Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 119 | Musa al-Gharbi on the Value of Intellectual Diversity

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

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. Support Mindscape on Patreon. 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

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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, you know, 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 in relatively mild ways. And the Academy, 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 Garby, 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 in being honest about their commitment to intellectual diversity. 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, you know, it helps illuminate his perspective where he's coming from. When he was a graduate student at the University of Arizona, he was a, and a teacher there, an instructor there, he wrote an article for a left-wing publication that was critical of the U.S. military.

Okay? 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. But because his name sounds kind of Arabic and because he's Muslim and he made critical remarks about the U.S. 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, you know, it wasn't us. Please don't take away our funding, that kind of thing. And interestingly, what Moose'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.

And so he has done that writing for National Review and elsewhere, and of course being active in Hedodox 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 come up with any answers here. I don't agree with Mousal 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 mentioned in the podcast, when it comes to hiring new people for your department, it kind of makes sense. more likely to hire people you think have correct ideas than incorrect ideas, right? 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-pathies. 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. 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 if I don't agree with them, I think they have something to offer. And I think this is actually, you know, 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 that's an interesting and very difficult distinction to try to make. So I'm not being, you know, 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. Musa Al Garby, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. Hey, it's good to be here. Thank you for having me. 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, you know, a narrative from the beginning to the end, but I hope we can talk about a bunch of them. And they're also fraught issues, right? 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 essay. is that you're, you know, 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? Sure. So the objective of Hedrox Academy is to promote instructive disagreement and open inquiry and viewpoint diversity on and 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. You know, for instance, race, gender, socioeconomic status, geography, which is, I guess a lot of people, 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, which by that we mean mostly religious and political diversity, although that's not the full extent of ideological diverse. Yeah, so the organization was founded to promote those things. And basically, you know, it's been an epic journey

through 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 Hedrodox 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, we're coming from a position of, I guess, strength and could afford to, and should be more generous, right? Generous in victory or whatever, you know, however you want to frame that. 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, you know, when they're seeing horrible things happening all the time and their people are panicked and uncertain and, you know, I'm 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, et cetera, et cetera. 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. And then after the election, you know,

it got worse. There were these major campaigns to try to, you know, basically troll students who are, especially students who were, you know, shaken up by the election and the way it went. And so higher ed became issues about high. And so oftentimes these people who were trying to troll these students got their reactions they were looking for. There were these big altercations, blowups and campuses nationwide. So by the trolls, you mean, you know, people inviting especially provocative speakers to campus hoping to get a rise and a cancellation so they could act canceled and like the victims. Is that what you mean? Absolutely.

So, I mean, sometimes, sometimes people are invited to campus and they're, and they're, and they, have something 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, you know, it's that wish 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 there are people that we disagree with. But in some cases, in many of these cases, people, you know, we're inviting people like Milo Yanopoulos, who doesn't have anything particular to say. Um, he's, like, his whole shtick was literally just trying to provoke people and he, and he would write essays about this. Like, uh, he had one in Breitbart that was something like how you can, how you can beat me, but spoiler you won't, basically. He was saying something like, um, I'm going to come to your, 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 that will, you know, et cetera. 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. Yeah. And then when they got the reaction they were looking for, it made them seem like their opponents were reactionaries. Right. Who, you know, and again, they were kind of being reactionary.

They didn't have to give the people the, they didn't have to give the reaction that these people were trying to solicit. But it's also at the same time as we recognized that. It's also important to recognize that the people they were engaging with weren't necessarily engaging in good self. Yeah, everyone is dragged down a little bit by this. Yeah. And so this was the environment in sort of in which Heterodox Academy was trying to find its footing. So there are these major blowups at campuses nationwide. There was a significant uptick and professors being fired for political speech on the left and the right on the right, mostly.

led by Fox News-oriented, you know, Fox News campaigns, which I have some personal experience with. And then on the left, you know, a lot of times it was sort of student-led campaigns to get someone fired for saying something they didn't like or otherwise representings. And it, you know, escalated even to the point of physical clashes in some cases, culminating, I would say, probably with a death of Heather Hire and that at University of Virginia. And so, you know, 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. Like, that wasn't going to cut it for the kind of problem, the kind of situation that we were facing post-2016. So we 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 developed a much more robust organizational structure to help move projects along, a much different membership structure to fold more people into the project and sort of, and pull their ideas and information and resources and stuff and disseminate them. 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, you know, we were a very different organization from the one we started with. We had a totally different approach to talking about and engaging on these problems. And, yeah, it was just a pretty wild journey. It's interesting because it's sort of the flip side of, of, not 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 Niscannon 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, you know, 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 the numbers. 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? Right?

