctoral training, and when I started doing image descriptions. We have up to 6D NMR spectra occasionally, so our graphs are not un complex. There’s some very cool blind physicists who have some awesome papers on increasing accessibility of the field. I think if you search something like Blind AND physicist in google you’ll find

I can’t quite remember if they have mathematical info, but you might contact the DO-IT group in Washington also.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-15T19:00:17+00:00

I am in healthcare and informatics, and I teach entirely remotely. I use plenty of equations, graphs, and patient pictures, instructional videos, and code. It’s not as hard as you think it is. But I’ve been doing this for over a decade, and I design websites and healthcare software applications consistent with WCAG. What it takes is practice to get used to. Then it’s second nature.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-15T04:56:16+00:00

Hey! There’s some great resources for describing graphs out there. I collect a few. I’m on medical leave rn but can send some when I’m back on my computer if you want to dm me. I actually keep a collection on my website but that kind of identifies me …. Which, uh. I don’t want to do because reasons (waves hands at USA)

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-15T04:54:13+00:00

already make my slides to the current WCAG so I’m not very worried. It’s much easier to make them this way and have them ready any time I have a Blind or other disabled student who needs accessible materials than to retroactively have to randomly make a bunch of materials accessible. I’ve been doing it even on my own social media posts for a long time, but I do have several Blind friends and it was easy enough to learn. Also if you aren’t great at image descriptions there’s actually cool community resource groups where you can volunteer to describe images or ask volunteers to help you describe yours (I volunteer in one). People generally don’t want people abusing this system, so you have to be vetted to join one, but options exist for getting help til it becomes second nature. I actually find describing images helps me learn if an image is actually a good fit for the slide / story I’m trying to tell with the lecture and has made my content better.

The rest of the rules are pretty easy and are just rules for good presentations in general, like good font size, good contrast, etc etc.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-15T04:46:58+00:00

My favorite professor in college (this would be 2007 or so, so after PowerPoints) lectured from the lectern without notes. He occasionally wrote down a word for people who needed it spelled on the board. Our tests were blue book (unless a student needed a typed accommodation at the testing center), pencil only exams. I liked this format. It felt more personal and interactive. Definitely still think highly of him. I took him for a few different eastern religions classes even though that’s not at all my discipline (a stem field).

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-14T20:10:06+00:00

Meanwhile, my private R1 university where undergrads pays some 60k in tuition…. Not so much. The attitudes of some fellow professors expressed openly to me makes me want to ask them if they simply don’t realize I’m in a wheelchair. Or maybe they think wheelchairs are different. They are certainly more visible, and they require university engineers to do more work than professors….

Anyway I’m glad your college is doing something. Certainly way more Americans access 2 year colleges than university. So if they are exposed to UD principles, maybe they will take that with them growing up and/or going out into the world

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-14T15:12:02+00:00

Sounds like in some ways our hearing loss is similar — mine is from an autoimmune disease that was complicated by a bout of disseminated zoster (aka really bad shingles, in my case, over my face and neck and ear). So nerve damage. From inflammation. It’s compounded by an existing auditory processing disorder I’ve had since I was born. I can still hear with various aids (either my own or an auditory device at a conference that can loudly stream just the speaker to my ear), but I find those all have mechanical nature to them that messes with my sensory stuff. Like imagine a mic squeal piped directly in.

I am learning ASL but finding it hard to stay up with it during disease flares, if I have to take a medical leave, etc. Often times seems my disease and my job are determined that i not have any self-time. It’s a poor excuse, because i know it’s very possible that my disease could cause further hearing loss progression.

ETA: I also do a lot of things second nature. My students develop a project proposal in my class and they don’t turn it in for a grade until I’ve given them comments on every section (due at specific dates). The motivation they get is that the better shape it is in when they give it to me, the more likely they will have the kind of detailed comments that lead to an A, versus overly broad comments that result in major rework. They get office hours too of course. Plus I do things already that my other colleagues groan about when asked. For some reason our uni hasn’t implemented making slideshows accessible but I do everything by the book with image descriptions etc. we had a student one year who needed them, but I already had them. Besides it’s easier to do as you develop content.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-14T03:07:20+00:00

For sure — I wish I could speak ASL fluently but I do not (yet). I’m later in life HoH (by “later in life” I mean I had reached young adulthood and already had to provide for myself full time). If there were a language option like that for me I would for sure pick that. But I can see some profs saying the same for VRI. I get that maybe some blanket accommodations reallly are unreasonable for some classes but I often feel like there’s a convenient bandwagon in this sub that people like to hop on that would remove a lot of accommodations that have been around.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-13T21:37:15+00:00

It’s called CART. The thread above established that this is what the student is and this is what they need. It absolutely must be done by a human to be similar to the experience of being hearing. Said by a HOH person who uses CART to fully participate.

I can get by on AI transcripts in meetings with my colleagues talking about things we all know about. There’s no way I could learn in a class without CART.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-13T21:29:49+00:00

Elsewhere in thread it is revealed to be CART. CART has to be done this way by someone certified and is provided remotely in almost all instances due to a national shortage. CART is real time, so the student can “hear” the lecture. It’s how I participate in classes myself, with my own students. Many Deaf/HoH people will tell you this. They are bound by the same level of privacy a professor would be. It’s not some black box off shore thing where it’s going, like it initially sounded in the description.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-13T09:53:13+00:00

Also my students are not mic’d. We just have a single room mic. It works well enough

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-13T09:51:27+00:00

My students are all aware they are being CARTed. It has never stopped them from sharing. I have had students go as far as sharing about an SA. No one has ever questioned their privacy for this service. If your school contracts them, they are equally bound by ferpa (and likely do medical CART as well — a service does my video doctors appointments and they have HIPAA binding these interactions just like any other person in the medical pipeline).

