119 | Musa al-Gharbi on the Value of Intellectual Diversity

In the service of seeking truth, there would seem to be value in intellectual diversity, both in keeping ourselves honest and in the possibility of new ideas coming from unexpected quarters. That’s true in the natural sciences, but even more so in the humanities and social sciences, where the right/wrong distinction is sometimes less clear. But academia isn’t always diverse; as an empirical fact, there are a lot more liberals on university faculties than there are conservatives. I talk with Musa al-Gharbi about why this is true — self-selection? discrimination? — the extent to which it’s a real problem, and how we should better think about the value of diverse viewpoints.

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Musa al-Gharbi received Masters degrees in philosophy from the University of Arizona and in sociology from Columbia University. He is currently a Paul F. Lazarsfeld Fellow in Sociology at Columbia, and until recently served as the Communications Director for Heterodox Academy. His essays have appeared in outlets such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Atlantic Magazine, Foreign Affairs, Voice of America, and Al-Jazeera.

• Web site
• Columbia web page
• Essays
• Panel discussion on Populism and Tribalism in American Life
• Heterodox Academy
• Twitter

[accordion clicktoclose=”true”][accordion-item tag=”p” state=closed title=”Click to Show Episode Transcript”]Click above to close. 0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll. And if you’re like me, nothing makes you happier than talking to people you disagree with. Most of us, I think, go out of our way to surround ourselves with people with utterly different perspectives, it’s so boring, so tiresome to talk to people who think you’re right. What we would like is to always be talking to people who have completely wrong ideas from our point of view. Well, anyway, that’s what we tell ourselves sometimes; most of us would actually say if you asked, yes, of course, I love having a diverse selection of opinions exposing themselves to me all the time, but in fact, in practice… Okay, sarcasm aside, many of us find it more comfortable, find it more easy to be surrounded by people we kind of agree with, or at least when we disagree, it’s a relatively mild ways.

0:00:52 SC: And the Academy of colleges and universities is no different from that. And the Academy for various reasons has leaned toward the liberal side of the spectrum for a very long time, and I think it’s true, I think that the data back up the idea that it’s becoming more liberal over time, so we can ask why this is. We can ask whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, and that’s what we’re going to do today in our discussion, I’m going to talk to Musa Al-Gharbi who is a sociologist, a member of Heterodox Academy for a long time, and someone who’s really I think done a very good job of sort of putting people’s feet to the fire in the public sphere and being honest about their commitment to intellectual diversity.

0:01:36 SC: This is probably a good place for me to tell a story that Musa actually told while we were recording, but due to technical glitches, the recording didn’t come through, so I’m going to try to tell it, not quite as well as he did, but it helps illuminate his perspective where he’s coming from. When he was a graduate student at the University of Arizona, he was a teacher there, an instructor there, he wrote an article for a left-wing publication that was critical of the US military. It pointed out that the military’s activities in the Middle East have worked to destabilize things, that the military had conducted torture and mistreated prisoners and so forth, various claims that you may or may not agree with, or you may not like the framing of them, but they’re certainly within the realm of acceptable opinions that you should be able to have about these things.

0:02:24 SC: But because his name sounds kind of Arabic and because he’s Muslim, and he made critical remarks about the US military, this was picked up by Fox News. And so Fox News started a little campaign, they criticized him, this caught on in other right-wing outlets, let’s say that, and he got a lot of death threats and things like that, the University of Arizona sort of disowned him and said, it wasn’t us, please don’t take away our funding, that kind of thing, and interestingly, what Musa’s response to this was, was to say, you know what I should do is write for more right-wing outlets. You know, if he’s just talking to people who are already ready to hear the message that he has, then he’s not doing as much good as if he reaches a different kind of audience.

0:03:10 SC: And so he has done that writing for National Review and elsewhere, and of course, being active in Heterodox Academy, and his claim is that this has helped him be a better scholar and thinker, because you have to really think about what you’re saying when you think that the audience you’re saying it to might start out being skeptical. So I don’t think we’re going to call with any answers here. I don’t agree with Musa on everything, he doesn’t agree with me on everything… There you go, right? But the point is, I’m not giving this podcast as a solution to, the solution to these problems, I think it’s a conversation we should be having. After all, as I mention in the podcast, when it comes to hiring new people for your department, it kind of makes sense you’re more likely to hire people you think have correct ideas than incorrect ideas, right?

0:04:00 SC: We all know that astronomy departments don’t want to hire astrologers, we all know that physics departments don’t want to hire flat-earthers or anything like that, and you can say, well, those are facts, they’re not values, but I think you can make the case we don’t want political science departments to hire objectively pro-fascist or pro-Nazi point of views, we don’t want child development departments to hire pedophiles or pro-pedophile advocates. There are some ideas we don’t want to engage with, so why is it the case that a large majority of academics turn out to be liberals or leftists? Is it because people who are conservatives select themselves out, or is it because conservatives are discriminated against? And you’ll be not at all surprised, I think, to learn that it’s both, like many of these things actually are.

0:04:47 SC: So I’m on the left side of things myself, as you may have gathered over the course of many podcasts, but I actually do want to think that it’s better to be surrounded by a diverse set of ideas, but ideas that sort of… Even I don’t agree with them, I think they have something to offer, and I think this is actually hopefully reflected in the selection of podcast guests that I have. I am very interested in talking to people I do disagree with, but only those who I think have something to offer, and it’s an interesting and very difficult distinction to try to make, so I’m not being… I don’t have a feeling of superiority here with any of my academic colleagues, I recognize how hard it is to truly walk the walk when it comes to intellectual diversity, but I think it’s an important thing to try to do and to try to understand what its limits as well as what its benefits really are, so that’s what we’re going to try to do. Let’s go.

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0:05:58 SC: Musa Al-Gharbi, welcome to The Mindscape Podcast.

0:06:00 Musa Al-Gharbi: Hey, it’s good to be here, thank you for having me.

0:06:02 SC: I think it’s going to be a fun conversation. I have planned it out even less than I usually plan out my podcast conversations, because there’s a lot of issues that are kind of tied into each other in different ways, where it’s hard to extract a narrative from the beginning to the end, but I hope we can talk about a bunch of them. And there are also fraught issues, these are issues that are intellectually important, but also politically and emotionally fraught. So that’s what I really liked about a lot of the things that I read on your website, a lot of your essays, is that you’re clearly trying to be fair and analytical and rigorous about these fraught issues. So maybe the best way to dive in is through the first essay that I read which introduced me to your work, which was about the Heterodox Academy where you’ve worked for a while and have stepped down from. So maybe you could set the stage a little bit by telling us about Heterodox Academy, and especially in the article I read, it was about some of the more recent challenges that it’s been facing.

