What was the cause of this allergy — that they were abusing the notion of ‘academic autonomy’ that they so fiercely defended, in its most negative sense as ‘the freedom to marginalize a certain kind of knowledge‘?
Our basic hypothesis here is this:
Establishing and maintaining an ideological hegemony is only possible if the loyalty noose between the epistemic community and the layers below it, is carefully being kept INVISIBLE. A situation in which an epistemic community (a politicized academic group) exposes it’s liaison with propagandists or agitators indicates the collapse of their ideological hegemony.