Category: academics behaving badly

Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman accused of plagiarism, admits guilt

January 6, 2024 • 11:30 am

Bill Ackman, you’ll recall, is the billionaire who helped bring down Harvard President Claudine Gay. First he chastised her for her performance before the House committee, calling out the antisemitism that occurred at Harvard on Gay’s watch. Then he announced that he would no longer donate to Harvard until they cleaned up their act. Finally, when Gay’s plagiarism in her scholarly papers came to light, he bored down on that, and kept doing it until she resigned as President.  There’s little doubt Ackman’s his stream of tweets about Gay promoted her resignation by calling everyone’s attention to Gay’s missteps and embarrassing the board of Harvard Overseers, which is Gay’s boss.

As I’ve said repeatedly, I think Gay shouldn’t have resigned until the evidence of plagiarism surfaced. Her remarks about antisemitism to the Representatives were wooden and unempathic, but a First-Amendment construal of Harvard’s speech code would indeed have deemed cries for genocide of the Jews as “conditional”. Sometimes it’s legal, and sometimes not. The problem was that Harvard doesn’t have a First-Amendment-based speech code, and it applied its own code unevenly, giving rise to hypocrisy.  However, I would have given her a chance, for if she’d implemented something like Steve Pinker’s “fivefold way”, Harvard would have greatly improved.

In the end, her plagiarism, which also called attention to a rather thin academic resumé, brought her down, and made me agree that she should resign.

Now, however, Ackman is somewhat hoist with his own petard, for his wife, Neri Oxman, a designer and a professor at MIT until 2021, stands accused of plagiarism herself.  It doesn’t seem quite as bad as Gay’s missteps, for Oxman, in her dissertation, did cite the sources of her information. What she failed to do, however, was put quotation marks around phrases and paragraphs she lifted from cited sources, and that’s a violation of MIT’s own plagiarism code.

Business Insider (BI), in the first two articles below, found examples of her plagiarism, and you can see that BI can barely contain its joy of catching an Ackman-adjacent person in the act of plagiarism. It’s almost tabloid journalism.

Click on either to read. The third article is a summary from CNN.  In the end, Oxman admitted guilt and said she’d correct the quotations, but Ackman is pushing back against the charges, vowing reprisal against both MIT and BI while not denying what Oxman did. But since Oxman is no longer at MIT, she has no academic job to lose.

Click below or find this article archived here:

Again, click below or go to the article archived here:

And from CNN, not paywalled.

The accusation (from BI):

The billionaire hedge fund manager and major Harvard donor Bill Ackman seized on revelations that Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, had plagiarized some passages in her academic work to underscore his calls for her removal following what he perceived as her mishandling of large protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza on Harvard’s campus.

An analysis by Business Insider found a similar pattern of plagiarism by Ackman’s wife, Neri Oxman, who became a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017.

Oxman plagiarized multiple paragraphs of her 2010 doctoral dissertation, Business Insider found, including at least one passage directly lifted from other writers without citation.

. . .An architect and artist who experiments with new ways to synthesize materials found in nature, Oxman has been the subject of profiles in major outlets such as The New York Times and Elle. She has collaborated with Björk, exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and had paparazzi stake her out after Brad Pitt visited her lab at MIT in 2018.

There are two kinds of accusations. First, that Oxman “self plagiarized”, using her own writing in her dissertation word-for-word in her published papers. That’s okay, and isn’t really plagiarism because a dissertation isn’t published, and in most cases is intended to be turned into papers. Thus, BI’s statement below isn’t incriminating:

She also recycled phrasing she used in her dissertation in subsequent papers. The opening paragraph of her dissertation, for instance, appears almost word-for-word in an article she published in 2013. While re-using material isn’t a formal violation of MIT’s academic-integrity code, a guide to “ethical writing” recommended by the university to its scholars and students warns against it.

Self-plagiarizing isn’t a good habit if you use the same phrases or paragraphs in one paper after another, but “plagiarizing” from a dissertation into a paper is not at all a violation. I suspect MIT’s dictum here refers to using your own words repeatedly in published work. And that’s not what Oxman did.

The evidence:

Then there are the other cases, in which Oxman did cite her original sources but also used big chunks of wording from them—without quotation marks. That’s a no-no, but it’s not as big a no-no as what Gay did, which was lift chunks of prose and then not include her using proper citations.

Here are a couple of examples of how Oxman used wording from previously-published papers in her thesis. Notice that she does cite the sources in parentheses, though:

and one more:

The MIT academic integrity code (below; click to enlarge) says that even though sources are cited, this is a no-no. But remember, this is plagiarism in a dissertation, not in a published paper. I’ve circled the bit that Oxman violated:

Oxman apologized for these errors in a tweet, though she couldn’t verify one of the accusations because the source was online. She’s going to get MIT to correct the citations. BI notes:

Neri Oxman, the wife of billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, admitted to failing to properly credit sources in portions of her doctoral dissertation after Business Insider published an article finding that Oxman engaged in a pattern of plagiarism similar to that of former Harvard president Claudine Gay.

BI identified four instances in Oxman’s dissertation in which she lifted paragraphs from other scholars’ work without including them in quotation marks. In those instances, Oxman wrote in a post on X, using quotation marks would have been “the proper approach for crediting the work. I regret and apologize for these errors.”

. . .Oxman wrote on X that after she has reviewed the original sources, she plans to “request that MIT make any necessary corrections.”

“As I have dedicated my career to advancing science and innovation, I have always recognized the profound importance of the contributions of my peers and those who came before me. I hope that my work is helpful to the generations to come,” she wrote.

Oxman now leads an eponymous company, Oxman, focused on “innovation in product, architectural, and urban design,” she wrote on X. “OXMAN has been in stealth mode. I look forward to sharing more about OXMAN later this year.”

I don’t know how MIT will correct these errors, because I don’t think most Ph.D. theses are online (mine certainly isn’t). If it is they can fix it, but perhaps they’ll just append the corrections in her thesis that reposes in MIT’s library.

If you read the Business Insider articles, they come off as hit jobs, as if somehow they’re joyfully getting back at what Ackman for what he did to Claudine Gay by showing that Ackman’s wife did the same thing. But Oxman didn’t do the same thing: she is guilty of not using quotation marks around quotations taken from an attributed source in a dissertation. Gay, on the other hand, is guilty of not using quotation marks around unattributed quotations, and doing this in published papers, not in a dissertation.  Further, Oxman is no longer a professor at MIT, and was never dean or president of any university, so it’s not such a big deal. Yes, she should have cited sources correctly, but in the end the damage is minor. Her missteps are far more excusable than Gay’s. But they are missteps, and academics need to know what constitutes plagiarism.

Business Insider keeps mentioning Ackman in their two pieces, which of course is what gives this story its legs, but BI also adds superfluous material to make both Ackman and Oxman look bad, like this:

In 2019, emails uncovered by the Boston Globe showed Ackman pressured MIT to keep Oxman’s name out of a brewing scandal over an original sculpture she gave to Jeffrey Epstein in thanks for a $125,000 donation to her lab.

