Bergesen’s approach also works well when applied to the violence at Middlebury College. The videos of the main shout-down show students chanting, singing, and at times swaying in unison to prevent Charles Murray from speaking.16 It’s a striking demonstration of Durkheim’s “collective effervescence” building up a charge of social electricity that prepares the group for action. Research shows that synchronous movements like singing and swaying make groups more cooperative and make people who participate physically stronger in challenges they undertake right afterward.17 Perhaps the violent attack on Professor Stanger would not have taken place if Murray had been moved out immediately and the students had not had so much time to sway and chant in unison.
We call a campaign a witch hunt when we believe that the targets of the attacks (such as Erika Christakis and Mary Spellman) are innocent, but even if we are right, that does not mean that the people doing the hunting lack any valid reason for their anger and fear. By 2015, most people had seen videos of police officers shooting or choking unarmed black men. It is understandable that many black students were on edge, felt a generalized sense of threat, and became increasingly active in movements to oppose systemic racism, particularly in the criminal justice system. But why did college students direct so much of their passion and effort toward changing their universities and to finding enemies within their own communities? And here’s a related puzzle: Why were the protests strongest and most common at schools known for progressive politics in the most progressive parts of the United States (New England and the West Coast)?18 Are these not the schools that are already the most devoted to enacting progressive and inclusive social policies?
To advance in our inquiry, let’s switch our focus away from students for a moment. We will examine a trend among professors that seems to fit the Durkheimian framework quite well: the use of open letters of denunciation. Professors try to round up hundreds of other professors to condemn a fellow professor or to demand that an academic article be retracted (rather than simply rebutting it). Something has been changing among the faculty, as well as among the students. (We’ll examine these changes in the broader national context of rising political polarization in the next chapter, when we’ll examine the role that provocation from the right from off campus plays in these unusual events on campus.)
A Provocative Idea
On March 29, 2017, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy posted to its website an article titled “In Defense of Transracialism.”19 In the essay, Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, juxtaposed the largely positive public reaction to news of Caitlyn Jenner’s gender transition (from man to woman) with the “ridicule and condemnation” that accompanied the revelation that Rachel Dolezal, a former chapter president of the NAACP, a civil rights organization, was not black but, rather, a white woman who claimed that she “identif[ies] as black.”20 Tuvel, noting that her concerns were not with the particulars of the Dolezal case but “with the arguments for and against transracialism,” argued that while society is hostile to transracialism and more open to transgenderism, the two kinds of identity transformation raise many of the same considerations.
In the article, Tuvel stressed that she is a strong advocate of transgender rights and that she was “not suggesting that race and sex are equivalent.” She had explored similar ideas before without controversy; her Rhodes College web page states that her research “lies at the intersection of feminist philosophy, philosophy of race and animal ethics.” In much of her work, she considers the ways in which the oppression of “animals, women and racially subordinated groups” overlap to “maintain erroneous and harmful conceptions of humanity.”21 This is a scholar who knows her way around contemporary debates, and surely meant no harm to transgender people.
But in today’s culture of safetyism, intent no longer matters; only perceived impact does, and thanks to concept creep, just about anything can be perceived as having a harmful—even violent—impact on vulnerable groups. According to Bergesen, anything that can be construed as an attack on a group can serve as an opportunity for collective punishment and the enhancement of group solidarity.