I mean, tell us about the founding impulse for having something like Heterodox Academy. Yeah. Well, I'll say at the outset, actually, one ironic thing, I guess one ironic thing about our whole positioning in the lead-up to the election is that we were assuming, like, everyone, I guess the leadership of Heterodox Academy was assuming, as were most people that Hillary Clinton is going to win. But part of the reason people had that overconfidence that Hillary Clinton was going to. to him. Ironically, it was because there was a certain kind of groupthink that had set in along the expert class. It's the very kind of problem that the Hederox Academy was supposed to be, you know, responding to. I was one of the people who had predicted the election would go the other way, like consistently, starting in March 2016. But my view was not the predominant view

in the organization or, you know, in general. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, And so, yes. But so basically the academy skews about, you know, 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 are once you, once you, so when you have an, so among those who,

who are in academia, you're much more, you're less likely to be kind of in that middle centrist kind of position. You're someone who's more likely to be decisively, you know, more decisively on the left or right. And among those who work in higher ed, it's the ratio is something like 10 to 1 left to right in social research fields and about 5 to 1 left to right in the academy overall, in terms of political diversity. 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 senses are, is it a problem, or is it a phenomenon that should be sort of understood on its own term? 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. And there's a value to that.

But at the same time, there's a lot that sort of over, it's a highly, in virtue of 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 sort of more pragmatic problems about the reach of our research and the impact of our research and the viability of our research. So, for instance, you know, 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. should be supported. 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 it's some class of, of people who are not like them using these institutions to attack or ignore or override the will of people like them, et cetera.

So in addition to the epistemological consequences, I guess the short is. We also, a lot of academics have a difficult time engaging with the public and policy makers and about our work as a result of these same shortcomings. For any business, one of the most high stakes decisions you make is who to hire. And when you're making high-stakes decisions, it's important to have the best possible information you can as soon as possible. That's why Indeed.com is the place to go to get access to the largest pool of talents you can hire the right people fast. Indeed.com is the number one job site in the world because Indeed gets you the best people. Unlike other sites, Indeed gives you full control and payment flexibility over your hiring. You only pay for what you need. You can pause your account at any time, and there are no low.

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Terms and conditions apply offer valid through December 31. My reaction is that, you know, there's so many things to unpack here. It's fascinating and difficult to get it all right. I mean, 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 sort of some basic answers, and I'm going to 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 five-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives in academia, why is that? And number two, let's just stick with number one there for a second. I mean, what are the best explanations? Is it because liberals are smarter and better professors, or is it because conservatives are discriminated against by narrowing, reminded liberals, or is it because conservatives self-select out and they join industries or think tanks? And how do we even know what the answer is? Yeah. So 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 we know that it's not that conservatives are just intrinsically bad scholars or are not interested in the academy or, you know, these kinds of narrative is a few things. One, but 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. 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 makeup of the geographical areas of the country where universities tend to be located as well, interestingly enough.

So I think part of the shift is responding to sort of 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 be, is that they're emerged, is that think tanks became more of a thing. And so you saw the emergence of, of, you know, heritage, Brookings had existed before that, but, you know, heritage, Cato, other institutions like this. So for libertarians or conservatives who felt ill at ease in the academy, because, because even though the ratios were much closer than they are today, you know, the academy has been a consistently kind of left-skewed institution for as long as, I mean, there's research on this going back, you know, to like, going back, you know, 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, you know, 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 and 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. 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, et cetera, 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. And so this is the point. One of the things that I talked about in a couple of my essays is that like, so the goal of an organization like Heterbox Academy isn't to have the academy, have institutions of higher learning, perfectly mirror the ideological base rates in the general population, right? Or the goal is to create conditions under which, regardless of what ideological sensibilities are, your work is going to be, um,

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 conservative 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

about what their political leanings are. Not step on anyone's toes. Yeah, and there's a few reasons for this. Again, part of it is that they're worried about about having their work spiked and things like peer review or whatever. But then part of it, too, is like, you know, they don't want to end up being that person who they walk into the room and everyone rolls their eyes or they have something to say.