So what? This is irrelevant to the story, and is pretty much of a smear.

As for Ackman, he’s not denying that his wife did what BI accused her of, but is standing by her nonetheless (see the linked tweet below):

Her husband, Ackman, lauded her transparency in his own post on X following the publication of Business Insider’s article.

“​​Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate,” he wrote.

However, this empathic stand is weakened by Ackman’s threat to examine the writings of Business Insider staff for plagiarism:

. . . and he’s going after plagiarism at MIT, too!

The guy is combative, that’s for sure! It’s not seemly for him to strike out at everybody, trying to find plagiarizing skeletons in their closets. Gay is gone; Oxman admitted fault and will correct her writing. It’s time to move on!

Here are Oxman and Ackman from NBC News; the caption is from NBC:

h/t: Greg Mayer

Claudine Gay discusses her resignation in the New York Times

January 4, 2024 • 11:30 am

As we all know by now, Harvard’s President Claudine Gay the first black woman head of the University, resigned on Tuesday (her letter of resignation, here, is also reproduced below the fold).  In her formal letter she doesn’t explain why she resigned, but simply says this:

. . . . after consultation with members of the Corporation, it has become clear that it is in the best interests of Harvard for me to resign so that our community can navigate this moment of extraordinary challenge with a focus on the institution rather than any individual.

There’s a soupçon of self-pity in her resignation, as well as calling attention to “personal attacks” and “threats fueled by racial animus.” I don’t doubt she received these, but had it been me, considerations of dignity would have compelled me to omit this stuff.  Still, it doesn’t bother me that much, but it’s worth noting this stuff:

Amidst all of this, it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor — two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am — and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.

Originally there was speculation that Gay might resign because of her rather uninspiring performance testifying before a House committee, but I didn’t think her performance was that bad: she reiterated that Harvard’s speech code allowed people to call for Jewish genocide on some occasions, but not others. As she implied, “context matters,” and that’s true if one is adhering to the First Amendment. The problem was that Harvard had never adhered to the First Amendment, for it has no speech code stipulating that. Rather, Harvard applied its speech code unevenly, sanctioning or warning some people for “offenses” far smaller than saying, “Gas the Jews.”  The problem was not context but hypocrisy.

That said, I thought that this could be a “teachable moment” for Gay and Harvard, one that might prompt her and the Overseers to finally fix the problems with “free” speech at Harvard. But when accusations of plagiarism began accumulating, and were undoubtedly plagiarism, eventually her position became untenable (see above).  Do note that those accusations were leveled largely by conservatives: Christopher Rufo and the New York Post.  This shows you that, unless you want a plagiarist as President of Harvard, it’s not good to write off what conservatives say simply because of their politics.

Gay will be replaced temporarily by economist and physician Alan Garber, Harvard’s provost and chief academic officer. And then the search will begin for Gay’s replacement. There is lots of speculation here (will it be another black woman?, etc.), but I won’t engage in any prognostications. As for Gay, she will return to her position as tenured professor of government and African and African American studies. But the tweet below suggests that she’s going to keep the enormous salary she got as President—nearly a million bucks a year. And that implies that she made some kind of deal with the Overseers to resign quietly so long as she got to keep that huge salary.  To me that seems unfair, but it’s better for Harvard that she leaves and gets a big salary than if she stayed.

 

The New York Times allowed Dr. Gay to respond to her “resignation”—surely more than just a suggestion from the Corporation—by writing an op-ed giving her take on the matter. And I have to say that she’s far less dignified, far too unwilling to own up to why she was fired, and far too self-pitying for such a piece.It makes her look petty, fragile, and too willing to blame others for her faults.  She should have just stuck by her resignation letter. Click the headline below to read.

I’ve reproduced her op-ed, paragraph by paragraph (indented) with my own comments, which are flush left.

Gay begins with a combination of self-pity, virtue-flaunting, and deflecting the blame for her resignation onto others.  Now I have no use for people who threaten her or use the n-word, but again, considerations of dignity would, at least to me, mandate that she leave this stuff out.  The bit about “weaponizing her presidency”, and accusing “demagogues” (Ackman?) of engaging in a campaign to erode the ideals of Harvard is simply silly, and makes her look unwilling to accept any culpability. Furthermore, it’s not right. People like Steve Pinker have used the occasion not to impugn Gay or call for her resignation, but to lay out principles Harvard could use to improve itself.

On Tuesday, I made the wrenching but necessary decision to resign as Harvard’s president. For weeks, both I and the institution to which I’ve devoted my professional life have been under attack. My character and intelligence have been impugned. My commitment to fighting antisemitism has been questioned. My inbox has been flooded with invective, including death threats. I’ve been called the N-word more times than I care to count.

My hope is that by stepping down I will deny demagogues the opportunity to further weaponize my presidency in their campaign to undermine the ideals animating Harvard since its founding: excellence, openness, independence, truth.

Continuing on:

As I depart, I must offer a few words of warning. The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader. This was merely a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society. Campaigns of this kind often start with attacks on education and expertise, because these are the tools that best equip communities to see through propaganda. But such campaigns don’t end there. Trusted institutions of all types — from public health agencies to news organizations — will continue to fall victim to coordinated attempts to undermine their legitimacy and ruin their leaders’ credibility. For the opportunists driving cynicism about our institutions, no single victory or toppled leader exhausts their zeal.

Here she shows what, exactly, is “bigger than me” (it should have been “bigger than I”). She clearly blames anti-wokeness as the force behind attacks on her.  Or at least that’s how I interpret it, for I can see no other forces trying to undermine “trusted institutions of all types”. Yes, the antiwoke went after the liberal media, but did they go after “public health agencies”? Perhaps, if you think that that’s what motivated the conspiracy theorists and Republicans who fought covid mandates. (But some of them were right, viz., about the value of masking and closing schools.)  Here Gay lumps together a whole bunch of disparate groups—conservatives, conspiracy theorists, people concerned with the truth about medicine, and liberals like me—as her “basket of demagogues.” The Associated Press implies that in the tweet below.  But does it really matter whether liberals, conservatives, or centrists call attention to plagiarism, so long as it turns out to be true?

Gay continues:

Yes, I made mistakes. In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.

Well, it would have been better for her not to have doubled down on Hamas, but rather to point out the hypocrisy of Harvard’s uneven enforcement of the speech code,  noting how odd it was that calls for adherence to the First Amendment arose only when that Amendment would have permitted calls for genocide against Jews.  But yes, she appeared wooden and unengaged, and she could have done better. Blame the lawyers. Still, her performance alone would not have gotten her to “resign” (the euphemism for “being asked to leave”).