0:07:02 MA: Sure. So the objective of Heterodox Academy is to promote constructive disagreement and open inquiry and viewpoint diversity in institutions of higher learning, and by viewpoint diversity, we take a more holistic approach, which includes diversity along the sort of, I guess the more standard demographic dimensions that most people in academia already care about more or less, for instance, race, gender, socioeconomic status, geography, which is a lot of… It’s not controversial, but it’s sort of under-emphasized, but then also including sort of ideological diversity, and we focus a lot on the… By that we mean mostly religious and political diversity, although that’s not the full extent of ideological diversity.

0:07:54 MA: Yeah, so the organization was founded to promote those things and basically, it’s been an epic journey for the organization over the time that I was involved with it. So we were formed in early 2015, and at that time, most people, including the founders of Heterodox Academy, were assuming that Hillary Clinton was going to win the presidency, and so we were engaging in this conversation from a standpoint of assuming that those of us on the left were going to be… Were coming from a position of, I guess, strength and could afford to, and should be more generous, generous in victory or whatever, however you want to frame that.

0:08:41 MA: But then the election didn’t go the way that a lot of people were expecting, and so the message… And so trying to engage with others on the left about why this was important and about why they should care about it, in the age of Trump, at a time when they’re very concerned about… When they’re seeing horrible things happening all the time and they’re, people are panicked and uncertain and freaking out about the future and where he’s… The President is saying repugnant things, and they’re assuming that his supporters must also be of a similar mind, or else why would they have voted for him, etcetera, etcetera. So trying to make the case for why… For why these things are important in the climate we found ourselves in shortly after we were formed was a very different sort of landscape to navigate than the one we had initially been, the one we had initially been expecting to enter.

0:09:36 MA: And then after the election, it got worse. There are these major campaigns to try to basically troll students who are, especially students who were shaken up by the election and the way it went, and so higher ed became issues about… And so, oftentimes, these people who were trying to troll these students got the reactions they were looking for… There were these big altercations, blow-ups on campuses nationwide.

0:10:03 SC: So by the trolls, you mean people inviting especially provocative speakers to campus hoping to get a rise and a cancellation so they could act cancelled and like the victims, is that what you mean?

0:10:17 MA: Absolutely. So sometimes people are invited to campus and they have something they… Because they have something substantive to contribute to the conversation, and the people want to hear them for that reason, and even if they’re controversial, that always should be respected, right, they should have the right to hear from the people that they’re trying to engage with or learn from, even if they are people that we disagree with. But in some cases, in many of these cases, people, we’re inviting people like Milo Yiannopoulos, who doesn’t have anything particular to say, his whole shtick was literally just trying to provoke people, and he would write essays about this.

0:10:57 MA: Like he had one in Breitbart that was something like, how you can beat me, but spoiler, you won’t, basically he was saying something like, I’m going to come to your area, I’m going to try to trigger you, I’m going to get the reaction I’m looking for, because even though you know what I’m trying to do, you won’t be able to resist giving me the reaction I’m looking for and… Etcetera. So there are these people, there became this whole kind of dynamic where a lot of groups would be inviting speakers to campus basically just to troll other people, to get a reaction, and then when they got the reaction they were looking for, it made them seem like their opponents were reactionaries, and again, they were kind of being reactionary, they didn’t have to give the people… They have to give the reaction that these people are trying to solicit, but it’s also at the same time as we recognize that it’s also important to recognize that the people that we were engaging with weren’t necessarily engaging in good [0:11:55] ____.

0:11:56 SC: Yeah, everyone is dragged down a little bit by this.

0:12:00 MA: Yeah, and so this was the environment and sort of in which Heterodox Academy was trying to find its footing, so there were these major blow-ups at campuses nationwide, there was a significant uptick in fire, in professors being fired for political speech on the left and the right, on the right mostly led by Fox News-oriented campaigns, which I have some personal experience with. And then on the left, a lot of times it was sort of student-led campaigns to get someone fired for saying something they didn’t like or otherwise [0:12:35] ____, and it escalated even to the point of physical clashes in some cases, culminating, I would say, probably with the death of Heather Heyer at the University of Virginia.

0:12:47 MA: And so we recognize that, I guess our initial approach to the problem, which was like here, let’s make some arguments and present some data about why this is important, that wasn’t going to cut it for the kind of problem, the kind of situation that we were facing post-2016. So we’ve tried to be a lot more systematic in how we thought about the problems and tried to address them, we started developing different tools and resources, we’ve developed a much more robust organizational structure to help move projects along, a different membership structure, to fold more people into the project, and pull their ideas and information and resources and stuff and disseminate them.

0:13:39 MA: And so now, Heterodox Academy is… We have, I guess they have about 4,500 members who are primarily faculty, but also grad students and administrators from all around the country. I stepped down in January of 2020, and so I haven’t been super involved with a lot of the sort of day-to-day operational stuff there. But yeah, at the time I left, we were a very different organization from the one we started with, we had a totally different approach to talking about and engaging on this problem and yeah, it was just a pretty wild journey.

0:14:15 SC: It’s interesting because it’s sort of the flip side of… Maybe not the flip side, but a different version of what Will Wilkinson told me about. I had him on the podcast, and he works for a libertarian think tank, the Niskanen Center, and they had plans for what happened when Hillary Clinton would get elected, namely they would work closely with people in Congress to sort of nudge everyone in a more libertarian direction and reach across the aisle and so forth. And all of those plans went very much out the window when the actual election results came in, but there’s sort of how we respond to the moment, and then there’s the bigger picture, so I’m sure that there’s plenty of listeners who have heard of the issue of intellectual diversity in the Academy, but maybe don’t know some of numbers.

0:15:00 SC: So the background fact that you’re responding to, and we can talk about what the right response is, but there is a fact, namely that professors in the Academy are, on average, much more liberal than people in the country, and then… Is that good? Or what can we do about it? Tell us about the founding impulse for having something like Heterodox Academy.

0:15:22 MA: Yeah, well, I’ll say at the outset, actually, one ironic thing, I guess the one ironic thing about our whole… About our whole positioning in the lead-up to the election is that we were assuming everyone, I guess, the leadership of Heterodox Academy was assuming, as were most people, that Hillary Clinton was going to win, but part of the reason people have that over-confidence that Hillary Clinton was going to win, ironically, it was because there was a certain kind of group think that had set in along the expert class. It’s the very kind of problem…

0:15:51 SC: There you go.

0:15:52 MA: That Heterodox Academy was supposed to be responding to. I was one of the people who had predicted the election would go the other way, consistently, starting in March 2016, but my view was not the predominant view in the organization or in general. And so basically the Academy skews about… Most people in the general population aren’t hardcore progressive or conservatives, and that’s true in the Academy too, there’s a lot of people who are moderate, but people who are highly educated, and especially people who are highly educated tend to be more partisan than the general population, so there… Among those who are in academia, you’re less likely to be kind of in that middle-centrist kind of position, you’re someone who’s more likely to be decisive, more decisively on the left or right, and among those who work in higher ed, the ratio is something like 10:1 left to right in social research fields, and about 5:1 left to right in the Academy overall, in terms of political diversity.

