Virtue Signaling

by Geoffrey Miller

  Also, these foreign students may have been exposed to a sample of American pop culture that doesn’t represent current campus culture. They may have grown up loving the dialogue in Quentin Tarantino movies, and assume it represents an acceptable conversation style in American seminars. They may have watched a fair amount of American porn as teenagers (Pornhub’s top 20 traffic countries in 2016 included India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, the Philippines, and Argentina), and they might assume that porn reflects, at least in a dark mirror, American mating norms.

  If English was their second language, they have no realistic hope of understanding the ever-changing nuances of American PC-speak, such as the differences between ‘colored people’ and ‘people of color,’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘Asian,’ or ‘homosexual’ and ‘queer.’ And if, God forbid, they try to level up their coolness by using Urban Dictionary to master American Gen-Z dialect, they’ll be in for a world of hurt from campus administrators.

  Foreign grad students face a formidable culture gap when they set foot on an American campus. They usually want to fit in, be cool, be funny, and attract friends and mates – which often requires pushing boundaries. Humor requires mild transgressions of social norms, for example. Asian grad students may want to challenge the American stereotype that they’re all nerdy, humorless, introverted workaholics, which might require being a bit provocative. But they also don’t want to get expelled or disappoint their parents. In calibrating their speech and behavior to our current campus norms, they face complicated risk/benefit tradeoffs, under a high degree of uncertainty about what our norms actually are, and how those norms differ from Tarantino movies, Pornhub scenes, and South Park episodes.

  Yet, at their new university in the U.S., these foreign students face speech codes full of vague euphemisms, but that lack concrete examples of what words, ideas, facts, and views one is actually forbidden to express. There is not even a list of the most common prohibited words such as the ‘racial epithets’ that pepper every episode of South Park, much less a list of prohibited ideologies. No university offers an annotated version of Urban Dictionary explaining which words and phrases are OK to use in classrooms, which are OK to use at parties but not in classrooms, which are OK for some groups to use but not for other groups to use, and which are forbidden to everyone all the time.

  Nonetheless, these foreign students may be required from day one to serve as teaching assistants for an undergrad course on human biology or human sexuality, and to hold office hours for famously sensitive American undergrads. They may be expected to maximize their ‘class participation’ grades in graduate seminars that discuss politics, religion, sexual orientation, and race relations, without having any idea what they’re allowed to say. Far from friends and family, they may crave to develop a social network and find a boyfriend or girlfriend, but they may have no idea how to navigate the hair-trigger sensitivities of campus sexual misconduct policies and Gen-Z dating norms.

  In principle, obeying most campus speech codes simply requires being ‘respectful,’ ‘inoffensive,’ and ‘considerate.’ In principle, following an American speech code is as easy as walking along the yellow brick road of respectfulness through a dark forest of offensiveness. But ‘being inoffensive’ camouflages the expectation that students will have already mastered a vast amount of implicit knowledge about American ideological norms before they ever set foot on campus.

  In practice, obeying campus speech codes requires a deep familiarity with American ideological norms, to understand what happens to be considered ‘offensive’ to U.S. administrators, students, and faculty circa this year. For foreigners, that’s as hard as a burglar doing acrobatics to get through a field of randomly-moving security lasers that protect that coveted prize: a Ph.D., or tenure. Speech codes are setting up foreign students and researchers for failure. For all the lip service given to ‘diversity,’ the speech codes and norms are baffling to the foreigners who embody real cultural diversity – such as the Chinese students who think that Xi Jinping’s authority is superior to American democracy, the Indian students who think arranged marriages are OK, or the Saudi Arabian students who take literally what the Quran says about women.

  For example, consider media exposure. Foreign students get a very sparse and misleading impression of current American college life from the movies and TV they may have seen when growing up abroad. The Hollywood movies that have been most popular abroad have very little content concerning our political and sexual sensitivities – they’re almost all big-budget, effects-driven films in the action, science fiction, and animated genres. Among highest-grossing American movies in overseas revenue, a large proportion recently have been Marvel or DC superhero movies, which avoid any explicit ideological issues concerning race relations, sexual misconduct, or political partisanship. The most popular American TV series abroad tend to be crime dramas, political action thrillers, or fantasy (think CSI, The Blacklist, or Game of Thrones). Other shows popular with foreign young people are cartoons such as The Simpsons or Family Guy.

  For the generation entering university today, the most popular movies and TV abroad include virtually no serious dramas set in American colleges. When students come from China or Saudi Arabia to an American campus, they have to adapt to speech codes and norms that bear little resemblance to those shown in classic college comedy-dramas that they may have seen as teens, such as Animal House (1978), Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Good Will Hunting (1998), Legally Blonde (2001), or The Social Network (2010). Most of these movies dramatize a conflict between playful, irreverent, often offensive students and stuffy, repressed, traditional faculty and administrators. In those movies, the irreverent students always win, partly by pushing the boundaries of free speech and partly by humiliating the sanctimonious censors. Yet in the current American climate, it’s mostly the social justice activist students imposing repressive speech codes and norms on politically centrist, conservative, libertarian, or foreign students and faculty.

