Elite paradoxes

 I just don't have the blogging bug these days, for a whole bunch of reasons. But I very much appreciate this article about elite education by Jonny Thakkar at Swarthmore. Some choice quotes:

...Swarthmore educates around 1,600 students per year at a cost of something like $110,000 per student. (I find it hard to believe it could be so expensive, but the figures are what they are and apparently the explanation is just that the facilities and support services are first class, the faculty are well paid, and the student-faculty ratio is extremely low.) By comparison, the annual per-student spending of Southern Connecticut State University is about $13,000. Surely there is no credible theory of social justice, or at least no view that would attract Swarthmore professors, according to which it could count as just to spend so much more on educating our students than on the rest of their cohort. In a just world, a college like Swarthmore simply wouldn’t exist. The mere possibility would be regarded as obscene.

This makes faculty radicalism at elite colleges largely phantasmagoric. Professors campaigning for something like divestment from fossil fuels typically take themselves to be fighting the man in the form of an inscrutable board of managers — or should that be board of donors? — whom they picture as bourgeois reactionaries. But if a college like Swarthmore is necessarily and essentially complicit in injustice, its faculty members are necessarily and essentially complicit as well, and campaigns to invest our billions more responsibly are mostly window dressing.

Everyone in academia agrees that our paramount task is to dismantle power structures. To that end, we will select administrators committed to dismantling power structures, and promote the career advancement of those committed to ending inequality.

In arguing that faculty radicalism is often illusory, I do not mean to suggest that it doesn’t matter. On the contrary, it probably matters more than we generally think, just because elites probably matter more than we generally think. One of the dogmas of contemporary academe is that history gets made from below and that any attempt to argue otherwise robs ordinary people of their agency. But it is true by definition, or near enough, that elites have more power than nonelites. It follows that what elites think and do should be of concern to everybody, and hence that a society should care a great deal about the political education its elites receive.

Much like the Keynes quote about "practical men" being slaves of dead economists and philosophers.

Of course, the committed anti-elitists will never leave their elite schools.  Thakkar offers some good reasons why:

In a funny way, though, I actually agree that conservatism is better represented on campus than is often assumed. Those who argued that the Chamberlain Project was antithetical to the college’s history of peace activism, for example, were clearly offering a conservative reason in the form of an appeal to tradition. And lately I’ve been wondering whether the decision to teach at an elite college doesn’t necessarily commit you to respecting a conservative consideration of a different kind, one emphasized by thinkers as disparate as Michael Oakeshott and G. A. Cohen, namely the thought that we have reason to cherish the value that already exists in the world even if the things that bear that value would not exist in a better world.

...

One characteristic of a desirable elite, it seems to me, is that its members be self-aware. Each needs to recognize that they are the recipient of a golden ticket, not so they can engage in pointless rituals of self-denunciation but so they can reckon with the question of which responsibilities follow from the privilege that has been unfairly bestowed upon them. What is needed, as conservatives such as Helen Andrews and Ross Douthat have rightly argued, is something like the old ethos of noblesse oblige, according to which a golden ticket comes with the unavoidable obligation to make what Christopher Lasch called “a direct and personal contribution to the public good.” The difficulty is knowing how to teach with this in mind, given that career decisions are generally considered private.

However, he makes one assertion which is common but I have lately heard is contested:

But America will not be just any time soon; even its public-education system devotes vastly greater resources to well-off children than to those from poorer backgrounds.

I have no doubt that spending disparities exist, but I have heard knowledge people contest the magnitude of the alleged disparities. I suspect, however, that affluent districts actually operate with less overhead and more spending on in-the-classroom things, like science equipment and smaller classes and sports facilities and whatnot, i.e. stuff that kids actually see and experience directly. Poorer districts probably have more bureaucracies overseeing the efforts to allegedly help poor kids. Because poor kids allegedly need case managers and assessments and whatnot, instead of, you know, science equipment and small classes and sports facilities and all that.

Higher Superstition, Chapters 6-9

I paid less attention in these chapters.  I think Gross and Levitt started off with a fair point in chapter 6, on environmentalism:  Romanticizing non-Western cultures or ancient civilizations is a really bad idea.  Rejecting science while searching for solutions to environmental problems is just plain dumb.  To the extent that environmentalism is pursued as an ideological project, as opposed to applied science that takes into account human factors (and ideologies pretty much always over-simplify human factors wrong), such anti-scientific perspectives are just plain dumb.

Gross and Levitt go too far, however, when they go after scientists who take alarmist stances.  If this were a book on strategies for communication, I would probably agree with most of what they say against alarmism.  However, this is a book on anti-scientific attitudes, not un-scientific attitudes.  A scientist who exaggerates his or her findings is not doing good science, but they certainly aren't acting with animus toward science.  If anything, they are making the pedestal too high, not toppling it.  There are any number of valid criticisms to make against alarmists, but the alarmist is NOT rejecting scientific data.  There's a difference between rejecting science and abusing it with fanatical excess.  Environmental alarmism by scientists does not belong in a book on postmodernist and sociological critiques of science.  Alarmists are NOT saying "Science is just, like, your opinion, man."  Quite the opposite.

