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S10 E2: Musa al-Gharbi: We have never been woke
23 Plays6 months ago
Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and Assistant Professor of Communication and Journalism at Stony Brook University. He researches how society thinks and talks about race, inequality, national security, and other contentious issues in the public sphere. His new book We Have Never Been Woke, exposes and takes on the contradictions of chattering class elites, who simultaneously decry inequality and perpetuate it. We discuss his book, as well as other issues related to the politics of higher education.
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Transcript
Introduction to Free Mind Podcast
00:00:07
Speaker
Welcome back to the Free Mind podcast, where we explore topics in Western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess.
Who is Musa Algarbi?
00:00:25
Speaker
My guest today is Musa Algarbi.
00:00:28
Speaker
Moussa Algarbi is a sociologist and assistant professor of communication and journalism at Stony Brook University. He researches how society thinks and talks about race, inequality, national security, and other contentious issues in the public sphere. His new book, We Have Never Been Woke, exposes and takes on the contradictions of chattering class elites, who simultaneously decry inequality and perpetuate it.
00:00:55
Speaker
we discuss this book, as well as other issues related to the politics of higher education. Musa Al Garvey, welcome to the Free Mind podcast.
What is 'We Have Never Been Woke' about?
00:01:03
Speaker
Thank you for having me. Yeah, I've wanted to have you on for a long time. I really want to talk to you, I really want to talk to you about your book, but I'm excited to talk to you in general because you're somebody that everything you write
00:01:18
Speaker
I probably agree with it like 70% of the time, but I always find it interesting and thought provoking, even when I disagree with that. Like, ooh, I don't like that, but it's a good argument. So I admit that I enjoyed reading it. But I'll admit I am sympathetic to the thesis of your book. So let me just start by reading the summary, because I think it's actually a really nice set up. So this is a summary from Princeton University Press that I think is really nicely set up the conversation.
00:01:48
Speaker
So the book is called We Have Never Been Woke. Society has never been more egalitarian in theory. Prejudice is taboo and diversity is strongly valued. At the same time, social and economic inequality have exploded. In We Have Never Been Woke, Moussa Algarbi argues that these trends are closely related, each tied to the rise of a new elite, the symbolic capitalists.
00:02:12
Speaker
In education, media, nonprofits, and beyond, members of this elite work primarily with words, ideas, images, and data, and are very likely to identify as allies of anti-racist, feminist, LGBTQ, and other progressive causes.
00:02:27
Speaker
Their dominant ideology is wokeness. And while their commitment to equality is sincere, they actively benefit from and perpetuate the inequalities they decry. Indeed, their egalitarian credentials help them gain more power and status, often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged.
00:02:46
Speaker
So I think it's a really good summary of the thesis and people who know your writing will be familiar, I think, with parts of this thesis. And I almost think of it as a woke critique of wokeness. Is that fair?
How do symbolic capitalists perpetuate inequality?
00:03:01
Speaker
Yeah, it's funny. I was talking to Camille Foster at this party and he started talking about
00:03:09
Speaker
We started talking about things like systemic or institutionalized inequality. He was kind of skeptical of the idea, and I delivered a spirited defense of why that concept is actually useful analytically, even if it's sometimes taken to some weird places and all of this kind of stuff. And then at the end of the conversation anyway, he was like, huh, you're a lot more left than I thought you were going to be. And I think in general,
00:03:34
Speaker
I do talk about this kind of explicitly towards the end of the book that in many ways what the project of the book is, is to take some of the arguments of postcolonial theory or queer theory or sociological institutional analyses and things like this and just take them to their logical conclusions. Because one of the problems a lot of times is social analysts
00:04:03
Speaker
are insufficiently reflexive, which is to say when we're analyzing social phenomenon, we often tend to focus on those people other than us. We kind of turn the analytic lens to people we don't like and we don't agree with. And we typically don't analyze ourselves or the institutions we're affiliated with and the kind of actors and causes that resonate with us.
Are social analyses consistent across groups?
00:04:28
Speaker
We don't analyze them.
00:04:29
Speaker
using the same, in the same way, using the same analytical lenses. So for instance, as a quick example that I talk about briefly in the book, when sociologists want to understand something like, when they look at something like people of the same ethnicity, preferring to hire and work with and promote people who share their ethnicity.
