In all departments in the university system censorship exists. We might want to call it philosophical filtering but that is a rather vague term. In some part the censorship is needed because not every research question is well founded or that some research is unethical and should not be performed. One can generally eliminate the majority of social sciences research because the results of the research cannot be reproduced and thus a major waste of time and money. On the other hand, in those physical science departments the problems are different. Here the research is tainted by a variety of factors which include outside interests that pay for results, egos that must be fed, and the need for the constant publishing of research papers (publish or perish is still the rule for all departments). Research has become a large heavy industry that is often out of the direct control of the university regents. And when your job tenure is subject to the whims of outside interests then the entire system from the heads of the university to the research assistants and students is corrupted.

I certainly agree.

There is also the complete time wasting factor as well. Given a group of people there will be those who just want to investigate total time wasting, resource wasting rubbish.

In any academic setting funding will be a limited resource; there will always need to be filtering of the claims to that money.

So, yes I think there is too much filtering, but no we cannot just eliminate it.

I work in a small college, and even at this level, in a conservative area, we have limits on what can and cannot be looked at.

Shame, really. And the funny part is, it's the side that claims to be "open minded" that is doing all the shutting down. Newspeak at it's finest.

I think of Galileo. Persecuted heretic. Hundreds of years ago but in terms of the pattern it’s fairly recent. Society always shapes perceptions. How could it be otherwise? Yet we continue to progress.

yeah, there is a societal process of idea filtering, but thankfully theyll never convince me that gravity falls up

Been happening for decades--longer, I'm sure. The Bell Curve. I think Sam Harris likes to talk about this book (maybe one of the others). It's absolutely OFF-LIMITS in academia as anything other than a book on Eugenics. But, if you actually read the book, the reasoning is pretty sound and anchored in science, in general. PPL didn't like the 'look', and they killed it on those grounds. But, at the risk of accepting ignorance over understanding. If there are things we can't ask, then how can we ever capture 'truth'?

Sadly there will be no way of knowing the truth if the scientific process is modified by an ideology or tampered with through philosophical filtering.

I did take a few classes at a "community college" with instructors wanting me to work at companies they worked for but not speak in their classes. The mind is closed, tunnel vision to follow the leaders.