How to read it when mass secular leftist movements no longer propel dreams of social justice?
Author: Ophelia Benson
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In the Internet Age We Are All at Harvard for Life
Public pressure is powerful, but not necessarily useful.
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What Were Einstein and Gödel Talking About?
‘There can never be surprises in logic,’ but Gödel’s incompleteness theorems were a surprise.
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An Abstract and a Party
And a little humour. Philip Stott tells us about a seminal new paper on climate change.
Abstract: the much-studied ‘Forest Period’ (Fp) persisted in southern England for only the briefest of geological time, being conservatively-dated to between October 14th, 1926 and October 11th, 1928, although some scholars argue that ‘Forest’ remnants may have survived on, and around, tumuli, or small mounds [see: Margot Mythenmaker, 1958. “The utopia of ‘enchanted places’ revisited.” The Panenic Review, Vol. 56(2), [1958] 1959, pp. 3-9]…
Despite the undoubted geological brevity of the ‘Forest Period’, Kaninchen postulates that it is possible to recognise no fewer than seven (7) different climatic phases (Phases FpI to FpVII) for the ‘Forest Period’ (Fp):
(a) Phase FpI: a cool-temperate phase, when the forest was characterised by bears, small pigs (Porcellus spp.), rabbits (Leporus spp.), and donkeys, and, possibly, by the now extinct, Vusillus spp. During this phase, the weather was breezy and balmy in summer, but noted for light snow falls during the winter months, when Vusillus hunting was a major occupation;
Read on.
And then there was that party at PZ Myers’ house a couple of weeks ago. I wish I’d been there.
At academic parties, one of the common things to do is to check out the books lying around (you don’t have to tell me, I know we’re nerds), and I’d happened to have The Dictionary of Fashionable Nonsense: A Guide for Edgy People out on the coffee table. Groups of people who ended up sitting on the sofa for a while would find it, chortle over it, and pass it around.
And then, I blush to say, they would find the definition for ‘scientist,’ read it, and leap to the conclusion that it had something to do with the host.
See? Now how could anyone read that at a party at my house and not break into peals of loud and knowing laughter?
So anyway. It’s good fun to make some people you don’t know break into peals of loud and knowing laughter at a party. All the more when they’re in Minnesota.
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With But a Single Thought
And speaking of self-fulfilling prophecies…We were speaking of them the other day in High Tension and ever since I keep bumping into them. You know how that goes, when you mention something or learn a new word and immediately afterward it’s everywhere. It’s been happening to me with that word ‘quotidian’ which I was told is a very rare, peculiar word – I keep hearing and reading it. It doesn’t seem to be all that rare. And self-fulfilling prophecy is everywhere too. There was that Robert Frank article in the NY Times a few days ago (which unfortunately has now gone into the archive and which the link generator never generated a link for, so I can’t quote from it), pointing out that first-year economics students are substantially more likely to believe that people (including economics students) are self-interested than non-economics students are. Actually ‘non-economics students’ is a hand-wave, because I don’t remember who the comparison group was. Than Xs are, it should have said. At any rate, the article was interesting, and persuasive. Many economists do seem to think that way, which makes their writing often a combination of the revelatory and the absurd. One minute one is thinking ‘Oh of course, that’s how that works,’ and the next one is thinking ‘Oh come on, that’s just not the only thing that motivates everyone!’ I’ve had that reaction in reading Frank himself, in fact. The Winner-Take-All Society and Luxury Fever. They’re very explanatory and stimulating, but they also keep leaving out huge aspects of the question, by assuming that everyone wants ‘success’ in the sense of Mo Money. But people want other things too, and sometimes even instead.
And Todd Gitlin talks about it in his Mother Jones article on David Horowitz’s campaign to get state legislatures to bean-count university faculties and their reading lists.
Academics do flock together and sometimes abuse their power. The even more intractable problem is that conformity, both the faculty’s and the students’, is self-fulfilling, lending itself to the enshrinement of the smug, the snug, and the narrow. Much of the muffling, as always, is the product of peer pressure, which is as real at liberal arts colleges as at military academies. When fundamentals go unquestioned and dissenters are intimidated, those who prevail get lazier and dumber.
Yup. But then – as Gitlin goes on to say, the answer is not to get The State (that is, the local real estate agents moonlighting as legislators) to fix the problem. The answer is to question fundamentals yourself. Not call the cops to ask fundamental questions for you, just shrug your shoulders, eat a handful of nuts or arugula for endurance, take a deep breath, and get in there and disagree with someone. Quit whining; show some backbone.
How deep is the silence? Hard to know. Much cited in conservative columns is a 2002 survey by the student newspaper at Wesleyan University, according to which a full 32 percent of the students felt “uncomfortable speaking their opinion” on the famously liberal campus. Whatever that means exactly, the pop-psych language is telling. Since when is higher education supposed to make you feel comfortable, anyway? In a largely unexamined triumph of marketplace values, college has come to be seen as a consumable product…What follows is grade inflation, epidemic cheating, scorn for a common curriculum, and an all-around supermarket attitude. Consumer choice—embrace whatever turns you on, avoid whatever turns you off—is elevated to a matter of high principle.