00:04:55
Speaker
Yeah. When they look at those, when they analyze those kinds of homophilic tendencies, and they're looking at non-whites, they're often analyzed in terms of solidarity and leveraging social capital. And this is praised. It's praised when black leaders try to help black new hires kind of move up the ladder in all of this. When whites engage in the exact same behaviors, they're analyzed through a completely different analytical lens. There's nothing about
00:05:24
Speaker
Solidarity, there's nothing about leveraging social capital. It's not praised. It's analyzed through the lenses of racial discrimination and white supremacy, and those same behaviors are condemned. And the same thing is true when we analyze men versus women or Republicans versus Democrats. Right. Left-wing authoritarianism wasn't acknowledged until recently, right? Yeah, absolutely.
What insights are revealed through postcolonial, queer, and sociological theories?
00:05:44
Speaker
And so part of what the project of this book is, is taking these analytic frameworks that can be useful and insightful,
00:05:51
Speaker
And turning them to us, turning them to people who produce these kinds of knowledge economy outputs. And the results are quite illuminating. I think a lot of readers will be surprised by what they see. But yeah, so in a way it is kind of a
00:06:09
Speaker
You could characterize it as a woke critique of wokeness, but it's a little bit of that. Yeah, there's a joke I've heard a few times in moderate and conservative circles that critical theory is critical of everything but itself, right? Yeah. So let's dig into that because... So for starters, let me ask you the following, right? How much...
00:06:39
Speaker
of what you're describing in your book is really just an instance of what I think people call social licensing.
00:06:48
Speaker
Like there's a trope during the Me Too movement about the feminist guy who's in moonlights as a sexual harasser. Is it just that on a big scale? Or is there something more unintentional about it? Because certainly one of the things that you say that I want to ask you about is
00:07:14
Speaker
this point that the people who, the symbolic capitalists are sincere in their beliefs in anti-racism and concerned about equality, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So there's a few tensions that the book kind of explores that in depth. One of them is that it's absolutely the case that symbolic capitalists are sincere in their commitments to anti-racism, feminism, things like this.
00:07:41
Speaker
People who work in fields like academia and journalism and so on are cynical when they say, when they express concern about African Americans or LGBTQ people or women and so on. The problem is that we have these sincere egalitarian commitments, but we also have these sincere commitments to being social climbers and to being elites. Like we want to be elites. We want people to refer to us. We want to have a different social status than Joe Le Plummer,
00:08:08
Speaker
We want to exert influence over society. We want to be better off financially than other people. We want our children to reproduce our own class position or you can be better off and so on and so forth. And this desire to be an elite is also sincere and is in fundamental tension with the desire to be an egalitarian, right? You've got an egalitarian social climber. Those are just, that's a contradiction in terms. And so that's one of the problems is that we do have this sincere commitment to egalitarianism
00:08:37
Speaker
but that's not the only sincere commitment we have. We also have sincere commitments to being elites and to climbing up the ladder and exerting our power and influence over other people and so on and so forth. And that's not really compatible with a lot of the egalitarian traits we have. Another, oh, sorry, go ahead.
00:08:52
Speaker
I want to ask you a few more meta questions, but first I think it might be helpful for listeners to get into some examples.
How do symbolic capitalists benefit from inequality?
00:09:03
Speaker
Can you give some vivid examples of how symbolic capitalists benefit from and perpetuate inequality?
00:09:13
Speaker
From what I know you're writing, some of those examples are maybe tangential to the beliefs that symbolic capitalists purport to have. The underpaid Uber driver drives you around and the underpaid DoorDash driver brings you your food. That may have nothing to do with your
00:09:34
Speaker
your professed wokeness, but maybe as a systematic inequality that you're benefiting from. But then on the other side, you're creating a system of etiquette, basically, right? With a lot of the verbal aspects of wokeness and kind of the...
00:09:54
Speaker
histrionic politeness is maybe a pejorative way to put it, that maybe do create barriers. And Rob Henderson has also written powerfully about this. So can you give some examples of where the symbolic wokeness itself perpetuates inequality, and then where symbolic capitalists perpetuate inequality in other aspects of their lives, maybe that's not directly connected to their beliefs?
