Category: academics

Luana Maroja encounters “Fat Studies”

June 15, 2026 • 9:45 am

“Fat Studies” is not a pejorative term, but rather an activist branch of academia with an agenda, including the claim that being fat is not unhealthy, and is a sign of oppression by the weight-deprived.  Particularly disturbing—and detrimental to health—is the persistent assertion that fatness (or whatever you want to call obesity) is not injurious to health.”Healthy at all sizes” is the mantra.

But a gazillion medical studies show that this is an arrant lie.  Now it’s not good to point out to someone that they’re fat, for, as Grania once told me when she was alive, that is a thoughtless, hurtful, and even useless remark. “Fat people,” she said, “know that they’re fat.” There should be no social stigma attached to the condition. But neither should we silently accept assertions that fatness is not harmful to health.  For lives can be saved by pointing out the dangers. Stigmas are one thing, empirical distortions another.

There’s a Wikipedia article about the “Fat acceptance movement,” which it also calls “fat pride, fat empowerment, fat liberation, and fat activism.”  And Fat Studies even has its own eponymous academic journal.  It’s an open-access journal, and you can see the latest issue here.  Scanning the articles, you immediately see the field’s ideological bent. These are simply the first five articles I saw, and they’re not just about fatness, but, vis-à-vis intersectionality, also connect fatness to all other purported forms of oppression (note the use of “playful” and non-standard language, a characteristic of postmodernist writing):

Luana Maroja has been fascinated by this field, I suppose because of its plethora of antiscientific assertions. She recently went to two lectures at the school where she teaches, Williams College, and wrote about them in the article below, just published on the Heterodox STEM site. Click the screenshot to read for free, or find the article archived here. It’s written in an objective, reportorial fashion, but what she heard was appalling.

I’ll reproduce a couple of excerpts below (indented):

Public confidence in higher education has dropped sharply in recent years. The main contributors appear to be a lack of ideological diversity in colleges and universities, constraints on open inquiry, and the erosion of empirical standards in parts of the academy. Here I describe two college-sponsored events dealing with “fat studies”—one in late 2024 and another in April 2026—which I attended out of simple curiosity about this academic discipline. Here is an account of the claims made at these events taken from my notes.

Lecture 1:

My biology and pre-med students were particularly intrigued by a Gender Studies talk that promised to “interrogate the false association between fat and unhealthiness” (see workshop description below). Being new to “fat studies,” I was curious to see more about this claim. Two years later, I decided to attend a second event, wondering whether the messaging had shifted in the age of Ozempic and following the 2024 elections. What I encountered may sound satirical, but it was not. The speakers were dead serious. I have kept the speakers’ names private; my aim is not to mock individuals but rather to show the persistence of anti-scientific perspectives in this field at my college. Both cases exemplify the ideological erosion of science that has led Americans to lose confidence in their colleges and universities.

. . .The event opened with identity: the speaker stated that she identified as “fat, white, and used they/them pronouns.” I learned that “obese,” “BMI,” and “weight” are seen as pejorative terms that should never be used. She added that it was bigoted to suggest that obesity is mainly a lower-socioeconomic-class issue tied to the inability to afford healthy food. This view, we were told, wrongly assumes that the foods fat people eat are unhealthy and that being fat is bad. We were then asked to “pair-share” with colleagues in the room, about our emotions and body image and recount when we first developed the idea that being fat is bad.

The speaker next wrote down the roots of “fatphobia” on the board (see figure below). Body mass index (BMI), she said, was invented to discriminate against fat people, and its origins lie in capitalism. White people were blamed for creating the notion that “whites are thin” as a way of oppressing black people. Medicine was described as another culprit: there is no such thing, we were told, as a “healthy diet.” Instead, “a healthy diet is what you like to eat.” Further, children were described as having an innate ability to sense how much food and what kind of food they need. The research on whether processed foods affect health was described as unclear. What ultimately harms fat people, the speaker claimed, is oppression and dieting. Anti-fatness, we learned, goes hand in hand with every other system of oppression: “Whenever we are talking about anti-fatness, we are also talking about white supremacy”.

The medical system was described as actively discriminatory: “When fat people come into the hospital with cancer, they are told to lose weight before being screened,” and waiting-room chairs are too small. These forms of discrimination, rather than physiology itself, were said to explain the observed correlations between fatness and health problems.

Here are some of the lies purveyed by the speaker, and the evasions they use when called out:

At this point people began asking questions. I inquired about animal studies: surely, fat rats do not die at higher rates because of fatphobia? The reply was nonsensical: “everyone knows fat is protective in rats.” A student noted the well-documented correlation between cardiovascular disease and fatness. The speaker asked for references. When he responded that there were thousands, she reminded the room that “correlation is not causation” and that people die from oppression and from being forced into diets.

. . . The speaker proceeded to write the word “Science” on the board under the heading “institutional problems.” She later stated that genetics, not food consumption, explains body weight: “People can be 15 pounds above or below their genetic makeup and no more or less.” This was another nonsensical idea, easily contradicted by looking at the recent past: just a couple generations ago people of every demographic group were skinnier than they are today, and the genetics of those groups could not have changed much in such a short time. The exchange illustrated how data-based questions were repositioned from a legitimate inquiry to an expression of overt bigotry.

A graph from Luana’s article (she made it) showing the rise in obesity over the last 35 years, which may reverse if Ozempic and other such drugs become prevalent. Note, though, that. as you see below, some Fat Studies people object strenuously to weight-loss drugs.

Oy! There’s more, including graphics and photos, but let’s move on to Lecture #2:

My second encounter with “fat-studies,” in April 2026, was a talk sponsored by the Dively Fund (created to support LGBTQ events, although the talk contained almost no LGBTQ content). It was billed as “A conversation on Blackness, Queerness, Gender, Fatness, Disabilities and Their Intersections.” Attendance here was higher—roughly 20 students plus three adults, myself included.

As before, I approached the talk with genuine curiosity; I wondered whether this corner of “studies” would adapt or remain unchanged in the era of Ozempic and recent shifts in public discussions of obesity.

Some of the speaker’s themes overlapped with those of the first event, including the claim that “good and healthy” food is simply whatever you like to eat. There was also a brief and negative reference to Ozempic: “GLP-1s are terrible because they make fat people appear suicidal for not wanting to lose weight.”

The rest of the talk took a very different direction. Because the content was somewhat disjointed, I will share some direct quotes. We were told that “fatness was invented to prepare individuals for war by the Nazis” (though the speaker later added that it was invented by the slave trade). “Body fascism is now practiced in France, USA, Israel and Britain.” “The ideal body is militarized to displace and violate black people.” “Fat fascism is about the subjugation of the slave and slave-adjacent (Palestinians).” “The Jewish body is imposed on Palestinians by starvation and the denial of junk food [which is the kind of food they would like to eat].” “This subjugation did not begin with Trump; it began with democracy and those elected to represent society.” Michelle Obama’s healthy-lunch initiatives were cited as a pre-Trump example. “Fatphobia is the making of the slave.” “Fatness has been projected onto African flesh.” “You are not men or women; you are just fat or thin in a ship hold” (referring to slave ships). “After Nazis, COVID, HIV, [and] slaves, one must prove they are fit and not crippled—this is how ableism started.” “Nationalists don’t believe cripples have the right to exist.” “Freedom requires the death of our desires.” “Our love keeps us in shackles. We need to divest from love to bring the revolution” (though the speaker added that his love for his people was too strong to relinquish).

Double oy!

Luana’s message is at the end:

When college-sponsored events list ‘Science’ itself as an institutional problem, they expose a deep split in how people view knowledge and truth—and in what these events are really selling. The talks confirmed this split: questions were met not with counter-evidence but with accusations of bigotry, rote reminders that ‘correlation is not causation,’ or outright commands to stop speaking—along with preposterous assertions that flouted basic standards of evidence. Such tactics do more than mislead audiences; by violating the very norms of reason and evidence that people have long accepted as good science, they accelerate the erosion of public trust in both science and higher education.