Right. So there's kind of a sort of. 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 sort of non-political issues and or try to keep their political leanings kind of close to the vest. And so one consequence of that, ironically, though, is that we're not even able to reap the epistemic benefits, I guess, of the ideological diversity that is in the academy. what of it there is is kind of concealed in many cases. And so we've been talking about the political

dimension, but this is also true, like I said, along other lines, along religious lines. 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, right? On the, one hand, I think that a lot of people, if you just ask, is diversity important, you know, along intellectual as well as other dimensions, they would probably give a sort of boilerplate positive response to that, right? Like some million idea of the free market of ideas, let a whole bunch of things be bounced around. But there's the, 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 certain points of you are incorrect. right? And I mean, I'm a natural scientist, so I see that in very non-political contexts where, you know, certain departments have nothing but string theorists in them and other departments will never hire a string theorist. And so how do you balance the idea that, you know, 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? I mean, I think the discrimination is fundamentally rooted. And as you said, in this exactly, it's funny. There's this tension in surveys. There's a sociologist at Columbia.

His name is Seamus Khan. And along with Colin Jerome Mack, he wrote this great essay on what's called the Attitudinal Falacy, which is basically what they argue is that in order to understand what people actually believe, it's not enough to kind of like ask them questions, but to look at behaviors, right? 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. 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 ask students, like, do you support viewpoint diversity? Do you think people with controversial views should be able to speak on campus, et cetera? People overwhelmingly said, yes, yes, yes, great, great, great. But then you present them with like specific examples. Like, this person. Do you think that, you know, this wasn't from the study, but like off the top of my head.

Like, do you think that someone who, you know, is a, is a hardcore sort of trans-exclusionary feminist should be allowed to speak on campus, right? A lot of people who said, oh, yes, viewpoint diversity go, I don't know about that, though. Or should we invite someone who, should we engage with someone who says, who wants to do it? would talk about inequality but focused on the role of African Americans in the perpetuation of racial inequality. They're like, well, I don't know about that, though. You can go on down the woods. 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, you know, et cetera. But then when you present them with cases that actually challenge. their core beliefs, then they're like, ah, and this is a phenomenon that you can see in polling when you zoom into specifics, but it's 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? So, for instance, with faculty hiring decisions, whoever you bring on when you're hiring a new faculty member is someone that you can expect to work with for years, who you'll have to make decisions with about who to bring into graduate, you know, 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, so if you feel like, so 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 and 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, you know, 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. 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 an even more pronounced left skew, right? Then you see this kind of,

then certain kinds of perspectives are sort of systematically locked out of the academy in general because no one, because 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, that's 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, and, but it brings,

it brings its own challenges, you know, diversity brings challenges. With all that's going on in the world right now, it can be hard to focus on things that are long-term and kind of annoying but nevertheless important. And surely buying life insurance has to be up there on the list of such things. PolicyGenius.com is here to help. It's a marketplace. It's not an insurance company by itself. You go to PolicyGenius, and you can find different insurers offering you different plans and figure out which one is right for you. Right now, you could save 50% or more by using PolicyGenius to compare life insurance from different insurers. And the process is simple. You go to the website. In minutes you can work out how much coverage you need, as well as

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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. 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 overall. 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 the answer to each other and clashing with each other and exposing one another's biases. 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, et cetera. And then within the mainstream academy,

you see a similar phenomenon on the left. 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, etc. by collaborating, by having people with differing views actually collaborate on projects and etc. 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 and 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, you know, understanding of reality towards better decisions, more objective decisions, et cetera. 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 a result of these processes that were supposed to correct the biases. And I think that's been the consequence of taking the sort of, of taking the sort of, I guess, hands-off, I guess the nonchalant perspective that, you know, look, if they don't fit in here,

they'll figure it out, you know, someone will, you know, life finds a way that's a Jurassic Park metaphor. But I guess the point is they did find a place where they can do, you know, 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 learnings 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, etc, were tightly connected with policymakers, with practical applications. 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, like, if you're a Republican policymaker and you're trying to formulate, say, 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, like, what does sociologists have to say about this if you're a Republican lawmaker? Because your assumption about sociology is that all a sociologist is going to tell you is, you're wrong, you're stupid, you're evil, you should probably become a Democrat, 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 sort of premise and approach to policymaking, 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 sort of, you know, in a way. way that's different from, say, the reputation of sociology or anthropology or, you know.

But this brings up, this brings up a different way of being a devil's advocate in the, in the following up on your, the starting point of how things have changed since, you know, the Trump election and so forth. Like, are there people who would say, if asked, you know, I have no trouble talking to, I'm a liberal, I'm a progressive, I'm leftist, I have no trouble whatsoever with people in my department saying that the free market is a 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, you know, they go to church every day. But I don't want people in my department who say that, you know, 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, Are there intellectual diversities that it's okay to not want to have? So, I mean, yes. So any, yes. So there are always, 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 swel of.

of society, et cetera. You know, 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 they're implicit in that is an idea that there could be things that fall outside the scope, right? So if it's... They might be hard to decide what they are, but they might be there. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, 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. But 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 like paradigm cases that people evoke to say, but, you know, 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, you know, so I guess the point is there is a sense in which in principle, viewpoint diversity, this kind of a campaign for viewpoint diversity could be overly permissive, folding it 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. 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 empiric, like, just purely empirical problems, which can be resolved, like, or more straightforwardly empirical problems, I guess. So questions about whether or not the earth is flat versus actual problems. versus yeah versus sort of social questions about that involve sort of that take you beyond just questions about facts but also into questions about values and priorities the sociologist gillayal has a good has a pithy way of putting it as trans-scientific questions this is riley de vluka from a really good cry i've been doing reformer pilates for years and i always loved how

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Yeah, I mean, this really makes me wonder what to do. And 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, you know, 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 with respect to? Yeah, it's kind of a hard question to answer, but I mean, I think some helpful guidelines

or ways to sort of 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 policymakers 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, you know, 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 sort of 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 or 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 policy makers 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 practical sense. And that's a problem also, again, in, and so, for instance, on the question of whether or not to return to one of your examples about, say, you know, gay marriage or something, that's a topic in which Americans have moved substantially over the last, you know, 10 years. But there are still a number of Americans who hold the view that, you know, marriage is a religious sacrament between a man and a woman, et cetera. 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 know, you're doing, 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 a sort of policy question, but you might be undermining your ability to understand the phenomenon in question, right? 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 be able that you should probably be engaging with. And this is so for instance, and you see you see this playing out in a few ways. So for instance, with the election of Donald Trump, a lot of social researchers, like they can't imagine how anyone could reasonably vote for Donald Trump. And that is a problem because it is their job to imagine that, right? 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 it that they're more racist or sexist or authoritarian or ignorant? And so all the options are bad. It can't be that they voted for Trump because they, you know, are patriotic. or whatever, that they love their families or they're concerned about, you know, so all the options are bad. And there's not a symmetrical analysis with respect to why people voted for, say, Hillary Clinton, right? Like, 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 or, 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 right or something like that? We would immediately go, well, that's a prejudicial study design that's, you know, not, you know, but when it applies to the Trump voter, you know, there's, that's a perfectly normal thing. And, and the impulse that sort of 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 because that's, you know, current. But researchers in general approach situations by thinking, 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 view, et cetera.

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. 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 then when this, when academics notice a 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 have such idiosyncratic fuse on this matter? The question is, what's wrong with everyone else, such that they can't see the obviously correct answer here?

And so, and that matters, well, that matters for a few reasons. Like one of them, for instance, one consequence of this sort of other-oriented blaming other people kind of approach to social, to studying social issues is that there's sort of, is that there's often sort of blind spots.

So I've written a little bit on, for instance, racial inequality, racialized 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 been 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%, et cetera. 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. They work through institutions, right? 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 media 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 to 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 yeah, so, I mean, there are significant consequences that sort of flow from this blind spot. So this, 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, you know, what is a strategy for dealing with it? I really liked one of the essays you wrote on diversity training. programs and how, you know, their hearts are in the right place. Diversity is good. And they're typically diversity training programs for, you know, 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 it, 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. Yeah. So the, I mean, 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, you know, I believe in engaging with people I disagree with, I believe in, like, 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 like, 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 with desire. So living those values is tough. So what Heterodox Academy and other initiatives like it are trying to do is 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

in 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. So, like, 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, right? It would be hard. And so, but what we can, so what Herodox 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, 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, based on the syllabus and it went really well and it was valuable, then like our respective was like, share it with us. This is a resource that other people can use, right? 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 crowd. crowdsource what works from other people and learn from that, so that we're not having to reinvent the wheel each of us, you know, from scratch. Because that's a high bar. I mean, 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 voiced them. And then, but another plank, I guess, is drawing people's awareness to the problem. So, you know, people know that the academy skews left for instance or that, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know,

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, et cetera. So spelling out the consequences 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're someone who's concerned about this problem, but when you look around your department, you don't necessarily know that anyone else is concerned about this problem or. Or, you know, 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 sort of create communities where people within different fields can collaborate together, think on this together, work it out together. Because 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. But we are, you know, these are, 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 priority, et cetera. So we want to facilitate them doing that. That's the main role of Heterodox Academy is to help facilitate those efforts.

I think. Go ahead. But at the same time, one thing that we have to, one thing that we have to, 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, et cetera, 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 interventions that make things worse rather than better, politicized things more rather than picking down. And everything from the Fox News campaigns to get people fired to, you know, state legislators, legislatures defunding, you know, sociology and other fields like that, like as 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. So if this isn't a problem that, so I guess the urgency for us is that we recognize that this, 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, you know, 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 economy that organizations like the AAUP and the AAC and you have been fighting to preserve since 1910. Already tenure is being eroded radically. I mean, something like 70% of new academic appointments today are non-tenure track. And even for people who are on the tenure track, you know, are sometimes being fired for, you know, political reasons. And so, so these are, these are problems. It's still within our capacity to, 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 sort of resolve some of these issues. 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, you 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 things, 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 onto some of these questions between people who say, look, most changes that we could make to the present system would be bad. You know, we spent a lot of time coming up with the present system. And so, like, don't ruin it just for the sake of change.

And those people will be labeled conservatives. And other people will say, well, it's clear the present system can't be the best system we have. You know, 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, you know, how do we balance in a very broad sense the project of being the best intellectual we can, given these, you know, competing, fairly reasonable sounding claim? 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 than a lot of people understand. And it's precisely this orientation towards tradition and concern about things like, you know, 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,

we can often make things worse. And, you know, history is replete with examples of people trying to make radical changes to society, and at not, one, not working out how they anticipated, but two, you know, not just them failing to achieve their, planned objectives, but making things far, far, far worse. And sometimes sliding into just outright totalitarianism and famine and things like that. So there is, I mean, and so you really need these two, these two, but at the same time, you know, absent the sort of progressive impulse to, of critique and of critiquing the prevailing order and looking for improvement, right, then you get stagnation and, and similarly, it's those those are social orders that also tend not to persist because they aren't responsive to

contemporary needs to contemporary concerns, priorities. So you really need these orientations to be in dialogue with one another. You did half of answering the question. I mean, you gave a good pep talk for taking on board the more conservative notion of let's be suspicious of proposed changes, right? But there is the, you know, the leftist progressive, liberal point of view of let's be suspicious of the present system as well, which also serves a purpose. And, you know, I know that you value that purpose as well. So maybe I'll give you a chance to say something about that. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, okay. So, yeah. So, I mean, one fact of the matter is that part of the reason that social orders exist is usually because they solve sort of specific problems and 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 disadvantage. And they matter too. Right. And so this is one of 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, you know, social orders come into being usually in a particular context, a particular historical context, you know, in response to particular challenges from particular actors. But, you know, the world evolves. Situations evolve. 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. 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 the social order has not been serving well. And then two, to make sure that the social order sort of is responsive to contemporary needs and collecting circumstances, right? This is why that impulse towards critique and that impulse towards change matters and is important and is like absolutely essential. I mean literally against social orders tend to collapse or die without that impulse as well. And so these are perspectives that that need to be put into contact with one another. One ironic thing though, I'll say, and actually this is the this is why they need to be put in dialogue with each other, is that the sort of the impulse to critique is usually other

oriented. Yes. Right. Or usually you're 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. And again, a lack of reflexivity of turning the critical lens towards oneself, towards the actors that one agrees with, towards the clauses that one agrees with, or sympathizes with, is often the reason why these sort of well-intentioned things go awry. It's because, you know, the critique-oriented people, the change-oriented people are focused on changing and critiquing everyone else. And so this is the ones who are wrong.

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, you know, that it will be self-correcting with just those people as because you need the lens to be turned against the people who are making those critiques. Well, it's, I agree. And I, you know, but it, I worry that it gets a bit utopian. I mean, 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, you know, better spend my time critiquing the wrong people rather than myself? But I think, but I think, you know, I say that jokingly because it is important because, you know, 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 and practice. 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 Hispanic or lower socioeconomic

status people, the people who are not well served by this, basically. They tend to, they often skew more socially conservative. So like blacks and Hispanics are most 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. 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, you know, first-generation students, lower socioeconomic students. So often, 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. Like communities dealing with crime, with violent crime, you know, want police.

And, you know, a lot of times I've written extensively about police reform. And this is always a 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, you know, I come from a very particular position. I'm at an Ivy League school. You know, I'm not from a wealthy background. I started at community college and whatever,

but like the milieu in which I'm currently in mesh and the environment in which I'm, is very different from that of most African-American. Similarly, you know, and so for substantial things like that, and then even from 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 a, 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, like, you know, 80, 20. They say, no. We don't like this term. This doesn't. Even when you ask people of, uh, there's, 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, like, 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? But when they did that, it turned out that a lot of that black people were no less likely than white people. The message just as strongly with blacks and resonated even more strongly with Hispanics than African Americans or whites. So these dog whistles resonated more strongly with minorities than with white people. And people across the board didn't find them racist. Similarly with microaggressions, when you present, when you present,

black and Hispanic people with canonical microaggressions 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 corresponds to a number of negative emotional effects, mental health effects, even just physical health effects. 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 mental

health outcomes, worth physical outcomes, worse, you know, interpersonal outcomes for minorities by trying to sensitize them to these slights that they don't find offensive 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 underrepresented group, oftentimes scholars ignore those very people whose interests they're championing. And I'll say they don't necessarily ignore them entirely. 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. We'll 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 to Disi Coates about, well, what do Black people want? What's good for Black people? Let's do what Coates has to say, right? Rather than like, let's poll African Americans. Right. And that's a problem, right?

Because Coates is a, again, he's great. But his views on the world are demonstrably out of touch. His socioeconomic position is demonstrably out of step, et cetera, 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 a trap that we fall into. I think we're closing up here.

So let me just sort of give you an open question that you can answer as you choose. I mean, a lot of these individual specific issues we've been talking. 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 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?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, I definitely hear that. I mean, I've, I've had to struggle a lot myself even. I mean, again, I don't come from a background where, 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, You know, anyway. So, I mean, 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, you know, 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 fund. 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, you know, that emerges out of this investment that the public is making in these institutions. And I don't know that intellectuals have been, have done an excellent job of explaining what that benefit is. And this, and so I guess one plank is that I think intellectuals need to do better at engaging with the public, you know, talking about their research in more accessible and compelling ways for ordinary people, engaging in more events outside of the academy to engage with, you know, 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 plane. Oh, but I will say there are actually some great organizations out there whose purpose is to help connect academics to the public, such as Scholar 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 help. Well, I think it's some good advice. I think you've given us a lot to think about. Musa Algarbi, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast. Thank you for having.