This is a really rich post and I really appreciate it. But I'm going to be selective in only discussing some parts that I really want to discuss. So this part: "a conservative social scientist might be interested in how traditional gender roles provide meaning, status, or functional social scripts among the members in a given population, while a progressive would instead examine how these same roles facilitate various sorts of deprivation or exploitation." I'd say a good sociologist should do *both.* For a while in the sociology of punishment, scholars exploring the consequences of mass incarceration on families, neighborhoods, etc. discussed both the positive and negative consequences. I love the concept of "sociological ambivalence," which was used here (see esp Megan Comfort for making this explicit). Across several studies, we learned families of incarcerated folks have mixed feelings about their loved ones' incarceration. In some ways, it was better with them gone and in other ways it was worse--and for complex reasons. One major problem is the one you're addressing--there was very, very little work even investigating whether mass incarceration was good (different scholars looked at the impact on the crime rate, but not P&S/S of P scholars), and where you could twist it to do so (e.g., job creation) it was treated conspiratorially (the prison industrial complex). But the second problem is the one I'm concerned about, which is a more recently widespread problem: people stop talking about the positive aspects. Miller and Stuart's carceral citizenship is one of the last pieces to do it, along with a few pieces on health outcomes for prisoners by Uggen and co. Instead, we get stories about how mass incarceration is to blame for IPV by formerly incarcerated men (with no willingness to concede that maybe the men contributed to this outcome and no investigation into whether they did so before they went to prison--the blame analysis Felson wrote about). So I totally agree that scholars will be interested in different questions based on their life experiences and personal preferences/beliefs (and this is the strongest argument, in my view, for diversity arguments). But I also think (a) any study needs to consider the full scope--the limitations and costs of, as well as the opportunities and meaning people derive from, e.g., gender roles, and (b) to deal with gaps in the literature, we need more field-level efforts to engage in systematic analyses of society, not in a kind of path dependent way we've done, but in a clean-slate, how would we do this better if we stated over kind of way. But I'm enjoying the discussion! In the end, I really hope we end up seeing multiple models of reform across the country so we can see which is/are most effective, laboratory of democracy/free-market style!
Thanks for this! I agree that individually as well as collectively, we should be trying to paint as full a picture as possible of the phenomena we want to understand. One issue I didn’t really bring up in this piece, but do in my T&S paper, is that in some ways I don’t think ideology is as big a problem as we sometimes make it out to be, because blatantly ideological scholarship can be easily identified and dismissed. It’s not great that there’s so much of it, but it’s less likely to convince people to believe dumb things. Arguably, the bigger problem is actually scarcity—there’s an infinity of social reality out there that we could study, but we only learn about the pieces of it that social scientists care about and can get funded and published. This matters for the reasons you suggest: If everybody wants to study, say, overpolicing, and nobody cares about underpolicing, then the literature as a whole will wrongly communicate that only overpolicing is a problem. This holds even if each of the individual studies conducted is sound. The larger point being that even if individual researchers are committed to painting as full a picture as they can, limitations of resources, time, and interest will steer them in some directions over others, and thus homogeneity within communities of researchers will create larger distortions. Part of the goal with viewpoint diversity is simply to cover more of social reality. I like your idea of stepping back within the different subfields, taking stock of the gaps, and then orienting our inquiry toward greater coverage—though I suppose the million-dollar question then is how to institute that approach systematically in social research.
I was at a humanities conference last week and I urged everyone there (~200 people) to start identifying as 'conservative' and to encourage all their friends to. Why? You know why.
Thanks for this post! I'm still reading but one clarification: my concern is not that I think conservatives will treat the Shields' list as facts rather than hypotheses, but that promoters like Shields seem to be saying that, which leads to a misrepresentation of conservative scholars (as value-/belief-driven rather than driven by science) and reifies the assumption that people who are willing to explore these ideas must be conservative.
Sociology was pretty conservative in the US at one point as I understand it. The period of Perkins et al and structural functionalism.
