
Academia’s Rejection of Diversity - rmason
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/31/opinion/academias-rejection-of-diversity.html?_r=1
======
hackuser
(Essential background: The author is head of the leading ideologically
conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute. For example, IIRC
they were behind many of the neo-cons who advocated the Iraq invasion and
related policies.)

Most importantly, the author desires an ideological war. Like any smart
advocate, he makes his case by framing the discussion: What he says _assumes_
there is an ideological contest and, due to the way framing works, nobody
questions it; they unconciously accept his framework when responding.

But I don't think most people are members of one ideological movement or
another. I suspect most people have a nuanced, inconsistent mix of beliefs.
Personally, and I know many agree, I think ideology of any kind is the enemy,
and I won't accept his presumption that I too am a dogmatic ideologue.

.

Also, the author seems to desire a sort of affirmative action for conservative
ideological ideas: They should be given a place regardless of their merits,
simply because they match his ideology. Why don't they (and he) have to
pursuade their peers like the advocates of any other idea? It's a loser
demanding he should get a trophy too.

An aside: Academics are overwhelmingly liberal. People say it is a consequence
of bias, but that is not necessarily true. If (broadly speaking) the smartest
people are mostly liberal, maybe that tells us something.

~~~
replicatorblog
"An aside: Academics are overwhelmingly liberal. People say it is a
consequence of bias, but that is not necessarily true. If (broadly speaking)
the smartest people are mostly liberal, maybe that tells us something."

Test the logic of this aside by changing "Academics" to "software engineering"
and replacing "Liberal" with "white/asian, straight, males." I don't think it
holds up very well.

~~~
hackuser
> Test the logic of this aside by changing "Academics" to "software
> engineering" and replacing "Liberal" with "white/asian, straight, males." I
> don't think it holds up very well.

I don't think the analogy applies: Software engineer quality don't vary in
quality by gender and race and even if they did, we want to treat people as
individuals. We don't want to discrimate based on those factors.

But Academia is a meritocracy of ideas; we do want to discriminate strongly
against bad ideas. It's not a place where everyone gets a hearing - if it was,
students and professors would spend 99% of their time on nonsense, learn
little, and make little progress in their fields.

For example, I think AEI (his organization) have been climate change deniers.
Should their ideas on climate change get an equal hearing in university
science departments? What about creationists who think the world was created
in the last 10,000 years? What about those who think the world is ending next
week?