Within a few weeks of its publication, the article had generated such an uproar that an open letter was published, addressed to an editor of Hypatia and the “broader Hypatia community.”22 The letter demanded that the article be retracted—not rebutted but retracted. The signers were not asking for a chance to respond to Tuvel and correct her alleged mistakes (a common practice in academia); they were demanding that the article vanish from the scholarly record (a very rare occurrence, usually reserved for cases of fraud or plagiarism). They contended that the “continued availability” of the article caused “harm” to women of color and the transgender community. Yet, although the letter’s authors asserted that “many harms” were “committed by [the article’s] publishing,” the alleged “harm” was not described. In fact, by claiming that the letter “is not an exhaustive summary of the many harms caused by this article,” they sidestepped their lack of evidence that the article had caused (or could cause) any harm at all.23
Individual critics were quick to chime in, calling the article “transphobic,” “violent,” and an expression of “all that is wrong with white feminism.” Nora Berenstain, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Tennessee, took to Facebook to expound on the article’s “discursive transmisogynistic violence.” She asserted that Tuvel “enacts violence and perpetuates harm in numerous ways throughout her essay,” because she “deadnames a trans woman” (that is, Tuvel mentioned that Jenner’s former male, or “dead,” name, was Bruce),24 she “uses the term ‘transgenderism,’” she “talks about ‘biological sex,’” and she “uses phrases like ‘male genitalia.’” It is striking how many of the critics’ complaints refer not to Tuvel’s arguments but to her word choices. In fact, one of the arguments for retraction given in the open letter was that Tuvel used “vocabulary and frameworks not recognized, accepted, or adopted by the conventions of the relevant subfields.” As when Dean Spellman used the word “mold” in her email, “petty and insignificant behavioral acts” (to use Bergesen’s phrase) can be considered “crimes against the [group] as a whole.”25
Jesse Singal, a left-leaning social science journalist, read the list of charges in the open letter and then read Tuvel’s original essay. As he put it in an online article for New York magazine, “Each and every one of the falsifiable points [that the open letter] makes is, based on a plain reading of Tuvel’s article, simply false or misleading.” He concluded:
All in all, it’s remarkable how many basic facts this letter gets wrong about Tuvel’s paper. Either the authors simply lied about the article’s contents, or they didn’t read it at all. Every single one of the hundreds of signatories on the open letter now has their name on a document that severely (and arguably maliciously) mischaracterizes the work of one of their colleagues. This is not the sort of thing that usually happens in academia—it’s a really strange, disturbing instance of mass groupthink, perhaps fueled by the dynamics of online shaming and piling-on.26
The reaction to Tuvel’s article fits well into a Durkheimian framework: it is a surprising, “out of nowhere” eruption of “mass groupthink” in which trivial things (such as using the phrase “male genitalia”) are taken as grave attacks on a vulnerable community. These attacks then warrant a collective, solidarity-boosting response: an open letter that recruits hundreds of people to publicly sign their names and collectively point their fingers at the accused witch. Singal even titled his essay “This Is What a Modern-Day Witch Hunt Looks Like.”
The Tuvel affair also shows the fourth criterion of a witch hunt: fear of defending the accused.27 Tuvel’s Ph.D. advisor, Kelly Oliver, wrote an essay defending her former student, in which she lamented the cowardice of so many of her colleagues:
In private messages [to Oliver, and to Tuvel], some people commiserate
d, expressed support, and apologized for what was happening and for not going public with their support. As one academic wrote to me in a private message, “sorry I’m not saying this publicly (I have no interest in battling the mean girls on Facebook) but FWIW [for what it’s worth] it’s totally obvious to me that you haven’t been committing acts of violence against marginalized scholars.”
Oliver noted that some scholars went beyond cowardice, privately supporting Tuvel while publicly attacking her:
In private messages, these people apologized for what she must be going through, while in public they fanned the flames of hatred and bile on social media. The question is, why did so many scholars, especially feminists, express one sentiment behind closed doors and another out in the open? Why were so many others afraid to say anything in public?28
Durkheim and Bergesen give us a direct answer to Oliver’s question.29 This is precisely what people do during a witch hunt.
Retraction Is the New Rebuttal
Other open letters condemning professors and demanding retraction of their work soon followed.30 In August 2017, two law professors, Amy Wax from the University of Pennsylvania and Larry Alexander from the University of San Diego, wrote a short opinion essay in a Philadelphia newspaper titled “Paying the Price for Breakdown of the Country’s Bourgeois Culture.”31 They argued that many of today’s social problems, including unemployment, crime, drug use, and the intergenerational transmission of poverty, are partially caused by the fading away of the “bourgeois cultural script” that used to compel Americans to “get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness.” The authors included one particular line that caused a firestorm: “All cultures are not equal. Or at least they are not equal in preparing people to be productive in an advanced economy.” The line is provocative because it violates a widespread taboo in the academic world: One is not supposed to say that a dominant culture is superior to a nondominant one in any way. But anthropologists generally agree that cultures and subcultures instill different goals, skills, and virtues in their members,32 and it can’t possibly be true that all cultures prepare children equally well for success in all other cultures. If we want to improve outcomes for immigrants and the poor in a free-market, service-oriented capitalist economy such as ours, Wax and Alexander argued, it would be useful to talk about bourgeois culture.
A week later, fifty-four graduate students and alumni of the University of Pennsylvania published a statement that condemned the essay and its authors for exemplifying the “malignant logic of hetero-patriarchal, class-based, white supremacy.” In good Durkheimian fashion, the open letter issued a strong call for solidarity among “all members of the University of Pennsylvania community who claim to fight systemic inequality,” and it included a demand that the president of the university confront the racism of Wax and Alexander and “push for an investigation into Wax’s advocacy for white supremacy.”33 The call for denunciation was taken up by thirty-three of Wax’s colleagues in the law school (nearly half the faculty), who wrote their own open letter of denunciation. They did not do what scholars are supposed to do: use their scholarly abilities to show where Wax and Alexander were wrong. They simply “condemned” and “categorically rejected” Wax’s claims.34
Solidarity or Diversity?
