Victory Lap

This time, its personal

Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. Winston Churchill

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.

It is about my experiences after The Racist Mule/PoPS Fiasco cancelation attack, in which I was denounced by almost 1400 academics for using a quote from Fiddler on the Roof. I am only one person and this is only one attack, so I do not want to make too much of its aftermath. At the same time, it is an existence proof that one can survive those attacks, however miserable they may be. More than survive. Thrive. This is my story.

One purpose of such attempts at public shaming is to ostracize the targets, to make them beyond the pale of normal decent morality and normal decent people. Another purpose is to send a clear message to everyone else in related fields: “If you do this sort of thing, you will suffer severe consequences, so you better not.” In academia, this manifests as potentially being closed out of jobs, grants, conference invitations, and to poison the well so that your papers have inordinate difficulty getting published.

I can’t speak to the message other people got from The Racist Mule attack. But I am writing this essay not mainly to brag, but to communicate to any of those paying attention, that they failed. If their goal was to ostracize me, and harm me professionally, they completely and utterly failed. This might be “news you can use” if you ever wonder about how you, or someone you care about, is subject to one of these attacks.

First, Tactics

Long before this happened to me, I had written about how to respond to cancelation attacks. Here are the key elements:

1. Stay calm; accept your fate; prepare to weather the storm.

2. DucknCover, go silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you during the attack by the mob.

3. Do not apologize.

4. Do not resign, cave, retract or voluntarily cooperate. You may win or lose but dig in and make them fight for every inch of territory.

5. Record everything you can. You can use this later (see next point).

6. Play the long game. These attacks are intense, brutal and short. The mob usually has a very short attention span. If you can survive the initial attack, you can make it…interesting.

7. Seek allies. People hate this cancelation attack shit. If you are fortunate (as I am in this way), some of them are in powerful places or have platforms that they can mobilize to fight it off.

8. Counterattack. I did, first at Unsafe Science (such as here, here and here, but there is way more) and then, see “Lemonade” below. And the counterattack ain’t over.

The Results

As the controversy heated up, my current chair asked me if I thought this was good for my career. She was not being hostile, demanding, or imposing; I think she was genuinely concerned both for the climate in the dept and also for me.

First, some context. I did not seek out controversy. I almost never do, though I rarely shirk from making points I know others disagree with or even despise, if I think the data support my claims or otherwise have a sound argument.

What happened started out as completely benign academic-normal. Fiedler, then editor at Perspectives on Psychological Science, invited me to do a commentary on Hommel’s paper (which inherently involved the Roberts et al (2020) paper because he critiqued it). I did. I wrote lots of things I knew many of my colleagues would dislike, including characterizing the dominant view of “diversity” in academia as narrow-minded, hypocritical, and essentially a Trojan Horse masking a bluntly political agenda that manifests, among other ways, as producing unjustified scientific claims. I knew this would be controversial, and I knew there was a risk of the type of cancelation attack that actually occurred (I warned Fiedler of exactly this when I reviewed the Hommel paper, so this was an a priori concern, not hindsight bias). But I hope I rarely refrain from stating things I think are on target because it might piss people off.¹

Regardless, one of the pieces of advice I gave to others, in thinking about how to respond to these types of attacks, is play the long game. That is because, though it may feel like the world is ending when one is targeted this way (or, at least the professional world of the person so attacked), the world is not ending. People hate this shit. By laying low during the attack, but playing the long game, it was possible, just possible, that I could fight these illiberal assholes to a draw, or, maybe, just maybe, come out on top. You don’t know till you make the attempt.

With all this in mind, I replied to my chair’s question about whether I thought this would be good for my career with, “That remains to be seen.”

Results are now in.

Personal Damage

There was some. I lost two collaborators, when early career researchers decided they could not be “seen” collaborating with me. This is important. These attacks are on the persons targeted, but they are much more than that. They are a way to communicate to others, “This behavior is beyond the pale. We are the new moral sheriffs in town, and you better conform to our politics and our values. If you don’t, you may be next.”