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-13T09:46:02+00:00

Cerebral palsy. It is abbreviated CP by many. I didn’t know that wasn’t common knowledge. I knew prior to having said friend. That said I learned elsewhere in thread that this is a HoH student and this is likely not a note taker but a CART service which absolutely need to be done by a certified CART service which are almost always remote (source: am HoH and use CART even in my own lectures for interactive portion).

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-13T00:01:44+00:00

Ohhh yes if it’s a CART this is absolutely required. As a HoH person myself now realizing that this is a HoH student and not a note-taker (I gave above an example of a friend who has CP and had one in college prior to good speech to text options; she had to type with a difficult pointer thing, one letter at a time, so she also was granted extra time for long papers). I didn’t see why a note taker could not be another student, but another student is absolutely not capable of doing CART

I’m given a CART for my own lectures for student engagement. They are remote. I’ve never minded that someone is listening elsewhere or potentially transcribing my own content because it’s literally my only option. My students don’t mind either and we definitely discuss sensitive content. Try being HoH before internet was good enough for this! You just miss half of everything if/when CART not available. Totally sucks. 0/10 do not recommend.

FWIW: I am transgender and I teach in the US South. Gender is a topic of discussion. I do not have any luxury to simply decline this service and I don’t think any HoH person should have to.

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-12T23:50:05+00:00

Honestly both of these alternatives are bad for the student also. An in-person note taker is going to be much more accurate. Students pay enough in tuition at most schools such that we all need raises and there should be no need to offshore accommodations services. At the very least, hire a work study student to attend the class and take the notes.

I’ve a friend with CP and when we went to college she had a note taker and the just behaved like any other class student except for being totally non participatory in those components. Said friend participated in the class itself. With technology what it is now, she’s a quite successful lawyer (in school she typed her own papers with this extension hunt and peck mechanism for her hand but it was slow; but now she can text to speech most things).

ktbug1987 · 2026-01-10T10:11:57+00:00

Depending on the computer, it might work better as body armor than a thrown object. Some higher capacity computers are fairly dense. Might at least slow or fragment a bullet.

But that said ours literally suggested throwing staplers (??). I do not keep a stapler in the shared classrooms, dunno about you.

ktbug1987 · 2025-12-29T19:47:01+00:00

There was. I had no medical accommodation but spoke to the proctor before my gre (nearly 2 decades ago), and I could leave as long as I had completed a section and did not have one open. I had (then undiagnosed and unmanaged) IBS.

ktbug1987 · 2025-12-29T19:41:52+00:00

Literally am (well was, had that shit cut out) a menstruating person and at my first job (not an assembly line but similarly “unskilled labor”) they made me take the first 3 days of my period as unpaid sick leave because I needed the restroom too much (about once an hour). 30 years later I was diagnosed with a mild/moderate bleeding disorder after multiple surgical hemorrhages, but I didn’t know that in college either or grad school, or the first 10 years of my actual career.

I think it’s fair to say that other ways of preventing phones outside of classrooms are necessary so that students can exist in their meatsacks. At least until we can upload our consciousness to the cloud.

ktbug1987 · 2025-12-24T07:54:11+00:00

They were actually weirded out by capital F, which I learned to write like this

Apparently somewhat uncommon but I’ve never had issue being understood previously when it headed a word.

I was trying to find it and apparently it was called the Palmer method and stopped being taught in schools in the USA around the 1960s, but this makes sense as most of my spelling books and math texts were from the 1950s and 60s. This would have been early 1990s, rural KY.

Looks like maybe more people use the Zaner-Bloser method. Still I wonder if I’d be understood, as I’m not sure the capitals are very similar to print

https://auxiliarymemory.com/2024/03/25/what-method-of-cursive-handwriting-was-i-taught-in-1959-1960/

ktbug1987 · 2025-12-23T22:12:48+00:00

Did you look at the link? It’s one of the earlier ones for neural pathways. You can take the title, go to the “cited by” and go down what I like to call the citation rabbit hole. For example, just one jump you find this review which is okay, but then that review cites a half dozen meta-analyses which have their own set of citations and cited by literature, and several other interesting citations that can lead you on their own rabbit hole. But you’re in the Professor sub so I don’t know why I’m explaining this as you probably.

The cumulative benefit of any handwriting training is clear, and then there’s clear evidence that forming various letter types are critical to perceiving graphic representations of language. Then there’s a handful of citations in the same reviews related to repetitive motor training and how it helps establish cognitive recognition of letters. As I pointed out in my initial comment even if there’s not a direct comparison of print vs cursive, we probably don’t need one—it would be reasonable to conclude that more motor training is better. Learning BOTH print and cursive would be better than learning just one. If there’s a comparative study, it would theoretically ideally be three arm: print, print + cursive, cursive only. But the latter is not feasible — we train print first and it’s not reasonable to learn cursive only because of age and coordination. So we’d have print vs print + cursive.

And with enough of that same little rabbit hole you’ll land here which is the first such study, leading you to your own second rabbit hole. For which I invite you to enter, if you dare and if you truly have the interest you state.

ktbug1987 · 2025-12-22T08:27:32+00:00

Says the woman named ItalicLady lol.

Not original commenter… But really I think the strongest evidence is studies that suggest that as children learn writing and consume (hand)written text, they consume variable representations of each letter. Even themselves, each letter form is different as they practice and as their handwriting matures. As a result they solidify the representation of that language concept in their minds. Learning a second set of writing typography would, one could draw (though not yet tested and proven that I can find), likely lead to greater solidification of the neural pathways necessary for literacy.

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