When people like (recently) the AAUP say that faculty should control the college curriculum, stuff like this calls that claim into doubt.  “Academic freedom” does not give professors the right to purvey lies to students, especially lies that are harmful to one’s well-being. And believe me, this kind of stuff is not only the subject of academic journals, but has made its way into the classroom. Grok, in a half minute of trawling the internet, came up with at least six universities that have courses on Fat Studies, including Harvard University. Here’s one from Southern Oregon University(click screenshots to enlarge):

And one from where I held my first job, The University of Maryland:

The intersectionality and postmodernism that pervade these courses are clear.  “Fatness as a social justice issue”, “fat liberation,” and so on. As I said, Fat Studies courses can be useful if they trace historical oppression against obesity, and thereby help dispel social stigmas against fatness. But I’d bet a pile of dosh that these courses do a lot more than that!

Oh, and shame on Williams College and its Gender Studies program for promoting speakers who lie about science.

Berkeley math professor argues that we need to bring back SATs and other standardized tests in college admissions

June 14, 2026 • 10:45 am

Svetlana (Lana) Jitomirskaya is a mathematics professor at Berkeley (Wikipedia, which puts her at two other schools, is out of date), and is one of 29 authors (I’m in there, too) on a paper in the Journal of Controversial Ideas, “In Defense of Merit in Science“. Lana is also a winner of the American Academy of Science and Letters’s Barry Prize for distinguished intellectual achievement.

I mention this because she is distressed at the very low math performance of entering students in Berkeley (and other schools in the University of California [UC] system), but did some calculations to show, as Governor Gavin Newsom intended with his 2024 California Education Compact, that the chances of a student getting admitted to a University of California branch are higher the worse the student’s high school is! Newsom and some “progressive” educators are against using standardized tests like the SAT for students applying for college, because they believe standardized tests discriminate against minority students.  Grade-point averages (GPAs) are one predictor of college and post-college success, but grade inflation is eliminating the inter-student variation that made GPAs useful, and data show that standardized tests add substantial predictive value to success (especially for highly selective schools like Berkeley), so it’s better that schools have both kinds of information for applicants.  Nevertheless, in an attempt to achieve “equity,” UC schools have completely barred the use of standardized tests, and that was against the recommendations of both a UC faculty task force and members of the Board of Regents.

At my own University, standardized tests are optional, but, weirdly, are used only when they can help a student get admitted, which seems to defeat the purpose of using a standardized benchmark. Here’s what Grok says about the University of Chicago’s standardized testing policy for admissions:

UChicago has maintained a test-optional policy since implementing it in 2018 as part of its UChicago Empower Initiative (initially focused on expanding access for first-generation and low-income students). This policy applies to all applicants, including domestic, international, and transfer students.

No Harm Testing Policy. In addition to being test-optional, UChicago uses a distinctive “No Harm” policy:

  • Submitting SAT or ACT scores is entirely your choice.
  • If you submit scores, they are only considered if they would positively affect your chance of admission.
  • Scores that could negatively impact your application are not used in the review process.
  • You can self-report scores on your application (via Common App or Coalition); official scores are only needed if you’re admitted and enroll.

This approach gives applicants flexibility—strong scores can help, but weaker ones (or not submitting) won’t hurt you.

Lana maintains that the omission of test requirements, (and I’d add the use of  “no harm testing policies”) hurts everyone: reducing the chances of really good students getting into even moderately good schools, while harming students from poorer schools by eliminating the pressure for them to study the “right” way: not memorizing but actually learning the material and learning to think, which you need to get good SAT scores. (It also eliminates the pressure for teachers to teach that way.) If you’re poorly qualified for a college you attend, the chances of you either dropping out or going into a “gut” major are higher.

The argument and the crucial graph is included in Lana’s new article in the Free Press, “Bring Back the SAT”.  You can read it if you’re a subscriber by clicking below, but I’ll reproduce some of her arguments plus the graph:

Lana gives several extended anecdotes about great students, once destined for Berkeley or UC San Diego, not getting in and having to go to community colleges, as well as students who got high grades by memorizing but did poorly in schools because they didn’t really learn to think. Many of those students, due to the negative correlation, get into places like UC Berkeley and UC San Diego.  I’ll mostly summarize the assertions about educational policy. (Quotes from Lana’s article are indented.)

What does an A grade in AP Calculus mean when it is paired with a score of 1 on the national exam? Exactly what a recent UC San Diego report revealed: In too many public schools, grades have become completely decoupled from learning.

None of this was Diego’s fault [his name is changed]. But now, he would face the reality of a world-class university. He would be required to retake calculus at Berkeley before moving on to the grueling upper-division requirements of mechanical engineering. With his immense drive and determination, common sense says he would catch up. Right?

“Getting into calculus in 11th grade is impressive,” I told him during the interview. “How and when did you realize you were good at math?”

“Math was always very difficult for me,” Diego replied. “But I worked hard and memorized all the formulas.”

This is the last thing a math professor wants to hear. Mathematics is not about rote memorization—it’s about conceptual understanding and logical reasoning, and Diego was never taught the difference. Like countless students at schools where teachers don’t understand mathematics themselves, he was instead taught what my colleague Hung-Hsi Wu calls anti-mathematics: a confusing, disconnected collection of unexplained procedures to be memorized for a test—and then immediately forgotten.

On the UC system’s abolition of SATs in 2020 and what it means for students like Diego:

To succeed now, Diego will need to unlearn these habits and rebuild his mathematical foundation from scratch, with much of what he has already learned not helping but standing in the way.

I desperately hope he manages to do so. But statistically, the chances are dangerously low. With the foundational deficiencies Diego demonstrated in his interview, the probability that he will survive his first Berkeley calculus course, even with a barely passing grade, is 50-50. He will spend his entire college career in a frantic, exhausting game of catch-up, and it is far more likely that he will be forced to change his major—leaving a hardworking young man’s confidence badly shaken, his engineering dreams derailed, and significant public resources wasted.

None of this would be as likely if the UC system still used a standardized test benchmark. The SAT was completely abolished for UC admissions by a Board of Regents decision in 2020, driven by concerns that standardized tests disadvantage minority and low-income students. This decision went against the unanimous, data-driven recommendation of the UC faculty task force—and against many of the Board of Regents’ own stated convictions. The SAT, imperfect as it is, measures knowledge of the absolute basics and the ability to reason clearly under a time constraint. An SAT score would have told us—and Diego himself—the truth about his preparation before it was too late.

Even more importantly, preparing for the test is itself a powerful intervention. If Diego knew that the SAT stood between him and a Berkeley engineering degree, his drive would have led him to use free, high-quality resources away from rote memorization and toward real mathematical reasoning. The preparation itself would have rewired his foundation. We failed Diego once by not providing him a decent math education. We should not fail students like him again by removing the incentive to build one themselves.

This is why my UC colleagues and I wrote an open letter to the Regents demanding a return to standardized testing. Within days, it garnered over 1,400 signatures, including those of 60 department chairs across the UC system. This unprecedented consensus is significant because STEM faculty aren’t political activists—they are the ones shaping California’s next generation of mathematicians and engineers.

That is indeed a powerful consensus!

According to Lana, the disconnect between grades and merit involves schools infusing courses with ideology:

Many of my colleagues teaching introductory gateway courses are not so lucky. They report a feeling of the bottom falling out of the classroom. “In my second-year engineering class, a student asked me to explain why 1/2 + 1/3 = 5/6,” one professor said. “The lecture had to stop while I explained fractions.”

The root cause of this bifurcation is California’s broken K-12 education. Teachers are trapped in systems that prioritize ideology over subject mastery, pressured by administrators to inflate grades, lower standards, and pass unprepared students along. The state has spent tens of billions of dollars on a high-speed rail line that has yielded zero benefit. It has spent far more, and done far worse, inflicting immense generational damage on California’s youth by failing to provide them a quality K-12 math education.

This is the fundamental reason why we cannot honestly satisfy the Newsom Compact’s goals. The onus for a decent math education has fallen entirely on parents. Those who can afford to move to a good school district or send their kids to after-school programs do so. Children of those who cannot are usually left trapped with subpar math instruction. Meanwhile, the schools that provide rigorous education become increasingly competitive. This is the engine behind the bifurcation we are seeing.