I think the real issue is that people think such arguments will be weaponized against the left, and I think they're probably right. The argument "more conservatives would lead to better social science" and "this call for more conservatives will be weaponized" can both be true.
But then I'm a politics guy, so I view it thru that lens. "Good faith pointing out of problems doesn't mean the solutions will be good faith attempts to fix the problem.. In fact, the history of the last few decades tell us they usually won't be."
I guess I've heard a lot of hand-wringing about the weaponization of hiring conservatives, but I just haven't seen it myself and I'm not sure what it would even look like. There aren't all that many conservatives around, and the ones there are tend not to be especially aggressive or activist—or else they wouldn't have stuck around long enough to make it up the greasy pole of academia in the first place! Also, you could multiply conservative presence x10 from its current proportion and still have a left-tilted social science, so I'm not sure how weaponization would work even if it were the goal.
But perhaps this is just a failure of imagination on my part.
Well that's fair, and gets at Rubin's concern to an extent. There are lots of reform efforts afoot and they are not all equally healthy and constructive. Some are likely to lump the healthy and toxic ones together—maybe in bad faith sometimes, but they also may just be difficult to tell apart. Particularly, as you suggest, from the outside!
The thing that I see being criticized the most currently is the establishment of new academic units for "civics" that tend to hire more conservative-leaning scholars. In some cases though, those civics centers have generally hired strong academics (Florida and Texas for instance); others seem to have been hired without much in the way of scholarly credentials (e.g. the guy who scuffled with a journalist at Ohio State).
But this seems similar to what already has happened nationally with the establishment of left-leaning centers and departments on campuses over the years as well as various mandates either at the campus or state level (see: California) to take DEI-themed course(s) to help support those departments.
That said, I'm not sure of the relative wisdom of this approach either if the goal is truly truth-seeking education. And given the highly negative view of higher education on the right these days, it doesn't seem likely that there's going to be an influx of conservative PhDs anytime soon, so the academy is likely to remain broadly politically tilted left.
I think advocates of DEI also tend to think that their preferred hiring targets are the best people for the job, because diversity enhances inquiry.
But you're right to push back against "data driven rather than belief driven." That's a meaningless notion. Have you studied Bayesian epistemology? It makes it crystal clear that the way we interpret data is informed by our priors.
I half-agree. This is all painting with a broad brush, of course, and different DEI proponents will have different rationales. But in terms of the center of gravity, I think they do believe their preferred hiring targets are the best people for the job, but don’t think the job is inquiry, but rather something more like dismantling the structures of oppression.
Never taken a deep dive into Bayesian epistemology though I think I’m informed by it indirectly by drawing from people who draw from it. E.g., Keith Stanovich, Kevin Dorst.
I thought this was a great post but I also disagreed with the claim that DEI proponents are interested in justice over inquiry. A few examples:
(1) Basic DEI policy changes like using structured interviews, blind screening, evaluating minority applications at the top of the pile instead of at the bottom, diversifying the interview panel -- however effective/ineffective you think they are -- are based on the idea that the most effective candidate is often overlooked because of implicit biases. When I Googled these policies, the first link that came up, from an HR consulting group, (https://www.hr-consulting-group.com/hr-news/diversity-hiring-a-complete-guide-to-dei-recruitment) lists "Better Employee Performance" as the first benefit of DEI hiring practices.
(2) When Barack and Michelle Obama wrote about the SCOTUS affirmative action decision (https://barackobama.medium.com/our-statements-on-the-u-s-supreme-courts-decision-to-overturn-affirmative-action-2e161f52b5d1), their arguments were explicitly cast in terms of BOTH justice and merit: "for generations of students who had been systematically excluded from most of America’s key institutions" ~ BO; "it helped offer new ladders of opportunity for those who, throughout our history, have too often been denied a chance to show how fast they can climb" ~ MO.
