This was very good. I in particular like your enumeration of 'small-c conservative propositions' that are undersaturated *specifically ideologically* in the academic discourse and social space relative to their utility. I think a great way of sidestepping broader affective dismissal (which of course itself is revealing, but may not help generate uptake) is to brush aside the issue of What Are We Calling Conservatism and instead click down a level of resolution to spotlight classes of claims that really aren't bearing many loads relative to what they ought.
I confess I just skimmed this, but I recall that there have been quite a few papers on the impact of immigration on wages. The results has been mixed, with studies from the 90s suggesting mild downward pressure and more recent ones little discernible effect. (Correct me if I’m wrong; this is from pure memory.) This was a major question at one time, and if there is no longer any large scale research program related to this, I suspect it is because it no longer seems like promising ground for a strong finding.
More broadly, I suspect academics will always tilt left for organic reasons. I believe intellectually is correlated with receptivity to new ideas (right or wrong), and so is political liberalism.
Thanks, that makes sense. I think the bigger problem though is that economists has mostly focused on the wage question while ignoring other things voters and policymakers care about. The long-term fiscal effects of immigrants and their descendants are much less clear than the wage stuff, for instance, if you just look at “the literature.” Other social science disciplines are probably even worse in this regard.
The ideological balance of university faculty was quite even up to the mid 1900s, when it started becoming increasingly more left
My best guess for why this occurred is that right wing academics are generally better at understanding the underlying grounds for left wing beliefs, and right wing profs on hiring committees were therefore more fair to left wing academics looking for a job. So start with a 50/50 balance of left/ring academics on hiring committees, and you initially have a a slight, but not overwhelming, bias for left wing academic job applicants. However, repeat this over many iterations and that bias becomes more overwhelming as future generations of tenured academics are increasingly left wing, and therefore more biased
I think it's not just about receptivity to new ideas. The choice of reason over other claims to knowledge--tradition, culture, religion, intuition--implies liberalism, and probably an at least somewhat left-leaning version of it.
And I think Kuatov is trying to conjure a reasonable rightist movement out of thin air. A commitment to unbiased truth-seeking isn't going to win the trust of the vast majority of the people who distrust academia and the media because it is that mission itself (rather than occasional failures at it) that is the cause of distrust. "Social order and economic growth are good" aren't actually controversial statements, and what would gain trust is stuff like "vaccines are part of an evil plot," "immigrants lower wages and are part of an evil plot," "the economy is good when my party is in power and bad when it's not, regardless of what the fake statistics say."
I think your perspective here is common, Sean - "why make room for the group that only has crazy ideas, especially lately?" But I think this misidentifies where the problem lies.
I think a "reasonable rightist movement" is being actively stifled by academia, and that a side effect of this problem is a growth of right-sided conspiratorial thinking. When people with a specific set of values are squeezed out of the places where they could use major funding and high quality tools to seek truth, their questions remain, and they're left to spiral around assumption and guesswork instead of finding solid answers. People are desperate for research *from people who share their values and can answer their questions in a way that makes sense to them*, even if that research comes up with unexpected answers, or non-answers. Instead, the closest thing to "funded research" that comes up when people ask moderate, normie questions online is, like, a rightwing "investigative journalism" podcast where they point out problems and give the solution that came to their mind in the shower last night, and then read tweets by random famous people as proof they're right.
sincerely,
someone with some conservative values (like "religion = good", "government is often ineffective", "traditional family = good") who shares your distaste for the proliferation of conspiracy on the Right.
First, for at least a half century (probably more like a century) there has been a deep hostility towards academia on the right. Some of this is a holdover from Vietnam and fights over communism, but a lot of it is due to fights over evolution. It is pretty common to find the attitude among conservative evangelicals that biologists are somewhere between hopelessly deluded and outright engaged in a conspiracy to prevent belief in God. I was fortunate to be raised in a church where Jesus and evolution were not placed at odds, but I have friends who were less fortunate and decided science had disproved their faith. So for generations conservative evangelicals were sending Christian kids off to college with the fervent belief that evolution was an anti-God plot, and getting back nonreligious kids within a semester or two. Basically a self-inflicted wound.
Second, there's just been a massive non-religious crank realignment to the right (thanks, populism!). Vaccine skepticism used to be a crunchy hippie thing; now it's an unambiguous right wing thing. When vaccine conspiracy theories, or 9/11 conspiracy theories, or whatever, were mainly leftist...was that because a reasonable leftist movement was being stifled by academia? I don't really think so. The realignment of nonreligious crankishness to the right is much more recent than that.
I don't deny that academia can be an uncomfortable place to be a conservative scholar (especially if you do not have the social skills or charisma to acquire social capital through relationships), but I think a lot of the conservative loathing of academia goes far, far beyond what the actual facts would license. That doesn't mean academics shouldn't take the advice of the OP! But I would expect the return to be minimal at best, and the primary benefits to be scholarly rather than reputational.
Just to clarify the disagreement here, I think there are three issues:
1. I agree that a wider variety of values is good for the reasons AK says.
2. I disagree that the value differences are what he and you say. Like, I doubt anyone really disagrees that gov't is sometimes ineffective (or effective at bad goals) or that order is good. Come on.
3. I disagree that distrust is primarily or even significantly related to deviations (which do certainly occur) from the mission of discovery of truth. The problem is the mission itself inevitably brings one into conflict with populist beliefs and discredits institutions in their eyes. Like, nothing did more to hurt the right's trust in media than the WaPo Watergate coverage. But that was accurate and important. So I think efforts to rebuild trust that don't go to the extent of affirming false beliefs will have very limited success.
Not sure if you're an academic or adjacent. But my sense is that attending a single faculty seminar in sociology (let alone any softer field) at a random state school would quickly dispel the idea that "nobody really disagrees that government is sometimes ineffective or that the social order is good."
I'm a bit confused how your point #3 is a response to me, since you say you "disagree" with... stuff I didn't say and also disagree with. I agree with you that the right is suspicious of true research sometimes and too trusting of conspiracy sometimes. My point was that the right as a whole could be landing closer to the truth if right-leaning researchers and academics were more able to flourish, and that right-leaning citizens would trust such truth the same way they currently trust the conspiracy theorists - because they're just looking for answers from people who see the world similar to how they do.
