Fascinating post. It's curious to see the collapse of trust in the institution of higher education treated (in part) as something of a tactical problem, where "education is caught in the middle of this [partisan] war." I very much look forward to Part Two, which will consider the "various reform programs" aimed at the partisanship of the academy itself.
The treatment is curious because it implies that the threat to the legitimacy of modern American higher education (and primary and secondary education for that matter) lacks a basis in the reality of the state of education today. I certainly concede that "the manner [in which] [t]hese fields are being presented to non-progressives...is triggering social identity threat mechanisms" but I'm not clear what that has to do with the accuracy of the representation? When the Klan marches in Skokie it certainly triggers "social identity threat" amongst the Jewish population there, but that seems rather beside the point. Is there some way to talk about the Klan marching in Skokie that doesn't "trigger social identity threat"? Or the Iranian mullahs executing women who remove their hijab? Or Alex Jones lying about gun control advocates? Or right-to-life activists demonstrating outside of abortion clinics?
The pertinent thing about these examples - or any other, and you can see that it would be trivial to come up with dozens more - is simply sidestepped by addressing their effect on "social identity." The important issues are:
(1) Are the representations factual?
(2) Are the inferences drawn from the representations valid?
Very much to the Dr. Bork's credit, he writes here as an honest broker with respect to (1). Also, I'm impressed that he appears to be genuinely committed to as objectively truthful an answer to the second as is possible. On the second item, however, we're on much more subjective ground, and his frustration shows with respect to ideologically driven attitudes ("Partisan Motivated Reasoning") on the right, perhaps especially as it pertains to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
I'm not an academic, I haven't read Dr. Bork's dissertation, and it's been decades since I've been a university student, but I'm going to walk out on a limb here by responding to what strikes me as the not-quite-but-almost-explicit claim in this essay, especially in Section 5. Dr. Bork sounds like he is claiming that conservatives are engaged in delusional thinking when they believe that the universities are abandoning their traditional roles as defenders of free speech, open inquiry and the pursuit of objective truth in the social sciences, and falsifiable claims in the natural sciences.
I really do appreciate the commitment here. It's an intellectual abdication of responsibility to grasp only shallowly the manner in which the world occurs to people with whom you do not agree. That takes real work, and of course a person risks changing his mind in the process because he will have to allow himself to consider the actual strength of views written off earlier as venal, ill-informed, self-serving or lazy.
Universities today may or may not be transforming in a deep way. To find out which it is we will have to look deeply into what - if anything - is actually happening in them. It is not enough to notice that a partisan industry exists to take changes or rumors of changes and turn them into marketable conspiracies. We will need to dig deeper than that. As I said above, I look forward to Part Two.
I wouldn't say that conservatives are delusional in believing that, "the universities are abandoning their traditional roles as defenders of free speech, open inquiry and the pursuit of objective truth in the social sciences, and falsifiable claims in the natural sciences."
Delusional would imply that there's nothing to these claims and that these problems only exist in their imaginations, and that's not exactly correct. What I do think is going on is that there is some truth to these claims, but how much is open to debate, and that people on the Right are motivated to see the problem as worse than it probably is, and people on the Left are likewise motivated to downplay these problems.
It's negativity bias in response to provocation on the Right, and in-group bias on the Left. Looking for the truth with an objective, falsifiable definition with a large enough data set to be representative of the whole is a daunting empirical challenge, but we can see this perception in the data we have on students, faculty, administrators, partisan legislators, and the general public.
I have Part Two in a rough draft form, based partly on a treatment effect experiment I did for the dissertation and some pedagogical practices I use in my classes. I'd love to hear your feedback on that when it's ready to be released.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to make such a thoughtful comment. It is very much appreciated!
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I absolutely appreciate the serious constraints we all operate under when it comes to weighing the extent, depth, range, salience, consistency, mutability and everything else which go into assessing evolving cultural changes like the ones you're writing about. It's amazing in a sense, given just how complex one human being is, that we can speak with anything even approaching accuracy or coherence about exponentially more complex systems of people.
Having said that, and also recognizing that the data is thin, my sense of things is pretty consistent with what you wrote above regarding the propensity of each side to amplify or dampen the "signal" based on its own motivation. A novel element to those amplification/damping mechanisms, which almost certainly have deep biological roots, is that social media and other channels of information delivery seem to me to be acting now like accelerants. They are able to sort people themselves into information bubbles by establishing new connections between people with aligned conceptual biases. They are also able to select/sort/filter data and narratives in ways that expose the most inflammatory information or suppress the most cognitively challenging. We all say that the plural of anecdote isn't data but our brains weren't built to really believe that. It's a challenge.