Academia, especially in the social sciences and humanities, is more a reputational game than a validity-seeking game. Every step in academic success involves, not producing things that are actually true, but succeeding because of others’ subjective evaluations of your work.

The earlier in one’s career, the more one has to be aware of this fact. Indeed, one is not being irrational if one worries about this, and studiously avoids such controversies in order to avoid pissing off those upon whom one’s career depends. This means that those most vulnerable to these attacks are not senior academics like myself, but early career researchers; those who need admission to graduate school, jobs, publications, grants and tenure. Often, all one needs is one hostile person on a search committee, admissions committee, grant panel, or in peer review to have one’s prospects or work torpedoed. Early career researchers are not being irrational if they decide, “Standing up for something on principle, whether it is truth, validity, morality, due process, liberal democratic values, or even my colleague and collaborator who I think is being unfairly targeted, is not worth the personal risk to my career.”

I cannot fault any of them for having made the decision to drop their collaborations with me out of fear of being tainted by guilt-by-association, a classic technique used by the illiberal and dogmatic to grab power by inducing ideological conformity (such as was used by Joseph McCarthy in the 1940s and 1950s). But this sort of conformity-inducing system is one of academia’s many dysfunctions, at least if you believe in open inquiry and validity. Free discourse is a crucial necessary condition for communally figuring out almost anything, including truth, wisdom, morality and controversial issues of any kind.

I am way overcommitted, and the project I lost out on was peripheral to my main interests and current efforts. So in reality, losing that project was probably a net plus for my life. It relieved me of having to work on something that was not all that crucial to me. Still, I did not choose to abandon that project; that occurred because two early career researchers felt they could not be seen around me. So I think it is fair to consider this a type of damage.

When one goes into battle, even academic and intellectual ones, one should always understand the risk of taking some personal or professional damage. It comes with the territory of dealing with controversies.

Scientific Damage

The figure below was produced by Rishi Joshi for a paper we have collaborated on and which just came outis under review, on censorship of scientific work by other scientists. It is based on his terrific paper, The Epistemic Consequences of Social Pressure, which I strongly recommend you read in full.

The figure shows a hypothetical state of affairs. The blue stars represent some evidence that something (let’s call it “X”) is true. The red stars are evidence that X is false. The large circle is the full set of evidence in the world, and it shows there is much more evidence that X is false than that it is true. The small circle is the peer reviewed literature, most of which shows that X is true. This can happen for many reasons, but the reason Joshi’s paper addressed was social pressure. If there is social pressure to NOT claim that X is false, (say, via censorship, conformity, or reputational concerns) then many people with evidence that X is false may not publicly present it, or they may avoid studying topics altogether that risk finding evidence that X is false. Now imagine how this dynamic might corrupt scientific literatures on anything controversial, including but not restricted to microaggressions, implicit bias, diversity in psychology (the topic of this particular controversy), transgender issues and even climate science.²

If there is social pressure not to present evidence reaching some conclusion about a particular claim, the peer reviewed literature may fail to reflect reality. This corrosion of the validity of the peer reviewed literature can, when it becomes public knowledge, contribute to an erosion in the credibility of academic research, and to the ongoing decline of trust in public institutions.

But Oh the Benefits!

So far, that all sounds bad, right? But the totality is not merely “not bad,” it is terrific. It has given my career a booster-rocket like acceleration. I can’t say I am “glad” it happened, but, looking back? I do not think I would trade it for a controversy-free life. Let me count the ways.

1. They Doubled My Salary

That is literally true but a bit misleading. I am in fact making twice what I made last year. However, last year, I was on sabbatical, so only received 80% of my normal salary, so its literally true but they did not double my base salary. Also, some of this is because of the new faculty contract, which provided small across-the-board raises to all faculty.

