The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has hit out at the New Zealand government for proposing to teach traditional Maori mythology as e
By: Hugh Tomlinson
Published: Mar 1, 2023
The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has hit out at the New Zealand government for proposing to teach traditional Maori mythology as equal to modern science.
The government of the former prime minister Jacinda Ardern proposed adding Matauranga Maori, or “Ways of Knowing” to the science curriculum, provoking a furious row. The proposal was put forward by the ministry of education, led at the time by Chris Hipkins, who succeeded Ardern after her shock resignation in January.
In a letter to The Spectator, Dawkins, who has recently returned from a speaking tour of New Zealand, attacked the policy of equating Maori knowledge and religious beliefs, which date back to the 13th century and include creationism, with modern science.
Dawkins defended New Zealand scientists who had opposed the plan and faced censure and allegations of racism. A number of fellows at the New Zealand Royal Society, including Garth Cooper, a medal-winning biochemistry professor at the University of Auckland who is of Maori descent, resigned from the society last year.
Seven professors, including Cooper, wrote a letter titled “In defence of science” to the New Zealand Listener in 2021, acknowledging that Matauranga Maori should be taught in schools but should not be equated with modern science. The letter said that indigenous knowledge and beliefs were “critical for the preservation and perpetuation of culture and local practices” but that “in the discovery of empirical, universal truths, it falls far short of what we can define as science itself”.
Five Royal Society members reportedly complained that the letter had caused them “untold harm and hurt”.
“Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of this sorry affair is the climate of fear,” Dawkins wrote, attacking the New Zealand government for “self-righteous virtue signalling”.
“New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father,” he wrote. “Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum.”
The government has taken several steps to incorporate indigenous beliefs into government policy over recent years. In 2017, the Ardern administration granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, closing one of New Zealand’s longest-running court battles. The Maori had campaigned for more than a century to secure legal protection for the river, and the ruling prompted other countries to grant legal rights to natural treasures.
Dawkins is a long-term critic of Matauranga Maori. In a 2021 letter to the Royal Society of New Zealand, he wrote: “Science classes are emphatically not the right place to teach scientific falsehoods. Creationism is still bollocks even if it is indigenous bollocks.”
[ Via: https://archive.is/TjzrP ]
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The argument being made here is that it's "unfair" or even "bigoted" to not grant indigenous myths and legends "equality" in the science classroom, to be given equal time and equal consideration with actual science. That they are entitled to access to the science classroom as a form of "inclusion," despite never being subject to - and indeed, declared immune from - the process of scientific checking.
It does this through manipulation and exploitation of egalitarian instincts. This is the same tactic the creationists adopted.
Thus the creationists began to portray themselves as an oppressed minority. “Under the present system . . . the student is being indoctrinated in a philosophy of secular humanism,” one typical creationist complained. “The authoritarianism of the medieval church has been replaced by the authoritarianism of rational materialism. Constitutional guarantees are violated and free scientific inquiry is stifled under this blanket of dogmatism.” That is what a fundamentalist Christian state education official in Arizona was getting at when he said that if parents tell their children that the earth is flat, teachers have no right to contradict them. No one has a right to impose his opinion on others—and the idea that humans evolved from earlier species is, the Christians said, ultimately just some people’s opinion.
-- Jonathan Rauch, "Kindly Inquisitors"
But neither creationism nor indigenous myths are entitled to inclusion in the science classroom. Because neither has been subjected to rigorous testing or disconfirmation, and are therefore not science. No matter what sort of emotional exploitation creationists and activists try to pull. The only thing any idea is entitled to inclusion in is submitting itself to the competitive and contentious process of scientific checking.
Unfortunately, while the former is being kept at bay, the latter has made significant inroads at corrupting scientific education and inquiry.
Universities cannot withstand the assault on objective truth.
By: Mark Goldblatt
Published: Feb 7, 2023
Several years ago, in the pre-pandemic world of in-person meetings, a newly hired colleague at Fashion Institute of Technology proposed an LGBT-themed sociology course before the School of Liberal Arts. This is a necessary step in getting the course approved by the college-wide curriculum committee. It’s a time for constructive feedback and occasional tweaking before the final committee vote.
It was a good course. The proposal was clear and concise, indicating not only a command of the relevant literature but a sensitivity to students’ interests, expectations, and ability to handle the workload. But I noticed an apparently minor, easily correctable issue. Among the learning outcomes listed was a requirement that students develop a greater acceptance of LGBTQ+ perspectives and rights. That struck me as problematic. I happen to think that such acceptance is a good thing, but to stipulate it as a learning outcome raises a knotty question. If a student masters the course material, turns in the required work, and passes the exams, but doesn’t exhibit that acceptance, is he going to fail?
After expressing my general admiration for the course, I raised my misgiving in the following way (and this is nearly an exact quote): “We need to keep in mind that we’re a state university. Our mission is to pursue, ascertain, and disseminate objective truth, and to equip our students to do the same. Given that mission, I don’t think we can list a learning outcome that requires students’ assent on a matter of personal morality. The other learning outcomes are fine. You don’t need that one, so I’d just cut it.” My colleague was fresh out of graduate school and not yet tenured, which (theoretically) put her in a vulnerable position. Nevertheless, she became apoplectic; so angry, in fact, that she had difficulty getting out her first sentence. “I can’t believe people still think that way!” she spluttered. “Queer Theory has deconstructed objectivity!”
