Why are so few professors troublemakers?

I wrestled with the title. I thought about “Why are professors so nice?”, but it felt too self-congratulatory and didn’t capture the critical tone I was looking for. “Why are professors so timid?” was tempting, but it was too mean, and I didn’t want to be mean.

Before spelling out the question I’m interested in, I’ll say this: I really like professors. I’m a professor, my wife is a professor, and most of my friends are professors. I heard about a retirement community in Arizona that’s just for professors, and if I ever end up in a retirement community, that’s where I want to go.

It’s not just that professors are my people; I think there are objectively good things about us. We tend to be pretty smart. We are sometimes socially inept, but in a sweet way. We are genuinely excited about ideas—professors spend a lot of time thinking about questions such as the origin of the universe, the nature of truth, the evolution of species, and whether Shakespeare discovered the unconscious. We are often generous. For instance, many professors spend a lot of time mentoring students in ways that aren’t requirements of the job and don’t lead to any tangible reward. And we are a peaceable lot. If you’re sitting at a bar, minding your own business, and some drunk takes a swing at you, the drunk is unlikely to be a professor.

But I don’t think we are very brave. We don’t tend to be troublemakers. I’m not denying that many of us say and write things that upset the public. Professors make bold and shocking claims—there is no immaterial soul; there are many genders; Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet; empathy makes the world worse¹; and so on. Philosophers are particularly provocative in this regard. I’ve heard them argue that babies don’t feel pain, that dogs and chairs don’t exist (because the only things that really exist are elementary particles), that atoms are conscious, and that life is terrible and we’d all be better off dead. Bold stuff!

But this boldness has its limits. It doesn’t typically extend to interactions with our colleagues. We want them to like us, and so we work to avoid their disapproval. We don’t want to make trouble.

I started thinking about this when I read the reactions to this recent paper.

Cory Clark and her co-authors first interviewed 41 professors (including me) to get a list of taboo topics in psychology, and then did a more quantitative survey of 470 other professors, asking questions about self-censorship. Here’s their summary of what they found.

Professors strongly disagreed on the truth status of 10 candidate taboo conclusions: For each conclusion, some professors reported 100% certainty in its veracity and others 100% certainty in its falsehood. Professors more confident in the truth of the taboo conclusions reported more self-censorship, … Almost all professors worried about social sanctions if they were to express their own empirical beliefs. Tenured professors reported as much self-censorship and as much fear of consequences as untenured professors, including fear of getting fired.

(What are the 10 taboo statements? Check the footnote.²)

When this paper came out, it got a lot of play on social media, and many people asked: Why are professors such cowards? Why are even tenured professors, people with the most secure jobs on Earth, so unwilling to speak their minds?

There is a story from Scott Alexander (sorry, I can’t remember the exact source) that nicely sums up how professors think. He tells of a professor who signs a political statement in his department that he plainly disagrees with. When asked why he signed, he says,

Because everybody else did.

Then he’s asked why he thinks everybody else signed, and he says:

Same reason.

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Noam Chomsky is one of the great trouble-makers in academia, and he has wondered why his colleagues aren’t more like him. He blames schooling. To become an academic, you have to do very well in high school and university, and this selects for a certain sort of submissiveness.

In fact, the whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent … and who don’t know how to be submissive.

Well, that’s pretty much what the schools are like … they reward discipline and obedience, and they punish independence of mind. … Most of the people who make it through the education system and get into the elite universities are able to do it because they’ve been willing to obey a lot of stupid orders for years and years.

(Both quotes are from a collection of talks called Understanding Power.)

Put crudely, if you are the sort to say fuck you to your professors, refuse to do assignments that you see as stupid, or even push back in milder ways, you’re not going to get perfect grades and glowing recommendations. And so you are not likely to get into a top graduate program, which means you’re not likely to end up in academia.³

Is it the case that only docile people make it through the educational system with nothing but gold stars? Or does the educational system influence the personality of certain people, making them docile? Maybe both? Nature and nurture, baby!