THE HIGH INTELLECTUAL STANDARDS AT UCLA PSYCHOLOGY

The official blurb: "The department of Psychology, one of the largest and most productive departments in the nation, is housed in Franz Hall. Its state-of-the-art facilities, numerous resources and renowned faculty provide ample opportunity for innovative research. Many departmental faculty and researchers are recipients of over $14 million in annual extramural funding, and are acknowledged leaders in their fields. Their scientific contributions, combined with the campus' remarkable growth and Los Angeles' cultural vibrancy, have hastened the University's emergence as a world-class research institution - the anchor of Southern California's intellectual and scientific achievement."

One of the people whom UCLA employs to teach "non-experimental methods" (meaning mainly questionnaire research) is Kevin Binning (kbinning@ucla.edu). Binning is the author of the piece of "research" that I alluded to on 16th. I made some perfectly proper scientific criticisms of it and forwarded the link to Binning. The result was a stream of emails from him that showed virtually no interest in discussing any academic or scholarly issues but which were heavily laden with ad hominem abuse and aspersions. In one such gem he called me a "dirty old man". What a high-powered intellectual! But readers don't have to take my word for Binning's intellectual level. The link to his work that I originally put up now leads to new content. It now says: "To Dr. Ray: I can just imagine you sitting there pathetically trying to ruin my research to help compensate for your own failures in the field. What a joke you are" -- which is pure abuse: No argument, no attempt to answer my criticisms and nothing else of an intellectual character. How Leftist!

There is another comment on standards at UCLA psychology here

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