And here’s the critical and completely counterintuitive graph, the result of “progressive” thinking. Lana introduces it this way (bolding is mine)

An analysis of official California Department of Education data reveals that this is a systemic pattern. Over the last decade, the UC system has transitioned from a positive correlation between a high school’s math and English proficiency and its admissions success to a statistically significant negative correlation. Today, the more successful a public high school is at preparing its students, the lower its graduates’ chances of getting into top UC campuses like Berkeley and San Diego.

This is the kind of graph that only a mathematician could produce, as it summarizes a ton of data but to a layperson its point is not immediately grasp-able. (Thanks to Jay Tanzman, who put me onto the article and is a statistician, for explaining it to me.)  It is a plot over time in which the Y-axis values represent correlations: the correlation in one year between the assessed quality of a high school itself (not of a student), and the probability of students from that school being accepted to two UC schools: Berkeley and San Diego.  The points not only fall with time, but have gone below zero into negative territory, showing that the worse the school, the higher the chances of a its students getting into Berkeley and, especially, UC San Diego, where there’s a whopping -0.5 correlation between high school quality and probability of its students getting into UCSD. (If you’re statistically minded, you could say “how BAD a high school you went to is 25% of the reason you got admitted to UC San Diego.”) 

This result is in fact what Newsom and other higher-ups had in mind, for high schools rated of lower quality also have a higher proportion of minority students. This negative correlation largely, says Lana, resulted from an ongoing attempt to achieve equity by upgrading the admission chances of students from poorer schools.  I believe Lana’s point is not that this situation is the result of dropping SATs—for the correlation was already falling before 2020 when SATs were abolished—but that we now need the SATs to be able to assess how good students really are. 

I’m told that nearly all high-school students in California get straight As now, so GPAs are a terrible predictor of success, even though I’m also told that “conventional wisdom” says that GPAs and standardized tests are roughly equally important in predicting success in college. That may be wrong, at least for California, but I’ll depend on diligent readers to look it up.

Whatever the case, it’s certainly true that if you go to a worse school, your chances of getting into the two best UC branches improve! Lana winds up for calling for the reinstatement of SATs, and I’m with her:

It is too late to reintroduce the SAT for the 2026 cycle, but we can still help thousands of students like Diego who will apply to the UC system in 2027. That is why a growing coalition of faculty members is rushing to force an emergency course correction. If a car full of your children is hurtling toward a cliff, it is not the time to create yet another subcommittee. You’ve got to slam on the brakes. The University of California must recognize this academic emergency for what it is and act to immediately restore objective standards to the admissions process.

Now if you’re a “progressive”, you’ll object to her characterizing SATs as “objective”, but that’s an argument for another day.

h/t: Jay Tanzman

A new report on the dangers of politicizing humanities in academia

June 8, 2026 • 9:30 am

Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, was previously the Provost of the University of Chicago. He was deeply invested in the Chicago Principles, which include free speech, institutional neutrality, and scholarship and teaching (adjudicated purely by merit) as the two overarching goals of a University.  I hoped he would succeed Bob Zimmer as President of our University, but after Zimmer fell ill with a brain tumor, Diermeier got the offer from Vanderbilt, and since Zimmer did not resign (sadly, he died later), Diermeier left.

At Vanderbilt he’s putting into place the Chicago Principles, and enforcing them more rigorously than we do here. When students held a sit-in in the administration offices, for example, he had them expelled and arrested. And he’s been busy writing and speaking about the goals of academia and how the principles first forged here promote those goals (see here and here, for example). When someone recently referred to Vanderbilt as “The University of Chicago of the South”, someone else responded, “No, Chicago is now the Vanderbilt University of the north.”

Along with Andrew Martin, the chancellor of St. Louis’s Washington University, Deirmeier commissioned a group of ten scholars to examine the issue of how scholarship in the humanities has become politicized, something that the two thought was endangering the value of the humanities and, indeed, of universities themselves. Headed by Paul Boghossian, a Professor of Philosophy at NYU (not to be confused with Peter B.), the group of ten produced a long report (29 pages when I printed out the pdf, which can be found here). The upshot is that yes, the humanities are becoming politicized and endanger scholarship in many ways (see below).  Although the ten authors do consider empirically-laden humanities areas like economics, history, and anthropology, they deliberately leave out science, though there is no end of discussion of how science, too, is becoming politicized to its detriment (see, for example, “The ideological subversion of biology,” by Luana Maroja and me, or “The peril of politicizing science” by Anna Krylov).

If you click on the first screenshot below you’ll go to the report (more information is apparently forthcoming), and the second screenshot gives a summary of the report by the Chronicle of Higher Education, which you’ll find more digestible.  Note that while the Chronicle piece refers to “The Left” as ruining humanities, the Boghossian et al. report explicitly assert that the erosion of the humanities is not due to the Left per se, but to the fact that most professors are on the Left, and that the Left has adopted some principles (e.g., relativism and postmodernism) that has played a role in eroding scholarship.  But they add that this is a danger of any ideology that infects academia, whether it be from the Left, the Right, or something else.

The Chronicle summary; click to read.  Brian Leiter at our Law School has also written his comments on the report, which are generally favorable, but see below.

What I’m going to do is simply group a few quotes from the big report (indented) under bold headings that I made myself.  The point of the Boghossian et al. report is not to indict anybody, or conclude what needs to be done, but simply to raise the problem as a serious issue, intending to promote discussion about what needs to be done. (And yes, they do think that something needs to be done, particularly in anthropology, which comes in for a drubbing.)

The problem:

The report is prompted by the widespread sense that, despite their value and their promise, the humanistic disciplines are in trouble. It is, of course, widely recognized that undergraduate enrollments in these disciplines have plummeted and that there have been numerous complaints about the content of syllabi.2 However, with rare exceptions, our committee has not focused on these issues. Our concern has rather been the quality of academic scholarship in this domain.

Scholarship on matters of human concern has been a source of controversy from the start — witness the trial of Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens. In recent years, however, the complaint has assumed a more specific form, namely, that the traditional goal of coming to understand the human world through careful scholarship has been subordinated to, or even displaced by, a “political” goal: the aim of realizing a conception of social justice nowadays associated with the progressive left. More specifically, the complaint is that scholarly standards for the assessment of academic work have been distorted within these disciplines both to privilege work on topics that are taken to be relevant to social justice, and much more importantly, to replace more traditional standards for assessing academic scholarship with political standards designed to ensure that only politically acceptable work is published, taught and valorized (§3 below). The sharpest version of the complaint traces this distortion in scholarly standards to a pervasive repudiation of the very idea of scholarly objectivity in favor of the view that since claims to knowledge are inevitably ideological, it is fair game to assess academic scholarship on political and social grounds (§4 below). The result of this distortion, the complaint continues, is an academic ecosystem in which much of what passes as scholarship in the humanistic disciplines is in fact a mix of tendentious, biased research, feeble academic agitprop and jargon-laden nonsense. To the extent that this is so, the complaint concludes, these scholarly disciplines can no longer play the valuable role they have traditionally played in the advancement of human knowledge and so risk forfeiting their claims to deference from concerned administrators and support from the wider public. . .

The importance of the humanities (There’s a nice discussion of this in the report, bearing on why they are worth saving through unpolluted scholarship.)

But who is going to help you decide what satisfactions are really worth pursuing? Which outcomes are worth aiming for? What is worth wanting? Who will help you decide whether John Stuart Mill was right to say that “it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied” (Mill 1985)? Indeed, who will let you know this question is even worth asking? And where will you learn that one reason for studying the nomothetic sciences is that understanding how the universe works and how we fit into it would be worthwhile in itself, even if we never put the knowledge to profitable use?

The answer, we think, is clear. These are the questions you learn to answer, however provisionally, with the help of literature and the arts, critically appreciated, through the study of philosophy and history and sociology and anthropology. Some humanistic disciplines take matters of value and meaning as a central focus; others aim to describe and explain the human world without pronouncing judgment; but all play an indispensable role in refining our conception of what is possible for human beings and which social arrangements we wish to aim for. If these disciplines are to help us answer these important questions, it is crucial that they use the right methods in search of the right answers. Their task is not to manipulate us into following a party line but to provide each free person with the tools for making their own informed choices.

The disciplines we are discussing prepare us for a free life by developing critical thinking and analytical skills, enhancing cultural understanding and empathy in a world of increasing global interconnections, teaching ethical reasoning and civic responsibility, and providing intellectual resources for creativity and innovation. Because their study is intrinsically worthwhile, they contribute directly to the intellectual and imaginative flourishing of those who study them. By defending and investing in the humanistic disciplines, we affirm our commitment to a society that values critical inquiry, empathy and the full spectrum of human potential, all informed by a clear-eyed view of who we are and where we’ve come from.

This goes along with my own view, though the report focuses on “good scholarship” in the humanities as “good scholarship that produces truth.” I’ve discussed before to what extent “truth”—in the sense of what exists in the universe and can be verified empirically—actually exists in the humanities. I concluded that in the arts, like music, literature, and so on, that no, there is no “truth” to be found; there are only different interpretations.  I suppose you can say that some interpretations are better than others, but such claims must be supported by facts. Other areas of humanities, including economics, history, and anthropology, do make assertions about what exists, and in those cases there is a provisional “truth” that can be adjuciated empirically.  These considerations are completely missing from the report, which suffers from a dearth of real examples (to be fair, the authors don’t want to demonize anyone).

The focus on good scholarship

Our focus is rather the quality of scholarship: the research produced by professors employed by colleges and universities and published (for the most part) in academic journals and scholarly monographs. The critique we take seriously is that this scholarly enterprise has been damaged in recent decades, not just by a general erosion of standards, but also by a reconceptualization of scholarship as a form of political activity, answerable in part to extra-academic standards.

The three ways that scholarship can be politicized. This is the heart of the discussion.

We have identified three main forms of politicized distortion in recent humanistic scholarship.

a. On the first track, scholarly claims are constrained by the requirement that they cohere with an antecedently accepted political goal, although this is not how the constraint is explicitly described. Rather, unwelcome results or debates are dismissed as having been rendered moot by “settled science.”

b. On the second track, the scholarly goal of understanding the world is displaced by, or supplemented with, the aim of telling stories that serve a pragmatic purpose. On this track, the existence of discourse-independent facts is not denied. Rather, it is claimed that, for epistemological reasons, our scholarly representations can only be partially constrained by such facts, the rest of the slack being taken up by the practical purposes that we allegedly have in devising these accounts.

c. On the third track, the idea that there are genuine facts about the world or about what the evidence supports independently of our political commitments is rejected. On this view, good scholarship cannot be distorted by political values because it is, at bottom, irredeemably constituted by such values.

The first of these routes is not philosophically problematic, in the sense that it makes no questionable claims about the nature of truth, evidence and so forth. However, this style of scholarship is deeply problematic, especially when questions are closed by demonizing opponents to suppress dissent. It is often bad scholarship, since it treats questions as closed that have not in fact been resolved by appropriate scholarly standards; but it is not bad philosophy.

One example of erosion: sex differences

The most straightforward form of distortion arises when otherwise traditional scholarship is constrained by disciplinary norms to yield results that have been determined in advance to be required by a political or social project. If scholars committed to social justice believe that the cause can only be advanced by finding, for example, that there are no behavioral differences between men and women traceable to biology, they will be under enormous pressure from their own commitments and from their colleagues to find no such differences. Either the research will not be done, or if it is done and the results look bad, the finding will be suppressed or the evidence reinterpreted so as to obscure it.12 Distortions of this sort can be harmless if they are isolated, since the politically motivated blind spots of one researcher will be exposed by others. When whole disciplines or subdisciplines prejudge substantive questions on political grounds, on the other hand, the upshot can be a serious distortion of the scholarly enterprise.

This is something that Luana and I discuss in our paper. There is in a fact a moiety of scholars who don’t think that there are real differences between the sexes, or if there are such differences, they are due entirely to socialization and bigotry.  What is taboo is the idea that such differences might be “innate,” that is, the result of evolution shaping which genes are turned on in which sex, and perhaps those evolutionary differences might be explained by natural selection. This is the subject of Steve Stewart-Williams’s new book, A Billion Years of Sex Differences: How Evolution Shapes the Minds of Men and Women, a good book that came out just two days ago.

The article talks about the wellsprings that can lead to distorted scholarship, including postmodernism and especially its scion: relativism—the idea that there is no absolute truth or knowledge, but there many different and equally valid truths and “ways of knowing”.  Relativism can be used, says the report, to dismiss scholarship on the grounds that it’s simply one scholar’s view of truth, and there are other views. But the report also shows why relativism is self-refuting:

The problem with relativism

While the political appeal of such relativistic views is well-understood, so, too, are their theoretical problems. For it is in fact extremely hard to make sense of the idea that there can be
no such thing as a purely epistemic reason for believing something. The idea that there must be such reasons seems to lie at the root of any viable conception of knowledge and inquiry. We can see this in a variety of ways.

Consider first that the relativism is rarely applied consistently by the relativists themselves. Ifsomeone really believed that all knowledge claims depend on contingent background nonepistemic values, they would have to admit that while they believe that climate change is real,
given their progressive values, the MAGA folks might be entitled to believe that climate change is a hoax, given their conservative values. Similarly, for claims about how many sexes there are, or whether race is real, and so on.

No one takes this tolerant attitude towards such disagreements, least of all the scholars who officially espouse the relativistic views. But with what right do they dismiss these opposing claims, if it really is true that every claim to knowledge depends on a variable non-epistemic context? On a relativistic view of justification, the only way in which such an intolerance could be justified is if there were something privileging one set of background values over the others. But it would be odd to be an objectivist about the non-epistemic values that inform the social construction of knowledge (privileging some over others) while being an anti-objectivist about the natural facts studied by biology and physics.

Moreover, even if proponents of such relativistic views could find it in themselves to be tolerant of these substantive disagreements, they could still not be fully consistent relativists, for
a familiar reason: The relativist would have to admit at least one exception to the relativistic thesis about knowledge, and that would be the thesis of relativism itself.

In his own summary, Brian Leiter, while positive on the report, takes issue with what he sees as its somewhat dogmatic stand on relativism. Leiter says this:

There is quite a lot of analytic philosophy in this report, unsurprisingly given the authors: besides Boghossian, also Anthony Appiah, Kit Fine, Gideon Rosen, plus some linguists, sociologists, psychologists historians and other humanistic scholars. This explains some of the rather surprising claims in the report, such as that “the intellectual case against relativism about knowledge is overwhelming” (the main citations are to Boghossian’s book and work by his NYU colleague Thomas Nagel). So much for Carnap’s “Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology” and some ways of understanding Quine–not to mention Herder, F.C.S. Schiller, and many other serious humanists. (And what about Boghossian’s colleague Hartry Field?) The report would make itself less vulnerable to dismissal had it not taken that position.

Brian clearly knows a lot more than I about the reach and validity of relativism, but I don’t know what he’s saying here; and I will ask him.

h/t: Greg Mayer

Maarten Boudry on the policing of academia

January 30, 2026 • 10:15 am

My friend Maarten Boudry, a Belgian philosopher, has been increasingly demonized for his heterodox views, especially on the Hamas/Israel war, since he is sympathetic to Israel (he isn’t Jewish). In the latest post on his Substack site, also published in condensed form in The Jewish Chronicle, Maarten recounts how there is a near-unanimity among European academics that Israel is the Great Satan. Any dissent on this issue is ruthlessly suppressed. Because of this, one gets a false impression, says Boudry, that European academia is united in hating Israel, Zionists, and, by extension, Jews.

Boudry himself, as you see below, has lost his position at the University of Ghent because of his outspokenness.  In the article he does a small experiment showing that there is indeed dissent that Israel is committing “genocide”, but academics who disagree about the Israeli “genocide” dare not speak up. This “spiral of silence”, as Steve Pinker calls it, suppresses speech, and is one reason why many American universities are beginning to adopt institutional neutrality—a policy that promotes free expression.