Somewhere recently I read something like - making a hash of it here - "the truth is boring." I knew what the writer intended: he meant that the actual world is not a morality play, with villains arrayed against heroes (so exciting!) so we have to resist our inclination to twist the data we have into a story that excites us. We have to live with the diffuse and ambiguous actual state of things, and we don't like that. We want an answer! I see it, including that instinct in myself, but I've also seen something genuinely exciting appear after peeling back the mythical narratives that glom onto things so automatically. Somewhere down in there the actual world is unfolding in beautiful and intricate ways. Whatever historical forces brought us the massive powers and benefits of science and free inquiry didn't just dissolve. Whatever moral drive compels people to protect the disenfranchised or powerless didn't simply drop from the sky ten years ago. Our culture is working through something. We don't know where it's going. We don't know yet what it will diminish and what it will enhance, and some of that won't even be evident for generations to come. But something's happening!
I haven't read even close to everything on your substack, but I have appreciated what I have read, especially the rigor with which you approach your material, the range of your interests, and what I can only call the integrity of your commitment to the truth. That last thing sounds so grandiose but how else is one to describe it? Anyway it's an honor to be offered a pre-read of your Part Two in this series. I'd be happy to comment if it's helpful and I'm not getting back to you too late.
Part II is not scheduled to be published for a while and it's still being edited, so I'd love to get your feedback on it.
I'm not sure if you can send DMs here on Substack or not, so I followed you on Twitter, and you can DM me there for my email address or you can send it here if you can figure out how.
When someone calls whoever a progressive they are saying that person is an elitist. When whoever calls themself a progressive they're saying I'm an elitist.
P.S. I just discovered that Dr. Bork's dissertation is online! Very cool. Here's the link:
https://mountainscholar.org/bitstream/handle/10217/235312/Bork_colostate_0053A_17106.pdf
Fascinating post. It's curious to see the collapse of trust in the institution of higher education treated (in part) as something of a tactical problem, where "education is caught in the middle of this [partisan] war." I very much look forward to Part Two, which will consider the "various reform programs" aimed at the partisanship of the academy itself.
The treatment is curious because it implies that the threat to the legitimacy of modern American higher education (and primary and secondary education for that matter) lacks a basis in the reality of the state of education today. I certainly concede that "the manner [in which] [t]hese fields are being presented to non-progressives...is triggering social identity threat mechanisms" but I'm not clear what that has to do with the accuracy of the representation? When the Klan marches in Skokie it certainly triggers "social identity threat" amongst the Jewish population there, but that seems rather beside the point. Is there some way to talk about the Klan marching in Skokie that doesn't "trigger social identity threat"? Or the Iranian mullahs executing women who remove their hijab? Or Alex Jones lying about gun control advocates? Or right-to-life activists demonstrating outside of abortion clinics?
The pertinent thing about these examples - or any other, and you can see that it would be trivial to come up with dozens more - is simply sidestepped by addressing their effect on "social identity." The important issues are:
(1) Are the representations factual?
(2) Are the inferences drawn from the representations valid?
Very much to the Dr. Bork's credit, he writes here as an honest broker with respect to (1). Also, I'm impressed that he appears to be genuinely committed to as objectively truthful an answer to the second as is possible. On the second item, however, we're on much more subjective ground, and his frustration shows with respect to ideologically driven attitudes ("Partisan Motivated Reasoning") on the right, perhaps especially as it pertains to Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).
I'm not an academic, I haven't read Dr. Bork's dissertation, and it's been decades since I've been a university student, but I'm going to walk out on a limb here by responding to what strikes me as the not-quite-but-almost-explicit claim in this essay, especially in Section 5. Dr. Bork sounds like he is claiming that conservatives are engaged in delusional thinking when they believe that the universities are abandoning their traditional roles as defenders of free speech, open inquiry and the pursuit of objective truth in the social sciences, and falsifiable claims in the natural sciences.