(3) When Mark Cuban got into a twitter spat with Elon Musk about DEI, this is how he described DEI: "DEI does not mean you dont hire on merit. Of course you hire based on merit \\ Diversity - means you expand the possible pool of candidates as widely as you can. Once you have identified the candidates, you HIRE THE PERSON YOU BELIEVE IS THE BEST." (https://x.com/mcuban/status/1743332724889280726)
(4) When Sonia Sotomayor made her famous "Wise Latina" comment, the full statement was about leveraging one's experiences to make better judicial decisions: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life ... However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care."
It is true that there are many DEI advocates with various views, and many who will simply advocate on the basis of justice alone, disregarding merit or inquiry. But I don't think this is true of either the most *prominent* DEI advocates (e.g. the president of the united states, a progressive billionaire, or a SCOTUS judge) nor of many DEI policies.
That's fair enough, I may have painted with too broad a brush. A couple things, though:
- Justice AND inquiry is already quite a substantial departure from just inquiry. It suggests inquiry needs to "share" consideration with another good, creating a possibility for conflicts where inquiry might lose. Second, it assumes some portion of justice is closed off from inquiry because we already know what it is, which imports some major assumptions from the get-go.
- I generally try to avoid accusations of bad faith, and maybe it's more charitable to think of it as the natural human tendency toward inconsistency or juggling competing goods. But I certainly think there can be a motte and bailey dynamic where those who emphasize merit and inquiry in one setting pivot to "all knowledge is ideological" and "dismantling structures of oppression" in another.
Maybe a better way to think of it is that under DEI logic, inquiry is in the mix some of the time, but it's not the consistently overriding concern or North Star.
Yes, what we need in early American history is more paens to the founders. That’ll really uncover the truth about the Revolution!
Why make this your rallying cry as the Trump admin violates the law to shake down universities by withholding money? Seems like a bigger threat to academic freedom.
I can give you a principled and a pragmatic answer.
Principled: Because I think it’s true.
Pragmatic: Because my working theory is that if higher ed weren’t a functionally partisan institution it would have higher public trust and thus be less vulnerable to political attacks from opposing partisans.
This is a really rich post and I really appreciate it. But I'm going to be selective in only discussing some parts that I really want to discuss. So this part: "a conservative social scientist might be interested in how traditional gender roles provide meaning, status, or functional social scripts among the members in a given population, while a progressive would instead examine how these same roles facilitate various sorts of deprivation or exploitation." I'd say a good sociologist should do *both.* For a while in the sociology of punishment, scholars exploring the consequences of mass incarceration on families, neighborhoods, etc. discussed both the positive and negative consequences. I love the concept of "sociological ambivalence," which was used here (see esp Megan Comfort for making this explicit). Across several studies, we learned families of incarcerated folks have mixed feelings about their loved ones' incarceration. In some ways, it was better with them gone and in other ways it was worse--and for complex reasons. One major problem is the one you're addressing--there was very, very little work even investigating whether mass incarceration was good (different scholars looked at the impact on the crime rate, but not P&S/S of P scholars), and where you could twist it to do so (e.g., job creation) it was treated conspiratorially (the prison industrial complex). But the second problem is the one I'm concerned about, which is a more recently widespread problem: people stop talking about the positive aspects. Miller and Stuart's carceral citizenship is one of the last pieces to do it, along with a few pieces on health outcomes for prisoners by Uggen and co. Instead, we get stories about how mass incarceration is to blame for IPV by formerly incarcerated men (with no willingness to concede that maybe the men contributed to this outcome and no investigation into whether they did so before they went to prison--the blame analysis Felson wrote about). So I totally agree that scholars will be interested in different questions based on their life experiences and personal preferences/beliefs (and this is the strongest argument, in my view, for diversity arguments). But I also think (a) any study needs to consider the full scope--the limitations and costs of, as well as the opportunities and meaning people derive from, e.g., gender roles, and (b) to deal with gaps in the literature, we need more field-level efforts to engage in systematic analyses of society, not in a kind of path dependent way we've done, but in a clean-slate, how would we do this better if we stated over kind of way. But I'm enjoying the discussion! In the end, I really hope we end up seeing multiple models of reform across the country so we can see which is/are most effective, laboratory of democracy/free-market style!
