Academia’s Rejection of Diversity
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Most importantly, the author desires an ideological war. Like any smart advocate, he makes his case by framing the discussion: What he says assumes there is an ideological contest and, due to the way framing works, nobody questions it; they unconciously accept his framework when responding.
But I don't think most people are members of one ideological movement or another. I suspect most people have a nuanced, inconsistent mix of beliefs. Personally, and I know many agree, I think ideology of any kind is the enemy, and I won't accept his presumption that I too am a dogmatic ideologue.
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Also, the author seems to desire a sort of affirmative action for conservative ideological ideas: They should be given a place regardless of their merits, simply because they match his ideology. Why don't they (and he) have to pursuade their peers like the advocates of any other idea? It's a loser demanding he should get a trophy too.
An aside: Academics are overwhelmingly liberal. People say it is a consequence of bias, but that is not necessarily true. If (broadly speaking) the smartest people are mostly liberal, maybe that tells us something.
Test the logic of this aside by changing "Academics" to "software engineering" and replacing "Liberal" with "white/asian, straight, males." I don't think it holds up very well.
I don't think the analogy applies: Software engineer quality don't vary in quality by gender and race and even if they did, we want to treat people as individuals. We don't want to discrimate based on those factors.
But Academia is a meritocracy of ideas; we do want to discriminate strongly against bad ideas. It's not a place where everyone gets a hearing - if it was, students and professors would spend 99% of their time on nonsense, learn little, and make little progress in their fields.
For example, I think AEI (his organization) have been climate change deniers. Should their ideas on climate change get an equal hearing in university science departments? What about creationists who think the world was created in the last 10,000 years? What about those who think the world is ending next week?
To the substance of your post: I don't see any reason to suspect he wants a "war" or even a "contest". All he is doing is showing a large, deep inconsistency in academia:
1. Academia believes diversity is good, not just for fairness, but for results.
2. Academia is massively uniform, politically. It has almost no diversity in that area.
3. Academia hugely cares about diversity in all other forms, but does not care at all about this particularly large lack of diversity in their own home.
In other words, he's showing that academia is hypocritical. I don't see any way to avoid agreeing with him on 1-3 (even if I personally do not share his politics, which I do not).
No, you don't want unlimited diversity of beliefs in an academic environment. You want to converge to the truth.
Conservatives openly dismiss the value of academia compared to alternative pursuits like commercial industry. Why is it surprising that conservatives are, then, underrepresented in academia, even if there is neither any bias in selection to academic positions nor any correlation between intelligence and political orientation?
Members of a ideological faction that is openly disdainful of academia are, unsurprisingly, less likely to choose to pursue academic careers.
An good point. I suspect there is a strong conservative bias in the population of Fortune 500 executives, especially in the fossile fuel industries. Perhaps they need more political diversity too.
http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/
It's a group of political scientists from a wide range of well respected schools (Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, NYU, Georgetown) making the exact same argument.
It's one thing to call into the question the motives of the AEI president, another to make the same argument against Harvard's Steven Pinker.
I think the fact that people are in the Democratic vs Republican party is related to their views on power (and winnability, but only 2 parties really win) rather than their views on politics. It just so happens right now that the Republican party collects votes with denial of climate change or evolution. The Republican party has made itself hostile to science, in that to back its claims, it has had to say that academia is engaged in a conspiracy to lie, and that academia brainwashes children into being liberal.
So regardless of your political beliefs, in terms of your power beliefs, voting Democrat is a good choice for those in academics. If Democrats started advocating for benefits for electricians, I'm sure we'd have more Democrats there. That does not mean that the political beliefs and attitudes of electricians are shifting. Does it surprise anyone that working in the petroleum industry strongly predicts political party?
There are also other reasons why the Republican party is quite difficult to support, like their lack of positive regard for secularism. You can't argue with the Texas GOP platform when it's splattered with God and Christian issues.
Take a skim through this Texas party platform document published 3 years ago.
http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012Pla...
To paraphrase Ben Kenobi, you will never find a more wretched hive of question begging and anti-empirical babble than the AEI.
* * *
More generally, I reject the claim of the paper he cites (http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430) that changing partisan affiliation among social psychologists is proof that the field has been overrun with leftists, who are driving out all the conservatives via active discrimination, and who have an agenda of proving that conservatives are evil/stupid/lazy/intolerant/....
There are many possible alternative explanations:
* Perhaps the social psychologists’ views have remained consistent while the US Republican party has become more radicalized, causing former political moderates to now fall in naturally with the Democratic party.
* Perhaps academia as a whole or social psychology as a field has lost status or become less desirable as a career, and folks whose ideological outlook emphasizes money and status have decided to go into industry more than before.
* Perhaps the Republican party’s cuts to education funding in general or diversion of funding away from social sciences toward STEM fields (including cutting direct funding for public institutions, cuts to research funding, etc.), attempt to exert governmental bureaucratic control over universities, etc. has changed the minds of formerly conservative-leaning academics away from supporting the GOP.
* Perhaps social psychologists or other social scientists have the perception that Republican lawmakers are disregarding the direct lessons of social science and thus framing policies which are “bad” for some reason independent of ideological bias.
* Perhaps the easy availability of money at institutions such as the AEI, the Heritage Foundation, etc. has swayed conservative-leaning social scientists to give up on universities and peer-reviewed research, and follow the money to these so-called think tanks.
etc.
That is indeed partly the case, at least as far as the US congress goes.
Based on a fivethirtyeight metrics, the average of each group has gradually moved away from the center, but the Republicans did so about twice as fast as the Democrats.
I can't find the post where both parties are discussed, but here's one about the Republicans: http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/jeb-bush-president-republ...
Relevant graph: https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/silv...
Republicans becoming radical or republicans cutting education funding will NOT explain why simply transposing data/conclusions on the exact same study suddenly results in more rejections.
The cited studies about transposing data/conclusions seem like they might be more interesting, but were only tangentially relevant to this paper’s point.
This comment richly illustrates the partisan divide mentioned in the article. In particular, it reflects the Left's dismissive attitude toward conservative think tanks.
Whether or not you agree with their views and orientation, the American Enterprise Institute is a prestigious organization. I was motivated by this comment in fact to visit aei.org which I've never read before, and I was quite impressed by the kinds of scholars contributing pretty intelligent commentary to the institute:
- a Yale professor of Asian studies, commenting on the Japan-China-Korea summit happening this weekend.
- a former Defense Dept. analyst discussing the tiny military team the U.S. has sent to Syria, and proposing more realistic strategies.
- a professor of military history at West Point, critiquing the current U.S. policy on missile defense
- a GWU professor of emergency medicine and previous advisor to the CBO, commissioner on Maryland's Health Services Cost Review Commission, etc. etc., discussing Medicare's future funding problems.
- a resident fellow, previous commissioner of education for Florida, secretary of education for Virginia, president and (current) chairman of the Black Alliance for Education Options, commenting on Brown v. Board of Education 60 Years Later.
And on and on.
These are not lightweights at all. They're serious, highly influential shakers and movers and to dismiss them as "partisan hacks" or bribed to say things because of "easy availability of money" is to dismiss the roughly 50% of the country with whose views you just happen to disagree.
This, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with the intellectual climate in the university and in the greater society in the U.S. today. There is a "closing of the American mind", as Alan Bloom phrased it, a preference for assumed agreement rather than polite disagreement or debate.
Once upon a time, in the 1970s and earlier (I came of intellectual age in the 1970s so experienced perhaps the last vestiges of this era) there was a kind of open mindedness among the 60-70% of people in the middle.
There were of course the very right wing bigoted "John Birchers", Southern racists, and their ilk, as well as the fanatically left wing Marxists and traditional socialists (Bernie Sanders is perhaps an example of the latter).