00:10:17
Speaker
Yeah, so I'll go in reverse order. So chapter three of the book is about, so oftentimes when symbolic capitalists try to think about elites or who benefits from the social order and all of this kind of stuff, we focus on the top 1%.
00:10:31
Speaker
The millionaires and the billionaires. That's what Bernie Sanders used to say until he was a millionaire. The billionaires. But in any case, as I show in the book, if you want to understand who benefits from the system and how, you can't just look at the top 1%. You actually have to look at basically the top 20%. When you look at who's responsible for the declines in social mobility, when you look at how it is that the 1% exert their power and influence over society.
00:11:01
Speaker
Who is it that's laundering their money and laundering their reputations and helping them achieve the things that they're practically doing in the world? It's actually people who run their nonprofits and media organizations and things like this, people like us. And so it's actually impossible even to understand how millionaires and billionaires exert influence over society without accounting for some public capitalists. But setting that aside, when you look at just who financially profits,
00:11:26
Speaker
from the prevailing order. Who are the winners in the contemporary society? Who are the losers? Often, the people who are actually losing and suffering the most in the knowledge economy, people who are left out in the knowledge economy, people who fly over country, people in small towns, people who are not college educated, and so people from less affluent backgrounds, and so on and so forth.
00:11:47
Speaker
We actually leveraged social justice discourse to villainize those people and to say those people deserve their suffering and they deserve to be excluded. Oh, you're suffering? Oh, you deserve it because you have the wrong attitudes about race or gender or sexual. Yeah, you're the deplorables, right? Yeah, you deserve your suffering. If anything, you have more power and influence than you should. You're not marginalized enough.
What is the impact of elite spaces on marginalized groups?
00:12:08
Speaker
And so we actually leveraged social justice discourse to justify why the losers in the prevailing order deserve to lose and why people like us deserve to lose.
00:12:16
Speaker
So that's one way in which another way in which this plays out though, as you noted, is it's absolutely the case that when you look at the distribution of attitudes across society, people who are lower income, who are from less advantaged backgrounds, who are immigrants, who are racial and ethnic minorities, religious minorities, and so on and so forth, they actually tend to be on average significantly more socially conservative than the moderates.
00:12:45
Speaker
And they tend to be more religious and religiously observant. And so in a lot of spaces like higher ed or journalism that are dominated by relatively affluent urban and suburban white people who are liberal, in many cases, they create an atmosphere that's hostile towards socially conservative or religious views and in their minds. I think they assume that this will primarily purge those privileged, you know, white people's regressive whites, whatever, but the people in practice
00:13:15
Speaker
the people who tend to benefit, who tend to suffer the most when you create an atmosphere that's hostile towards those views. Are people from less advantaged backgrounds? Are there people who didn't go to elite schools or who didn't grow up in relatively affluent backgrounds where they learned the proper social signaling that you don't say colored people, you say people of color, or that you use even better would be something like
00:13:46
Speaker
underrepresented minority, or URM, and so on and so forth. And in fact, there's a lot of empirical research that shows, and this is actually one of the ways that a lot of diversity initiatives go awry, when you make it easier to punish or fire or censor people on the basis of them crossing these, saying the wrong things or feeling the wrong. Yeah, the people who tend to suffer most actually are people who are already underrepresented in
00:14:14
Speaker
Alexandra Dobbin and, sorry, Alexandra Kalev and Frank Dobbin have a great study they did in Harvard Business Review, for instance, that shows that when companies create grievance procedures that make it easier to punish and eliminate managers who say or do the wrong thing, actually the people who are most likely to get fired are black managers.
00:14:41
Speaker
followed by Hispanic managers. Asian managers are a little bit less, but white managers are not affected at all. And Jennie Smith Derson had a similar article, I believe in Harvard Law Review, that talked about how when the Title IX policies under Obama, you know, got, you know, lowered the standard of proof, got very permissive for punishing people, it was disproportionately black men that were affected by that.
00:15:08
Speaker
Yeah, and I did an analysis for Reason magazine, where I similarly looked at, when you look at faculty who are fired for political speech, again, a lot of times, many people on the left in academia think that if you make it easier to fire people who say the wrong political thing, that that will purge conservatives and it'll get rid of, you know, we'll have a more diverse and inclusive and, you know, etc.
