Looking at Chicago, should my son worry about about this?
https://quillette.com/2018/09/07/academic-activists-send-a-published-paper-down-the-memory-hole/
The UC involvement in not allowing a conversation is troubling to my family. His interest in Chicago came in part from his dislike of the PC/SJW at the smaller similar schools he is looking at (Carleton, Smith). Now this? With so many people from Chicago involved?
Insofar as the U of C aspect of this matter, it seems to me to be limited to the role of the Math prof. She certainly spearheaded the effort to suppress the article in question. Was the mathematics in it so shoddy and disreputable that it deserved that treatment? Or was it merely that she didn’t like the paper’s conclusion? Others with more knowledge of the math part will have to answer that question. However, she surely had the right to make those representations, whether they were true or false. If her representations about the math were false then her association with the University of Chicago certainly becomes ironic and even perhaps embarrassing. So what? Many profs have said many silly and embarrassing things over many years. Academic freedom means the freedom to speak your mind. I believe that was what Zimmer was saying in refusing to intervene in the matter when requested by the author to do so.
mmmmm. Well, that’s interesting. You wrote: “Was the mathematics in it so shoddy and disreputable that it deserved that treatment? Or was it merely that she didn’t like the paper’s conclusion?”
Either way, the paper was reviewed by others and accepted for publication. A representative of UC actively worked to censor reviewed scholarship under that belief that talking about an idea could harm others. That is in DIRECT contradiction to the UC Dean Ellison’s excellent statement (in a letter to freshmen) that education means engaging in ideas that trouble you. You see the inconsistency in your argument…right? You can’t have it both ways. If education requires engagement (and I believe it does) you can’t have faculty out banning books.
You wrote “So what? Many profs have said many silly and embarrassing things over many years. Academic freedom means the freedom to speak your mind.” Yes! Agreed Yes! But that’s EXACTLY what this UC prof denied to others. She gets freedom to speak, he does not. She actively works to deny him the right to publish.
To put it a different way, how does Dr. Wilkinson’s actions differ from Middlebury students stopping Charles Murray? Or Berkeley trying to stop Ben Shapiro? I disagree with both but the answer to ideas that I disagree with is not censorship. But that’s exactly what Un Chicago is defending here.
@mathprodigy , there’s a big difference: those are events happening on the campuses of institutions in which the administration in each case had it in its power to exercise control. If the journals in question were published by the University of Chicago, you might have a point. But for Zimmer to have intervened in this case would have required him to do what exactly? Order the math prof to retract her views? Censure her for having expressed those views? You can’t believe that.
Perhaps you’re upset with the journals that first accepted the piece and then, apparently unprecedentedly, retracted their acceptances. If this article was being treated differently from all others, then your criticism of those journals might well be justified on free-speech principles. Indeed, I would agree with you.
You may also be right about the prof herself - though an assessment of the math would make a difference in any critique of her motivations and good faith. Do you know enough math to make that assessment?
However that may be, you need to give a concrete answer to the question of what Zimmer could properly have done in the facts of this particular case. It’s easy to bloviate, hard to apply principles to concrete realities.
Not well enough informed to take a position on this, but here is Prof. Wilkinson’s response:
Your son is looking at Smith?
Thanks, @hebegebe . If that statement accurately represents her position and actions in this matter, then I have no problem with what she did. She states very emphatically that she did not request that the paper be withdrawn from the first journal but only that it be opened up for critical replies and rebuttal. The author of the Quillette piece would have had no problem with that sort of intervention. I have to assume the honesty of Prof. Wilkinson’s statement. Perhaps the editor of the journal was seeking cover in having made the decision to suppress and threw her under the bus.
To the OP I will say this: That this U of C Professor felt the need to respond so promptly to this article and to so emphatically affirm her commitment to free speech ought to buck you up just a bit. To be on the wrong side of that issue at Chicago might not be a firing offence but would, I dare say, bring social disapproval down on your head. Good conservatives believe that that is the strongest of all sanctions!
