[Link] Diversity and Academic Open Mindedness

GLaDOS

I had an interesting recent conversation with a fellow academic that I think worth a blog post. It started with my commenting that I thought support for "diversity" in the sense in which the term is usually used in the academic context—having students or faculty from particular groups, in particular blacks but also, in some contexts, gays, perhaps hispanics, perhaps women—in practice anticorrelated with support for the sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.

I offered my standard example. Imagine that a university department has an opening and is down to two or three well qualified candidates. They learn that one of them is an articulate supporter of South African Apartheid. Does the chance of hiring him go up or down? If the university is actually committed to intellectual diversity, the chance should go up—it is, after all, a position that neither faculty nor students are likely to have been exposed to. In fact, in any university I am familiar with, it would go sharply down.

The response was that that he considered himself very open minded, getting along with people across the political spectrum, but that that position was so obviously beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse that refusing to hire the candidate was the correct response.

The question I should have asked and didn't was whether he had ever been exposed to an intelligent and articulate defense of apartheid. Having spent my life in the same general environment—American academia—as he spent his, I think the odds are pretty high that he had not been. If so, he was in the position of a judge who, having heard the case for the prosecution, convicted the defendant without bothering to hear the defense. Worse still, he was not only concluding that the position was wrong—we all have limited time and energy, and so must often reach such conclusions on an inadequate basis—he was concluding it with a level of certainty so high that he was willing to rule out the possibility that the argument on the other side might be worth listening to.

An alternative question I might have put to him was whether he could make the argument for apartheid about as well as a competent defender of that system could. That, I think, is a pretty good test of whether one has an adequate basis to reject a position—if you don't know the arguments for it, you probably don't know whether those arguments are wrong, although there might be exceptions. I doubt that he could have. At least, in the case of political controversies where I have been a supporter of the less popular side, my experience is that those on the other side considerably overestimate their knowledge of the arguments they reject.

Which reminds me of something that happened to me almost fifty years ago—in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running for President. I got into a friendly conversation with a stranger, probably set off by my wearing a Goldwater pin and his curiosity as to how someone could possibly support that position.

We ran through a series of issues. In each case, it was clear that he had never heard the arguments I was offering in defense of Goldwater's position and had no immediate rebuttal. At the end he asked me, in a don't-want-to-offend-you tone of voice, whether I was taking all of these positions as a joke.

I interpreted it, and still do, as the intellectual equivalent of "what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" How could I be intelligent enough to make what seemed like convincing arguments for positions he knew were wrong, and yet stupid enough to believe them?

Yup. (Q_Q)

Follow up post: Academic Orthodoxy: Official Lies

David Friedman writes on his blog.

I had an interesting recent conversation with a fellow academic that I think worth a blog post. It started with my commenting that I thought support for "diversity" in the sense in which the term is usually used in the academic context—having students or faculty from particular groups, in particular blacks but also, in some contexts, gays, perhaps hispanics, perhaps women—in practice anticorrelated with support for the sort of diversity, diversity of ideas, that ought to matter to a university.

I offered my standard example. Imagine that a university department has an opening and is down to two or three well qualified candidates. They learn that one of them is an articulate supporter of South African Apartheid. Does the chance of hiring him go up or down? If the university is actually committed to intellectual diversity, the chance should go up—it is, after all, a position that neither faculty nor students are likely to have been exposed to. In fact, in any university I am familiar with, it would go sharply down.

The response was that that he considered himself very open minded, getting along with people across the political spectrum, but that that position was so obviously beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse that refusing to hire the candidate was the correct response.

The question I should have asked and didn't was whether he had ever been exposed to an intelligent and articulate defense of apartheid. Having spent my life in the same general environment—American academia—as he spent his, I think the odds are pretty high that he had not been. If so, he was in the position of a judge who, having heard the case for the prosecution, convicted the defendant without bothering to hear the defense. Worse still, he was not only concluding that the position was wrong—we all have limited time and energy, and so must often reach such conclusions on an inadequate basis—he was concluding it with a level of certainty so high that he was willing to rule out the possibility that the argument on the other side might be worth listening to.

An alternative question I might have put to him was whether he could make the argument for apartheid about as well as a competent defender of that system could. That, I think, is a pretty good test of whether one has an adequate basis to reject a position—if you don't know the arguments for it, you probably don't know whether those arguments are wrong, although there might be exceptions. I doubt that he could have. At least, in the case of political controversies where I have been a supporter of the less popular side, my experience is that those on the other side considerably overestimate their knowledge of the arguments they reject.

Which reminds me of something that happened to me almost fifty years ago—in 1964, when Barry Goldwater was running for President. I got into a friendly conversation with a stranger, probably set off by my wearing a Goldwater pin and his curiosity as to how someone could possibly support that position.

We ran through a series of issues. In each case, it was clear that he had never heard the arguments I was offering in defense of Goldwater's position and had no immediate rebuttal. At the end he asked me, in a don't-want-to-offend-you tone of voice, whether I was taking all of these positions as a joke.

I interpreted it, and still do, as the intellectual equivalent of "what is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?" How could I be intelligent enough to make what seemed like convincing arguments for positions he knew were wrong, and yet stupid enough to believe them?

Yup. (Q_Q)

Follow up post: Academic Orthodoxy: Official Lies

They certainly exist, but it's certainly the kind of thing that would be held against an applicant.

I'm not talking about rare, exceptional cases for those examples. In many areas, right-wing ideas are overrepresented, e.g. libertarians in economics. But I think that has more to do with how relatively interested libertarians are in economics.

