Is Internal Reform of Academia Possible?
Rebuttals of the "Can't do" attitudes among some reformers
Lee here to start off this co-written post. My as-yet unindicted co-conspirator is Kevin McCaffree. He is a professor of sociology, co-editor-in-chief of Theory and Society (Springer Nature), co-editor of Evoutionary Analysis in the Social Sciences (Routledge), and co-director of the Skeptic Research Center. His interests and publishing spans fields and sub-disciplines and his hope is to play even a small role in saving academics from themselves.
On the latter point, this will become obvious in the post.
Kevin McCaffree & Lee Jussim
THE problem within academia that has gotten us in so much trouble: left-wing ideological corruption of theory, methods, hiring, teaching, grant-making and publishing.1 Solving this problem is going to be very difficult.
Typically, the contributing factors to this problem are assumed to exist among “those people,” that is, in the ideologically-motivated professors and incompetent administrators that facilitate cancel culture, censorship, intellectually suffocating conformity pressures, politicized journals, politicized professional societies, politicized funding, activism-infused scholarship, political discrimination, biased scholarship, narcissistic scholarship,2 and on and on and on…
Although much of the blame for our current circumstance can be fairly laid at the feet of these people, this post is not about them. It is, instead, about turning the mirror back on ourselves—on the real (and posturing, more on this forthwith) reformers who claim they would like to improve the situation. At some point, those frustrated with the state of social science and higher education should consider their potential role in the ongoing problems. It’s all too easy to point the finger, and again, much of the finger pointing is sensible, but the state of affairs probably wouldn’t be as bad as it is if the ostensible reformers had been doing their job.
Thus, this post is about self-inflicted obstacles to reform. It is about the denialism that there even is a deep problem. It is about attempts to deflect attention from addressing the problems. It is about the handwringing, pearl-clutching timidity among some of those who, with one hand, claim to want reform, and, with the other, are constantly explaining why it can’t be done, or why now is not the right time to do it, or why the real concerning problem is something else entirely.
One of the best such examples can be found … ready? … wait for it … you won’t believe it … At the Heterodox Academy 2025 conference. Scroll through this video till the 9:10 mark, and listen to Mark Roth, President of Wesleyan University talk till about 12:30. 3 1/2 minutes.
If you have just kept reading, please, I urge you to spend the 3 minutes to listen to him.
He is not alone. Far from it. According to The Atlantic, Princeton President
Eisgruber argued that American higher education was in better shape than ever before. He rejected the right-wing narrative that universities indoctrinate students in leftist ideology, as well as the notion that they should attempt to achieve an ideological balance that matches the country’s.
Better shape than ever?
Eisgruber can “reject” anything he likes, but the evidence for indoctrination grows every year.3 His latter point is a straw argument that no one is making, and exemplifies the sort of deflection that is the focus of this essay. If you can get people thinking, “Yeah, achieving ideological balance in academia is ridiculous. Except for buffoons, Trump, and rightwingers, no one in their right mind thinks that’s a great idea” then you can get them to stop paying attention to the actual arguments and proposals of the internal-to-academia reformers none of which involve achieving some sort of Utopian ideological balance in academia. And if you relentlessly deflect, deny and avoid the arguments and proposals of those internal to academia, the only route left open to reform is from outside forces, such as the federal and state govts.
Deny, Deflect, Avoid
We participate in a variety of organizations and efforts to reform academia. And we hear variations on these defensive deflections all the time.
If some academics wish to fight Trump and his policies, that’s the American way. Go for it.
But Trump’s real or imagined failures are completely irrelevant to addressing the very real, and now massive and multi-pronged, problem of left-wing political corruption within academia. No one in their right minds would declare “well cancer is really terrible so now is not the time to address heart disease.” And yet… Roth again, paraphrased in The Atlantic:
Roth told me that universities have room to improve on some fronts, including increasing viewpoint diversity among faculty. But he believes that they can address that on their own time once Trump is out of office. “To be worried about that right now seems to me like people in Ukraine worrying about corruption in the mining industry,” Roth told me. “It’s the Russians that are the problem.”