Then she goes on to the plagiarism charges, refusing to admit she copied (well, she could hardly admit that, could she?):

Most recently, the attacks have focused on my scholarship. My critics found instances in my academic writings where some material duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution. I believe all scholars deserve full and appropriate credit for their work. When I learned of these errors, I promptly requested corrections from the journals in which the flagged articles were published, consistent with how I have seen similar faculty cases handled at Harvard.

I have never misrepresented my research findings, nor have I ever claimed credit for the research of others. Moreover, the citation errors should not obscure a fundamental truth: I proudly stand by my work and its impact on the field.

Despite the obsessive scrutiny of my peer-reviewed writings, few have commented on the substance of my scholarship, which focuses on the significance of minority office holding in American politics. My research marshaled concrete evidence to show that when historically marginalized communities gain a meaningful voice in the halls of power, it signals an open door where before many saw only barriers. And that, in turn, strengthens our democracy.

Here plagiarism becomes “material that duplicated other scholars’ language, without proper attribution”.  It’s been euphemisms all the way down with her and Harvard, with nobody daring to use the p-word.  However, she requested corrections of only three items (there were forty or more), and attributed her mistakes to “errors”—as do all plagiarists. It’s hardly possible, I think, to engage in the amount of plagiarism she did without knowing that you’re doing something wrong.  She also decries the people who brought her down as being afflicted with “obsessive scrutiny”.  Her “scholarship” is still under question, with some saying that what she published from her thesis differs from what the original sources say, but we’ll wait to see how that shakes out.

Throughout this work, I asked questions that had not been asked, used then-cutting-edge quantitative research methods and established a new understanding of representation in American politics. This work was published in the nation’s top political science journals and spawned important research by other scholars.

Never did I imagine needing to defend decades-old and broadly respected research, but the past several weeks have laid waste to truth. Those who had relentlessly campaigned to oust me since the fall often trafficked in lies and ad hominem insults, not reasoned argument. They recycled tired racial stereotypes about Black talent and temperament. They pushed a false narrative of indifference and incompetence.

I’ll let others assess her scholarship and methods, but let it be known that she published a total of only eleven papers in her career (and edited one volume), a remarkably thin record of scholarship for a scholar picking up the reins of Harvard. As for the “truth” of her research, other scholars are now vetting her papers (some have claimed that she won’t provide her original data), and we’ll see what happens. If she did manipulate or misrepresent data, that is one thing that could cost her her job at Harvard, though I doubt that this will happen.

It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution. Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.

Above she descends deeply into defensiveness and self-pity, and most clearly plays the race card, which is beneath her. Yes, racists may have assailed her, but she should ignore them in a public discussion like this, except perhaps for a brief mention. There’s no evidence that she was attacked by Rufo, Ackman and the NY Post because of her race. In Ackman’s case, it was clearly his being fed up with the antisemitism at Harvard, not Gay’s race. Self-pity is undignified.

Finally, she engages in a bit of virtue flaunting, and once again refers to the demagogues who brought her down, implying that she was unfairly pressured to resign by Evil Outside Forces pursuing an agenda to destroy Harvard’s wonderful values:

I still believe that. As I return to teaching and scholarship, I will continue to champion access and opportunity, and I will bring to my work the virtue I discussed in the speech I delivered at my presidential inauguration: courage. Because it is courage that has buoyed me throughout my career and it is courage that is needed to stand up to those who seek to undermine what makes universities unique in American life.

Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be. Too often they are pursuing self-serving agendas that should be met with more questions and less credulity.

College campuses in our country must remain places where students can learn, share and grow together, not spaces where proxy battles and political grandstanding take root. Universities must remain independent venues where courage and reason unite to advance truth, no matter what forces set against them.

It all comes down to this summary statement: “Antiwoke people, including demagogues, brought me down, largely because of my race. Yes, I made mistakes, but they were trivial. In the end, it was political grandstanding that pried me out of my position as President. And by the way, I’m a very good person.”

She’s enmired in victimhood. Color me unimpressed.

Click “continue reading” to see Gay’s letter of resignation:

Continue reading “Claudine Gay discusses her resignation in the New York Times” →

Stanford Law School tries to succor Federalist Society by sending its members into the jaws of lions

March 13, 2023 • 12:00 pm

Get a load of this. Although Stanford University Law School is trying to make amends for the shameful display put on by its students last week, they continue to stick their feet deeper into the mud.

Yesterday I reported on the execrable deplatforming of Fifth Circuit federal appellate Judge Kyle Duncan during his scheduled talk at Stanford Law School (SLS). Students, outraged that a conservative judge should be given any platform, interrupted the Judge so persistently and loudly that he was forced to stop his speech. (His topic was the relationship between his court and the Supreme Court.)

The students had been egged on by Tirien Steinbach, the Law School’s Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Before Judge Duncan’s talk, she sent an email to the students explaining why Duncan was an oppressor And then when Duncan asked for faculty help in quelling the in-class demonstration, Steinbach stood up and read nine minutes of prepared remarks to Duncan explaining how awful and hurtful he was and how,  perhaps, Stanford’s policy of free speech wasn’t so great after all because it caused “harm”. As she suggested, perhaps the “juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.” Steinbach’s method of promoting harmony apparently involves setting groups against each other.

In a “mistakes-were-made” brand of email to the Stanford community, SLS Dean Jenny Martinez apologized for the incident without placing blame on anyone. But the next day, Martinez and Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne sent a joint apology to Judge Duncan promising that an incident like this would never happen again. Here’s that email:

Dear Judge Duncan,

We write to apologize for the disruption of your recent speech at Stanford Law School. As has already been communicated to our community, what happened was inconsistent with our policies on free speech, and we are very sorry about the experience you had while visiting our campus.

We are very clear with our students that, given our commitment to free expression, if there are speakers they disagree with, they are welcome to exercise their right to protest but not to disrupt the proceedings. Our disruption policy states that students are not allowed to “prevent the effective carrying out” of a “public event” whether by heckling or other forms of interruption.

In addition, staff members who should have enforced university policies failed to do so, and instead intervened in inappropriate ways that are not aligned with the university’s commitment to free speech.

We are taking steps to ensure that something like this does not happen again. Freedom of speech is a bedrock principle for the law school, the university, and a democratic society, and we can and must do better to ensure that it continues even in polarized times.

With our sincerest apologies again,
Marc Tessier-Lavigne, Ph.D.[,] President and Bing Presidential Professor
Jenny Martinez[,] Richard E. Lang Professor of Law & Dean of Stanford Law School

In the penultimate paragraph, they clearly place some of the blame on diversity dean Steinbach for inciting the disruption.  Will they discipline her, or at least tell her to lay off the incitement; and will Stanford discipline any of the disruptive students?  I’d bet money they won’t. And, of course, a policy that isn’t enforced is not a policy at all.

If Stanford were real mensches, they would invite Duncan back to deliver the talk he prepared, and ensure that the event would be peaceful. That won’t happen, either.

