Do Universities Still Care about Truth?

By Carine Hajjar

Saturday, October 02, 2021

 

It’s a tale as old as time, the stereotype of the liberal professor pushing his opinions on impressionable students. But the stereotype reflects real numbers. In 2017, only 8 percent of Yale’s faculty reported being conservative. In 2021, only 3 percent of Harvard University’s faculty reported being “conservative” or “very conservative.”

 

The Kremlin-on-the-Charles caricature has taken on a new dimension: According to the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings, a report based on a survey by College Pulse, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and RealClearEducation, professors, including the stereotypically liberal ones, and students alike are scared to defy a rising campus orthodoxy and are self-censoring on campus. The damper on free speech clearly goes against the university’s supposed mission, which is to educate by fostering knowledge. How can academia tolerate such a direct blow to its very purpose? A change in priority can be the only explanation. As the university grows into a more corporate entity, it chooses the stability of ideological orthodoxy over the risks that come with open discourse.

 

College and cancel culture have become disturbingly synonymous. FIRE, which offers legal aid to students and faculty facing restrictions on free expression or the denial of due process, has seen a dramatic uptick in reports of these issues. Public attempts to sanction faculty members, as counted by FIRE, increased from 76 in 2019 to 115 in 2020. Yet the situation is worse than that number suggests. FIRE’s faculty cases actually greatly outnumber public calls for sanction, coming in at 428 in 2020.

 

Whether presenting opinions or factual findings, professors today navigate an ideological minefield. CV-type qualifications are no longer enough — they need to be woke to survive.

 

Take Steven Pinker, the noted cognitive-psychology professor at Harvard. On July 3, 2020, hundreds of members of the Linguistic Society of America signed a petition to have him removed as one of the organization’s distinguished academic fellows and media experts. The 638 signatories (among which Pinker and others uncovered forgeries) deemed him unworthy of the “honor, credibility, and visibility” that comes with being a fellow. They claimed to have “no desire to judge Dr. Pinker’s actions in moral terms,” adding that they did not “seek to ‘cancel’ Dr. Pinker.”

 

The main allegation was a “pattern of drowning out the voices of people suffering from racist and sexist violence,” allegedly exhibited by Pinker’s tweets and some of his writings. As Pinker, responding to one of the complaints in the petition, commented to me, “citing an African American social scientist” who finds that overt racism is decreasing is apparently “unsayable” and “legitimate grounds for punishment.” The signatories claimed that Pinker’s public utterances were “not above deceitfulness, misrepresentation, or the employment of dogwhistles.” (But no, this is not an attempt “to cancel.”)

 

Lucky for Pinker, he’s a big-enough name to weather this storm, with tenure and notable public allies in his corner. Other educators are not nearly as fortunate. “If you have to be Steven Pinker to avoid getting canceled, that’s a problem,” said Adam Goldstein, an attorney and senior researcher at FIRE, during an interview.

 

In September 2020, University of Southern California professor Greg Patton stepped away from his teaching duties for a semester after some students in his communications class expressed outrage at his authentic pronunciation of the Chinese equivalent of the filler word “um.” The administration received a letter complaining that the word — used during a discussion of pauses in speech — sounded like a racial slur in English.

 

Although Chinese students attested to the accuracy of his pronunciation, the dean of the USC business school wrote that “it is simply unacceptable for faculty to use words in class that can marginalize, hurt and harm the psychological safety of our students.” At the whiff of (absurd) controversy, the university kowtowed to woke doctrine, issuing a (seemingly copy-paste) condemnation. This was just one example of the woke autopilot operating almost everywhere in higher education.

 

The consequence? Students and professors self-censor as survival. I know I sure did as a student at Harvard. “We’re in the empire-strikes-back part of free speech,” jokes Goldstein of FIRE. “It’s a dark time for the rebel alliance of people who think that the First Amendment should actually matter on campus.”

 

Academics, journalists, and politicians have begun to react to this illiberalism. In July 2020, 153 intellectuals — including Pinker — published an open letter in Harper’s Magazine calling for “justice and open debate.” They warned that the “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted.”

 

Although this constriction is most palpable on college campuses, most universities do have robust free-speech protections. At Harvard, for instance, there are free-speech guidelines that go so far as to protect “noxious” ideas, noting their “long-term benefits” to conversation. They articulate the importance of a “free interchange of ideas” to the university’s mission of “discovering and disseminating ideas through research, teaching, and learning.” (As a Crimson columnist, I suggested that the university “make stronger attempts to actually uphold” the guidelines.)

 

Harvard administrators endorse these guidelines. In 2019, the dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana, condemned the fact that some students “see those with differing opinions as undeserving of our attention, our respect or our compassion.” He remains confident in Harvard’s commitment to dissenting opinions. Khurana, a faculty member at Harvard Business School, told me that he was given tenure while writing a book on “how business education was failing American society.” In his own words, it was not a “soft-pedaling book.” “At the end of the day, institutions like ours survive because we really believe in the idea of veritas. . . . If law is to justice, and medicine is to health, the university is to the truth.” And if the mission to truth is hindered? “We might as well shut the enterprise down.”