Roth has been President of Wesleyan since 2007. Because it is very important to understand how much credibility he has earned when he says they will address the problems after Trump is gone, his vast track record of reforms addressing the political corruption of academia pre-Trump is show in the Figure belown
He does have a rhetorical flare, though, doesn’t he? Trump cutting indirect costs on grants, extirpating DEI from grant funding, and making demands that universities ensure Jews on their campuses aren’t discriminated against is just like Russia invading Ukraine. We can’t see a difference, can you?4
Rhetoric Deployed to Obstruct Reform Efforts
Bluntly, the problem facing social science and higher education appears so intractable because many professors and administrators are either incompetent or ideologically motivated and because those in a position to create and implement reform are too uncertain, cowardly, or confused to carry out their charge. We already know the tired refrains from status quo professors and administrators:
everything’s fine, no serious bias exists, our job as academics is to fight inequality, power dynamics, and injustice (even though we understand relatively little about the real world outside of our narrow expertise, and, sometimes, precious little understanding of even that. Besides, much of our work doesn’t replicate). Progressivism is just naturally more accurate about the world, and intrinsically more scientific!5
Now, anyone paying attention (including most of the American public) knows these points are BS. As do most would-be reformers. Unfortunately, too many among the reformers respond with a “can’t do”6 attitude when provided with opportunities for reform — strangely tired refrains and flaccid obstructionary talking points. Below you will find the ones we have heard, and our response to them.
We can’t start the hard work of reforming academia because (flaccid obstructionary point in bold; our response in italics):
Denials
Academia is better than ever. America has the greatest universities in the world.
The international standing of American universities is irrelevant. Also, whatever their quality, it was achieved by eschewing ideologically-infused scholarship. The superiority of American Universities can hold only insofar as the ideological corruption is reduced to very low levels and merit and rigor are prioritized.
“Reform” is just a masquerade for a rightwing takeover!
This is deeply ignorant of the alarms raised about ideological corruption of academia and arguments for reform by academics on the left and of the low quality of much social science “scholarship.” It also completely fails to engage the merits of arguments by those on the right.
The supposed need for reform is just a MAGA plot.
Lest you accuse us of caricaturizing the views of opponents of reform:
This is QAnon level delusion, we are not bothering to refute it. If you try to defend it in the comments, I (Lee here) will respond with 10-20 sources, all by academics calling for greater viewpoint diversity, all of which predate Trump or are otherwise very not MAGA, starting with John Stuart Mill’s 19th century classic:
Cartoonish Caricatures of Calls to Reform Deployed to Distract Attention from the Actual Proposed Reforms
They just want DEI and preferential selection for conservatives in admissions and hiring.
Irrelevant to the problem of ideological corruption of higher education. What they “want” is irrelevant to what we should be doing to reform academia. (Lee here): My cat wants to eat my chicken salad sandwich. I do not plan to give it to him but nor do I plan to throw him out of my house. I do plan to reform the sandwich by adding some onion.
We’re not going to start selecting faculty to represent the partisan or ideological distribution of Americans.
Irrelevant deflection. No one has called for this. The ideological corruption of social science and higher education is a problem begging for solutions, independent of whatever the partisan/ideological distribution of the American public might be.
Its not reform, Trump wants to destroy academia.
What Trump wants is irrelevant to our own severe internal problem of corrupt teaching, research, and hiring. Those who find this point about “what Trump wants” persuasive fail to grasp the political reality that our inability to clean up our internal mess—to the point where public confidence in higher education is at historic lows—opens up the door to chaotic efforts by outsiders, including govt officials, at external reform.
Its not reform, Trump wants to capture academia.
What Trump wants is irrelevant to our own severe internal problem of corrupt teaching, research, and hiring. See point 3.
It’s not That Bad
The criticisms of academia are too harsh!
Many reformers are genuinely unaware of how bad the situation in social science is. They might be aware of a few cancellation attempts, or maybe they were annoyed that some faculty in their department wanted to defund police in 2020. Or, maybe, they feel a bit uncomfortable sharing their politically conservative views. But, they conclude, though social science has some problems, they aren’t widespread, severe, and reaching (or past) a point of intractability. These individuals are ignorant but, being professors and thus, technically, “academic insiders,” they cannot imagine the magnitude of work outside of their awareness showing the severity of the problem.
What about the 30% of academics who aren’t completely ideologically captured?
There are layers to ideological capture. The top layer, which ignorant reformers are most fixated on, are the loud, extreme, bullying ideologues who act like they have some personality disorder. The next, more subtle, layer are the quieter people who have imbibed the ideology and will dutifully transmit it through papers, lectures, reviews, and so on but who don’t openly berate non-conformers. The next, even more subtle, layer are the people who are aware of the problem of ideological conformity and corruption, but who—totally unbenknownst to them—rely on status quo measures, survey questions or theories which overtly import ideological bias (e.g., debunked or empirically shaky concepts like stereotype threat, system justification, Implicit Association Tests, microaggressions, the Racial Resentment Scale, or exclusive reliance on measures of relative vs. absolute poverty, etc).