0:17:12 MA: And that matters. That matters for a number of reasons, I’ll say, so some examples of how it matters. It matters in terms of how questions are sort of framed and understood, so for instance, is inequality a problem? In what sense is it a problem or is it a phenomenon that should be sort of understood on its own terms? The predominant approach is to start by assuming inequality is a problem that must be rectified and it’s a problem that is described as originating in very particular ways. For instance, it’s pretty much exclusively the actions of people in the dominant class, whatever dimension of inequality you’re looking at, socioeconomic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, whatever dimension you’re looking at, it’s people in the dominant class, so whites, men, rich people, heterosexuals, whatever, who are responsible for inequality and its rectification, and there’s sort of an asymmetrical way in which these problems are discussed.

0:18:13 MA: And there’s a value to that, but at the same time, there’s a lot that’s sort of… It’s a highly… In virtue being a highly constrained sort of conceptual field, there are a number of phenomenon and dimensions of these problems which go under-explored or not explored at all, and that can often undermine our ability to actually understand and address the problems that we’re trying solve, so that’s… Yeah. And it’s not just… In addition to the sort of, I guess, epistemological problems related to the lack of viewpoint diversity in higher ed, there are also more pragmatic problems about the reach of our research and the impact of our research and the viability of our research. So for instance, most people in the country are religious, but social researchers tend to be pretty not religious and kind of uncomfortable talking about religion or talking about things in religious ways, and so this undermines… In a world where people were more comfortable talking and engaging with these different kind of metaphysical and moral frameworks, we would be more effective at activism, we would be more effective at making the case to policymakers, in some cases, we would be more effective at convincing ordinary people about why what we do matters and should be supported.

0:19:32 MA: And to the extent that people don’t… That people in the general population don’t feel like their views or their values, or people like them in general are represented in institutions of higher learning, they don’t necessarily feel like they have a stake in those institutions and, in fact, often support them being cut, monitored, surveilled, interfered with, because they assume that it’s other people who are sort of… That’s it’s some class of people who are not like them using these institutions to attack or ignore or override the will of people like them, etcetera. So in addition to the epistemological consequences, I guess the short is a lot of academics have a difficult time engaging with the public and policymakers about our work as a result of the same shortcomings.

0:20:25 SC: My reaction is that there’s so many things to unpack here, and it’s fascinating and difficult to get it all right. I think the most important thing I want to talk about is why, if and why, and when and under what circumstances, intellectual diversity is important, but let me not ask that right away, because you’ve already given some basic answers and we’ll dig into it deeper. But there’s some things I know are going to instantly be brought up in people’s minds like, okay, if there’s a 5:1 ratio of liberals to conservatives in academia, why is that? And number two, let’s just stick with number one there for a second, what are the best explanations, is it because liberals are smarter and better professors, or is it because conservatives are discriminated against by narrow-minded liberals, or is it because conservatives self select out and they join industries or think tanks or… And how do we even know what the answer is?

0:21:19 MA: Yeah, it’s a complicated phenomenon. And the short answer is that it seems to be a combination of… I would say it’s primarily a combination of discrimination and self-selection, and those two things are related to each other, so for instance… And the reason… And the reason we know that it’s not that conservatives are just intrinsically bad scholars or are not interested in the Academy or these kinds of narratives is a few things. One, that until the mid-90s or so, the ratio of liberals to conservatives in the Academy was much different. So Sam Abrams, a political scientist at Sarah Lawrence College, has some good data on this.

0:22:07 MA: You really saw this shift happen in the professoriate around the mid-90s, and it’s a shift that corresponds to changes in the political make-up of the geographical areas of the country where universities tend to be located as well, interestingly enough. I think… So I think part of the shift is responding to broader socio-cultural trends in higher ed. One thing that happened around this time, actually a little bit prior, but kind of around this time, is that there emerged, is that think tanks became more of a thing. And so you saw the emergence of Heritage… Brookings had existed before that. But Heritage, Cato, other institutions like this. So for libertarians or conservatives who felt ill at ease in the academy, because even though the ratios were much closer than they are today, the Academy has been a consistently kind of a left-skewed institution for as long as…

0:23:12 MA: There’s research on this going back to… Going back decades. It’s had a pretty consistent left skew, but it hasn’t been… But it wasn’t like it is today. So what you saw, I would say around the mid-90s, as you saw the emergence of these sort of alternative academic centers where people could do research and they could… And pursue the kinds of questions they wanted to pursue using the methods they wanted to pursue without worrying about their ideas being spiked, for instance, in peer review or institutional review boards and things like this. We do know that there is a number of biases in things like peer review, institutional review boards, hiring and promotion committees. We know this from empirical research, it’s not just along the political dimension, it’s actually along a lot of dimensions, so along race, for instance, along gender lines, along the lines of sexuality in many cases, but the political and religious dimension is one dimension in which this kind of discrimination occurs.

0:24:20 MA: And to the extent that… And then there becomes this kind of self-reinforcing dynamic where a lot of people go into the Academy thinking that an academic career is out of their reach because the Academy is skewed and the skew is increasing, and there are these potential concerns about discrimination and things like that, so they don’t even try necessarily to even become a professor, they instead plan from the outset to move on to a think tank afterwards, etcetera, right, and so you see this kind of self-selection effect that is responding to perceived discrimination, and so it’s kind of a weird, gnarly feedback loop that we’re in right now.

0:25:03 MA: And so this is the point… One of the things that I talked about in a couple of my essays is that, so the goal of an organization like Heterodox Academy isn’t to have the Academy have institutions of higher learning perfectly mirror the ideological base rates in the general population, or… The goal is for it to create conditions under which regardless of what one’s ideological sensibilities are, your work is going to be, that you’re not going to be subject to this kind of discrimination and that there’s not this kind of capture over certain institutions, and especially certain sort of sub-fields of knowledge. One interesting thing that you see, I’ll just note also about the conservatives that are in the Academy today, is that for the ones that didn’t exit the Academy, most of them, increasingly, they try to work on topics that are non-controversial, that don’t dive into political things, and they kind of try to stay on the DL of what their political leanings are…

0:26:11 SC: Don’t step on anyone’s toes.

0:26:12 MA: Yeah, and there’s a few reasons for this. Again, part of it is that they’re worried about about having their work spiked in things like peer review or whatever, but then part of it too is like they don’t want to end up being that person who they walk into the room and everyone rolls their eyes or if they have something to say, right, so there’s kind of a social dimension to this that also matters, no one wants to be a pariah in their department or anything like that. So mostly, a lot of the conservatives who remain in the Academy today try to work on non-political issues or try to keep their political leanings kind of close to the vest, and so one consequence of that, ironically, though, is that we don’t even… We’re not even able to reap the epistemic benefits, I guess, of the ideological diversity that is in the Academy, because what of it there is is kind of concealed in many cases.