I really do appreciate the commitment here. It's an intellectual abdication of responsibility to grasp only shallowly the manner in which the world occurs to people with whom you do not agree. That takes real work, and of course a person risks changing his mind in the process because he will have to allow himself to consider the actual strength of views written off earlier as venal, ill-informed, self-serving or lazy.
Universities today may or may not be transforming in a deep way. To find out which it is we will have to look deeply into what - if anything - is actually happening in them. It is not enough to notice that a partisan industry exists to take changes or rumors of changes and turn them into marketable conspiracies. We will need to dig deeper than that. As I said above, I look forward to Part Two.
What a thoughtful comment. Thank you so much!
I wouldn't say that conservatives are delusional in believing that, "the universities are abandoning their traditional roles as defenders of free speech, open inquiry and the pursuit of objective truth in the social sciences, and falsifiable claims in the natural sciences."
Delusional would imply that there's nothing to these claims and that these problems only exist in their imaginations, and that's not exactly correct. What I do think is going on is that there is some truth to these claims, but how much is open to debate, and that people on the Right are motivated to see the problem as worse than it probably is, and people on the Left are likewise motivated to downplay these problems.
It's negativity bias in response to provocation on the Right, and in-group bias on the Left. Looking for the truth with an objective, falsifiable definition with a large enough data set to be representative of the whole is a daunting empirical challenge, but we can see this perception in the data we have on students, faculty, administrators, partisan legislators, and the general public.
I have Part Two in a rough draft form, based partly on a treatment effect experiment I did for the dissertation and some pedagogical practices I use in my classes. I'd love to hear your feedback on that when it's ready to be released.
Again, thank you so much for taking the time to make such a thoughtful comment. It is very much appreciated!
-Dr. Bork
Thank you for taking the time to reply. I absolutely appreciate the serious constraints we all operate under when it comes to weighing the extent, depth, range, salience, consistency, mutability and everything else which go into assessing evolving cultural changes like the ones you're writing about. It's amazing in a sense, given just how complex one human being is, that we can speak with anything even approaching accuracy or coherence about exponentially more complex systems of people.
Having said that, and also recognizing that the data is thin, my sense of things is pretty consistent with what you wrote above regarding the propensity of each side to amplify or dampen the "signal" based on its own motivation. A novel element to those amplification/damping mechanisms, which almost certainly have deep biological roots, is that social media and other channels of information delivery seem to me to be acting now like accelerants. They are able to sort people themselves into information bubbles by establishing new connections between people with aligned conceptual biases. They are also able to select/sort/filter data and narratives in ways that expose the most inflammatory information or suppress the most cognitively challenging. We all say that the plural of anecdote isn't data but our brains weren't built to really believe that. It's a challenge.
Somewhere recently I read something like - making a hash of it here - "the truth is boring." I knew what the writer intended: he meant that the actual world is not a morality play, with villains arrayed against heroes (so exciting!) so we have to resist our inclination to twist the data we have into a story that excites us. We have to live with the diffuse and ambiguous actual state of things, and we don't like that. We want an answer! I see it, including that instinct in myself, but I've also seen something genuinely exciting appear after peeling back the mythical narratives that glom onto things so automatically. Somewhere down in there the actual world is unfolding in beautiful and intricate ways. Whatever historical forces brought us the massive powers and benefits of science and free inquiry didn't just dissolve. Whatever moral drive compels people to protect the disenfranchised or powerless didn't simply drop from the sky ten years ago. Our culture is working through something. We don't know where it's going. We don't know yet what it will diminish and what it will enhance, and some of that won't even be evident for generations to come. But something's happening!
I haven't read even close to everything on your substack, but I have appreciated what I have read, especially the rigor with which you approach your material, the range of your interests, and what I can only call the integrity of your commitment to the truth. That last thing sounds so grandiose but how else is one to describe it? Anyway it's an honor to be offered a pre-read of your Part Two in this series. I'd be happy to comment if it's helpful and I'm not getting back to you too late.
That's extremely kind of you to say. :)
Part II is not scheduled to be published for a while and it's still being edited, so I'd love to get your feedback on it.
I'm not sure if you can send DMs here on Substack or not, so I followed you on Twitter, and you can DM me there for my email address or you can send it here if you can figure out how.
When someone calls whoever a progressive they are saying that person is an elitist. When whoever calls themself a progressive they're saying I'm an elitist.
There is a past version of me that called himself a progressive. I don't think I meant to say that I was an elitist... :shrugs: