Dorian Abbott:
It’s my honor today to introduce Lee Jussim. I think probably an interesting aspect of Lee’s talk is that he’s going to be able to talk about some of the things that we’ve been discussing, but from an actual… This is his academic specialty, which gives it a special sort of flavor and a little more data emphasis. And probably, it’ll be more interesting to listen to Lee than me, so I’ll get out of the way.
Lee Jussim:
Given the way the conference has been misrepresented and denounced, I think this is worth saying: I’m an old lion liberal. I was an anti-Vietnam Was protestor in the ’70s. I was a community organizer in the ’90s, and I ran an Indivisible Group in 2017. So, when I say I’m an old lion lefty, I kind of am.
That has multiple points, not just to debunking some of the ridiculous ways the conference has been misrepresented. It also would be untrue to say, in fact… I think it’s fair to say most people on the left, most liberals embrace free speech and academic freedom and view the rise of this sort of authoritarian censorship cancel culture on the left, although as several people have pointed out, there are different kinds of problems on the right, but that most of us really find that repugnant.
Okay, so without further do, I’m going to talk about the radicalization of academia. I’m going to frame this around four ideas or four hypotheses. The first is that academia is massively, massively left of the American mainstream. The second is that this has downstream consequences. In academia, you can make almost any claim, no matter how bizarre or unjustified, no matter how much it constitutes this sort of virulent incitement to group hatred, if you frame it as some form of social justice… I realize that’s a really extreme claim. I plan to document that. The third is sort of the opposite of that. In academia, if you criticize or oppose or seen as crossing efforts framed as advancing social justice, no matter how many facts you bring to bear on your argument, your increased risk of being punished, sanctioned, or ostracized. Again, I plan to document that as well.
Okay. So, let’s start with the easy part. Academia is massively left of the American mainstream. First, well, what’s the comparison? It’s the American mainstream. To keep this reasonably short, I’m only presenting this one Hidden Tribes report. But whether you look at gallop polls or Pew, the results are always about the same. Somewhat more than a third of Americans identify as being somewhere on the left, from somewhat liberal to the progressive left. Here, it’s like, I think 34, I want to say it’s 37, 38, 39. But it’s about a little over a third typically identify that way. What I also want you to register is that it’s less than 10%, that’s also consistent with lots of surveys, identify as far left. So, this is the American landscape. Third or so, maybe a little more than the third think of themselves as being on the left. Single digits, far left.
Okay. Now let’s look at academia. This is actually data from Langbert, but zillions of studies have shown very kind of similar kinds of patterns. What’s shown here is the ratio of registered Democrats to registered Republicans across a whole slew of disciplines at more than 50 of the most elite colleges, universities in the country. Because ratios are kind of weird to digest, even if you’re reasonably quantitative, it kind of takes a minute to understand that once you get into the 15 to 20 to 1 range, for all practical purposes, this means there’s no registered Republicans in the department. There might be 25 and 1 or something like that, and probably at the point that it’s 25 to 1, you’re keeping your head down and your mouth shut because the risks of being openly anywhere on the right in the university are excessive. There’s a really good book called Passing on the Right, which sort of goes through how conservatives cope with being in academia. The top couple of fields, engineering not too bad, but once you get into the social sciences and humanities, the skew is massive.
Okay. So, the skew is massive, but that doesn’t mean they’re extremists. Like, actually, Nate Honeycut, my now former student who is about to start work or has actually very recently started work at Fire, just completed his dissertation. As part of that dissertation, he conducted two national surveys, one of faculty, one of graduate students, and one of the things he asked them was to identify which of several possible political identities they felt described them. They could choose more than one. What he found with this large national surveys is that 40% of faculty identify as radicals, activists, Marxists or socialists, not necessarily generally on the left, radicals. And this includes people who chose more than one. With graduate students, it’s even higher. The graduate student, I think, is important because graduate students are the future faculty of academia. So, these numbers, not only is the skew extreme, they are actually extremists. Now, it’s not a majority, right? 40% is not 70%. But given that these are often activists, and several people have alluded to this in other talks, that their presence probably exceeds their representation, but their representation is also massive.
Okay. Well, so what? What does people’s politics matter if they do good science or good scholarship? [inaudible 00:06:29] is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. That very quickly gets us to the second hypothesis, the idea that you can make almost any claim, no matter how bizarre, no matter how unjustified, no matter how hateful, if it’s framed as advancing some kind of social justice, and this requires existence proofs. I’m certainly not claiming that most academics, even the 40% of our colleagues who self-identify as radical, as activists and Marxists go around making bizarre claims all the time. They probably make relatively few bizarre claims, but this requires existence proofs, of which I have many, and to keep this short and limited, I’m only going to present a few.
