The Coddling of the American Mind Chapter 5. Witch Hunts
Author: Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt Publisher: New York, NY: Penguin Random House. Publish Date: 2019-8-20 Review Date: Status:💥
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Maoist,” “McCarthyite,” “Jacobin,” and above all, “witch hunt.” These terms are sometimes applied to the sorts of events we described in the last chapter. Those who apply such terms are claiming that what we are witnessing on campus exemplifies a situation long studied by sociologists in which a community becomes obsessed with religious or ideological purity and believes it needs to find and punish enemies within its own ranks in order to hold itself together.
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From the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, Europe experienced multiple waves of witch hunts, driven primarily by religious wars and conflicts in the wake of the Reformation, and also by fears brought on by recurring plague outbreaks.2 Tens of thousands of innocent people—and possibly hundreds of thousands—were put to death, often after being “put to the question” (that is, tortured) with the aid of boiling oil, red-hot iron bars, or thumbscrews.3
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Pavlac (2009).
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Pavlac (2009).
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The most famous witch hunt in U.S. history occurred in Salem, Massachusetts. In January of 1692, two young girls began to suffer from fits and tremors, which their elders attributed to witchcraft. In the following months, dozens of people claimed that they were tormented by witches or that they or their animals had been bewitched. Legal action was taken against at least 144 people (38 of them male) who were accused of practicing witchcraft. Nineteen were executed by hanging; one was crushed by heavy stones.4
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Norton (2007), Introduction.
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Norton (2007), Introduction.
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Historical and sociological analyses of witch trials have generally explained these outbreaks as responses to a group experiencing either a sense of threat from outside, or division and loss of cohesion within. In Salem, a terrifying border war had broken out a few years earlier against the French and their Native American allies in what is now Maine (but was at that time part of Massachusetts). The townspeople were still anxious about attacks.5
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One of Jon’s favorite thinkers of all time is Emile Durkheim, the nineteenth- to early twentieth-century French sociologist. Durkheim saw groups and communities as being in some ways like organisms—social entities that have a chronic need to enhance their internal cohesion and their shared sense of moral order. Durkheim described human beings as “homo duplex,” or “two-level man.”6 We are very good at being individuals pursuing our everyday goals (which Durkheim called the level of the “profane,” or ordinary). But we also have the capacity to transition, temporarily, to a higher collective plane, which Durkheim called the level of the “sacred.” He said that we have access to a set of emotions that we experience only when we are part of a collective—feelings like “collective effervescence,” which Durkheim described as social “electricity” generated when a group gathers and achieves a state of union. (You’ve probably felt this while doing things like playing a team sport or singing in a choir, or during religious worship.) People can move back and forth between these two levels throughout a single day, and it is the function of religious rituals to pull people up to the higher collective level, bind them to the group, and then return them to daily life with their group identity and loyalty strengthened. Rituals in which people sing or dance together or chant in unison are particularly powerful.
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- Durkheim (1915/1965). For an updated analysis of the joys of collective action and group ritual, see also: Ehrenreich (2006).
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A Durkheimian approach is particularly helpful when applied to sudden outbreaks of moralistic violence that are mystifying to outsiders. In 1978, the sociologist Albert Bergesen wrote an essay titled “A Durkheimian Theory of ‘Witch-Hunts’ With the Chinese Cultural Revolution of 1966–1969 as an Example.”7 Bergesen used Durkheim to illuminate the madness that erupted in Beijing in May 1966, when Mao Zedong began warning about the rising threat of infiltration by pro-capitalist enemies. Zealous college students responded by forming the Red Guards to find and punish enemies of the revolution. Universities across the country were shut down for several years. During those years, the Red Guards rooted out any trace they could find—or imagine—of capitalism, foreign influence, or bourgeois values. In practice, this meant that anyone who was successful or accomplished was suspect, and many professors, intellectuals, and campus administrators were imprisoned or murdered.8
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- Bergesen (1978).
