Religion is a Mental Illness

Liberal Organizations Should Not — And Boy Is It Crazy That I Have To Type This — Explicitly Denounce Objectivity And Rigor

On the Urban Institute and 'superpredators' and the importance of basic intellectual standards

jessesingal.substack.com|Jesse Singal

Recently, the Urban Institute, a highly respected think tank, published an article online headlined “Equitable Research Requires Questioning the Status Quo.” The article argues that “long-standing values and practices rooted in racism, ableism, and classism are ingrained in the fabric of research, leaving many researchers unaware of the harm they are causing. Researchers can counteract harmful aspects of these practices by sharing power with the people and communities they study.”

To help researchers do better, the post lists three “Harmful Research Practices.” Two of them are ‘objectivity’ and ‘rigor.’ This seems strange. Aren’t objectivity and rigor the hallmarks of any decent knowledge-producing body? The Urban Institute, after all, touts itself as “a nonprofit research organization that believes decisions shaped by facts, rather than ideology, have the power to improve public policy and practice, strengthen communities, and transform people’s lives for the better.” It’s unclear what the words ‘unbiased’ and ‘authoritative’ and ‘facts’ could possibly mean in the absence of ideals like objectivity and rigor, even if, as is true of literally every human ideal, these concepts can be abused to justify malevolent acts or beliefs.

(To be clear, the post explicitly calls objectivity and rigor “Harmful research practices.” It does not say something like “they are generally good things that can be abused.” If the post did say that, there would be no reason for it to exist, because this is a very obvious point. But whenever these sorts of arguments arise, someone pops up to say, “Well, really what they’re saying is…” No! That’s a motte-and-bailey tactic and it’s annoying and we should glide on right past it.)

This explicit denunciation of objectivity and rigor and other crucial intellectual concepts isn’t new, unfortunately. It’s been percolating in liberal spaces for a while — particularly in education. Back in 2019, for example, I wrote about a slide from a training given to administrators in the New York City public school system which described ‘Individualism,’ “Worship of the Written Word,” and, yes, ‘Objectivity,’ among other things, as elements of “White Supremacy Culture.” (The New York Post originally broke that story, reporting that some administrators, unsurprisingly, were not happy with the training.)

Why Harvard’s canceling of Roland Fryer matters

Opinion

fairforall.substack.com|Robert Evans

Harvard economist and professor Roland Fryer Jr. has built his name on asking tough questions. As a MacArthur Fellow, recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal, and the founder of Harvard’s Education Innovation Laboratory, Fryer has dedicated his career to understanding the persistent performance gap in low-income K-12 schooling, with a specific emphasis on black students. He has questioned how students respond to financial incentives and peer pressure, and identified the critical role that both parents and high quality teachers play in student achievement. Unafraid to challenge established orthodoxy around both race and education, Fryer’s work offers a practical path, backed by decades of empirical evidence, to improving outcomes for America’s most vulnerable students.

In spite of, or maybe because of, the transformative nature of Fryer’s work, Harvard University has effectively canceled this uniquely gifted researcher—silencing a clearly influential voice when it may be needed most. A new documentary titled Harvard Canceled its Best Black Professor. Why?, seeks to uncover the truth behind Fryer’s sanction. Produced by Rob Montz’s Good Boy Productions, the short film outlines Fryer’s early celebrity, storied career, and most notably his 2011 findings from the Harlem Children’s Zone, in which he concluded that “high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor,” while “community programs appear neither necessary nor sufficient.”

Using first-person interviews with Fryer’s students, witnesses, and Harvard staff, the film seeks to understand the Title IX complaint that is the basis for Harvard’s sanctioning of its celebrity professor. Elsewhere, the film explores Fryer’s challenging upbringing of parental abandonment and poverty, rightly casting Fryer as the perfect voice to address the issues that black America faces in the twenty-first century. Since Fryer has declined to publicly speak on the sexual harrassment complaint, the legendary economist Glenn Loury, who has long served as Fryer’s professional mentor and personal father-figure, acts as his surrogate in the film, offering viewers a glimpse into Fryer’s emotional world without compromising the treasured intimacy shared between the two men.

Filed in 2018 by Fryer’s former personal assistant, the Title IX complaint arose after Harvard fired the unnamed woman for failure to perform. Of the thirty-eight complaints filed against Fryer, six were immediately rejected by Harvard, with an additional twenty-six being dismissed after the completion of the investigation. Taking an objective look at the hundreds of pages of evidence, Montz acknowledges that Fryer is not entirely blameless in this affair. He erred in creating an overly familiar culture in his lab, which may have inadvertently led to the complaints against him, the resulting penalties, his suspension, and the closure of EdLabs. With witnesses testifying that the complainant lied before the committee, however, and with evidence showing that there existed a mutual state of intimate familiarity between her and Fryer, the punishments placed on Fryer seem excessive when measured against the university’s sexual harassment policy.

