I suspect once you have given me the opportunity to take you inside the departments of psychology, by tour's end the so-called hallowed halls of the Ivory Tower will resemble hollowed stairs to the Ivory Dungeon, where all the phenomena, and students of phenomena, are chained to the wall like political dissidents. Behind the facade that is their cosmetic science beats the heart of this massive self-serving and fundamentally flawed community that betrays its own claims to evidence, ethics, empathy, and diversity.

Psychology professors, including the politically motivated Berkeley researchers, show their rigidity, prejudice, and lack of intellectual curiosity (characteristics associated with Archie Bunker-type conservatives) not only in their research but in their end-of-academic-term faculty meetings, where evaluations of student academic performance lapse into slanderous assessment, driven by groupthink, of student personalities and in some cases, character assassination, all for the purposes o declaring students they don't like 'unfit' for this profession. I have witnessed too many such meetings in which psych profs threaten to withhold career milestones from students whose esoteric theoretical alignment, unconventional research interest, or unprototypical choice as a researcher, student-teacher, or assistant foments aggressive questioning as to whether they might be less than perfect fits or, worse, less than professional. I do not even have to mention what happens to students or colleagues who fail to give 100 percent allegiance to the policies, procedures, and prejudices that govern research and teaching in departments of Psychology but that actually advance institutional requirements (i.e. managing day-to-day affairs and public perception of the academic community) rather than fundamental science. Psychology's cosmetic (or ADHD) science constrains independent thinking, deindividuates students and research participants, restricts the scope and depth of fact collection, bureaucratizes knowledge production, domesticates the field's true explorers, and homogenizes the field's membership and subject matter (for details, see ADHD Science). All these observations could be used to just as easily (and even more credibly) cast aspersions on the mental health of psychology professors, who I believe suffer from professional analogues of their own DSM disorders. I succuumbed to this temptation, and unlike the government-subsidized Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition, my aspersions will hold up to scrutiny. If the authors of Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition are determined to find modern comparisons to Hitler, they need look no further than their own halls and, in many cases, their own mirrors.

Why do I think anyone should watch me turn the tables on the psychological community? I've been a graduate student in Psychology -- which means I can speak intelligently about the pressure to uniformity exerted by the training programs, the programs that transform ordinary students into professors and practitioners. Having known what this does to a person, and particularly, to persons with certain personalities and research interests, I am inclined to discuss what it means for the pot to call the kettle black. More importantly, having battled my way to the PhD, I am now qualified (as a social psychologist) to opine on the effects of this field's sociological properties and dysfunctional dynamics on its science and services. As an apostate (someone who turned his back on the field after the field made it clear he was not wanted), I am poised to offer credible testimony that addresses both anecdotal evidence of abuses and my high-level analysis of the field in which I was trained and into which I was nearly indoctrinated.

For years in this discipline it was fashionable to seek social justice through a scholarly deprecation of the Archie Bunker personality, officially named the right-wing authoritarian. We designed questionnaires to measure right-wing authoritarianism (e.g., F scale), characterized by fear and aggression, dogmatism, feeling threatened by outgroups, desire for inequality within groups, intolerance of ambiguity, and avoidance of uncertainty. For decades psychology professors studied right-wing authoritarianism as it expressed itself in prejudices toward various demographic groups. But as a group we never paid more than grudging lip service to the proposition that these characteristics are not unique to right-wing authoritarians, that a comparable set of prejudicial characteristics is exhibited by counterparts on the left of the political spectrum (often in the very name of equality, freedom, and justice). For years, authoritarianism was tacitly synonymous with right-wing authoritarianism, and this assumption was kept afloat by political winds blowing through psychology departments which, to this very day, continue to be rancorously anti-Republican.

The characteristics associated with the authoritarian personality are fostered as much by community as by isolation or, more elegantly, by how we cope with the threat of isolation. Psychology professors let their fear of isolation and chaos get the best of them, which is to say that in the very name of science and the public interest do they design a Psychology that manages chaos rather than explores the meaning, manifestation, and functionality of life's psychological aspects. And like most trenchant authoritarians, psychology professors engineer whatever order is necessary in seeking immediate and total relief from all uncertainty and ambiguity. Setting aside a healthy balance of open-mindedness and skepticism, and using science as a tool of disqualification rather than a tool of exploration, psychology professors serve an ever-widening nucleus of policies and procedures that behave like prejudices in adversely affecting knowledge production with respect to the most psychologistic phenomena (e.g. dreaming, personality) and, by extension, the livelihood of those students who would stake a career on the study of such phenomena. These systemic biases manage a neglect and distortion of the phenomena and give an unfair advantage in the hunt for tenure-track assistant professorships to individuals who do not have to make so many sacrifices or adjustments to produce a competitive vita on a career timetable. When viewed from an evolutionary perspective, over the course of training generations the systemic biases can be said to find human incarnation in those selected to be Psychology's professors, and it is no wonder that among the characteristics of individuals who survived so many layers of vetting is a para-skeptical contempt for dreaming and other unhealthy attitudes toward science. Psychology is founded on the most inhuman prejudice, as evidenced by the disappearance of Personality programs at a time when less psychologistic programs like Human Factors and Cognitive psychology are flourishing.