One of my favorite, although I have another one, which we could go through in the Q&A. They’re jaw-dropping. The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind is the title of a talk given at Yale’s Grand Rounds in its psychiatric program. Katie Herzog got a hold of a recording of that, shared it with me, and these are some of the quotes, some of the statements by the speaker presenting that talk. I’m just going to leave that up there for a minute. It’s silly for me to read it. You can all read, I think so.
Okay. I’m going to continue. Now, what do you make of this? It’s one person. Who is surprised that there is a whack-out academic out there? There’s more than one whacked-out academic than this. What does this even mean. I’m nut-picking here. In some sense, I am nut-picking, but I’m not just nut-picking. Remember, this was at Yale, one of the elite universities, programs in the country. What is actually more interesting to me than the just insane claims by this person doing the presentation, are the responses of the audience, which was also on the recording. It’s like the fawning gratitude is just… So, it’s not just a single nutcase. In fact, there was nothing but comments, and I only extracted a few. There was nothing but comments like this,. It’s like, make my head explode.
Now, we don’t really know. Do they really mean it? Was there like a conformity? Was there a group thing going on? People were afraid. But it was all, “Wow.” “Yes, you got fantasies of blowing white people away. That was such a great talk. I learned so much from it.” I was like, “What?” Okay. Now, fine. Even though I have plenty more of these, I’m going to move on from this. You might say, “Okay, it’s a talk. Who knows? It’s weird social dynamics. That’s why we have peer review, to ensure that only the highest-quality findings make it into the scientific literature.” Okay. I’m going to, as they say in social justice land, interrogate that.
First, I’m sure most of you’re familiar with this. There was the grievance studies sting by Lindsey, Boghossian, and Pluckrose four or five years ago. They wrote up a slew of papers, I think it was like 12 or 13 or 14 papers, making just intentionally bizarre, crazy framed social justice-y type claims. They submitted them to peer review journals, and it was eventually discovered, I think, by the Wall Street Journal. They reported it. So, they kind of terminated it before it was completed. But by the time they terminated it, there were seven papers accepted, two given revise and resubmit, and the R&Rs are probably on the way to being accepted, and one receives an award as the best paper of the year in that journal.
Okay. Here are some of the claims. Here are some of the ideas in a subset of those papers. There was… I’m sorry. I just can’t. The Feminist Mein Kampf… Jesus. You can’t make this… If somebody just made this up and it didn’t actually happen, you would say they were being histrionic, that this couldn’t possibly happen in the real world. Men should be least like dogs in order to overcome patriarchy. Then, white students should be chained to the floor and to desks in order to experience oppression, and students who mock feminism should be punished. All of these were, I think, the chained to desks was an R&R. The other three were all published.
Now, you might say, well, that was a sting. They purposely lied. The real peer reviewed literature would never have anything like this, would it? Oh, wait. I’m sorry, I jumped ahead. I’m sorry. I’m going to backtrack. So, nine papers, but it’s not just nine papers. It’s the reviewers and the editors. You multiply all that out and you get to about 30 academics who are complicit in the elevation of these bizarre ideas. Now, I can get back to my…
Okay. Returning to launching the peer reviewed literature, this came out sometime in the last year or so. It’s On Having Whiteness. I don’t know if you can see the highlighted thing, and I’m just going to enjoy reading it because it’s just so much fun to read… [inaudible 00:12:37]. I should have got somebody up here to help me give this.
“Parasitic whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites, particularly target non-white peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate.” When I first saw this, I actually thought it was another hoax paper. But it was like, for real, as far as I could tell. The journal posted it, then they took it down and there was controversy surrounding it.
Putting that aside, after a couple of months of knowing this, it’s like the rhetoric here struck me as familiar. I’m going to give you a second to… I’m not going to ask you. But just think. Have you seen something like this before? Because I have, and I’m going to tell you where I saw it… I’m going to take a quick sip. In contrast to the delusions of Nazis that you see throughout academia, this rhetoric is in the actual Adolf Hitler’s actual Mein Kampf. Here I have them side to side. That one’s I think, big enough. You can read that for yourself. But the parallels between the rhetoric is just jaw-dropping. It is absolutely jaw-dropping.
