Oh good. I'm glad internet rando has straightened that out.
>Academics are not selected for bravery, they're selected for conformity.
Haha, this is laughable. You know which academics are held in highest regard? Those that moved the field from a previous belief to a new belief based on better evidence.
> They're very politically partisan
That's demonstrably false; like the population at large, they are not exceptionally politically partisian - this is how a certain US political party projects it to account for appealing to the uneducated or to ignore evidence.
The majority of academics are the same as regular populace, except they try to follow accurate evidence. That one US party actively tried to downplay and ignore evidence makes the causality go the other direction, in the same manner that when the same party embraced evidence a few decades back that they claimed academia was more in their camp.
Heck, even JD Vance writes on this - he realizes the right lost academia, not by academia moving left or right, but from the right moving away from evidence.
> or Marxian
Anyone thinking some large percentage of academics are "Marxian" is a sure sign of not understanding either term.
This is outright wrong. That is the ideal of academia, yes. The practice of academia is rather different: They're very politically partisan, and especially in the humanities (where the SPLC's input is most relevant) academia is very prone to doing things like citing shoddier studies that cater to the academics' own (liberal-left) biases and ignoring ideologically inconvenient ones:
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/201906...
Academics are not selected for bravery, they're selected for conformity.
Hell, the whole peer review and working off of grant money things mean you have to please your (left-lib or Marxian) colleagues to get the money to do research at all, and then to get your results incorporated into the wider body of work.