[Wrecked944]

One of my good friends (who is a super hard core lib) from college once worked on a research project in the Criminal Studies Dept. He was crunching numbers to determine the rates of recidivism for convicts serving hard time vs parole/community service etc. And no matter how he ran the numbers, his results showed that inmates who did hard time were no more likely to re-offend than those treated less harshly. But the profs running the study simply could not believe the results. So they had him re-run the numbers every which way from Sunday. But they kept coming out the same.

The result? The research was never published. My friend said the reason was that the profs flat out could not believe the answers they were getting and squashed the whole thing.

I don't think this anectode proves that academics are crazy deceptive liberals. Instead, I think it suggests that it is harder than you think for people (academics or anyone else) to overcome their prejudices. Even people who are trained to think with open minds find it difficult. Every belief carries with it a lot of emotional inertia.