Conor Friedersdorf (and Alexander Barvinok) on ideological coercion in American colleges

The Atlantic‘s Conor Fridersdorf is a breath of fresh air among liberal woke media.  He is in fact a liberal, but not a “progressive”, and in the new article below he reports one mathematician’s observations of how DEI has insinuated itself into academics, creating not only viewpoint homogeneity, but authoritarianism.

Like my colleague Anna Krylov, Alexander Barvinok began his studies in Russia (math for him, chemistry for Anna), and then moved to the U.S., where, at the university of Michigan, he initially enjoyed the academic freedom he lacked overseas. But then, as time crept towards the present, Barvinok found that math began changing in the direction of a Soviet-style academia, with required conformity and fealty to non-scienctific but ideological ideals. Granted, we don’t kill American academics for bucking conventional ideology, but the parallels between Russia and the U.S. about how the authoritarianism started and advanced are striking. Anna’s story is very similar.  Right now we’re at the “DEI stage” of authoritarianism, but will it stop here? I doubt it.

Click to read, though it’s paywalled. I didn’t find it archived, so a judicious inquiry might yield the piece.

I’ll quote from Friedersdorf’s nice piece, in which Barvinok’s words are given in quotation marks.

“I grew up in the Soviet Union, where people had to affirm their fealty to ideals, and the leaders embodying those ideals, on a daily basis,” he told me. “As years went by, I observed the remarkable ease with which passionate communists turned first into passionate pro-Western liberals and then into passionate nationalists. This lived experience and also common sense convince me that only true conformists excel in this game. Do we really want our math departments to be populated by conformists?”

Barvinok insists that it isn’t diversity to which he objects. Any coerced statement, he says, would trouble him as much. “Even if one is required to say ‘I passionately believe that water would certainly wet us, as fire would certainly burn,’” hewrotein his resignation letter, “the routine affirmation of one’s beliefs as a precondition of making a living constitutes compelled speech and corrupts everyone who participates in the performance.”

It is this compelled speech, which we all know has to adhere to the Kendi-an au courant antiracist doctrine, that makes DEI statements offensive and inimical.  If you diverge from the accepted narrative, your job application might not even get looked at, and you may not be promoted. This is neither inclusive nor promotes diversity, since it leads to everyone having—or at least professing—the same views on diversity.  Those who aren’t “included” keep their mouths shut. And do mathematicians really need to even deal with such issues? I haven’t heard a good argument for it. So long as professors and universities don’t discriminate on the grounds of race, gender, or any other such immutable trait, and concentrate on academic merit and service instead, all will be well.

Barvinok graduated first in his class in St Petersburg, but couldn’t get a good job because he was Jewish. (Yes, Russia was and is still rife with antisemitism.)  After Gorbachev came to power and things loosened up, he got a postdoc in Stockholm, and then moved to Cornell and finally to Michigan in 1994, where he became tenured.

The ideological rot in mathematics (and other sciences, I’m guessing) began soon thereafter, and occurred, Barvinok says, in three stages.

STAGE 1: The NSF kicks off the “broader impact” requirement for scientists

When did he first fret about the political environment in American universities? Looking back, he recalls steady growth in three broad trends that he began to notice sometime in the early 2000s. “Initially, as an American professor, you were in good standing if you taught well, did reasonable research, and were a good colleague, which was demonstrated by your willingness to do committee work,” he recalled. “The first trend I noticed was that to count as a ‘good citizen,’ you were increasingly expected to contribute, so to speak, to the betterment of humanity at large.”

In particular, he recalled the National Science Foundation introducing a requirement starting in 1997 to describe the “broader impacts” of research proposals and how that changed the experience of participating as an expert on panels convened to judge grant applications. In a few cases, applicants he knew as “excellent mathematicians” and “pretty decent individuals” would describe their research objectives with care, knowledge, and enthusiasm, whereas in the mandatory “broader impact” section, they would have “nothing better to say than that they plan to write joint papers with women and supervise female graduate students,” so mething that outraged some members of the panel

“I understood the outrage, of course, but for me it was an indication that this perhaps well-intended requirement was in fact ill-advised, as it pushed otherwise decent people to behave in a silly, sometimes obnoxious manner,” he reflected. “It also appeared that the university and college policies in hiring, and to some extent promotions and merit raises, were increasingly motivated by the desire to effect some positive social changes, in the form of a contribution to DEI.”

STAGE 2:  College administrations grow with new hires involved in DEI

The second trend that Barvinok began to notice in the aughts was the growth of college administrators and the growing coherence of the messages issued by the administrators across institutions. Today, the University of Michigan’s DEI bureaucracy is huge: According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “Michigan’s DEI structure, with $85 million in initial funding and more than 100 employees contributing at least part time to diversity efforts, is widely considered among the most ambitious and well-funded offices in the nation.” Multiple pages on the University of Michigan website emphasize efforts to infuse DEI values into faculty hiring, research, and more.