But the main reason it doubled is because, and you can’t make this up, I am now Acting Chair of Rutgers Anthropology Department. There was some internal snafu that the deans decided to resolve by bringing in a non-anthropologist as chair. I was their top choice and after some negotiations, agreed to do it. Chair positions come with a temporary salary boost that comes from one’s appointment going from 9 months to 12 months, and which will disappear after I step down. HOWEVER, I also received a hefty raise that is permanent. This is great, because it means a salary boost that will last the rest of the time I work at Rutgers (and I have no plans to retire, so we are talking what? 5 years? 10? 15? 20?). When you put all this together, my salary this year is double last year.

My main deanly negotiations were with one particular dean. Also a psychologist, who I am pretty sure knew all about the PoPS fiasco. In trying to persuade me to take on the position, he said, paraphrasing from memory but this is pretty close, “You are walking into a difficult position and some people may resent you for being an outside chair. But we know you can handle it graciously because we know you have a thick skin.” This is so delicious because it constitutes a total backfiring of any attempt on the part of the mob to inflict career damage on me. Should I thank the mob?

One of the first things we did with my new paycheck was take a trip to France. We spent 10 days, first in the Loire Valley and then in Paris, where, among other things, we attended the 2023 Bastille Day fireworks, which really seems fitting as both metaphor and celebration.

That’s fireworks bursting from The Eiffel Tower! on the left.

2. Spike in Paid Substack Subscriptions

Most people hate cancellation attacks and censorship more broadly. And some voted with their pocket books. Shown below is the spike in paid subscriptions to Unsafe Science in response to the attack. At the time the attack was occurring, this was probably as valuable as moral support as it was as income (but I get to its value as income below the figure!). THANK YOU.

I have dedicated at least 2/3 of this income to research and activism designed to fight all this nonsense, and used some of it to support the first conference of the Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences. I have otherwise not yet spent a dime of it for anything personal, preferring to keep it in reserve to fund projects that cannot be funded in other ways. THANK YOU.

3. Large Scale Collaborations

Given that one purpose of cancellation attacks is to ostracize the target, this is as delicious as my recent salary raise. Before the attack, in 37 years of academic publishing, I had published only three large scale collaboration (let’s define this as one involving at least 15 co-authors). Since the attack, i.e., 10 months ago, I have been involved in another three, titles and authors shown (the first two are published; the third is under review 11/9 update: also now accepted for publication!). Ostracize my ass.

4. National Press Attention to My Scholarship

I had had major mainstream media outlets write about my work once in the prior 37 years of my career. The PoPS attack occurred in December, 2022. Since then, three major news outlets ran stories or op-eds on my scholarship. The Washington Post covered my work on glorification of self-harm on social media, and The New York Times and Wall Street Journal covered our paper on merit, shown above. I doubt that the attack caused them to cover my work, but it sure didn’t prevent them from doing so. Ostracize my ass.

5. Invitations to Activism: Free Speech, Academic Freedom, Open Inquiry

After the attack, I was invited to participate in writing The Princeton Principles, a working group that wrote a new clarion call for institutions of higher education to create bedrock protections for free speech, academic freedom and open inquiry. From the introduction:

The core mission of the university, and its distinctive contribution to the American republic, is the pursuit of truth and advancement of knowledge through scholarship and teaching. This mission is sustained by freedom of inquiry, freedom of expression, and equality before laws and campus regulations. The best universities cultivate free and thoughtful minds

I was also invited to participate in The University of Austin’s First Principles meeting, to help build a new university with a commitment to free and open inquiry. This was a great experience and I hope to keep that connection going strong. I am hoping to present at their Forbidden Courses program next summer.

