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.
This in turn leads to the belief that <unpopular opinion> is held only by assholes. No, it's just that the rest of us who believe it are keeping our heads down.
One problem with being a troublemaker is that you've got to deal with the fallout, which takes time, and it takes time away from the things we got into academe to do. It also helps to be thick-skinned, and by necessity our skin is only a little thick--as needed to deal with prickly colleagues, but not so much that we're indifferent to approval/disapproval.
What a great (and not at all troublemaking ;) analysis.
What's amazing to me is that the taboo statements are NOT AT ALL EXTREME. They are mostly qualified, used to be absolutely mainstream (and not in the "slavery is ok" sense) and probably in reality match not just the opinion of the median voter but even a median university educated person in most countries (perhaps apart from the intelligence one).
So what would be interesting to see is how such "objectively hardly objectionable" beliefs became considered taboo, and how much of it is social signalling of some kind rather than actual beliefs.
And another question if have is, is this worse at elite institutions, ie do less conformist professors survive in muffling schools?
And finally, you mention law and business (probably also philosophy). What about stem subjects? I know biologists etc got into trouble for expressing less than 100% unquestionably affirming views about trans identities but if we go into even harder sciences....?
As a professor who is likewise married to a professor and mostly socializes with professors, I can say that there is a lot of black and white thinking among academics when it comes to the “correct” beliefs and ideas. People who don’t subscribe to the correct ideas are the “bad people” or even worse, the people who “vote against their own interests.”
Professors tend to be very far to the left, so even us moderates risk being ostracized for espousing otherwise normie mainstream beliefs about things like race, gender, crime, etc. This bleeds into academic research where people are not allowed to challenge underlying theoretical and methodological assumptions of people who study anything related to “systemic” inequality.
Moreover, professors tend to think everybody with a PhD agrees with them, so we casually make broad proclamations about how horrible Trump or Republicans generally are on “x” issue and assume that everyone agrees and no one feels alienated. And most professors do agree with such dogma. What does anyone have to gain by speaking out in defense of a minority position (in an academic setting) that colleagues have already decided is wrong and associated with being a bad person?
Psychology has a few of its own Chomskys, creative and rebellious scholars who break disciplinary molds. Skinner rebelled against the nearly religious adoption of large group NHST research in his pursuit of functional behavior environment relationships in single participants. His classic research on schedules and stimulus control are easily replicated by students today in class demonstrations.
Great piece Paul, I believe I read the original piece a while ago. If the question were "are fewer professors troublemakers relative to other types of comparable professions?" I wouldn't know how to answer. One of the jobs of good journalism for instance is to be some kind of troublemaker, find out what individuals are doing that's bad in institutions of power and reporting on that. But if I surveyed the entire media landscape, I'd probably find the % of true troublemakers to be small. Many people are working their little beats and writing about new movies, football contracts, and new gadgets. And using the availability heuristic, there are many professors these days TRYING to be troublemakers and not being all that successful, and many professors who are doing run of the mill kinds of thinking and writing and teaching and getting put on lists. But relative to the sheer size of the profession, is that higher than journalists? Engineers? Not sure.
Thanks! Your response is fair enough. I made a guess about why troublemaking is discouraged among profs, but, yes, it assumes that we’re more timid than others in comparable professions, and maybe that’s wrong. Still, I do think career punishment for unpopular views is ONE cause of self-censorship in profs and even if it’s a minor cause (or even if the same punishment happens in other professions), I think it’s reasonable to want less of it.
I think the costs of hiring by departmental committee are great, including but not limited to this issue. I'm not quite sure if these costs outweigh the benefits. I just came back from Australia whereby hiring was more top down, at the "Dean" or above level whereby the department was simply advisory. Might be even worse!
One might argue that professor's profession is somewhat self-serving, so it is only normal that people so strongly concerned with themselves are also not willing to risk their wellbeing :-)
Joking aside, it would be nice if academics show more spine, but what about the rest of us?
Nice post. Funny about Choamsky’s theory on selection of the meek and compliant. I’ve often wondered the same about my colleagues, but in a much more limited way. I think people disparage undergraduate samples as too non-representative because they went to elite institutions and only hung out with other scholarly inclined peers in labs and libraries. Those who went to large public universities and prioritized social lives over their academic ones might have seen another side.
I also can’t recall my reaction when I first read that paper about taboo topics. But today it seemed like that was a silly list. All of those questions have specific instances in which they are obviously true and an outrage to deny, but they also have much more controversial and inflammatory specific instances where to ask or assert them might be understandably eyebrow raising. I wondered if the authors were courting outrage by making them so general. But I was too lazy to look it up.