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Among the many cruel features of the Cultural Revolution were the “struggle sessions,” in which those accused of ideological impurity were surrounded by their accusers, taunted, humiliated, and sometimes beaten as they confessed to their crimes, offered abject apologies, and vowed to do better. Students sometimes turned on their own teachers. Over the next few years, tens of millions were persecuted, and hundreds of thousands were murdered.9
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- For an overview of the Cultural Revolution, see: MacFarquhar & Schoenhals (2006). See also this interview with a woman who joined the Red Guard at age thirteen: Xiangzhen, Y. (2016, May 15). Confessions of a Red Guard, 50 years after China’s Cultural Revolution. Retrieved from http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/15/asia/china-cultural-revolution-red-guard-confession/index.html
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How could such an orgy of self-destruction have happened? Bergesen notes that there are three features common to most political witch hunts: they arise very quickly, they involve charges of crimes against the collective, and the offenses that lead to charges are often trivial or fabricated. Here’s how Bergesen puts it:
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They arise quickly: “Witch-hunts seem to appear in dramatic outbursts; they are not a regular feature of social life. A community seems to suddenly find itself infested with all sorts of subversive elements which pose a threat to the collectivity as a whole. Whether one thinks of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution, the Stalinist Show Trials, or the McCarthy period in the United States, the phenomenon is the same: a community becomes intensely mobilized to rid itself of internal enemies.”10
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- Song, Y. (2011, August 25). Chronology of mass killings during the Chinese Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). SciencesPo. Retrieved from http://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/chronology-mass-killings-during-chinese-cultural-revolution-1966-1976
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- Bergesen (1978), p. 20.
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Crimes against the collective: “The various charges that appear during one of these witch-hunts involve accusations of crimes committed against the nation as a corporate whole. It is the whole of collective existence that is at stake; it is The Nation, The People, The Revolution, or The State which is being undermined and subverted.”11
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- Bergesen (1978), p. 20.
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Charges are often trivial or fabricated: “These crimes and deviations seem to involve the most petty and insignificant behavioral acts which are somehow understood as crimes against the nation as a whole. In fact, one of the principal reasons we term these events ‘witch-hunts’ is that innocent people are so often involved and falsely accused.”12
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- Bergesen (1978), p. 21.
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To Bergesen’s list we’ll add a fourth feature, which necessarily follows from the first three:
Fear of defending the accused: When a public accusation is made, many friends and bystanders know that the victim is innocent, but they are afraid to say anything. Anyone who comes to the defense of the accused is obstructing the enactment of a collective ritual. Siding with the accused is truly an offense against the group, and it will be treated as such. If passions and fears are intense enough, people will even testify against their friends and family members.
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Does Bergesen’s Durkheimian analysis of the Cultural Revolution help to explain the dramatic events that have been happening on campus since 2015, some of which we described in the previous chapter? As historical events, the two movements are radically different, most notably in that the Red Guards were supported by a totalitarian dictator who encouraged them to use violence, while American college students have been self-organized and almost entirely nonviolent. Yet there are similarities, too. For example, both movements were initiated by idealistic students fighting for what seemed to them a noble ideal: the remaking of society along egalitarian lines. Bergesen’s analysis captures the fact that both movements began with “dramatic outbursts,” which were followed by intense and rapid mobilization on college campuses across the country.13 It also captures the fact that large reactions are often launched in response to small acts, such as Erika Christakis’s email about Halloween costumes at Yale14 and Mary Spellman’s use of the word “mold” when reaching out to a student at Claremont McKenna College.15 Outside observers were often unable to comprehend how these two emails could have triggered mass movements demanding that the two women be denounced and fired.
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For example, see TheDemands.org, a site that arose within a few weeks of the 2015 Yale protests, at which students from eighty universities posted their demands.