Her words hung in the air as I glanced around the room. Not a single faculty member, not even those in math or sciences, seemed fazed by her categorical statement. Since I was a tenured professor, I was reluctant to debate an untenured colleague during a school meeting. So, I let the matter drop. The course was approved without revision by the School of Liberal Arts, and went on to gain approval by the curriculum committee. And that is how my college got into the business of winning converts.
That moment haunts me as I begin my final semester before retirement—not only because faculty on the state payroll have deliberately crossed the critical line from pursuing the truth to professing The Way, but also because the Enlightenment sensibility that finds such mission creep objectionable seems to be passing from the scene. The “deconstructive turn”—as the critic Christopher Norris once called it—is nothing more than a verbal sleight-of-hand. It invites us to tease out secondary and tertiary senses of words to show how a text contradicts what it seems to be saying, free-associate our way to philosophical banalities or outright non-sequiturs, and finally glaze the mishmash with a layer of impenetrable jargon. If a reader is foolish enough to attempt to make sense of what is being said, he’ll get bogged down before he can figure out nothing is being said at all.
When Jacques Derrida, the renowned “father of deconstruction,” was awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University in 1992, 20 of the world’s preeminent philosophers—including W.V. Quine and Ruth Barcan Marcus—signed a letter of protest, in which they argued:
M. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some marks of writings in that discipline. … In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigor. … M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists. … Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.
The claim that Queer Theory has “deconstructed objectivity” means only that a certain number of academic performance artists have doodled with a cluster of words related to the concept of objectivity in order to gain university employment, win friends, and influence a distressingly large number of gullible fans. But no epistemological breakthrough has come of their efforts: if it had, it would be self-refuting since it would consist of an objective truth about the impossibility of objectivity. (At a lecture I attended 40 years ago, a debonair British postmodernist stated that Derrida had shown us how it was possible to formulate a consistent argument with a contradiction in it. When I inquired how, in that case, we could recognize an inconsistent argument, the question was met with actual hisses from his acolytes. I’m still waiting for an answer.)
Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis. The statement “Objectively true statements are still made on a regular basis” is itself objectively true. And Queer Theorists make objective truth claims all the time—as when they cite statistical evidence of harms visited upon the LGBT community or proving the reality of climate change. One of the silent faculty members at the meeting I mentioned, also near retirement, had devoted his entire distinguished career to combatting the effects of global warming. You’d think he’d be miffed at the suggestion that such effects were not objectively real. But no, he just sat in silence like everyone else.
Either he didn’t understand or didn’t take seriously the implications of what our new colleague was saying. The latter possibility seems the far likelier one. My sense, based on hundreds of informal conversations I’ve had with STEM faculty, is that people working in the hard sciences tend to roll their eyes at the alleged insights of postmodernism. They inhabit a world in which truth is still gauged by correspondence between belief and reality, and in which reality exists independently of our beliefs about it. Generally speaking, they don’t give a rat’s ass about discourse communities and meta-narratives. They want to know if the equations balance, if the instruments work, and if their hypotheses match empirical outcomes. In other words, they are interested in discovering if what they believe to be true is objectively true. They are certainly not interested in the ethnicity, sexuality, or gender identity of the people making truth claims.
Put all of that together, and you’ve got the makings of a schism. The humanities and social sciences are undergoing a mission reversion—they’re returning to a pre-Enlightenment view of the purpose of higher education. Prior to the Enlightenment, universities were sites of religious instruction that trained clergy. Harvard was founded in 1636, a mere six years after the settlement of Massachusetts Bay, to ensure that future generations of New England Puritans would be served by learned ministers. That goal is found among Harvard’s original “Rules and Precepts”:
Let every Student be plainly instructed, and earnestly pressed to consider well, the maine end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life (John 17:3) and therefore to lay Christ in the bottome [i.e., at the base of the boat, to keep it steady in the water], as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and Learning.
That’s a version of what we’re seeing with the rise of the subjectivist movement in the humanities and social sciences. It is a new secular faith, a version of The Way. Instruction in radical progressive curricula is baptism by accreditation. It’s witness and testing. You gather for three hours a week to dwell in the spirit, commit yourself to individual rituals and collective causes, despair the fallen state of humanity, call out and cast out demons, immerse yourself in sacred texts and memorize venerable chants, then venture forth to spread the gospel. The end is performative, sacramental. Let me tell you the many ways you’re oppressed so that you may be a river to the masses.
Increasingly, that is the state of the humanities and social sciences at public universities in the US. Whatever you think of that development, it signals an existential crisis for higher education because instruction in the STEM fields at American universities remains traditional, objectively focused, and globally competitive. The reversion of the humanities and social sciences to religious preparation cannot coexist indefinitely with the Enlightenment mission of STEM instruction. Something has to give.
What, for example, becomes of science textbooks that report that only female mammals give birth? (Pity the poor seahorse, hitherto famous as the only species in which the male gives birth. But for how long?) You cannot be told in your morning sociology seminar that the pursuit of objectivity is an instrument of white supremacist culture, which must therefore be deconstructed, and then be told in your afternoon biology class that identical twins are objectively always the same sex.
