2023: Academic Self-Delegitimization and the Resurgence of Academic Freedom
And a belated Christmas Gift
Its been a banner year for academics delegitimizing themselves and academia as an institution, at least in the good ole' USA. But this steaming pile of organic fertilizer has also proven … fertile?… ground for a renewed commitment to free speech, academic freedom and open inquiry by both individuals and organizations. Let’s walk down memory lane.
SCOTUS
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that one of the great pillars of progressive activism -- the legitimacy of discrimination against some groups to fight discrimination against other groups — was illegal, at least for college admissions (and, one can hope, by extension, to other forms of discrimination). Thus, the pillar on which much DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) has been built — discrimination to fight discrimination — has been pulled out from under the DEI-Ideological-Bureaucratic Complex found throughout academia. Of course, the bureaucracies and grass roots academic support are still there, and it is not hard to find statements by academic administrators and faculties that are (sometimes not even that) thinly veiled clarion calls to circumvent the law. DEI is not going anywhere, though perhaps the bureaucrats’ jobs have gotten a bit tougher and some of the wind has been taken out of their sails. Which gets me to:
DEI
After years of stealth-installation of DEI bureaucracies (“long march through the institutions” anyone?), there is now a vigorous public debate about it. Calls to end DEI have appeared in Bari Weiss’s influential The Free Press and recognition that DEI erodes academic freedom has even appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education (among other places). In a good news (at least it has happened in one academic professional organization)/bad news story (it remains the only one as far as I know), the first open debate about the (de)merits of DEI at an academic professional society conference was held at the 2023 Conference of the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences; I was one of the debaters). Regardless, some open discussion and debate is better than none and I have yet to be denounced for taking the demerit side on the debate. Florida has defunded academic DEI programs, and Texas has banned them. If one has any doubt that DEI bureaucracies are politicized (rather than, e.g., some sort of objective societal good, which is what its advocates argue), that it was two states dominated by Republicans doing this should leave little doubt. One could argue that DEI bureaucracies do produce objective measurable goods that exceed their negative side effects and are worth the costs. However, its advocates almost never provide this sort of serious cost/benefit analysis, as if it is “obvious” how wonderful they are. Which it is — if you are a far left ideologue.
Along those lines, opponents of mandatory diversity statements had several victories this year. University of North Carolina banned them. After some heated debate (appearing at Unsafe Science), and Jon Haidt’s public resignation, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology abandoned requiring them for submissions to its yearly conference. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has argued that they are often tantamount to loyalty oaths and therefore violate the First Amendment ban on government infringement on speech and most colleges and universities’ own policies and commitments regarding academic freedom.
In case the connection between DEI and erosion of liberal democratic norms around speech and academic freedom isn’t obvious, this data-packed essay suggests otherwise. It provides some of the clearest evidence that DEI bureaucracy benefits (even for progressive demographic diversity) are dubious at best and they are toxic to academic freedom. (More on the year in academic freedom per se later in this essay).
From that essay:
Bringing Down the House (of Representatives) on Elite U’s
I recently posted on this, so this will be short. A committee of the House, inspired at least in part by my recent NCRI report on foreign countries corrupting American U’s (which the committee explicitly cited and recommended it), held hearings on the orgy of Jew-hate bursting out all over academia. The Presidents of Penn, Harvard and MIT disgraced themselves in ways that, finally, revealed to the public, the depraved ideology that has gripped them (see my post linked above for gory details and quotes and links to essays by both rightwing and leftwing intellectuals).
It was great to see the wider public waking up to the political corruption and leftwing antisemitism rampant throughout academia. And I have heard that this committee ain’t done yet, either.
Speech/Academic Freedom/Free Inquiry
The Missing Data Depot (MDD) is a great substack to follow. Data rich and very … unorthodox. Author is anonymous as far as I can tell, but clearly some sort of skilled social scientist because most of what has been posted so far is data rich. This is from MDD’s post, Ideology and Intolerance at America’s Elite Universities:
These data show that there is almost no tolerance at elite U’s for a speaker characterizing BLM as a hate group. This is consistent with testimonials to the importance of the BLM movement that appears on so many university, deanly, and even departmental websites, and to the obsequious confessions of guilt and complicitness in racism that have appeared all throughout academia in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s killing and the subsequent protests. (Exactly this type of chilling effect on speech is addressed later herein, when I discuss institutional neutrality). So BLM can be considered pretty close to sacred on American campuses.
Academia at its, in my view, best skewers sacred cows and roasts them on open pit fires. So shall we have some fun? This was found on 4chan (the notorious electronic gathering place for far right extremists) in the aftermath of the October 7th Hamas pogrom in Southern Israel that killed 1200 people and included rape and sexual mutilation. The attack included Hamas fighters paragliding into Israeli territory. The green guy gliding in below is Pepe, who has become a weird combination of meme, identity symbol and mascot for some on the far right, where classic antisemitic conspiracy theories remain rife and virulent. It is not surprising, then, that such people would glorify the rape and killing of Jews.
