World’s top trauma conference is a nucleus for woke ideology. I counted the presentations.

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Source: International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies
Read time: 2.5 minutes

This Happened
The International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) released the program schedule for its 2024 annual conference.
 
Who Did This
ISTSS is the world’s largest professional organization for researchers and clinicians interested in psychological trauma and stress. Over 1,000 attend its annual conference, which is where all the leading trauma researchers present their latest works.
 
The Premise
Being the premium gathering of trauma researchers, this conference influences the direction of research and clinical practice, and educates the next generation of professionals. It is the indispensable venue for networking and getting your work recognized.
 
Analysis
Over three days in November 2024, approximately 527 talks are scheduled. Of those, 170 (32%) will promote ideology of progressive leftist ideas. The breakdown of those 170 talks, is that 126 will be on oppression-based stress. Racial discrimination is the most common (44), followed by LGBTQ+/transgender discrimination (21), followed by immigrant discrimination, historical/intergenerational trauma, moral injury, and man-made climate change. These oppression experiences are controversial concepts for which no good evidence exists that they cause psychological disorders.
There will also be 28 talks on toxic stress and 16 on complex PTSD.
 
Lest one thinks these concepts will be presented in a neutral fashion that will stimulate productive debate of opposing views, that will not happen. I attended my first ISTSS conference in 2000 and presented my work for the next fifteen years. It was the conference I most looked forward to every year because PTSD research was a fresh field. Groundbreaking studies on important topics were being conducted. Gradually, the conference became overrun with controversial topics by activist researchers. I tried to generate debate from the audience, but this never went far. The presenters and audience members seemed to have no intellectual framework at the ready to understand how they might be mistaken. And, there were no other skeptics in the rooms to extend the discussions. I stopped going after 2017.
 
What should talks focus on? The types of questions that would provide real help to victims of trauma include improving access to treatment (13 talks), accurate assessment (0), prediction of responders and nonresponders (0), better retention in treatment (12), implementing evidence-based treatments (25), innovations in therapy techniques (18), and mastery of therapy techniques (0). These will account for only thirteen percent of the program.
 
Why Is This Happening?
Institutions of higher learning suffer from ideological capture in which professors in academia are overwhelmingly liberal. In psychology, the ratio of Democrat to Republican faculty members is 16.8:1. In sociology, it’s 43.8:1, and in anthropology it’s 56:0 [1].
 
David Horowitz documented the impact of this imbalance in his books The Professors (2006) and Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom (2007). He described activism within campuses as attempts to deconstruct the nation’s identity and divide its communities into victims and oppressors, all under the banner of social justice.
 
Chris Rufo diagnosed the genesis of this imbalance as the “long march through the institutions,” which he claims is the skeleton key for understanding the modern Left: it’s how they captured power, how they shape the narrative, and how they influence what you think about the world around you. It explains the invention of buzzwords and control of language that you hear but aren’t quite sure what they mean or where they came from.
 
Rufo marks the 1960s as the shift of Marxist intellectual strategy from popular revolt to the long march [2]. But the groundwork was set in the early 1900s when many of the social sciences—namely, psychology, sociology, and anthropology—were born. The vagueness of these sciences make them ideal for bending scientific methods to support ideology. Those who gravitated to these fields were often self-selected individuals with fevered dreams of social justice [3].
 
The Heterodox Academy was formed in 2015 by three scholars to try to combat this lack of ideological diversity through blog posts and hosting discussions on campuses. They are trying to ensure that universities are truth-seeking and provide constructive disagreement. While large in size, the effort has been deemed a failure, however, because the discussions are often liberal professors debating with liberal professors [4]. Apparently, there aren’t many conservative professors to go around.
 
 
REFERENCES
[1] Mitchell Langbert (2018). Homogenous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty. Acad. Quest. (2018) 31:186–197. DOI 10.1007/s12129-018-9700-x
[2] Christopher F. Rufo (2021). Critical race theory: What it is and how to fight it. Imprimis. A Publication of Hillsdale College 50(3), March 2021:1-5
[3] Carl N. Degler (1991). In Search of Human Nature. The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought. New York: Oxford University Press
[4] Nathan Cofnas (2022). Four reasons why Heterodox Academy failed. Acad. Quest. 35(4):13-24, DOI: 10.51845.35.4.4
 
 
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