Click below to read the Substack piece. 

Unless you’re in Europe, you have no idea how strong and pervasive the anti-Israel pressure is. In an article in Quillette, Maarten and I described how we and another academic were canceled from giving a talk at the University of Amsterdam on the ideological suppression of science—a talk that had absolutely nothing to do with Israel. And yet we were explicitly told by the student science organization that our talk was cancelled because of our views on Israel. That was my first experience with cancellation, and believe me, it affected me strongly. I couldn’t believe that fellow scientists were blackballing us simply because of our views on the war, and for a talk that had nothing to do with that war. We were, apparently, tainted.

But on to Maarten’s narrative; his quotes are indented below. He begins by describing the academic consensus that Israel aims at genocide in Gaza, and recounts his own demonization.

In Europe, social pressure is even more intense than in the United States. A petition opposing the IAGS resolution garnered hundreds of signatories in the U.S., but only a handful in Europe—primarily in Germany and around a single London-based center for antisemitism research. In the Low Countries, where I live, my stance on the Gaza war has left me increasingly isolated within the ivory tower. In an interview with the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, the rector of my alma mater, Ghent University, declared that any academic questioning the genocide in Gaza can no longer rely on the protections of academic freedom: “This is a line that cannot be crossed.” Five professors have called on the previous rector to discipline me for my “Zionist-tinged” views. I’ve also been deplatformed twice at the University of Amsterdam for my views on Israel, a matter I detailed inQuillette together with my friend and fellow cancellee, the biologist Jerry Coyne.

And yet, for the past two years, I have been receiving regular emails from academic colleagues that can be summarized as follows: “I completely agree with you and am glad that you’re fighting this battle, but please keep it quiet—I don’t want to get into trouble.” The social pressure to condemn Israel, preferably in the strongest possible terms, has become so intense that many dissidents no longer dare to speak out. After a number of such discreet messages of support, I began to grow annoyed. To the outside world, it appeared as if I was the only academic rejecting the official narrative—but in reality, many others agreed with me.

This reluctance to speak up gives rise to what psychologists call pluralistic ignorance: people mistakenly assume that they are alone in holding a dissenting opinion and therefore either remain silent or misrepresent their own views, inadvertently perpetuating the illusion of consensus and raising the social cost of dissent.

Maarten then did a nonscientific experiment (there could have been respondent bias), but one showing there’s a lot more sympathy for Israel than you’d guess from living as a European academic:

In the spirit of the [“Emperor has no clothes”] fable, I wanted to see whether there was a way to break the spell. What if people could anonymously explain why they believed the emperor was naked, without exposing themselves to social or professional risk? To test this, I collected anonymous testimonies from academics with dissenting views on Israel and Gaza, by putting out a call on X in Dutch. The testimonies that landed in my inbox were both sobering and chilling.

Chilling to the reader, but also chilling to speech. Academics in Europe won’t dare to speak in sympathy with Israel, or contest the stupid “genocide” canard against Israel, for fear of professional repercussions. There’s a long list of responses, but I’ll give only a few:

A senior lecturer at a Dutch university writes: “I’m afraid to share my thoughts freely with my colleagues and feel restricted in my freedom to speak openly about this.” A philosophy professor describes academic debate on the war in Gaza as effectively “impossible”: “Critical voices are silenced through exclusion, dismissal, and sometimes even violence. In such circumstances, I don’t feel compelled to express my critical thoughts openly.” Another Dutch lecturer admits bluntly: “I certainly keep my mouth shut about my views to my colleagues.”

. . . . Among the testimonies are also voices with the relevant expertise, rarely heard in mainstream media. A professor of military law stresses that “extreme caution is required” on the question of genocide and warns against “jumping to conclusions.” Some actors, he notes, “automatically assimilate the conduct of hostilities with acts of genocide, but this reasoning seems incorrect to me.” A doctor of law and former advisor to the International Court of Justice, who has pored over previous genocide dossiers for many years, writes in a lengthy email: “I am not convinced that Israel is committing genocide, but I am currently raising capital and will not risk taking this position publicly.”

Dissenting opinions can be found even at the highest levels of academic institutions. A vice-chancellor of a Belgian university observes: “The Gaza mania that is currently prevailing seems to me a collective madness. The call to declare what Israel is doing a genocide is in line with this.” Yet in official communications, universities often strike a different tone, shaping and constraining the debate. A Ghent academic notes that the election of our new rector Petra De Sutter—who is strongly anti-Israel—further worsened the atmosphere: “I saw this tendency strengthen following the rector elections. Either you were outspoken, or else you were better off keeping quiet. The election result and the political convictions of the new rector have reinforced their ideology.”

. . . .Another lecturer’s testimony illustrates how subtle yet pervasive the professional and social repercussions can be, even for tenured staff: “I stopped reposting and commenting about Israel on X after noticing that my university suddenly stopped sharing any of my achievements. While colleagues were receiving retweets and links to their projects, mine went unnoticed, whereas this had never happened before.” The pressure extended to the social realm, with colleagues unfollowing him or no longer responding to messages. Ultimately, he gave up the fight for family-related reasons: “The decisive factor came when my wife asked me to leave the fight to others. We simply cannot afford to lose our jobs.” Several colleagues describe struggling with guilt for remaining silent, scolding themselves as “cowards” or “sell-outs.”

And the understatement of the year:

Several colleagues explicitly argue that the academic hostility towards Israel stems from antisemitism.

This hostility, says Boudry, also obtains largely in Canada, and in Europe can degenerate into threats of violence for those sympathetic to Israel or Jews:

Even before October 7, an Israeli academic working at a European university relates how he moved his tutorials off campus, because the threat of physical violence was constantly on his mind, even though his academic field was completely unrelated to Israel or the Middle East: “I always worried about being known as an Israeli and outspoken about my views that someone could just show up and attack me.” After the October 7 massacre and the ensuing Gaza war, of course the situation became far worse. An anti-Zionist website hosted on a server in the Netherlands even placed bounties for assassination as high as $100,000 on the heads of Israeli academics.

If you think this violence is directed simply against “Zionists”, and has nothing to do with Jews, I have some land in Florida to sell you. People didn’t stop to survey people’s views on Israel before they commit massacres on Australian beaches or in American synagogues.

In the end, Boudry concludes that censoriousness, threats of professional reprisal, and threats of violence have produced an artificial and false consensus about Israel being The Great Satan:

The academic consensus on Israel is, therefore, partly a mirage. Pluralistic ignorance, suppression of dissent and fear of professional and social reprisal have produced an artificial unanimity that is untethered from evidence and reasoned debate. In particular, the “Gaza genocide” accusation has become the Left’s equivalent of the stolen election hoax on the American Right—a baseless claim that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. It functions much like mantras such as “men can get pregnant” or “scientific and Indigenous ways of knowing are equally valid”: deep down everyone understands that it’s nonsense, but that is precisely what allows it to serve as an ideological litmus test. Breaking the spiral of silence will require more people to step forward and call out such nonsense, thereby lowering the social cost of dissent.

Again, the only remedy for this is a tough one; dissenters must be willing to speak out in a climate of hostility. And European universities must do more to allow free speech. I don’t know of any university outside the U.S.—though here I may be wrong—that both promotes freedom of speech and maintains an policy of institutional neutrality, whereby the school takes no official position on moral, ideolotical, or political issues. If we think we have things bad in America, remember that it’s far worse across the pond.

******

A poster in Dam Square, Amsterdam, photographed in May, 2024:

The degeneration of the AAUP, an organization that’s now all but useless

June 15, 2025 • 9:35 am

Like the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the once-venerable American Association of University Professors (AAUP) has by and large abandoned its primary values and mission. In the case of the AAUP, celebrating its 110th anniversary this year, that mission was the protection of academic freedom as well as “to define fundamental professional values and standards for higher education, and to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”

How has this happened? First, in a post in 2025 (see other critiques of mine here), I summarized the ways the AAUP has gone to ground:

The three changes the AAUP has made to this end include these (there are a few other and more minor ones included in the piece):

a.) Abandoned its opposition to academic boycotts

b.) Approved of the use of diversity statements, finding them “compatible with academic freedom”

c.) Averring that institutional neutrality, as embodied in Chicago’s Kalven Report, need not impact academic freedom one way or the other, so one need not adhere to the Kalven principle that the university or parts of it cannot issue ideological, political, or moral statements unless those statements bear directly on the mission of the University.

In a new article, the Chronicle of Higher Education (click headlines below of find it archived here), Matthew Finkin, once head of the committee that criticized academic boycotts and DEI criteria for promotion (“Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure”), explains the 180º turn the AAUP took on these positions. Finkin finds, as the title below shows, that the newer reversed positions are incompatible with the organization’s original mission. As he says:

Recent actions have departed from these standards — and radically. The AAUP, acting through its Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, has, first, abandoned its prior position that systematic participation in the boycott of Israeli universities could threaten academic freedom and, second, declared that adherence to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) dictates as a condition of faculty retention can be consistent with academic freedom. These actions reveal a body now driven by considerations other than fidelity to principle. As a result, the deep well of communal respect has been drained dry; the AAUP’s credibility has been destroyed.

Let’s summarize the source of the reversals by topic.

Academic boycotts. 

As recently as 2005, when the British Association of University Teachers called for its members not to engage academically with two Israeli universities, the AAUP opposed this move strongly, issuing this statement:

Since its founding in 1915, the AAUP has been committed to preserving and advancing the free exchange of ideas among academics and irrespective of governmental policies and however unpalatable those policies may be viewed. We reject proposals that curtail the freedom of teachers and researchers to engage in work with academic colleagues, and we reaffirm the paramount importance of the freest-possible international movement of scholars and ideas.

A subsequent subcommittee report opposed organized academic boycotts by groups (including both departments and universities), though of course considerations of academic freedom allow individuals to cooperate or collaborate with whomever they want.

Then came October 7, 2023 and the subsequent demonization of Israel by many liberals—liberals who, by and large, make up most university faculties. The AAUP then did that 180 and, in 2024, decided that boycotts of universities (read: Israeli universities) was okay after all.  And it allowed this because, the AAUP proclaimed, banning boycotts actually compromised academic freedom. The striking thing was that the AAUP gave not a single example of how boycotts actually had compromised academic freedom:

There matters stood until the summer of 2024, when Committee A approved a statement that expressly “supersedes” the position adopted nearly two decades before. The new Statement on Academic Boycotts explained its raison d’être: The 2006 position was “controversial, contested, and used to compromise academic freedom. We therefore believe that this position deserves reconsideration and clarification.” Unfortunately, the reasons given for this reconsideration are threadbare, at best. The result is a tangle of inconsistencies and begged questions — without any reference to, let alone inquiry into, the role played by freedom of research and teaching on which the committee’s position rested a generation before.

The assertion that because the 2006 position has been “used to compromise academic freedom” it should be reconsidered could provide a valid reason for revision. But the report makes no mention of any instance, in press accounts or complaints brought to the staff, of any faculty member having been disciplined or threatened with discipline simply for advocating for a boycott. So “compromise” must mean something other than violation or abridgment, but the 2024 statement breathes no hint of what.

The AAUP. whose Committee A chair, Rana Jaleel, is apparently pro-Palestibnian, favoring the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Movement, decided that academic boycotts were fine because opposing them would chill the speech and actions of those who favor boycotts. Note, though, that the AAUP is not a university, and so is not subject to academic neutrality provisions of universities. Further, this argument, as Finkin notes, is nonsensical:

This argument is logically flawed and empirically unsupported. By its logic, were the state to accede to the demands of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement and divest university investments in companies that do business in Israel, those faculty members who oppose the boycott and wish to say so would have had their own academic freedom “compromised.” The only way that would not be the case would be to maintain that advocacy for BDS is protected by academic freedom, but advocacy against it is not.

Nor is there any factual basis for the claim that such legislation has actually “been used to compromise” academic freedom in that chilling sense. Illinois law, for example, directs its public-university retirement system to decline to invest in companies that observe the anti-Israel boycott and to divest in those that do. Yet at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the BDS movement shows no sign of abatement.

According to the AAUP’s new argument,  organized academic boycotts or prohibition of them would both infringe on academic freedom. The only rational solution is to impugn organized boycotts (but not individual ones), because such organized movements impinge on scholarly interchange between institutions, which is essential for academic freeedom. The AAUP blew this one.

DEI (Diversity, equity and inclusion) statements

Here we’re talking about the use of DEI statements as prerequisites for hiring, promotion, and tenure, something prohibited by the University of Chicago. Although our university favors at least the DI parts of DEI, it also considers ideological statements of this sort to violate our 1970 Shils Report, which bases hiring and promotion on meritocracy. DEI statements are compelled speech, as those who are forced to write them must adhere to the going norms of DEI, norms that sneer at statements like “I have treated and will treat all students the same, regardless of their immutable characteristics like race or religion.” Modern DEI statements are expressly ideological, hewing to “progressive” Leftist politics.

Finkin notes the slipshod way that the AAUP went about giving its imprimatur to DEI statements:

Had Committee A taken up DEI in keeping with its customary process of policy consideration in such a weighty matter, it would have assembled the data on what these policies actually provided, how widespread they were, and how they were being administered; engaged with the arguments on the relationship of DEI to academic freedom in the literature and in the deliberations of faculties, including those that refused to use them; and provided a clear, dispassionate analysis of how DEI stacked up against the 1940 statement’s commitment to freedom of research, teaching, and political engagement. It did nothing of the kind. Instead, it launched an aggressive defense of DEI accompanied by a strident attack on its critics, in all of six paragraphs and three conclusory recommendations. Each bears brief synopsis before the substance of the statement is addressed.

I won’t go through these arguments except to say that they seem to boil down to this:  if DEI statements are approved by a faculty as essential for professional advancement, then opposing them is violating academic freedom. Apparently academic freedom, says the AAUP, is what a faculty consensus says it is.  Finkin points out the problems with this view:

It is worth noting that a number of faculty members subject to the anti-Communist loyalty oath supported it, and a larger number were indifferent. The AAUP did not consider the depth of faculty support for the loyalty oath to have any bearing on its consequences for academic freedom. The reason is that the abridgment of academic freedom is a matter of fact irrespective of the status or motive of those effecting or acquiescing in it. The way Committee A has cast it, a DEI policy identical in every word would or would not abridge academic freedom depending only on the ideological or political proclivities of a majority of a bare quorum of “an appropriate larger group.” Faculty liberties cannot be made to hang by so precarious a thread. It should be enough to say of the right to exercise academic freedom what the Supreme Court said of the right to exercise freedom of thought and speech: It depends on no majority; it hinges on the outcome of no vote.

And, in fact, as I’ve said, required DEI statements, by okaying compelled speech, violate the Constitution and are therefore illegal, at least at public universities that must adhere to the First Amendment. The only reason they’re still compulsory in some public universitie—I believe the University of California is one—is because nobody so far has had the moxie to challenge the statements in courts, for that would require having “standing”, which would endanger all your academic prospects. As Finkin explains:

It seems inevitable that sometime, somewhere, one or more instructors will not be reappointed for no reason other than the failure to satisfy a DEI requirement. It seems equally inevitable that at least one housed in a public university will contest the decision on constitutional grounds; and, in that event, that the AAUP will appear before the court as amicus curiae. In that case, it would be expected that the AAUP will address the court much along this line:

We appear before this court as the repository of a century’s thoughtful engagement with the meaning and significance of academic freedom, to bring our considered judgment, expressed in the Statement on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Criteria for Faculty Evaluation, to the court’s attention and to argue in support of it.

To which the only frank response a court could make is: “You are the successor in title, but no longer in principle, spirit, or scrupulous care.”

I’ll finish by noting that the real defender of academic freedom these days, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), is opposed to both academic boycotts and DEI statements.  The AAUP is now an opponent rather than a guarantor of academic freedom, and FIRE is its true successor.

h/t Wayne

Should academia practice “political DEI” and hire more conservatives?

