According to its critics
Steven Pinker on Trump v Harvard:
In my 22 years as a Harvard professor, I have not been afraid to bite the hand that feeds me. My 2014 essay “The Trouble With Harvard” called for a transparent, meritocratic admissions policy to replace the current “eye-of-newt-wing-of-bat mysticism” which “conceals unknown mischief.” My 2023 “five-point plan to save Harvard from itself” urged the university to commit itself to free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity and disempowering D.E.I. Last fall, on the anniversary of Oct. 7, 2023, I explained “how I wish Harvard taught students to talk about Israel,” calling on the university to teach our students to grapple with moral and historical complexity. Two years ago I co-founded the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, which has since regularly challenged university policies and pressed for changes.
In short, he’s a stone in Harvard’s shoe, but that’s not the same thing as being the mashed potatoes-throwing toddler at Harvard’s dinner table.
So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”
And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”
This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just moved to stop Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as 15-fold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status.
And we all know why. It’s because Harvard is the top of the tree and Trump did not go there.
Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions. In 2021 the biologist Carole Hooven was demonized and ostracized, effectively driving her out of Harvard, for explaining in an interview how biology defines male and female. Her cancellation was the last straw that led us to create the academic freedom council, but it was neither the first nor the last.
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How to achieve an optimal diversity of viewpoints in a university is a difficult problem and an obsession of our council. Of course, not every viewpoint should be represented. The universe of ideas is infinite, and many of them are not worthy of serious attention, such as astrology, flat earthism, and Holocaust denial. The demand of the Trump administration to audit Harvard’s programs for diversity and jawbone a “critical mass” of government-approved contrarians into the noncompliant ones would be poisonous both to the university and to democracy. The biology department could be forced to hire creationists, the medical school vaccine skeptics and the history department denialists of the 2020 election. Harvard had no choice but to reject the ultimatum, becoming an unlikely folk hero in the process.
Still, universities cannot continue to ignore the problem. Though obsessed with implicit racism and sexism, they have been insensitive to the most powerful cognitive distorter of all, the “myside bias” that makes all of us credulous about the cherished beliefs of ourselves or our political or cultural coalitions. Universities should set the expectation that faculty members leave their politics at the classroom door, and affirm the rationalist virtues of epistemic humility and active open-mindedness. To these ends, a bit of D.E.I. for conservatives would not hurt. As the economist Joan Robinson put it, “Ideology is like breath: You never smell your own.”
What is Trump’s ideology? Trump. That’s it: that’s the ideology.
Pinker has never been one to pull his punches. I have disagreed with him, I have agreed with him, but I have always respected him.
I don’t know about ‘DEI for conservatives’, though. That strikes me as just creating the same problem in reverse. If we hire by merit, and there are no conservatives in the college, that could mean something. But I can’t believe there aren’t any. Every university I have attended has had a large number of conservatives…the business and economics departments are usually chock-full of them. History departments may be predominantly liberal, but there is always at least one conservative who counters the liberals.
And the conservatives are no better in terms of pushing ideology…maybe worse. When I got my degree in political science, the one conservative in the department required students to demonstrate they were registered to vote – if they were registered Democrat, he failed them. (I avoided his classes like the plague.) The liberal professors had no such policy. They didn’t ask what you believed, or how you were registered, and they kept their political positions to themselves, though it was possible to figure out in a lot of cases which side they were on. Of course, this was long before ‘woke’ campus culture. This was during the 70s.
It has long been a truism that there are few or no conservatives in the Liberal Arts departments of universities. This has been taken as a bias in hiring, but I suspect the bias is as much in availability as anything else. Conservatives tend to veer away from things like Sociology and Psychology, and even the hard sciences in many cases. Why? Because the programs tend to be more poorly paid, and a lot of them are much less prestigious (at least to some) than the business and economics programs. It isn’t a bias in hiring. It isn’t a bias in teaching. It is simply a self-selection based on a differing value system.
Next time they decide to figure out the political leanings of a university, maybe they should move outside the liberal arts department. Check out business…
The roots of the GOP becoming what it is today and its enabling of Trump can be found in US Universities. It can be traced back to the economic voodoo of Milton Friedman and his Chicago School, its attacks undermined democracy, freedom, and economic prosperity in great swathes of Central and South America before being inflicted on the USA and its sphere of influence.
Jobs were lost, communities were destroyed, and public services were underfunded and unable to cope. Those who fell victim to the “New World Order” of economics before everything felt disempowered and sought someone to blame. The people making $500.00 an hour convinced the people making $20 an hour that it was all the fault of the people making $5 an hour, the (mostly) immigrants who were “stealing our jobs” and sucking up government schools.
And along came Trump …
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What is it about the American system that requires people to declare party allegiance when they register to vote?
I didn’t know it did. Found this:
That’s not what you asked, though. I don’t know the answer to what you did ask.
It is not the case that US states require registration with a party. Alabama and several other states do not have any mechanism at all to register with a party affiliation. Many (possibly all?) other states allow you to declare as “unenrolled”, not affiliated with any party.
(Alabama primaries allow you to choose whichever ballot you want, which locks you into that party if there is a primary runoff; you can’t vote Dem in the primary and then vote in the GOP primary runoff, for instance. Dishonest politicians try to give the impression that the runoff rule means that voting in the GOP primary means you have to vote for the GOP candidates in the general election, which is of course not the case.)
Virginia works like Alabama. And in any case, I don’t know of any other country that has a system similar to the US primary system for choosing party candidates. In most countries it’s the party members who choose the candidates (which was pretty much true in the US until the last 50 or so years).
And the primary system is part of the problem in the US—we’d probably be better off with a less (superficially) democratic method of choosing party candidates.
Thanks for the above. I am always confused when I read things like “Registered Democrat/Republican”, sort of like I register a car or a gun, so there is a legal paper trail to hold me accountable for misuse.
Rev, you have to register to vote, but you don’t have to register in a party. Independent is a choice you can make.
iknklast @8 re “Independent”:
In Massachusetts a while back, there was a political party called the Independent Voters Party. There was an issue where there was confusion whether people registering “Independent” were affiliating with them or with no party, the official term for that being “unenrolled”. I believe the same confusion occurred somewhere else. I think the state should not have allowed a party of that name, but that’s what happened.
WaM @6: hearty agreement here. I think primaries are terrible.