00:15:34
Speaker
In fact, the professors who are most likely to get fired for political speech are African-American professors, non-white professors in general, religious minorities, and people who are adjunct and contingent faculty, which tend to be people who went to less elite schools and who are from less affluent backgrounds, non-traditional affluent backgrounds, the kinds of people like me who went through to Columbia
00:15:59
Speaker
I'm from a non-traditional academic background, but I also have a PhD from Columbia University. People with PhDs from Columbia University are not the kind of people who are most likely to get affected. Would the following be kind of a pithy summary of what you just said, which is that
00:16:24
Speaker
to be able to punish people for speech, you have to be in power. Yeah.
00:16:32
Speaker
And therefore, by definition, censorship will always favor whoever's in power. And so the only time when it would be rational to favor censorship is if you think you're in power, right?
Does censorship backfire on minorities?
00:16:45
Speaker
Yeah. And this is actually a mistake that a lot of people make when they pass censorious laws is they assume that people like them will be in power forever. The problem is when you create this kind of a tool, even if you're in power now,
00:16:57
Speaker
chances are that other people will be in power at some point who you disagree with and may use these same tools against you. But yes, absolutely. Censorship is always and only, pretty much. People deploying, people in power, deploying that power against people with less power than them. It's hard to censor people who are more powerful than you. And in fact, you can, so this is this is just a kind of chronic error that people make. It's pretty much always and only going to be
00:17:25
Speaker
people who are already institutionally vulnerable or underrepresented, who are going to suffer the most from censorious regimes. Even the cases where people seem to be that are often described as people punching up. So there are lots of cases of
00:17:38
Speaker
symbolic capitalists canceling ordinary people because of some interaction they had that was recorded and disseminated online, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, there was a famous example in 2020 of the blue collar worker, I forget his industry, who was flicking a cigarette out of his window and someone thought he was making a white nationalism sign. Turns out he was Hispanic. That would be kind of an example of what he was driving, right? Yeah, at Smith College, they had a janitor that got punished because
00:18:08
Speaker
students argued that he was racist, that they were racist in some way or whatever. There's a lot of these cases. You can see of affluent people punching down at normal people. It's not too often that normal people successfully cancel elites. Even the cases that people like to come up with of punching up, it's just usually some constellation of pretty advantaged people
00:18:35
Speaker
working together to purge someone who's even more advantaged, but there's almost no cases of just ordinary joes out in the world successfully purging or collapsing elites. Or they're punching up in one narrow sense, like I've seen examples up close of non-white female full professors bullying
00:18:58
Speaker
white male junior professors and saying that they're punching up. Well, actually, so this is the point of my book is that it's actually what we.
00:19:08
Speaker
What symbolic capitalists often tend to do is actually think about structural conditions like who's actually in power, who actually wields power. Part of the reason why they have this blindness is because we often tend to exempt from analysis elites. For instance, when we talk about elites, we tend to talk about Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk.
00:19:31
Speaker
not Oprah or Jay-Z, who are also billionaires. So when we're railing against the billionaires, we're not railing against Oprah and Jay-Z, we're railing against Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. But the problem with this is insofar as we exclude from analysis elites who are non-white, non-cisgender, who are religious minorities, and so on and so forth, if we exclude those people from analysis,
00:20:00
Speaker
The problem with that is that the elite strata in America is growing more and more diverse. There are a lot more women who are in positions of power and influence. There are a lot more non-whites. There are a lot more religious minorities and immigrants and disabled people and LGBTQ people and so on and so forth who are in positions of power.
Why is symmetric analysis of elite behavior important?
00:20:19
Speaker
And so if you exclude all of those people from analysis and you have this increasingly narrow and impoverished understanding of who benefits from the social order and how, why social orders persist,
00:20:30
Speaker
and so on and so forth. And so one of the things that I emphasize throughout the book is it's actually really important to not just single out white people or men or whatever for unique analysis. It's actually important to symmetrically analyze the behaviors of non-white elites. The fact that you're not white doesn't negate the fact that you're an elite. And so this is the problem that, but a lot of times we try to leverage, this is another example of how
00:20:59
Speaker
leveraging social people, sometimes leverage social justice discourses, and modes of social analysis in ways that mystify or obscure social realities instead of clarifying them. So let me ask you two follow-up questions about that. And one is, how much of the pattern you're describing boils down to
00:21:26
Speaker
just the history of the last 50 to 70 years in this country being ones where, on average, the importance of race as a stratum of unequal opportunity has declined, not as fast as we'd like, in some dimensions, not as much as people think.