June 3, 2025 • 9:30 am

The Atlantic article below, by staff writer Rose Horowitch, points out a fact the whole world knows: academia in America comprises nearly exclusively faculty of a liberal persuasion. Conservative professors are as rare as hen’s teeth. This has led to a dearth of political argumentation pitting Left versus Right, since the Right is hard to be found. It’s also led, as Horowitch says, to a decline in respect for academia. But I’m getting ahead of myself.  Click the headline below to read, or find the article archived here.

First, the data:

Between 30 and 40 percent of Americans identify as conservative, but conservatives make up only one of every 10 professors in academia, and even fewer in the humanities and most social-science departments. (At least they did in 2014, when the most recent comprehensive study was done. The number today is probably even lower.) Of the money donated by Yale faculty to political candidates in 2023, for example, 98 percent went to Democrats.

This is a relatively new degree of such imbalance:

Academia has leaned left for as long as anyone can remember. But for most of the 20th century, conservative faculty were a robust presence throughout the humanities and social sciences. (In 1969, for example, even as anti-war protests raged across campuses, a quarter of the professoriate identified as at least “moderately” conservative.) But their ranks have thinned since the 1990s. At the same time, moderate and independent professors have been replaced by people who explicitly identify as liberal or progressive.

Here’s the claimed inimical effect of this imbalance on the reputation of colleges and universities:

Conservative underrepresentation has also hurt higher education’s standing with the country at large. Polls show that Americans, particularly on the right, are losing trust in universities. A Gallup survey taken last year, for example, found that Republican confidence in higher education had dropped from 56 to 20 percent over the course of a decade. Respondents attributed this in part to perceived liberal bias in the academy.

Why the dearth of conservatives? Horowitch adduces data that some of it may be due to a lack of good candidates, but there also seems to be a bias against hiring conservatives:

Opinions differ on the precise extent to which conservatives are being excluded from academia versus self-selecting into nonacademic careers. But they clearly face barriers that liberal and leftist scholars don’t. Professors decide who joins their ranks and what research gets published in flagship journals. And several studies show that academics are willing to discriminate against applicants with different political views. One 2021 survey found that more than 40 percent of American (and Canadian) academics said they would not hire a Donald Trump supporter. Then there’s the fact that entire disciplines have publicly committed themselves to progressive values. “It is a standard of responsible professional conduct for anthropologists to continue their research, scholarship, and practice in service of dismantling institutions of colonization and helping to redress histories of oppression and exploitation,” the American Anthropological Association declared in 2020.

“Professors will tell you straight up that people who hold the wrong views don’t belong in universities,” Musa al-Gharbi, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University who studies progressive social-justice discourse, told me. “That’s the difference between viewpoint discrimination and other forms of discrimination.”

If this is the case, then the dearth of conservatives is not due solely to a lack of meritorious conservative candidates, but is in part due to bias.  And that has caused several universities, including ours, to try to bring in conservative speakers,= and to develop new programs that allow right-wing voices to be heard:

Some university leaders worry that this degree of ideological homogeneity is harmful both academically (students and faculty would benefit from being exposed to a wider range of ideas) and in terms of higher education’s long-term prospects (being hated by half the country is not sustainable). Accordingly, Johns Hopkins recently unveiled a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a center-right think tank, designed to inject some ideological diversity into the university. Steven Teles, a political scientist who wrote a widely discussed article last year for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?,” is one of the faculty members involved with the partnership. The institutions will collaborate on a number of efforts to integrate conservative and heterodox thinkers.

So we have an odd situation in which both sides are behaving counter to their reputations. Conservatives, who have generally opposed affirmative action, now favor it—for professors with conservative viewpoints.  In contrast, the progressive Left, which is often opposed to turning academia into a meritocracy, now wants a meritocracy because conservatives are often seen as lacking academic merit.

But there are other issues to consider.  The First Amendment, for example, bans the government from restricting speech based on its content. This would seem to prevent universities—at least state universities—from restricting the hiring professors of merit just because they espouse conservative views. (Note the admissions of anti-conservative bias above.)  Further, universities are generally forbidden to hire professors based on race, creed, degree of disability, and so on.  The University of Chicago’s 1973 Shils report, for example, notes this (my emphasis):

There must be no consideration of sex, ethnic or national characteristics, or political or religious beliefs or affiliations in any decision regarding appointment, promotion, or reappointment at any level of the academic staff.

And there’s an elaboration of this at the report’s end, which includes this:

In discussions and decisions regarding appointments, promotions, and reappointments, appointive bodies should concentrate their consideration of any candidate on his qualifications as a research worker, teacher, and member of the academic community. The candidate’s past or current conduct should be considered only insofar as it conveys information relative to the assessment of his excellence as an investigator, the quality of the publications which he lays before the academic community, the fruitfulness of his teaching and the steadfastness of his adherence to the highest standards of intellectual performance, professional probity, and the humanity and mutual tolerance which must prevail among scholars.

This would seem to ban even considering political beliefs and stances as a criterion for hiring (or promotion).  In Chicago, at least, we cannot redress the imbalance between Right and Left among faculty by preferentially hiring on the Right.  That also amounts to discrimination of hiring Left-wing faculty, itself a violation of Shils.

Nevertheless, a faculty almost entirely comprising liberals is a faculty not conducive to meeting an important mission of the university: promoting fruitful discussion between those having opposing views on issues. It’s not like all conservatives are lunatics: there are many, some of them here, who are eloquent and make arguments worthy of consideration.  Further, even if you are on the Left, you should agree with John Stuart Mill’s claim that you cannot defend your own viewpoint very well if you don’t know the best arguments of the other side.

But if that side is missing, what do we do?

I have no solution here, at least not one that doesn’t violate the Shils report.  One solution is what the newly-established Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression (a free-speech discussion site) is doing: bringing in speakers of divergent views and creating new fora, all designed to promote discussions and debates.

But is that an adequate substitute for having faculty members on different sides of an issue? Conservatism, after all, is not like creationism. Creationism is a debunked set of scientific claims and need not be debated on campus (though I wouldn’t oppose such debates). In contrast, conservatism is a widely represented set of political views, many of which can be rationally defended.

So, my question to readers (actually two questions):

Do we need more conservative faculty members in American colleges and universities?

If so, how do you propose to do it without violating the law or academic freedom?

Trump administration tries to stop Harvard from accepting international students; Harvard sues; Pinker pens NYT op-ed about government’s “Harvard derangement syndrome”

May 23, 2025 • 9:23 am

Trump continues to go after Harvard, ostensibly because of its pervasive antisemitism (granted, President Alan Garber says that the climate is still antisemitic and he himself has been a victim). However, Trump is punishing the wrong people for Harvard’s presumed crimes, and those include researchers whose grants have been cut or rescinded.

Now he’s taken an even more egregious step: threatening to ban the school’s ability to accept international students unless it coughs up a pile of information about all of Harvard’s foreign students.  Click the headline from April 17 below to read, or find the article archived here:


An excerpt:

The Trump administration on Thursday said it would halt Harvard University’s ability to enroll international students, taking aim at a crucial funding source for the nation’s oldest and wealthiest college in a major escalation of the administration’s efforts to pressure the elite school to fall in line with the president’s agenda.

The administration notified Harvard about the decision — which could affect about a quarter of the school’s student body — after a back-and-forth in recent weeks over the legality of a sprawling records request as part of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigation, according to three people with knowledge of the negotiations. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

The latest move intensifies the administration’s attempt to upend the culture of higher education by directly subverting the ability of one of the nation’s premier universities to attract the best and brightest students from all over the world. That capability, across all of academia, has long been one of the greatest sources of academic, economic and scientific strength in America.

It is also likely to prompt a second legal challenge from Harvard, according to another person familiar with the school’s thinking who insisted on anonymity to discuss private deliberations. The university sued the Trump administration last month over the government’s attempt to impose changes to its curriculum, admissions policies and hiring practices.

“I am writing to inform you that effective immediately, Harvard University’s Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification is revoked,” a letter to the university from Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said. A copy of the letter was obtained by The New York Times.