All right. But this is some weird psychoanalytical journal. Psychoanalysis has had issues for a hundred years. Is this really the scientific literature? Well, how about Nature Geoscience, 2022? What’s shown there so far is the title: Scientists from Historically Excluded Groups Face a Hostile Obstacle Course.” What they’re doing here is they’re purporting to debunk or replace the leaky pipeline metaphor with the hostile obstacle course metaphor. I read this article. Yeah, I mean, I do work on prejudice and discrimination. This sounded overblown and histrionic, but maybe there was a there, there. And there was. There was a cartoon. The centerpiece. This is true; you can look it up. If you have your computer or your smartphone, you can look this up as I’m talking. This is absolutely true. The centerpiece of this article in Nature Geoscience was this cartoon.
Again, Slate Box. I mean, that would be real. But this is Nature Geoscience. But it’s like, okay. I backed off a little bit from my own reaction and I’m like, “Well, okay, maybe this is just a creative way to communicate something that is really scientifically well-grounded as they document in the actual article.” There was actually an article there. I started reading the article, and the title claim comes up very early, and that’s now quoted here. “However, as many have argued, this passive imagery,” the leaky pipeline, “betrays the fact that in many ways, the experience for minoritized scholars is more like a vicious or hostile obstacle course.” That’s what’s shown highlighted. The 5 to 10 are the references, the citations they use to support that claim. It’s like, okay. It’s a short article. They’re not going to go into all the data. They don’t have enough space. Let’s see what those referenced sources are and what data they bring to bear on this argument.
Reference 5 is this tweet. It’s this tweet. Now, the first part of the tweet, “When I graduated, there were 8 Black engineering PhDs in the country.” I didn’t double check that. That may well be true. But that’s not what it’s cited for. It’s cited for the second part or the third part. “It’s a vicious obstacle course.” And it’s a tweet. It’s a guy virtue-signaling on Twitter to protest or whatever. This is not evidence. This is evidence that this tweeter tweeted this. It’s not scientific evidence of any shape or form. This is, again, make my head explode. Okay. So, that’s reference 5.
I almost stopped there, but actually thanks to one of my followers on Twitter, pointed me to reference 6. Reference 6 is an actual peer-reviewed article, and I stopped reading after I went halfway through the abstract, and now I will show you why I stopped reading after I got halfway through the abstract. Because about halfway through, this sentence appears. In Nature Geoscience. I don’t know… I just don’t. I can’t. What do you do with this?
Returning to… “That’s why we have peer review showing the highest-quality findings making the scientific literature.” Here’s my pushback on that. It’s just completely ridiculous. I don’t want to overstate here. There are good things in the peer review literature, peer review has some value. But nonetheless, this claim, the one shown on the slide here, is itself wildly overstated. Okay.
Yeah. I think I’ve presented all sorts of real-world evidence that in academia you can make almost any claim, no matter how bizarre or unjustified, if it is presented or framed as advancing some form of social justice.
What about the flip side? If you are perceived or actually critical of social justice, programs intended to advance social justice, you are at serious risk of some form of punishment. I really don’t… This is the purpose of this conference. That’s what motivated a lot of this. A lot of the people who’ve been targeted by such events are here. Most of you know most of these stories. This is a very short and woefully incomplete list. If you have been targeted in this way, you’re not here. I apologize. I’m trying to move along. The main point is I don’t feel like I need to spend a lot of time on this.
But in case you didn’t know, Fire, which is amply represented here, keeps a Scholars Under Fire database, which every time I look at it or return to it, there’s more people there. I first discovered it, I don’t know, about six months ago. There were maybe 200-250 cases. Now, the last I looked, it was over 700, maybe over 800 by this point. These are scholars who have come under attack. Some attacks are more successful than others. In most extremes, somebody would be fired. Sometimes people lose a position. Sometimes they’re simply denounced and publicly shamed, but not exactly sanctioned. They’re all included in this. It’s over 700 faculty here.
I saw a clip of Graham Lukeinoff from not too long ago comparing these data to McCarthy, and is kind of characterizing it as actually worse than the McCarthy Era. But if you look at simply the number of faculty who have been targeted in this way, it is more extreme, more extensive now than it was during McCarthy.
Okay. All right. I feel like I’ve had pretty good evidence for all three of these. Academia is massively left, and the extreme left is massively overrepresented. The existence proofs in academia, you can make almost any claim no matter how virulent or bizarre if it seems to advance social justice. And if you dare to criticize any aspect of that, your risk of serious reputational damage in academia.
Okay. So, what do we do about this? We just had a panel on it. Some of those recommendations, I think, were quite good. But here are mine. This is three quarters not serious. But there is, even here, abandoning all hope, there is something liberating and energizing and empowering about going completely Stoic, saying, whether this is true or not, “Academia is completely lost. And now I am going to say and do whatever the hell I damn feel like.” Okay, so that’s the abandoned all hope. And then if that doesn’t work, there’s always bourbon.