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See chapter 3. See also: Friedersdorf, C. (2016, May 26). The perils of writing a provocative email at Yale. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/the-peril-of-writing-a-provocative-email-at-yale/484418
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See chapter 3. See also: Haidt, J. (2015, November 18). True diversity requires generosity of spirit [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/2015/11/18/true-diversity-requires-generosity-of-spirit
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Bergesen’s approach also works well when applied to the violence at Middlebury College. The videos of the main shout-down show students chanting, singing, and at times swaying in unison to prevent Charles Murray from speaking.16 It’s a striking demonstration of Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” building up a charge of social electricity that prepares the group for action. Research shows that synchronous movements like singing and swaying make groups more cooperative and make people who participate physically stronger in challenges they undertake right afterward.17 Perhaps the violent attack on Professor Stanger would not have taken place if Murray had been moved out immediately and the students had not had so much time to sway and chant in unison.
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- DiGravio, W. (Publisher). (2017, March 2). Students protest lecture by Dr. Charles Murray at Middlebury College [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6EASuhefeI
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We call a campaign a witch hunt when we believe that the targets of the attacks (such as Erika Christakis and Mary Spellman) are innocent, but even if we are right, that does not mean that the people doing the hunting lack any valid reason for their anger and fear. By 2015, most people had seen videos of police officers shooting or choking unarmed black men. It is understandable that many black students were on edge, felt a generalized sense of threat, and became increasingly active in movements to oppose systemic racism, particularly in the criminal justice system. But why did college students direct so much of their passion and effort toward changing their universities and to finding enemies within their own communities? And here’s a related puzzle: Why were the protests strongest and most common at schools known for progressive politics in the most progressive parts of the United States (New England and the West Coast)?18 Are these not the schools that are already the most devoted to enacting progressive and inclusive social policies?
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Wiltermuth & Heath (2009). See also: Cohen, Ejsmond-Frey, Knight, & Dunbar (2009).
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See Woodard (2011). The culture of safetyism and the most vigorous protests and shout-downs seem to occur mostly in just two of the eleven “nations” that Woodard identifies: Yankeedom (from New England to the upper Midwest) and The Left Coast (the coastal strip of the three West Coast states).
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To advance in our inquiry, let’s switch our focus away from students for a moment. We will examine a trend among professors that seems to fit the Durkheimian framework quite well: the use of open letters of denunciation. Professors try to round up hundreds of other professors to condemn a fellow professor or to demand that an academic article be retracted (rather than simply rebutting it). Something has been changing among the faculty, as well as among the students. (We’ll examine these changes in the broader national context of rising political polarization in the next chapter, when we’ll examine the role that provocation from the right from off campus plays in these unusual events on campus.)
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On March 29, 2017, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy posted to its website an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism.”19 In the essay, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, juxtaposed the largely positive public reaction to news of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition (from man to woman) with the “ridicule and condemnation” that accompanied the revelation that Rachel Dolezal, a former chapter president of the NAACP, a civil rights organization, was not black but, rather, a white woman who claimed that she “identif[ies] as black.”20 Tuvel, noting that her concerns were not with the particulars of the Dolezal case but “with the arguments for and against transracialism,” argued that while society is hostile to transracialism and more open to transgenderism, the two kinds of identity transformation raise many of the same considerations.
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- Tuvel (2017).
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In the article, Tuvel stressed that she is a strong advocate of transgender rights and that she was “not suggesting that race and sex are equivalent.” She had explored similar ideas before without controversy; her Rhodes College web page states that her research “lies at the intersection of feminist philosophy, philosophy of race and animal ethics.” In much of her work, she considers the ways in which the oppression of “animals, women and racially subordinated groups” overlap to “maintain erroneous and harmful conceptions of humanity.”21 This is a scholar who knows her way around contemporary debates, and surely meant no harm to transgender people.
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Johnson, K., Pérez-Peña, R., & Eligon, J. (2015, June 16). Rachel Dolezal, in center of storm, is defiant: “I identify as black.” The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/17/us/rachel-dolezal-nbc-today-show.html
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But in today’s culture of safetyism, intent no longer matters; only perceived impact does, and thanks to concept creep, just about anything can be perceived as having a harmful—even violent—impact on vulnerable groups. According to Bergesen, anything that can be construed as an attack on a group can serve as an opportunity for collective punishment and the enhancement of group solidarity.