What about the good research out there?
Irrelevant. There are so many social scientists doing research that there will always be some good research. The problem is the research corrupted by infusion of ideology and partisan politics. One would not respond to a medical diagnosis of “You have lung cancer” with “But the rest of me is healthy!”
Not all academics identify as Marxists or radicals!
Again, there are layers to this corruption. Only the top, most visible and smallest, layer of status quo social scientists will be yelling at you, sweaty and red-faced, figuratively waving a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book or its modern successors.
Deflections
What about how evil Trump is? Now is not the time.
The entirety of Trump, Trumpism, and the Republican Party are irrelevant to our own severe internal problem of corrupt teaching, research, and hiring. Trump did not cause psychology’s and biomed’s replication crises. Trump did not cause the antisemitic outbreak at many universities at the onset of the Gaza War. Trump did not cause the dramatic rise in cancel culture at universities 2010-2023. Trump did not cause progressive propaganda to masquerade as scholarship. Trump did not cause higher ed to install massive, expensive, and mostly useless, or worse, DEI bureaucracies. Trump did not cause universities to engage in widespread illegal discrimination in admissions and hiring. Trump did not cause journals to retract articles at the instigation of academic social justice mobs.
What about how scary, racist, and fascist conservatives are?
See response to point 1 above. Replace “Trump” with “conservatives.”
The only thing that matters is stopping Trump.
Until Trump gets a PhD in any of the social sciences and begins teaching that capitalism causes poverty, sex is a social construct, America is an irredeemable white supremacy, and everything from statistics to medicine to social science to teaching needs to be decolonized, he is our concern at the ballot box. Nothing Trump does should prevent us from attempting to clean up our own mess.
Govt. interference in academia is a more severe problem than the corruption of academia itself.
This is entirely backwards. It is our failure to engage in reform for decades that has evoked govt interference. If we don’t reform ourselves, and simply continue to maintain corrupted programs of teaching, research and publishing, calls for outside reform will only grow and seem more and more legitimate to the public. Whether any specific govt policy towards academia is net good or bad is irrelevant to the need for academics to take the bull by the horns and institute internal reforms.
Pearl-Clutching
We haven’t agreed on the specifics of the problems!
Probably because some “reformers” can’t keep their eye on the ball of actually reforming acdemia, or are not aware of the depth and extent of the problems. Also, active reform efforts require neither unanimity nor consensus. Both of us have already instigated some internal reforms; neither of us asked anyone for permission.
We haven’t agreed on solutions!
See point 1.
We haven’t agreed on how to talk about the problems!
Hmmm, oh, wait, could this be due to “reformers” not familiarizing themselves with the evidence for massive ideological corruption?
What about this slight terminological adjustment/rephrasing that I would prefer?
Academics love their pet phrasings and jargon. But arguing about the words we use to address the problems is time and effort wasted when it could have been used to … address the problems.
What about how some pose the problem? Aren’t their elbows a little too sharp? Won’t it alienate some people?
Academics are mostly cowards. Honesty about the problems and concerted efforts at reform are what matter.
Some advocates of reform act like assholes on social media! We do not want to be associated with them do we?
Who cares? Our problems are much more severe than “someone might think I, or my academic group, associate with an asshole.” You already are associated with assholes — the “intellectual” assholes who have produced the problems we now face (see our response to Deflections, point 3). Which “assholes” do you want to be associated with? The choice is yours.
If we support reforms intended to address leftist corruption of academia, then people will think we are MAGA, MAGA dupes, or useful idiots!
See our response to point 5. Also, some of the MAGA reforms are probably net good (e.g., the extirpation of DEI from grant funding and the holding of universities accountable for addressing antisemitism and for not engaging in illegal discrimination). Regardless, there are two ways to be seen as “not MAGA”: i. Oppose everything Trump does and denounce him and his supporters as deplorable racists and fascists (how’s that worked out?); or ii. engage in reforms independently of MAGA. Alex, we’ll take choice ii and go for the gold.
If we publicly acknowledge the failings of academia, it will be exploited by malicious actors on the right to advance nefarious purposes and we can’t allow that!
Despite the convictions of many of our colleagues that only lefties care about truth, the reality is that everyone—right, left, and center—values having true beliefs and reliable data. If we reform ourselves, it will be less likely to be imposed by outsiders, and we will also be in a much stronger position to defend ourselves from unjustified attacks (precisely because if we succeed at self-reform, it will be easier to point out that further attacks on academia are unjustified and unnecessary).
Deflection, denial, avoidance. Deflection, denial, avoidance. They are the ingredients for ensuring nothing changes, nothing gets better.7 But we hope that this post has now armed those of you committed to reform with some useful rhetorical points to push back, hard, against those who engage in deflection denial, and avoidance and, perhaps, more motivation to do so.
Homework Assignment For Those Skeptical of Our Analysis
Read each of these (which just skims the surface), and the two posts linked in footnote 1, and at least one academic article linked in the various posts. Then at least you will have something beginning to approximate enough information about the state of academia to express informed skepticism as opposed to knee-jerk, tribal, defensive skepticism.
Commenting
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Footnotes
The problem of leftwing corruption of academia. Just Lee here: I am not going to fully justify this in this post, but if you need justification, you need to do the homework listed above. Also, more than half of all Americans see higher ed as going in the wrong direction. If you are a subscriber, you know that I address these problems at Unsafe Science maybe half the time, indeed, that is part of what makes it unsafe. Most of those articles have links to the underlying academic scholarship (for those of you who believe that deserves more credibility than Substack, something which I very much doubt as explained here):
Still, if you want purely academic sources, you know, peer reviewed articles, books, surveys, experiments, attesting to the hopelessly politicized corruption of academia, go here:
“What is narcissistic scholarship?” you ask. Go to Google Scholar, look up “autoethnography” and pick any article at random.
Evidence for indoctrination grows every year. This excellent article in Persuasion analyzed millions of syllabi, and, for topics like race and incarceration and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, ~95% of readings present nothing but progressive-to-far-left perspectives, often ignoring higher quality alternative perspectives. And this as yet unpublished, heavily quantitative article, including about 300,000 students at 500 colleges, found that, lo and behold, the social sciences and humanities push students left.
Ukraine, Russia, and the idea that it is silly to fight corruption when there is a war going on. War is expensive. The historical ignorance of Roth’s comment is a bit staggering. Especially when engaged in a war for survival, fighting corruption within one’s own ranks can be critical. Harry Truman first came to prominence in 1941, on the eve of the American entry into WWII, by fighting corporate corruption in America, known as “war profiteering.” Wartime production companies were gouging the govt to the tune of billions of dollars, seriously draining the ability of the US of the financial resources necessary to mobilize, at least until Truman’s investigations turned the tide.
Progressivism is just better and more scientific anyway. Those who believe this may be, therefore, stunned by this article in the apex journal Science, finding that, from 1980 to 2020, Republican Presidential administrations funded scientific research at higher levels than did Democratic administrations.
“Can’t do.” In the olden days, Americans were known for having a “can do” attitude — whether it was taming a wilderness, engineering new inventions and improvements on old ones, or defeating authoritarian empires, Americans approached the problems with grit and ingenuity. It can still be found in some places, although it is probably part of fewer Americans’ identity as Americans than it once was.
Nothing gets better. (Just Lee here again). Although I signed on to The Manhattan Statement calling for govt intervention to save academia from itself, my first preference is for academia to reform itself from within. Despite being deeply pessimistic about academia’s motivation or ability to do so, I am also participating in several working groups within academia to promote reforms. The two types of effort — from outside and from inside — are not mutually exclusive. Having spent most of my career feeling like I was howling in a locked, sealed, windowless, one room building deep in a desert hundreds of miles from the nearest human, I am ready, willing and able to work on stuff despite not being optimistic about its prospects. Also, documenting this is not the purpose of this post, but things have gotten somewhat better over the last few years (e.g., over 120 new universities signed on the institutional neutrality; the number of cancellation attacks on academics from the left is way down; civic centers are springing up all over the country and bona fide reform efforts within the academic ecosphere are in progress — but, even IF (big if) successful, it will be slow progress, and in bits and pieces.
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You two are doing a great service to future generations by trying to nudge the ship of academia back on course. And it's not just in academia, the public schools in America are also way off course infusing young students with the same left-wing thought. But I hope the changes will come and the work done at the University level trickles down to high schools and middle schools as well.
It's pretty impressive that college presidents truly believe they can't do the thing that is right in front of them, but somehow that makes them more capable of the higher-level task. "I may not be able to excise the festering Jew-hate from my campus but I can fight Fascism." Okay, sure.