About three weeks ago Michael Powell of The New York Times wrote a piece about the Dorian Abbot situation, M.I.T.’s Choice of Lecturer Ignited Criticism. So Did Its Decision to Cancel. I admire Powell a great deal, and I am obviously sympathetic to Abbot. But let me highlight this section of the piece, which went viral on Twitter:
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.
Dr. Cohen has now put out her side of the story, Becoming Clickbait for Speaking Out. First:
By the time Michael Powell from The New York Times reached out to me, however, I was already wary, feeling unsettled by questions that a reporter from The Boston Globe had asked me. When Powell asked me to talk to him, I responded, “If you’re serious about nuance then I am willing to talk. But if you’re just looking for a pull quote about liberal cancel culture, I’m not your person.” Powell assured me he was indeed seeking nuanced conversation and “not looking to insert Quote A into Space B.” Feeling somewhat reassured, I agreed to talk with him.
A moment of sympathy for the devil: if a reporter approaches you always be wary, and don’t trust them. They want their story. You are just a means to an end. They don’t see you as human, you are a source. The good reporters won’t lie about what you say, but the bad ones will. Even the good reporters though will strip you out of your preferred context into their own narrative. I like Powell quite a bit, and I’m aligned with him. But if he asked to talk to me, I would still record it (I’m in a one-party consent state). Generally, I refuse to talk to reporters though. That’s bad for society, but good for me. The media has brought this distrust on themselves, and only fools or total friendlies will talk to them. Be a fool, you’ll learn the hard way that the scorpion always stings you in the end.
Second, she elaborates her viewpoint in detail:
Intellectual debate and the concept of “rigor” are often seen as the pinnacle — that is, the most ideal form — of intellectualism today in American higher education, a type of discourse that is prioritized and prized in a system that was created by and for white men. There are many other forms of intellectual discourse and knowledge building that don’t center on conflict. “Intellectual debate” is often cited as an ideal for finding truth, but in reality, it is a framework that gives equal weight to two ideas that often are not, in fact, equally worthy of platforming. Some things, such as the humanity of any group of people or the roundness of the Earth, are simply not up for debate.
Further, the idea that two people standing behind wooden podiums pummeling each other in front of a rapt audience is the only way to engage in discourse is exclusionary, outdated and ignores the many ways that knowledge is generated, reshaped and discussed. For example, calls to decolonize higher education and academic disciplines ask those of us in dominant groups not only to update and change our curriculum and syllabi but also require us to ensure our classrooms are spaces where students feel accepted and engaged, as well as active and equal partners with the professor in their learning. And outside the classroom, my most productive and engaging intellectual conversations — the ones that have actually moved my science forward — have not been based in conflict, but instead in collaboration and a shared spirit of curiosity.
Beyond the concept of “debate,” critiques that center on rigor are equally problematic. Rigor according to whom? What standards are we using, and who is setting those standards? For centuries, a very thin slice of our society — primarily white, Christian, wealthy, non-disabled, cisgender men — has defined rigor in Western education systems.
That is not to say that debate or rigor are inherently wrong, useless or lack a place in academic discourse. But they do carry with them their own contexts and biases, and they are not neutral. For example, many metrics that academe has historically used to evaluate merit, such as standardized testing, are poorly designed and better reflect variables like family income rather than intellectual ability or even success in graduate school. Thus, using them as the standard by which we judge all people and all discourse is inherently flawed.
…I spoke up because pushing back against flawed “free speech” and “meritocracy” narratives is vital…
I was wrong. In each article in which I was quoted, I seemed to be the lone dissenting voice. Me, a liberal arts professor and paleontologist — not an expert on campus free speech, not a scholar on the history of conservative thought, but a rather scientist who studies the early evolution of life on our planet.