I don’t think this is a problem in all of academia. 3 of these 10 taboos overlap with economics, where they are the topic of active research with no taboos attached. More broadly, I don’t think academic economics has any taboos around political sensitivity in research topics. It’s an interesting question why the culture of economics is so different. It is perhaps not unrelated that there are few “progressives” in economics. Economists, like other academics, do lean left, but it’s nearly always centre-left. There is also a good number of right of centre economists.
You disincentivise them by punishing them for keeping and exercising it. You don't beg a bully to be good. You punish him for being bad and facilitate an environment for the desirable goodness you want.
I dunno. I think we should be civil and generous when it comes to people who say troubling things. But I feel that this charity should extend to those who are themselves harsh and critical of these troubling things. It's free speech all the way down.
Free speech absolutist here as well. They aren't usually harsh about the thing being said alone. Instead, they tend to mob the person for saying it, while not addressing its veracity or substance. There must be fewer processes that busybodies can weaponise to muzzle others. That protects their right to oppose the substance of things they view as harsh or troubling with their speech, but disincentivises them from encroaching on others' rights through formal processes. It is the dopamine hit they get from successfully ruining people that keeps them doing it. If it is the danger of the actual thing that they hate so much, then they should be willing to protest it when they don't get the notoriety of taking down someone's career.
Hmm. This definitely happens. For instance, there are a lot of people who try to publicly shame and fire "woke professors", hoping to ruin their careers. I agree with you that this is awful behavior, but I'm not as sure that these anti-woke crusaders should be "punished". Can you clarify what sort of punishment you have in mind?
Basically, universities must fiercely defend their environment, else you get someone equivalent to the man on Jubilee who believes in democracy up until the point of voting in the modern equivalent of General Franco, just so he can do away with democracy. Freedom is the natural state of predators and bullies, who make captives of prey and victims. If we want freedom for all, including academics who may have their nerdy quirks and may not be as charismatic as predators and bullies, then there must be a system in place to protect the weak from the strong, while not insulating anyone's ideas from criticism.
Sure. It really depends on what they do. Something proportionate. So, if they want to waste administrative time and resources with frivolous crap, waste their time and resources. Academic freedom lectures in person with exams, and make them extremely boring on purpose. But also ensure that they still must hit their academic and research targets within a specific time while doing these. Or, in the case of them siccing mobs onto others just because of their speech, more stringent harassment procedures, but with very high thresholds of evidence, so that these are not abused. It all depends on what they do and how. Anything that does not reward them for undermining academic freedom. If they wish to act like children, then treat them like children. It sounds petty, but petty begets petty.
I admit that there are people who purposely stir up the pot without adding any academic value. However, when it comes to academic discussions or progresses in general, I think the academia should still be more generous to topics that people generally shun, considering how all the historical "breakthroughs" we had -- including humanism when the church had power, empiricism when rationalism was the general norm, and nihilism when many people thought everyone had to adhere to the same moral rules -- were completely against the social norms and expectations in each of the generations.
Here is a story I heard from a friend, which I will alter slightly to protect the innocent. A prestigious psychology professor signed an open letter in which psychologists condemned belief in innate sex differences. My friend knew that this professor believed such differences existed, and asked him why he signed the letter. He said that he expected everyone else in his department would sign it, so it would look really bad if he didn’t. My friend asked why he expected everyone else in his department to sign it, and he said “Probably for the same reason I did”.
Heartlily agree on Chomsky. I learned a lot from him.
I learned about Manufacturing Consent too.....
To your point on being successful, a famous exchange between Andrew Marr (then a journalist at The Independent, later with the BBC) and Noam Chomsky came to mind.
It happened during a 1996 BBC interview (broadcast on The Big Idea).
Marr challenged Chomsky’s thesis from Manufacturing Consent — that mainstream journalists don’t usually self-censor CONSCIOUSLY, but internalize limits set by ownership, advertisers, and elite sources.
Chomsky replied:
“I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is, if you believed something DIFFERENT, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.....!”
TLDR: How many Andrew Marr's UNCONSCIOUSLY manufacturing consent in Social Psych today, I wonder?
Neither your exposition nor Chomsky’s are mutually exclusive (you may have said that already). Not being a political theorist, I recognise the situations you describe in academia much more easily though. I have seen such situations often in the crossover world between academics and senior clinicians. Nice essay.
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.
https://youtu.be/ZO5u3V6LJuM
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.
This in turn leads to the belief that <unpopular opinion> is held only by assholes. No, it's just that the rest of us who believe it are keeping our heads down.
One problem with being a troublemaker is that you've got to deal with the fallout, which takes time, and it takes time away from the things we got into academe to do. It also helps to be thick-skinned, and by necessity our skin is only a little thick--as needed to deal with prickly colleagues, but not so much that we're indifferent to approval/disapproval.
What a great (and not at all troublemaking ;) analysis.
What's amazing to me is that the taboo statements are NOT AT ALL EXTREME. They are mostly qualified, used to be absolutely mainstream (and not in the "slavery is ok" sense) and probably in reality match not just the opinion of the median voter but even a median university educated person in most countries (perhaps apart from the intelligence one).
So what would be interesting to see is how such "objectively hardly objectionable" beliefs became considered taboo, and how much of it is social signalling of some kind rather than actual beliefs.
And another question if have is, is this worse at elite institutions, ie do less conformist professors survive in muffling schools?
And finally, you mention law and business (probably also philosophy). What about stem subjects? I know biologists etc got into trouble for expressing less than 100% unquestionably affirming views about trans identities but if we go into even harder sciences....?
As a professor who is likewise married to a professor and mostly socializes with professors, I can say that there is a lot of black and white thinking among academics when it comes to the “correct” beliefs and ideas. People who don’t subscribe to the correct ideas are the “bad people” or even worse, the people who “vote against their own interests.”
Professors tend to be very far to the left, so even us moderates risk being ostracized for espousing otherwise normie mainstream beliefs about things like race, gender, crime, etc. This bleeds into academic research where people are not allowed to challenge underlying theoretical and methodological assumptions of people who study anything related to “systemic” inequality.
Moreover, professors tend to think everybody with a PhD agrees with them, so we casually make broad proclamations about how horrible Trump or Republicans generally are on “x” issue and assume that everyone agrees and no one feels alienated. And most professors do agree with such dogma. What does anyone have to gain by speaking out in defense of a minority position (in an academic setting) that colleagues have already decided is wrong and associated with being a bad person?
Psychology has a few of its own Chomskys, creative and rebellious scholars who break disciplinary molds. Skinner rebelled against the nearly religious adoption of large group NHST research in his pursuit of functional behavior environment relationships in single participants. His classic research on schedules and stimulus control are easily replicated by students today in class demonstrations.
Great piece Paul, I believe I read the original piece a while ago. If the question were "are fewer professors troublemakers relative to other types of comparable professions?" I wouldn't know how to answer. One of the jobs of good journalism for instance is to be some kind of troublemaker, find out what individuals are doing that's bad in institutions of power and reporting on that. But if I surveyed the entire media landscape, I'd probably find the % of true troublemakers to be small. Many people are working their little beats and writing about new movies, football contracts, and new gadgets. And using the availability heuristic, there are many professors these days TRYING to be troublemakers and not being all that successful, and many professors who are doing run of the mill kinds of thinking and writing and teaching and getting put on lists. But relative to the sheer size of the profession, is that higher than journalists? Engineers? Not sure.
Thanks! Your response is fair enough. I made a guess about why troublemaking is discouraged among profs, but, yes, it assumes that we’re more timid than others in comparable professions, and maybe that’s wrong. Still, I do think career punishment for unpopular views is ONE cause of self-censorship in profs and even if it’s a minor cause (or even if the same punishment happens in other professions), I think it’s reasonable to want less of it.
I think the costs of hiring by departmental committee are great, including but not limited to this issue. I'm not quite sure if these costs outweigh the benefits. I just came back from Australia whereby hiring was more top down, at the "Dean" or above level whereby the department was simply advisory. Might be even worse!
Wonderful article - thank you!
One might argue that professor's profession is somewhat self-serving, so it is only normal that people so strongly concerned with themselves are also not willing to risk their wellbeing :-)
Joking aside, it would be nice if academics show more spine, but what about the rest of us?
I recommend Tim Dillon's 'Nice Apartments are for Rats' for a good exploration of the submission point
Nice post. Funny about Choamsky’s theory on selection of the meek and compliant. I’ve often wondered the same about my colleagues, but in a much more limited way. I think people disparage undergraduate samples as too non-representative because they went to elite institutions and only hung out with other scholarly inclined peers in labs and libraries. Those who went to large public universities and prioritized social lives over their academic ones might have seen another side.
I also can’t recall my reaction when I first read that paper about taboo topics. But today it seemed like that was a silly list. All of those questions have specific instances in which they are obviously true and an outrage to deny, but they also have much more controversial and inflammatory specific instances where to ask or assert them might be understandably eyebrow raising. I wondered if the authors were courting outrage by making them so general. But I was too lazy to look it up.
I don’t think this is a problem in all of academia. 3 of these 10 taboos overlap with economics, where they are the topic of active research with no taboos attached. More broadly, I don’t think academic economics has any taboos around political sensitivity in research topics. It’s an interesting question why the culture of economics is so different. It is perhaps not unrelated that there are few “progressives” in economics. Economists, like other academics, do lean left, but it’s nearly always centre-left. There is also a good number of right of centre economists.
How do you incentivise the people who benefit most from this type of exclusion to give up that power?
You disincentivise them by punishing them for keeping and exercising it. You don't beg a bully to be good. You punish him for being bad and facilitate an environment for the desirable goodness you want.
I dunno. I think we should be civil and generous when it comes to people who say troubling things. But I feel that this charity should extend to those who are themselves harsh and critical of these troubling things. It's free speech all the way down.
Free speech absolutist here as well. They aren't usually harsh about the thing being said alone. Instead, they tend to mob the person for saying it, while not addressing its veracity or substance. There must be fewer processes that busybodies can weaponise to muzzle others. That protects their right to oppose the substance of things they view as harsh or troubling with their speech, but disincentivises them from encroaching on others' rights through formal processes. It is the dopamine hit they get from successfully ruining people that keeps them doing it. If it is the danger of the actual thing that they hate so much, then they should be willing to protest it when they don't get the notoriety of taking down someone's career.
Hmm. This definitely happens. For instance, there are a lot of people who try to publicly shame and fire "woke professors", hoping to ruin their careers. I agree with you that this is awful behavior, but I'm not as sure that these anti-woke crusaders should be "punished". Can you clarify what sort of punishment you have in mind?
Basically, universities must fiercely defend their environment, else you get someone equivalent to the man on Jubilee who believes in democracy up until the point of voting in the modern equivalent of General Franco, just so he can do away with democracy. Freedom is the natural state of predators and bullies, who make captives of prey and victims. If we want freedom for all, including academics who may have their nerdy quirks and may not be as charismatic as predators and bullies, then there must be a system in place to protect the weak from the strong, while not insulating anyone's ideas from criticism.
Sure. It really depends on what they do. Something proportionate. So, if they want to waste administrative time and resources with frivolous crap, waste their time and resources. Academic freedom lectures in person with exams, and make them extremely boring on purpose. But also ensure that they still must hit their academic and research targets within a specific time while doing these. Or, in the case of them siccing mobs onto others just because of their speech, more stringent harassment procedures, but with very high thresholds of evidence, so that these are not abused. It all depends on what they do and how. Anything that does not reward them for undermining academic freedom. If they wish to act like children, then treat them like children. It sounds petty, but petty begets petty.
I admit that there are people who purposely stir up the pot without adding any academic value. However, when it comes to academic discussions or progresses in general, I think the academia should still be more generous to topics that people generally shun, considering how all the historical "breakthroughs" we had -- including humanism when the church had power, empiricism when rationalism was the general norm, and nihilism when many people thought everyone had to adhere to the same moral rules -- were completely against the social norms and expectations in each of the generations.
The anecdote is in https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/23/can-things-be-both-popular-and-silenced/
Here is a story I heard from a friend, which I will alter slightly to protect the innocent. A prestigious psychology professor signed an open letter in which psychologists condemned belief in innate sex differences. My friend knew that this professor believed such differences existed, and asked him why he signed the letter. He said that he expected everyone else in his department would sign it, so it would look really bad if he didn’t. My friend asked why he expected everyone else in his department to sign it, and he said “Probably for the same reason I did”.
Found thanks to this fantastically powerful tool for semantic search of Scott's corpus: https://readscottalexander.com/
That’s it! Thanks
Maybe worth updating the article to link to it?
Heartlily agree on Chomsky. I learned a lot from him.
I learned about Manufacturing Consent too.....
To your point on being successful, a famous exchange between Andrew Marr (then a journalist at The Independent, later with the BBC) and Noam Chomsky came to mind.
It happened during a 1996 BBC interview (broadcast on The Big Idea).
Marr challenged Chomsky’s thesis from Manufacturing Consent — that mainstream journalists don’t usually self-censor CONSCIOUSLY, but internalize limits set by ownership, advertisers, and elite sources.
Chomsky replied:
“I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is, if you believed something DIFFERENT, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.....!”
TLDR: How many Andrew Marr's UNCONSCIOUSLY manufacturing consent in Social Psych today, I wonder?
Neither your exposition nor Chomsky’s are mutually exclusive (you may have said that already). Not being a political theorist, I recognise the situations you describe in academia much more easily though. I have seen such situations often in the crossover world between academics and senior clinicians. Nice essay.