The Department of Homeland Security said the action applied to current and future students.

“Harvard can no longer enroll foreign students, and existing foreign students must transfer or lose their legal status,” the department said in a news release after Ms. Noem posted the administration’s letter on social media later on Thursday.

Not only that, but current foreign students have to find another place to study, pronto. Do you think that’s easy? And of course Trump has a way to enforce this plan: all he has to do is revoke the visas of foreign students.

Granted, a lot of dosh is involved, as foreign students tend to pay full fare:

The administration’s decision is likely to have a significant effect on the university’s bottom line. Tuition at Harvard is $59,320 for the 2025-26 school year, and costs can rise to nearly $87,000 when room and board are included. International students tend to pay larger shares of education costs compared with other students. (Harvard notes it is need-blind for all students, regardless of nationality.)

You can read the letter from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem here, which lays out what Harvard has to cough up to prevent loss of its foreign students. It was apparently sent to the school

I don’t think Harvard responded by the April 30 deadline, and they have responded this way:

Harvard relayed those concerns to the administration on April 30. On the same day, the university’s executive vice president, Meredith Weenick, issued a public letter that vowed the school would provide the administration only with information “required by law” and urged students to “stay as focused as possible on your academic pursuits.”

The administration responded the following week, notifying Harvard that the school’s response did not satisfy Ms. Noem’s request, the people said. In the same message, the administration appeared to narrow its request by asking for information on international students who met any one of four criteria.

Noem then disqualified Harvard from the student visa program. I have just learned that Harvard has filed a lawsuit over this latest action and has filed a restraining order against the government (you can read the new suit here). I haven’t read it yet,  and though I’m not a lawyer, I think the university has a good case. Harvard is being singled out among all American universities in this way (some are even more antisemitic than Harvard) and the government’s dismissing of foreign applicants has never been done before. I’m not sure whether selective enforcement is grounds to sue, but you can be sure that Harvard will mount a case.

One quarter of Harvard’s students are foreign, and they are essential to Harvard being Harvard. Further, it’s inimical to scholarship to prevent students who want to study at Harvard from coming here, denying the world the ability to send people to an American university renowned for producing brilliant foreign scholars.

This morning, Steve Pinker published a long op-ed in the NYT on the “Harvard derangement syndrome” of the administration. Click on the headline below to read it, or find it archived here:

An excerpt (Steve first mentions all the pieces he’s written criticizing Harvard):

So I’m hardly an apologist for my employer when I say that the invective now being aimed at Harvard has become unhinged. According to its critics, Harvard is a “national disgrace,” a “woke madrasa,” a “Maoist indoctrination camp,” a “ship of fools,” a “bastion of rampant anti-Jewish hatred and harassment,” a “cesspool of extremist riots” and an “Islamist outpost” in which the “dominant view on campus” is “destroy the Jews, and you’ve destroyed the root of Western civilization.”

And that’s before we get to President Trump’s opinion that Harvard is “an Anti-Semitic, Far Left Institution,” a “Liberal mess” and a “threat to Democracy,” which has been “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students and so-called future leaders.”

This is not just trash talk. On top of its savage slashing of research funding across the board, the Trump administration has singled out Harvard to receive no federal grants at all. Not satisfied with these punishments, the administration just forbade Harvard from enrolling foreign students and has threatened to multiply the tax on its endowment as much as 15-fold, as well as to remove its tax-free nonprofit status.

Call it Harvard Derangement Syndrome. As the country’s oldest, richest and most famous university, Harvard has always attracted outsize attention. In the public imagination the university is both the epitome of higher learning and a natural magnet for grievances against elites.

He admits that Harvard still has problems:

Yet some of the enmity against Harvard has been earned. My colleagues and I have worried for years about the erosion of academic freedom here, exemplified by some notorious persecutions. In 2021 the biologist Carole Hooven was demonized and ostracized, effectively driving her out of Harvard, for explaining in an interview how biology defines male and female. Her cancellation was the last straw that led us to create the academic freedom council, but it was neither the first nor the last.

. . .The most painful indictment of Harvard is its alleged antisemitism — not the old-money WASP snobbery of Oliver Barrett III, but a spillover of anti-Zionist zealotry. A recent, long-awaited report detailed many troubling incidents. Jewish students have felt intimidated by anti-Israel protests that have disrupted classes, ceremonies and everyday campus life, often met with a confused response by the university. Members of the teaching staff have gratuitously injected pro-Palestinian activism into courses or university programming. Many Jewish students, particularly Israelis, reported being ostracized or demonized by their peers.

As with its other maladies, Harvard’s antisemitism has to be considered with a modicum of discernment. Yes, the problems are genuine. But “a bastion of rampant anti-Jew hatred” with the aim of “destroying the Jews as a first step to destroying Western civilization”? Oy gevalt!

I’m glad there’s some Yiddish in there.  He notes that withholding grant money hurts Jews than other groups, and is hypocritical given Trump’s past statements:

Just as clear is what won’twork: the Trump administration’s punitive defunding of science at Harvard. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, a federal grant is not alms to the university, nor may the executive branch dangle it to force grantees to do whatever it wants. It is a fee for a service — namely, a research project that the government decides (after fierce competitive review) would benefit the country. The grant pays for the people and equipment needed to carry out that research, which would not be done otherwise.

Mr. Trump’s strangling of this support will harm Jews more than any president in my lifetime. Many practicing and aspiring scientists are Jewish, and his funding embargo has them watching in horror as they are laid off, their labs are shut down or their dreams of a career in science go up in smoke. This is immensely more harmful than walking past a “Globalize the Intifada” sign. Worse still is the effect on the far larger number of gentiles in science, who are being told that their labs and careers are being snuffed out to advance Jewish interests. Likewise for the current patients whose experimental treatments will be halted, and the future patients who may be deprived of cures. None of this is good for the Jews.

The concern for Jews is patently disingenuous, given Mr. Trump’s sympathy for Holocaust deniers and Hitler fans. The obvious motivation is to cripple civil society institutions that serve as loci of influence outside the executive branch. As JD Vance put it in the title of a 2021 speech: “The Universities Are the Enemy.”

Indeed. It’s natural that a populist and delusional President will go after America’s most elite university.

. . . . Why does this matter? For all its foibles, Harvard (together with other universities) has made the world a better place, significantly so. Fifty-two faculty members have won Nobel Prizes and more than 5,800 patents are held by Harvard. Its researchers invented baking powder, the first organ transplant, the programmable computer, the defibrillator, the syphilis test and oral rehydration therapy (a cheap treatment that has saved tens of millions of lives). They developed the theory of nuclear stability that has saved the world from Armageddon. They invented the golf tee and the catcher’s mask. Harvard spawned “Sesame Street,” The National Lampoon, “The Simpsons,” Microsoft and Facebook.

Ongoing research at Harvard includes methane-tracking satellites, robotic catheters, next-generation batteries and wearable robotics for stroke victims. Federal grants are supporting research on metastasis, tumor suppression, radiation and chemotherapy in children, multidrug-resistant infections, pandemic prevention, dementia, anesthesia, toxin reduction in firefighting and the military, the physiological effects of spaceflight and battlefield wound care. Harvard’s technologists are pushing innovations in quantum computing, A.I., nanomaterials, biomechanics, foldable bridges for the military, hack-resistant computer networks and smart living environments for the elderly. One lab has developed what may be a cure for Type 1 diabetes.

Pinker feels that Harvard is capable of reforming itself, and in fact is now doing so. But even if some of the reforms coincide with those demanded by the Trump administration, it’s simply bad for the government to mold universities to its liking. Withholding grants and revoking the visas of foreign students will not cure Harvard of antisemitism.

Trump is violating the third of Haidt and Lukianoff’s “great untruths” which, ironically, are supposed to motivate young people, not universities:

“Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

Read the whole op-ed, written with Pinker’s typical panache; he concludes that, for Harvard, the “appropriate treatment (as with other imperfect institutions) is to diagnose which parts need which remedies, not to cut its carotid and watch it bleed out.” Sadly, Trump has already wielded the knife.

h/t Greg Mayer