Thanks for this! I agree that individually as well as collectively, we should be trying to paint as full a picture as possible of the phenomena we want to understand. One issue I didn’t really bring up in this piece, but do in my T&S paper, is that in some ways I don’t think ideology is as big a problem as we sometimes make it out to be, because blatantly ideological scholarship can be easily identified and dismissed. It’s not great that there’s so much of it, but it’s less likely to convince people to believe dumb things. Arguably, the bigger problem is actually scarcity—there’s an infinity of social reality out there that we could study, but we only learn about the pieces of it that social scientists care about and can get funded and published. This matters for the reasons you suggest: If everybody wants to study, say, overpolicing, and nobody cares about underpolicing, then the literature as a whole will wrongly communicate that only overpolicing is a problem. This holds even if each of the individual studies conducted is sound. The larger point being that even if individual researchers are committed to painting as full a picture as they can, limitations of resources, time, and interest will steer them in some directions over others, and thus homogeneity within communities of researchers will create larger distortions. Part of the goal with viewpoint diversity is simply to cover more of social reality. I like your idea of stepping back within the different subfields, taking stock of the gaps, and then orienting our inquiry toward greater coverage—though I suppose the million-dollar question then is how to institute that approach systematically in social research.
I was at a humanities conference last week and I urged everyone there (~200 people) to start identifying as 'conservative' and to encourage all their friends to. Why? You know why.
Thanks for this post! I'm still reading but one clarification: my concern is not that I think conservatives will treat the Shields' list as facts rather than hypotheses, but that promoters like Shields seem to be saying that, which leads to a misrepresentation of conservative scholars (as value-/belief-driven rather than driven by science) and reifies the assumption that people who are willing to explore these ideas must be conservative.
Sociology was pretty conservative in the US at one point as I understand it. The period of Perkins et al and structural functionalism.
I think the real issue is that people think such arguments will be weaponized against the left, and I think they're probably right. The argument "more conservatives would lead to better social science" and "this call for more conservatives will be weaponized" can both be true.
But then I'm a politics guy, so I view it thru that lens. "Good faith pointing out of problems doesn't mean the solutions will be good faith attempts to fix the problem.. In fact, the history of the last few decades tell us they usually won't be."
Nothing wrong with long pieces.
I guess I've heard a lot of hand-wringing about the weaponization of hiring conservatives, but I just haven't seen it myself and I'm not sure what it would even look like. There aren't all that many conservatives around, and the ones there are tend not to be especially aggressive or activist—or else they wouldn't have stuck around long enough to make it up the greasy pole of academia in the first place! Also, you could multiply conservative presence x10 from its current proportion and still have a left-tilted social science, so I'm not sure how weaponization would work even if it were the goal.
But perhaps this is just a failure of imagination on my part.
I don't suppose that would make a difference. But "social sciences are left wing bullshit" does seem to have lead to negative policies.
Perhaps we're talking past each other here, but for example:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/floridas-attacks-on-education-threaten-science/
Anyway. You're inside. I'm not. Just saying what it looks like from outside.
Well that's fair, and gets at Rubin's concern to an extent. There are lots of reform efforts afoot and they are not all equally healthy and constructive. Some are likely to lump the healthy and toxic ones together—maybe in bad faith sometimes, but they also may just be difficult to tell apart. Particularly, as you suggest, from the outside!
The thing that I see being criticized the most currently is the establishment of new academic units for "civics" that tend to hire more conservative-leaning scholars. In some cases though, those civics centers have generally hired strong academics (Florida and Texas for instance); others seem to have been hired without much in the way of scholarly credentials (e.g. the guy who scuffled with a journalist at Ohio State).
But this seems similar to what already has happened nationally with the establishment of left-leaning centers and departments on campuses over the years as well as various mandates either at the campus or state level (see: California) to take DEI-themed course(s) to help support those departments.
That said, I'm not sure of the relative wisdom of this approach either if the goal is truly truth-seeking education. And given the highly negative view of higher education on the right these days, it doesn't seem likely that there's going to be an influx of conservative PhDs anytime soon, so the academy is likely to remain broadly politically tilted left.