I agree this leaves a really bad taste in the mouth, given that it involves a tenured UChicago prof. in a highly respected academic department.
The editors of the academic journals in question should have stuck to the true merits of the piece, not the politics of the day. They, not Amie Wilkerson or her knights in shining armor (hubby and Daddy) are ultimately responsible for the content of their periodicals.
Whether he says something or not, Zimmer should be concerned if his field is becoming politicized. Applicants who are considering a math major - and their parents - are well within reason to consider this a potential drawback (if only to avoid the wrath of some in the department). Frankly, anyone interested in academic integrity should hesitate. No one wants walk on eggshells or find out - too late - that their BA paper will be dismissed on political grounds.
Also, unless Zimmer can provide a coherent response to concerned students and their families, OP’s DS might want to consider MIT.
Oh, good grief.
Nobody who makes a good-faith argument and supports it with robust evidence is being censored at UChicago. Even bad-faith arguments supported mostly by hot air are tolerated. For evidence to this effect, I refer you to the writings of one Rachel Fulton Brown.
A light sampling: https://newrepublic.com/minutes/140786/university-chicago-professor-gone-off-milo-yiannopouliss-opponents-calling-spineless-cnts
She has an entire section of her website dedicated to Milo Yiannopoulos: https://fencingbearatprayer.blogspot.com/p/milo.html
But despite Prof. Fulton Brown’s extracurricular activites, nobody is asking “Is UChicago too concerned with ‘triggering the libs?’”
She even gets into lengthy arguments with random students on Facebook. If nothing else, that suggests tenured professors have a lot of time on their hands.
In my personal experience, there’s a set of people who don’t agree with a set of political or social views, and there’s a set of people who label those views as “PC” or “SJW.” The former group disagrees with advocates for views they disagree with, and will say so - with evidence and a reasoned argument; the latter asks bad-faith questions like “Why do you keep bringing up race?” or “Why does everything have to be about gender?” or “I grew up poor. Where’s my white privilege?” This group also tends to believe “triggering the libs” is an effective form of political persuasion. They make up the ascendant alt-light faction of the College Republicans, and the rest of the university does its best to ignore them.
In general, the College will not get in the way of a well-formulated argument supported by evidence. If you are an economic conservative or a fan of John Locke, you might get into a few debates with fellow students but nobody is going to shun you. If you listen to Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones, you’ll be roundly mocked because Rush Limbaugh is a jerk and Alex Jones is a nutcase.
If you identify as “not a SJW” then that’s problematic, but you’re hardly alone. If you identify as “anti-SJW,” you’re in bad company that includes Charlie Kirk, Milo, and a host of others. Either way, if you want to argue politics without well-reasoned arguments or credible evidence to back up those views, you are going to have a very bad time.
Yeah, I don’t think it will be a fit.
It feels as if so many of these “liberals everywhere aaaah!” posts are made in bad faith by people with few posts making the same argument.
@JBStillFlying , are you suggesting that a student in the U of C mathematics department doing work somewhat along the lines of this paper would be flunked or otherwise find it impossible to do that work inside the department, simply because of the political implications? Certainly I see the problem of doing that work for this particular prof, but wouldn’t there be a sufficient number of other ones up for it, possibly even some who identify as un-p.c. if not actually anti-p.c. according to Dun’s taxonomy? Unless, of course, the work really is mathematically or otherwise unsound. God save the University of Chicago (because no one else will) if work is being suppressed by a monolithic p.c. culture even in the field of mathematics.
@DunBoyer - interesting you mention Fulton-Brown. Her actions resulted in at least two very severe statements published on the UChicago website: her own history department, and the English department. The difference is that while History restricted its comments to senior (tenured) faculty, English compelled - or at the very least gave the appearance of compelling - speech by including junior (untenured) faculty signatures. Violation of academic protocol and another example of how speech or ideas can be controlled in academia.
@marlowe1 - the problem would be that a thesis otherwise approved - or peer reviewed article accepted for publication - somehow incurs the wrath of someone who finds it politically intolerable. While that might fly in a partisan environment such as a political committee or candidate, it’s not an appropriate standard for academia.
