Happy New Year!

 

After a bit of a break, it is time to jump right in. The academic world can be a challenging space, depending on where one lives. Even if we take location out of the equation, there are plenty of political interest groups pressuring colleges and universities to crack down on whole degree programs, faculty speech, and student speech. I may not be a free speech absolutist, but I do generally err on the side of free expression, as the academy writ large tends to function better when faculty and students can speak their minds, with the caveat that there is an agreement on the fundamentals (what I call data or what everyone else would call facts or premises). So far, I've been pretty lucky, but I always know I am always one legislative session away from running out of luck. But I choose to be hopeful. I do know we will face some serious headwinds depending on what the next president of the US pursues in terms of student visa availability, the would Department of Education, and so on. In a sense, it is a good thing that policies governing curriculum are devolved to the states and in my sector often to college or university systems. Without some centralized means of enforcing faculty or students to follow a particular party line, the odds of pulling that feat off are very minimal, but not non-existent. If we're really fortunate, the incoming US president will prove to be about as lazy and ineffective as he was during his first term (2017-2021). 

This is an especially interesting time to be studying authoritarianism. I study authoritarianism from a psychological perspective as opposed to studying authoritarian political organizations and systems. I do think the work I and others who are far more well-known does inform how to understand how an authoritarian regime could become established and perpetuated, and that those in political science and history can inform us psychologists on how those systems might influence authoritarian attitudes among the citizenry. 

I have slowed down my research activities considerably these last few years. Initially, the pandemic threw a monkey wrench into my plans. Then it just came down to a series of personal family crises these last couple of years that have kept me out of the game. Thankfully, I am now essentially a senior academic, so perhaps it matters a bit less if I publish or not. I have been revisiting a couple topics recently and should be sharing a bit of that with you at some point later on in the year. 

In the meantime, happy new year!