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Within a few weeks of its publication, the article had generated such an uproar that an open letter was published, addressed to an editor of Hypatia and the “broader Hypatia community.”22 The letter demanded that the article be retracted—not rebutted but retracted. The signers were not asking for a chance to respond to Tuvel and correct her alleged mistakes (a common practice in academia); they were demanding that the article vanish from the scholarly record (a very rare occurrence, usually reserved for cases of fraud or plagiarism). They contended that the “continued availability” of the article caused “harm” to women of color and the transgender community. Yet, although the letter’s authors asserted that “many harms” were “committed by [the article’s] publishing,” the alleged “harm” was not described. In fact, by claiming that the letter “is not an exhaustive summary of the many harms caused by this article,” they sidestepped their lack of evidence that the article had caused (or could cause) any harm at all.23
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Open letter to Hypatia. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://archive.is/lUeR4#selection-71.0-71.22 [inactive]
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Note: A new paragraph with the sentence “The statement is not an exhaustive summary of the many harms caused by this article” was added to the open letter at approximately the 520th signature, on 5/1/2017. See: Open letter to Hypatia. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1efp9C0MHch_6Kfgtlm0PZ76nirWtcEsqWHcvgidl2mU/viewform?ts=59066d20&edit_requested=true
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Individual critics were quick to chime in, calling the article “transphobic,” “violent,” and an expression of “all that is wrong with white feminism.” Nora Berenstain, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee, took to Facebook to expound on the article’s “discursive transmisogynistic violence.” She asserted that Tuvel “enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay,” because she “deadnames a trans woman” (that is, Tuvel mentioned that Jenner’s former male, or “dead,” name, was Bruce),24 she “uses the term ‘transgenderism,’” she “talks about ‘biological sex,’” and she “uses phrases like ‘male genitalia.’” It is striking how many of the critics’ complaints refer not to Tuvel’s arguments but to her word choices. In fact, one of the arguments for retraction given in the open letter was that Tuvel used “vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” As when Dean Spellman used the word “mold” in her email, “petty and insignificant behavioral acts” (to use Bergesen’s phrase) can be considered “crimes against the [group] as a whole.”25
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Tuvel referred to Caitlyn Jenner as “Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner.” “Deadnaming” is a term used to deride the practice of referring to transgender people by their former, “dead” names. The online version of the article was edited after publication, on May 4, 2017, and the correction reads in part: “[A]t the author’s request, a parenthetical reference to Jenner’s birth name was removed.” See: Tuvel (2017). It’s worth noting, though, that even Caitlyn Jenner herself insists, “I will refer to the name Bruce when I think it appropriate.” See: Oliver, K. (2017, May 8). If this is feminism … The Philosophical Salon. Retrieved from http://thephilosophicalsalon.com/if-this-is-feminism-its-been-hijacked-by-the-thought-police. See also: Berenstain, N. (2017, April 29). Nora Berenstain on Rebecca Tuvel and Hypatia. GenderTrender. Retrieved from https://gendertrender.wordpress.com/nora-berenstain-on-rebecca-tuvel-and-hypatia
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Bergesen (1978), p. 21.
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Jesse Singal, a left-leaning social science journalist, read the list of charges in the open letter and then read Tuvel’s original essay. As he put it in an online article for New York magazine, “Each and every one of the falsifiable points [that the open letter] makes is, based on a plain reading of Tuvel’s article, simply false or misleading.” He concluded:
All in all, it’s remarkable how many basic facts this letter gets wrong about Tuvel’s paper. Either the authors simply lied about the article’s contents, or they didn’t read it at all. Every single one of the hundreds of signatories on the open letter now has their name on a document that severely (and arguably maliciously) mischaracterizes the work of one of their colleagues. This is not the sort of thing that usually happens in academia—it’s a really strange, disturbing instance of mass groupthink, perhaps fueled by the dynamics of online shaming and piling-on.26
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- Singal, J. (2017, May 2). This is what a modern-day witch hunt looks like. New York. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/transracialism-article-controversy.html
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The reaction to Tuvel’s article fits well into a Durkheimian framework: it is a surprising, “out of nowhere” eruption of “mass groupthink” in which trivial things (such as using the phrase “male genitalia”) are taken as grave attacks on a vulnerable community. These attacks then warrant a collective, solidarity-boosting response: an open letter that recruits hundreds of people to publicly sign their names and collectively point their fingers at the accused witch. Singal even titled his essay “This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like.”
