“I wish I understood why you like this.”
- Well, to paraphrase and summarize my 10+ posts on the subject, what I thought was "outside the box" was the approach he took to framing and clarifying the debate. It seemed unusual and was clearly controversial. Scholarship shouldn't be afraid of risk or controversy; the scholar should go where the idea and the data lead, even if some are uncomfortable with what you might find.
“The actual thesis is nowhere near as bad as his blog posts or the various right-wing articles about him. But that doesn’t make it actually good, or original, or particularly worth paying attention to.”
- Haven't read the author's blog posts and only read the Daily Wire article, since it was written by a UChicago alum. You seem to have done a lot more research on this person and "possible motivations", over and above spending time reading the paper. I'm reminded of the joke in mathematics where the prof. insists to the class that the answer to a particular theorum is "trivial." When questioned on that, the professor looked incredulously at the students, then back at the theorum. He then stared at the latter for several minutes. Then, he suddenly dismissed class - early. The next class, everyone showed up only to find that it had been cancelled for the day. So it was with the following class as well. Finally, on the third day of this, class was back in session. The professor opened with: "I was right. It IS trivial."
- Academics posting their political opinions ("right-wing", "left-wing" and "center") on twitter or blog posts is nothing new. Nor is the journalistic temptation to grab a headline.
“On the basis of this paper, would you hire Jacobs to teach students? Would you hire him to solve problems, to identify problems, to perform a mediation? I wouldn’t.”
- Hmm. I simply can't assess the questions you pose, and I wonder how you yourself can do so given that you profess to know little about mediation methods in social science work. Were someone to produce a similar piece of work getting the questions "right" and moving the debate along as a result, then we would have a good standard for comparison. Do you know of such a work? Or are you using standards other than the author's paper to make your judgements?