How do profession and family structure influence inequality?
00:21:46
Speaker
Whereas, since about the 70s, by many measures, although there's some debate about
00:21:52
Speaker
year to year dynamics of it and how much and all that. But by many measures since the 70s, class inequality has increased. So how much of what you're describing just comes down to, you know, not using the, not focusing on the right axis of inequality versus something kind of more pernicious than that.
00:22:11
Speaker
Well, actually one thing that's interesting and actually, as I show in the book, actually what's probably actually more predictive and influential than class in a contemporary economy. So what's more predictive than the kind of socioeconomic rank that you were born into is what professions you're a part of and what professions your parents are a part of. And family structure also, right? I'm thinking of the episode I did with Brad Wilcox.
00:22:38
Speaker
Oh, sure, sure. I mean, things like family structure matter. And again, things like class also matter. But things like educational attainment in a profession that you're a part of and professions that your parents are a part of actually are some of the most predictable. And they predict a lot of this other stuff like family structure and so on, as Rob Henderson and others have highlighted in one of the interesting contradictions.
00:23:03
Speaker
of symbolic capitalists is that we're some of the people who are most likely to disparage traditional families or write off the significance of traditional families. But in fact, we're some of the people who are most likely to have hailed ourselves from traditional families and to be producing traditional families of our own.
00:23:22
Speaker
But yeah, so professions, the symbolic professions have actually become an important means of transmitting inequality. Things like college degrees increasingly shape who is worth listening to, and actually this is one of the core social tensions that we see. So for instance, in a lot of small towns and stuff like this, there are all sorts of people who run used car dealership chains or
00:23:47
Speaker
or grocery store chains or have some other small business or something like this. It used to be in the past that those people would be well-respected in their community and they would get a lot of deference and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But today, the kids aren't looking to emulate those people. They're looking at people in big cities and entertainment and knowledge economy, professions and stuff like this. And so wealth actually doesn't give a lot of those people the same kind of symbolic capital that it used to.
00:24:14
Speaker
And there's a lot of resentment about that. That's actually one of the key sources of kind of social tension right now is that the sheer amount of money you make actually doesn't influence the kind of, doesn't determine the kind of influence you have over society to the extent that it used to credentials actually matter more, especially credentials from elite institutions like Harvard and Yale and whatever.
00:24:37
Speaker
And so that's why the guy who owns the used car dealership will probably bend over backwards to try to get his own kids through Yale or Columbia or something like this. So let me tie a couple of these threads together. You mentioned Rob Henderson's stuff on luxury beliefs. You were just talking about how wealth and symbolic social status don't always go together.
Is the median voter socially liberal and economically conservative?
00:24:59
Speaker
And then you were talking about how
00:25:01
Speaker
People who are economically disadvantaged and symbolically disadvantaged in our society tend to be, for example, more socially conservative. So let's bring that all together and into a empirical pattern that I believe you and I have both written about, which is that there's this idea in elite circles that the median voter is a social liberal and an economic conservative, and in truth, it's the exact opposite of that, right?
00:25:27
Speaker
And when I always try to explain the intuition of that to students and in talks, combined with the pattern that the extremes on both sides are disproportionately rich, white, and educated, I'll say if you're
00:25:41
Speaker
If you're living on the margins, politics affects your life in a visceral way, right? You're not going to do experiments with getting rid of the police, for example, right? But if you're on the extremes and you're a political hobbyist, which is also a disproportionately a trait of people in the extremes, politics is a shirt, and you want your shirt to be more colorful and attention grabbing than everyone else's shirt, because that's how you gain status, right? And I think this may be why academia is so
00:26:05
Speaker
susceptible to, you know, faddish, faddish luxury beliefs, right, is that we are for good reason, I think, insulated from immediate negative consequences of having bad ideas. And so combine that with the incentive to get attention, and you have issues.
