[This is a mildly edited version of a post that was initially sent out to paid subscribers only.]
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 specifically for professors, and if I ever end up in a retirement community, that’s where I'd like 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 rewards. 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 was released, 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 clearly disagrees with. When Scott asks why he signed, he says,
Because I was worried that everybody else would sign.
Then he asks the professor why he thinks everybody else would sign, and the professor says:
Same reason.
Noam Chomsky is one of the great troublemakers 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’re unlikely 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!
Chomsky might be right. But students who wish to pursue non-academic pursuits such as medicine and law also benefit from a spotless academic record. If academics are more docile than doctors and lawyers, then we need to look elsewhere for an explanation.
The explanation I like better has to do with the nature of academia and the importance of not pissing people off.
Let me tell you about a search committee I was once on. We were looking at senior candidates, and someone’s name came up—a person of considerable accomplishment. And then a member of the committee said something like, “I hear she’s difficult. Not really a good colleague.” And we all moved to the next person, because we had a lot of names, so why waste our time on someone that we weren’t all enthusiastic about?
If you’re a colleague of mine at any of the universities I’ve ever worked at, you might think that you remember that meeting. You probably do, because this has happened in every senior search committee meeting I’ve ever been in. Sooner or later, we end up talking about how likable the candidates are—to put it in more professional terms, about what sorts of colleagues they are—and, sooner or later, someone will express their concern that one of the candidates wouldn’t be a good personal fit with our department, and they’re dropped from consideration.
This sort of negative screening is less likely to happen for junior searches, where we’re looking at graduate students and postdocs, because such candidates aren’t as well known. Here, the cues to collegiality come mainly from the letters; it’s a rare letter that doesn’t talk about how nice the candidate is, about their warmth, generosity, and so on. Young people are more vulnerable to negative screening when they come up for tenure, because by then, they are better known.
The point here is not just that it’s good to be liked. I’m sure that helps, but I’ve seen people secure great jobs due to their accomplishments as scholars and scientists, even if they weren’t especially popular. Instead, the point is that it’s bad to be disliked—even by a small proportion of people. If 90% of the field adores you and 10% will describe you as “difficult”, you're likely screwed, career-wise.
What does this have to do with bravery, troublemaking, and self-censorship? Well, some academics really don’t like people who don’t share their political and moral views. And so the pressure not to be disliked translates into pressure to self-censor.
The negative effects of having unconventional views aren’t limited to search committees. A 2012 study of about 800 social psychologists found that conservatives (about 6% of the sample) fear the negative consequences of revealing their political beliefs to their colleagues, and so they shut up about them. They are right to do so. The same study finds that many of these non-conservative colleagues, particularly the more liberal ones, tended to agree that if they encountered a grant or paper with “a politically conservative perspective”, it would negatively influence their decision to award the grant or accept the paper for publication. They also tended to agree that if they had to choose between a conservative candidate and a liberal candidate, they would select the liberal one. And it gets worse:
At the end of our surveys, we gave room for comments. Many respondents wrote that they could not believe that anyone in the field would ever deliberately discriminate against conservatives. Yet at the same time, we found clear examples of discrimination. One participant described how a colleague was denied tenure because of his political beliefs. Another wrote that if the department “could figure out who was a conservative, they would be sure not to hire them.”
The focus of their study was the effect of having conservative views, but I’ll add that there are non-conservative views that can get you into trouble as well. It does not help your career, for instance, to be seen as strongly anti-Israel. (See here for a case where a professor was, allegedly, denied tenure for his pro-Palestinian views and activities.)
In the taboo paper, Clark and her colleagues report that while most professors are upset at the censorious nature of their colleagues, a minority believe that a proper response to someone who expresses a taboo view is:
ostracism, public labeling with pejorative terms, talk disinvitations, refusing to publish work regardless of its merits, not hiring or promoting even if typical standards are met, terminations, social-media shaming, and removal from leadership positions.
Given this censorious minority, the reasonable response is risk-aversion. Don’t say anything that will piss off these colleagues—and that includes not making statements that they find politically or morally unacceptable. If you’re not careful in this way, you run the risk of not being hired, not getting tenured, and having your career damaged in all sorts of other ways.
I talked about this with a couple of friends4, and they raised the issue of exceptions. There are professors in our field who are troublemakers, who pick fights with their colleagues over ideological issues, and who are known for their heterodox views.
These exceptional people fall into different categories.
They got jobs and tenure before they got controversial. It’s now difficult or impossible for them to move, but they made it in under the wire.
They aren’t in traditional Arts and Sciences departments, such as Psychology, but instead are professors in other parts of the university, like business schools and law schools, where there is more tolerance for troublemakers.
They are geniuses. Chomsky is the best example here. Putting aside his political writings and activities, which landed him in jail more than once (how’s that for troublemaking?), he has made enormous contributions to linguistics and cognitive science. In my view, he’s the most important intellectual alive. He is also highly polarizing, worshipped by many in academia and hated by many others. So, I don’t know—maybe the rules change if you’re as smart as Chomsky?
These categories may overlap. Chomsky became an Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics at MIT in 1957; he retired from his faculty position in 2002. Could he have left MIT for another top university if he wanted to? This might seem like a dumb question—for much of his career, he was one of the most cited scholars alive5, and I know that many faculty members at other top universities would have killed to have him in their departments. But I do wonder if his many haters among faculty and administrators would have prevented any offer from being made.
Should more professors be troublemakers?