I've also stated somewhere else in this comment section that there are examples of unwarranted exclusion of non-left views by academic leftists. (I'm a huge Orwell nut, by the way.) If this is a huge problem, I want to see it in terms of base rates, not particular examples. I will also add that I do count being right-wing against a source. Right or wrong, I live in Tennessee and I'm surrounded by a majority of evangelical, Christian Republicans who fill the local opinion pages with letters about how they're never represented by the press. I've heard these people cry "persecution" too often for it to have much effect. Again, this might best be considered damage that ought to be repaired, but you should at least know that it is there.

From the National Review post:

As with the “debate” on fossil-fuel divestment at Harvard, no student prior to that vote mounted a challenge to the fundamental premises of the movement: that fossil-fuel producers are “public enemies” every bit as contemptible as South African apartheid, that catastrophic levels of global warming are imminent, and that America’s fossil-fuel industry can be effectively shut down by government fiat without massive social harm.

I would like the author to name someone, anyone, who says all that.

Posters advertizing the lecture were promptly covered or ripped down, and widespread campus ridicule followed.

Perfectly believable. The first part is bad. The second part is not.

Hassan says that at this point, his room lock was broken. Who broke it or why is unknown, yet the timing is curious. Hassan now had legitimate concerns for his safety.

Actual break-in or not, this is not what a campus climate denialist can reasonably expect to happen to him or her.

I am far from taking the divestment campaign’s founder and leader, Bill McKibben as my guide in such matters, but if even McKibben was willing to respectfully debate Epstein at Duke University, why shouldn’t Vassar students hear from Epstein as well?

Was bringing Epstein free? I have other reasons, if you like.

And if Vassar’s Political Science, Sociology, and International Studies Departments can serve as official co-sponsors of a teach-in on behalf of the extremist and openly anti-capitalist Occupy Wall Street movement, how is inviting an libertarian defender of American industry to Vassar out of bounds?

I protested with Occupy. If you need some of the important differences between an Occupy protestor and a "libertarian defender of American industry" explained, I will be happy to do so.

In all my years of reporting on campus conflicts, this is the most appalling instance of political correctness I can recall.

My overall reaction to this most appalling thing ever is a "meh," with a few ideas about how things might have been better. If this is about the worst we're dealing with, I think we're OK.

On the College Insurrection article:

The title: Western Civilization driven off campus at Hamilton College. This one's got to be good. The problem is that I'm having trouble understanding it. There was an "Alexander Hamilton Institute" spearheaded by a guy named Robert Paquette to focus on American history and ideals. It gets initial support, but opposition arises and the idea is shot down. Paquette goes to press blaming left-ideologues and political correctness, his complaints being picked up by outlets willing to outrageously title selected snippets and then cite the school's diversity policy - successfully establishing that Hamilton College practices affirmative action.

We're obviously missing big parts of the story here. It could be a real and serious example of something wrong, but I haven't figured that out yet. But from Paquette:

Leaders of this movement had brought or attempted to bring to campus Susan Rosenberg, former member of the Weather Underground and a convicted felon, to teach writing; and Ward Churchill, the academic charlatan, to speak about prison reform. Even more bizarrely, Brigette Boisselier was brought to the campus. She is in charge of cloning for the Raelian sex cult, which believes humans are descended from aliens. She claimed to have produced a baby through cloning, though no non-Raelian has reported seeing the child. Boisselier was installed at Hamilton as a visiting assistant professor of chemistry.

Sounds like he and I might agree about some things. I don't know Boisselier's skill as a chemist, though she did come to Hamilton recently after being fired for being a Raelian. Rosenberg was a convicted felon, but not on any crime related to writing skills. Churchill was invited to speak.... back in 2005, before his university determined misconduct. Paquette seems to interpret all of these events and his own experience as a weird whole: "they'll tolerate anything leftist!"

[Edit: Paquette may be referencing a later attempt at invitation, but I haven't found it. Google is swamped by the controversy surrounding the '05 visit]

Look at their previous guest speakers. We got Condie and everything!

Paquette doesn't mention another interesting former guest: ex-Porn Star Annie Sprinkle. Here is Paquette-friendly account of that episode:

Hamilton College provided an instructive illustration of this procedure at work. Robert Paquette attempts to have Miss Sprinkle’s performance cancelled but is told that doing so would be a violation of the First Amendment and academic freedom. He then arranges for the college’s audio-visual department to tape Miss Sprinkle’s performance, having previously obtained her signature on a waiver that, among other things, authorized “unrestricted access” to and copying of the tape. David Paris, the dean of the faculty at Hamilton, learns of the tape and intercepts it. In response to a request from Professor Paquette, Dean Paris responds that he will release the tape, but only if it is agreed that it will not be copied or made publicly available. But why? Doesn’t Professor Paquette enjoy the same freedoms that the Womyn’s Center and Annie Sprinkle enjoy? Or perhaps Dean Paris believes that Professor Paquette’s freedom of expression is less important than theirs?

I recommend reading that source. Because

Academic freedom for me but not for thee

is the header to an article which laments Paquette's failure to boot Sprinkle and rages at the Dean's initial - and later reversed - refusal of Paquette's request to make public a taping of her talk.

Rosenberg was a convicted felon, but not on any crime related to writing skills.

Is still feels strange to me that people who participate in terrorist groups, rob banks, etc. are welcome at universities; while people who suggest that maybe women have less mathematical geniuses than men are unwelcome.

Just to make sure, is it important whether the terrorism is left-wing or right-wing? Would that university be OK to hire Anders Breivik for writing lessons? I mean, he did some crazy stuff, but none of that is related to writing skills.