What endears me most to Fryer is that he seems to easily meld the urban swagger familiar in many black men with a staggering intellectual excellence, without regard for the opinions of his peers—qualities that Montz and Loury believe hold the key to understanding Harvard’s clearly unfair treatment of the superstar economist. Reading Fryer’s work, you are confronted with uncompromising truths and radical prescriptions that, when applied to the classroom, indirectly cast a light on the failings of many prevailing theories. Focusing specifically on black K-12 students, Fryer’s 2009 study, An Empirical Analysis of “Acting White,” makes clear that academic success for black students often results in a correlated diminished social status.

Refusing to be confined to a lab, Fryer places himself in spaces that allow him to both collect data and directly experience the subjects that he studies. In his 2010 study, Policing the Police: The Impact of “Pattern-or-Practice'' Investigations on Crime, Fryer embedded himself with multiple police departments to gain a better understanding of the relationship between the police and the public in response to federal investigations after viral police shootings. Like many, Fryer’s views on policing in the black community were framed by his upbringing in urban America and the recent frequency of viral videos depicting police brutality. In a 2020 interview with the Manhattan Institute, he admits to initially being moved by the “abhorrent behavior” of police officers in these videos and believing that they were the norm. He states that he began his 2010 study expecting to find no significant changes in police behavior in response to these viral incidents. After compiling millions of data points, Fryer found that in the aggregate Pattern-or-Practice investigations do not have a significant effect on crime rates. However, Fryer was shocked to find that total crime—specifically, murders in the black community—increased when an investigation was conducted after a viral incident of police use of force.

Many see Fryer as heir to a powerful tradition of freethinking black academics like the legendary Thomas Sowell, the late Walter Williams, and Fryer’s mentor, Glenn Loury. Despite the struggles they faced growing up—whether from good old boys in the Jim Crow south, or from gangs on the streets of Chicago—these exceptional minds all acknowledge the impact of America’s history of racial discrimination while also insisting that this past does not determine the future of black America.

Fryer’s work is a perfect embodiment of what academic research should be: identifying issues of great importance to society, developing a hypothesis and testing it through rigorous empirical analysis, following the data wherever it leads, no matter how unpleasant or unpopular, and pugnaciously defending the results. He would seem like the quintessential Harvard man—in a different time, perhaps.

Fryer’s work calls us to a simple truth: that the noblest paths to success and dignity are found in truth and accountability. This is a maxim that all of us would do well to adopt. But the question is, as Fryer would say, “Do we have the courage to do it?”

Politics in Academia: A Case Study

This is the story of our effort to publish a paper that threatens academia.

www.psychologytoday.com

Academic publishing is famously brutal. You might have a great manuscript that is under review then is rejected based on comments of one anonymous reviewer who thinks that you use too many exclamation points. Or a reviewer who is bitter because you didn't cite his particular work. Or a reviewer who didn't really read the manuscript and who goes on to criticize your work for neglecting some important statistical process that you, in fact, implemented plainly and correctly.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

I know, because I have published more than 100 academic pieces in my career to date. I've pretty much been through it all.

From this context, I will say that the most difficult paper that my team (the New Paltz Evolutionary Psychology Lab) and I have ever tried to publish was a paper on the topic of political motivations that underlie academic values of academics.

That paper, inspired by a visit to our campus from NYU's Jonathan Haidt, founder of the Heterodox Academy, was, a bit surprisingly to us, so controversial that it was rejected by nearly 10 different academic journals. Each rejection came with a new set of reasons. After some point, it started to seem to us that maybe academics just found this topic and our results too threatening. Maybe this paper simply was not politically correct. I cannot guarantee that this is what was going on, but I can tell you that we put a ton of time into the research and, as someone who's been around the block when it comes to publishing empirical work in the behavioral sciences, I truly believe that this research was generally well-thought-out, well-implemented, and well-presented. And it actually has something to say about the academic world that is of potential value.

I've never had a paper that was so difficult to publish. Not even close.

A few months ago, I participated in a colloquium hosted by the Institute for Humane Studies. In our discussion, I brought this paper up to see if anyone had any ideas on a good forum for publishing it. There, renowned psychologist Clay Routledge of North Dakota State University suggested something pretty simple: How about just publish it yourself and post it on your blog?

Honestly, this suggestion seemed kind of genius to me. After all, I don't need more publications for any extrinsic reason at all. I've held tenure since 2004. Further, I know full well that my Psychology Today blog posts receive way more views than do my academic articles. And I know that, in fact, many of these views come from academics themselves.

Consider this post exactly what Clay suggested. Here, after years of efforts from our team to publish a study of political values among academics, is, in full, that paper, titled as such: Politics and Academic Values in Higher Education: Just How Much Does Political Orientation Drive the Values of the Ivory Tower?