It’s natural to expect the demand for severing ties to come from the professoriate on the STEM side, from a desire not to be sidetracked in their pursuit of objective truth. More likely, though, as evidenced by that liberal arts meeting at FIT, the demand will come from the humanities and social science side, caused by the unbearable adjacency of reality-based standards and scholarship to the postmodern insistence that the demand for objectivity is oppressive.
Entrance into STEM fields requires rigorous standards of assessment, as does progression and graduation. Rigorous standards of assessment, however, don’t produce equity or (objectively!) diverse student populations. Asian students are currently overrepresented in STEM, black students underrepresented; male students are overrepresented, female students underrepresented. According to the tenets of progressive activism, demographic imbalances of that nature constitute de facto proof of racial and gender bias since in an unbiased system every demographic would be proportionally represented. How long will student activists, encouraged by humanities and social science faculty, tolerate this alleged injustice on their campuses?
The disintegration of academia is coming. Whichever side precipitates the break, it will be a necessary development. Higher education is a serious intellectual endeavor, and nothing is less intellectually serious in contemporary academia than the suggestion that the pursuit of objectivity has been discredited. Empirical observation, mathematical inquiry, inductive and deductive reasoning, and falsifiability are the sine qua nons of higher education. As courses of study in the humanities and social sciences depart from such things, they cease to be higher education in the Enlightenment sense.
[ Via: https://archive.is/vQvgg ]
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It's pivotal moments like this that inform what comes next. That realization something was really wrong here, with that hesitation, that second-guessing, that telling the truth might upset them, that it would just be easier to let this one slide, that instinct to just go along to get along, and the creeping recognition a group delusion was going on.
Who would have thought that the downfall of western academia could be powered by the worst, most pretentious and puerile French philosophy which can be encapulated as an academic formalization of the Equivocation Fallacy, and language games worthy of a 7 year old who just discovered a book of knock-knock jokes?
It was a mistake to think that nobody would take this seriously. It was a mistake to think that it wouldn't leak out of the bogus Fantasy Studies domains within Humanities which they'd invented and credentialed themselves in. And it was damn sure a mistake to give them a seat at the grown-ups table as far as knowledge claims and knowledge production.
To paraphrase Sam Harris, those who reject objective reality belong at the margins of our societies, not in our halls of knowledge.
Denying objective reality should be regarded as an announcement they do not live in it. This is a definition of delusional, not a definition of intellectual.
I’m in New Zealand, climax to my antipodean speaking tour, where I walked headlong into a raging controversy. Jacinda Ardern’s government im
By: Richard Dawkins
Published: Mar 4, 2023
I’m in New Zealand, climax to my antipodean speaking tour, where I walked headlong into a raging controversy. Jacinda Ardern’s government implemented a ludicrous policy, spawned by Chris Hipkins’s Ministry of Education before he became prime minister. Science classes are to be taught that Māori ‘Ways of Knowing’ (Mātauranga Māori) have equal standing with ‘western’ science. Not surprisingly, this adolescent virtue-signalling horrified New Zealand’s grown-up scientists and scholars. Seven of them wrote to the Listener magazine. Three who were fellows of the NZ Royal Society were threatened with an inquisitorial investigation. Two of these, including the distinguished medical scientist Garth Cooper, himself of Māori descent, resigned (the third unfortunately died). I was delighted to meet Professor Cooper for lunch, with others of the seven. His resignation letter cited the society’s failure to support science against its denigration as ‘a western European invention’. He was affronted, too, by a complaint (not endorsed by the NZRS) that ‘to insist Māori children learn to read is an act of colonisation’. Is there an implication here – condescending, if not downright racist – that ‘indigenous’ children need separate, special treatment?
Perhaps the most disagreeable aspect of this sorry affair is the climate of fear. We who don’t have a career to lose should speak out in defence of those who do. The magnificent seven are branded heretics by a nastily zealous new religion, a witch-hunt that recalls the false accusations against J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock. Professor Kendall Clements was removed from teaching evolution at the University of Auckland, after the School of Biological Sciences Putaiao Committee submitted the following recommendation: ‘We do not feel that either Kendall or Garth should be put in front of students as teachers. This is not safe for students…’ Not safe? Who are these cringing little wimps whose ‘safety’ requires protection against free speech? What on earth do they think a university is for?
To grasp government intentions requires a little work, because every third word of the relevant documents is in Māori. Since only 2 per cent of New Zealanders (and only 5 per cent of Māoris) speak that language, this again looks like self-righteous virtue-signalling, bending a knee to that modish version of Original Sin which is white guilt. Mātauranga Māori includes valuable tips on edible fungi, star navigation and species conservation (pity the moas were all eaten). Unfortunately it is deeply invested in vitalism. New Zealand children will be taught the true wonder of DNA, while being simultaneously confused by the doctrine that all life throbs with a vital force conferred by the Earth Mother and the Sky Father. Origin myths are haunting and poetic, but they belong elsewhere in the curriculum. The very phrase ‘western’ science buys into the ‘relativist’ notion that evolution and big bang cosmology are just the origin myth of white western men, a narrative whose hegemony over ‘indigenous’ alternatives stems from nothing better than political power. This is pernicious nonsense. Science belongs to all humanity. It is humanity’s proud best shot at discovering the truth about the real world.