------
Torgo
The best evidence I have seen for this among friends still in academia is the
near-uniform lack of knowledge of, or inability to articulate serious
critiques of their own ideas. Almost down to the person, the people I interact
with have a "my ideology represents the end of history" mindset. It is getting
worse and is not limited to right-left. I recently have seen ruthless attacks
against Germaine Greer by campus feminists that don't seem to have an inkling
of the history or ideological basis of her school of thought. She's just old,
stupid and evil, according to them. Our ideas are unopposed among sane, decent
and intelligent people.

~~~
kobayashi
Higher education is mostly an echo chamber of Leftist thought. This lack of
self-awareness and self-critique actually hurts Leftist thought as a whole -
rather than the best ideas being sorted to the top, more extreme and largely
unscrutinized Leftist theory begets more of the same.

------
replicatorblog
Everyone dismissing the notion of political diversity being a problem because
of the author's institutional affiliation should check out this site:

[http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/](http://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/)

It's a group of political scientists from a wide range of well respected
schools (Harvard, Northwestern, Penn, NYU, Georgetown) making the exact same
argument.

It's one thing to call into the question the motives of the AEI president,
another to make the same argument against Harvard's Steven Pinker.

------
threatofrain
I don't think it's at all easy to recognize where people's political lines
are. There are only two parties that can win, Democrat and Republican. This
goes to the question of, "What is diversity in this context? More Republicans
in academic positions?" I don't think so.

I think the fact that people are in the Democratic vs Republican party is
related to their views on power (and winnability, but only 2 parties really
win) rather than their views on politics. It just so happens right now that
the Republican party collects votes with denial of climate change or
evolution. The Republican party has made itself hostile to science, in that to
back its claims, it has had to say that academia is engaged in a conspiracy to
lie, and that academia brainwashes children into being liberal.

So regardless of your political beliefs, in terms of your power beliefs,
voting Democrat is a good choice for those in academics. If Democrats started
advocating for benefits for electricians, I'm sure we'd have more Democrats
there. That does not mean that the political beliefs and attitudes of
electricians are shifting. Does it surprise anyone that working in the
petroleum industry strongly predicts political party?

There are also other reasons why the Republican party is quite difficult to
support, like their lack of positive regard for secularism. You can't argue
with the Texas GOP platform when it's splattered with God and Christian
issues.

Take a skim through this Texas party platform document published 3 years ago.

[http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012Pla...](http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012Platform_Final.pdf)

------
jacobolus
Watching the president of the American Enterprise Institute whine about how
the partisan hacks he sponsors don’t get respect among intellectuals is pretty
amusing.

To paraphrase Ben Kenobi, you will never find a more wretched hive of question
begging and anti-empirical babble than the AEI.

* * *

More generally, I reject the claim of the paper he cites
([http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430](http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X14000430))
that changing partisan affiliation among social psychologists is proof that
the field has been overrun with leftists, who are driving out all the
conservatives via active discrimination, and who have an agenda of proving
that conservatives are evil/stupid/lazy/intolerant/....

There are many possible alternative explanations:

* Perhaps the social psychologists’ views have remained consistent while the US Republican party has become more radicalized, causing former political moderates to now fall in naturally with the Democratic party.

* Perhaps academia as a whole or social psychology as a field has lost status or become less desirable as a career, and folks whose ideological outlook emphasizes money and status have decided to go into industry more than before.

* Perhaps the Republican party’s cuts to education funding in general or diversion of funding away from social sciences toward STEM fields (including cutting direct funding for public institutions, cuts to research funding, etc.), attempt to exert governmental bureaucratic control over universities, etc. has changed the minds of formerly conservative-leaning academics away from supporting the GOP.

* Perhaps social psychologists or other social scientists have the perception that Republican lawmakers are disregarding the direct lessons of social science and thus framing policies which are “bad” for some reason independent of ideological bias.

* Perhaps the easy availability of money at institutions such as the AEI, the Heritage Foundation, etc. has swayed conservative-leaning social scientists to give up on universities and peer-reviewed research, and follow the money to these so-called think tanks.

etc.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
"...partisan hacks..." "...wretched hive..."

This comment richly illustrates the partisan divide mentioned in the article.
In particular, it reflects the Left's dismissive attitude toward conservative
think tanks.

Whether or not you agree with their views and orientation, the American
Enterprise Institute is a prestigious organization. I was motivated by this
comment in fact to visit aei.org which I've never read before, and I was quite
impressed by the kinds of scholars contributing pretty intelligent commentary
to the institute:

\- a Yale professor of Asian studies, commenting on the Japan-China-Korea
summit happening this weekend.

\- a former Defense Dept. analyst discussing the tiny military team the U.S.
has sent to Syria, and proposing more realistic strategies.

\- a professor of military history at West Point, critiquing the current U.S.
policy on missile defense

\- a GWU professor of emergency medicine and previous advisor to the CBO,
commissioner on Maryland's Health Services Cost Review Commission, etc. etc.,
discussing Medicare's future funding problems.

\- a resident fellow, previous commissioner of education for Florida,
secretary of education for Virginia, president and (current) chairman of the
Black Alliance for Education Options, commenting on Brown v. Board of
Education 60 Years Later.

And on and on.

These are not lightweights at all. They're serious, highly influential shakers
and movers and to dismiss them as "partisan hacks" or bribed to say things
because of "easy availability of money" is to dismiss the roughly 50% of the
country with whose views you just happen to disagree.

This, in a nutshell, is what's wrong with the intellectual climate in the
university and in the greater society in the U.S. today. There is a "closing
of the American mind", as Alan Bloom phrased it, a preference for assumed
agreement rather than polite disagreement or debate.

Once upon a time, in the 1970s and earlier (I came of intellectual age in the
1970s so experienced perhaps the last vestiges of this era) there was a kind
of open mindedness among the 60-70% of people in the middle.

There were of course the very right wing bigoted "John Birchers", Southern
racists, and their ilk, as well as the fanatically left wing Marxists and
traditional socialists (Bernie Sanders is perhaps an example of the latter).

But in the middle, people were willing to debate the issues and listen
politely to the opposition. It appears that this willingness has disappeared,
just as that generation of Depression babies and WWII soldiers have largely
disappeared.

Younger generations raised during the passionate us-versus-them demonstrations
of the 1960s, the "me generation" 1970s, and the self-absorbed materialism of
the 1980s-90s, do not have that kind of training and orientation. Furthermore,
their teachers largely have a left/liberal orientation (something like 80-90%
of K-12 teachers in the U.S. are Democrats, and similarly the professors on
college campuses).

I really miss the days when you could actually sit down and debate the issues
with someone, over a beer. It seems that today, people are loathe to even
bring up politics unless they know they're among likeminded company and then
it's like an echo chamber.

~~~
hackuser
AEI does have very well-credentialed members and prestige, but if you look at
their history they are still partisan hacks, providing intellectual
justification for dangerous partisan nonsense. I used to try to be even-handed
and give people like them equal credit, but it was a false equivalency and
they are parasites on that open-mindednes. There are reasonable conservative
ideas, some of which I support, but climate change denial, torture, the Iraq
invasion, absolute refusal to increase any taxes rates, default on the US
debt, and many others are absurd and outside the pale (I don't know AEI
supports all of those). It's time we started calling it what it is; the damage
is too serious. (There are partisan left-wing think tanks, though not as many
AFACIT, and I think they are equally absurd.)

> There were of course the very right wing bigoted "John Birchers"

The backers of the modern Tea Party are John Birchers by a new name. The
policies are similar and the Koch brothers' father, for example, was either a
John Birch Society founder or at least a leader (IIRC; I don't have time to
check the details, sorry).