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The Tuvel affair also shows the fourth criterion of a witch hunt: fear of defending the accused.27 Tuvel’s Ph.D. advisor, Kelly Oliver, wrote an essay defending her former student, in which she lamented the cowardice of so many of her colleagues:
In private messages [to Oliver, and to Tuvel], some people commiserated, expressed support, and apologized for what was happening and for not going public with their support. As one academic wrote to me in a private message, “sorry I’m not saying this publicly (I have no interest in battling the mean girls on Facebook) but FWIW [for what it’s worth] it’s totally obvious to me that you haven’t been committing acts of violence against marginalized scholars.”
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- Sally Scholz, the editor to whom the open letter was addressed, issued this powerful statement in defense of the publication of Tuvel’s article: “I firmly believe, and this belief will not waver, that it is utterly inappropriate for editors to repudiate an article they have accepted for publication (barring issues of plagiarism or falsification of data). In this respect, editors must stand behind the authors of accepted papers. That is where I stand. Professor Tuvel’s paper went through the peer review process and was accepted by the reviewers and by me.” See: Weinberg, J. (2017, May 6). Hypatia’s editor and its board president defend publication of Tuvel article. Daily Nous. Retrieved from http://dailynous.com/2017/05/06/hypatias-editor-board-president-defend-publication-tuvel-article
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Oliver noted that some scholars went beyond cowardice, privately supporting Tuvel while publicly attacking her:
In private messages, these people apologized for what she must be going through, while in public they fanned the flames of hatred and bile on social media. The question is, why did so many scholars, especially feminists, express one sentiment behind closed doors and another out in the open? Why were so many others afraid to say anything in public?28
Durkheim and Bergesen give us a direct answer to Oliver’s question.29 This is precisely what people do during a witch hunt.
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- Oliver (2017); see n. 24.
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- Outside of feminist philosophy, in the broader philosophical community, many professors did stand up for Tuvel and against the efforts to have her work retracted. The relevant community, from a Durkheimian perspective, was a subset of feminist philosophers.
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Retraction Is the New Rebuttal
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Other open letters condemning professors and demanding retraction of their work soon followed.30 In August 2017, two law professors, Amy Wax from the University of Pennsylvania and Larry Alexander from the University of San Diego, wrote a short opinion essay in a Philadelphia newspaper titled “Paying the Price for Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.”31 They argued that many of today’s social problems, including unemployment, crime, drug use, and the intergenerational transmission of poverty, are partially caused by the fading away of the “bourgeois cultural script” that used to compel Americans to “get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness.” The authors included one particular line that caused a firestorm: “All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” The line is provocative because it violates a widespread taboo in the academic world: One is not supposed to say that a dominant culture is superior to a nondominant one in any way. But anthropologists generally agree that cultures and subcultures instill different goals, skills, and virtues in their members,32 and it can’t possibly be true that all cultures prepare children equally well for success in all other cultures. If we want to improve outcomes for immigrants and the poor in a free-market, service-oriented capitalist economy such as ours, Wax and Alexander argued, it would be useful to talk about bourgeois culture.
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Another open letter of condemnation and demand for retraction was aimed at Bruce Gilley, a political scientist at Portland State University in Oregon, for writing an essay arguing that colonialism conferred some benefits on colonized countries. The article was retracted after the journal editor received death threats. See Patel, V. (2018, March 21). Last fall, this scholar defended colonialism. Now he’s defending himself. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from https://www.chronicle.com/article/Last-Fall-This-Scholar/242880
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Wax, A., & Alexander, L. (2017, August 9). Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture. The Inquirer. Retrieved from http://www.philly.com/philly/opinion/commentary/paying-the-price-for-breakdown-of-the-countrys-bourgeois-culture-20170809.html
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Shweder (1996).
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A week later, fifty-four graduate students and alumni of the University of Pennsylvania published a statement that condemned the essay and its authors for exemplifying the “malignant logic of hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy.” In good Durkheimian fashion, the open letter issued a strong call for solidarity among “all members of the University of Pennsylvania community who claim to fight systemic inequality,” and it included a demand that the president of the university confront the racism of Wax and Alexander and “push for an investigation into Wax’s advocacy for white supremacy.”33 The call for denunciation was taken up by thirty-three of Wax’s colleagues in the law school (nearly half the faculty), who wrote their own open letter of denunciation. They did not do what scholars are supposed to do: use their scholarly abilities to show where Wax and Alexander were wrong. They simply “condemned” and “categorically rejected” Wax’s claims.34
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The letter said that all those who are against hateful ideas about racial superiority “must denounce faculty members that are complicit in and uphold white supremacy” by treating ideas like Wax’s as “the very basis for white supremacy.” See: Guest column by 54 Penn students & alumni—Statement on Amy Wax and Charlottesville. (2017, August 21). The Daily Pennsylvanian. Retrieved from http://www.thedp.com/article/2017/08/guest-column-amy-wax-charlottesville
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Jon wrote a summary of the case and a defense of Wax. See: Haidt, J. (2017, September 2). In defense of Amy Wax’s defense of bourgeois values [Blog post]. Heterodox Academy. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/09/02/in-defense-of-amy-waxs-defense-of-bourgeois-values. A few weeks later, the leader of the faculty letter of condemnation, Jonah Gelbach, wrote a long essay responding to the details of the Wax & Alexander essay. See: Haidt, J. (2017, September 21). Jonah Gelbach responds to Amy Wax & Jon Haidt [Blog post]. Heterodox Academy. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/2017/09/21/jonah-gelbach-responds-to-wax-and-haidt
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Solidarity is great for a group that needs to work in unison or march into battle. Solidarity engenders trust, teamwork, and mutual aid. But it can also foster groupthink, orthodoxy, and a paralyzing fear of challenging the collective. Solidarity can interfere with a group’s efforts to find the truth, and the search for truth can interfere with a group’s solidarity. The Greek historian Thucydides saw this principle in action over two thousand years ago. Writing about a time of wars and revolutions in the fifth century BCE, he noted that “the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.”35
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- Thucydides (431 BCE/1972). Book III, chapter 82, section 4.
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This is why viewpoint diversity is so essential in any group of scholars. Each professor is—like all human beings—a flawed thinker with a strong preference for believing that his or her own ideas are right. Each scholar suffers from the confirmation bias—the tendency to search vigorously for evidence that confirms what one already believes.36 One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases. Even if professors often cannot see the flaws in their own arguments, other professors and students do them the favor of finding such flaws. The community of scholars then judges which ideas survive the debate. We can call this process institutionalized disconfirmation. The institution (the academy as a whole, or a discipline, such as political science) guarantees that every statement offered as a research finding—and certainly every peer-reviewed article—has survived a process of challenge and vetting. That is no guarantee that it is true, but it is a reason to think that the statement is likely to be more reliable than alternative statements made by partisan think tanks, corporate marketers, or your opinionated uncle. It is only because of institutionalized disconfirmation that universities and groups of scholars can claim some authority to be arbiters of factual questions, such as whether certain vaccines caused the rise in autism (they didn’t)37 or whether social programs designed to help poor children close achievement gaps with wealthier kids actually work (some do, some don’t).38
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See: Haidt (2012), chapters 2 and 4.
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Eggertson (2010).
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One of the best experiences of Jon’s academic career was moderating a bipartisan working group of poverty experts who worked together to strip away partisanship from a complicated research literature and identify the programs that truly work. See: American Enterprise Institute/Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity. (2015, December 3). Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security. Retrieved from http://www.aei.org/publication/opportunity-responsibility-and-security. Chapter 5 evaluates early child-hood interventions.
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But what would happen to a university, or an academic field, if everyone were on the same team and everyone shared the same confirmation bias? The disconfirmation process would break down. Research shows that reviewers go easy on articles and grant proposals that support their political team, and they are more critical of articles and proposals that contradict their team’s values or beliefs.39 This, to some extent, is what has happened in many academic fields since the 1990s, with enormous ramifications for university culture today.
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- Duarte et al. (2015). See especially: Abramowitz, Gomes, & Abramowitz (1975). See also: Crawford & Jussim (2018).
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It is no surprise that, on the whole, professors lean left. So do artists, poets, and people who love to watch foreign movies. One of the strongest personality correlates of left-wing politics is the trait of openness to experience, a trait that describes people who crave new ideas and experiences and who tend to be interested in changing traditional arrangements.40 On the other hand, members of the military, law enforcement personnel, and students who have well-organized dorm rooms tend to lean right. (Seriously. You can guess people’s political leanings at better-than-chance levels just from photographs of their desks.)41 Social conservatives tend to be lower on openness to experience and higher on conscientiousness—they prefer things to be orderly and predictable, they are more likely to show up on time for meetings, and they are more likely to see the value of traditional arrangements.
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On the personality, political, and behavioral correlates of openness, see: McCrae (1996). See also: Carney, Jost, Gosling, & Potter (2008).
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Gosling (2008).
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In a free society, therefore, it will simply never be the case that every occupation is evenly balanced, politically, and it will generally be the case that professors lean left, especially in the humanities and social sciences. This is not a problem as long as there are enough professors who don’t lean left to guarantee institutionalized disconfirmation in any field that addresses politicized topics. A left-to-right ratio of two or three to one should be enough to sustain institutionalized disconfirmation. And that’s about what the ratio was for most of the twentieth century.
Note: not sure if bringing more right wingers into universities is the solution to anything
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We are not saying there is anything inherently wrong with the increasing number of left-leaning students on campus. But we are saying that viewpoint diversity is necessary for the development of critical thinking, while viewpoint homogeneity (whether on the left or the right) leaves a community vulnerable to groupthink and orthodoxy.
Note: I would agree, but why do all views critical of leftist consensus have to me right wing? Why does this involve bringing more right wingers into universities? Can’t leftist be critical of leftists? As seen below
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If both the faculty and the students have been losing moderates and gaining progressives since the 1990s, and if this shift among students has accelerated since 2012, then we would expect to see some changes in the culture and social dynamics of American universities, especially after 2012.52
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- A wave of essays published in March 2018 claimed that nothing on campus had changed with regard to free speech. See, for example: Yglesias, M. (2018, March 12). Everything we think about the political correctness debate is wrong. Vox. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/3/12/17100496/political-correctness-data. But on closer inspection of the data, Jon and his colleagues at Heterodox Academy showed that there had been many changes in average attitudes toward controversial speech and toward a greater willingness to use illiberal methods to prevent such speech. See: Stevens, S., & Haidt, J. (2018, March 19). The skeptics are wrong: Attitudes about free speech on campus are changing. Heterodox Academy. Retrieved from https://heterodoxacademy.org/skeptics-are-wrong-about-campus-speech
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This is the third problem. It is the Durkheimian problem. It is the risk that some academic communities—particularly those in the most progressive parts of the country—may attain such high levels of political homogeneity and solidarity that they undergo a phase change, taking on properties of a collective entity that are antithetical to the normal aims of a university. A collective entity mobilized for action is more likely to enforce political orthodoxy and less likely to tolerate challenges to its key ideological beliefs. Politically homogeneous communities are more susceptible to witch hunts, particularly when they feel threatened from outside.