Explicit and implicit biases, structural racism, and ableism contribute to not only few minoritized students entering the field but even fewer deciding to stick it out for the long run. Abbot’s views on meritocracy and affirmative action deny the real, lived experiences of these students, as well as ignore the numerous published qualitative and quantitative studies on diversity in the geosciences. Where is the merit in that?
Dr. Cohen admits she’s no historian. She’s a geologist and paleobiologist. But, she’s got sterling credentials and I think her views reflect much of the thought of many academics, and it is likely the future. To be entirely frank she has no idea what she’s talking about, but her views are also widely shared and will be promulgated as the truth on high from the podiums of many universities. Her views are wrong on the merits, as anyone who digs into intellectual history will know, but that doesn’t matter, academics can develop a group consensus fast in the age of social media, and anyone denying these assertions will be seen as “white supremacist” and “ignorant.”
There’s an irony here: the idea that rigor is fundamentally the patrimony of white men would be agreed to heartily by the white supremacists of yore. One of the bizarre things about the current elite discourse, which I started noticing around 2010, is that it recycles the ideas of early 20th century Nordic supremacism, though white men are depicted as devils and evil rather than the virtuous creators.
But I think these assertions are based on false history. There are two major threads to this, the contingent and the general. In a contingent sense “disputed questions”, the genealogical ancestor of the contemporary Western intellectual tradition, began under the scholastics. In The Warriors of the Cloisters Christopher Beckwith argues that this method was imported (and perfected) into the West from the Islamic world and that its ultimate origins go back to Turanian Buddhism. Ergo, its origins are not Western, but Central Asian.
There is also a more general issue about rigor and debate: is this not the common human inheritance? There were intellectual debates in ancient India, over 2,000 years ago. There were debates in ancient China. And of course, in ancient Greece. These traditions didn’t emerge from a common invention by a lone genius. Debate didn’t have to be invented, it is part of human nature. We argue, we dispute, and we criticize.
Dr. Cohen asserts that some questions are simply not up for debate, pointing out whether particular groups are human and if the earth is round as two examples. But the consensus in these cases arose only after debate and discussion. At some point, questions are closed, and that’s what Dr. Cohen wants to do with affirmative action. She and her colleagues get to decide which ideas should be platformed, or not. This is just empirically true. Even though the American public is skeptical of affirmative action, there is now a consensus among the liberals who dominate academia that skepticism is racism, so that’s that.
Though Dr. Cohen is a scientist, of course, she doesn’t know the field of psychometrics and just repeats falsehoods that I hear commonly among academics. She asserts that tests are poorly designed (they’re not!), and that family income, not intellectual ability predicts scores (this doesn’t even make sense, as the two are entirely different sorts of variables), and that they don’t predict success in graduate school (range restriction). If standardized testing were part of her intellectual domain she wouldn’t engage in such sloppy thinking. But it’s not, and the things she says are now held to be truths across broad sectors of academia, so I don’t mind that she’s repeating nonsense. That’s a feature, not a bug.
Finally, she asserts the “lived experiences of these students.” Which students are these? Those she and her fellow travelers deem worthy of counting and considering. Many nonwhite students feel that rigor is their inheritance, their birthright, and they oppose affirmative action. But their lived experiences don’t count, they are dismissed. They decide.
I appreciate Dr. Cohen’s piece because she articulates the dominant mode of thought that is on the march in the academy today. There are dissenters, like Abbot, but most are silent in the face of the new order. This is the future Americans pay for in their tax dollars and tuition.
But a bittersweet aspect of this all is that when you banish rigorous debate as the ultimate arbiter of intellectual discussions, what you have left is pure power. When Dr. Cohen says that her most “productive and engaging ” intellectual advances “have not been based in conflict, but instead in collaboration,” listen. This is the velvet glove of power. If you disagree deeply, you are not a collaborator. If you are not on her team, you are problematic. They come not to bring peace but a sword. They will burn these institutions to the ground, and we will stand and watch because the courage of men has failed. We have only ourselves to blame.