But in a really hamhanded gesture, Jeanne Merino, the SLS Associate Acting Dean of Students, “reached out” to the Federalist Society, which had invited Duncan, and offered them University sources of succor. What’s unbelievable is that one of the sources suggested was Steinbach, the diversity dean who escalated the whole affair.  They also offered help from the other two deans (and Merino herself), all of whom had been in the classroom and did nothing to stop the demonstration. You can read Merino’s email here. 

Here’s part of it (second bolding is mine)

2. Connection with OSA, DEI, Levin Center: Please reach out to any of us here at SLS if you would like support or would like to process last week’s events: a. OSA (Jeanne Merino, jmerino@law.stanford.edu, Holly Parrish, hparrish@law.stanford.edu, John Dalton jwdalton@law.stanford.edu, and Megan Brown, mybrown@law.stanford.edu), b. DEI (Tirien Steinbach, tsteinbach@law.stanford.edu) c. Levin Center (Diane Chin, dchin@law.stanford.edu; Anna Wang, annawang@law.stanford.edu).

Apparently, besides Conflagator Steinbach herself, Merino, as well as Associate Director of Student Affairs Holly Parrish and Student Affairs Program Coordinator Megan Brown, were all in the room—and did nothing— as the demonstration unfolded.  But to suggest that the Federalist Society should reach out to Dean Steinbach for comfort (not to mention to the other three as well) is like suggesting that the Roadrunner reach out for help to Wile E. Coyote.

Stanford has affirmed in writing that the juice (a climate conducive to learning) is indeed worth the squeeze (the school’s free-speech policy).  The real question is whether the juice is worth the squeeze of having a diversity dean who’s out of control.

These days, Stanford Law School (and its East Coast counterpart Yale Law School) are like a pair of cross-country soap operas. But it’s important to see that this kind of thing is inevitable so long as you claim that DEI programs are in complete harmony with free speech policies. As Steely Dan sang, “Only a fool would say that.”

Three authors “problematize” rigor, objectivity, replicability, and yes, all the aspects of “colonizing and white Eurocentric science”

February 6, 2023 • 12:20 pm

If you want to see every aspect of Critical Social Justice (CSJ) instantiated in one paper, combined with about the worst possible writing—obscurantist, laden with jargon, and nearly Butlerian in opacity—I commend to you the paper below from The Journal Of Social Issues (click on screenshot to read or get the pdf here).  But I warn you: unless you’ve already drunk the Kool-Aid®, you’re going to need a very strong stomach.  The title is what caught my eye, plus it was called to my attention by several readers. It’s an example of trying to undo modern science in favor of the tenets of the academically fashionable CSJ ideology (see here for the best explication of those tenets).

You can get a flavor of the paper from the abstract.

ABSTRACT

The purported goal of social science research is to develop approaches and applications to the psychological study of social issues that allow us to know, accurately and inclusively, the lived experiences of all human beings. However, our current theoretical and methodological tools, while perceived as “objective,” were founded on ahistorical and context-eliminating perspectives that privilege research designs and analytic strategies that reflect biased racial reasoning with roots in European colonial knowledge formations. By analyzing how the language of “rigor” is deployed within specific instances of social science research, we assert that it is conceptualized and operationalized to maintain a Eurocentric worldview and conception of the “human.” In exploring the ways that the language of “rigor” furthers a European conception of knowledge production as normative, this manuscript provides a critical analysis that seeks to redress ongoing epistemic colonial violence by decolonizing a key term in psychological scholarship.

And although the authors claim they’re not trying to get rid of rigor in psychological scholarship, in fact that’s exactly what they are trying to do: removing the distinction between subjective and objective views, prizing “lived experience” above all research, deposing so-called “Western Eurocentric science”, which they consider white supremacist (note the paper’s title), and in general taming all those nasty aspects of modern scientific analysis which enables it to find out stuff. The paper, then, is nothing more than a clarion call to dismantle modern science and replace it with postmodern views involving power struggles and identity.  As the authors say in their very first sentence, quoting Lorde, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”  So much for rigor, objectivity, replicability, generalizability—indeed, the whole megillah.

Of course it’s necessary for the authors to begin by explaining their “identities” in great deal, for one’s cultural and racial bona fides matter hugely in such analyses, for you have the wrong identity, your ideas are bunk. I won’t go into the very long descriptions, but they are there for all three authors. Here’s just part of the “lived experience” of author #1:

I (first author) was raised as a Muslim immigrant-origin girl in a small Iowa town and constantly aware that my family was “different.” Having been an educator in PK-12 contexts, my goal in studying developmental psychology was to make the process easier for other youth who, like myself, were intersectionally minoritized and privileged because of religious, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and/or other identities or experiences. I was unprepared for the microaggressions embedded in developmental scholarship rooted in non-inclusive modes of knowledge production that resisted the nuances of the diverse individuals and groups I sought to better understand. . . . I seek to place myself in relationships and contexts to learn and engage in a co-conspiring, co-liberatory inquiry stance.

That’s a new one on me: “intersectionally minoritized and privileged” (isn’t that oxymoronic?). And notice the privileged in-group language that helps place an author firmly within the bailiwick of Critical Social Justice.  The other two authors do likewise.

But notice how dreadful the writing is throughout, as well as the profuse use of ideological jargon.  Just looking at the pages can tire you, showing you that you’re going to have to wrestle with a lot of big and complicated words. Just for fun, I calculated the Gunning Fog index (GFI) on some of the text. What is that? Wikipedia tells us this:

In linguistics, the Gunning fog index is a readability test for English writing. The index estimates the years of formal education a person needs to understand the text on the first reading. For instance, a fog index of 12 requires the reading level of a United States high school senior (around 18 years old). The test was developed in 1952 by Robert Gunning, an American businessman who had been involved in newspaper and textbook publishing.

The fog index is commonly used to confirm that text can be read easily by the intended audience. Texts for a wide audience generally need a fog index less than 12. Texts requiring near-universal understanding generally need an index less than 8.

You can calculate it just by pasting text into this website. But let’s go on; I’ll give the figures shortly.

Now to be as fair as I can, here’s how the authors claim that they’re not really trying to upend rigor, objectivity, and other aspects of science:

Our goal, however, is not to assert that the concept of rigor in theoretical or methodological contexts should be abandoned or that standards of excellence in psychology as a science be lowered or jettisoned. Instead, our intent is to interrogate the consequences of “rigor” with respect to how it is conceptualized and operationalized in psychology research, and thereby imagine how we might more effectively achieve the spirit and substance of rigor in our work in a manner that unmoors it from Western epistemological norms. Accordingly, we address three broad problematics: (1) how dominant conceptions of rigor within psychological sciences presume universality; (2) how scholars perpetuate epistemic violence through colonial claims to, or denials of, rigor in the name of “good” or “normative” psychological science; and (3) how a decolonial approach to “rigor” enhances epistemic justice and the quality of science.

[The GFI for the paragraph above was 19.05. But that’s peanuts compared to the GFI for the Abstract above: a whopping 26.93. Twenty-seven years for formal schooling just to understand the text! That’s all the way though college and then ten years of postgraduate study!]