Also, the Gaia types lost.  Public pitches for environmentalism in America today are overwhelmingly dominated by appeals to science.  Somebody somewhere might be saying "Technological society is just a damaging Western construct based on scientific knowledge that poses as objective while in fact being a produce of heteropatriarchy..." but that person has no influence outside of their book club.

Chapter 7 covers a number of miscellaneous topics, among them AIDS and Afro-centric science.  I won't defend every statement made by every AIDS activist ever, but to my knowledge most of them criticized science from a place of frustration with the slow pace of good science, not from a place of rejecting scientific knowledge.  Even if some individuals adopted some anti-science rhetoric, it clearly was coming from a desire to speed up science, not replace it.  I would not have placed them alongside the postmodernists or the gender essentialists.

Afro-centric curricular with false historical claims about the scientific feats of African civilizations are a different matter, and tend to also blend in much of the same cultural relativism ("Science is just a Western way of looking at the world...") as many of the other targets of Gross and Levitt, albeit with appeals to different texts.  Gross and Levitt were fair here, and perhaps the best evidence that they were fair is that they also singled out a place where Afrocentric curricula are correct:  The first known example of steel production was in Tanzania 2,000 years ago.  It's worth noting the paradox of asserting, on the one hand, that ancient civilizations accomplished amazing innovations in science and technology, and on the other hand that science and technology are just arbitrary Western constructs.

Chapters 8 is on why people believed in the various sociological and philosophical critiques of science.  The basic conclusion of Gross and Levitt is restlessness with a Western society that failed to fix the problems people hoped it would fix.  I think that restlessness is indeed at work, and is also the source of many edufads.   People want a fix, and they want to rebel against whatever isn't delivering it.

Chapter 9 is on whether any of thtis matters.  They believed that it did.  They contended that it would lead to a schism between STEM and humanities (with social science probably being torn in two), with the revolt being led by STEM faculty.  That's not what happened, however.  Administrators put STEM on the pedestal because of grant money, but also pushed on us to deliver it (making many tenure-track jobs effectively into grant-writing jobs) and to take in more students rather than weeding out students.  We didn't tell the humanities faculty to shove it, the administrators did.  And they didn't do it in response to the postmodernists.  They would have just as easily pushed aside conservative defenders of the traditional Western Canon, and probably faster (in the name of diversity).

They argued that this will lead to the debasement of science education, but the people who have done the most to weaken science education are the people pushing edufads at the highest levels, and the people who have declared it a political imperative to get every available warm body into STEM.  Keynes was right about practical men being slaves of defunct intellectuals, but it doesn't follow that every defunct intellectual will enslave a generation of practical men.

They argued that it will debase public discourse, but ultimately it's not the left that did the most to weaken science in public discourse.  The left has much to answer for in the politics of the outside world, including misunderstanding and misusing science in certain cases, but the left has NOT tried to dethrone science.  If anything, lefty technocrats have elevated science above its station, ignoring the is/ought distinction.

Why were they wrong?  I think they were wrong because they over-estimated the power that humanities professors have over the next generation.  As I said above, one must not over-state Keynes' observation on the power of intellectuals.  Dethroning science was never an interesting project for Gen X, coming of age as the internet did.  Science kept improving things for us; why would we take up torches and pitchforks at the behest of our comparative lit profs?  Instead, we made the mistake of listening to the other idea-pushers, the ones insisting that we'd soon face a STEM shortage.  And the final result of that was to make traditionalists like me so pissed off that I've spent two and a half years reading and blogging about humanities and social science.

The real enemy we face now is a technocratic class that somehow rejects meritocracy.  Hey, I don't get it either.  But they see stubborn social problems and believe that we can fix it by defining away merit in STEM education.

Strange times.

Final thoughts on _They're Not Dumb, They're Different_: The policy consensus side

In her conclusions (pages 83-86), Sheila Tobias starts off going in a promising direction:  She briefly questions the forecasts of a shortage of scientists.  These questions are so juicy, so refreshing, that for a moment I was taken to the present!  (Where a few people--just a few, mind you--are starting to question that narrative.)  I felt like maybe I'm reading something from the here and now, not the 1990's.  But after acknowledging that we can't be certain, she moves on to make recommendations rooted in the consensus assumption of a 1990's science education researcher.  I shall quote the bottom of page 86:

The first step is a moral and strategic imperative: no college student should be permitted to say "no" to science without a struggle.

I cannot imagine anyone in a modern university calling for such an overbearing push to get more students  into humanities.  I cannot imagine majoring in humanities being declared a "moral imperative."  The STEM pedestal is an astounding thing.