Also, I think we might have a different understanding of the word "values". To me, values aren't just statements of sometimes-truth, they're ideas that are of highest priority when interpreting the world. While many on the left might be caught agreeing that government is occasionally ineffective or that order is generally good, give them a situation where forces of social order and forces of fairness are at odds, and they'll never be pro-order. Put in front of them a marginalized group facing a difficult situation and their first suggestion is often a government program to ease the situation. These sorts of value conflicts are not simply "one side owns reality and one side owns conspiracy", they reveal preferences that affect choices made even when everyone agrees on the facts. Seeing values this way, it's obvious how having entire value sets missing from the social sciences would leave a gap in identifying problems, identifying solutions, and understanding people groups.
I'm pushing back against a strawman from the piece, actually (the idea that, basically, "good things are good" is controversial). The actual matters of controversy are different.
Which doesn’t negate the fact that your claims about those whose trust has been eroded and how to move them are deeply flawed caricatures that carry the same tone and spirit the article condemns.
Thank you for continuing to be a living, breathing illustration of the problem. You don't have any idea what my experience is, what "looking into" the issue I have done, what my own concerns may or may not be. I can tell you flat out that your claims don't match what I hear from many people who have lost trust in the system, nor do they align with my own concerns. Your sense that you already know everything you need to know, that you needn't bring any curiosity to the question sits right at the heart of the "it isn't happening and it's good that it is" environment the OP describes. If I were him I'd screenshot you as an exemplar in case he does a follow-up :)
It would be amazing if social-science journals would simply hire conservative reviewers to give readers' reports for the torrent of left-wing papers they publish.
Some huge proportion of social-science papers take the form of saying "Here's a noteworthy inequality/disparity. Isn't it horrible? We'll assume without proof that this disparity is the product of oppression and discrimination, and proceed to make policy proposals that assume without argument that all relevant policy actors are primarily concerned with decreasing the disparity."
But this is totally nuts. Inequality is indeed natural, universal, and impossible to eradicate, as anyone who lives on planet Earth and hasn't had their brain fried by academia can tell you. Since progressive academics never have to defend or prove these background assumptions of theirs (inequality is bad, inequality is fixable, inequality is injustice), they become some of the intellectually laziest people on the planet.
It seems that sociology departments are leftwing, and do not believe in hiring moderates or conservatives. How can such departments exist in state universities in conservative states? Such states should eliminate all their sociology departments, and the departments should not complain-- they've been getting funded by people who think their research and teaching is false for years.
I agree entirely that there is a problem, but find the idea of affirmative action problematic. It feels like suggesting a bad solution to a bad situation.
How about offering research funding to investigate the “taboo” questions? This may attract scholars who are interested in such questions (and have other points of view). It can also signal that such questions have a place in academia.
And maybe it is worth conducting research into the problem among students. There is anecdotal evidence that students self censor, or adjust their assignments to align with the (often left) perspectives of the lecturers, and if they don’t, they get penalized. There should be some independent mechanism addressing it as the staff is not even allowing to be challenged by fresh ideas of students, who might themselves ask the important questions and push the discussion in class to different directions. This can help normalizing diversity of opinions in class.
Thanks, I'm unsure about affirmative action, too. But your idea on research funding sounds good to me. Some conservative donors and think tanks should absolutely do this more!
How much of this is downstream of the erosion of cultural norms that attempt to separate scholarship from activism? It seems intuitively plausible that if we had better ought/is separation in scholarly spaces, we could distinguish between not hiring people because of their indefensible empirical beliefs (anti-vaxxers, creationists, people who think human-caused climate change is a Chinese hoax, believers in the Great Replacement theory) vs not hiring people who do careful empirical work and hold unpopular-in-academia normative views.
I feel like it's hard these days to advocate for those kind of is/ought separation norms without people thinking you're saying dumb things like "scientists can and should be pure unbiased empiricists whose scholarship is not motivated by their normative convictions" or "activism is bad" or "activists' normative views are wrong" or "professors shouldn't teach courses on politically loaded subjects where they have relevant normative views". Especially given that those last two are things a lot of right-wing critics of academia actually say. I tried to thread this needle a few years ago and still think it's one of my best takes:
BTW, since you mentioned fertility, to me Lyman Stone is one of the best examples of someone with obnoxious ultraconservative social views who is nonetheless a careful and insightful scholar always worth listening to. I don't know how many people like him there even are in today's world, but if I were trying to hire for viewpoint diversity I'd look for them.
I agree with you in principle, and I'd like to see much more explicit separation between is and ought in scholarship (just read your essay, which threads the needle well).
The problem though is that in the social sciences the separation can arguably only go so far. Scholars will always be informed by some priors, and those priors shape not just the conclusions they reach but which questions get asked in the first place. And that’s why I think diversifying priors is how your norm actually gets enforced: people with different oughts are the ones most motivated to check each other's is.
Lyman Stone is a good example of that dynamic—I’m glad that people like him are also doing demographic research.
Seems like "young-earth creationist applying to a biology department" is a common way to dunk on proponents of ideological diversity. While I understand a biology department wanting to screen out YECs, ironically social science seems like the exact place where being a YEC would not only be neutral, but potentially helpful - to have a head start in studying all those YECs out there and the social movements that arise from such groups.
"What are the long-term consequences of permanent low-skilled migration, including for migrants’ descendants?"
I believe many scholars have run the numbers, but they throw out their findings because they either do not fit the preferred narrative or because publishing them would amount to academic suicide.
Whenever the positive fiscal impact of migration is cited, the studies often rely on a simple trick: they group all migrants together. But once you separate EU migrants from third-country migrants, the picture changes significantly. Third-country migration appears to impose a substantial net fiscal cost on society. Because they are largely unskilled.
As long as academics believe groups differences are only because of oppression and discrimination, I know I can't take them seriously.
It doesn't even make logical sense, because no one thinks oppression is the reason why women now dominate in academia, or why Chinese and Jews are making much more money that whites.
Thomas Sowell wrote books(not sure how many) on how different groups will always perform differently In every society. It's very straightforward, very obvious. Yet the academic establishment just hold their hands in front of their eyes.
We will not hire non consensus people because they are obviously by default...wrong. we'd like to keep group cohesion. Outliers will be shoved off the board.
You say that the Left in academia ignores the voters who pay their salaries, but then you reject the reforms pushed by the politicians those very same voters put in power.
You either respect the wishes of the voters or you don’t. And if you promote an ideology that is abhorrent to the vast majority of voters, you will eventually face harsh corrective measures. That’s what’s happening now.
Ali Afroz: “Should the biology department start hiring people who believe in creationism?”
Alexander Kustov: “so would you allow a climate skeptic in your environmental science department?” “A migration skeptic in your geography department?”
Yes. Of course. It doesn’t matter what the scientist believes, it matters that they fulfill the integrity of their role as a scientist.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the main breakthrough from science from the enlightenment a recognition that people, and that includes scientists, are all biased. Therefore, we should focus on the integrity of the process, instilling an ethic (or value) into every scientist to have a reverence for the truth as the primary driver. Everything else should be de-prioritized,…. pressures of activism, ideology, social status, peer pressure.
If people are going to infuse alternative values and ethics, then science is not for them. In the non-science private sector, where I come from, this person would have been immediately replaced as the head of this institution after those comments. Well, frankly, she wouldn’t have made it that far, considering the interview she gave. Institutions are built for purposes, not people’s motivations.
I don’t think hiring more conservatives or bringing more people of diverse viewpoints is the answer. Hook up a lie detector to every scientist and ask them “are you a scientist solely because you have a reverence for truth and you believe seeking the truth is best way to understand the world?”
Viewpoint diversity might be good at the top of the chain, might help in diversifying which research projects get funded. Example: I believe famously, the studies of authoritarianism in political psychology was always focused on right wing movements for decades, before somebody said “gee, I wonder if authoritarianism ever happens on the left?”
From a managers point of view, and from an outsider’s point of view, here is what I think would work:
• Focus limited resources on the issues that are most important to the most people in society
• Scientists must exhibit a reverence for truth (better interview process, weed out people not serious in science)
• There needs to be appropriate cancel culture (in the case of Rouse, fire her. Show an example to the industry how serious science takes its integrity)
• Better media publicity of research results
Somebody like me thinks we should end public funding for all social science because it just seems like an endless waste of money with multiple scandals that negatively impact society (2014 NIH transgender study cover-up, 2020 black infant mortality study, a general struggle to replicate or reproduce studies, etc). Better PR, more accountability, the tax payers need to know what good is coming out and the impetus should be on the universities and media to prove the case for science.
Thanks for this. I'm all for merit-based hiring and promotion. Unfortunately, it's not something that's easy to implement in many fields, because there are no objective standards for what counts as important or serious research. That's exactly where some viewpoint diversity can help on top of making thing more merit-based.
Interesting, thanks. Usually the people holding the purse strings are the ones that setting standards and determining what is serious research. But if there is little direction and accountability with the money doled out, that's definitely going to cause some untethering. And I imagine money can come from multiple sources in these fields,...different federal govt agencies, foundations, universities, private endowments, etc. - do we think the varied sources makes it difficult to create standards?
If you hire someone who believes in young earth creationism, firstly, I seriously doubt that under realistic conditions, anyone who continues to hold this attitude while applying for an academic job is at all likely to be a good scientist and secondly the likelihood of this view being correct is not actually zero, but it’s dam close. So any research based on such assumptions is pretty much guaranteed to be garbage. Thanks to GIGO. Would it be worth the time of a university to to pick an even more extreme example hire somebody who believes that the standard rules of arithmetic can be used to prove that 2+2 = 5 do you expect that to be a worthwhile expenditure of university money, obviously not past a point. The likelihood of a view is so small that it’s not worth hiring the person and the fact that some people refuse to higher even people whose views are actually fairly reasonable doesn’t change this fact.
also quite frankly, the rest of what you say doesn’t follow from the recognition that humans are biased. Quite the contrary, if someone actually applied your lie detector test, I expect the results would be dominated by people who have convinced themselves that they only care about the truth because that is a socially useful thing to believe in reality, no one would actually pass your test or to be more precise, almost nobody would, if it was conducted such that self deception didn’t count. Having strong motivations and preferences, other than finding out the truth and which can potentially affect your search for the truth is very much normal to the human conditions. You have to find an alien. And any human likely to satisfy your condition is so abnormal that they would be likely to be abnormal in other ways, not all of which are likely to be good for being a scientist. This whole attitude of if only the institutions were full of good people. They would be no problems is just a big mistake. Good people are either rare or if you define the term more generously, not that different from normal people and our institutions will not perform well if they depend on exceptional virtue.
Note, I am only defending cases where the disqualification is relevant to the research of the scientist, believing in absurd nonsense that has little relation to your research is probably okay and certainly modern cancel culture goes too far especially as it often cancels for believing in actually potentially accurate things that are up for reasonable debate, not to mention completely unrelated to your work. Although I still probably would think less of someone who believed in obvious nonsense. But we should not jump from the idea that some people withhold hiring in cases where it should not be withheld to the idea that actually we should hire without any viewpoint constraints and waste resources on complete scientific dead ends.
I mostly agree with you on the young earth creationism, they likely they wouldn’t be a great scientist. The point is whether we think behavior can be separated from belief so we can create better science.
A more realistic example is OB-GYN Dr. Nisha Verma, who in testimony in front of Congress, refused to honestly answer the question “can biological males get pregnant?” in good faith. Dr. Verma, a medical doctor, stated that she treats patients with diverse gender identities and complex personal experiences, and in doing so, she refused to acknowledge biological realities. But in practice, she would have to acknowledge biological realities in treatment or should would be a really bad doctor. I tend to think we can separate behavior from belief.
Conducting lie detector tests for interviews would probably be illegal. Are there interview questions we can craft to get a better understanding if a person will faithfully fulfill the integrity of their role? I tend to believe some people can separate behavior from belief, but some people cannot. Is there a non-intrusive way we can tell.
I’m not attributing values of “good people” or “bad people.” There are good people who cannot separate behavior from belief, so maybe work for a private foundation that supports that world view. I just don’t think we should be spending tax payer money on ideological activism.
And I don’t think people who care mostly about searching for truth so we can better understand the world is an exceptional virtue. Everybody has the capability to project manage their own personal lives, the ability to apply discipline to one’s life. Example: I could call in sick, stay home today and eat ice cream all day……. or I can tough it out and go to work. Discipline, virtue, morality,…these things can be taught and learned. But there does have to be a system of accountability and a culture of appropriate peer pressure.
I get the feeling that accountability seems to be a thing missing in some of these fields, perhaps you have ideas on how to improve?
I agree with almost everything you say here, but I admit I am pretty uncomfortable with your argument about not wanting to depart too much from the tax paying public. You argue that it’s completely legitimate because of the distinction between matters of fact and matters of values, but firstly even in matters of values, regardless of whether there is an objective morality, it is substantive be true that many attitudes that are common among the public like the idea that a country should only care about its own citizens are much much harder to defend as a moral philosophical view, which is not impossible to defend just much harder than the public attitude would Have you believe. Also, while you may draw the distinction it is absolutely not a distinction that the public has ever shown any inclination to care about. I have never seen any evidence that the public responds differently to disagreenents that are based in values compare to disagreement based in factual opinions, if for example, the public thinks that the economy is in crisis because of the vibesession while the economics community doesn’t think so and therefore is not thinking of solutions. The public response will not be different merely because the disagreement is not about values. So if the cause for concern is the public response that concern equally applies to a factual disagreement. As such if you care about the public opinion of the day because of the funding implications, you should equally care about it when it comes to factual questions because the reasons are not any weaker in that case.
I also admit that while obviously nobody right now is proposing that biology department start hiring people who believe in creationism that is again merely an part of the academic debate. There was a time not so long ago when most of the people now calling for consideration of the public opinions were cheering on Richard Dawkins saying that universities shouldn’t feel any need to appease the views of the tax paying public. The problem I suspect is that people are okay making concessions to the public when these involve views that the academic in question considers reasonable, but not when the views are something the academic considers unreasonable the problem of course being that different academics disagree about what is reasonable, so that doesn’t seem like a door we want to open. In any case while I get the pragmatic implications consciously building in a social rule about caring about the opinions of people in general seem like it’s actively baking in a bias mostly unrelated to truth, which does not sound like a great idea.
I am also to be fair suspicious that the public doesn’t realistically pay enough attention to academic research and the debates among academics to actually be affected by changes in academia. Such that I think even if your reforms are implemented, the public in large part would not hear about it, and therefore would not change their opinion of academia simply because learning about academia is very low on their priority list. That is I suspect why academia has been able to mostly stay insulated from public opinion and why appeasing the public will simply not work as a pragmatic strategy both because as long as there is significant disagreement from the public, the fact there is no discrimination against their viewpoints going on Wouldn’t change anything for the public, especially given the difficulty of demonstrating discrimination has gone away and also because the public just doesn’t know enough about academics to be able to actually Tell even if academia became much more favourable to their views. It’s not like the public goes and checks opinion polls on academics. If I had a penny for every time somebody from the general public was completely mistaken about what the consensus of this or that academic field is, I’d be a rich man by now.
Fair points, and I will happily concede that the public is not very attentive and would not always distinguish, say, a creationist hire in biology from a heterodox one in sociology. But I don't see how this challenges the piece's conclusions. I am not saying universities should chase public opinion, only that they should know where the public stands and stop adding fuel to the fire. And while people don't follow academia day to day, sagas like Jason Arday's end up in the press, and those are exactly what taxpayers remember (and rightly so IMO).
I don’t disagree with the conclusions of your peace as I mentioned. I just think that treating public opinion and catering to it as a legitimate goal and even recommending that universities treate it as one among many guiding stars will be socially corrosive. The extreme examples and arguments were mostly to establish why I think public opinion should not be considered a legitimate guiding star, so mostly meant as reasoning by analogy rather than suggesting what you’re suggesting is similar. I do think that recommending that universities not push in certain directions because of the public is a milder version of chasing public opinion. Although I suppose you could reasonably argue that I am being a bit too absolutist in wanting to ignore public opinion, I just intuitively feel like it would be a bad idea to start thinking of this as a legitimate consideration. Obviously, this is not relevant to whether pushing in those directions is bad because those directions are mistaken or being advantage in a way not conducive to truth discovery.
On steelmanning - and I say this as someone whose whole publication is built on making the strongest case for each side - it is much easier to steelman answers than questions. Fit example, with effort, an outsider can state the case for immigration restrictions well enough to be mistaken for a believer. What you cannot simulate is which problems feel urgent enough to study in the first place, and a question nobody asks leaves no trace.
On values: once a set of values becomes a field's working assumptions, it becomes its quality standards too - so the gatekeeping is sincere, and the people denying discrimination are doing so honestly. This reaches further than simply hiring conservatives. Grant panels fund the topics the panellists themselves find interesting, and thus neglected questions are also unfunded ones; the loop closes before a heterodox candidate even enters the picture. Kuhn argued that fields normally work this way, questioning details but accepting core principles as undeniable facts, resulting in the big shifts coming from outsiders. And whilst in natural science a wrong framework eventually breaks against the evidence, value-based fields don't break that way; an extra data point won't make or break an underlying value. That leaves outside pressure as the only corrective.
Hence both arguments end in the same place. Arguments can be imported and evidence gathered; questions and priors only arrive with people. Better to bring them in by design before others keep doing it by force.
This was very good. I in particular like your enumeration of 'small-c conservative propositions' that are undersaturated *specifically ideologically* in the academic discourse and social space relative to their utility. I think a great way of sidestepping broader affective dismissal (which of course itself is revealing, but may not help generate uptake) is to brush aside the issue of What Are We Calling Conservatism and instead click down a level of resolution to spotlight classes of claims that really aren't bearing many loads relative to what they ought.
Thanks, Zac, I appreciate it!
I confess I just skimmed this, but I recall that there have been quite a few papers on the impact of immigration on wages. The results has been mixed, with studies from the 90s suggesting mild downward pressure and more recent ones little discernible effect. (Correct me if I’m wrong; this is from pure memory.) This was a major question at one time, and if there is no longer any large scale research program related to this, I suspect it is because it no longer seems like promising ground for a strong finding.
More broadly, I suspect academics will always tilt left for organic reasons. I believe intellectually is correlated with receptivity to new ideas (right or wrong), and so is political liberalism.
Thanks, that makes sense. I think the bigger problem though is that economists has mostly focused on the wage question while ignoring other things voters and policymakers care about. The long-term fiscal effects of immigrants and their descendants are much less clear than the wage stuff, for instance, if you just look at “the literature.” Other social science disciplines are probably even worse in this regard.
The ideological balance of university faculty was quite even up to the mid 1900s, when it started becoming increasingly more left
My best guess for why this occurred is that right wing academics are generally better at understanding the underlying grounds for left wing beliefs, and right wing profs on hiring committees were therefore more fair to left wing academics looking for a job. So start with a 50/50 balance of left/ring academics on hiring committees, and you initially have a a slight, but not overwhelming, bias for left wing academic job applicants. However, repeat this over many iterations and that bias becomes more overwhelming as future generations of tenured academics are increasingly left wing, and therefore more biased
I think it's not just about receptivity to new ideas. The choice of reason over other claims to knowledge--tradition, culture, religion, intuition--implies liberalism, and probably an at least somewhat left-leaning version of it.
And I think Kuatov is trying to conjure a reasonable rightist movement out of thin air. A commitment to unbiased truth-seeking isn't going to win the trust of the vast majority of the people who distrust academia and the media because it is that mission itself (rather than occasional failures at it) that is the cause of distrust. "Social order and economic growth are good" aren't actually controversial statements, and what would gain trust is stuff like "vaccines are part of an evil plot," "immigrants lower wages and are part of an evil plot," "the economy is good when my party is in power and bad when it's not, regardless of what the fake statistics say."
I think your perspective here is common, Sean - "why make room for the group that only has crazy ideas, especially lately?" But I think this misidentifies where the problem lies.
I think a "reasonable rightist movement" is being actively stifled by academia, and that a side effect of this problem is a growth of right-sided conspiratorial thinking. When people with a specific set of values are squeezed out of the places where they could use major funding and high quality tools to seek truth, their questions remain, and they're left to spiral around assumption and guesswork instead of finding solid answers. People are desperate for research *from people who share their values and can answer their questions in a way that makes sense to them*, even if that research comes up with unexpected answers, or non-answers. Instead, the closest thing to "funded research" that comes up when people ask moderate, normie questions online is, like, a rightwing "investigative journalism" podcast where they point out problems and give the solution that came to their mind in the shower last night, and then read tweets by random famous people as proof they're right.
sincerely,
someone with some conservative values (like "religion = good", "government is often ineffective", "traditional family = good") who shares your distaste for the proliferation of conspiracy on the Right.
I see two basic issues here.
First, for at least a half century (probably more like a century) there has been a deep hostility towards academia on the right. Some of this is a holdover from Vietnam and fights over communism, but a lot of it is due to fights over evolution. It is pretty common to find the attitude among conservative evangelicals that biologists are somewhere between hopelessly deluded and outright engaged in a conspiracy to prevent belief in God. I was fortunate to be raised in a church where Jesus and evolution were not placed at odds, but I have friends who were less fortunate and decided science had disproved their faith. So for generations conservative evangelicals were sending Christian kids off to college with the fervent belief that evolution was an anti-God plot, and getting back nonreligious kids within a semester or two. Basically a self-inflicted wound.
Second, there's just been a massive non-religious crank realignment to the right (thanks, populism!). Vaccine skepticism used to be a crunchy hippie thing; now it's an unambiguous right wing thing. When vaccine conspiracy theories, or 9/11 conspiracy theories, or whatever, were mainly leftist...was that because a reasonable leftist movement was being stifled by academia? I don't really think so. The realignment of nonreligious crankishness to the right is much more recent than that.
I don't deny that academia can be an uncomfortable place to be a conservative scholar (especially if you do not have the social skills or charisma to acquire social capital through relationships), but I think a lot of the conservative loathing of academia goes far, far beyond what the actual facts would license. That doesn't mean academics shouldn't take the advice of the OP! But I would expect the return to be minimal at best, and the primary benefits to be scholarly rather than reputational.
Just to clarify the disagreement here, I think there are three issues:
1. I agree that a wider variety of values is good for the reasons AK says.
2. I disagree that the value differences are what he and you say. Like, I doubt anyone really disagrees that gov't is sometimes ineffective (or effective at bad goals) or that order is good. Come on.
3. I disagree that distrust is primarily or even significantly related to deviations (which do certainly occur) from the mission of discovery of truth. The problem is the mission itself inevitably brings one into conflict with populist beliefs and discredits institutions in their eyes. Like, nothing did more to hurt the right's trust in media than the WaPo Watergate coverage. But that was accurate and important. So I think efforts to rebuild trust that don't go to the extent of affirming false beliefs will have very limited success.
Not sure if you're an academic or adjacent. But my sense is that attending a single faculty seminar in sociology (let alone any softer field) at a random state school would quickly dispel the idea that "nobody really disagrees that government is sometimes ineffective or that the social order is good."
:) I'll concede that "nobody" is an exaggeration.
I'm a bit confused how your point #3 is a response to me, since you say you "disagree" with... stuff I didn't say and also disagree with. I agree with you that the right is suspicious of true research sometimes and too trusting of conspiracy sometimes. My point was that the right as a whole could be landing closer to the truth if right-leaning researchers and academics were more able to flourish, and that right-leaning citizens would trust such truth the same way they currently trust the conspiracy theorists - because they're just looking for answers from people who see the world similar to how they do.
Also, I think we might have a different understanding of the word "values". To me, values aren't just statements of sometimes-truth, they're ideas that are of highest priority when interpreting the world. While many on the left might be caught agreeing that government is occasionally ineffective or that order is generally good, give them a situation where forces of social order and forces of fairness are at odds, and they'll never be pro-order. Put in front of them a marginalized group facing a difficult situation and their first suggestion is often a government program to ease the situation. These sorts of value conflicts are not simply "one side owns reality and one side owns conspiracy", they reveal preferences that affect choices made even when everyone agrees on the facts. Seeing values this way, it's obvious how having entire value sets missing from the social sciences would leave a gap in identifying problems, identifying solutions, and understanding people groups.