To your earlier comment - @mathprodigy is correct: It was reviewed by others and deemed acceptable for publication. And it WAS accepted for such. While you, or I, or @mathprodigy - or Prof. Wilkerson - can’t make that assessment, the scholars asked to referee the paper most certainly can. From anyone else on the outside to interfere with that process is highly inappropriate - especially someone not even in the same field. Had Wilkerson developed a highly controversial or “hot button” solution to some mathematical quandry (as happens in academia) you can be sure that she would NOT be advocating her work be reviewed by “outside experts” but would prefer that it be assessed by those who are versed in the field.
And Benson Farb’s statement is here: https://www.math.uchicago.edu/~farb/statement. Farb clearly had a lot to do with the disappearing of the paper at the New York Journal of Mathematics.
A few things:
First, anyone who thinks that Dean Ellison’s letter reflects a universal opinion at Chicago, either among the faculty or among the students, has another think coming. The University of Chicago is a place where conservative positions get more respect and more respectful debate than at some other places – but those other places for the most part are nowhere near as intolerant as the right-wing victimization crowd likes to pretend – but it’s a place where conservative positions will get lots of pushback.
Second, Wilkinson’s statement is barely credible, unless Hill was lying about her social media posts.
Third, Farb’s statement – apart from the implication that his spouse had nothing to do with the positions he was taking – is a lot more credible, and seems a lot more honest. It is consistent with the abstract of the paper linked in Wilkinson’s statement, and indeed with Hill’s own description of it: a simple, intuitive argument how differential variability might arise under natural selection, confirmed in the abstract by relatively simple math, and (deliberately) lacking any engagement with key questions like whether the sex differences necessary for the model to be relevant exist anywhere in the natural world, or whether differential variability actually exists, or whether if it exists it extends to the characteristics that people find controversial. For Hill, the absence of such discussions is a virtue – he is not supporting the differential variability hypothesis as it relates to intelligence, he is just providing a simple model of how it might arise under certain conditions.
I can see that having value, provided the math is interesting, but I tend to believe Farb’s statement that the math is simple and really beside the point, nothing that a theoretical math journal would ever care about publishing other than to engage in surreptitious political polemics. In which case the editorial board ought to be behind it, and this one wasn’t, although Farb admits that there was a substantial minority faction that wanted to publish the paper. Hill wasn’t really doing math, and he wasn’t really doing evolutionary biology, either. The reviewers were not people who knew anything about the complexities of the field in which Hill was dabbling, and thus were not appropriate reviewers for the paper.
Fourth, I think everyone would agree that it would be a lot more enlightening to read the paper and to read detailed critiques of it. I am a little suspicious of Wilkinson’s statement that that’s what she wanted, but it’s not like Hill is a disinterested, thoroughly credible source, either. It’s unforgivable if, as Hill claims, the paper’s ephemeral life on the NYJM’s website prevents it from ever being published elsewhere, but I think that’s a bunch of hooey.
“However that may be, you need to give a concrete answer to the question of what Zimmer could properly have done in the facts of this particular case. It’s easy to bloviate, hard to apply principles to concrete realities.”
When it “mattered” (ie big sums of money involved) Zimmer has involved himself directly with departmental decisions. Not really clear what he could have done in this case directly, even if it were a UChicago publication. Journals, like academic departments, are typically given a lot of leeway (and perhaps enough rope to hang themselves). What he might have done, since this involved another member of his own academic department, was to use the opportunity to re-affirm the University of Chicago’s commitment to academic freedom and free speech - and to CLARIFY that this freedom does not give someone license to shut down work they don’t agree with (unless on clear methodological grounds). No one is going to have a problem with that. If anything it can settle the little brouhaha (and yes, there is one, which is why Amie Wilkerson came out with her statement) that this issue has caused in some academic circles. And it would be consistent with other public responses that UChicago faculty have made about the offensive behavior of their colleagues.
