HISTORY HAS AN IDEOLOGY PROBLEM: A recent fracas over a widely publicized article in an academic journal shows the damage that progressive bias has done to the profession.

Why would such a strong step be taken to defend a paper that is clearly lacking in historical rigor? The answer lies in politics.

The History and Technology editorial focuses on the paper’s usefulness in “decentering white actors in formative technology developments of the early British industrial era,” and its problematization of “the concepts of modernization and industrialization . . . help show the close ties between these aims and colonizers’ assertions of geopolitical, racial, and religious supremacy.” Bulstrode’s work is valuable in its argument against “a schema which valorizes EuroAmerican intellects and disallows for non-European peoples as the creators of novel technological practices,” helping to displace “narratives that center the agencies and experiences of white capitalists.” According to the editors, “she brings to this literature an agile analytic by which ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ must be detached from pre-existing ideas of where a particular technology begins and ends.” This is politics, not scholarship.

Americans were told that supporting higher education would support a search for truth. It’s done the exact opposite.