Meet the New Book Burners
Introduction to Academics Demanding Censorship of Other Academics
Authoritarianism produces so much that is bad, harmful, and outright evil. Mass murder. Genocide. Corruption. War. It is evil when its consequences are short of mass killing. “Soft” authoritarianism goes hand-in-glove with corruption, deprivation of fundamental human rights, demagogues, propaganda and conspiracy theories. As such, the rise of authoritarianism in the American academy should be a concern for everyone, and a special concern to academics committed to liberal democracy. In this essay, I introduce you to some of the professors enthusiastically participating in the rise of authoritarian practices in the academy.
Book Burning
Books have been burned throughout the ages as a way for some group, often a powerful one, to establish and consolidate power, by saying "these ideas, and the people promoting them, are the type of filth and corruption that must be purged from the society to protect decent people like you and me." As a psychologist, I find this dynamic exceedingly interesting. People do not say to themselves, “I am going to censor work I oppose.” Instead, they say something like, “This work is so dangerous, so harmful, I am doing the good thing, the moral thing, by preventing its dissemination.”
In 1933, the Nazi law banning political meetings and demonstrations was called “For the Protection of the German People” (Mchangama, 2022). In the U.S. antebellum South, politicians often justified bans on abolitionist speech on the grounds that they were malicious and injured southerners’ feelings (Mchangama, 2022). More recently, the apex journal Nature now considers “potential harms” (aka empirically unidentified flying harms) as justification for rejecting submitted papers for publication. Whereas rejection is not necessarily censorship (the paper might not be up to snuff), rejecting a paper because the editor or reviewer calls “harm” constitutes a policy empowering editors to inflict their values and politics on acceptance decisions.
Ray Bradbury, author of, among other things, Fahrenheit 451, a dystopian scifi novel that centers on book burning as a centerpiece of authoritarian control, put it this way:
"“There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.”
Book burning in Bradbury’s sense includes but is not restricted to the literal burning of books. It also includes almost any attempt to censor any type of expressive work, including art, fiction, and academic papers and talks.
Academics are in the business of exploring all sorts of topics, including controversial and even taboo topics. As such, one might think book burning would be anathema to academics. If so, one would be wrong. Literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands of academics, endorse book burning as defined here (attempts to suppress work that pisses them off; it is easy enough to track down the open letters and petitions in the cases of Tuvel, Gilley, and Gliske; and then there are additional hundreds, maybe thousands, denouncing and calling for the retraction of papers or by Cesario, Diaz & Bailey, Littman and to shut down a website hosted by Lawford-Smith).1
Of course, if you have been a subscriber for a while, you know that the book burning attempt with which I am personally most familiar is the fiasco at Perspectives on Psychological Science (PoPS). I wrote about this extensively (such as here, here, and here), and also had several guest posts on this (such as here and here) so will briefly just summarize the events here. Then-editor of PoPS Klaus Fiedler accepted a target article arguing that diversity was more than just race and marginalized groups; and he also accepted three commentaries on this article that mostly agreed (all can be found here; one was mine). Included in some of the pieces (including mine) was a critique of a prior article emphasizing race and marginalized groups. Although the author of that article was invited to submit his own response to the entire set, he instead chose to publicly denounce all of us as racists. This led to the rapid formation of an online mob and an open letter calling for Fiedler to be fired and on PoPS not to publish the papers.2
The table below is from a chapter on book burning that will soon be published; it exposes some disturbing similarities between the actions advocated in the open letter and practices common in some of the 20th century’s worst totalitarian regimes. No, I am not saying “the signatories to the open letter are identical in every way to Nazis and communists.” Nor is this “Vegetarianism is bad because Hitler was a vegetarian.” The comparison of the tactics is relevant and instructive because there are some clear similarities.
Furthermore, the "authoritarian temptation"3 runs deep and is ever-present, in large portions of even the American population, on both the left and the right and among academics. It is not that "most Americans (or even most academics) are authoritarian." The ambient levels of authoritarianism on the left and right in the U.S. is probably in the single digits percentwise. But moral outrage, actual injustices, demagogues, hyper-polarization, etc. all can and do create situations where otherwise seemingly more or less normal decent people endorse aggression directed at their political enemies and seek to deprive them of rights that are the bedrock of a liberal democratic society (free speech, free association, due process, etc.) and of a well-functioning scientific and academic community.
There were almost 1400 academic signatories to the open letter calling to book burn the articles Fiedler had accepted at PoPS. We can’t meet all ~1400. But even meeting a few signatories is … instructive.
Presidents of Social Psychology Societies
Nothing quite says far left “ideological capture” as does major society presidents endorsing book burning, confiscation of private property, public shaming, and rejection of due process.
Laura King, former President of The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). She also was President when SPSP adopted its controversial mandatory DEI statement requirement for submissions to its yearly conference, a requirement subsequently abandoned. Inasmuch as mandatory DEI statements are plausibly viewed as a form of compelled speech, at least her authoritarianism is consistent.
Christian Crandall, former president of The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Some of his publications are also … interesting.
Crandall, C. S. (2019). Science as dissent: The practical value of basic and applied science. Journal of Social Issues, 75(2), 630-641.
White II, M. H., & Crandall, C. S. (2017). Science, democratic values, and the politics of research. Translational Issues in Psychological Science, 3(3), 321.
I can’t resist quoting the abstract in full:
We review the key role that independent science plays in promoting democracy. Political psychologists must pay careful attention to the norms of science, and keep their personal and political values in balance with scientific goals. The voice of science becomes a sort of dissent—an independent voice not beholden to partisan politics.
Some More Delicious Ironies
Alison Ledgerwood is the first signatory of the PoPS open letter and, therefore, a likely candidate for being one of the main organizers and, possibly, lead writer. The most delicious thing about Professor Ledgerwood is that she received an SPSP service award for … get this, her efforts to advance constructive scientific discourse in the field. To be clear, the award was in 2017 and it was not for leading the PoPS denunciation brigade. Let’s just call this another “failed replication.”
Kurt Gray,has published some good work on liberal democracy, and, as such, it is particularly sad to his polarizing, authoritarian, denunciatory behavior in the real world. Consider these:
Hartman, R., Hester, N., & Gray, K. (2023). People see political opponents as more stupid than evil. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 49(7), 1014-1027.
This paper leads off with this from the abstract: Affective polarization [hating the other side] is a rising threat to political discourse and democracy…These studies clarify the way everyday partisans view each other, an important step in designing effective interventions to reduce political animosity.
Puryear, C., Vandello, J. and Gray, K., 2022. Virality Drives Moral Panics on Social Media.
Here is how the abstract starts: Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear to occur almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps to fuel moral panics by combining societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification—virality. Ten studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics, in which virality amplifies the perception of threat posed by deviant behavior and ideas, prompting moral outrage expression.
Ya think?
Even more delicious, Professor Gray is highlighted at The New Pluralists, where he is among a group described as:
making distinctive contributions to new pluralism across a range of domains in this growing field — from depolarization, social healing, bridge building, and racial reconciliation to immigrant inclusion, collaborative problem-solving, civic skill-building, and interfaith engagement.
Who is up for an open letter publicly shaming him for grotesque hypocrisy and calling on the New Pluralists to remove him from the website?
Jason Stanley is a philosopher at Yale who publishes a fair amount on fascism. On the right, of course. Only on the right. I mean, that’s fine, it is good that people study fascism on the right. Fascism on the right is a very bad thing. But, in signing the PoPS open letter, he is not merely ignoring authoritarianism on the left, he participated in it. The Orwelexicon has a term for this:
The Journal Editor
Aidan Wright, is a Professor of Psychology at UMichigan and editor of The Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science. I only discovered he was a signatory to the PoPS open letter after having this bizarre exchange with him on Twitter.
He posted this:
https://twitter.com/aidangcw/status/1709724009514856475
Shown was the full text of an ad, which is printed in full in the appendix below. Here I only excerpt the relevant text:
In service of APA’s commitment to equity, diversity and inclusion and the Racial Equity Action Plan, APA Publishing’s fellowship programs seeks to elevate leadership opportunities for ECPs [early career psychologists] from communities that have been historically underrepresented in research and publishing leadership roles. Such individuals include, but are not limited to, psychologists who are Black, Indigenous, or other people of color and ethnicities as well as those psychologists who study, advocate on behalf of, or practice primarily with communities of color.
I asked this:
A thread is a series of linked tweets. You can find the whole set as a sort of raw blog post, here. I also posted quotes from Supreme Court rulings that long predate the recent case concluding that the type of affirmative action in admissions practiced at Harvard was illegal, such as:
My Twitter thread also linked to both Federal and Washington DC (where APA, The American Psychological Association, is located) law prohibiting racial discrimination. The DC law strikes me as even stronger and clearer than Federal civil rights protections:
It is the intent of the Council of the District of Columbia, in enacting this unit, to secure an end in the District of Columbia to discrimination for any reason other than that of individual merit, including, but not limited to, discrimination by reason of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, marital status, personal appearance, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression…
Just in case APA thinks it is getting around these prohibitions against racial discrimination by virtue of calling this a “fellowship,” DC has the answer:
“Employer” means any person who, for compensation, employs an individual, except for the employer’s parent, spouse, children or domestic servants, engaged in work in and about the employer’s household; any person acting in the interest of such employer, directly or indirectly; and any professional association.
Here are some of Aidan’s responses:
This might look reasonable until you reread the ad (“psychologists who are Black or Indigenous) and the DC law closely (no discrimination for any reason other than merit).
It then goes downhill from there:
After I pointed out that there is literally no mention of viewpoing diversity in the ad, and there is quite explicit mention of race/ethnicity, he replied with this:
Deflection anyone? Gaslighting? I mean, he’s a clinical psychologist, so again we have Nietszche, monsters and abysses…
It is also so delicious because of just how wrong it is. Let’s go chronologically. It is employment given DC’s definition. I do have a pirate Twitter avatar, but “cosplay” involves dressing up in real life (I confess to having bought a pirate costume for my 6 year old granddaughter’s Halloween style birthday party). Some pirates were indeed thieves and bullies, but plenty were Jews driven out of Spain by The Inquisition who went on to plunder the Spanish fleet, and pirate ranks include Jean Lafitte, a hero of The War of 1812 and whose base of operations can still be found in New Orleans.
But of course debating pirate history is not the point. Professor Wright couldn’t rebut the point so was simply searching for some way to delegitimize me personally. So he unleashed a series of silly personal insults.
Last, my identity warrior followers? APA posts an ad based on racial identities and those of us asking whether Aidan had any idea about the legality of the ad are identity warriors?
And doing so is “shameful”? I guess once you get into the denunciation game, you get a taste for it.
And if anything is “shameful,” it is an editor of a major psychology journal promoting a policy that may be illegal, a policy that has been very salient lately with the recent SCOTUS affirmative action case, and without apparently giving it much serious consideration prior to the issue being raised on Twitter.
Welcome to academia in 2023.
Reference
Mchangama, J. (2022). Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media. Basic Books: Hachette Book Group.
Footnotes
Not all calls for retraction are book burning. The Committee on Public Ethics has produced clear, a priori, professional standards for retraction, and include criteria such as data fraud or rampant error and plagiarism. None of the papers discussed here were even accused of these sorts of transgressions.
PoPS papers. I was recently contacted that PoPS is going to publish the papers despite the mob. However, they will also be presenting “editorials” about the incident. Stay tuned, this may continue to be … interesting.
The authoritarian temptation is a minor modification of The Totalitarian Temptation, which was the title of two of Jacob Mchangama’s exquisite Clear and Present Danger podcast on a history of free speech. I recommend the entire series.
APPENDIX: The American Psychological Association ad posted by Aidan Wright, in full:
"Why I won't bother pursuing a PhD" part the umpteenth
"...pirate ranks include Jean Lafitte, a hero of The War of 1812 and whose base of operations can still be found in New Orleans."
One man's hero is another man's villain. We burned the White House in that glorious 1812 War of yours. Ha ha ha. And you do not teach that history in your schools, I learned from my American wife...
Out of jest. Historical and not eulogised Lafitte was an outlaw who smuggled goods against the laws of your country and took part in the war in exchange for a pardon for his crimes. Most historical pirates, corsairs and privateers were individuals of highly questionable ethics if not outright criminal, including my dear Francis Drake. Nevertheless, and psychologists like Mr Wright should know that, pirates come in our culture to represent a symbol of rebellion and refusal to bend to oppressive laws. If Mr Wright would like to dictate the social media avatars that academics can use to be considered respectable, we are at an all time low.
On the specific matter. I think that Mr Wright believes to be saved by the "Such individuals include, but are not limited to" premised sentence. I have seen it used as a safeguard from accusations of discrimination, by people who then maintain that their mentioning those categories is just in order to encourage submissions from underrepresented groups, but does not limit submissions to them nor has any bearing in the actual process of selection, which is done on merit.
Unfortunately I fear that the initial statement defeats that purpose... "The editorial leadership team for the Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science seeks nominations for 4 editorial fellowship positions for early-career psychologists from historically underrepresented groups." There is no "not limited to" clause. Pretty damning.
I miss, though, as a historian, the barb about studying Fascism only on the right. Fascism is by definition a very specific and historically detailed ideology of the right. Totalitarianism on the left takes different names and different shapes, although it is equally illiberal and murderous.
I have not read Jason Stanley. Does he give a generic illiberal, authoritarian attitude the name of Fascism, in the way of Antifa? Because if he does, he is a REALLY poor scholar.