My speeches in Auckland and Wellington were warmly applauded, though one woman yelled a protest. She was politely invited to participate, but she chose to walk out instead. I truthfully said that, when asked my favourite country, I invariably choose New Zealand. Citing the legacy of Ernest Rutherford, the greatest experimental physicist since Faraday, I begged my audiences to reach out to their MPs in support of New Zealand science. The true reason science is more than an origin myth is that it stands on evidence: massively documented evidence, double blind trials, peer review, quantitative predictions precisely verified in labs around the world. Science reads the billion-word DNA book of life itself. Science eradicates smallpox and polio. Science navigates to Pluto or a tiny comet. Science almost certainly saved your life. Science works.
Postscript on the flight out: Air New Zealand think it a cute idea to invoke Māori gods in their safety briefing. Imagine if British Airways announced that their planes are kept aloft by the Holy Ghost in equal partnership with Bernoulli’s Principle and Newton’s First Law. Science explains. It lightens our darkness. Science is the poetry of reality. It belongs to all humanity. Kia Ora!
[ Via: https://archive.is/ehxJ3 ]
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When you're an authoritarian putting people through inquisitions and threatening their livelihoods, you're not doing science, you're doing ideology... and possibly theology.
And it's reliably the case that there's some gross form of virtuous (neo)racism baked in there somewhere.
CSPI Report No. 4 Summary: The National Science Foundation (NSF) is the main governmental scientific grant distributing body in the United
Richard Feynman introduced a concept he called “cargo cult science” during a commencement speech at Caltech in 1974.1 In the Second World War, Allied and Japanese airbases sprung up on islands in the South Pacific that were home to pre-industrial cultures that previously had little contact with the modern world. The soldiers on many of these bases would trade manufactured clothing, medicine, canned food, and other goods with the natives, most of which arrived by airdrop. After the war ended and the soldiers left, the native populations on some of the islands began to create replicas of things like airstrips, airplanes, and flight control towers. They even made mock radios and headphones out of coconuts and straw. The natives believed that by recreating the conditions under which the airplanes came and dropped goods, they could get the airdrops to resume.
There were entire areas of academic study that Feynman called “cargo cult science” – mostly in the fields of social science and education. These areas of inquiry see the success that the scientific method delivers in disciplines like physics, chemistry, and medicine, and produce superficial replicas of scientific practices. They miss something essential, however, and as Feynman says, “the planes never land.” So, what is this missing element in “cargo cult science?” It is “a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty.” Science requires a willingness to relentlessly assail one’s assumptions and a capacity to bend over backwards to try and disprove ideas even if one passionately wants to believe they are true. I would love to be able to revisit this critique of Feynman’s and have a good laugh at how strange and backwards academic institutions and scientific agencies must have been in the 1970s, but unfortunately, this critique feels as salient today as it must have when Feynman first expressed it almost 60 years ago.
Ideally, the “cargo cult sciences” should start to recede as their practitioners start to notice that “the planes aren’t landing.” What if, however, we have in place institutions that have degraded to a point where they subsidize and reward practices that are not actual science, but a kind of science-like interpretive dance? Patrick Collison and Michael Nielsen find that there has been a precipitous increase in the number of science publications, PhD students graduating in STEM fields, and government spending on National Institute of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants since the 1960s.2 Their same work, however, shows that when scientists were surveyed about the importance of Nobel Prize winning discoveries between the 1920s and 1980s, results indicated anywhere from a decline to a general stagnation in the impact of science over that time period – nothing anywhere near the output we might expect given the tremendous amount of time and energy now invested. One theory posited by Collison, as well as economist Tyler Cowen and others, is that science might just be getting harder; we have gotten to all the low-hanging fruit and now are in the territory of diminishing returns.
Science may be getting harder, but it seems unlikely that this is the sole, or perhaps even largest, cause of decreasing productivity. In addition to the previously mentioned increase in funding to scientific research, the costs of many of the important inputs to research – such as computing power, gene sequencing, and various types of lab equipment – have been declining exponentially. With a rise in funding and a decline in the costs of many inputs, we might expect to be able to generate increased scientific output despite potentially increasing difficulty.
Although a fuller explanation for technological and scientific stagnation is beyond the scope of this work, here I analyze the abstracts of successful NSF applications and find two reasons to believe that something has gone wrong with the culture of science, particularly in the last few decades. The first of these is increasing politicization. If paying lip service to fashionable political ideas becomes an important criterion for successful grant applications, this will certainly detract from the importance of other more vital criteria – namely those related to the quality and importance of the proposed research. When the process of deciding what research projects get funded comes to be based on a political litmus test, the scientific endeavor suffers. Additionally, the more that scientific institutions come to be viewed as conduits for promulgating ideology, the less capable they will be of swaying public opinion on important issues. We may be starting to see the harmful effects of this process in the current epistemic crisis regarding public health. The growing view of science as a vehicle for activism detracts from its more vital role of being a dispassionate referee that adjudicates the validity of empirical claims.
The second major result in this work is the constriction of the space of ideas within NSF award abstracts. The number of NSF awards given and the total amount of taxpayer money spent by the NSF have increased consistently since 1990, and yet this work provides evidence suggesting that the breadth of ideas within NSF award abstracts has been contracting. In different contexts, bureaucracies can become positive feedback chambers reinforcing and amplifying favored ideas while excluding others. Recent work by Johan Chu and James Evans supports this view by showing that the larger a scientific field becomes, the more it tends to stagnate, with more reliance on established works in citation patterns and fewer fundamental breakthroughs.3 The NSF is ostensibly an organization meant to stimulate scientific progress for the benefit of the nation, but the way in which it has become entangled with academia and established institutions may make it seem more like a professional guild representing the interests of its members. Such factors could explain the stagnation we see in the ability of the NSF to identify and support novelty.
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Science is already under threat from religious faith as the superstitious insist variously that: their feelings-based beliefs, such as "intelligent design" occupy equal footing with actual science; evolution is a fiction and science is a tool of the "devil" to deny (their) god; and "science" (e.g. the pseudoscience called "creation science") has already verified the existence of (their) god.
We must protect it just as fiercely from political capture as the ideologically compromised insist variously that: "other ways of knowing" and "lived experience" are just as valid as actual science; sex, gender, math and even reality itself are merely "social constructs (and thus evolution is a fiction) and science is a tool of heteronormative white male supremacy or someshit; and their replacement "studies" pseudosciences have already confirmed their presupposed beliefs.
These are identical tactics. The problem is the latter are working much more successfully, and even being actively pursued to ideologically compromised institutions. People know to keep the former outside the gates, but are politically coerced into welcoming the latter.
There are already those who insist that science is "oppressive" because scientists have biases. Or in other words, they're telling us both that they don't understand how it works, and what they plan to do once they capture it. We already have nonsense "cargo cult" domains like "black math," "feminist glaciology" and "queer agriculture."
Science is the best of everything we've learned over the centuries about how to determine what's true. We shed the notion that we should accept a divine "truth" as prescribed by the ideologically motivated. We must also refuse the notion that we should accept a social or political "truth" as prescribed by the ideologically motivated.
As Lysenkoism taught us, corruption of science in the name of a political narrative has truly catastrophic consequences.
NYU professor Jonathan Haidt is resigning an academic association after attempts to force diversity statements into his work.
By: J.D. Tuccille
Published: Sep 30, 2022
It was probably inevitable that Jonathan Haidt, an academic long concerned about the politicization of academia, would eventually be caught up in the displacement of intellectual inquiry by ideological rigidity.
Last week the New York University (NYU) psychology professor announced that he would resign at the end of the year from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, his primary professional association, because of a newly adopted requirement that everybody presenting research at the group's conferences explain how their submission advances "equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals." It was the sort of litmus test against which he has warned, and which he sees as corroding institutions of higher learning.
"Telos means 'the end, goal, or purpose for which an act is done, or at which a profession or institution aims,'" he wrote in a Sept. 20 piece published on the website of Heterodox Academy, an organization he cofounded that promotes viewpoint diversity on college campuses, and republished by the Chronicle of Higher Education. "The telos of a knife is to cut, the telos of medicine is to heal, and the telos of a university is truth."
"The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth," he added. "I was going to attend the annual conference in Atlanta next February to present some research with colleagues on a new and improved version of the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. I was surprised to learn about a new rule: In order to present research at the conference, all social psychologists are now required to submit a statement explaining 'whether and how this submission advances the equity, inclusion, and anti-racism goals of SPSP.'"
Such diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements have proliferated at universities and in academic societies, he notes, even though "most academic work has nothing to do with diversity, so these mandatory statements force many academics to betray their quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth by spinning, twisting, or otherwise inventing some tenuous connection to diversity."
But the SPSP requirement went a step further, dropping "diversity" in favor of "anti-racism," a term frequently associated with Boston University's Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist and other works. Among the book's passages is a widely shared one highlighted by Haidt:
"The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination."
That's an "explicitly ideological" interpretation of social interactions, Haidt objects, along with prescribed remedies to which he has moral and professional objections. He believes individual members of SPSP should be free to adopt the sentiment themselves, but adherence shouldn't be compelled.
"So I'm going to resign from SPSP at the end of this year, when my membership dues run out, if the policy on mandatory statements stays in place for future conventions," he concludes.
Mandatory DEI statements became a concern well before Haidt's run-in with the SPSP and the substitution of "anti-racism" for diversity." Just weeks ago, Reason's Emma Camp noted that "in many American universities, prospective professors are now expected to include lengthy diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements in their job applications."
A recent American Association of University Professors survey found that DEI criteria are included in consideration for tenure at 21.5 percent of colleges and universities, and at 45.6 percent of large institutions of higher education.
"In many cases, these policies threaten to restrict employment or advancement opportunities for faculty who dissent from the prevailing consensus on DEI-related issues of public and academic interest," warns the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). "These policies may even negatively impact faculty who broadly agree with their institution's DEI values but disagree on some of the specifics, or who simply cherish the right to speak without compulsion."