Let me emphasize that I’ve been at the University of Chicago since 1986, and although DEI has grown and is more visible, it hasn’t been as noticeable here nor as oppressive as at Michigan, which has a much bigger DEI bureaucracy.

STAGE 3: DEI comes to dominate and invade all academic effort

The third trend he noticed was the changing nature of debate. More and more often, someone would claim that an argument was harming a particular demographic, often without specifying how. As he recalls it, “It was at this ‘harm’ stage that people became afraid to speak their minds.”

This is where the diversity of opinion began diminishing and those who didn’t feel “included” became too intimidated to oppose the trend.

Barvinok sees all these stages as related and thus, perhaps, an “organic progression”:

In Barvinok’s telling, the three trends he described—the institutional requirement to do public good, the growth of the academic bureaucracy, and the accusations of causing harm to silence opponents—are interrelated. “The more social goals one wants to effect, and the more ambitious they are, the more administrators one needs, who in turn may put forth new social goals or make the existing ones more ambitious,” he explained. “If you are convinced that what you do is in the public good, then clearly your opponent is causing harm.” Furthermore, if someone’s actions fail to advance progress (as self-styled reformers see it) quickly and smoothly, or have the opposite effect, there’s a tendency “to search for the enemies within, who hinder the effort, maybe unwittingly.”

As an example of how well the termites have been dining, Barvinok uses the case of UC Davis math professor Abigail Thompson (recounted on this website), who was demonized simply for publishing an article in Notices of the American Mathematical Society favoring DEI but arguing against mandatory DEI statements. That caused a maelstrom (read the link above). It was, for Barvinok, a watershed moment when he realized that, as in Russia, simply expressing a heterodox idea could get you in trouble.

But wait! The rot kept spreading. Here’s what happened after the death of George Floyd, when academic ideology became totally authoritarian:

On June 26, 2020, about a month after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, an email addressed to the math department arrived in his inbox. In it, the department chairman told everyone that a math-department committee that focuses on the “climate” of the department, with the vetting of the department’s executive committee, had written a statement on the department’s response to racism.

It contained the following lines:

We understand and acknowledge that systemic racism permeates all aspects of our society. We acknowledge that systemic racism permeates the culture of our own institution and department. For this we are deeply sorry; we know that we have work to do.

Once again, Barvinok thought of the society he’d left as a young man.

“In my memory from Brezhnev to more recent Putin times, the slogan ‘We have work to do’ served as an unmistakable indicator that no work would be done, as those who work don’t have an appetite for sloganeering,” he told me. “Still, to gather my wits, I decided to do some work of my own and went to wash the deck of my house.” When he returned, an email to the whole math faculty by a fellow professor was in his inbox. The math department’s email, it read, “essentially states that the majority of my colleagues are racists, a false accusation which I refuse to join.”

Barvinok then responded himself. “I wrote a couple emails to the effect that the department has no business making political (or religious, or artistic, or gastronomical) statements on behalf of its members, and suggested that those who support the statement should just sign it,” he told me. “It became clear then that people were afraid to voice their opinion, unless it was aligned with what was perceived as the dominant narrative. There were many fewer people who expressed their disapproval of the statement publicly than those who did it privately.”

The Michigan fealty statement is very similar to the University of Chicago’s Lab School Science Department statement that I highlighted yesterday, a likely violation of our University’s principle of institutional neutrality. It’s harmful for reasons that Barvinok gives above.  Are we becoming like Russia?

Read and weep (Lab School, please ditch this statement!) The markings are from a parent.

It’s not that different from the Michigan statement, right?

The result is, as you’d expect, a reduction in expressed viewpoint diversity and a “non-inclusion” of those who don’t accept the loyalty oaths.  Friedersdorf issues a call for those who dissent to speak up:

Asurveyof 1,500 faculty in the U.S. conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that half of respondents considered such statements “an ideological litmus test that violates academic freedom.” If Barvinok’s analysis is correct, that cohort could speak out against DEI statements without significant risk to their career, if only they coordinate and do so in numbers.

Then again, the longer the current system is in place, the harder it may be to reform––if hiring processes are biased in favor of a given ideology, and against those who dissent from it, the faction benefiting from bias will come to dominate the institution over time. As Barvinok put it in his letter to the American Mathematical Society, “I anticipate an argument that the AMS is ‘not involved in politics.’ But this is the kind of ‘politics’ that, rephrasing Pericles, will get involved with you, whether you like it or not, and hence inaction is just as political as action.”

For dissenters, the best time to speak up is now.

And so I have.  Onward and upward!

Here’s Barvinok lecturing at MIT in 2019:

Oh, and here’s an informative tweet about U. Mich. Look at those salaries!

The University of Michigan spent $18M on 142 DEI bureaucrats last academic year, according to @Mark_J_Perry: https://t.co/WVTdmBPhfm pic.twitter.com/iI2hgwQurQ

— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) November 18, 2023