Yes, that’s right: scholars are, through their colonialism, “perpetuating epistemic violence”.  How tiresome to hear the word “violence” used to refer to scholarship, over and over again. There’s even a section of the paper having that title!:

And pardon me if I don’t take the authors’ word that they’re not trying to lower standards of excellence when they say stuff like this:

The criterion of subjectivity dictates that the researcher makes him/her/themself and their self-understanding visible in the research. Decolonizing Western scientific norms requires reconceptualizing who we consider knowledgeable and how they relate to a range of lived experiences, cultural and spiritual practices, and other phenomena.

. . . We do not challenge the notion that there should be standards of excellence in social science research. Instead, we resist notions of rigor that require fidelity to uncritical truths that pass for just-natural facts in “normative” psychological scholarship. We argue that research is rigorous (i.e., high quality) when it reflects the following interlocking credibility criteria. Researchers should engage in self-reflexivity to understand our own subjectivities, historical embeddedness, and positionalities that frame our epistemological approach while also inclusively encouraging people to draw from their own and others’ lived experiences to inform scholarship. [GFI 16.9]

In other words, research is rigorous insofar as it comports with the authors’ ideology.

I won’t go on, for the paper is long, tedious, and laden with buzzwords embedded in bad prose. (Wokesters seem to have problems writing clearly, but maybe, as with Judith Butler and the postmodernists, it’s a deliberate tactic.)

I was going to make this a two-item post, for there was a talk at U. Mass. Boston by one of the authors of this paper and a colleague, and the second and third tweets below will show you some of the slides from that talk, as well as a snarky take from Substack Site “The Flickering Beacon”, an antiwoke venue written by people at U. Mass. Boston. It has two articles on the talk (here and here).

Here are the posts, which you can click on:

They also show slides from the talk and yes, the talk had a land acknowledgment. Here’s one slide:

Enough. If there were a God, I would thank him every day that I didn’t go into the social sciences. Science is already beleaguered by those who want it redone along Critical Social Justice lines, but the social sciences have been completely taken over.

Pamela Paul’s funny (and trenchant) op-ed on campus free speech (trigger warning: many harmful words!)

February 3, 2023 • 9:30 am

Although the word “woke” and its derivatives seem to trigger some readers, I still can’t find a good substitute. I just read Andrew Doyle’s new book, The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World, and I see that that Doyle doesn’t much like “woke” either. (His book is a good complement to John McWhorter’s book Woke Racism.) At any rate, I tried to find a replacement in Doyle’s critique, but the best replacement I could come up with for the pejorative “woke” is “illiberal Left”, which is a mouthful. And it becomes “anti-illiberal Left” (a bigger mouthful) when characterizing people like Doyle or McWhorter. So I’ll perhaps use both terms. (Remember that Doyle is the creator of Titania McGrath, who hasn’t been tweeting much lately.)

But I digress. Pamela Paul, who used to be the Sunday Book Review editor for the New York Times, now writes a weekly column for the paper. Not only is she a good and clever writer, but she appears to be anti-woke anti-illiberal Left. That makes at least two good NYT columnists of that ideological stripe: Paul and McWhorter.

Her piece this week (click below to read, and I see it’s been archived here) is about the woke Language Police at Stanford, and about the chilling of speech in general on American campuses.  The amusing bit is that her piece uses over a quarter of the words that the Stanford University IT group recommended be changed, and she’s put them in bold. Her intro (I added the link to the list, now archived):

The following is a celebration of the cancellation of the Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative, an attempt by a committee of IT leaders at Stanford University to ban 161 common words and phrases. Of those 161 phrases, I have taken pains to use 45 of them here. Read at your own risk.

Click to read, but you may incur much harm. Her message, though, has hopeful bits.

Note that even “Hip Hip Hooray!”  in the title was deemed harmful by the guide:

Paul uses 20 “harmful” words in the first three paragraphs alone:

Is the media addicted to bad news? It’s not a dumb question, nor are you crazy to ask. After all, we follow tragedy like hounds on the chase, whether it’s stories about teenagers who commit suicide, victims of domestic violence or survivors of accidents in which someone winds up quadriplegic, crippled for life or confined to a wheelchair.We report on the hurdles former convicts face after incarceration, hostile attitudes toward immigrants and the plight of prostitutes and the homeless. Given the perilous state of the planet, you might consider this barrage of ill tidings to be tone-deaf.

Well, I’m happy to report good news for a change. You might call it a corrective, or a sanity check, but whatever you call it — and what you can call things here is key — there have been several positive developments on American campuses. The chilling effects of censorship and shaming that have trapped students between the competing diktats of “silence is violence” and “speech is violence” — the Scylla and Charybdis of campus speech — may finally be showing some cracks.

Matters looked especially grim in December, when the internet discovered the 13-page dystopicallly titled “Elimination of Harmful Language Initiative. A kind of white paper on contemporary illiberalism, it listed 161 verboten expressions, divided into categories of transgression, including “person-first,” “institutionalized racism” and the blissfully unironic “imprecise language.” The document offered preferred substitutions, many of which required feats of linguistic limbo to avoid simple terms like “insane,” “mentally ill” and — not to beat a dead horse,but I’ll add one more — “rule of thumb.” Naturally, it tore its way across the internet to widespread mockery despite a “content warning” in bold type: “This website contains language that is offensive or harmful. Please engage with this website at your own pace.”

By using those words, Paul of course emphasizes the inanity of claiming that they’re “harmful.”  She does add that the Stanford list has been taken down (the link above is to a WSJ copy), and considers this good news—part of a salubrious trend that she sees in American education. But she can’t resist using perhaps the dumbest “harmful word” on the list (save “American”):

Could this be a seminal moment for academic freedom? Consider other bright spots: Harvard recently went ahead with its fellowship offer to Kenneth Roth, the former head of Human Rights Watch, which was earlier rejected, allegedly owing to his critical views on Israel. M.I.T.’s faculty voted to embrace a “Statement on Freedom of Expression and Academic Freedom.” At Yale Law School, which has been roiled by repeated attempts to suppress speech, a conservative lawyer was allowed to appear on a panel with a former president of the A.C.L.U. after protests disrupted her visit the year before. And Hamline University, which had refused to renew an art history professor’s contract because she showed an artwork that some Muslim students may have found offensive, walked back its characterization of her as “Islamophobic.”

Finally, when an office within the School of Social Work at the University of Southern California banned the terms “fieldwork” and “in the field” to describe research projects because their “anti-Black” associations might offend some descendants of American slavery, U.S.C.’s interim provost issued a statement that “The university does not maintain a list of banned or discouraged words.”

And here is a form of linguistic conflict that I hadn’t noticed:

The chilling effects of censorship and shaming that have trapped students between the competing diktats of “silence is violence” and “speech is violence” — the Scylla and Charybdis of campus speech — may finally be showing some cracks.