Then there’s this one, which I am more than half serious about. I think that, one, I found some of the legal discussion of the last panel really interesting. I think Dorian’s presentation comes closest to this and certainly resonated with me, and that is if you accept that most of academia is mostly lost or that many of our colleagues are cowed into silence, but should the opportunity arise, might be more willing to stand up, one avenue short of convincing legislatures to pass new laws is to form our own new organizations and institutions within academia, within our universities, as islands of academic freedom and scientific integrity, as you have seen some people have done. You have the MIT Academic Freedom Alliance. You have the recent dramatic upscaling in Fire’s activities. You have the Academic Freedom Alliance out of Princeton. I’m one of the founders of a new organization, the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences that is intended to preserve much of what John Height described in his opening talk.
Okay. I’ll stop there. Thank you. That’s my son after we climbed a 14,000 foot mountain.
Adithia:
As I mentioned, previous question, my name is Adithia. I’m an undergrad studying philosophy and poli sci. I write for The Review. I thought it was really interesting seeing all this. So, thank you for sharing. Although there is sort of you could say critique that I think myself and a lot of other people, undergrads especially, feel, which is that it’s almost like talking about these sort of crazy things that happen in academia almost gives conservatives a sugar rush, where we can laugh and we can clap and it’s great. Then, when it comes to finding the solution, it’s just more rhetoric about owning the libs and drinking leftist tears. That’s all. Then when it comes to actual solutions, it seems like we continue to want to work within this system to form our own organizations, as you mentioned. Why not open up the possibility of simply smashing the system itself? For example, it’s Nero or it’s Diocletian persecuting the Christians. It took Constantine for things to change. So, instead of starting grassroots, why not dream bigger?
Lee Jussim:
Well, okay. One, I’m just being personal and parochial. I’m an academic. I kind of like my job, so I would rather not not have my job. But treating your point more seriously, I do think that both from the standpoint of young people setting down on their paths in life, becoming whatever, seeking gainful employment in one way or another, that it is absolutely appropriate and viable. There are more and more avenues for finding ways outside of college and graduate school. I think Teal’s talk captured a little bit of that. I’m very sympathetic to the idea of the creation of alternative avenues. I think market forces have created some. The simple version is coding schools. There are these three-month, six-month coding programs that you can take. I don’t know. They vary from, I don’t know, probably $5,000 to about $25,000, and then you’re ready to enter a job in IT somewhere. You don’t need to do the four years, $450,000 of college debt to do that. So, that’s at the level of students figuring out how to take the next steps.
From the standpoint of science, actually this essay that Dorian Abbott asked me to write for the Heterodox STEM predicting the state of science 1, 3, 10, and 30 years out, my take was that with the installation of DEI bureaucracies accelerating, that it’s not clear how science is going to thrive within academia. There may eventually be some peace or truce that permits that. To me, that’s not clear. But even if it completely fails within universities, the university is not the only places that sciences are conducted. In fact, in my opinion, sort of engineering more than anything else, but it’s sort of engineering drawing on the science. Now, Musk is now most famous for Twitter, but actually I think both Tesla and SpaceX are amazing accomplishments, and that was done outside of academia. That is my best guess, actually, that if academia fails, that science will proceed outside of academia. So, I’m very sympathetic to the point. But I hope to be doing this for another 20 years. So, I hope it doesn’t fail too soon.
Peter Syakima:
Following up on that, Peter Syakima from Duke, can you point to some wins in terms of academics, where the research has survived despite going against the narrative? Because that gets at whether we should be abandoning hope or not, if there are places where we do see success.
Lee Jussim:
Yeah. I don’t want to… Let me be more careful. I don’t think… Let me answer that concretely with something I know. I’m a psychologist. Psychologists has been wracked by what’s known as the replication crisis for the last 10 years. The replication crisis refers to the fact that some disturbingly high number of our studies, even our famous studies published in our best journals, don’t replicate when independent researchers try to replicate them. Ballparking it, the run rate is about 50% success. Now, 50% success is not 0 or 2 or 10. So, that does mean that despite the many dysfunctions that do characterize my field, there is often a there, there. Now, I don’t think we’re very good here now at identifying which of the 50% are true and which aren’t. But 50% is much higher than if it was all garbage.
I could go through a list of things in my own field that I think have held up over time, but that would be a narrow and parochial talk. I’m sure there are things across the disciplines that have actually held up. I do not mean to be damning in discipline. “Everything that goes on in academia,” that would be going too far.