In my experience, the most pronounced and elegant illustrations of authoritarianism were provided by psychology professors themselves, who exhibit at the individual level behaviors aimed at aggressively engineering solidarity through the end-of-academic-term evaluation of graduate student progress. And in the article Political Conservatism as Social Cognition we have a classic case of psychology professors demonstrating the frustration with an outgroup that is emblematic of authoritarians. And that's what I suspect motivated the political frustration of former APA President Phil Zimbardo (i.e., bashing of the administration's position on helping parents help their children to cope with war and terror) and vaunted Tufts University cognitive scientist, Daniel Dennett. They would like to apply the comb with which they straightened their own hair to the world at large. They would like the public to oust the conservative politician in much the same way they oust students who do not as readily submit to, or fit into, the academic or professional gild. As individuals, and you should take my reference to them as individuals with a huge grain of salt, psychology professors are byproducts or instantiations of their profession's public persona. They want to be thanked by the public for saving it from its own myths and folklore and every so many years release scientific findings seeking to dismiss the propositions that dreams have meaning or function or that opposites attract (when in actuality, their research never truly addresses the phenomenon under study; see Junk Science). They grouse about not being given a greater role in public policy, and even go so far as to attempt to use their scientific status as a springboard to mock the faith of the masses (see Turn Off Your High Beams). Their whole notion of reinforcement reflects their own emphasis on validation and guidance from without rather than within. Could it be that when you sacrifice your own development (and subvert your own will) to external authority, as psychology professors have done and continue to do, that you demand authority by proxy? That you need to validate your submission to the profession by seeing this profession dictate terms in the wider world?

Whatever the ultimate cause may be, I have documented this epidemic of left-wing authoritarianism across departments of psychology, one manifestation of a tendency to ego-diffusion and ego-inflation emblematic of borderlines (see Psychology Professors Suffer from Analogue of Borderline Personality Disorder). 'Epidemic' is not an inappropriate term here, as interpersonal contact and concern is the vehicle or instrument through which authoritarianism is perpetuated and propogated until it becomes hard-coded into a community's reinforcement structure. The pressure to uniformity which I observed could be tangibly felt, and I often joked about measuring it in pounds per square inch. It is as if you are diving into the depths of the psychology department's own Unconscious, where the air is thick with complexes and repressions. But at the root of the problem is the business of managing a psychological community that deprives individual students and researchers of their freedoms, alienating them from both their wits and the scope/depth of the factual material comprising their phenomena of interest.

FEAR AND AGGRESSION

Let's talk for a moment about this habit of psychology professors to violently draw inferences about a student's professionalism and fit during an end-of-semester evaluation meeting. The history of the end-of-semester evaluation meeting is replete with instances in which a discussion of a student's academic performance crosses the line into an aggressive and characterological evaluation of the student as a person. Despite everything they claim to know about social psychology, a professor invites groupthink when he or she identifies for the faculty as a whole the student as a 'potential concern and imperfect fit at risk for unprofessional conduct,' and slander becomes self-fulfilling prophecy when his or her colleagues, asked to look out for this behavior in the student, finds another equally egregious behavior. Fashioning themselves police officers charged with protecting and serving mental hygiene, scientific standards, and the public interest, the professors act out of fear that an undeserving student might slip past the gate into their fiefdom. During a fact-finding discussion about a student, professors who disagree with the way a student is characterized will remain silent in the knowledge that while the faculty has to live with a student for at most four years, they have to live with one another for the rest of their professional lives. In deference to this, psychology professors are more than willing to subvert the goal of accuracy to the goal of maintaining group harmony.

Before I frame the crux of a chronic disease, allow me to clean your palate with an abbreviated list of the acute episodes. This is what I have seen:

• In extrapolating from the facts, a trigger-happy diagnostician strays into hyperbole when he or she hangs a DSM diagnostic label on a student.
  
• A liberal psychology professor insinuates that a student's choice of husband (the student was married to a classmate who withdrew to express disapproval over the aggressive evaluation procedures) reflected poorly on her clinical judgment.
  
• A liberal psychology professor, assigned to work an election day polling district, questions his student as to why he did not see him. With a tactful guile, the student claims to have voted by absentee ballot in another state, at which point the professor replies, "but we really needed your vote here" (assuming the student would have voted Democratic).
  
• In the evaluation meeting, professors offer the names of students they claim to be at-risk for unprofessional conduct. The judgments are often overblown, as when one student received a theatening form letter for having made comments they deemed too 'self-deprecating.'
  
• Psychologists on staff across a variety of Veterans Hospitals deny internships to applicants on the basis of their disabilities (see A Code Word for Full Disclosure) and then hide behind an APPIC policy of non-disclosure to avoid having to answer questions.
  