I think advocates of DEI also tend to think that their preferred hiring targets are the best people for the job, because diversity enhances inquiry.
But you're right to push back against "data driven rather than belief driven." That's a meaningless notion. Have you studied Bayesian epistemology? It makes it crystal clear that the way we interpret data is informed by our priors.
I half-agree. This is all painting with a broad brush, of course, and different DEI proponents will have different rationales. But in terms of the center of gravity, I think they do believe their preferred hiring targets are the best people for the job, but don’t think the job is inquiry, but rather something more like dismantling the structures of oppression.
Never taken a deep dive into Bayesian epistemology though I think I’m informed by it indirectly by drawing from people who draw from it. E.g., Keith Stanovich, Kevin Dorst.
I thought this was a great post but I also disagreed with the claim that DEI proponents are interested in justice over inquiry. A few examples:
(1) Basic DEI policy changes like using structured interviews, blind screening, evaluating minority applications at the top of the pile instead of at the bottom, diversifying the interview panel -- however effective/ineffective you think they are -- are based on the idea that the most effective candidate is often overlooked because of implicit biases. When I Googled these policies, the first link that came up, from an HR consulting group, (https://www.hr-consulting-group.com/hr-news/diversity-hiring-a-complete-guide-to-dei-recruitment) lists "Better Employee Performance" as the first benefit of DEI hiring practices.
(2) When Barack and Michelle Obama wrote about the SCOTUS affirmative action decision (https://barackobama.medium.com/our-statements-on-the-u-s-supreme-courts-decision-to-overturn-affirmative-action-2e161f52b5d1), their arguments were explicitly cast in terms of BOTH justice and merit: "for generations of students who had been systematically excluded from most of America’s key institutions" ~ BO; "it helped offer new ladders of opportunity for those who, throughout our history, have too often been denied a chance to show how fast they can climb" ~ MO.
(3) When Mark Cuban got into a twitter spat with Elon Musk about DEI, this is how he described DEI: "DEI does not mean you dont hire on merit. Of course you hire based on merit \\ Diversity - means you expand the possible pool of candidates as widely as you can. Once you have identified the candidates, you HIRE THE PERSON YOU BELIEVE IS THE BEST." (https://x.com/mcuban/status/1743332724889280726)
(4) When Sonia Sotomayor made her famous "Wise Latina" comment, the full statement was about leveraging one's experiences to make better judicial decisions: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life ... However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others. Other simply do not care."
It is true that there are many DEI advocates with various views, and many who will simply advocate on the basis of justice alone, disregarding merit or inquiry. But I don't think this is true of either the most *prominent* DEI advocates (e.g. the president of the united states, a progressive billionaire, or a SCOTUS judge) nor of many DEI policies.
That's fair enough, I may have painted with too broad a brush. A couple things, though:
- Justice AND inquiry is already quite a substantial departure from just inquiry. It suggests inquiry needs to "share" consideration with another good, creating a possibility for conflicts where inquiry might lose. Second, it assumes some portion of justice is closed off from inquiry because we already know what it is, which imports some major assumptions from the get-go.
- I generally try to avoid accusations of bad faith, and maybe it's more charitable to think of it as the natural human tendency toward inconsistency or juggling competing goods. But I certainly think there can be a motte and bailey dynamic where those who emphasize merit and inquiry in one setting pivot to "all knowledge is ideological" and "dismantling structures of oppression" in another.
Maybe a better way to think of it is that under DEI logic, inquiry is in the mix some of the time, but it's not the consistently overriding concern or North Star.
Yes, what we need in early American history is more paens to the founders. That’ll really uncover the truth about the Revolution!
Why make this your rallying cry as the Trump admin violates the law to shake down universities by withholding money? Seems like a bigger threat to academic freedom.
I can give you a principled and a pragmatic answer.
Principled: Because I think it’s true.
Pragmatic: Because my working theory is that if higher ed weren’t a functionally partisan institution it would have higher public trust and thus be less vulnerable to political attacks from opposing partisans.