Ironically, this paper, now easily self-published thanks to the magic of cloud technology, officially should be cited as an unpublished manuscript. This said, the full APA citation is found in the references below and it is perfectly appropriate to cite in academic papers (the fact that it is "unpublished" clearly lets the reader know that it did not pass the process of peer review, for whatever reason; I figure people can do whatever they want with that information).

The Story of the Paper

As alluded to above, this paper has something of a saga behind it. I provide the short version here.

In 2016, our campus at the State University of New York, like so many campuses around the world at the time, was abuzz with issues surrounding academic freedom and free speech. Through a series of fast-moving events, in fact, we had an instance of a self-declared conservative speaker (Cliff Kincaid) become dis-invited from campus. He was then re-invited. But the whole thing was clunky and kind of uncomfortable, to put it simply.

I was asked to head a Free Speech Task Force on campus at the time to help our community work through, in a truly collaborative fashion, some of the issues that surrounded these controversies. We were charged with organizing events.

Our committee decided to invite Jonathan Haidt to come give a public lecture on our campus. That talk (streamed here) addressed the fundamental conflict between academic and political values, suggesting that if academia is to be an institution that seeks truth, it cannot concurrently be an institution that has a political agenda, primarily for the reason that a political agenda may come to taint efforts to arrive at truth.

The event was standing-room only. I personally thought the talk was great and was highly thought-provoking and important. Members of my research team and the Free Speech Task Force generally seemed to agree. Interestingly, many people in our academic community were outraged by the talk. I was genuinely surprised by this fact. I felt like I learned a lot and was provided new intellectual tools for understanding the nature of academia.

Yet many people in our community reported that they felt the talk was offensive and even inappropriate. They reported that he was not being politically correct and that he promoted an anti-social-justice-based approach to higher education. Note that this talk took place less than two months before the 2016 presidential election, and it was a tense time on college campuses for sure.

After the talk, in my capacity as chair of the Free Speech Taskforce, I was asked by multiple people to organize a follow-up event for members of our community to discuss Haidt's talk and process it together. In all my years, I'd never heard of such a request—a fact that speaks volumes about the truly controversial nature of this event. There was even some minor vandalism connected with the event that took place, as a large, high-quality poster advertising the event was (after the event was over) taken down and shoved behind a desk in the main Psychology Department office. People were genuinely angry. Again, I was surprised. I thought that most of Dr. Haidt's points made sense. It was a strange situation to be in.

The Study

My research team meets every Friday afternoon and so, of course, the Friday after Haidt's presentation, we really couldn't focus on anything else! Being relatively proactive, our team quickly started to think about a study that could help shed light on the situation. We were interested in understanding the degree to which various factors related to political motivations might underlie academic values among academics, as Haidt had suggested in his presentation.

Haidt specifically talked about the degree to which academics differentially value knowledge advancement versus social justice as core values in the academy. We designed a study with academics in mind. In short, we surveyed nearly 200 academics from around the US and asked them to rate the degree to which they prioritize each of the five following academic values:

• Academic rigor
• Knowledge advancement
• Academic freedom
• Students' emotional well-being
• Social Justice

We asked these professors to report on their gender, political orientation, basic personality traits, and field of academic study. And just as Haidt's presentation suggested, several of these variables were strongly and significantly related to the values that one holds as an academic.

Our full report of these findings is found in our (now published) "unpublished manuscript," here.

Some highlights of the findings are as follows:

• Relatively conservative professors valued academic rigor and knowledge advancement more than did relatively liberal professors.
• Relatively liberal professors valued social justice and student emotional well-being more so than did relatively conservative professors.
• Professors identifying as female also tended to place relative emphasis on social justice and emotional well-being (relative to professors who identified as male).
• Business professors placed relative emphasis on knowledge advancement and academic rigor while Education professors placed relative emphasis on social justice and student emotional well-being.
• Regardless of these other factors, relatively agreeable professors tend to place higher emphasis on social justice and emotional well-being of students.

Our Discussion focuses largely on how these data are consistent with a highly politicized portrait of academia; one in which political orientation, biological sex, personality, and field of study importantly shape the values held by professors in the modern landscape of higher education. Implications for better understanding academia are discussed.  

Of course, we see great irony in the fact that a paper about the politicization of academia might have been seen as too politically incorrect to actually publish in an academic journal!

Bottom Line

Academic publishing is famously difficult. This post was designed to shed light on the highly politicized nature of this process. In all my years within the academy, I've never had so much difficulty trying to publish an article. Hopefully, our effort to self-publish the paper here, allows our findings to reach a broad audience. And hopefully, this effort on our part helps shed important light on the nature of politics within the academy.

As is true with any field, academia has its politics. I'd say that research designed to help understand the nature of the politics in the academy has the capacity to help us best understand higher education in our modern world. And I think that's a good thing.