From the guide (not the column):

She continues, causing a lot more harm but making a point at the same time:

But we do know two things: First, college students are suffering from anxiety and other mental health issues more than ever before, and second, fewer feel comfortable expressing disagreement lest their peers go on the warpath. It would be a ballsy move to risk being denounced, expelled from their tribe, become a black sheep. No one can blame any teenager who has been under a social media pile-on for feeling like a basket case. Why take the chance.

Yet when in life is it more appropriate for people to take risks than in college — to test out ideas and encounter other points of view? College students should be encouraged to use their voices and colleges to let them be heard. It’s nearly impossible to do this while mastering speech codes, especially when the master lists employ a kind of tribal knowledge known only to their guru creators. A normal person of any age may have trouble submitting, let alone remembering that “African American” is not just discouraged but verboten, that he or she can’t refer to a professor’s “walk-in” hours or call for a brown bag lunch, powwow or stand-up meeting with their peers.

Now that you know woke language guidelines, you’ll be able to figure out why the Puritans see all the words in bold as harmful. (Having trouble with “African American? Go here.)

Paul then gives the worrying statistics about the drop over time in the proportion of students who think that free speech rights are secure and notes the frightening 2/3 of students who think that college climates prevent people from expressing views that could be seen as offensive.

In the last two paragraphs she drops the use of “harmful words” and makes her serious point:

It is reasonable to wonder whether any conceivable harm to a few on hearing the occasional upsetting term outweighs the harm to everyone in suppressing speech. Or whether overcoming the relatively minor discomforts of an unintentional, insensitive or inept comment might help students develop the resilience necessary to surmount life’s considerably greater challenges — challenges that will not likely be mediated by college administrators after they graduate.

Rather than muzzle students, we should allow them to hear and be heard. Opportunities to engage and respond. It’s worth remembering how children once responded to schoolyard epithets: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me.” Narrow restrictions on putatively harmful speech leave young people distracted from and ill-prepared for the actual violence they’ll encounter in the real world.

And this type of bowdlerization is performative. In the end, it accomplishes nothing. The people who promulgate these changes are the Entitled Woke, and the tut-tutting directed at people who will continue to use the old argot. The changes are made for one reason: to flaunt one’s virtue.

Jon Haidt to resign from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology for placing ideology above truth

September 23, 2022 • 9:15 am

Although social psychologist Jonathan Haidt is considered “heterodox” (these days that means “anti-progressive”), I’ve found that nearly everything he’s written is worth reading. That especially includes his two books The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. and The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, the latter co-written with Greg Lukianoff. Haidt is neither a polemicist nor a firebrand, but he says what he thinks and calls out nonsense in a no-nonsense way. And now he’s taking a hike from an important academic group because it violates his principles.

Haidt was in fact one of the cofounders of the Heterodox Academy, an organization of academics promoting viewpoint diversity, which of course is the wrong kind of diversity. The group grew out of a talk promoting viewpoint diversity given by Haidt in 2011 at the meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)—the biggest and best-known society of its kind.

And that leads to the double irony that’s the subject of today’s post.  In an article on the Heterodox Academy‘s website (click below to read), Haidt announces that he’s resigning from the SPSP, and for exactly the reason that helped birth the academy ten years ago—the quashing of viewpoint diversity by academia.


Haidt notes that there are two “fiduciary duties” of professors, and by that he means duties that are directed towards a beneficiary (in this case, academics and students), must be adhered to with absolute loyalty, and in which there is no taint of self-interest. All other duties are subsidiary and must go away when in conflict with these two. Here are those duties as quoted by Haidt:

1). As teachers I believe we have a fiduciary duty to our students’ education.

2.) As scholars I believe we have a fiduciary duty to the truth.

Together these serve to fulfill the telos of a university (its end or purpose), and that telos is truth—finding and promulgating truth.

Haidt actually calls these duties “quasi-fiduciary duties” since we aren’t obligated to promote students’ overall welfare, nor is there an agent for whose benefit we seek the truth. He gives four examples of how a professor can violate each of these duties, and argues that universities are now declining in public esteem because they’re making the second duty subsidiary to other goals, goals that fall under the aegis of “advancing social justice”.

Recalling his 2016 lecture at Duke University where he advanced the telos argument, he says this (my emphasis):

I said that universities can have many goals (such as fiscal health and successful sports teams) and many values (such as social justice, national service, or Christian humility), but they can have only one telos, because a telos is like a North Star. It is the end, purpose, or goal around which the institution is structured. An institution can rotate on one axis only. If it tries to elevate a second goal or value to the status of a telos, it is like trying to get a spinning top or rotating solar system to simultaneously rotate around two axes. I argued that the sudden wave of protests and changes that were sweeping through universities were attempts to elevate the value of social justice to become a second telos, which would require a massive restructuring of universities and their norms in ways that damaged their ability to find truth.

I expanded on this argument in a blog post for Heterodox Academy where I predicted that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable … Universities that try to honor both will face increasing incoherence and internal conflict.” It’s now six years later, and I think it’s clear that this prediction has come true. It has been six years of near-constant conflict, with rising numbers of attempts to get scholars fired or punished for things they have said, and a never-ending stream of videos showing students (and sometimes professors) saying and doing things that are gifts to critics of universities and of the left. As one university president said to a friend of mine in 2019, “Universities are becoming ungovernable.” Public trust in universities has plummeted since 2015,² first on the right, but later across the board. We are in trouble.

He’s right. Even at the University of Chicago I can see the search for truth becoming subsumed under loud and ubiquitous calls for the university to become a Social Justice Mill. And the sciences, the exemplar of disciplines whose goal is truth (understanding the Universe), are being bent towards Leftist “progressive” ideology, with departments trying to promulgate ideological statements and beginning to ask for DEI statements by job applicants (that’s technically illegal here, but people find ways to get around that).

Although Haidt sees no way around this truth-effacing clash, his advice for us academics is to always stick to our two “fiduciary duties” above all else. When a subsidiary “duty” violates these, don’t adhere to it.

Recently Haidt was asked to abandon or water down duty #2 in the interest of promulgating social justice. Ironically, he was asked by the SPSP, which has gone woke (my emphasis below):

I have been thinking a lot about fiduciary duty because my main professional association — the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) — recently asked me to violate my quasi-fiduciary duty to the truth. 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.” Our research proposal would be evaluated on older criteria of scientific merit, along with this new criterion.

These sorts of mandatory diversity statements have been proliferating across the academy in recent years. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the Academic Freedom Alliance, and many professors have written about why they are immoral, inappropriate, and sometimes illegal. I’ll just add one additional concern: 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. I refuse to do this, but I’ve never objected publicly.

The SPSP mandate, however, forced us all to do something more explicitly ideological. Note that the word diversity was dropped and replaced by anti-racism. So every psychologist who wants to present at the most important convention in our field must now say how their work advances anti-racism. I read Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist in the summer of 2020, so I knew that I could no longer stay silent.