6. Vast Support in Public Coverage of the PoPS Fiasco

I followed my own advice regarding dealing with cancelation attacks and sought allies. And they really came through. Every bit of public coverage of this event by nonacademics of which I am aware criticized mocked or denounced the denouncers. See discussions in:

The Chronicle of Higher Education, Blocked and Reported Podcast, Quillette, The Washington Free Beacon, Minding the Campus, The College Fix

7. Making Lemonade-Flavored Scholarship

You know the old saw, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” I implemented it. I turned the entire attack into inspiration for a publication, a book chapter to appear in Joe Forgas’s edited book, The Psychology of Tribalism. The chapter is called The New Book Burners, about the rise of: 1. an illiberal far left ideology on campus; and 2. calls to retract peer reviewed papers by mobs decrying violations of some form of social justice sacred beliefs and values. The PoPS fiasco is one of the events covered in that chapter. An earlier draft of that chapter is available here for paid subscribers.

Academic success runs, in large part, on publications. Should I thank the mob?

We had to revise the chapter, though, before publishing. Mostly, this involved trimming it to fit page limitations, but we were able to add one thing that did not appear in the earlier draft. Enjoy:

Updates Nov 9, 2023: It Gets Even Better

That censorship paper shown above (“Proscial motives…” led by Cory Clark, with me second and a cast of stars), which was under review when this was first posted, is now published and appears in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

You might think “What could top that?” Well, here goes.

On 11/6, my collaborators and I over at The Network Contagion Research Institute³ posted a report titled: “The Corruption of the American Mind – How concealed foreign funding of U.S. higher education predicts erosion of democratic values and antisemitic incidents on campus.” The full report linked above has all the scientific gory details, but here are the headlines:

• Over 200 American colleges and universities illegally withheld information on approximately $13 billion in undocumented contributions from foreign governments, many of which are authoritarian

• At institutions receiving this money (especially if it was from an authoritarian or Middle Eastern regime there was more:

  • speech/academic freedom erosion, manifesting as campaigns to silence academics or punish them for speech

  • antisemitism, as measured by the FBI, ADL and AMCHA (the latter two are Jewish activist organizations but one amazing thing in the report was the similarity of results regardless of source).

Our report was then picked up by Bari Weiss who covered it as the lead story at The Free Press. I recommend her article, it is an excellent short description of what we found, and includes some pretty good analysis by Bari and others. Weiss’s Free Press (created after she was ostracized at the NYTimes) may not be quite at the level of the Times/WaPost/WSJ but it is even more influential in some circles. If that sounds like sour grapes because the big media did not pick up our report, consider this:

A day later, The House (as in U.S. House of Representatives House) Committee on Education and the Workforce picked up Weiss’s story, was appalled by what our report showed, put it on the agenda for the next day and by Nov 8 (yesterday!) had voted to advamce to the full House, by a bipartisan 27-11 vote, H.R. 5993, the Defending Education Transparency and Ending Rogue Regimes Engaging in Nefarious Transactions (DETERRENT) Act.

Stay tuned. It might be a while before the bill is even considered by the full House. Still, this is a first for me. It is the first time I have ever published anything that was deemed of sufficient importance to influence federal legislation (and this is simply a report posted at NCRI’s website, it is not in a peer reviewed journal — but maybe that’s half the secret?).

Conclusion

This essay was about my experiences, but its not just about me. I am definitely fortunate to work at a place that is not totally ideologically captured and that still rewards merit; to have collaborators with guts of steel; and to have allies with platforms. Still, I have long been loud about these sorts of issues because being loud is an existence proof: It shows that, at least under some circumstances, one can not only survive these attacks, but thrive after, and even to some extent, because of them, at least if one has a few high cards and plays them well. As such, 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.

Ostracize my ass.

1. On not refraining from saying things. Even I realize that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. And that concessions to win a larger battle are often justified. This is beyond the scope of this essay.

2. Climate science. Not my field, but it is perhaps worth stating that, as a non-expert, I believe that the world is getting warmer and that much of that is caused by human activity. That does not prevent Joshi’s figure from applying to some common climate science claims in the peer reviewed literature.

3. Network Contagion Research Institue is a deeply interdisciplinary group studying radicalization, hate and conspiracy theories mostly online — though they brought me in to expand out to include conventional social science. I have several reports with them, including the one covered by the Washington Post linked in this essay.