 

I’d like to think that the best kind of learning occurs with the collision of diverse perspectives, resulting in dynamic conversation and, ultimately, the adoption of informed opinion. Harvard, per its guidelines, agrees. So do faculty members such as Khurana and Pinker. But as a student, I feared that collision, especially as I saw the university administration’s passivity on the lack of it. What happened to that commitment to the free interchange of ideas?

 

Simply put, universities are no longer exclusively in the business of education, the product of that interchange. They’re increasingly in the business of, well, business.

 

Before the Cold War, universities were run by faculty: “From the perspective of 100 years ago,” says Goldstein, “the idea that a faculty member would have his speech suppressed by the university was difficult to conceptualize.” During the Cold War, higher education was laden with research grants, one of the factors leading to the bureaucratization of the modern university. From 2007 to 2018, public degree-granting postsecondary schools in the U.S. generated a revenue of $671 billion. “The amount of money involved in higher education in the U.S. was slightly more than all the software we sell and electricity combined,” notes Goldstein. The result? “Universities don’t reflect the interest of the faculty anymore, they have the priorities of a corporation.”

 

The idea of university corporatism as an impetus for illiberalism is not new. In 2015, Fredrik deBoer, who had just completed a Ph.D. at Purdue, wrote a piece for the New York Times on the pernicious effects of corporatism on campus, stating that “a constantly expanding layer of university administrative jobs now exists at an increasing remove from the actual academic enterprise.”

 

Academic freedom is not optimal for market share. “Tranquility and profitability tend to win out over truth and inquiry,” says Goldstein. Controversial views (even if factually accurate) can disturb the corporate equilibrium. This may be one of the reasons why universities are increasingly dedicated to a new concept: “safetyism,” a term coined by FIRE’s founders, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt in their book The Coddling of the American Mind. Educators’ telos is no longer only knowledge; it’s ensuring that students feel “safe.”

 

But what is “safe”? Goldstein deals with cases where students claim to feel “unsafe” when presented with certain arguments in class. But can one really equate words — statements, claims, hypotheses — to physical safety? “It isn’t as if somebody saying words will make you explode into a fine mist,” as Goldstein says.

 

“Safe” in modern parlance seems to be about being on the “correct” side of an issue. That side is no longer simply the one on the left. Pinker shared a story with me about a hiring process he was involved in. The candidate, in Pinker’s words, “was a kind of middle-of-the-road liberal Democrat.” His political orientation did not matter; he violated a pillar of the orthodoxy. “He was skeptical about affirmative action,” which got him “branded as an extreme right-winger.” I asked if this was the reason the candidate was not hired. “It went into it,” among other factors.

 

Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, told me that certain topics demand more homogeneity than others: “We’re comfortable accepting a fairly wide range of views on U.S.–China foreign policy but we’re not comfortable accepting a wide range of views on affirmative action.” Other taboos include certain positions on race, gender, and colonialism. Summers shared a hypothetical: “If someone did research that showed that it’s better for children to spend more time with their mothers during the first six years of their life during the day, you’d have to be an extraordinarily brave person to do that on Harvard’s campus.”

 

How did we get here? Wasn’t the once-whimsical soft Marxism of college enough? Pinker offered a psychological explanation, mentioning the work of his former postdoctoral student, Peter DiScioli, on the human creation of groups. Humans have a propensity to compete for prestige as well as a fear of being in the “more vulnerable coalition.” So they join the mob lest they be the target of the mob. It’s a phenomenon that occurs in witch hunts, cultural revolutions, and political purges: “Anyone can be a victim if they themselves don’t join the ‘denouncers.’” This can be extrapolated to universities-turned-corporations, which, seeking to avoid controversy, are happy to oblige denouncers.

 

Ironically, the hippie-student-against-the-man crowd is driving this whole corporate tilt. “It’s easiest for [administrators] if they cave. . . . No skin off their nose if the universities are less able to investigate questions of truth and falsity and explanation,” said Pinker. They’re more worried about appeasing the “left-leaning students protesting outside their office.”

 

Why is this woke crowd powerful enough to dictate university incentives? Humans, in general, want to be on the “right” side of history. “We’re all moralistic animals,” said Pinker. But that doesn’t mean objective morality: “Moralistic efforts are those that attempt to claim superiority and demonize opponents.” We go for what is perceived as moral. The Harper’s open letter touched on this: There’s a “vogue for public shaming” and a “tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.”

 

So long as this “vogue” continues, profit-seeking entities will comply. Safetyism and moralism go hand in hand: Universities can avoid controversy by tolerating mob mentality. It’s similar to the virtue-signaling you’re seeing in corporate America (think woke Coke). It’s trendy, it’s safe, and it sells.

 

After all, what’s more corporate than appearing moral?

 

Pinker was able to weather his storm. But the petition against him sent a disturbing message to budding academics and students alike: “If you step out of line — if you doubt the overall woke orthodoxy — you’ll be subject to professional punishment.”

 

I asked Pinker if he had any advice for them. “Consider sitting on your controversial opinions until you get tenure.”

 

I said something about that being troubling.

 

Pinker replied: “I completely agree.”