0:27:07 MA: And so we’ve been talking about the political dimension, but this is also true, like I said, along other lines, along religious lines, for instance.

0:27:14 SC: Well, I want to actually use this as a sort of jumping-off point for digging a little bit more deeply into this justification for when and why intellectual diversity is important, because there’s certainly a tension going on here. On the one hand, I think that a lot of people, if you just asked, is diversity important along intellectual as well as other dimensions, they would probably give a sort of boilerplate positive response to that, like some Millian idea of the free market of ideas, let a whole bunch of things be bounced around, but there’s… On the other hand, we have people who are lifelong committed to their intellectual endeavors and they think that certain points of view are correct and certain points of view are incorrect. And I’m a natural scientist so I see that in a very non-political contexts, where certain departments have nothing but string theorists in them and other departments will never hire a string theorist.

0:28:15 SC: And so how do you balance the idea that, I’m sure that… I’m sure, I’m very, I shouldn’t say sure, I’m very open to the idea that people with liberal political leanings will end up discriminating de facto against people with conservative political leanings. How do you separate that out from just a substantive belief that these people are on the wrong track?

0:28:39 MA: I think the discrimination is fundamentally rooted in, as you said, in this… Exactly, it’s funny, there’s this tension in surveys, there’s this sociologist at Columbia, his name is Shamus Khan, and along with Colin Jerolmack, who wrote this great essay on what’s called the attitudinal fallacy, which is basically… Basically what they argue, is that in order to understand what people actually believe, it’s not enough to ask them questions, but to look at behaviors. So in the abstract, when you ask people, do you support free speech, do you support diversity, do you support anything like. As you said, people overwhelmingly say yes, but then when they’re faced with difficult cases in their local context, and in fact, you don’t even have to look at actual behaviors in the world, because sometimes you can actually elicit a similar effect when you just present them with concrete cases, even in polling.

0:29:34 MA: So for instance, one essay that I did was focused on the results of a Cato Institute survey on free expression on campus, and so when they asked students, do you support viewpoint diversity, do you think people with controversial views should be able to speak on campus, etcetera, people overwhelmingly said, yes, yes, yes, great, great, great. But then you present them with specific examples like do you think that… This wasn’t from the study, but off the top of my head, do you think that someone who is a hard core trans exclusionary feminist should be allowed to speak on campus. A lot of people who said, oh, yes, viewpoint, diversity, do, I don’t know about that though. Or should we invite someone who, should we engage with someone who says, who wants to do a talk about inequality, but focused on the role of African-Americans in the perpetuation of ritual inequality, they were like, I don’t know about that, though, or… You can go on down the list.

0:30:45 MA: So if you ask them in general, do you support this, do you support engaging with views that you disagree with, everyone says, yes, of course I do, I’m open-minded. Everyone thinks they’re open-minded, everyone, etcetera, but then when you present them with cases that actually challenge their core beliefs, then they’re like, aah, and this is a phenomenon that you can see in polling if when you zoom into specifics, but is even more clear when people are forced to confront these kinds of decisions in their local context in the real world, when there’s actually things that stick, right.

0:31:14 MA: So for instance, with faculty hiring decisions, whoever you bring on, when you’re hiring any faculty member is someone that you can expect to work with for years, you’ll have to make decisions with about who to bring into graduate… About which graduate students to admit or not, about a whole range of other things about how the department is structured, and so these are high stakes decisions that have a lot of sort of… If you feel like this person is sort of fundamentally opposed to things that you find important or valuable or whatever, it’s going to be difficult to justify, it’ll be difficult for a lot of people to feel like even if they believe in diversity in principle, when the rubber meets the road, if they could pick someone who’s sort of an ally to themselves, or they can pick this person who they disagree with, assuming their records are kind of comparably, everyone sort of clears the bar of whatever meritocratic decision procedure they have, then people tend to gravitate towards the person who’s more like them, the person who’s going to be an ally, the person who’s going to advance the cause they care about, rather than the person who’s not.

0:32:21 MA: And that’s a normal impulse that people have, but the problem is when everyone makes that same kind of calculation, and virtually all institutions of higher learning have a sort of decisive left skew and social science departments have even more pronounced left skew, then you see this kind of… The certain kinds of perspectives are sort of systematically locked out of the Academy in general, because no one… ‘Cause everyone else is making that same calculation that you’re making, and so this is one of the challenges, so one of the… And so the tension is, and this is where this kind of work gets hard, where the rubber meeting the road gets challenging, where it’s legitimately challenging, is convincing people that in certain circumstances, you actually should… You should try to bring on this person that you disagree with instead of the person who’s the ally, because it will benefit… It will benefit the academic community, it will benefit the knowledge environment, but it brings its own challenges, diversity brings challenges.

0:33:21 SC: So part of my job here is to be the devil’s advocate, so I can’t help but ask this question, couldn’t I take an attitude that this is exactly the kind of issue that should be solved by the free market. If we find that there is systematic discrimination against a brilliant conservative, isn’t that a wonderful opportunity for certain departments to corner the market by hiring all these brilliant conservatives that can’t get hired anywhere else. I don’t necessarily buy that argument, but I’m curious as to what your response is.

0:33:53 MA: Well, so there has been a market solution, an almost literal market solution, and that is the emergence of these private think tanks that are taking all of these conservative intellectuals and whatever who feel like they don’t have a place in the Academy of the world. The problem, though, what you see as a result of that is that basically neither… Is you get these two sort of separate ecosystems, so you actually lose… The benefit of diversity happens when you have these different viewpoints actually engaging with each other and having to answer to each other and clashing with each other and exposing one another’s vices, but instead what you see is two separate echo chambers, you have a sort of think tank echo chamber with a lot of right-wingers or religious people or whatever, kind of talking amongst themselves without much of a challenge, referring to one another’s work, etcetera, and then within the mainstream Academy you see a similar phenomenon on the left.

0:34:49 MA: And so there’s technically diversity in the sense of there are conservative intellectuals, a lot of them, outside of the Academy, but the benefits of diversity that you get from putting these perspectives into conversation with each other, by being challenged, etcetera, by collaborating, by having people with different views actually collaborate on projects etcetera, none of that’s happening, and in fact, one consequence of that is that a lot of the institutional structures that we have, like peer review or institutional review boards, committee decisions, they’re fundamentally premised on the idea of this kind of adversarial thing that you would have people with diverse frameworks and views, whatever, hashing it out, and so as a result, these kinds of committee decisions like peer review and institutional review boards and committee decisions and whatever will push us towards a more objective, more truthful, more accurate understanding of reality towards better decisions, more objective decisions, etcetera.