Sorry Sean, that’s exactly the kind of strawman this article gestures at.
I'm pushing back against a strawman from the piece, actually (the idea that, basically, "good things are good" is controversial). The actual matters of controversy are different.
Which doesn’t negate the fact that your claims about those whose trust has been eroded and how to move them are deeply flawed caricatures that carry the same tone and spirit the article condemns.
I think my claims are accurate, and if you look into the matter, you'll agree.
Thank you for continuing to be a living, breathing illustration of the problem. You don't have any idea what my experience is, what "looking into" the issue I have done, what my own concerns may or may not be. I can tell you flat out that your claims don't match what I hear from many people who have lost trust in the system, nor do they align with my own concerns. Your sense that you already know everything you need to know, that you needn't bring any curiosity to the question sits right at the heart of the "it isn't happening and it's good that it is" environment the OP describes. If I were him I'd screenshot you as an exemplar in case he does a follow-up :)
It would be amazing if social-science journals would simply hire conservative reviewers to give readers' reports for the torrent of left-wing papers they publish.
Some huge proportion of social-science papers take the form of saying "Here's a noteworthy inequality/disparity. Isn't it horrible? We'll assume without proof that this disparity is the product of oppression and discrimination, and proceed to make policy proposals that assume without argument that all relevant policy actors are primarily concerned with decreasing the disparity."
But this is totally nuts. Inequality is indeed natural, universal, and impossible to eradicate, as anyone who lives on planet Earth and hasn't had their brain fried by academia can tell you. Since progressive academics never have to defend or prove these background assumptions of theirs (inequality is bad, inequality is fixable, inequality is injustice), they become some of the intellectually laziest people on the planet.
You are exaggerating a tiny bit, but I like the idea. Perhaps some conservative think tanks like the Manhattan Institute can lead the charge?
It seems that sociology departments are leftwing, and do not believe in hiring moderates or conservatives. How can such departments exist in state universities in conservative states? Such states should eliminate all their sociology departments, and the departments should not complain-- they've been getting funded by people who think their research and teaching is false for years.
I agree entirely that there is a problem, but find the idea of affirmative action problematic. It feels like suggesting a bad solution to a bad situation.
How about offering research funding to investigate the “taboo” questions? This may attract scholars who are interested in such questions (and have other points of view). It can also signal that such questions have a place in academia.
And maybe it is worth conducting research into the problem among students. There is anecdotal evidence that students self censor, or adjust their assignments to align with the (often left) perspectives of the lecturers, and if they don’t, they get penalized. There should be some independent mechanism addressing it as the staff is not even allowing to be challenged by fresh ideas of students, who might themselves ask the important questions and push the discussion in class to different directions. This can help normalizing diversity of opinions in class.
Thanks, I'm unsure about affirmative action, too. But your idea on research funding sounds good to me. Some conservative donors and think tanks should absolutely do this more!
How much of this is downstream of the erosion of cultural norms that attempt to separate scholarship from activism? It seems intuitively plausible that if we had better ought/is separation in scholarly spaces, we could distinguish between not hiring people because of their indefensible empirical beliefs (anti-vaxxers, creationists, people who think human-caused climate change is a Chinese hoax, believers in the Great Replacement theory) vs not hiring people who do careful empirical work and hold unpopular-in-academia normative views.
I feel like it's hard these days to advocate for those kind of is/ought separation norms without people thinking you're saying dumb things like "scientists can and should be pure unbiased empiricists whose scholarship is not motivated by their normative convictions" or "activism is bad" or "activists' normative views are wrong" or "professors shouldn't teach courses on politically loaded subjects where they have relevant normative views". Especially given that those last two are things a lot of right-wing critics of academia actually say. I tried to thread this needle a few years ago and still think it's one of my best takes:
https://futuremoreperfect.substack.com/p/saving-the-world-by-separating-ought
BTW, since you mentioned fertility, to me Lyman Stone is one of the best examples of someone with obnoxious ultraconservative social views who is nonetheless a careful and insightful scholar always worth listening to. I don't know how many people like him there even are in today's world, but if I were trying to hire for viewpoint diversity I'd look for them.
I agree with you in principle, and I'd like to see much more explicit separation between is and ought in scholarship (just read your essay, which threads the needle well).
The problem though is that in the social sciences the separation can arguably only go so far. Scholars will always be informed by some priors, and those priors shape not just the conclusions they reach but which questions get asked in the first place. And that’s why I think diversifying priors is how your norm actually gets enforced: people with different oughts are the ones most motivated to check each other's is.
Lyman Stone is a good example of that dynamic—I’m glad that people like him are also doing demographic research.
Seems like "young-earth creationist applying to a biology department" is a common way to dunk on proponents of ideological diversity. While I understand a biology department wanting to screen out YECs, ironically social science seems like the exact place where being a YEC would not only be neutral, but potentially helpful - to have a head start in studying all those YECs out there and the social movements that arise from such groups.
"What are the long-term consequences of permanent low-skilled migration, including for migrants’ descendants?"
I believe many scholars have run the numbers, but they throw out their findings because they either do not fit the preferred narrative or because publishing them would amount to academic suicide.
Whenever the positive fiscal impact of migration is cited, the studies often rely on a simple trick: they group all migrants together. But once you separate EU migrants from third-country migrants, the picture changes significantly. Third-country migration appears to impose a substantial net fiscal cost on society. Because they are largely unskilled.
There is data on this from Denmark:
https://fm.dk/media/25228/indvandreres-nettobidrag-til-de-offentlige-finanser-i-2018.pdf
The Netherlands:
https://www.iza.org/publications/dp/17569/the-long-term-fiscal-impact-of-immigrants-in-the-netherlands-differentiated-by-motive-source-region-and-generation
And the UK:
https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/Fiscal-risks-and-sustainability-report-September-2024-1.pdf
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/2024-Briefing-The-fiscal-impact-of-immigration-to-the-UK.pdf
As long as academics believe groups differences are only because of oppression and discrimination, I know I can't take them seriously.
