I’ve been enjoying your podcast, and I’m curious how you (and some other academics I’ve heard or read online) are able to publicly take various “politically incorrect” positions. Is “cancel culture” not as bad in academia as it seems from news reports, or does it vary from place to place perhaps?
Most academics don’t take politically incorrect positions. If you don’t have tenure doing so would be very dangerous. If you do, it could make it much harder to move to a higher ranked school, but it is very difficult to fire tenured professors for speech. One way to move up in academics is to take staff positions as a dean, provost, or college president. Taking politically incorrect positions likely completely forecloses this path.
Thanks for this explanation. I take it that you do have tenure then, because you’re a Professor of Economics? Did you personally have to be more politically correct before you got tenure? If so, is it still possible for someone who is not very left-leaning to hide their politically incorrect beliefs and get tenure these days?
Do you think political correctness / virtue signaling in academia is getting worse at a pretty fast pace, as it seems from news reports? How bad do you think it will get before the trend stops or reverses itself?
I was initially denied tenure but appealed claiming that two members of my department voted against me for political reasons. My college’s five person Grievance Committee unanimously ruled in my favor and I came up for tenure again and that time was granted it. I wrote about it here: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0607/054.html#d70ce6c6e9f1
Yes, in many fields you could hide your politically incorrect beliefs and not be harmed by them so long as you can include a statement in your tenure file of how you will work to increase diversity as defined by leftists.
I think it is getting worse in that people who have openly politically incorrect beliefs are now being considered racist. I don’t see the trend reversing unless the economics of higher education change.
I don’t see the trend reversing unless the economics of higher education change.
How is the economics of higher education causing the trend? Have you written about this anywhere? I’ve been trying to understand the underlying dynamics that’s driving the leftward trend in academia and have not been able to find much online. (The same trend exists in journalism, K-12 education, etc., but that could perhaps all be explained by academia producing graduates who are increasingly left-wing.) It seems like while LessWrong has been trying to “raise the sanity waterline”, the bigger trend in society is increasing bias (towards the political left, especially among elites), which I think we should probably pay more attention to, because it seems likely to affect our x-risk efforts sooner or later. (Arguably it already is.)
As the left have taken over most colleges, I think that only thing that could stop them would be if colleges faced tremendous economic pressure because, say, online education or drastic cuts in government funds threatened the financial position of the colleges and they were forced to become more customer oriented, more oriented to producing scientific gains or to enhancing the future income of their students. Right now, elite colleges especially are in a very comfortable financial position and so face no pressure to take actions their leaders would consider distasteful which would include becoming more open to non-leftist views. I haven’t written on this.
I agree with you on x-risks. I think one of our best paths to avoiding them would be to use genetic engineering to create very smart and moral people, but most of academia hates the possibility that genes could have anything to do with intelligence or morality.
I’ve been trying to understand the underlying dynamics that’s driving the leftward trend in academia and have not been able to find much online.
Since I wrote that, I came across Why Are Professors Liberal? with Neil Gross
(a talk based on his 2013 book) which presents evidence that at least as of 2013, professors were mostly liberal due to self-selection: liberals tended to see academia as a suitable career choice more than conservatives (possibly due to some historically contingent reasons which then became self-reinforcing).
But since that book/video was released, the leftward trend in academia has accelerated, which I still haven’t found a great explanation for, but my guess is that it’s due to a combination of (1) increasing virtue signaling makes academia seem even less suitable for those who aren’t left leaning and (2) more explicit or barely concealed discrimination based on ideology.
My economics department is hiring a macroeconomist this year. A huge number of applicants are submitting statements of teaching and diversity in which they describe how if hired they will promote diversity in their teaching.
I’ve been enjoying your podcast, and I’m curious how you (and some other academics I’ve heard or read online) are able to publicly take various “politically incorrect” positions. Is “cancel culture” not as bad in academia as it seems from news reports, or does it vary from place to place perhaps?
Most academics don’t take politically incorrect positions. If you don’t have tenure doing so would be very dangerous. If you do, it could make it much harder to move to a higher ranked school, but it is very difficult to fire tenured professors for speech. One way to move up in academics is to take staff positions as a dean, provost, or college president. Taking politically incorrect positions likely completely forecloses this path.
Thanks for this explanation. I take it that you do have tenure then, because you’re a Professor of Economics? Did you personally have to be more politically correct before you got tenure? If so, is it still possible for someone who is not very left-leaning to hide their politically incorrect beliefs and get tenure these days?
Do you think political correctness / virtue signaling in academia is getting worse at a pretty fast pace, as it seems from news reports? How bad do you think it will get before the trend stops or reverses itself?
I was initially denied tenure but appealed claiming that two members of my department voted against me for political reasons. My college’s five person Grievance Committee unanimously ruled in my favor and I came up for tenure again and that time was granted it. I wrote about it here: https://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0607/054.html#d70ce6c6e9f1
Yes, in many fields you could hide your politically incorrect beliefs and not be harmed by them so long as you can include a statement in your tenure file of how you will work to increase diversity as defined by leftists.
I think it is getting worse in that people who have openly politically incorrect beliefs are now being considered racist. I don’t see the trend reversing unless the economics of higher education change.
How is the economics of higher education causing the trend? Have you written about this anywhere? I’ve been trying to understand the underlying dynamics that’s driving the leftward trend in academia and have not been able to find much online. (The same trend exists in journalism, K-12 education, etc., but that could perhaps all be explained by academia producing graduates who are increasingly left-wing.) It seems like while LessWrong has been trying to “raise the sanity waterline”, the bigger trend in society is increasing bias (towards the political left, especially among elites), which I think we should probably pay more attention to, because it seems likely to affect our x-risk efforts sooner or later. (Arguably it already is.)
As the left have taken over most colleges, I think that only thing that could stop them would be if colleges faced tremendous economic pressure because, say, online education or drastic cuts in government funds threatened the financial position of the colleges and they were forced to become more customer oriented, more oriented to producing scientific gains or to enhancing the future income of their students. Right now, elite colleges especially are in a very comfortable financial position and so face no pressure to take actions their leaders would consider distasteful which would include becoming more open to non-leftist views. I haven’t written on this.
I agree with you on x-risks. I think one of our best paths to avoiding them would be to use genetic engineering to create very smart and moral people, but most of academia hates the possibility that genes could have anything to do with intelligence or morality.
Since I wrote that, I came across Why Are Professors Liberal? with Neil Gross (a talk based on his 2013 book) which presents evidence that at least as of 2013, professors were mostly liberal due to self-selection: liberals tended to see academia as a suitable career choice more than conservatives (possibly due to some historically contingent reasons which then became self-reinforcing).
But since that book/video was released, the leftward trend in academia has accelerated, which I still haven’t found a great explanation for, but my guess is that it’s due to a combination of (1) increasing virtue signaling makes academia seem even less suitable for those who aren’t left leaning and (2) more explicit or barely concealed discrimination based on ideology.
My economics department is hiring a macroeconomist this year. A huge number of applicants are submitting statements of teaching and diversity in which they describe how if hired they will promote diversity in their teaching.