If Professor Brown wants to make incendiary political statements without being criticized, she should seek out one of those safe spaces she and Milo constantly deride. If she’s free to say this stuff in a public forum, her colleagues are free to say she’s wrong.
Junior faculty signing letters is not a new phenomenon here.
The university has run, and continues to run, Fulton Brown’s writing in several university-sponsored publications. That includes one article in Sightings, a magazine at the Div School, that met Breitbart’s standards; they quickly shared it. Another professor invited Steve Bannon to speak on campus earlier this year. Richard Spencer attended UChicago in the early aughts, and felt comfortable enough to stick around and complete an M.A. in the Humanities.
At this rate, I expect a headline like “Is Bob Jones University Censoring Conservatives?” before the year is out.
@DunBoyer Don’t forget “Spicey” - I believe he was invited by Axelrod.
Did Bannon actually ever speak? Or is inviting someone to a talk that doesn’t materialize due to community pressure evidence of “tolerance” in your eyes?
I do believe Prof. Brown was criticized? You missed my point. The senior faculty of the history department handled it appropriately. The senior faculty of English spearheaded a project and compelled the very people beholden to them for tenure, to join in. Whatever your views, surely you can’t find that to be appropriate? I could see where the tables were turned and you’d be outraged. Do the ends justify the means in some cases?
Your two posts have very decisively answered OP’s original question. TLDR: Yes.
“First, anyone who thinks that Dean Ellison’s letter reflects a universal opinion at Chicago, either among the faculty or among the students, has another think coming. The University of Chicago is a place where conservative positions get more respect and more respectful debate than at some other places – but those other places for the most part are nowhere near as intolerant as the right-wing victimization crowd likes to pretend – but it’s a place where conservative positions will get lots of pushback.”
I agree with most of this, but what’s this equating of “pushback” with “conservative” positions? Are “progressive” positions now accepted uncritically at the University of Chicago or are you saying a good number of the faculty could only wish it were so? If that’s truly the case, then - yeah - OP, check out MIT. They are ranked better than UChicago in just about everything anyway.
LOL. Is there anything more PC than getting mad about a paper being rejected on academic grounds because you happen to like the political implications of it? So much for claiming only the left does that.
LOL. The professor only asked that the article’s ideas be opened to debate/critique - just like every idea at UChicago. If
@HydeSnark - What paper are you referring to? Hill’s paper had twice been reviewed and accepted for publication (the 2nd time as a revised and not with the co-author) - it was rescinded, not “rejected”. Papers get rejected all the time for publication based, to a large extent, on referee comments - mostly on “academic grounds” as you call it. What happened here was quite different.
Has any one on the thread expressed a preference for or against the article itself either on methodological or political grounds? Not sure anyone has even read the article. @JHS probably came the closest to guessing some relatively rational basis for the second rescind, but even that doesn’t get around the astonishing events that transpired.
I tried to post this yesterday, but I think CC flagged the WordPress link.
Tim Gowers at Cambridge wrote a couple of blog posts on this. These are the links I tried to post.
An excerpt from the second:
The long and short of it, from what I could glean as a non-mathematician, is that the authors wrote a mathematical model, and made a series of bad assumptions about evolutionary biology that led the model towards a specific conclusion. The math itself, for the most part, isn’t bad - though Gowers is puzzled by one key aspect. Assuming it’s correct, the model supports a certain hypothesis - if you make a certain set of assumptions about evolutionary biology. Gowers finds these assumptions highly suspect at best.
This article was submitted to a couple of journals with less-than-stringent peer-review processes (the Intelligencer seems to actively court opinions and ‘hot takes’). These were both math journals reviewing an evolutionary biology paper, so they didn’t question many of the paper’s assumptions - until the paper was slated for publication.
At this point, a couple of UChicago professors expressed concerns. The paper was examined by the full editorial board of the NYJM and rescinded, while the editor of the Intelligencer decided not to publish it.
Hard pass on speculating about people’s motives, because I don’t know the math well enough to judge either way.