0:35:50 MA: But in a world where the people making decisions all share the same axioms, the same blind spots, the same assumptions about the world, then you can have… Rather than correcting biases by means of things like peer review or committee decisions, you can actually exacerbate biases, as result of these processes that were supposed to correct the biases, and I think that’s been the consequence of taking the… Taking the sort of, I guess, hands-off, I guess the nonchalant perspective that, look, if they don’t fit in here, they’ll figure it out, someone will… Life finds a way. That’s a Jurassic Park metaphor.

0:36:37 MA: But I guess the point is this, they did find a place where they can do… Where they can do research and pursue scholarship and whatever, but it’s just there are a whole bunch of negative consequences for this. And one negative consequence, ironically for institutions of higher learning and academics, I’ll say, is that a number of policymakers, then, the think tanks from the very beginning, think tanks like Heritage and AEI, etcetera, were tightly connected with policymakers, with practical applications, and as a result of the fact that institutions of higher learning don’t really have… And especially specific fields don’t really have a lot of political diversity and are perceived as being partisan fields, there’s a whole range of… If you’re a Republican policymaker and you’re trying to formulate, say, a response to… A response to, say, COVID 19 or something like that, you’re not going to, one, you’re probably not going to consult, say, a sociologist about… You’re not going to look at what do sociologists have to say about this if you’re Republican lawmaker because your function about sociology is that all that sociology is going to tell you is you’re wrong, you’re stupid, you’re evil, you should probably become Democrat.

0:37:50 MA: Right, if that’s what you think you’re going to hear from a sociologist, if you ask for their opinion about something is basically you should abandon entirely your whole premise and approach to policy making, then you’re just not even going to waste your time, you’re going to ask someone, maybe an economist instead. And this is part of the reason why economics has this kind of prestige it has among the social sciences compared to other fields like anthropology and sociology, is because it’s relatively less skewed. It’s still significantly skewed in favor of the left, but less so, and even left-leaning economists can sort of, are known to talk and engage with people on the right in an amicable way and can offer… In a way that’s different from, say, the reputation of sociology or anthropology or…

0:38:38 SC: But this brings up, this brings up a different way of being a devil’s advocate in the following up on your… The starting point of how things have changed since the Trump election and so forth. Are there people who would say, if asked, I have no trouble talking to… I’m a liberal, I’m a progressive, I’m a leftist. I had no trouble whatsoever with people in my department saying that the free market is the best engine of growth. I might disagree with them, but I can talk to them. I have no trouble at all talking to people who say that God exists and they go to church every day, but I don’t want people in my department who say that gay marriage should be illegal, or we shouldn’t invest in Africa because black people are too stupid to use the resources that we give them. I just think that’s too dehumanizing to allow in my department. Is that a different kind of issue? Are there intellectual diversities that it’s okay to not want to have.

0:39:36 MA: Yes, there are sort of limits, so the way I always talk about it and think about it is that viewpoint diversity I think should be understood best as an instrumental good rather than an absolute good, so it’s valuable for the purpose of increasing our knowledge and understanding about the world, helping us engage with the wider swath of society, etcetera, you can list the ways in which it’s instrumentally valuable, but it’s not something that you pursue just for its own sake, in my view. And so to the extent that… And so implicit in that is an idea that there could be things that fall outside the scope, right, so if it’s…

0:40:19 SC: It might be hard to decide what they are, but they might be there, yeah.

0:40:24 MA: Yeah. So it’s a tough question, it’s not a question that you can easily answer, it’s a question that has to be worked out by intellectual communities sort of responsive to their needs and priorities and things like that. So for instance, if you’re a geographer, you don’t necessarily need a flat-earth geography person or something like that, right. So these kinds of paradigm cases that people evoke, that say, but shouldn’t there be some kind of limits. Yes, there should be some kind of limits, but the problem is right now, I would say is that we’re very far… So I guess the point is, there is a sense in which in principle, viewpoint diversity, these kind of a campaign for viewpoint diversity could be overly permissive, and folding in a bunch of viewpoints that actually aren’t valuable for helping us understand the world, helping us understand society, things like… But we’re very far from that.

0:41:19 MA: And one of the tensions is, again, is that… And I guess one helpful distinction too is to draw a line between, is that it’s helpful to think, I guess, between sort of like just purely empirical problems which can be resolved or more straightforwardly empirical problems again. So questions about whether or not the earth is flat…

0:41:43 SC: More intellectual problems.

0:41:44 MA: Yeah, versus sort of social questions about… That involve, that take you beyond just questions about facts, but also into questions about values and priorities. The sociologist Gil Eyal has a good, has a pithy way of putting it as trans-scientific questions.

0:42:02 SC: Yeah. This really makes me wonder what to do, and this is… I’m not playing devil’s advocate now, this is something where I truly don’t know what the answer should be. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense to say, unlike facts, values are not shared by different people, and therefore we should have diversity of values, because we can’t just do an experiment to decide who’s right. On the other hand, I can easily see people saying, but these values that that person has are just out of bounds, I don’t… Those deny my basic humanity and I don’t want to engage with them. So I’m sure this is a hard question to answer, but how do we decide which values we want to be diverse in with respect to.

0:42:41 MA: Yeah, it’s kind of a hard question to answer, but I think some helpful guidelines or ways to structure the… So one of them, for instance, is if it’s a widely held view, that a lot of people in society hold, that a lot of policy makers hold, then it’s a kind of view that you’re going to have to engage with, and that if you don’t engage with, it’s actually probably going to be counterproductive to advancing whatever your values are, if you just can’t even talk to or understand where other people are from. So when you’re talking about weird niche views that not too many people hold, then those are the kinds of things which can be more safely excluded, although still under certain circumstances, there might be reasons to engage with them anyway. But for things that are sort of… That there’s millions and millions of people in America who you will have to engage with or policymakers or whatever who hold a certain view, and if you’re saying that’s out of bounds, that’s something that I’m not even going to be able to deal with or talk about or whatever, then that’s a problem, that’s a problem for you in a very practice sense. And that’s a problem also again…

0:43:51 MA: So for instance, on the question of whether or not, to return to one of your examples about, say, gay marriage or something, that’s a topic on which Americans have moved substantially over the last 10 years, but there are still a number of Americans who hold the view that marriage is a religious sacrament between a man and a woman, etcetera, and if you’re putting it beyond the pale to even talk with those people or understand where they’re coming from, or engage their perspectives and views, then not only are you, then you’re undermining your ability to, one, reach those people, and then, two, in some cases, you might be even undermining your ability to understand… Well, that’s the sort of policy… But you might be undermining your ability to understand the phenomenon in question. So I guess that’s one thing is like if it’s a view that’s sort of widely held, that a lot of people in America hold, then it’s a view that you should probably be engaging with, and this is… So for instance… And you see that it’s playing out in a few ways, so for instance, with the election of Donald Trump, a lot of social researchers, they can’t imagine how anyone could reasonably vote for Donald Trump, that…

0:45:06 SC: And that is a problem, because it is their job to imagine that, right?