> But in the middle, people were willing to debate the issues and listen
> politely to the opposition. It appears that this willingness has disappeared

It is the right wing fringe that has created this situation, and it's still
mostly a problem of the right. There is no influential left-wing equivalent of
Fox' propaganda, by far the leading cable news channel, the Wall St Journal
editorial page (the NY Times isn't nearly as partisan), or of right-wing talk
radio (Limbaugh, etc.). For example, the Tea Partiers in Congress refuse to
respect that their fellow citizens should have a say in the nation's laws and
oppose everything that doesn't go exactly their way. They literally try to do
serious damage to their own nation's government and economy to get their way.
There is no equivalent on the left. Democrats and the few remaining moderate
Republicans (not voted out by Tea Partiers) are willing to make deals.

It hasn't always been a problem primarily of the right; the radical left was
ascendent and probably equally problematic a few decades ago. But it's a
dangerous delusion to overlook the problem on the right now.

The real division needs to be between moderates and radical idealogues, who
will sacrifice the rest of us to their dogmas. The idealogues of 2015 are
mostly on the right.

------
cafebeen
While I agree with the general sentiment, the article makes a pretty poor
argument. One one hand, they cite research saying that gender and racial
diversity can improve performance and creativity, and then they go on to talk
about the lack of political diversity. If want you want is a diversity of
ideas (and political views are only ideas, gender and race are not), then
academia is full of competing thoughts about nearly every topic. I surely
wouldn't want to force a biology department to hire people who deny that
evolution occurs...

------
DanielBMarkham
It's a shame these comments went so far off the rails. The most important
diversity is in life experience and problem-solving skills. If your idea of
diversity is something that's only skin deep, you deserve what you get.

However most voters do not deserve the public education system they are paying
for. They're expecting a reasonable, open-minded discussion of ideas. What
they're getting is evidenced by the comments here. We're starting to see kids
leave academia with 5 and 6-figure college debts with no discernible job
skills, no ability to discuss political matters without resort to either
threats or stereotypes, and no experience dealing with intellectuals with
widely divergent life experiences and problem-solving methods. That's a total
and complete fail.

------
thefastlane
this article reminds me of when creationists say "teach the controversy!"

~~~
burnte
First thing in my mind was "reality has a well known liberal bias."

------
chiefmongoose
It is not surprising that a field driven by government funding lacks
ideological conservatives.

------
revelation
What a bizarre line of thinking. A 50/50 split in reasoning isn't "diversity",
it's "uncertainty". It is the absence of knowledge. If a researchers
"ideology" related to their field wasn't moving in line with results, we would
rightly call them biased.

~~~
ch4s3
That isn't what the article is saying. It argues that the lack of ideological
diversity in social sciences leads to less scrutiny of conventional wisdom.
Which it claims is partially responsible for the field's trouble reproducing
the results of published research.

[edit] I'm just paraphrasing the argument of the article, which I don't
necessarily agree with.

~~~
_delirium
> As such, the field seems to have trouble reproducing the results of
> published research.

I'm skeptical that ideological diversity or lack thereof is at the root of
this, since you see it in a lot of "soft science" disciplines of varying
political inclinations. Political science, psychology, and economics have
fairly different distributions of political viewpoints, and yet none of those
fields has a strong track record of reproducibility.

~~~
oldmanjay
If the views are diverse when viewed across all disciplines but a monoculture
inside, then you've made an argument in favor of the position you're against.

~~~
_delirium
They aren't really a monoculture inside, though. Economics, for example, is
pretty politically diverse, with economists ranging from socialist to
libertarian in their political preferences, and yet still can't reproduce
much.

------
PaulHoule
The problem with retaining conservatives in academia is that they can make too
much money from super pacs, crazy billionaires, telecom companies that want
you to pay a lot for crappy DSL, etc.

~~~
blisterpeanuts
I'd love to hear the rest of the list, signified by the "etc." :)

------
stupidcar
There is a big difference between homogenous, but mostly uncoordinated and
unconscious biases held by liberal academics, and the conscious, coordinated
and incredibly aggressive campaign by conservative politicians, business
interests, activists and academics to attack and discredit any theory or
research that conflicts with their world-view.

If some innocent conservative academics are facing blowback for being
associated with the wrecking tactics of their ideological peers, I'd say it's
the least of our problems. The risk that we might literally wind up destroying
our civilisation due to the malfeasance of the right weight more heavily on my
mind than that some conservative academics struggle to get tenure. If
anything, attempting the resolve the latter problem will only exacerbate the
first, by helping legitimising the garbage research that conservative
academics are paid to produce.

~~~
oldmanjay
That you think the only threat to civilization comes from the right shows a
bit of bias all on its own. That you can say this in the same paragraph where
you essentially condone censuring people for holding views you find
unconvincing is just icing on that nasty little cake.

~~~
nemo
"That you think the only threat to civilization comes from the right"

That's not what they said nor is it implied.

~~~
oldmanjay
It was directly said that conservatives threaten civilization. I'll admit the
"only" was my insertion. The implications of the rest of the comment are clear
and I'll stand by my interpretation.

