Apologies, I meant conservative in the sense of resistance to contemplate new ideas rather than the political sense. Somewhat naively I had assumed that academic research was where people would be most welcoming of at least discussing new ideas, whereas I found the opposite to be true.
Thanks! Could you give a few examples? About what were folks so conservative? Were they stubborn proving/supporting their own paradigm/hypothesis or ... they were just simply not open to any ideas? About methods or about theory? Both?
It was quite a long time ago (~30 years) but I suspect a lot of it was simply because senior academics didn't realise they were actually managers, had no interest in managing or even understand that there were problems.