0:45:10 MA: Well, and so a consequence of that is that a lot of the research on Trump and his supporters basically starts from the premise that there must be something wrong with those people, so they try to explain Trump votes by looking specifically at pathologies or deficits. So there are whole studies that are literally designed like what best explains why someone would vote for Trump is that they’re more racist or sexist or authoritarian or ignorant, and so all the options are bad, it’s can’t be that they voted for Trump because they are patriotic or whatever, that they love their families or they’re concerned about… So all the options are bad, and there’s not a symmetrical analysis with respect to why people voted for, say, Hillary Clinton, they don’t… Sometimes they measure the extent to which they try to frame Trump votes as motivated by sexism, for instance, but don’t explore the extent to which these same factors could explain Hillary Clinton votes, and there’s just a lack… Like if someone designed a study that was like, why would someone vote for Hillary Clinton? Is it because they’re communists or they hate America, or something like that. We would immediately go, well, that’s a prejudicial study design that not…

0:46:25 MA: But when it applies to the Trump voter, that’s a perfectly normal thing. And the impulse that generates that… This is a kind of thing you see in a lot of fields, right. And not just with respect to Trump, that’s just an easy example ’cause it’s current, but researchers in general approach situations by thinking that their own views are correct, that’s why we hold the views, because we think they’re correct. So our own sort of theoretical perspectives, metaphysical views, moral views, etcetera. And so, one consequence of that assumption, though, is that we tend to assume that, we tend to use our own sort of position as the baseline against which others should be measured, and then deviance from that baseline is often explained again in terms of negative attributes, some kind of deficit, some kind of pathology.

0:47:20 MA: And this even holds in cases where the scholars themselves hold demonstrably idiosyncratic views, so on a number of issues, on a range of things, academics are kind of weird with respect to the rest of society. Like the way we talk about things, the way we think about things. But when academics notice the divergence between how they think about the world and how others seem to think about the world, the question isn’t usually, why do people like us hold such idiosyncratic views on this matter? The question is, what’s wrong with everyone else, such that they can’t see the obviously correct answer here. And that matters for a few reasons, one of them, for instance, one consequence of this sort of other oriented blaming other people kind of approach to studying social issues is that there’s often sort of blind spots.

0:48:15 MA: So I’ve written a little bit on, for instance, racial inequality, racial health inequality in the United States. I have an article that I recently published in Sociological Forum on this, where people in the professional… What is often called the professional managerial class, often when they’re trying to understand something, a phenomenon like racialized inequality, the first people they look at to assume that as the bad guys, as the people who are responsible for racialized inequality are the millionaires and billionaires, the 1%, etcetera, it’s like these elites over here are the ones who are responsible for this problem. The issue with that is that millionaires and billionaires can’t just sort of, don’t just sort of make things happen as if by magic.

0:49:02 MA: They work through institutions, institutions run by the professional managerial class, so if you want to understand how a lot of these phenomena happen, you have to look at it through the organizations and institutions of higher learning and government bureaucracies, these are the institutions through which the 1% exercise their will, it would actually be impossible for a lot of these conditions to be maintained without the active participation of people in the professional managerial class. But the extent that they focus, that people within that class don’t look at their own actions and behaviors, don’t consider the way their own institutions serve to reify and perpetuate these states of affairs, they have a poor understanding of how the social phenomena come about. Of what to do about them. And there are significant consequences that sort of flow from this blind spot.

0:49:54 SC: So I think we can finally get to the question I suppressed way at the beginning, which was, what are we going to do about it or what is a strategy for dealing with it? I really liked one of the essays you wrote on diversity training programs and how their hearts are in the right place, diversity is good, and they’re typically diversity training programs for racism and sexism and things like that, not for political or religious orientation, but you point out that they generally are not effective in actually fixing the problem. It seems like this problem of viewpoint diversity within the Academy would be even harder to solve in a systematic way, or is the strategy just to sort of bring people’s attention to it, to sort of let them self-correct, because their hearts are also in the right place hopefully.

0:50:42 MA: Yeah, yeah. The diversity training thing. I’ll just bracket that, actually. Okay, so yeah, the general strategy, though, the general hope is when people say things like, I believe in engaging with people I disagree with, I believe in… I don’t think that they’re lying about that, I think they’re sincere about that, even though when presented with concrete cases, a lot of times they have this kind of ugh reaction, right, when it’s time to put those values into practice that turns out to happen less than maybe they’re aware of or would desire, so living those values is tough. So what Heterodox Academy and other initiatives like it are trying to do is to provide people with tools and resources to better live those values, so a lot of people, so for instance, if you’re a professor and you’re like, you know what, I think maybe we should be engaging more with, say, conservative or religious perspectives and studying these issues, but you’re not conservative and religious, you don’t know too many people who are, you don’t even know where to start.

0:51:43 MA: So how would you design a syllabus, for instance, on racial inequality that folds in conservative or religious perspectives, if you’re not familiar with them yourself. It would be hard, and so… But what we can… So what Heterodox Academy is trying to do is provide people with resources, like template, so this is one thing that we’re trying to do now is crowdsource, for instance, syllabi made by people who support the mission and who have tried to sort of incorporate conservative or religious perspectives into their exploration of some of these issues. If they’ve taught a class, at least on the syllabus and it went really well and it was valuable, then our perspective is like, share it with us, this is a resource that other people can use it. So we can crowdsource what works to lower the bar, to lower the amount of effort it takes for people to put it into practice, so that’s one sort of plank is trying to crowdsource what works from other people and learn from that, so that we’re not having to reinvent the wheel each of us from scratch, ’cause that’s a high bar, that in itself often disincentivizes people who agree on principle but don’t know where to start, so they just kind of do what they’ve always done.

0:52:54 MA: But another plan, I guess, is drawing people’s awareness to the problem, so people know that the Academy skews left, for instance, or that it’s a secular institution, but they’re less aware maybe of, one, how dire the skew is, and two, the fact that it’s not just kind of an organic thing that happens, but it’s a thing that people actively create through discriminatory behaviors or actions that they might not even be necessarily aware of, so making them aware of them can help. And spelling out the consequences of, if we don’t have these kinds of diversity, here’s how it messes up our understanding of the world. Here’s how it undermines the viability of our research in the future, or the impact of our research here and now, etcetera.

0:53:42 MA: So spelling out the consequence is helpful for creating a sense of urgency around the problem. And then cultivating sort of communities of practice, I guess this is related to the crowdsourcing thing, but putting people in touch with one another, so if you are someone who’s concerned about this problem, but you don’t, but when you look around your department, you don’t necessarily know that anyone else is concerned about this problem or… Then it can be hard to be the one to kind of… Right. But if you know that there are a whole bunch of other people in your field who are also concerned about this, who are committed to doing something about it, then we’re trying to create communities where people within different fields can collaborate together, think on this together, work it up together, ’cause what we don’t think… What Heterodox Academy doesn’t think is that they’re in a position to just kind of decree like, this is what must happen.