• Psychologists record silently in a student's file a misdiagnosis of anxiety based on nystagmus.
  
• Psychologists punish a student for expressing an interest in a school of thought or theorist he or she could not have known was unpopular with the faculty.
  
• Psychologists get around the obvious violation of social norms prohibiting mistreatment of persons with disabilities, as when they made life miserable for the classmate/fiance of a visually-impaired student who complained about the lack of ADA accommodations.
  

INTOLERANCE OF AMBIGUITY, UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE, TERROR MANAGEMENT

Psychology is a messy and young field. Psychology professors are hypersensitive when it comes to the scientific status of their field, and constantly manage the public (outsider) perception of legitimacy and solidarity. Therefore, while essential science is a relatively open framework that allows an individual scientist a certain degree of discretion in the design of research, psychological researchers practice a brand of science (i.e., a "paradigm") loaded with Procrustean pork, which is to say they over-develop, celebrate, and enforce this massive artifice of arbitrary and superfluous conventions (e.g., NHTS). Tauted as the 'glue that holds them together,' this paradigm disproportionately affects researchers of different personalities, skills, and interests. The paradigm can be said to be a massive prejudice against persons:

• disposed to think. While contemplation and reflection is an important part of essential science, independent and profound thinking often pushes the paradigm's envelope. Most psychological research is a mindless though impeccable execution of design principles and sophisticated statistical analysis in support of dull, lazy, and narrow hypotheses, resulting in data doomed to be expediently or sloppily mis- or under-interpreted.
  
• who research psychologistic phenomena at the heart of the human condition (e.g., dreaming). The paradigm as a wheelhouse exposes its limits here, as it is suited only for technical, utilitarian, or superficial questions smaller than a breadbox (e.g. how to build a better cockpit on a grant from the FAA). Most of the big questions do not lend themselves as perfectly to the knowledge production assembly line and thus the work struggles for publication and its authors struggle to earn a career in the field. And you can just forget about grants!
  
• who have an insatiable curiosity and appetite for freedom. The paradigm works against creative control of one's project. Students who want to be explorers and pioneers end up struggling to find their cog within a hierarchy of clerks. The paradigm represents a preference for (rather than a confluence of) confirmatory over exploratory data analyses, quantitative over qualitative data, inferential over descriptive statistics, and nomothetic (etic) over idiographic (emic) methodologies.
  

A Perfect Storm of Political Persecution, Paradigmatic Prejudice, and Professional Training

This pseudo-scientific and pseudo-professional culture, in which students are encouraged to confuse institutional requirements for genuine scientific ones, constrains independent thinking and conceals and compensates for the diversity of pet theories, specialities, and theoretical alignments one would expect to be inherent to Psychology.

One of the problems is that psychology professors need to believe that what they are doing is right. Rather than capitalizing on the room for pioneering in this young science, the psychology professor would apologize for the lack of what they call 'standards,' which in my opinion are not truly standards, but popular (i.e., standardized) opinions. Like a vampire who sold his and everyone else's soul (the last I checked, the dictionary defined psyche as soul) for immortal membership in a fraternal order or community. Roughly translated, this means psychology professors will do anything for tenure. This reminds me that tenure is wasted on the tenured professor, who survived so many layers of vetting as to prove himself unworthy of appreciating or formulating an original idea. Their lives (or should I say pale imitations of life) is about harnessing reassurance from observing students and colleagues conform with the social conventions. This may explain why any student who steps one inch to either side of the white line receives this punishment or probation of sorts that seems patrician and out of proportion with the deviation. This of course speaks volumes about the extent to which psychology professors as individuals identify with (bask in the reflected facade of) their community. Deviations from the community are perceived as personal insults.

Here we have an outer-directedness, a deference to external agencies for guidance and validation. I swear they need assurance like oxygen. Let it be said that without constant reassurance, they will die. Eventually, the necessity for these external agencies is a fulfilled prophecy, as generations of cloning themselves and conducting most decisions by committee or proxy bureacratizes knowledge production, instruction, and faculty selection, and ultimately homogenizes the field's membership, not to mention degrades its talent like a fourth generation photocopy. Once grudgingly having ceded their freedoms and functions, over time the perfect storm of political persecution, paradigmatic prejudice, and professional training has resulted in an evolved faculty with no wits to cede and no freedom to choose their abrogation. They are the true recipients of my Darwin awards. And in what is a classic Jungian neurosis, they vacillate between arrogance and insecurity, each concealing and compensating for the other. Psychology predictably grows like a tumor of sorts. Like a tumor that has grown so large that oxygen and nutrient-rich blood could no longer reach its center (i.e., the human condition as the 800-pound gorilla in the psych department), it reaches out in all directions as the cellular mass at its enter dies (i.e., oncologists call this necrosis). Eventually the hollowed tumor metastasizes and/or reaches a size that kills its human host (i.e., human beings/individuals as subject matter, as research participants, and as students in training).