It doesn't even make logical sense, because no one thinks oppression is the reason why women now dominate in academia, or why Chinese and Jews are making much more money that whites.
Thomas Sowell wrote books(not sure how many) on how different groups will always perform differently In every society. It's very straightforward, very obvious. Yet the academic establishment just hold their hands in front of their eyes.
“groups differences are only because of oppression and discrimination” unless the disadvantaged group (in academic hiring) is conservatives :)
We will not hire non consensus people because they are obviously by default...wrong. we'd like to keep group cohesion. Outliers will be shoved off the board.
That is the way Science works..😁
You say that the Left in academia ignores the voters who pay their salaries, but then you reject the reforms pushed by the politicians those very same voters put in power.
You either respect the wishes of the voters or you don’t. And if you promote an ideology that is abhorrent to the vast majority of voters, you will eventually face harsh corrective measures. That’s what’s happening now.
Sorry, that posted on an errant keystroke, but I’ve run on ong enough anyway.
I did want to commend you for your efforts, even if iI do think that the “reality has a liberal bias” bumper sticker slogan is a heap of horse shit.
Best to you.
Lol dei for conservatives. The humanities need dei for leftists that arent conspiritards first, if my experience with them is representative
Ali Afroz: “Should the biology department start hiring people who believe in creationism?”
Alexander Kustov: “so would you allow a climate skeptic in your environmental science department?” “A migration skeptic in your geography department?”
Yes. Of course. It doesn’t matter what the scientist believes, it matters that they fulfill the integrity of their role as a scientist.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the main breakthrough from science from the enlightenment a recognition that people, and that includes scientists, are all biased. Therefore, we should focus on the integrity of the process, instilling an ethic (or value) into every scientist to have a reverence for the truth as the primary driver. Everything else should be de-prioritized,…. pressures of activism, ideology, social status, peer pressure.
If people are going to infuse alternative values and ethics, then science is not for them. In the non-science private sector, where I come from, this person would have been immediately replaced as the head of this institution after those comments. Well, frankly, she wouldn’t have made it that far, considering the interview she gave. Institutions are built for purposes, not people’s motivations.
I don’t think hiring more conservatives or bringing more people of diverse viewpoints is the answer. Hook up a lie detector to every scientist and ask them “are you a scientist solely because you have a reverence for truth and you believe seeking the truth is best way to understand the world?”
Viewpoint diversity might be good at the top of the chain, might help in diversifying which research projects get funded. Example: I believe famously, the studies of authoritarianism in political psychology was always focused on right wing movements for decades, before somebody said “gee, I wonder if authoritarianism ever happens on the left?”
From a managers point of view, and from an outsider’s point of view, here is what I think would work:
• Focus limited resources on the issues that are most important to the most people in society
• Scientists must exhibit a reverence for truth (better interview process, weed out people not serious in science)
• There needs to be appropriate cancel culture (in the case of Rouse, fire her. Show an example to the industry how serious science takes its integrity)
• Better media publicity of research results
Somebody like me thinks we should end public funding for all social science because it just seems like an endless waste of money with multiple scandals that negatively impact society (2014 NIH transgender study cover-up, 2020 black infant mortality study, a general struggle to replicate or reproduce studies, etc). Better PR, more accountability, the tax payers need to know what good is coming out and the impetus should be on the universities and media to prove the case for science.
Thanks for this. I'm all for merit-based hiring and promotion. Unfortunately, it's not something that's easy to implement in many fields, because there are no objective standards for what counts as important or serious research. That's exactly where some viewpoint diversity can help on top of making thing more merit-based.
Interesting, thanks. Usually the people holding the purse strings are the ones that setting standards and determining what is serious research. But if there is little direction and accountability with the money doled out, that's definitely going to cause some untethering. And I imagine money can come from multiple sources in these fields,...different federal govt agencies, foundations, universities, private endowments, etc. - do we think the varied sources makes it difficult to create standards?
If you hire someone who believes in young earth creationism, firstly, I seriously doubt that under realistic conditions, anyone who continues to hold this attitude while applying for an academic job is at all likely to be a good scientist and secondly the likelihood of this view being correct is not actually zero, but it’s dam close. So any research based on such assumptions is pretty much guaranteed to be garbage. Thanks to GIGO. Would it be worth the time of a university to to pick an even more extreme example hire somebody who believes that the standard rules of arithmetic can be used to prove that 2+2 = 5 do you expect that to be a worthwhile expenditure of university money, obviously not past a point. The likelihood of a view is so small that it’s not worth hiring the person and the fact that some people refuse to higher even people whose views are actually fairly reasonable doesn’t change this fact.
also quite frankly, the rest of what you say doesn’t follow from the recognition that humans are biased. Quite the contrary, if someone actually applied your lie detector test, I expect the results would be dominated by people who have convinced themselves that they only care about the truth because that is a socially useful thing to believe in reality, no one would actually pass your test or to be more precise, almost nobody would, if it was conducted such that self deception didn’t count. Having strong motivations and preferences, other than finding out the truth and which can potentially affect your search for the truth is very much normal to the human conditions. You have to find an alien. And any human likely to satisfy your condition is so abnormal that they would be likely to be abnormal in other ways, not all of which are likely to be good for being a scientist. This whole attitude of if only the institutions were full of good people. They would be no problems is just a big mistake. Good people are either rare or if you define the term more generously, not that different from normal people and our institutions will not perform well if they depend on exceptional virtue.
Note, I am only defending cases where the disqualification is relevant to the research of the scientist, believing in absurd nonsense that has little relation to your research is probably okay and certainly modern cancel culture goes too far especially as it often cancels for believing in actually potentially accurate things that are up for reasonable debate, not to mention completely unrelated to your work. Although I still probably would think less of someone who believed in obvious nonsense. But we should not jump from the idea that some people withhold hiring in cases where it should not be withheld to the idea that actually we should hire without any viewpoint constraints and waste resources on complete scientific dead ends.
I mostly agree with you on the young earth creationism, they likely they wouldn’t be a great scientist. The point is whether we think behavior can be separated from belief so we can create better science.