Anyway, Tobias goes on to recommend the formation of an industry of advisers, mentors, recruiters, and STEM education and pipeline professionals who will devote all of their efforts to trying to get more students into and through science programs.  To a large extent the National Science Foundation has done as she recommended more than a generation ago.  There is indeed an industry of such people, largely funded by NSF.  She wasn't the only person urging this, and such an industry was already present in some form then, but we see how the elite chatter of a generation ago to some extent does shape the enterprises of today.  John Maynard Keynes was right about "practical men" being "slaves of some defunct economist."  Even as we hear rumblings against the notion of a "STEM crisis", tremendous numbers of well-funded people proclaim their desire to seek "data-driven best practices" to solve a crisis whose existence was proclaimed as gospel a generation ago.

de Tocqueville on the American approach to intellectual questions

Volume 2 is all about American culture.  I expect to be blogging far more about Volume 2 than I did about Volume 1.  Indeed, Part 1 of the volume is titled "The influence of democracy upon the intellectual movement in the United States."  Chapter 1 is titled "The Americans' philosophic method".

de Tocqueville's basic point is that we are an unlettered and practical people, so the average American will approach an intellectual question based only on his own ideas and intuitions, rather than in reference to intellectual schools of thought.  An educated American will not say "Well, if we approach this question in the manner of [insert name here]..." but will simply give his own thoughts.  Obviously this is less true today than it was in the 1830's, especially due to the rise of great universities in America.  And obviously this is more true in the natural sciences than in the humanities or social sciences.

I don't think that I can fairly speak to a line of causation from the state of 1830's America to the modern academic zeitgeist that I so often lament on this blog. There are far too many widely-read scholars today for me to attempt a serious argument that American academia remains a refuge for the unlettered. What I can note, however, is a set of analogies between the things that de Tocqueville noted in the wider society and the problems that I see today in the zeitgeist of academic scientists in America.

For starters, when I read science education research written by natural scientists the trail of citations is often (but not always) very modern and technocratic, and focused on writings from and about the natural sciences, rather than a wider context of social science and culture.  I notice less of that in psychology papers.  Science education research in America seems to be stuck in a mode described on page 494 of Democracy in America:

Amid the continuous shifts which prevail in the heart of a democratic society, the bond which unites generations to each other becomes slack or breaks down; each person easily loses the trail of ideas coming from his forbears or hardly bothers himself about it.

A tempting response would be that science education research in the United States is a young field, but that seems inaccurate to me.  Perhaps the current approach to science education research in America is rather new, but the choices of questions and methods are inevitably informed by a cultural backdrop.  (Indeed, is that not the essence of the modern zeitgeist among the educated classes?)  American attitudes toward science and science education emerge from centuries-old cultural attitudes concerning "practical education", and assumptions about our "STEM Workforce" needs are fundamental assumptions about labor markets.  It just so happens that economists have been studying labor markets for longer than physicists have been administering the Force Concepts Inventory, and that government agencies have been making projections about our nation's "STEM Workforce" needs since at least Sputnik, if not earlier.  (If I ever get through the thick pile of books on my dining room table, I will add to my blogging projects Michael Teitelbaum's Falling Behind?: Boom, Bust, and the Global Race for Scientific Talent.  In the meantime, here's a good essay that he wrote on the matter.)

Also, much of the conversation about science education in the US is really a conversation about inequality (often explicitly so).  It is relevant that de Tocqueville wrote (again on page 494):

As for the effect which one man's intelligence can have upon another's, it is of necessity much curtailed in a country where  its citizens, having become almost like each other, scrutinize each other carefully and, perceiving in not a single person in their midst any signs of undeniable greatness or superiority, constantly return to their own rationality as to the most obvious and immediate source of truth.

Those of us who question the prevailing zeitgeist are often accused of being the ones who fall into that folly of privileging their own reason above the findings of others.  After all, the zeitgeist is supported by data!  Well, yes, by some data, but data rarely tells you as much as it would like you to, so it can only be interpreted in light of assumptions.   The person acting only on their own reasoning faculties suffers the disadvantage of being unrooted from the past (though they rarely perceive it as disadvantage) but suffers the advantage of not being sucked into the mistaken assumptions of their peers.

de Tocqueville's commentary about how little Americans know about the writers of the past is particularly interesting if read alongside Keynes' famous remark about ideology:

 “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”

American intellectuals may style themselves to be people who simply follow the best evidence rather than people proceeding on the basis of assumptions and culture (even while simultaneously embracing a postmodern zeitgeist about how culturally biased we all are), but their lack of grounding in the writings of the past only makes it easier for them to sit in thrall to older currents.  I can't say that I'm free of influence from the past, but my reading projects of the past year (detailed on this blog) have made it somewhat easier for me to identify and articulate the influences that drive me and the influences that I recoil from.  The fact that I can identify both Catholic and Puritan influences on my mindset does not make me any less influenced by them, but at least it helps me explore ideas more carefully.

Finally, related to the issue of whether people who eschew the zeitgeist are eschewing evidence, something making the rounds right now is a statistical critique of "stereotype threat" research by Rutgers psychology professor Lee Jussim, whose book was previously blogged about here. Stereotype threat research is often cited as a key factor underpinning persistent inequality, and a reason why biases and stereotypes are so pervasive and overpowering. I lack the context and background to decide if Jussim's critique of that research is satisfactory or deficient, but I think it's compelling enough that one should not make that line of research an overly prominent piece of their world-view.