Horrible, right? Hate groups, right? Right. This was tweeted by BLM Chicago:
You see much difference beween the two? Now, just in case you think this is nutpicking, consider this:
The near-identicality of the symbols is no coincidence. Here, a BLM founder declares that they were “trained Marxists.”
Marxism is an ideology of anger, resentment and hate, and this was captured exquisitely by Lorenzo Warby writing on Helen Dale’s wonderful Substack:
From that essay:
The record of revolutionary Marxism as a ruling ideology is quite simply the worst record of any political philosophy in human history. It has the worst record for mass murder: in the order of 100 million dead from the deliberate killings, starvations and policies of Marxist regimes.1 It has the worst record for tyranny: every single revolutionary Marxist state has been a tyranny. It has an appalling record for cruelty mixed in with the mass murder. It has generated a series of natural experiments of divided or adjacent societies where the Marxist regime has, over time, done much worse in promoting human flourishing than its mercantile equivalent.2
What sort of mind looks at this record and says “yes, this ideology of appalling failure, murder, and misery deserves more chances?”
…every appalling aspect of revolutionary Marxist regimes is a direct consequence of Marx’s theories. The problem was not they were not doing “authentic Marxism”.
It was that they were.
The mass murders of Marxism were justified by Marx’s theory of surplus value. Surplus value is a theory of parasitism: that owners of productive property are oppressors who exploit workers and extract a surplus that is unearned.
If you convince a sufficiently large group of Homo sapiens that some group is made up of economic parasites whose removal from society will make society work better, and you richer, mass murder is primed to follow. Every massacre of every market minority (Jews, overseas Chinese, Igbo, Armenians…) has had a claim of parasitism as part of the motivating and/or justifying murderous animus.
When critics refer to “cultural Marxism”3 they are referring to the modern version of a binary manichean worldview that divides people into two categories: Oppressor and Oppressed. In Marxism, it was the proletarian versus the bourgeoise; for the modern illiberal progressive left, this is based on cultural identity groups, not economic class. Thus, “cultural marxism.” Or, to bring it back to the Fall of the Elite Universities, a brilliant Andrew Sullivan essay, put it this way:
The critics who keep pointing out “double standards” when it comes to the inflammatory speech of pro-Palestinian students miss the point.
The “double standard” argument (which I have made here about Penn’s antisemitic enforcement of its policies around speech; and in my coverage of Fall of the Elite U’s), is this: In their Congressional testimony, the Three Presidents claimed that their policies are to protect speech, up to and including calls for committing genocide against Jews, as long as it does not constitute harassment of an individual. In fact, all three have punished or permitted the punishment by others under them of faculty for speech far less hateful than “kill the Jews,” such as advocating to restrict immigration to Europeans, ending DEI or declaring sex to be biological and binary. It clearly is a double standard from a standpoint of a principled protection of speech, inasmuch as they applied one standard to some speech (“kill the Jews”) but applied a different standard to other speech (“sex is binary”). But Sullivan continues with a brutally trenchant point revealing the moral depravity of the ideology that has overrun academia:
These are not double standards. There is a single standard: It is fine to malign, abuse and denigrate “oppressors” and forbidden to do so against the “oppressed.”
Back to Warby:
Marx’s theory of surplus value, of economic parasitism, is not only predictably a theory of mass murder; every revolutionary Marxist regime has used it as a justification for mass murder, whether killing hundreds, thousands or millions. To say that such mass murder is not authentically Marxist is ridiculous: it shows a stunning lack of historical understanding or awareness.
I doubt that BLM is going to instigate mass murder or Gulags anytime soon. However, some have argued that the social justice protests of 2020 did instigate a soft American version of China’s Cultural Revolution, complete with struggle sessions and public shaming of and punishments for those violating the “new norms” far left social justice activists sought to impose on the rest of us. See this excellent essay by Xiao Li, whose parents came to America fleeing China’s Cultural Revolution, called “America’s Cultural Revolution is Just Like Mao’s”; this essay by Anna Krylov who fled to America from the Soviet Union, “From Russia With Love” or this one by Izabella Tabarovsky, who also fled to America from the Soviet Union about “The American Soviet Mentality,” both of which identify disturbing parallels between life in the late Soviet Union and 21st century America.