But in the middle, people were willing to debate the issues and listen politely to the opposition. It appears that this willingness has disappeared, just as that generation of Depression babies and WWII soldiers have largely disappeared.
Younger generations raised during the passionate us-versus-them demonstrations of the 1960s, the "me generation" 1970s, and the self-absorbed materialism of the 1980s-90s, do not have that kind of training and orientation. Furthermore, their teachers largely have a left/liberal orientation (something like 80-90% of K-12 teachers in the U.S. are Democrats, and similarly the professors on college campuses).
I really miss the days when you could actually sit down and debate the issues with someone, over a beer. It seems that today, people are loathe to even bring up politics unless they know they're among likeminded company and then it's like an echo chamber.
> There were of course the very right wing bigoted "John Birchers"
The backers of the modern Tea Party are John Birchers by a new name. The policies are similar and the Koch brothers' father, for example, was either a John Birch Society founder or at least a leader (IIRC; I don't have time to check the details, sorry).
> But in the middle, people were willing to debate the issues and listen politely to the opposition. It appears that this willingness has disappeared
It is the right wing fringe that has created this situation, and it's still mostly a problem of the right. There is no influential left-wing equivalent of Fox' propaganda, by far the leading cable news channel, the Wall St Journal editorial page (the NY Times isn't nearly as partisan), or of right-wing talk radio (Limbaugh, etc.). For example, the Tea Partiers in Congress refuse to respect that their fellow citizens should have a say in the nation's laws and oppose everything that doesn't go exactly their way. They literally try to do serious damage to their own nation's government and economy to get their way. There is no equivalent on the left. Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans (not voted out by Tea Partiers) are willing to make deals.
It hasn't always been a problem primarily of the right; the radical left was ascendent and probably equally problematic a few decades ago. But it's a dangerous delusion to overlook the problem on the right now.
The real division needs to be between moderates and radical idealogues, who will sacrifice the rest of us to their dogmas. The idealogues of 2015 are mostly on the right.
Not picking on you specially, but I've noticed that the word reactionary has been dropped from the political lexicon. I feel kind of silly rooting for a word to be used more, but most of the time that I see "radical" applied to Republicans, I think "reactionary" would be a better fit..
Only the rhetoric has been changed towards STEM fields. Actual per-capita NIH and NFS funding has dropped.
However most voters do not deserve the public education system they are paying for. They're expecting a reasonable, open-minded discussion of ideas. What they're getting is evidenced by the comments here. We're starting to see kids leave academia with 5 and 6-figure college debts with no discernible job skills, no ability to discuss political matters without resort to either threats or stereotypes, and no experience dealing with intellectuals with widely divergent life experiences and problem-solving methods. That's a total and complete fail.
[edit] I'm just paraphrasing the argument of the article, which I don't necessarily agree with.
I'm skeptical that ideological diversity or lack thereof is at the root of this, since you see it in a lot of "soft science" disciplines of varying political inclinations. Political science, psychology, and economics have fairly different distributions of political viewpoints, and yet none of those fields has a strong track record of reproducibility.
What about global warming denial, anti-vax, young-earth creationism, etc? I'm not being snarky, it legitimately troubles me that "can you convince people?" is the best measure of truth we seem to have, because it seems so noisy and unreliable.
Imre Lakatos. Science and Pseudoscience. From Imre Lakatos, Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 1-7. Written in early 1973 http://crl.ucsd.edu/~ahorowit/lakatos.pdf
If some innocent conservative academics are facing blowback for being associated with the wrecking tactics of their ideological peers, I'd say it's the least of our problems. The risk that we might literally wind up destroying our civilisation due to the malfeasance of the right weight more heavily on my mind than that some conservative academics struggle to get tenure. If anything, attempting the resolve the latter problem will only exacerbate the first, by helping legitimising the garbage research that conservative academics are paid to produce.
That's not what they said nor is it implied.