FIRE acknowledges that private institutions have the right to adopt any ideological requirements they wish (public institutions are bound by the First Amendment). But it says DEI mandates threaten the commitments to free speech and academic freedom that most universities espouse.
"Academics seeking employment or promotion will almost inescapably feel pressured to say things that accommodate the perceived ideological preferences of an institution demanding a diversity statement, notwithstanding the actual beliefs or commitments of those forced to speak," agrees the Academic Freedom Alliance in a statement released last month.
Haidt, years ago, sounded the alarm that colleges and universities were compromising their intellectual mission with growing commitment to a particular set of political beliefs.
"I believe the conflict reached its boiling point in the fall of 2015 when student protesters at 80 universities demanded that their universities make much greater and more explicit commitments to social justice, often including mandatory courses and training for everyone in social justice perspectives and content," he wrote in 2016. "Now that many university presidents have agreed to implement many of the demands, I believe that the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable."
The conflict certainly became unmanageable for Haidt himself, who chose what he sees as the pursuit of truth over required affirmation that his work serves a political purpose. He's still uncertain how his dispute with the SPSP will shake out, or the ultimate fate of academia writ large.
"I have gotten about a dozen supportive emails from other social psychologists, and no real criticism beyond a few psychologists on Twitter who, perhaps shaped by Twitter, go to great lengths to assume the worst about me and my motives for writing the essay," Haidt told me by email. "I have the sense that there is a large generational split. Psychologists and academics who are older than me (I'm 58) seem uniformly supportive: they are all on the left, and the left used to be creeped out by loyalty oaths, whether administered by the McCarthyite right or the Soviet left. But young people on the left seem to be very comfortable requiring such pledges."
Where SPSP stands on the matter can only be inferred from Its actions. Officials in the professional society acknowledged my query but hadn't responded by deadline. As of now, everybody presenting research at the society's upcoming conference will have to pledge that their work advances political goals.
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When ideology supersedes truth.
American higher education continues its navel-gazing decline into irrelevance. China is rubbing its hands gleefully as the US’s self-immolates its own future competitiveness.
The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.
By: Zac Kriegman
Published: May 12, 2022
Until recently, I was a director of data science at Thomson Reuters, one of the biggest news organizations in the world. It was my job, among other things, to sift through reams of numbers and figure out what they meant.
About a year ago, I stumbled on a really big story. It was about black Americans being gunned down across the country and the ways in which we report on that violence. We had been talking nonstop about race and police brutality, and I thought: This is a story that could save lives. This is a story that has to be told.
But when I shared the story with my coworkers, my boss chastised me, telling me expressing this opinion could limit my ability to take on leadership roles within the company. Then I was maligned by my colleagues. And then I was fired.
This is the story Reuters didn’t want to tell.
I had been at Thomson Reuters for over six years—most recently, leading a team of data scientists applying new machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms to our legal, tax and news data. We advised any number of divisions inside the company, including Westlaw, an online legal research service used by most every law firm in the country, and the newsroom, which reaches an audience of one billion every day around the globe. I briefed the Chief Technology Officer regularly. My total annual compensation package exceeded $350,000.
In 2020, I started to witness the spread of a new ideology inside the company. On our internal collaboration platform, the Hub, people would post about “the self-indulgent tears of white women” and the danger of “White Privilege glasses.” They’d share articles with titles like “Seeing White,” “Habits of Whiteness” and “How to Be a Better White Person.” There was fervent and vocal support for Black Lives Matter at every level of the company. No one challenged the racial essentialism or the groupthink.
This concerned me. I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.
The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.
Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.
But it’s more complicated than that. Police are authorized to use lethal force only when they believe a suspect poses a grave danger of harming others. So, when it comes to measuring cops’ racial attitudes, it’s important that we compare apples and apples: Black suspects who pose a grave danger and white suspects who do the same.
Unfortunately, we don’t have reliable data on the racial makeup of dangerous suspects, but we do have a good proxy: The number of people in each group who murder police officers.
According to calculations (published by Patrick Frey, Deputy District Attorney for Los Angeles County) based on FBI data, black Americans account for 37 percent of those who murder police officers, and 34 percent of the unarmed suspects killed by police. Meanwhile, whites make up 42.7 percent of cop killers and 42 percent of the unarmed suspects shot by police—meaning whites are killed by police at a 7 percent higher rate than blacks.
If you broaden the analysis to include armed suspects, the gap is even wider, with whites shot at a 70 percent higher rate than blacks. Other experts in the field concur that, in relation to the number of police officers murdered, whites are shot disproportionately.
There has been only one study that has looked at the rate at which police use lethal force in similar circumstances across racial groups. It was conducted by the wunderkind Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who is black, grew up poor, had his fair share of run-ins with the police and, initially, supported BLM. In 2016, Fryer, hoping to prove the BLM narrative, conducted a rigorous study that controlled for the circumstances of shootings—and was shocked to find that, while blacks and Latinos were likelier than whites to experience some level of police force, they were, if anything, slightly less likely to be shot. The study generated enormous controversy. (In 2018, Fryer was suspended from Harvard over dubious allegations of sexual harassment.)
Unfortunately, because the BLM narrative was now conventional wisdom, police departments, under intense scrutiny from left-wing politicians and activists, scaled back patrols in dangerous neighborhoods filled with vulnerable black residents. This led to soaring violence in many communities and thousands of needless deaths—otherwise known as the Ferguson Effect.
For many months I stayed silent. I continued to read Reuters’ reporting on the movement, and started to see how the company’s misguided worldview about policing and racism was distorting the way we were reporting news stories to the public.
In one story, Reuters reported on police in Kenosha, Wisconsin shooting a black man, Jacob Blake, in the back—but failed to mention that they did so only after he grabbed a knife and looked likely to lunge at them.
In another story, Reuters referred “to a wave of killings of African-Americans by police using unjustified lethal force,” despite a lack of statistical evidence that such a wave of police killings had taken place. (In 2020, 18 unarmed black Americans were killed by police, according to The Washington Post database.)
And in yet another, Reuters referred to the shooting of Michael Brown as one of a number of “egregious examples of lethal police violence,” despite the fact that an investigation conducted by the Justice Department—then run by Barack Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder—had cleared the police officer in question of all wrongdoing.
A pattern was starting to emerge: Reporters and editors would omit key details that undermined the BLM narrative. More important than reporting accurately was upholding—nurturing—that storyline.
At some point, the organization went from ignoring key facts to just reporting lies. When Donald Trump declared, in July 2020, that the police kill more white than black people—this is true—Reuters, in its dispatch, repeated the false claim that blacks “are shot at a disproportionate rate.” In December 2020, Reuters reported that black Americans “are more likely to be killed by police,” citing a 2019 National Academy of Sciences study that, our reporters claimed, found that black men were 2.5 times likelier than white men to be killed by police. In fact, the only rigorous study to examine the likelihood of police use of force—Roland Fryer’s—found that police, as mentioned, were less likely to use lethal force against black Americans.
All this left me deeply unsettled: It was bad for Reuters, which was supposed to be objective and withhold judgment. It was bad for our readers, who were being misinformed. And it was bad for black people in rough neighborhoods, where local officials, prompted to take action by reporting like ours and the public outcry it triggered, were doing things like defunding the police.
Reuters, which is headquartered in London, is hardly the biggest news organization in the United States, but its stories are published in newspapers across the country and read by millions of Americans. It influences our perception of reality. It matters. I didn’t know what to do. I thought I should speak up, but I wanted to preserve my career. My wife, Cynthia, and I started arguing. I’d stay up late into the night compulsively reading the news and studies about policing. I took a two-month leave of absence while I agonized over what to do.
While I was gone, I started writing a post about the disconnect between what we thought was true and what was actually happening. I wasn’t sure what I planned to do with it. Maybe I would share it. More likely it would just be a kind of therapy, a chance for me to work through some of these issues.
In my post, I examined all the data I had compiled, and I cited the Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey and several academic studies (see, for example, here, here, here and here) to help back up my conclusions—in addition to Fryer’s.
I also pointed out that there had been zero properly designed studies refuting Fryer’s findings. And I noted that a growing number of criminologists—like Paul Cassell, at the University of Utah; Lawrence Rosenthal, at Chapman University; and Richard Rosenfeld, at the University of Missouri-St. Louis—now believed that the false rhetoric around police bias had played a key role in the recent spike in violent crime. This suggested that the BLM lie had led to the murder of thousands of black people.
To drive home my point, I included this striking statistic: On an average year, 18 unarmed black people and 26 unarmed white people are shot by police. By contrast, roughly 10,000 black people are murdered annually by criminals in their own neighborhoods.
When I returned from my leave of absence, I was ready to post my summary to the Hub, where my colleagues regularly posted things about any number of hot-button issues. Cynthia wasn’t sure. She wasn’t just worried about my job, but also about her job, and she was worried that word would get out to the rest of our community. BLM lawn signs lined our street. Our friends sympathized with the cause. We wondered whether we’d be ostracized. We spent many hours over many weeks talking it through. I had come close to posting and then pulled back, and then again, and again. We were talking about it in couples therapy. Finally, I got the okay from Cynthia to publish. She understood that this was about me speaking freely and honestly about something I knew about, cared about and felt I had the responsibility to do something about. I took a deep breath and shared my post on the Hub. It was early May 2021.
Within an hour or two, the moderators had taken down my post.
I messaged my Human Resources contact to inquire why my post had been removed. She told me anyone could flag a post for review, at which point it would be immediately taken down. She didn’t say anything else. I had no idea who had objected or what the grounds for the objection were, or when, if ever, my post would be reinstated.
Over the next two weeks, I kept checking back with her to see when they would reinstate it. After a good bit of waiting and wondering, she told me that “a team of human resources and communications professionals” was reviewing it. I asked if I’d be allowed to discuss the moderators’ concerns with them. She said no. Finally, she told me my post would not be reinstated because it had been deemed “antagonistic” and “provocative.”
When I asked what, exactly, was antagonistic or provocative, she suggested I speak with the Head of Diversity and Inclusion. So, I scheduled a meeting.
I should mention that, while this was going on with H.R., I met with my manager, who expressed surprise and concern that I had written and then shared my post. It could hurt me at the company, she said. It could put the kibosh on any future promotions.
The next week, I met with the Head of Diversity and Inclusion. I asked what was wrong with my post. She said she couldn’t tell me, because she hadn’t been involved in the decision to remove it. (I was unclear whether she’d actually read it.)
The next week, there was another meeting—this time with H.R. and Diversity and Inclusion. I wanted to know what I had to change in my post to make it acceptable. They suggested scrubbing all instances of the term “systemic racism,” to start.
So I did that, and the piece was reinstated. I was relieved. Such discussion about facts and statistics had to be permitted. It was impossible to report the news accurately if employees were not allowed to have internal, sometimes heated discussions about pretty much anything.
Then the comments started rolling in. A handful of BLM supporters, all of them white, said that, as a white person, I had no place criticizing BLM. They called my review of the academic literature “whitesplaining” (failing to note that many of the academics I cited were black). I was publicly derided as a “troll,” “confused,” “laughable,” and “not worth engaging with or even attempting to have an intelligent conversation” with. One colleague said: “I do not believe that there is any point in trying to engage in a blow-by-blow refutation of your argument, and I will not do so. My unwillingness to do so doesn't signal the strength of your argument. If someone says, ‘The KKK did lots of good things for the community—prove me wrong,’ I'm not obligated to do so.”
Notably absent from the attacks directed at me was even a single substantive challenge to the facts I was citing.
It was insulting and painful. Not a single executive, no one in H.R., no one in Diversity and Inclusion, condemned any of the public attacks on me. They were silent. I’m not surprised no one came to my defense. Who would take that kind of a risk? It became very clear very fast that my public takedown was intended to ensure that there would be no discussion around BLM or the question of police brutality and race.
After enduring waves of abuse, I emailed H.R. to express my concern about these attacks on me and their chilling effect. They responded by removing my post—and shutting down the conversation. I was told that, if I discussed my experience on any internal company communications channel, I would be fired.
I was distraught. Here I was trying to bring the company's attention to how we were spreading lies that were contributing to the murders of thousands of black people, and I was compared to a Klansman sympathizer, and forbidden by the company to discuss any of it.
I had little doubt about the sincerity of H.R.’s threat to fire me. But I still had a faint hope that the company’s senior leadership would right the ship if I could only make them aware of the matter. Regardless, given the way the internal conversation had ended, I didn’t see a tenable way to continue working at the company without some sort of resolution.
So, I sent an email to colleagues and company leadership, again expressing concern about how the attacks against me had successfully shut down any productive conversation and left my reputation in tatters. The next day, H.R. called me to say that my access to all company computer and communications systems had been revoked.
Three days later, on June 8, 2021, I was fired.
“As we discussed on Friday,” H.R. said in their parting email, “you’ve violated our expressed direction and have repeatedly refused to follow the counsel offered.” The email went on:“The manner in which you’ve conducted yourself in recent weeks does not align with our expectations for you as a leader within Thomson Reuters.”
A decade ago, my experience at Thomson Reuters would have been unthinkable. Most Americans probably think it’s still unthinkable. That’s what makes it so dangerous. Most of us don’t understand how deeply compromised our news sources have become. Most of us have no idea that we are suffused with fictions and half-truths that sound sort of believable and are shielded from scrutiny by people whose job is to challenge them. This is true, above all, of my fellow liberals, who assume that only Republicans complain about the mainstream media. But this is not a partisan issue. This is a We The People issue.
In January, I filed a complaint with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination stating that I was fired in retaliation for complaining about a racially hostile work environment. (The MCAD works in conjunction with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.) We’ll see whether the state finds that there are grounds for a lawsuit.
However that shakes out will not change the fact that thousands of black Americans are dead, in part because too many people are still unaware of basic facts about policing since their trusted news sources meticulously obscure the truth. The job of journalists is to report the stories that don’t comport with the prevailing or popular narrative. We desperately need them to do that again.
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Black Lives Matter Are Useful.
Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, the idea that you should be fired for asking questions, or even criticizing a group or an idea - and we’re reliably told that “iTs aN iDeA!!” - that is entitled to be criticized, is concerning.
It’s no less true that we need to have an accurate, evidence-based understanding of human societies, than it is to have an accurate, evidence-based understanding of the natural world.
If black life and wellbeing actually matters - and they do - then why do they only seem to matter when they’re politically - not to mention, financially - useful?
As the Grievance Studies scandal made very clear, these... “fields” are set up absent of rigor. Simply start with your pet peeve as the conclusion and work your way backwards. Find someone’s previous peeve and make it fit, or invent a concept out of thin air to prop it up. Direct your ire in the right directions and you’re good to go.
To disagree with any of it, someone must be some kind of bigot or wilfully ignorant, rather than someone who notices that it’s full of fallacies, language games, big empty words and sophistry, that it’s lacking supporting evidence and is entirely composted of unfalsifiable assertions propped up by scholarship that is itself un-evidenced unfalsifiable assertions.
Believers make their gods incoherent in order to shield them from the discovery that their claims are mere assertions and built atop literally nothing.
The same is also true of every college “Studies” course in the Humanities department.