He wrote to the SPSP’s president, Laura King, who affirmed that this was indeed the policy: all speakers had to submit diversity statements affirming that their talks would advance “equity, inclusion, and anti-racism”. Talks would be evaluated not just for their intrinsic merit, but on ideological grounds as well. (As implied above, Haidt doesn’t adhere to Kendi’s principles as limning any form of “truth”: they are ideology—debatable ideology—pure and simple. He sees Kendi’s dicta (read How to be an Antiracist) as “incorrect morally because it requires us to treat people as members of groups, not as individuals, an then to treat people well or badly based on their group membership.”

Let me add that Haidt doesn’t disagree that a form of diversity, “amplifying the voices of those who have historically been underrepresented in our field,” as unobjectionable. This is what he objects to:

I believe that anti-racism has a place at SPSP, and I said so to King. Let there be speakers, panels, and discussions of this morally controversial and influential idea at our next conference! But to adopt it as the official view and mission of SPSP and then to force us all to say how our work advances it, as a precondition to speaking at the conference? I thought this was wrong for two reasons: First, it elevated anti-racism to be a coequal telos of SPSP, which meant that we would no longer rotate around the single axis of excellent science. Every talk would have to be both scientifically sound and anti-racist, even though good science and political activism rarely mix well. Second, it puts pressure on social psychologists — especially younger ones, who most need to present at the conference — to betray their fiduciary duty to the truth and profess outward deference to an ideology that some of them do not privately endorse.

The last sentence is, to me, especially important, for it gives the very reason why scientific societies and universities should not make official political or ideological pronouncements or take ideological or political positions— unless (and this should be rare) they buttress the telos of an organization. That is why my University’s Kalven Report prohibits such statements, and why groups like the Society for the Study of Evolution have betrayed their telos by injecting ideology into their program, declaring, for example, that “sex is a continuum.”  Here we see ideology—the desire to not offend those who consider themselves of a sex that they weren’t born with—taking precedence over truth, which is that in nearly all animals—and certainly in humans—sex is not a continuum. (Gender is more of one, but we’re talking about biological sex, something that the SSE should know something about.)

But I digress. Since the SPSP will not rescind its policy, Haidt is quitting:

I raised my voice again to write to King and object to the new policy. But soon it will be time for exit. I cannot remain loyal to an organization that is changing its telos and asking its members to violate their quasi-fiduciary duties to the truth. I am especially dubious of the wisdom of making an academic organization more overtly political in its mission, especially in the midst of a raging culture war, when trust in universities is plummeting.

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. I hope that other members will raise their voices.

Would that the large number of academics who object to ideological violations of our telos do likewise! Most academics lack both the eloquence and courage of Haidt. But you don’t have to be eloquent. All you have to do is voice your objections and, like Haidt, resign from academic societies that make social justice a higher value than truth.

Professor Phoebe Cohen of Williams College nabs the Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech

October 29, 2021 • 10:30 am

Dr. Phoebe Cohen would just be another academic laboring away at woke Williams College (she’s an associate professor of Geosciences and department chair) if Michael Powell of the New York Times hadn’t mentioned her in its article on MIT’s deplatforming of University of Chicago Professor Dorian Abbot. Cohen was quoted as not only favoring deplatforming Abbot, but deplatforming anybody who opposes a school’s DEI program and, most invidiously (see my post here), Cohen dismissed intellectual debate and rigor as products of a white patriarchal culture (my emphasis in NYT quote below):

Phoebe A. Cohen is a geosciences professor and department chair at Williams College and one of many who expressed anger on Twitter at M.I.T.’s decision to invite Dr. Abbot to speak, given that he has spoken against affirmative action in the past.

Dr. Cohen agreed that Dr. Abbot’s views reflect a broad current in American society. Ideally, she said, a university should not invite speakers who do not share its values on diversity and affirmative action. Nor was she enamored of M.I.T.’s offer to let him speak at a later date to the M.I.T. professors. “Honestly, I don’t know that I agree with that choice,” she said. “To me, the professional consequences are extremely minimal.”

What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate? Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.

Oy, does that get my kishkes in a knot! It’s not only dismissive of the only way science can move forward (how does she do science—by feelings?), it’s dismissive of every woman and every non-white person who tries to advance knowledge using the very methods Cohen decries.  What an extraordinarily stupid thing to say to a NYT writer! If she uses this philosophy in her classes, I weep for her students.

Now, however, Cohen is getting a taste of her own medicine, as those words she uttered have redounded upon her. In Wednesday’s NYT column by John McWhorter, “Wokeness is oversimplifying the American creed,” which defends Abbot and others who have been “cancelled”—like University of Michigan professor Bright Sheng—there are several mentions of Dr. Cohen in an unflattering light.

I’m less concerned with the particulars of Abbot’s case here than how it demonstrates our broader context these days. I refer to a new version of enlightenment; one that rejects basic tenets of the Enlightenment, as exemplified by Prof. Phoebe Cohen, chair of geosciences at Williams College, who downplayed Abbot’s apparent disinvitation with the observation, as reported by The New York Times, that “this idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism” — the idea, presumably, that the widest possible range of perspectives should be heard and scrutinized — “comes from a world in which white men dominated.”

. . .Clearly some cogitation is in order. Yet it appears that Abbot was barred from a more august podium out of an assumption that his views on racial preferences are beyond debate. Even though he was to speak on an unrelated topic. This “deplatforming” — if we must — was, in a word, simplistic.

Simplistic, too: Cohen points to a time when white men, exclusively, were in charge. Yes, but the obvious response is: “Does that automatically mean that their take on intellectual debate and rigor was wrong?” The implication that the questions Abbot raised are morally out of bounds forbids basic curiosity and rational calculation and stands athwart the very purpose of the small-L liberal education that universities are supposed to provide.

Twice in the New York Times in a week! Now that is infamy! What’s also interesting about this is McWhorter’s discussion at the end of Wokeness as a religion, a religion that Phoebe Cohen appears to espouse.
McWhorter:

Note also the eerie parallel between the conceptions of original sin and white privilege as unremovable stains about which one is to maintain a lifelong concern and guilt. Religions don’t always have gods, but they usually need sins, which in the new religion is the whiteness that supposedly bestrides everything in our lives.

There is a pitchfork aspect to how this way of thinking is penetrating our institutions of enlightenment. With an unreachable pitilessness, a catechism couched in an elaborate jargon is being imposed almost as if sacred: privilege, decentering, hegemony, antiracism. Nonbelievers, sometimes even agnostics, are cast out, leaving a cowed polity pretending to agree. This is a regrettable kind of religion, aiming to run the state. That’s not how this American experiment was supposed to go.

The only thing that will turn back this tide is a critical mass willing to insist on complexity, abstraction and forgiveness. As a Black man, I am especially appalled by the implication that to insist on these three things in thinking about race issues is somehow anti-Black.