0:54:35 MA: But again, these are questions that intellectual communities have to work out within themselves, that different fields have to work out, that different universities have to work out in accordance with their own needs, their own priorities, etcetera. So we want to facilitate them doing that, that’s the main role of Heterodox Academy, is to help facilitate those efforts.

0:54:54 SC: I think… Go ahead.

0:54:55 SC: But at the same time, one thing that we have to… One thing have that we’re concerned about, and that we’re trying to… And that motivates some of the urgency we have around this problem is that we recognize that there are people in this country, all around, policymakers, ordinary citizens, etcetera, who also recognize, who are not patient, who are not content to let academics figure this out themselves, either because they don’t trust the academics or because they think the problem has been going on too long and there’s nothing changing or maybe it’s even getting worse or whatever, and so there are all these external stakeholders who are trying to find ways to intervene in the Academy in a way that runs contrary to academic freedom, that is often kind of these ham-fisted kind interventions that make things worse rather than better, politify things more rather than breaking down and everything from the Fox News campaigns to get people fired to state legislatures de-funding sociology and other fields like that, like a has happened in Wisconsin, to interventions at the federal level, for instance, like Trump and his attempted executive orders on free speech, and things like this.

0:56:07 MA: So if this isn’t a problem that… So I guess the urgency for us is that we recognize that right now, these are problems that we can try to address within the Academy by acting together, by thinking through these with a sense of urgency, by trying to reform institutions in ways that preserve academic freedom, that enhance knowledge production and things like that, but if these problems continue to be ignored by us, they’re not being ignored outside and eventually, probably sooner rather than later, these outside actors are going to be able… And actually already are, but will probably be increasingly able. To threaten academic freedom, threaten autonomy of professors and institutions of higher learning, very hard-fought autonomies that organizations like the AAUP and the AAC&U have been fighting to preserve since 1910.

0:56:57 MA: Already tenure… It’s being eroded radically. Something like 70% of new academic appointments today are non-tenured track, and even for people who are on the tenure track are sometimes being fired for political reasons. And these are problems, it’s still within our capacity to help sort of resolve some of these problems ourselves, but it won’t be that way forever. So that’s kind of the urgency that we have for trying to resolve some of these issues.

0:57:30 SC: Let me even take the lens back a little bit more to a wider perspective here, because these issues of why it’s good in the Academy, forget about politics and forget… I like the points you just made, don’t get me wrong, but if I’m just worried about being the best intellectual I can be, being the best thinker about a thing, you’ve written interesting essays on the role of critique and how it’s so important to have this attitude, I guess, towards ideas that we should be suspicious of them in some sense. Somehow, if we put aside modern politics and contemporary worries, there is this fundamental value or orientation difference in my mind that maybe maps on to some of these questions between people who say, look, most changes that we could make to the present system would be bad. We spent a lot of time coming up with the present system, and so don’t ruin it just for the sake of change, and those people will be labeled conservatives.

0:58:34 SC: And other people will say, well, it’s clear the present system can’t be the best system we have, there’s all sorts of influences on it that are not oriented towards making things they can, so our job is to undermine the present system, and how do we balance, in a very broad sense, the project of being the best intellectual we can, given these competing, fairly reasonable sounding claims?

0:59:00 MA: Yeah, and actually, I think you put your thumb pretty firmly on the issue of, for instance, why conservative perspectives would be more valuable in the Academy then a lot of people understand. And it’s precisely this orientation towards tradition and concern about things like harm caused by naive interventionism, the fact that the things that persist sometimes persist for a reason, and that if we don’t understand sort of how they came about and why they persist, then when we change things that we can often make things worse. And history is replete with examples of people trying to make radical changes to society and it not, one, not working out how they anticipated, but two, not just them failing to achieve their planned objectives, but making things far, far, far worse, sometimes sliding into just outright totalitarianism and famine and things like that.

0:59:57 MA: So there is… And so you really need these two, but at the same time, absent the sort of progressive impulse to critique and critiquing the prevailing order and looking for improvement, then you get stagnation and, similarly, those are social orders that also tend not to persist because they aren’t responsive to contemporary needs, to contemporary concerns and priorities, you really need these orientations to be in dialogue with one another.

1:00:28 SC: You did half of answering the question, you gave a good pep talk for taking on board the more conservative notion of, let’s be suspicious of proposed changes. But there is the leftist, progressive liberal point of view of let’s be suspicious of the present system as well, which also serves a purpose, and I know that you value that purpose as well, so maybe I’ll give you a chance to say something about that.

1:00:54 MA: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, one fact of the matter is that part of the reason that social orders exist is usually because they solve specific problems that gave rise, that caused the collapse of the previous order, and that led to the emergence of the new one, and part of the reason why it’s stable is because it actually is working pretty well for a lot of people. But it’s often the case that there are a number of people for whom the prevailing order does not work and has never worked, and there are people who are excluded and marginalized and disadvantaged, and they matter too. And so this is… One of the sources of critique of the prevailing social order often comes from these people for whom the social order isn’t working well, for people who are marginalized and disenfranchised. Additionally, social orders come into being usually in a particular context, a particular historical context, in response to particular challenges from particular actors, but the world evolves, situations evolved, the challenges change. And to the extent that society can’t change with them, then it tends, again, then that social order tends not to survive.

1:02:12 MA: So for both of those reasons, one, to help elevate and ensure the dignity of people for whom the social order previously has not, that social order has not been serving well, and then two, to make sure that the social order is responsive to contemporary needs and [1:02:33] ____ circumstances. This is why that impulse towards critique and that impulse towards change matters and is important. And it’s absolutely essential. Literally, again, social orders tend to collapse or die without that impulse as well. And so these are perspectives that need to be put into context with one another. One ironic thing though, I’ll say, and actually this is why they need to be put in dialogue with each other, is that sort of the impulse to critique is usually other-oriented, right, you usually are critiquing, again, things you disagree with, things that aren’t working well for you, you’re critiquing people who are your, perceived to be your ideological adversaries or whatever.

1:03:15 MA: And again, a lack of reflexivity of turning the critical lens towards oneself, towards the actors that one agrees with, towards the causes that one agrees with or sympathizes with, is often the reason why these sort of well-intentioned things go awry, it’s because with the critique-oriented people, the change-oriented people are focused on changing and critiquing everyone else, and so…

1:03:42 SC: They’re the ones who are wrong…

1:03:44 MA: This is why diversity is important. This is why it can’t just be all of the… If you have the critique-centered people that somehow that it’ll be self-correcting with just those people, because you need the lens to be turned against the people who are making those critiques.

1:04:04 SC: Well, I agree, but I worry that it gets a bit utopian, I worry that in a world where there are plenty of people who are willing to critique me, and you’re asking me to now join them in critiquing me… Couldn’t I better spend my time critiquing the wrong people rather than myself? But I think, I say that jokingly because it is important because on the one hand, we should have some convictions and move forward on the basis of them, and at the same time, we should be always questioning that we haven’t gotten things right. And it’s just so difficult to pull off in practice.