Richard Lowery:
Richard Lowery, UT Austin. I think you did this sort of nest of, “Hey, here’s a crazy person.” Then we go up as like, “Oh no, it’s systematic because there’s fields. Oh, it’s systematic because there’s journals.” I think my feeling is you kind of stop a little too soon because there’s still are people who are who do sensible things, do solutions, but they did nothing to stop this process. So, what happened that actual serious scientists and actual serious humanities scholars didn’t quash this when it was coming up. Do we have any hope that those people will do anything now?
Lee Jussim:
No, I think that… Can I get the slides back up. If I just hit the power… Is there tech people here? No. Let’s see if this just works because I have some backup slides that partially address that. So if I do that… Oh, okay. Fine.
My best guess as to on the narrow question of why they didn’t stop it is because they embrace it. They want it to happen. They’re the advocates. And so in the spirit of keeping the talk short, I cut out my fourth hypothesis, which I’m now going to briefly go through. That is that academic organizations are actually leading the erosion of academic freedom. What I presented was a lot of the level of individual scholar and the paper and editors and reviewers. But you have a lot of nonsense going on in the halls of power throughout academia. This has been touched on by other people in this conference so far.
When you have DEI statements required as the entrance fee of admission to the academy, basically… Well, first part is it is worth pointing out, I think, that DEI in general is affirmative action on steroids. It is like trying to mobilize the universities towards the goal of what is plausibly viewed as affirmative action. I don’t have the data here… Well, actually I do have data way on backup slides. But somebody else said this, they’re absolutely right: About 60%, up to about 80-85% of every racial ethnic group surveyed in national surveys by groups like Pew oppose affirmative action, which is why California, a majority-minority state, one of the most left states in the country, has repeatedly rejected affirmative action. Americans have a strong consensus against affirmative action.
If DEI statements are required to be admitted either for a job or to present research at a conference, it is a form of either not state, not legally-compelled speech, but professionally-compelled speech for anyone who opposes those initiatives. Because it’s completely reasonable, a young scholar comes in and say, “Boy, to present at this conference, or I need a job, I’m going to make my peace with doing this. I don’t really agree with it. But I’m going to play the game and I’m going to say how great my contributions to DEI are because I need a job or because I need to attend national conferences to have the visibility to get promoted and get tenure and all that kind of stuff.” In that sense, it’s a form of socially or professionally-compelled speech.
But then there are the refuseniks. “No, no, no. I refuse to bend the knee to your affirmative action ideology.” If that’s the case, you don’t get the job, you don’t get to present at the conference, and therefore you don’t get to disseminate your ideas. It’s either a form of compelled speech or it’s a form of censorship. This is being instituted nationwide for jobs, for actually graduate admissions, beginning with undergraduate admissions, and in my field in social psychology, in one of its major conferences.
I think Luana might have talked about this earlier. But societies, major professional societies are now imposing ideological litmus tests on what they accept for publication. I’m only going to, again, so that I don’t go on and on and on… I’m only going to go through Nature and Human Behavior. But the same thing is true for the Royal Society and Chemistry. They have this editorial sort of announcing this new policy: “Science must respect the dignity and rights of all humans.” Yeah. I think it was we might have talked about the advocacy groups and anti-abortion groups… [inaudible 00:34:40] ethics experts and advocacy groups were needed. It is a completely absurd policy, and the absurdity of the policy can be seen here. If I’m a member of an advocacy group that finds that guidance offensive, what the hell are they going to do? It was actually Anna Krylov who articulated very much that argument, I don’t know, a year or so ago, in response to the chemistry thing. So, my long answer, Richard, to your question is because they embrace it, endorse it, and are the vanguard of making it all happen.
Jules Van Binsbergen:
Jules Van Binsbergen, the Warden School. As economists, we struggle a lot with trying to disentangle what we call permanent shocks and transitory shocks. So, the one behavioral bias that people have is that we tend to over-extrapolate recent trends that we’ve seen. I think that between the different talks that we’ve seen today, Jonathan Height very much went into since 2015, which seems like a very recent thing. Peter Thiel was more talking about a secular decline for 50 years where things have been on the downward path. How much mean reversion to this do you think we can meaningfully expect? And also, once more competition to academic institutions are introduced, then don’t you think that the universities will, through the competition of the students, be forced to at least mean revert to some extent or should we just give up on that?
Lee Jussim:
I opened up my essay for Dorian’s thing on the predictions that I have no confidence in my ability to predict the future. I think very few people should have confidence in their ability to predict the future. So, I don’t really know.