The answer is not an obvious yes. There is value in agreeableness, after all. Nothing gets done when people are constantly fighting. Research teams, in particular, benefit from a sense of shared mission, and there is a downside to intellectual diversity, particularly when everyone is highly vocal about their contrasting perspectives. It would be amazing to have a Chomsky in my department; I’m not sure how we’d fare if we had two or more.6
I also believe that self-censorship is sometimes a good thing. If I had a colleague who was in favor of slavery or wanted to exterminate the Jews or thought women should not be permitted to work, I would hope that he or she would have the good sense to refrain from expressing these views. Some believe that certain topics that academics actually think about fall into this category. This article, for instance, argues that the harm that ensues when certain scholars debate trans issues is so severe that it outweighs any intellectual benefit that their views might have. I disagree, but it’s a concern worth taking seriously.
Still, I believe that academics err in the direction of being too censorious and too self-censoring. The taboo topics in my field (see footnote 2) aren’t at all like “slavery is good”, and would benefit from more open debate.
Some think otherwise. When the taboo paper was released, one prominent scholar was disgusted by its implication that there is something inherently wrong with self-censorship. She wrote a post on Twitter suggesting that if you give people the freedom to discuss these dumbass ideas, it would lead to, um, mass murder.
I assume the particular taboo statement she was talking about is this one, as it’s the only statement that’s about sex differences and evolution:
Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.
Now, first, note that this is not exactly the same as “women are ruining science with the rubbish brains evolution gave us.”
And second, while I do agree that mass murder is worse than self-censorship (I’m more of a utilitarian than a free speech absolutist), I don’t see this as a fair description of the choice that academics face.
Just by the way, I’m surprised that this statement ended up on the list. My view is that, yes, some sex differences are due to evolution, particularly those that involve sexual preferences, nurturance, and aggression. Others disagree. Are certain views on this issue really taboo? If so, they shouldn't be. I think I’m right (of course), but I don’t want to win the scientific debate because my opponents are afraid to express their views, just as I assume they don’t want to win because I’m afraid to express mine.
I really don’t know if professors are more timid than real estate agents, accountants, nurses, and so on. If I’m right, our timidity arises from a fact about our profession—the career cost of offending even a small proportion of the people who are in power. But maybe this may also be true for other jobs. If so, it’s a more general problem. Something is lost if real estate agents, say, feel that they will be punished if they express their views on Israel-Gaza.
But it matters even more when it comes to professors. We are in the truth business, after all. The freedom to explore offensive ideas is so central to our profession that we have been given the protection of tenure—we can’t be fired, no matter what we say and who we piss off. It’s a great loss if we squander this opportunity and privilege.
Some will say the solution here is obvious: Professors should be braver. They should speak their minds regardless of the costs of doing so.
My solution is different. I think other professors should stop imposing these costs. We should be more generous toward those with whom we disagree, more receptive to the possibility that they are right, and, most relevant to the issue here, we should break the habit of punishing them.
I’ve discussed this issue before in another context (Progressives should worry more about their favorite scientific findings), and I ended by admitting that I didn’t know how to fix the culture. I still don’t, so I’ll close with a sad little joke.
—How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
—Just one. But the light bulb must want to change.
Here they are. Perhaps not surprisingly, almost all of them have to do with sex or race.
“The tendency to engage in sexually coercive behavior likely evolved because it conferred some evolutionary advantages on men who engaged in such behavior.”
“Gender biases are not the most important drivers of the under-representation of women in STEM fields.”
“Academia discriminates against Black people (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”
“Biological sex is binary for the vast majority of people.”
“The social sciences (in the United States) discriminate against conservatives (e.g., in hiring, promotion, grants, invitations to participate in colloquia/symposia).”
“Racial biases are not the most important drivers of higher crime rates among Black Americans relative to White Americans.”
“Men and women have different psychological characteristics because of evolution.”
“Genetic differences explain non-trivial (10% or more) variance in race differences in intelligence test scores.”
“Transgender identity is sometimes the product of social influence.”
“Demographic diversity (race, gender) in the workplace often leads to worse performance.”
I’ll add, in case it’s not obvious, that doing exceptionally well in school also reflects all sorts of good traits, such as intelligence, perseverance, and self-control.
Thanks to Yoel Inbar and Mickey Inzlicht, who, along with Azim Shariff, also provided me with helpful comments on an earlier draft.
One analysis, looking between 1980 and 1992, finds that Chomsky was ranked eighth overall in citations, coming in behind Marx, Lenin, Shakespeare, Aristotle, the Bible, Plato, and Freud
Consider this paragraph a teaser trailer for a future post.
Chomsky is an interesting case because he's a troublemaker both within his field and outside of it. And it's really the disappearance of the former -- a professor's willingness to challenge the dogmas of their field -- that I find most concerning. Whether they air their political grievances is their business. But where are the physicists who think that modern physics is fundamentally in error? Where are the psychologists who think we've fundamentally misunderstood the mind? Where are the revolutionaries -- the non-incrementalists -- pushing for paradigm shifts? Honestly, I think the only way to bring them back is to take a page from the Catholic Church and establish "devil's advocate" positions in every academic department. 20% of all academic hires should be hired on the understanding that their job is to tell the other 80% that they're doing it all wrong. And the P&T guidelines should specify that they are to be promoted exclusively on the basis of their success in that endeavor.
A great many trouble-makers aren't being brave. Some of them are socially inept, and only understand they were making trouble after they have made it. It may be too late to back down then, pride among other things demanding that they stand by what they wrote or said. But even more trouble-makers delight in being outrageous/notorious/difficult/what-have-you. They are quite gleeful about it. Pissing people off is fun for these people.