Regardless, the evidence here, alone, is enough for a prima facie case that BLM is a hate group and a hateful movement. I am not saying that I have conclusively proved this case, and, frankly, I am not sure I even believe it, because BLM is really many different groups, and they should not all be painted with a single brush. It is also an umbrella slogan for a movement that takes that name to make the reasonable point that it needs to be stated that “Black lives matter” because the U.S., both by its laws and policies and the actions of many of its individual citizens, for much of its history, did not act like Black lives matter much, if at all. But putting BLM-the-21st-century- organization up on some sacred pedestal and acting like even intense criticism of it (as a movement and organization) is somehow blasphemous and cannot be permitted in the halls of academia is exactly the type of thing that keeps getting academia in trouble. And that’s not even counting the related issue of whether BLM accomplished anything constructive, let alone things net more constructive than destructive.
Free Speech and Academic Freedom Breaking Out All Over Academia
I am not saying censorship and punishment for expressing wrongthink are gone, far from it. Anyone who follows the seemingly endless flow of letters and suits brought by The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression against academic institutions for violating speech and academic freedom knows otherwise.
Still, the Presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT did free speech advocates a service by pointing out, correctly, that, unless speech constitutes harassment of an individual, it is protected by their policies. Although Carole Hooven lost her job at Harvard for declaring sex to be biological and binary in 2022-2023, and Amy Wax of Penn is subject to an investigation seeking to remove her tenure for saying things like Black students perform worse in her classes, and Dorian Abbot was deplatformed at MIT for criticizing diversity initiatives, this was all before the Presidents’ accurate but still disgracefully hypocritical Congressional testimony. But it was retrospectively disgracefully hypocritical (i.e., it was bullshit because they all kowtowed to mobs demanding these sorts of punishments for speech that we now know the Presidents’ universities policies all consider completely legitimate). Going forward, it may be far harder to punish faculty and students, even at elite universities, for saying almost anything as long as it does not constitute harassment of an individual.
Or, as Bryan Caplan put it in his terrific essay, The Perfect Time to Speak Your Mind:
University leaders have rhetorically painted themselves into a corner. If they try crushing dissent, “weighing in,” or preaching about “our values,” they’re going to look even worse than they already do. Indeed, given the mass of Hamas-wear (including a full Hamas cape) I’ve seen at GMU and the University of Texas over the last few weeks, I think you can now get away with discussing any topic you like while wearing any costume you like.4 Now is your chance — and the chance of every true on-campus dissident. As Treebeard roars at the end of the The Two Towers, “Break the dam! Release the river!”
More Free Speech/Academic Freedom Good News
The Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (SOIBS), which I and my former grad student (now FIRE researcher, Nate Honeycutt) helped found as a safe harbor for academics to express controversial (and conventional) perspectives, is on a roll:
We held our first conference in 2023, and it was a roaring success (and produced four essays here: Overview, The Great DEI Debate, Who Agrees with Hitler? and Left Wing Authoritarians are Averse to Masculine Men).
The February 9, 2024 conference in San Diego is now in the home stretch of planning stages. Contact me directly if you are interested in attending (because we have severe capacity limitations, it is, for now, by invitation only, but getting one is not particularly hard yet).
The Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences (for which I am Editor in Chief), another SOIBS initiative, has now published 5 main articles and a slew of commentaries. The main articles are all good (so far), but my favorite is Bailey & Diaz (2023), on rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD), not because I have strong opinions about ROGD, but because I have strong opinions about academic censorship. As I wrote about here, this paper was published in another journal which then retracted it on fairly ridiculous grounds, you guessed it, instigated by academic mobs on Twitter. This is exactly the type of thing we created JOIBS for.
I am also one of four editors of a book compiling dozens of essays on free speech and academic freedom titled The Free Inquiry Papers (led by Robert Maranto and also with Catherine Salmon and Sally Satel, all founders of SOIBS). This book was recently accepted for publication by American Enterprise Institute Publishing and, as such, should be generally available at a reasonably affordable price in about a year (contra conventional academic publishing, which is usually insanely priced).
Beyond SOIBS, lots of other good things have been happening.
FIRE has Upped its Game
Its scope has expanded well beyond academia and now defends speech broadly. They recently joined a suit against Vermont on behalf of a guy who was arrested for flipping a cop the bird and calling him an asshole (which may be annoying to the cop but is protected by The First Amendment).
Its research game has stepped up, and includes a survey of 2000 students, which found that 1 in 10 say they have been investigated for their speech. If the results generalize to the population, this means that one could estimate that about a million students, nationwide, have been investigated by their colleges for speech. Another juicy tidbit: 38% of students said speech they've heard on campus constitutes “an act of violence,” which if you read April Bleske-Rechek’s data-packed essay here, Offense = Harm = Violence, you will find very not surprising.
Its first College Free Speech Rankings came out. Completely in character, Harvard ranked dead last, Penn next. Rutgers was right in the middle, which sounds about right.