Exactly. It’s the ‘comfortable’ thing again. See Dictionary. You’re not supposed to feel comfortable! Plenty of time for that once you’re dead. While you’re alive you’re supposed to feel awake, alert, challenged, on the stretch.
And then there was this article about Summers and research on gender differences – which brings us around in a circle, because that was the subject of the ‘High Tension’ post. So we’re talking about the same thing here. Here:
There is a lot of tension in all this – because there are some rational, non-ostrich-like, non-fingers-in-ears, non-You Can’t Say That reasons for worry about, for instance, saying that a particular identifiable set of people may have, in however small a statistical sense, less of a given ability than another set or sets. One such reason is the self-fulfilling prophesy. The worry is that if you tell people – especially and all the more so if you tell them officially academically scientifically studies have shownically – that they are, or they belong to a group or subset of the population that is, statistically, however slightly and tail end effectly, innately less good at X, there is very often a strong tendency for the people in question to give up on X as a result. To relax their efforts, to decide it’s hopeless, to give themselves permission not to bang their heads against a wall.
And in the article:
Aronson and his colleagues have shown that many of the performance differences between men and women, and also between different races, can be erased with minor adjustments that influence test takers’ confidence. Tell a group of girls before a math exam that the test does not detect gender differences in mathematical ability and their scores increase. Tell white men before a similar exam that their scores are going to be compared to those of Asians and their scores drop simply because they think they won’t measure up. “This suggests there’s something about the testing situation itself,” Aronson says. “If there is a biological difference, then it’s one that’s awfully easy to overcome.”
Self-fulfilling prophecy is both interesting in itself, and a difficult problem for questions about policy, research, and the like. It’s not as if everyone can just shut up about everything because of the self-fulfilling propecy issue. But there may be times when everyone should. Just before math class, for instance.
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Peter Benenson 1921-2005
His 1961 newspaper article ‘The Forgotten Prisoners’ changed the world for the better.
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Amnesty International on Peter Benenson
‘In 2005 his legacy is a world wide movement for human rights which will never die.’
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More From Amnesty International on its Founder
Spanish orphans and trade unionists, German Jews, Greek Cypriots, Portuguese political prisoners…
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Gender, Brains, Expectations, Numbers
Studies show brain differences, also that beliefs affect test performance.
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Watch Out! Stop Eating! Throw Up!
Everything is dangerous, everything is toxic, there is no safe level, we’re all doomed.
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Richard Dawkins on the Giant Tortoise’s Tale
Islands provide the barrier to sexual intermingling that evolution needs.
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A C Grayling Reviews Fuller on Popper and Kuhn
Popper’s promotion of critical spirit of scientific enquiry preferable to Kuhn’s incommensurability.
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Did Larry Summers Have a Cunning Plan?
If not, he wasn’t doing his job and doesn’t know what it is, Stanley Fish says.
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Scott McLemee Goes to Derrida Conference
Where Jack Balkin suggests that Bush has hoisted Derrida by his own aporias.
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Dynamic Behind Campus Free-speech Fights
Parochial argument turned into national banquet for right-wingers hungry for culture enemies.
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Bush Admin Science Advisor Gets One Thing Right
John Marburger stated point blank, ‘Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory.’
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Todd Gitlin on Permission to Speak Freely
Conformity is self-fulfilling, lending itself to enshrinement of the smug and the narrow.
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Beliefs Should Precede ‘Positioning’
Michael Tomasky: Democrats just don’t talk about fundamental ideas enough.
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‘More Than a Stretch’
The first casualty of David Horowitz’s effort to impose ideological “diversity” on American campuses has been the truth. Horowitz initially supported his proposal for an Academic Bill of Rights (ABOR) with “independent” studies pointing to a vast predominance of “leftists” on American campuses. As I pointed out last September, neither of the studies in question seems to be independent of Horowitz’s own Center for the Study of Popular Culture. (Nor does the help of the notoriously mendacious Frank Luntz serve as any guarantee of credibility.) In a subsequent exchange with me, Horowitz underwent breathtaking contortions in an effort to back out of bogus claims he had made in support of his ABOR campaign. For instance, in order to deny that he had repeatedly called for the institution of ideological “balance” on American campuses, Horowitz disclaimed all responsibility for a letter written in the first person, bearing his name and a photograph of his signature, and published in his own FrontPage Magazine. I responded with a reflection on “Academic vs. Horowitzian Truth Standards.”
Despite the clear widening of his credibility gap, Horowitz has continued to propagate lies about the academy and the ABOR. Just last week, in an article posted on his Students for Academic Freedom website without comment, Horowitz is quoted as saying that university professors are a privileged elite who work between six to nine hours a week, eight months a year for an annual salary of about $150,000. As anyone with even a passing knowledge of actual university life would know, this is a ‘fact’ that even Frank Luntz would have trouble substantiating.
