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Tenure and the intellectual monoculture

How Tenure Fosters Conformity:

This is a tough one to answer technically. We have nothing to compare directly with the academia we have today, no alternative system of higher education. Still, it is clear that American academia has fallen far short of this ideal. Worse, in some fields, far from being open to entertaining controversial thought, academics behave more like priests with an orthodoxy to defend.

In the subjects I know most about, I am very skeptical of academics. While often rigorous in their approach and skilled in their technical analysis, they nonetheless shy away from difficult truths (with some rare exceptions). This leaves large holes in their study and analysis, holes that are filled in by more activist-minded professors, distorting the discussion powerfully in their favor. My feeling is backed up (somewhat) by data: We know for a fact that academia is highly skewed politically, heavily left-of-center. The difference between academic fields is merely in the degree of the skew.

Here is an example I’ll give…in June of 2020 academics of all fields endorsed BLM marches after being COVID hawks. The reason was obviously ideological, but there were some statistics papers showing that the marches didn’t have a contagion effect later in the summer. Because these were less infectious forms of COVID and the marches were outside this is not implausible on the face of it (though many of the marches and protests in many areas just masked the reality that people also wanted to party, indoors). A friend of mine who is a statistician at an R1 university looked at the paper a year later and concluded that it was trash; the statistics were crap and they couldn’t draw any conclusion. So why did the paper showing that “the science” proved that the marches weren’t conducive to COVID spread get published and repeated in the press? Because they supported the view that academics wanted to be true, so all the extreme professional skepticism and methodological rigor went out the window. This is obviously a problem. If academics want something to be ideologically true..they now seem to be willing to go along with people just making things up.

Second, I have a friend who is mildly heterodox and plans on staying in academia until tenure so he can “tell academics how they aren’t that smart and wrong a lot.” Generally, I eye-roll at this attitude. Does my friend want collaborators? Does he want his graduate students to have postdoctoral fellowships? Does he want graduate students?

Yes, tenure guarantees your job and a minimum income, but operationally most academic fields are collaborative and you need buy-in and acceptance from the community. And the community does not agree upon error. At least anymore. For whatever reason, in the last few decades, and especially the last ten years, academia has become much more ideologically and culturally conformist, and the room and freedom given to oddballs and heretics has disappeared, and the window of dissent is highly controlled. Academia has a massive culture problem, and I don’t know how they’re going to solve it. Only those who conform to nonconformism are allowed anymore.

5 thoughts on “Tenure and the intellectual monoculture

  1. I think it’s social media. It’s become a lot easier for professors to gain audiences outside of the academia that give them clout, usually by being strident and activist.

    The flip side is that it’s become much easier to condemn and harass professors who have said something is taboo, or socially unacceptable among their circles.

    Here is an example I’ll give…in June of 2020 academics of all fields endorsed BLM marches after being COVID hawks.

    I get regular academics being hypocrites about that – it was an extremely tense time in their circles where people were literally getting fired because they’d said something banal that suddenly became emotionally charged. The real disappointment for me was the public health people not only getting on board, but actually trying to weasel on it in rationalization in public.

  2. yes. academic tenure policy is downstream of culture.

    at the margin tenure policy probably increases conformity, but the effect is dwarfed by culture, and the battle will be won/lost there.

  3. This is why, when it come to new genetic papers that come out, I am only excited for analyzing the raw data. Because I know the narratives made by the authors will likely be skewed to accommodate left-wing ideals.

    I think the Global Guidelines for aDNA research has made that abundantly clearly. Because no matter what the evidence shows, they intend on “disconnecting the link between identity and belonging”.

  4. Solving the problem requires institutional restructuring.

    I think that the combination of research an teaching that was derived from the German University system of the late 19th century is the source of much of the trouble and that this model needs to be split up into several pieces.

    At the very least real research (scientific research in the physical and biological sciences) should be institutional separated from education. Lots of graduate programs need to be closed. I could go on, but its late.

  5. Second, I have a friend who is mildly heterodox and plans on staying in academia until tenure so he can “tell academics how they aren’t that smart and wrong a lot.” Generally, I eye-roll at this attitude. Does my friend want collaborators? Does he want his graduate students to have postdoctoral fellowships? Does he want graduate students?

    Oh, my sweet summer child. Is your friend really this naive? Or is this just a “brave front” or a cover for assimilating into the academia Borg? “I’m joining the STASI so I can reform it from the inside!”

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