Solidarity is great for a group that needs to work in unison or march into battle. Solidarity engenders trust, teamwork, and mutual aid. But it can also foster groupthink, orthodoxy, and a paralyzing fear of challenging the collective. Solidarity can interfere with a group’s efforts to find the truth, and the search for truth can interfere with a group’s solidarity. The Greek historian Thucydides saw this principle in action over two thousand years ago. Writing about a time of wars and revolutions in the fifth century BCE, he noted that “the ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action.”35
This is why viewpoint diversity is so essential in any group of scholars. Each professor is—like all human beings—a flawed thinker with a strong preference for believing that his or her own ideas are right. Each scholar suffers from the confirmation bias—the tendency to search vigorously for evidence that confirms what one already believes.36 One of the most brilliant features of universities is that, when they are working properly, they are communities of scholars who cancel out one another’s confirmation biases. Even if professors often cannot see the flaws in their own arguments, other professors and students do them the favor of finding such flaws. The community of scholars then judges which ideas survive the debate. We can call this process institutionalized disconfirmation. The institution (the academy as a whole, or a discipline, such as political science) guarantees that every statement offered as a research finding—and certainly every peer-reviewed article—has survived a process of challenge and vetting. That is no guarantee that it is true, but it is a reason to think that the statement is likely to be more reliable than alternative statements made by partisan think tanks, corporate marketers, or your opinionated uncle. It is only because of institutionalized disconfirmation that universities and groups of scholars can claim some authority to be arbiters of factual questions, such as whether certain vaccines caused the rise in autism (they didn’t)37 or whether social programs designed to help poor children close achievement gaps with wealthier kids actually work (some do, some don’t).38
But what would happen to a university, or an academic field, if everyone were on the same team and everyone shared the same confirmation bias? The disconfirmation process would break down. Research shows that reviewers go easy on articles and grant proposals that support their political team, and they are more critical of articles and proposals that contradict their team’s values or beliefs.39 This, to some extent, is what has happened in many academic fields since the 1990s, with enormous ramifications for university culture today.
It is no surprise that, on the whole, professors lean left. So do artists, poets, and people who love to watch foreign movies. One of the strongest personality correlates of left-wing politics is the trait of openness to experience, a trait that describes people who crave new ideas and experiences and who tend to be interested in changing traditional arrangements.40 On the other hand, members of the military, law enforcement personnel, and students who have well-organized dorm rooms tend to lean right. (Seriously. You can guess people’s political leanings at better-than-chance levels just from photographs of their desks.)41 Social conservatives tend to be lower on openness to experience and higher on conscientiousness—they prefer things to be orderly and predictable, they are more likely to show up on time for meetings, and they are more likely to see the value of traditional arrangements.
In a free society, therefore, it will simply never be the case that every occupation is evenly balanced, politically, and it will generally be the case that professors lean left, especially in the humanities and social sciences. This is not a problem as long as there are enough professors who don’t lean left to guarantee institutionalized disconfirmation in any field that addresses politicized topics. A left-to-right ratio of two or three to one should be enough to sustain institutionalized disconfirmation. And that’s about what the ratio was for most of the twentieth century.
Figure 5.1 shows the percentage of professors (across all fields) who self-identified on a survey as being on the left (in the top line), the right (bottom line) or “middle of the road” (middle line). The left-to-right ratio in the early 1990s was around two to one. The few studies we have that go back to the mid-twentieth century generally also show that professors leaned to the left, or voted for Democrats, but not by a very lopsided margin.42 Things began to change rapidly, however, in the late 1990s. That’s when the professors from the Greatest Generation began to retire, to be replaced by members of the Baby Boom generation. By 2011, the ratio had reached five to one. The Greatest Generation professors were p
redominantly white men who had fought in World War II, and then got a boost into higher education from legislation designed to help them in the postwar period. That wave of scholars included many Republicans and many conservatives.
The Politics of Professors
FIGURE 5.1. How professors described their own politics. The left-right ratio has increased rapidly since the mid-1990s. (Source: Higher Education Research Institute.43 Data is from nationally representative surveys of professors in the United States. Graphed by Sam Abrams.)
The Baby Boom professors, in contrast, were more diverse by race and gender but less diverse in their politics. Many of them were influenced by the great wave of social protests in the 1960s; many went into academic careers in the social sciences and education in order to continue to fight for social justice and progressive social causes.
The Coddling of the American Mind Page 12