So, as most of your probably know, I recently made the transition to university. And--again, as most of you probably know--I am a Conservative, in the sense that I tend to prefer the Tories over any other political party in the UK. I usually don't describe myself as a "conservative",but the label is sufficient for my point here.
I've already gotten into a few discussions, one with a girl who was a third-wave feminist and a Labour voter (who, the next day, I heard drunkenly say "All Tories should kill themselves) and a couple of other people who also voted Labour. We all know that students have a tendency to be more left-of-centre, progressive and to have attitudes of social justice. Already I have encountered people calling me a "wanker" or "scum" for voting Conservative, although most of the time it's done in a light-hearted manner and is actually pretty funny. But it's a useful segue into a point I've been wanting to make for a long time.
On college campuses--the one place which should be devoted to intellectual diversity and freedom of speech--we are seeing a worrying trend towards intolerance of these things (and, indeed, among younger people in general). Occurrences such as
this, where speakers are shouted down or somehow silenced on or removed from a campus are becoming increasingly common. In fact, there was a case at my own university two years ago when students effectively
removed Israel's deputy ambassador when he was scheduled to give a talk.
The first example, though, is particularly interesting. The speaker who was shouted down was done so for recently publishing some literature which questioned the whole "rape culture on college campuses" meme--which, by now, is pretty well known to be false. He was, as far as it matters, prevented from speaking for committing heresy; he was shouted down and silenced for questioning the dominant narrative, with no respect from the people upholding that narrative for his point of view. It's rather an insult to whole point of higher education: the one place you should indeed have the freedom to speak and listen, the freedom to have your views challenged, the freedom to feel uncomfortable and the freedom to be offended.
Why do I call these things freedoms? Social psychologists--particularly Jonathan Haidt--have documented how humans are rather "anti-fragile". Facing resistance and obstacles is good for you and it develops you as a person; yet we have calls for things like trigger warnings and safe spaces. Keeping in mind, by the way, that the best way to deal with post-traumatic stress is to
face your triggers and
harden yourself to them. Again, humans are generally anti-fragile in nature. It's also dangerous as it seems to be breeding a generation of students who have no respect for the fact that the world around them will not change because they shout down people they disagree with--often something they mistake for strength, when it is in fact a sign of significant weakness. Ancient philosophers from the stoics to Buddha and even Jesus recognised it makes far more sense to change yourself to deal with the world around you, than to try and change the world extrospectively.
This shouting down of speakers to a more benign way of non-participation in intellectual fora belies a class of people unwilling to have their assumptions and their dogma challenged. It is the kind of anti-intellectualism that has always accompanied intolerant regimes or ways of thinking. It is a situation that has led to the actual
shunning of students. It's not a case of the majority thinking the minority incorrect; it's a case of them believing them to be also evil, malicious or immoral in some form or another. This sort of moralising attitude
kills discourse in the very place it ought to be protected. It's similar to the "Hands Up, Don't Shoot" narrative regarding Michael Brown which was pushed by progressives and social justice activists--and, funnily enough, I discussed this with the aforementioned girl. People who disagreed with the narrative were sometimes labelled
racist, and this continued after the Justice Dept. (and, IIRC, an independent report commissioned by the family) disproved that narrative.
Now, let me be clear, the issue is not that these "progressives" were wrong about Michael Brown. The issue is that they approached the issue in such a way as to stifle discussion and, ironically, genuine progress on that case. Of course, when it comes to college campuses, the fault doesn't lie squarely with the students; if anything, the professors and academics facilitating this behaviour--and indeed those who do nothing to encourage intellectual diversity in homogeneous fields--are primarily to blame.
All students should have their assumptions and pre-conceived ideas challenged: from the conservative to the progressive.
And this is rather an endemic problem in academia. Particularly social psychology and sociology. Indeed
psychology, there has been a worrying trend leftwards with most respondents describing themselves as "liberal" (although, in this post, I am using the term "progressive" synonymously); prior to the 1990s, academic psychology leaned left, whereas today it is overwhelmingly devoid of conservatives, libertarians or even moderates. The current ratio of liberals and Democrats to conservatives and Republicans is around 14:1, being just 4:1 before the '90s. The paper I linked goes on to describe a number of "risk points" that come with this political monoculture, one being the assumption of progressive values in research. Which, indeed, we
do see--
this paper finds that individuals who are high in either right-wing authoritarianism or social dominance orientation tend to make more unethical decisions, yet the things considered unethical are decisions such as not formally taking the side of a female colleague in a sexual harassment complaint while having limited information. Researchers may also follow "progressive-friendly" lines of research while ignoring those with 'uncouth' connotations; for instance, there was starkly little research into stereotypes between the 1930s and 1980s--just assumed by psychologists to be false--until a conservative psychologist in 1978 put it to the test and sparked a litany of literature which indeed confirmed the
opposite to be true. Stereotypes, it so happens, actually have a pretty decent chance of being broadly correct.
Such monoculture in psychology has also led to the
mischaracterisation of opponent conservatives, by calling them more intolerant--or, perhaps, rigid is a better word. Despite the fact we
now know that this cognitive failure arises in both liberals and conservatives pretty much equally. We can also see numerous other examples, such as the prevalence of
confirmation bias which is
worsened in ideological echo chambers.
Of course, you could offer explanations for this which have little to do with the political homogeneity of psychology--and social sciences in general. Maybe conservatives are just less intelligent and thus less likely to get a PhD and find a place in academia? While social conservatism is indeed correlated with lower cognitive ability,
economic conservatism is correlated with
higher cognitive ability, while libertarians have the highest IQ of any group while being severely under-represented. It's also probably not the case that education makes future academics so
overwhelmingly liberal. The biggest factors that seem to influence the lack of conservatives heading into psychology tends to be the existence of disproportionate self-selection, a general
hostile climate and genuine
discrimination.While the issue with the politicisation of psychology has been raised as early as
1994, this is a disease afflicted social science
more broadly. And, personally, I find it scary when this bleeds into campuses; the infection of academia is a cancer worthy of fear all by itself, but when
55pc of colleges have restrictive speech codes in some sense, it becomes
very worrying. Indeed, it is probably true that
hearing other viewpoints is one of the most important process in making us more tolerant people (there's that anti-fragility again), and yet the trend we clearly see is moving away from that. When we have this kind of attitude to opposing ideas, we can't face the evidence against us
even if we ultimately turn out to be correct; take
this example from sociology:
[E]xamples of inconvenient facts abound. Blacks (and Asians) have better mental health than Whites, an effect labeled the Black–White paradox (Keyes 2009). Hispanics have better physical health and lower mortality than Whites, an effect known as the Hispanic paradox (Markides and Eschbach 2005). And Asians have a higher average education level than Whites (Sakamoto et al. 2009), an effect which is as yet unnamed. The use of “paradox” rather than “falsification” for these effects is telling, given that a robust theory should have no paradoxes. In other cases, no clear ranking can be made. Although Asians have the highest median household income, Whites have the highest median net worth (Kochhar, Taylor, and Fry 2011). Black men are perceived as both highly attractive and highly dangerous (Lewis 2011; Sadler et al. 2012). And Blacks have the highest risk of being a victim of a hate crime, but Blacks also commit hate crimes at the highest per capita rate (Chorba 2001; Rubenstein 2003). Meanwhile, Jews and Asians and are almost exclusively victims rather than perpetrators of hate crimes (Chorba 2001; Rubenstein 2003), which seems to put them at bottom of a racial hierarchy, but their education and income put them at the top of the racial hierarchy.
TL;DR: We are fucking goosestepping towards a world of academic echo-chambers, intellectually intolerant students, young people who have no idea how to face the world and a general attitude of the prioritisation of emotional and social justice over fundamental liberties and empirical rigor. Fuck me.
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