Finally, Cohen, apparently unable to resist speaking to reporters and oblivious about how she looks, said this to the Boston Globe:

But Phoebe Cohen, one of Abbot’s critics, applauded the university’s decision.

“I did not actually call for the cancellation of the lecture, although now that it’s happened I support MIT’s decision to do that,” said Cohen, an associate professor of geosciences at Williams College and a former researcher at EAPS. Cohen said that arguments like Abbot’s discourage greater minority participation in the STEM specialties — science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.

”Underrepresented faculty and students have spoken out repeatedly about how harmful this kind of language is, and how it makes them feel like they have no place in STEM,” Cohen said. “I have colleagues who are negatively impacted by this language…I chose to believe them.”

Didn’t call for cancellation of the lecture? She might as well have if you look at what she said to the NYT above: she was “one of many who expressed anger on Twitter at M.I.T.’s decision to invite Dr. Abbot to speak.” Also note the emphasis on “harm” which is matched, as you’ll see below, by her emphasis on words and offense as “violence.” And any minority student who gives up participating in STEM simply because Dorian Abbot was invited to give a STEM lecture that has nothing to do with Abbot’s views of DEI needs some therapy.

If you don’t think Dr. Cohen is an acolyte of this “religion”, have a look at this column she wrote in the Williams student newspaper (click on the screenshot). While Cohen is right to decry sexism and racism, she’s wrong to say that it’s pervasive at Williams, or to insist that “violence, both physical and emotional, happens to our students, faculty and staff”. (She needs to understand that words and offense are not “violence”, and I’m not aware of any physical violence at Williams.)  But what makes her an acolyte of Wokeism is her self-flagellation at the beginning of her letter: her admission that she’s afflicted by the Original Sin:

 

Cohen’s opening confession:

I am white. I am racist. I am not proud of this fact, but I have accepted it. Acknowledging that I am racist helps me to become, I hope, less so. I catch my instinctive thoughts and ask them why they are there. Why am I feeling annoyed, fearful, dismissive in this moment? When someone in my community at Williams tells me they feel unsafe, and my first instinct is skepticism, I know that it is a fallacy to say that I’m skeptical because of my training as a scientist. Instead, it is because I don’t want to believe that my colleagues are racist, sexist, transphobic. Not believing it doesn’t make it true. I am a white person raised in a racist, white supremacist country. Every day I have to make a conscious decision to fight against that and to challenge my own thoughts and biases.

Are Cohen’s colleagues at all disturbed by her characterizing them as “recist, sexist, and transphobic”?

She goes on to describe the nonexistent violence at Williams, and says that we must believe those who claim that it happens. I’ve been following Williams for a while, and haven’t seen racism, much less “violence” at the college. There have been one or two racist incidents like odious graffiti, but they appear to have been hoaxes. Williams is about the most antiracist campus I know, second only to Evergreen State and Middlebury. Yet people like Cohen don’t realize that they’re smearing the reputation of their own school by insisted that it’s infested with bigots.

This reminds me of something John McWhorter said in his column today, which hasn’t yet been published (I get the newsletter):

I don’t completely trust white guilt. It lends itself too easily to virtue signaling, which overlaps only partially, and sometimes not at all, with helping people. I recall a brilliant, accomplished, kind white academic of a certain age who genially told me — after I published my first book on race, “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America,” two decades ago — “John, I get what you mean, but I reserve my right to be guilty.” I got what he meant, too, and did not take it ill. But still, note that word “right.” Feeling guilty lent him something personally fulfilling and signaled that he was one of the good guys without obligating him further. The problem is that one can harbor that feeling while not actually doing anything to bring about change on the ground.

The final ignominy: Louis K. Bonham at the Minding the Campus site has bestowed on Cohen the first “Minding the Campus Lysenko Award,” named after the charlatan agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who screwed up Soviet genetics for decades with his false and falsified theories of “vernalization.” Because Lysenko didn’t follow the scientific method but was resolutely supported by Stalin, millions died of famine,’ and good Russian geneticists, like Nikolai Vavolov, were imprisoned or killed.  The award thus dishonors those who suppress academic dissent, like Cohen. From Bonham:

The moral of Lysenko is that suppressing academic debate and dissent for political reasons yields bad science, bad scholarship, and inevitably bad results. It can even lead to the collapse of nations. The genius of the scientific method and Western academic culture is that you get closer to the truth by subjecting all theories and ideas to rigorous testing and debate. When you frustrate this process because you are afraid the results might prove politically inconvenient, uncomfortable, or “triggering,” the ghost of Lysenko smiles.

Ergo:

Our winner, however, has no such excuse. While also involved in l’affaire Abbot, she is not on the MIT faculty or in its administration, so unlike Prof. van der Hilst [who got the “Dishonorable Mention” award], she was not thrust into the fray. Nevertheless, this Williams College department chair helped lead the keyboard warriors demanding that Prof. Abbot be disinvited from giving the Carlson Lecture—not because his science was unsound, or that he was unqualified, or that he had broken the law or committed a tort, but because he believes that individuals in higher education should be evaluated based on their individual merit rather than their membership in an identity group. Scandalous, I know. Apropos to the purpose of our award, when interviewed by the New York Times, our winner justified her actions thusly:

What, she was asked, of the effect on academic debate? Should the academy serve as a bastion of unfettered speech?

“This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” she replied.

Trofim Lysenko would be pleased, although he likely would have formulaically dismissed the need for academic rigor and debate as being the product of fascist-bourgeois-imperialist-capitalist culture, instead of the current wokeism of “straight white men” as the source of the world’s problems.

So congratulations, Williams College Professor Phoebe Cohen, you are the first recipient of the Minding the Campus Lysenko Award for the Suppression of Academic Speech.

After all this, Cohen is now getting a taste of her own medicine, the kind of taste she says, in a piece from NBC News, that Abbot deserves.

But equating the cancellation of a school’s public lecture to censorship oversimplifies the matter, said Phoebe Cohen, a paleontologist and associate professor of geosciences at Williams College. She said concerns over whether such actions curtail free speech on campuses are overblown.

“It becomes this battle cry of free speech and academic freedom, but he has academic freedom,” Cohen said of Abbot. “He is allowed to say whatever he wants to say, and he has, but that doesn’t mean that he’s free from consequences.”

And while universities should uphold academic freedoms, Cohen said, institutions also have a responsibility to consider the communities their students and faculties are a part of.

“It comes down to who is being harmed,” she said. “Universities don’t have a responsibility to platform people who are harming others.”

Cohen, too, is not “free from the consequences” of her ridiculous views. Instead of finding ubiquitous approbation for her statements, which I guess she expected, she was criticized heavily on Twitter.  Since she won’t be fired or cancelled—and she shouldn’t be—I don’t care if the Twitter criticism bothered her or offended her. (When she strikes out with words, it’s appropriate to respond with words.) It apparently did bother her, though, for first she cancelled her Twitter account and then restricted it a few days ago: