Steve Pinker has published his remedy for Harvard’s woes in today’s Boston Globe; he outlined these to me last week over a beer, but I didn’t feel at liberty to divulge what he said he was writing about. Now I can.
But the fricking Globe is completely paywalled, so I had to go to our University library to get this article. If you click on the title below (the subtitle is “For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This includes Harvard.”), you won’t be able to see it. So I’ll give a précis and some excerpts, and perhaps a judicious inquiry will get you the article.
For now, excerpts (indented) will suffice. As usual, Pinker’s piece is very well written. First he talks about Presidentgate, when the Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn were excoriated first by Republicans in a Congressional hearing, and then by most of the media.
. . . . The fury was white-hot. Harvard is now the place where using the wrong pronoun is a hanging offense but calling for another Holocaust depends on context. [President Claudine] Gay was excoriated not only by conservative politicians but by liberal alumni, donors, and faculty, by pundits across the spectrum, even by a White House spokesperson and by the second gentleman of the United States. Petitions demanding her resignation have circulated in Congress, X, and factions of the Harvard community, and at the time of this writing, a prediction market is posting 1.2:1 odds that she will be ousted by the end of the year.
I don’t believe that firing Gay is the appropriate response to the fiasco. It wasn’t just Gay who fumbled the genocide question but two other elite university presidents — Sally Kornbluth of MIT (my former employer) and Elizabeth Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned following her testimony — which suggests that the problem with Gay’s performance betrays a deeper problem in American universities.
Pinker then notes that Gay was correct in answering Stefanik’s questions the way she did, for what you make of the calls for genocide of the Jews depends on how you interpret the intentions of the chanters. Further, Harvard can’t punish anyone without an investigation. (Remember, Harvard doesn’t abide by First-Amendment speech principles so Gay was answering according to Harvard’s code of student conduct.)
The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out). Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos.
So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.
That was the problem: the hypocrisy of having damned free speech in the past but suddenly adopting it when it involved calling for the deaths of Jews. It’s the double standard that got Harvard in trouble.
Pinker then tenders his five-point solution (I’ve condensed the text):
For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.
Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions. These include crimes that by their very nature are committed with speech, like extortion, bribery, libel, and threats, together with incitement of imminent lawless action. It also permits restraints on the time, place, and manner of expression. The First Amendment does not entitle someone to blare propaganda from a sound truck in a residential neighborhood at 3 a.m. or to set up a soapbox in the middle of a busy freeway. . .
Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer. It’s even worse when individual departments take positions, because it sets up a conflict of interest with any dissenting students and faculty whose fates they control.. . . .
It’s about time that Harvard adopt Chicago’s Kalven Report. (Only three schools have done so: the U of C, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Vanderbilt.) But institutional neutrality only makes sense, for it exists to promote free speech. If colleges adopt official moral, political, or ideological positions, those who buck them will be intimidated. Speech will be quashed. Institutional neutrality is really required for a college to have free speech.
Nonviolence. Some students think it is a legitimate form of political expression to drown out a speaker, block the audience’s view with a screen, obstruct public passageways, invade a lecture hall chanting slogans over bullhorns, force administrators out of their offices and occupy the building, or get in the faces of other students.
Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others. . . .
Note that the “heckler’s veto” is permitted under the First Amendment, but not under any decent college speech policy. This is one place where I accept not fully embracing the First Amendment in college speech. But of course I do agree with Steve about prohibiting acts of vandalism, extortion, or trespassing. But that part of the recommendation is superfluous, as those are prohibited by all colleges.
Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative. Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class. (The appalling antisemitism infesting college campuses grew out of the corollary that Israelis, and by extension Jews who support them, are a party to this conspiracy.) Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship. . .
Agreed, of course. And then Steve tenders a controversial but necessary nostrum:
Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them. . .
. . .Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.
And the conclusion:
A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.
Harvard would certainly be “fixed” if these plans were implemented, but the chance they will be is nil. The letter from Harvard’s Board of Overseers, shown in the previous post, suggests that they clearly don’t want institutional neutrality, and any plan like the one above requires the approval of the Board. Likewise, I don’t see Harvard approving of free speech anytime soon. Nor will it get rid of DEI: bad “optics”.
The fivefold way only makes sense, though ditching DEI is a no-go, even at the University of Chicago. But at Harvard I fear that Steve’s suggestions will remain a pipe dream.
Some of these issues also affect education at high school level. The “hierarchy of victim groups” certainly does. A few years ago, when Fieldston School in New York set up “affinity groups” for members of minorities, they initially refused to allow an affinity group for Jews. Ultimately parental pressure on the administration prevailed and Jews can have an affinity group. But the initial set-up reflected the prevailing ideology, according to which “diversity and inclusion “ administrators don’t treat Jews, or anti-Semitism, as included in their concerns. There is a long history with these issues at Fieldston.
It’s too bad that Jewish parents went along with the affinity group idea in the first place – demanding their own – if I understood you correctly.
To get around the paywall, take the article’s URL and paste it into the box at this web site: https://12ft.io/
I got to the Pinker op-ed with no difficulty this way.
If the Boston Globe wants you to pay for their publications, I think we should respect the decision.
Closely related: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/4321195-universities-must-quit-with-the-bs/
Steve Pinker’s recommendations make sense to me. But having just read “Niall Ferguson: The Treason of the Intellectuals
Anyone who has a naive belief in the power of higher education to instill morality has not studied the history of German universities in the Third Reich” I’m not sure it is enough. Ferguson’s rendering of that history is chilling and cautionary. He indicts the German intelligensia for helping to first incite then support horrific abuse of Jews, communists, the intellectually handicapped and other so-called undesirables. He chronicles the influence of German academics. “In 1927 the French philosopher Julien Benda published La trahison des clercs—“The Treason of the Intellectuals”—which condemned the descent of European intellectuals into extreme nationalism and racism.” ”Those who were meant to pursue the life of the mind, he wrote, had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds.” And those hatreds were already moving from the realm of the ideas into the realm of violence—with results that would be catastrophic for all of Europe.” It’s worth reading and pondering the similarities with today’s American academy.
https://www.thefp.com/p/niall-ferguson-treason-intellectuals-third-reich
Dismantle the DEI bureaucracy. This is what enables, institutionalizes, and perpetuates the hypocrisy, the policing of speech (which prevents universities from adhering to the First Amendment), the acceptance of antisemitism, the cancellations, the stifling of debate, the decline of standards, and the self-censorship. This may take time—decades even—but universities can start by freezing hiring in DEI departments. Allow people to “age out” if you have to, but you need to find an antidote to this poison. Take the first steps now. Everyone will thank you (except the DEI apparatchiks).
I think you’re right. All DEI departments should be dismantled in academic and business settings.
Excellent, concise, and to the point…including the conclusion of hopelessness under the current Fellows. So maybe someone can cross-stitch the five-fold way onto a pillow that will sit on a couch in President Gay’s office until the time is right for leadership to be looking to fix their mess.
Also just finished Greg Lukianoff’s “Cancelling of the American Mind”. He points out that a freedom CULTURE precedes a set of specific freedom LAWS. Culture is responsibility of the Fellows to define for President and staff to promulgate and enforce policy.
My knowledge is defective regarding the Heckler’s veto vis-a-vis the First Amendment. I need to study the matter. I wonder if disabling a sound system, or using a bullhorn is a manifestation of the Heckler’s veto. In the spirit of retribution, one is all too easily tempted to attend a speaking event a given hypocritical heckler wants all to refrain from heckling, and return fire with sustained noisesome vocal broadsides.
This is classic Pinker – clear and reasonable – I wish this plan well.
Personally, I was hoping Pinker would go way further to note “DEI” as the epistemically subversive project that it (IMHO) is – but I understand this would be confusing…
… or as I like to call it (nod to Confucius) :
Dialectical Epistemic Inversion, in which the wizards determine meaning with the secret knowledge.
According to an article in Forbes, “Between 1976 and 2018, full-time administrators and other professionals employed by those institutions increased by 164% and 452%, respectively. Meanwhile, the number of full-time faculty employed at colleges and universities in the U.S. increased by only 92%, marginally outpacing student enrollment which grew by 78%.”
How many of those administrators are involved in DEI, I wonder? It would be refreshing to see a major university eliminate their entire DEI apparatus. (A pipe dream, I know.)
Unfortunately, Pinker’s recommendation on viewpoint diversity is even less likely to manifest. Faculty approve new faculty and they’re not going to change who they hire.
“Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative.”
I don’t agree that pointing out the disproportionate percentage of college faculty members who identify as liberal vs. conservative is, in itself, somehow proof of a problem. It seems to presuppose that all ideologies have equal merit. However, not all ideologies are consistent with modern moral principles (such as the principle of “democracy”), such that there is no reason to expect that all ideologies would be equally represented in any group of people. To use an extreme example, I suspect that a disproportionate percentage of college faculty members also identify as being anti child pornography as opposed to pro child pornography.
Whether or not an ideology should be respected requires an assessment of that ideology on its merits. The dearth of individuals with a particular ideology in any group is not, a priori, proof that those individuals are being treated unfairly, or that we should work to increase the number of individuals with that ideology in that group.
“The dearth of individuals with a particular [trait] in any group is not, a priori, proof that those individuals are being treated unfairly, or that we should work to increase the number of individuals with that [trait] in that group.”
Ironically this is exactly opposite the view of Claudine Gay and other anti-racists: all differences in representation of a trait are evidence of bias against that trait, and must be addressed by increasing the number of members in a group that have the trait (if necessary at the expense of others who lack the trait). Applies to race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, and should apply equally or not to viewpoint (or ideology).
But maybe you & I agree it’s the hypocritical application of this view rather than its merits that we object to.
I’ll state something perhaps controversial here. While the First Amendment allows for speech calling for murder, I think this speech should be unwelcome on a college campus (and I understand that private colleges have more leeway than public ones but I’ll ignore that). As the French article in the NYT points out, threatening to kill individuals or small groups can be harassment or intimidation or stalking and not protected but threats against large groups, say online, is non-specific and OK.
To use the Jewish example (in no way my belief and only and example and could be any ethnic group) the phrase “all Jews should die,” is pretty odious but does it meet the standard of provoking imminent violence? It might. It doesn’t target an individual but it might and I fail to see how talk of genocide is defensible as free speech on a college campus. Who MUST express this sentiment to make a point?
OK, still 3rd person and non-specific, so how about “kill or gas or murder all the Jews”? Now we’re in active voice and getting prescriptive and sounding even more like incitement.
What if 200 Palestinian students are chanting this during a campus march and intimidating Jewish students? Kill all members of an ethnic group or race? How a Jewish person would not see these placards or hear these chants and not feel absolutely physically unsafe on campus escapes me. I would and I’m not Jewish. Further, we know if the group was “blacks” – instant expulsion.
Which is why I don’t think campuses should allow anyone to threaten to kill anyone. It flirts too closely to violence or incitement, public or private, and the school is sworn to protect the students. One can say anything else – “from the river to the sea” “Israel should disappear,” etc. but not taking the life of a person or ethnic group in my view. Even “kill Hamas” does not mean ‘kill the Palestinians’ bc that’s an organization. Maybe I lack imagination but I fail to see any context that would legitimize uttering death threats on a college campus.
Would this be too restrictive of free speech or elide into the feared slippery slope argument. I don’t think so but in a world where ‘silence is violence,’ maybe.
One correction of Pinker: libel should not be included as a “crime” that uses speech. Some countries (and even a few US states) have criminal libel laws on the books, and it’s a terrible thing that the First Amendment should clearly prohibit. Libel is a civil violation you can be sued for damages over, not a crime in the US. (And it should not be a punishable offense at a university, as the University of Chicago recently made it.)
One correction of Jerry: The heckler’s veto is not protected by the First Amendment. If it was, public colleges could not prohibit it, and clearly they can (the question of whether someone speaking on a soapbox on the quad can be shouted down legally is quite different). By the way, the original meaning of the heckler’s veto, as coined by Harry Kalven, is government censorship of events using the excuse of protesters breaching the peace. He called it “heckler veto” and then the Supreme Court misquoted him, adding the possessive.
The First Amendment does not require the heckler’s veto.
https://www.thefire.org/news/rejecting-hecklers-veto
Archive of the article:
https://archive.is/20231212144034/https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/12/11/opinion/steven-pinker-how-to-save-universities-harvard-claudine-gay/
Pinker’s article includes a link to the FIRE ratings on free speech on campus, which leave Harvard literally last! (https://rankings.thefire.org/rank) Colleges have a duty, it seems to me, to foster what one of my idols psychologist Scott Lilienfeld used to often talk about and encourage in psychology conferences intellectual, also known as epistemic, humility (which he also researched: https://scottlilienfeld.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/bowes2020-1.pdf) As a related story, I recently joined an environmental group to take more of a stand against what I perceive as failures in our country to better address climate change. There are attempts within the group, and also attempts when we try to forge networks with other environmental groups, to ally with a non-environmental cause, Free Palestine, and that not appearing to do so by, say, not writing a statement on our website, could lose us support among young prospective members. I myself tried writing a statement that condemned violence and extremism in all its forms, but while some liked it, others thought it did not sufficiently condemn Israelis (I did not mention states, groups, peoples or beliefs). There is a reluctance among younger members to acknowledge that Hamas is an antisemitic organization, nor to define what will be Free about Palestine if Israel did not have control over West Bank or Gaza. But more significantly, while environmentalists, like all people, may be sickened by this violence on either side, including Israel’s killing of a large number of civilians, the issue is not, at its core, relevant to environmentalism, other than perhaps in recommending forms of governance that are democratic, peaceful, and ecological. There is no reason, as with colleges, that an environmental movement must take a stand necessarily, other than to promote free and respectful conversation among its members.
The fastest way to a solution is through the wallet. If prestigious universities won’t change, then employers should make it clear that a degree from there will have little to no value. If the only job anyone can get coming out of an Ivy is a professional activist, then the number of people choosing to go will dry up and blow away.
Harvard and all higher education should be aware of UNESCO’s intense interest in “higher education” – which I noted previously – especially in problematic scenarios – I give an excerpt and add some bold :
Parr, et. al.
“Knowledge-driven actions: transforming higher education for global sustainability”
2022
UNESCO
https://doi.org/10.54675/YBTV1653
“Transformation is the red thread running through all the Sustainable Development Goals, the United Nations’ agenda for responding to global challenges facing humanity and the planet. Setting our world on a more sustainable course requires radical shifts in current development paradigms that are exacerbating inequalities and imperilling our common future. This transition is dependent on new knowledge, research and competences that only higher education institutions are in a position to provide, rooted in their historic role of service to society.”
“In 1964, inspiring the 1968-student revolt a couple of years later, Herbert Marcuse wrote a key text against “one dimensional man”, urging universities and campuses around the world to become places that resisted reductionism. ”
… I would note that resistance is exactly what we see lately – resistance to colonialism of “Western”/Enlightenment values – with, of course, communism – but they never use that word for some reason.