As much as I would love for you to get a paid subscription (you can read more about that here, where I point out that I am using this income for SOIBS and mostly grad student research projects on things like political intolerance and leftwing authoritarianism), if the spirit moves you, I’d encourage you to donate to FIRE. They are a nonprofit, and depend on donations and grants, and they are doing great work.
Our big collaboration on scientists censoring science came out in 2023. Full paper here, Substack essay on it here. Anna Krylov (who has done all sorts of great work on the politicization of science) has created a site, Spotlight on Scientific Censorship, that hosts not only this article, but many others expanding on key ideas and addressing issues we just could not get to in that single paper.
The Washington Post(!!) endorsed institutional neutrality. This is a big deal because WaPost is a leading light for the left, and because, at least since the American Cultural Revolution, whoops, I mean social justice protests of 2020, far left academics have been deploying the official organs of their institutions to make blatantly political statements. This is a problem because it casts a pall of orthodoxy for anyone at such an institution and likely chills the speech of those who do not ascribe to that university’s stated “values.” WaPost’s endorsement of institutional neutrality, alone, won’t change much, but it might be a sign that the sane left is coming to its senses after being seduced by the most illiberal manifestations of social justice for nearly a decade.
And Now Your Christmas Present
I am making one of my posts formerly for paid subscribers, free: Victory Lap.
In it, I tell the story of how my career thrived with booster rockets after the racist mule attack, where I was denounced by almost 1400 academics for using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof (highlights: post-denunciation, Rutgers doubled my salary and asked me to Chair Anthropology; my work has been covered in the NYTimes, WaPost & Wall Street Journal; and I have several papers inspired, in part, by this denunciation). Frombh Victory Lap:
I don’t usually brag. I am making an exception in this essay. That is because this essay is about me, but it is bigger than that…
I hope this essay does two things: 1. Encourages others to stand up to mobs, should they come for you or those you hold dear; and 2. Provides a blueprint for doing so that others can draw upon.
Most Important of All
Rutgers football won the highly prestigious, competitive and nationally important Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl. Glad that ~$73million a year athletics deficit is finally producing real results.
Merry (belated) Christmas, Happy Holidays and a very Happy New Year to All
Footnotes
100 million deaths by communism may be an underestimate. RJ Rummel was a political scientist whose lifework was the study of “democide” — death by government, excluding war. His estimates by country for the 20th century can be found starting here. The Wikipedia article on him points out that some scholars have criticized his methods and argued that his numbers for communist regimes (up around 300-400 million) are overestimates. I am no expert on counting deaths-by-govt, which is why I put this in a footnote. However, most academics are left, many are far left, and the left has an unbelievably ugly history of glorifying communist revolutions and denying the horrors they perpetrated (something well-documented in Thomas Sowell’s Intellectuals and Society). The modern left’s denial of the violence by their “fellow travelers” was exquisitely captured by this CNN story which went viral for its unintentional self-own:
And, ICYMI, some had quite a lot of fun with this:
Warby on natural experiments comparing Marxism to other societies. Consider oppression and national economics in culturally similar countries such as: North v South Korea; China v. Taiwan; East Germany v. West Germany. Or consider the old Soviet dissident joke:
“A guy walks into a shop and asks, ‘Are you out of fish?’ The shopkeeper answers, ‘No, we are the shop that’s out of meat. You have to go down the block to find the shop that’s out of fish.’
“Cultural Marxism” manages to be both a bizarre antisemitic conspiracy theory and also a reasonable descriptive term for modern far left identitarianism. I described this state of affairs briefly here, but for a deep dive, go here.
Bryan Caplan’s comment about say anything you like while wearing any costume you like is an allusion to one of the precursors to the Soft American Cultural Revolution, occurring at Yale in 2015. After Erika Christakis sent an email to the students saying a nuanced version of “maybe being quick to denounce others for wearing the “wrong” costume for Halloween is not such a hot idea” she was denounced by mobs of students. Nicholas Christakis, her husband, made the mistake of trying to talk to the the mob as if they were there for a discussion,** and was … you guessed it, further subject to public denunciation. They both resigned from positions at Yale, though Nicholas remained a professor there.
**Proving once again the old adage, “Never bring a reasoned argument to a public denunciation.”
Lee, very well said...but there is a piece of info you might want to update. The news articles about defunding Minneapolis PD ends with an article with a title saying Minneapolis to spend $6.x Million to improve police recruitment. Be advised that after this article came out and the Mayor and police chief tried to implement that plan, the Minneapolis City Council voted AGAINST spending the money on recruitment/retention of police officers. They haven't learned a thing despite being under a court order to increase the number of officers to the charter mandated minimum of 731.
Happy new year, Lee! Let's hope that reason and enlightenment prevail in 2024.