  Only if foreign students happen to have watched videos by Jordan Peterson, Christina Hoff Sommers, Jonathan Haidt, Alice Dreger, or other viewpoint diversity advocates are they likely to understand the current situation.

  Moreover, consider the overlap of cultural diversity and neurodiversity: if many foreign students come to study and work in STEM fields, they’re more likely to be on the autism spectrum, stronger on systematizing ideas than empathizing with the ideological sensitivities of others. So, many of them face a triple handicap: they may have aspie brains, developed in foreign cultures with different speech norms, using English as their second language to express possibly taboo ideas.

  But their concerns are neglected, because they don’t tend to get organized, complain, and protest in the way that many U.S. undergrads do. They don’t have the same ‘coddling culture.’ In fact, they may have come from more authoritarian cultures where students show extreme respect for academics. They may not know how to petition administrators to protect their rights and to change policies, and may not even realize this is possible. When American students are loudly protesting in libraries, foreign students may be the ones just trying to study. They may also worry about their immigration status if they make trouble: students or postdocs might worry about losing their F-1 visas, and faculty may worry about losing their J-1 and H-1B visa. Finally, they may feel a risk-averse accountability to their parents and extended family, who may have invested heavily in their education, and who would lose face if they got into any trouble.

  The Challenge of Foreign Student Groups

  How do foreign students react when they come to American campuses and encounter these baffling new forms of political correctness? Many do their best to acculturate and learn the unwritten norms. But many feel alienated by American culture. They often withdraw into student groups centered around their home culture, where they feel more at ease. In grad school, I often went to Bollywood movie nights sponsored by the Stanford India Association, which was full of grad students from India. In class,
these students often seemed wary, cautious, intimidated, and uneasy. But on these evenings, among young people from their own culture, they were joyous, uninhibited, confident, and funny. They could relax, because they knew the cultural rules.

  Most universities have student groups for different countries. My university has fewer foreign students than most, but its list of student clubs still includes a Brazil Club, Chinese Language and Culture Club, Deutsche Klub, Filipino Student Organization, Iranian Student Association, Korean Club, Mexican Student Association, Taiwanese Student Association, and Turkish Student Association. Such student groups offer an oasis of cultural familiarity in the desert of ideological unfamiliarity.

  These student groups raise a problem, though: do our campus speech codes and norms apply to them? If a bunch of Brazilian students throw a party, which codes and norms apply? Can they talk about political, moral, religious, and sexual issues the way that they would at home, or do they have to follow our Respectful Campus Policy in the ways that they would if interacting with Americans, given all of our strange hang-ups and taboos? If they’re flirting, canoodling, and falling in love the way they would in São Paulo or Fortaleza, can they use the verbal courtship norms they’ve soaked up since adolescence, or do they have to follow our norms of ‘non-sexist’ speech and ‘affirmative consent?’

  These foreign student groups occupy a grey area between the home country and American culture, and create a huge problem for campus speech codes. No American campus speech code I’ve ever read has been clear about how it applies to foreign student groups, their meetings, their parties, and their relationships. How much elbow room do they really get to be themselves when they’re among their compatriots?

  I think we must support freedom of association for foreign students to form groups based on their national cultures. But with freedom of association should come freedom of speech and freedom of conscience.

  Foreign grad students should be able to enjoy a respite from American political correctness where they can relax back into their home culture without fear of their speech and behavior being policed by self-righteous American administrators and social justice activists. This means, in practice, that American campus speech codes, based on American notions of what is acceptable versus offensive, cannot be imposed on foreign student groups.

  Here’s the tricky part: if we don’t impose these speech codes on foreign students doing their own thing, why should we impose them on American students doing their own thing? If the Mormon students in the Stanford Latter-Day Saint Student Association (LDSSA) want to have a party where they court one another according to the norms of their home culture in Utah, do they have less right to do so than the Brazilian students? If the young kink enthusiasts of the Harvard College Munch student club want to have a party where the BDSM norms of pre-negotiation and safe words apply, rather than the usual campus policies of affirmative consent, shouldn’t they be able to enact the well-honed rules of their sub-culture rather than conforming to a vanilla administrator’s idea of ‘sexual respect?’

  Examples like this highlight a key problem with speech codes and norms: their one-size-fits-all inflexibility. It’s not just that every foreign student’s home culture is its own culture. It’s that, despite the hegemony of mainstream media, every American sub-culture becomes into its own culture. Every academic department becomes its own culture. Indeed, every university seminar becomes its own culture over the course of each semester. Real cultural diversity – including free speech, viewpoint diversity, and sexual heterogeneity – can’t flourish if every sub-culture on an American campus is subject to the same administrative norms of inoffensiveness.

  Why Should We Care That Speech Codes Discriminate Against Foreign Students and Faculty?