A more realistic example is OB-GYN Dr. Nisha Verma, who in testimony in front of Congress, refused to honestly answer the question “can biological males get pregnant?” in good faith. Dr. Verma, a medical doctor, stated that she treats patients with diverse gender identities and complex personal experiences, and in doing so, she refused to acknowledge biological realities. But in practice, she would have to acknowledge biological realities in treatment or should would be a really bad doctor. I tend to think we can separate behavior from belief.
Conducting lie detector tests for interviews would probably be illegal. Are there interview questions we can craft to get a better understanding if a person will faithfully fulfill the integrity of their role? I tend to believe some people can separate behavior from belief, but some people cannot. Is there a non-intrusive way we can tell.
I’m not attributing values of “good people” or “bad people.” There are good people who cannot separate behavior from belief, so maybe work for a private foundation that supports that world view. I just don’t think we should be spending tax payer money on ideological activism.
And I don’t think people who care mostly about searching for truth so we can better understand the world is an exceptional virtue. Everybody has the capability to project manage their own personal lives, the ability to apply discipline to one’s life. Example: I could call in sick, stay home today and eat ice cream all day……. or I can tough it out and go to work. Discipline, virtue, morality,…these things can be taught and learned. But there does have to be a system of accountability and a culture of appropriate peer pressure.
I get the feeling that accountability seems to be a thing missing in some of these fields, perhaps you have ideas on how to improve?
I agree with almost everything you say here, but I admit I am pretty uncomfortable with your argument about not wanting to depart too much from the tax paying public. You argue that it’s completely legitimate because of the distinction between matters of fact and matters of values, but firstly even in matters of values, regardless of whether there is an objective morality, it is substantive be true that many attitudes that are common among the public like the idea that a country should only care about its own citizens are much much harder to defend as a moral philosophical view, which is not impossible to defend just much harder than the public attitude would Have you believe. Also, while you may draw the distinction it is absolutely not a distinction that the public has ever shown any inclination to care about. I have never seen any evidence that the public responds differently to disagreenents that are based in values compare to disagreement based in factual opinions, if for example, the public thinks that the economy is in crisis because of the vibesession while the economics community doesn’t think so and therefore is not thinking of solutions. The public response will not be different merely because the disagreement is not about values. So if the cause for concern is the public response that concern equally applies to a factual disagreement. As such if you care about the public opinion of the day because of the funding implications, you should equally care about it when it comes to factual questions because the reasons are not any weaker in that case.
I also admit that while obviously nobody right now is proposing that biology department start hiring people who believe in creationism that is again merely an part of the academic debate. There was a time not so long ago when most of the people now calling for consideration of the public opinions were cheering on Richard Dawkins saying that universities shouldn’t feel any need to appease the views of the tax paying public. The problem I suspect is that people are okay making concessions to the public when these involve views that the academic in question considers reasonable, but not when the views are something the academic considers unreasonable the problem of course being that different academics disagree about what is reasonable, so that doesn’t seem like a door we want to open. In any case while I get the pragmatic implications consciously building in a social rule about caring about the opinions of people in general seem like it’s actively baking in a bias mostly unrelated to truth, which does not sound like a great idea.
I am also to be fair suspicious that the public doesn’t realistically pay enough attention to academic research and the debates among academics to actually be affected by changes in academia. Such that I think even if your reforms are implemented, the public in large part would not hear about it, and therefore would not change their opinion of academia simply because learning about academia is very low on their priority list. That is I suspect why academia has been able to mostly stay insulated from public opinion and why appeasing the public will simply not work as a pragmatic strategy both because as long as there is significant disagreement from the public, the fact there is no discrimination against their viewpoints going on Wouldn’t change anything for the public, especially given the difficulty of demonstrating discrimination has gone away and also because the public just doesn’t know enough about academics to be able to actually Tell even if academia became much more favourable to their views. It’s not like the public goes and checks opinion polls on academics. If I had a penny for every time somebody from the general public was completely mistaken about what the consensus of this or that academic field is, I’d be a rich man by now.
Fair points, and I will happily concede that the public is not very attentive and would not always distinguish, say, a creationist hire in biology from a heterodox one in sociology. But I don't see how this challenges the piece's conclusions. I am not saying universities should chase public opinion, only that they should know where the public stands and stop adding fuel to the fire. And while people don't follow academia day to day, sagas like Jason Arday's end up in the press, and those are exactly what taxpayers remember (and rightly so IMO).
I don’t disagree with the conclusions of your peace as I mentioned. I just think that treating public opinion and catering to it as a legitimate goal and even recommending that universities treate it as one among many guiding stars will be socially corrosive. The extreme examples and arguments were mostly to establish why I think public opinion should not be considered a legitimate guiding star, so mostly meant as reasoning by analogy rather than suggesting what you’re suggesting is similar. I do think that recommending that universities not push in certain directions because of the public is a milder version of chasing public opinion. Although I suppose you could reasonably argue that I am being a bit too absolutist in wanting to ignore public opinion, I just intuitively feel like it would be a bad idea to start thinking of this as a legitimate consideration. Obviously, this is not relevant to whether pushing in those directions is bad because those directions are mistaken or being advantage in a way not conducive to truth discovery.
There are two arguments here worth separating.
On steelmanning - and I say this as someone whose whole publication is built on making the strongest case for each side - it is much easier to steelman answers than questions. Fit example, with effort, an outsider can state the case for immigration restrictions well enough to be mistaken for a believer. What you cannot simulate is which problems feel urgent enough to study in the first place, and a question nobody asks leaves no trace.
On values: once a set of values becomes a field's working assumptions, it becomes its quality standards too - so the gatekeeping is sincere, and the people denying discrimination are doing so honestly. This reaches further than simply hiring conservatives. Grant panels fund the topics the panellists themselves find interesting, and thus neglected questions are also unfunded ones; the loop closes before a heterodox candidate even enters the picture. Kuhn argued that fields normally work this way, questioning details but accepting core principles as undeniable facts, resulting in the big shifts coming from outsiders. And whilst in natural science a wrong framework eventually breaks against the evidence, value-based fields don't break that way; an extra data point won't make or break an underlying value. That leaves outside pressure as the only corrective.
Hence both arguments end in the same place. Arguments can be imported and evidence gathered; questions and priors only arrive with people. Better to bring them in by design before others keep doing it by force.