1:04:39 MA: Well, and one reason why it’s important I’ll flag is that… Is actually, this is super important for trying to help people from historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups, so one irony, for instance, is that… So for instance, look at African-Americans or Hispanics, or lower socio-economic status people, the people who are not well-served by this, basically. They often skew more socially conservative, like blacks and Hispanics are more socially conservative on average than whites, so are many immigrant communities, they’re also more religious on average than whites, and low socioeconomic status people the same way compared to upper socioeconomic status people.

1:05:17 MA: And so if you create an environment that’s hostile towards, for instance, socially conservative or religious views, that will disproportionately affect people of color, it will disproportionately affect immigrants, it will disproportionately affect first generation students, lower socioeconomic students, so sometimes what happens is in the very name of championing people from disadvantaged groups, we alienate and ignore some of those very people. And it’s important if you want to help promote the interests of, say, African-Americans, to listen to what African-Americans actually want. So for instance, with respect to police reform, there’s a movement to defund the police, but if you ask black people, do you want to defund the police, they overwhelmingly say no, they want substantive police reform, they want to end discrimination, but they want police in their communities, communities dealing with crime, with violent crime want police.

1:06:11 MA: And a lot of times, I’ve written extensively about police reform, and this was always the check on me as well, that I try to check myself when I get a little too amped up about the problems with law enforcement and it’s trying to keep in mind the fact that I come from a very particular position, I’m at an Ivy League school, I’m not from a wealthy background, I started at community college and whatever, but the milieu in which I’m currently enmeshed and the environment in which I’m in is very different from that of most African-Americans. Similarly, you… And so for substantial things like that, and then even from more… Where oftentimes the desires and opinions of the very people you’re supposedly championing are being ignored, and that happens in substantial issues, that also happens in trivial issues, like for instance, the term Latinx is often championed as the proper way of referring to people of Hispanic or Latino origin but if you ask people of Hispanic or Latino origin, do you like the term Latinx, do you consider yourself this, like overwhelmingly 80:20, they say, no, we don’t like this term. This doesn’t…

1:07:24 MA: Even when you ask people of… There was a great essay, report that just came out in the New York Times where, for instance, a lot of speech coded as racist dog whistles, so usually they would take, say, some rhetoric from Trump and they would say, this is a dog whistle that appeals to sort of white supremacist leanings or whatever, and so because they come with this analytical frame, it never occurs to a lot of… It didn’t occur to a lot of researchers to ask people of color how they understood these comments, because the researcher said that’s racist. Right, they didn’t ask, do you find this racist?

1:07:57 MA: But when they did that, it turned out that a lot of, that black people were no less likely than white people, that the messages resonated just as strongly with blacks as with whites and resonated even more strongly with Hispanics than African-Americans or whites. So these dog whistles resonated more spindly with minorities than with white people and people across the board didn’t find them racist. Similarly, with micro-aggressions, when you present black and Hispanic people with canonical micro-aggressions and ask them, do you find this offensive. Overwhelmingly, they do not find them offensive, let alone harmful. And the reason that this matters, that this microaggressions fact matters is because we do know from research, however, that when people perceive themselves to have been the target of racism or discrimination, that that corresponds to a number of negative emotional effects, mental health effects, even just physical health effects.

1:08:56 MA: So sensitizing people more to these things that they don’t currently find offensive, so taking people of color and teaching them that they should be offended by these things that they’re not currently offended by, would probably correlate with worse and mental health outcomes, worse physical outcomes, worse interpersonal outcomes for minorities by trying to sensitize them to these slights that they don’t find defensive right now, ostensibly in the name of promoting their own interest. So it’s important. So I guess the shorthand is oftentimes disturbingly, this impulse to champion people from historically marginalized and under-represented groups, oftentimes scholars ignore those very people whose interests they’re championing, and I’ll say they don’t necessarily ignore them entirely.

1:09:38 MA: What happens is you’ll have elites who represent those groups, basically, whose views are not representative, whose views are more in line with other white elites than with the typical black or Hispanic person, for instance, will be serving as the sort of lead on the reference point for other academics about, what is in black or Hispanic people’s interest? So for instance, people are going to consult Ta-Nehisi Coates about, well, what do black people want… What’s good for black people? Let’s see what Coates has to say, right, rather than, like, let’s poll African-Americans. And that’s a problem because Coates is, again, he’s great, but his views on the world are demonstrably out of touch, his socioeconomic position is demonstrably out of step, etcetera, with the typical black or Hispanic person, so if you’re looking at Coates to understand what’s best for the typical black or Hispanic person, you’re probably going to be led astray, and this is the trap that we fall into.

1:10:36 SC: Let me, I think we’re closing up here, so let me just sort of give you an open question that you can answer it as you choose. A lot of these individual specific issues we’ve been talking about play into the question of the role of the intellectual in modern society, and I think the word intellectual has even become hard to take seriously, in some sense, like if you call yourself you’re intellectual you’re pretentious, and it’s used in a sort of denigrating sense in some way, there’s a feeling that we live in a world where the discourse is not really fundamentally intellectually oriented. What do you think about that situation we’re in, and does it turn into any specific advice you could give on would-be or current intellectuals out there?

1:11:22 MA: Yeah, I mean, I definitely hear that. I’ve had to struggle a lot myself even, again, I don’t come from a background where the word intellectual would be understood as a positive thing, it would be a derisive thing you said about someone. So it’s been a journey myself to understand myself as an intellectual in a non… I guess, anyway, so I guess my advice to people… One bit of advice to people is that I think academics have been kind of bad at explaining things like why our work matters, connecting the work we do to the needs and priorities of ordinary people, and this matters, especially, I think for scholars at institutions that are paid for largely through taxpayer funds.

1:12:13 MA: I feel like a lot of taxpayers and politicians who represent them feel like, and not unreasonably, that if they’re making these large investments in these institutions of higher learning, that there should be some kind of benefit to them or society or whatever, that emerges out of this investment that the public is making in these institutions. And I don’t know that intellectuals have done an excellent job of explaining what the benefit is. And so I guess one plank is that I think intellectuals need to do better at engaging with the public, talking about their research in more accessible and compelling ways for ordinary people, engaging in more events outside of the Academy to engage with just people in their communities and their needs and priorities and concerns, connecting their scholarship to sort of practical matters that people care about. That’s one plank.

1:13:07 MA: But I will say, there are actually some great organizations out there that, whose purpose is to help connect academics to the public, such as Scholars Strategy Network or the FrameWorks Institute has good work about how to talk about matters in a compelling way to the public, and I think that that would… I think that that would help.

1:13:30 SC: Well, I think it’s some good advice, I think you’ve given us a lot to think about. Musa Al-Gharbi, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

1:13:36 MA: Well, thank you for having me.

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