I do think, and I was not the first person to comment on this, that in the wider culture outside of academia, the worst of this sort of soft cultural revolution-like manifestations of wokeness have receded somewhat. People are not being fired as much as they were in summer and fall of 2020 for minor missteps. You had the New York Times with a series of articles advocating for the importance of free speech in a variety of ways. You have Netflix telling its woke employees if they don’t like the atmosphere there, they can go find a job [inaudible 00:37:00]. So, this is very different than 2020, 2021.
But that’s outside of academia. You also have the rise of sort of an anti-wokeness agenda among Republican-dominated states. And I’m ambivalent about that. Some of that, I think, is reasonable. I’m actually sympathetic to some of Amy Waxe’s proposals there. But I think it’s also clear, I think, Graham Lukeinoff has referred to some of the bans on critical race theory in higher ed as egregiously unconstitutional. So, there is this pushback in the wider society. Some of it may itself be overreach. But within academia, between the constitution of the grassroots and the installation of these vast DEI-type bureaucracies, I don’t see a regression to the mean prior to this anytime soon. You go on far enough, everything’s unpredictable.
Harold:
[inaudible 00:38:07] maybe let me ask Jules’ question in a slightly different way. When the marketplace for university, I mean you document it nicely, the very leftist orientation of the faculty at many universities, and I think the publications are just a tip of the iceberg of that, all these developments. Maybe that’s what people want. Maybe the current young generation is very woke; they’re very happy to be far left. It’s been said, if you’re young and not a communist, you don’t have a heart. There’s a second part of that sentence, too, but maybe that’s what the parents and the students want. They want these leftist woke universities, and maybe that’s what we are giving them. Otherwise, I’m wondering why they aren’t counterexamples of that.
Lee Jussim:
Yeah. I don’t know what parents want. I would be surprised if the parents want woke universities. I think there’s lip service paid to the truth-seeking functions, and it’s not always only lip service. I think I would be surprised to discover parents embracing the ideological infusion into science and the like. Some… The first law of psychology is some do, some don’t. But in general, I would be surprised, although lots of things have surprised me over the last 5 or 10 years, so who the hell knows? But beyond that, I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Dorian Abbott:
I’m Dorian Abbott, U Chicago, over here. My response, Harold, is students want whatever they have to want to get into Harvard.
Lee Jussim:
No. That is actually a really good point. I mean, students want to get a job; they want to go into medical school or become a lawyer. They’ll do what they’re told, what they think they need to do. That’s true. That’s absolutely true. Although there is, within the last 10 years or so, there were a series of papers concluding that usually, though not always, students do shift left when they go to college, but that most of that influence was from their peers rather than from the faculty. There’s a very recent paper that didn’t really distinguish between faculty and peer influence, but found a pretty profound shift to the left and a shift towards moral absolutism. So, something is going on in universities, I think, that is socializing students into this sort of consistently more and more left-wing world views.
Elizabeth Weiss:
I don’t know if you are… All right. I’m Elizabeth Weiss from San Jose State University. One of the things I was thinking is, I’m an anthropology professor, so we see that the different departments have different amounts of leaning to the left. One of the things I wonder is how much do you think GE has affected the trickle-down from anthropology, for example, where cultural anthropologists oftentimes have very bizarre ideas, to STEM, where if all the students have to take some of these GE classes, and of course with California, we just now have the new GE requirement, a ethnic studies requirement, and how do we fight back against that?
Lee Jussim:
Look. The solutions were all individual activism-type, create new organizations. I was a chair of my department for 7 years spread over 12. It was not consecutive, thank God. And after seven years of chairing my department, I have no idea how administrators think or do things. How does the dean sit down with the provost to decide, “Yeah, we need this requirement.” I have no idea. After seven years as chair. So.
Francis Widowson:
Thank you very much for your talk. My name’s Francis. I was a professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. I was fired in December, 2021. I’m talking tomorrow about this very, very important academic freedom case in Canada. I was battling the phenomenon that’s referred to as wokeism. Pluckrose and Lindsay, the academic term is reified postmodernism. I’m just wondering if that’s what you see the problem as being in many of these things. Also, I’m wondering, I’ve heard this many times today, this “left-wing ideology.” I don’t understand how identity politics is seen as being left-wing. It is trying to change the hierarchy from supposedly the white, straight males dominating everyone to the other side of the intersectional scale dominating everyone, like just inverting that. So, it’s really basically a hierarchical scheme in reverse. I don’t understand how this is a left-wing type of ideology.
Lee Jussim:
Well, I mean, look, you have authoritarianism on both the left and the right. The kinds of things that you describe are a form of left-wing authoritarianism. Actually, this is another thing that I actually did have here, if I could find it. Oh, there we go. For 50 years, the lore in much of the social sciences was that there is no left-wing authoritarianism in the Democratic West. We looked and we looked and we looked and we looked and we just couldn’t find it. Then about five or six years ago, two independent teams started working really quite hard on measuring left-wing authoritarianism in the Democratic West. One team did it simply by flipping the targets on one of the most common right-wing authoritarianism scales. Rather than intolerance of sexual minorities, it was intolerance of religious Christians. So, you flip that around and all of a sudden, you get evidence of left-wing authoritarianism.
But the point is that it has these three big sort of components: intolerance, especially political intolerance; willingness to censor one’s opponents and aggression; willingness to punish one’s ideological opponents. I would argue that there’s ample evidence, certainly, for that kind of behavior in academia. So that’s the answer to, well, how is this left? Well, it’s just a left-wing form of authoritarian intolerance. That part is actually kind of easy.
I do think my Nature Geoscience example actually looks a lot to me like an infection of critical race theory, critical social justice-type theories into the natural sciences. If you want to make claims about the power of discrimination, you’re actually doing social science, you’re not doing physical science, you’re not doing geological science. The idea that you can just make shit up on the basis of tweets and cartoons, it’s about creating a narrative. It’s not about actually having evidence that supports the claim. So, whether or not there are any, and I don’t remember the article well enough, whether Derek Bell is cited in that article, I have no idea. But the spirit of that paper is very much how I think of critical social justice. It’s you tell a narrative. And that’s important, is you tell a narrative.
Peter Blair:
Peter Blair from Harvard and Hoover, I want to say first, I think to Dorian’s point, I do think that there are a lot of Harvard students who are doing really interesting things that they’re genuinely interested in based on my experience as a scholar-in-residence there and a faculty member. So, I want to defend Harvard a little bit there.
I also want to make a call-out, too. DEI has become a kind of boogieman, to say, “Here are all of these woke people looking at diversity, equity, and inclusion.” And we have to take a big step back historically and ask ourselves the question. From much the life of the university in the United States and the West, half of the population, women were excluded by fiat from producing. So, those of us like me who’ve studied physics and who’ve done differential equations, we know that the particular solution of any diff eq is going to depend on the initial conditions, and the initial conditions were 100% men. We have to wrestle with that fact and we have to think about the ways in which there was a kind of affirmative action that existed in the university.
Given that, well what are we going to do in these institutions to create access and offer a positive vision of making sure that rooms like this are reflective of the true underlying distribution of potential within the university. If we think that rooms that look like this are reflective of the distribution of talent by race, by gender, by geography and so on and so forth, I think that that’s the money-making question. So, it’s not enough to just beat up on what is being done, but to say proactively what is a constructive way to make sure that a kid, regardless of where they’re born in the US or across the world, has access to the resources to express their innate God-given human potential. I think when concrete proposals are offered to make sure that human potential is not stifled, then we won’t need these additional structures to increase diversity in ways that might be unpalatable.
Lee Jussim:
Cory Clark and Bert Weingart have a report that came out in Collette recently, the last month: Women are now a majority in the academy. That problem may not be solved in every corner of the academy, but writ large, the problem you described of complete exclusion of women is basically over. It’s not completely over in every corner. But when saying that, what you also have is massive domination by women in many corners of the academy. So, you have that.
Now, there are other groups besides men and women and I, actually, without going into lots of detail, if there are… when there are, not if, because there are, when there are non-authoritarian approaches to uplifting people and enhancing diversity within both the classroom and the university, depending on the details, I could get on board with them.
Yep.
Speaker 12:
Okay. Maybe I just wanted to get back to the issue which was raised here about how do you characterize left or right. Of course, basically everybody knows that the spectrum is actually compact. It’s a circle. So, maybe [inaudible 00:49:56] actually to identifies what you call the left today, which is based on racialist ideas, identity politics, all sorts of things which really belong to the extreme right. So, maybe we should turn things around and call them fascists. That’s what they are.
Lee Jussim:
Well, fascist is authoritarians. I’m fine with that. Yeah.
Speaker 13:
I actually want to go back to the question of competition in academia because I think it’s a good one. But before I do that, one of the thing that irritates me most about, and certainly not this speaker, but is this belief that in the past, there was a lot of discrimination and the way we solve that is we take current people who have nothing to do with the past and discriminating against current people.
My view is if you have a strong view that in the past there was a lot of discrimination and you’re 60 years old, that means you benefit from the discrimination and therefore you should give up your job. If you’re unwilling to give up your job because you better from the discrimination, I don’t want to hear about other people. I find it annoying as all hell that anybody would have the gall to say this young man over here who happens to be a white man, he has to suffer for the past discrimination. It’s ludicrous.
But back to the competition, I think the problem with the competition rule… First of all, I don’t agree that there isn’t already effect. I mean, this is anecdotal, but amongst admissions, I think there’s been a rise of the University of Chicago relative to the other institutions. I think that’s precisely because the University of Chicago has taken the stands that it has. So, I would say there is some effect ready of the competition.
But the real problem is that academic competition plays out over decades or even centuries. What is the cost [inaudible 00:51:54] Stanford or take a university that is just off the charts. Yale. Okay, what’s the cost to Yale? If Yale says, “The business model where we admit rich kids and we admit poor kids, and the rich kids will give donations to help the poor kids, we’re giving up on their business model. We’re only admitting poor kids. No more benefits for rich kids.” Yale’s got a huge endowment right now. It has no effect on Yale whatsoever. It will have an effect on Yale in 40 or 50 years because they won’t get the donations they were getting previously. But that takes 50 years to play out. So, I reject the view that the competition doesn’t exist. It exists. It’s just it’s a very long played-out competitive mark.
Dorian Abbott:
Last question.
John Chisholm:
I’m John Chisholm. I served on the MIT corporation, our board of trustees from 2015 to 2021 and was president and chair of the alumni association from 2015 to 2016.
If you look at our undergraduate student body at MIT, the same may apply to your university as well, the most underrepresented segments are not racial minorities. The most underrepresented segment is what I call the other half of the United States. The 25 least-represented states in the United States, graduating students on a per capita basis, are represented at only one third the rate of the most represented 25 states. These least-represented 25 states tend to be rural, lower income, and center right. There is no advocacy or representation for students from these states at all. They are completely invisible.
Now, that may not seem very consequential, that there’s no attention focused on geography. But it’s much more consequential than it may seem because students from these states tend to be different, not merely geographically, but socially, culturally, economically, and politically. And so, there’s an entire swath of cognitive and intellectual diversity that we’re missing out on in the MIT undergraduate student body by unduly focusing on a few dimensions of diversity. By unduly focusing on a few dimensions, as we do, we actually further underrepresent students from other important dimensions. So, rather than use a few dimensions with a hammer, as we currently do, we need to use many dimensions with a light touch. Thank you.
Lee Jussim:
That was the last… I completely endorse that. In fact, I have a paper coming out in one of the big side journals called Diversity is Diverse, and it hammers at exactly that set of points. Experientially, I was probably the first faculty in Rutgers’ psychology department to have a diversity statement on their professional webpage. This was 10, 12, 14 years ago, which included all the conventional kinds of diversity. But I also included religious students and politically conservative students who need to be stated, given the status of the university. The effect of that in the last 10 years or so, I like to describe as having cornered the market on conservative students in social psychology. And they are good. They are very, very good. It doesn’t take that just… What it takes is saying, yes, it’s welcoming. This is not a hostile environment that you might find in other places.
But consistent with that, this is an another thing I didn’t really get to present. This is the saddest fact. The irony of inclusion in academia is the way it’s being implemented is excluding 80-90% of the country on political grounds. But you look at the data on faculty. Faculty are 80, 90, 95% left no matter how they get there. When it’s 3% or 5% or 6% Black, or 32% female, then all these things need to be done in order to get those presenters up, and we can debate on how reasonable the specific actions are, but regardless when it is 100% percent left or 90% left and getting more and more left so that there are almost no people on the right or even in the middle throughout academia, this form of inclusion is excluding most of the country, and that is absolutely in the process. That’s not even going at it… We are in the process. And I think John Height presented some of these data of academia losing its credibility outside of progressive circles because of that.
John Chisholm:
One more point. I came out late, in my mid-30s. Prior to that, if I were selected, elected, or promoted to some position, I knew it was because of what I had contributed or accomplished, not because I’m gay. Now that I’m out, I can’t always be sure. No one should be subject to that indignity and uncertainty. We need to be cautious of undermining the very people that we are trying to help by being unduly focused on a few dimensions and, as I said, using a few dimensions with a sledgehammer rather than a light touch.
Lee Jussim:
I’m not religious, but I’m in.
Dorian Abbott:
Carl wants to make one comment and then…
Carl:
My comment is the demographic you described. It’s not that they’re being passively overlooked, they’re being actively-
Speaker X:
No, no, no, no.
Carl:
… overlooked because that demographic is the deplorable demographic. Not a joke. Those states and that rural and that socioeconomic level, that is the deplorable class. I think they’re being actively rejected, not just passively overlooked.
Dorian Abbott:
Okay, great. Thank you, Lee. Actually, let’s thank Lee again, everybody.