  First, there’s the financial issue. American universities get a lot of revenue from foreign students: total financial contributions were about $30 billion in 2015. The foreign students often pay full tuition for degrees, with little financial aid. If we make them miserable while they’re here by imposing confusing speech codes and terrifying sexual misconduct policies, word will get out. They will take their rupees, euros, renminbi, and pesos elsewhere, and we will lose not only their tuition payments in the short term, but their alumni donations in the long term. Also, many American universities get a lot of grant money from successful foreign faculty. If we make American campuses ideologically hostile work environments for the best, brightest, most fundable scholars from abroad, we handicap our universities’ intellectual cultures and research funding.

  Second, there’s a national PR issue: America is supposed to be the land of freedom. It’s important for America’s global influence that foreign students feel happy and free when they come to our campuses. American universities have a huge influence in training the global elites: the brightest foreign undergrads from the most influential families are likely to become business and political leaders back in their home countries. The brightest foreign grad students will become scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs, shaping the intellectual cultures of the coming global mega-powers: China and India. This is the main rationale for the U.S. Department of State running the Fulbright programs – to promote international good will through the cultural exchange of students and scholars.

  The experiences that foreign grad students have on American campuses will shape their views of our country forever. If they come expecting a culture of freedom and openness, but they encounter a culture of repression, sanctimony, and over-sensitivity, their view of the U.S. will sour. If they come hoping to escape traditionalist cultures of misogyny, arranged marriages, and slut-shaming, but they encounter even weirder forms of sex-negativity such as ‘affirmative consent culture’ that deters them from dating and drives them into asexual worker-bee mode, they’ll be frustrated and bitter.

  If they escaped one form of political conformism, repression, and coercion only to encounter an even more hypocritical form of it, they may see American freedom, democracy, and diversity as fake news.

  Finally, there’s the ethical issue. Foreign students and faculty are people too. Their happiness, security, and freedom matter just as much as that of American students. This is simple application of the impartiality principle from utilitarian moral philosophy. Just because foreign students don’t make as much of a fuss as American social activist students doesn’t mean their lives matter less. They may be suffering in silence, because they were raised not to complain.

  If American universities are willing to accept foreign students and faculty at all, we have a duty to treat them fairly, with the same moral regard accorded to their peers. This includes respecting their basic human rights to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and freedom of courtship. That’s the path towards real cultural diversity on American campuses.

  Further Reading

  If you want to explore virtue signaling in more detail, here are some suggested readings: 4 other books and about 20 papers by me, plus about 100 books by other people.

  They’re listed in standard American Psychological Association (APA) academic format, except that I spell out the authors’ full first names so you can look them up more easily. I’ll also post all of these on my website www.primalpoly.com, with direct links to amazon.com in case you want to check them out.

  Geoffrey Miller’s books

  All four of my books include a fair amount on virtue signaling, from the origins of moral virtues in The Mating Mind , to romantic virtue signaling in Mating Intelligence , to consumerist virtue signaling in Spent , to cultivating and displaying moral virtues in Mate .

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2000). The mating mind: How sexual choice shaped the evolution of human nature. NY: Doubleday. (Also available in Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, German, Hungarian, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portugese, Russian, Turkish, and Vietnamese.)

  Geher, Glenn, & Miller, Geoffrey F. (Eds.). (2008). Mating intelligence: Sex, relationships, and the mind’s reproductive system . Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2009). Spent: Sex, evolution, and consumer behavior. NY: Viking. (Also available in Chinese, Dutch, Korean, Polish, Portugese, and Turkish.)

  Max, Tucker, & Miller, Geoffrey (2015). Mate: Become the man that women want . NY: Little, Brown, & Co. (Published in paperback as What women want .)

  Geoffrey Miller’s papers

  I’ve just listed my 20 or so papers that are most relevant to virtue signaling. These are in chronological order; most of the papers are on my website (www.primalpoly.com).

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (1993). Evolution of the human brain through runaway sexual selection: The mind as a protean courtship device . Ph.D. dissertation, Psychology Department, Stanford University.

  Miller, Geoffrey F., & Todd, Peter M. (1998). Mate choice turns cognitive. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2 , 190-198.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (1999). Sexual selection for cultural displays. In R. Dunbar, C. Knight, & C. Power (Eds.), The evolution of culture (pp. 71-91). Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh U. Press.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2000). Memetic evolution and human culture. Quarterly Review of Biology , 75 , 434-436.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2000). Mental traits as fitness indicators: Expanding evolutionary psychology’s adaptationism. In D. LeCroy & P. Moller (Eds.), Evolutionary perspectives on human reproductive behavior (pp. 62-74). NY: New York Academy of Sciences.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2000). Sexual selection for indicators of intelligence. In G. Bock, J. Goode, & K. Webb (Eds.), The nature of intelligence (pp. 260-275). NY: John Wiley.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2001). Aesthetic fitness: How sexual selection shaped artistic virtuosity as a fitness indicator and aesthetic preferences as mate choice criteria. Bulletin of Psychology and the Arts, 2 , 20-25.

  Miller, Geoffrey F. (2003). Fear of fitness indicators: How to deal with our ideological anxieties about the role of sexual selection in the origins of human culture. In Being human (pp. 65-79). Wellington, NZ: Royal Society of New Zealand.