Let’s consider a second claim in greater depth. In “A Campaign of Lies” (a recent fulmination against the AAUP and the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations) Horowitz states that
[w]hen I drafted the Academic Bill of Rights — and before I published it — I took pains to vet the text with three leftwing academics — Stanley Fish, Todd Gitlin and Michael Berube — and with Eugene Volokh, a libertarian law professor at UCLA, who is one of the nation’s leading experts on First Amendment law. Anything in the original draft of the Academic Bill of Rights that so much as irritated these gentlemen I removed.
This case for a solid academic fan base is audacious even by Horowitzian standards. Could it be true that four genuine intellectuals — leading American scholars with nuanced and varied political views — are actually in favor of the ABOR’s radical diversity agenda? To get to the truth of the matter, I sent all four professors Horowitz’s claim, and simply asked whether they were indeed satisfied with the ABOR as it stands. All four graciously replied. While Volokh declined to comment on his advice to Horowitz, Fish, Gitlin and Bérubé provided me with detailed responses.
Stanley Fish — an authority in both rhetoric and legal studies, famous for his contention that politics and academics don’t mix — responded by directing me to his year-old essay “Intellectual Diversity,” noting that it displays “the extent of both my agreement and disagreement” with the final ABOR. In this essay Fish tries to give Horowitz the benefit of the doubt, yet he determines that the ABOR’s plea for “intellectual diversity” is “the Trojan horse of a dark design.” According to Fish, “it is precisely because the pursuit of truth is the cardinal value of the academy that the value (if it is one) of intellectual diversity should be rejected.” Pointing to the dangers of two recent calls for “intellectual diversity,” Fish concludes that
these are not examples of a good idea taken too far, but of a bad idea taken in the only direction — a political direction — it is capable of going. As a genuine academic value, intellectual diversity is a nonstarter. As an imposed imperative, it is a disaster.
The responses from Todd Gitlin and Michael Bérubé are reprinted below. I leave it to the reader to determine whether the members of Horowitz’s supposed support group are indeed behind the ABOR, and to consider the source of the real “campaign of lies” surrounding the bill.
Graham Larkin
Stanford University, Department of Art & Art History
CA-AAUP VP for Private Colleges and UniversitiesADDENDUM: Todd Gitlin and Michael Bérubé respond to David Horowitz’s claim that that he removed “anything in the original draft of the Academic Bill of Rights that so much as irritated [them].”
Todd Gitlin
(from an e-mail to Graham Larkin, dated February 15 2005)
In September 2003, David Horowitz sent me a draft of his Academic Bill. I objected explicitly to a provision that would have required the taping of hiring and tenure meetings for faculty, for scrutiny by university boards and others. We went around about the dangers of such surveillance and in the end he said he would remove that provision. To say that he removed “anything….that so much irritated” this particular gentleman, however, would be excessive. In fact, we did not correspond about the concept that state legislatures or other trans-university bodies should sit in executive or quasi-judiciary authority over faculty bodies charged with defending the academic freedom of students and faculty. I did, and do, object to interventions by such higher authorities, as is envisioned in his current campaigns directed at state legislatures. But the issue didn’t come up in our correspondence. So far as I understood matters then, it was Horowitz’s intention to campaign for university resolutions, not legislative interventions.
By the way, you might be interested in a piece I have on the current Academic Bill campaign forthcoming in the March/April issue of Mother Jones.Michael Bérubé
(from an e-mail to Graham Larkin, dated February 15 2005)
I told David that the taping of hiring and tenure meetings was at once intrusive and counterproductive — that is, it would have the effect of making sure that no one said an honest word in those meetings, and conducting the real business of hiring/tenure committees in bars and bathrooms instead. Then David suggested that every candidate rejected for a job should be informed of the basis for the decision in writing, and I replied that David clearly hadn’t been serving on any hiring committees recently — otherwise he’d know how impossible it is to send personalized rejection letters to 500 or 1000 job applicants. So yes, David abandoned those two suggestions.
But it’s more than a stretch for David to suggest now that I endorsed the final ABOR. In fact, I rather pointedly declined to sign it, as David asked me to, precisely because it would lead to all manner of absurd conclusions, under the seemingly benign banner of “diversity.” We should ask David if he really wants, for example, the al-Qaeda perspective on the Middle East more widely taught in American universities, because right now it is severely underrepresented. Brian Leiter put it best, I think:The real difficulty, of course, is that if you create rights, you also have to have remedies. And at some point even the genuinely dumb conservatives will notice that the Horowitz proposal will create causes of action for Marxist economists who can’t be hired by economics departments, for postmodernists who can’t get hired by philosophy departments, and on and on. And what is to stop Intelligent Design creationists from suing biology departments that won’t hire them? Or alchemists from suing Chemistry departments? You get the idea.
And, of course, I object to “diversity” in academic departments and subjects being mandated by state legislators. Note that Ohio’s bill, introduced by State Senator Larry Mumper, prohibits instructors from “persistently” discussing controversial subjects. His examples of controversial subjects? “Religion and politics.” So that’s what Republican state senators want in Ohio — universities devoted solely to sports and weather.
To join the fight against the Academic Bill of Rights, get involved with the AAUP, tireless defenders of academic freedom since 1915.
©2005 CA-AAUP
This article was first published on the California AAUP website and is republished here by permission.