Do symbolic capitalists manage reputation over independent thought?
00:26:22
Speaker
So
00:26:23
Speaker
How much of it is that? How much of the problem is the incentives of symbolic capitalists by virtue of their professions are to have attention getting faddish ideas more so than making people's lives better? One of the unique things about the symbolic professions is that
00:26:47
Speaker
The key way that you succeed in a lot of these professions is by winning the esteem of your peers and kind of differentiating yourself from your peers and so on and so forth. And so we're much more oriented than a lot of other people and a lot of other types of jobs in trying to manage our status and our reputation and have people on. And in fact, this is one of the things that's striking that
00:27:17
Speaker
I spend a lot of time talking about in the book and that'll probably be, uh, spicily received. This is a spicy podcast. Let's see. Um, so, okay. So when you look at, at, at dynamics that are often, um, uh, dominate symbolic capitalist spaces, things like, um, people going viral and, and then, um, being canceled or, or things, uh, kind of, uh, blowing up quickly and then, or, or then then falling into irrelevance and, and so on and so forth.
00:27:47
Speaker
These kinds of dynamics are really acute and pronounced in our kinds of symbolic capitalist spaces, but they're not what you would expect in a world where in institutions that are dominated by people who follow the facts wherever they lead and think carefully and form their conclusions based on
00:28:06
Speaker
These are trends that you see, dynamics that you see when people instinctively and reactively just imitate the people. Right, changing your mind is good in science, but this person who had a bad opinion and apologized for it should still lose his job, right? And so what I show in the book is that we've...
00:28:22
Speaker
from the beginning of the symbolic profession. So going back to like the interwar period, the period in between World War I and World War II, since that period when a lot of these professions were formed in a recognizably modern form.
Does academia foster conformity over independent thinking?
00:28:35
Speaker
Since then, we've often defined ourselves as people who defy convention and follow the truth wherever it leads and we're kind of independent pre-thinkers and so on and so forth. But when you look at who academia actually selects for,
00:28:57
Speaker
in higher ed how do you get into a school like harvard well those are the people who show up to class every day and they do all of their homework on time and in accordance with the specifications and they work really hard on it and they get good grades and they're really proud of their grades and they think they say something important about them and they they really want to please and impress their teachers and they do impress them and they get nice glowing letters of recommendation right and they take part in all of the good extracurriculars and they avoid getting in trouble at all or getting suspended or
00:29:13
Speaker
It tends to be people who are highly conscientious conformists.
00:29:23
Speaker
or arrested or anything like that. That's how you end up at a school like Hartford. There's a contradiction that's really interesting where the... I often warn my graduate students about this. I tell them, in academia, all of the short-term incentives are for risk aversion and all the long-term incentives are for risk-loving. The distribution of
00:29:44
Speaker
output in academia is more right skewed than a log normal. My PhD advisor, one of them who's I think the most cited ecologist alive now, he used to say, if you're lucky, you'll be remembered for one idea at the end of your career. In terms of the long term,
00:30:05
Speaker
The rational strategy is focused like a laser on what's the most important thing. My PhD advisor used to say to me, you go to his grad students and say, what's the most important question in your field? And then you come up with an answer and he'd say, why aren't you working on it? Well, and as you say, the incentive structures are often
00:30:27
Speaker
often in the short term and medium term off the flip opposite. And so so like, for instance, the advice that I've always gotten throughout my entire academic career, well intentioned people who are trying to kind of make sure that I didn't get cancelled like I did.
00:30:44
Speaker
and eventually had a job. Just a quick sidebar for those of our listeners who don't know your career as well as I do. You were at one of the big schools in Arizona and you wrote something about the America's war in the Middle East that got conservatives to think that you were an Islamist or something and you were canceled. Yeah, yeah. They portrayed me as an anti-American radicalist. They talked about me
00:31:12
Speaker
a lot on Fox News and other places like this. And then I was a contingent faculty member at the time.
00:31:19
Speaker
my, even though I had glowing teaching recommendations and I was publishing more in the field than actual professors and so on and so forth, my teaching contract was not renewed. And then I applied to grad programs at Arizona, at University of Arizona, and I got uniformly rejected from all of them, despite having, again, glowing letters of recommendation. Yeah, you have the distinguished, you know, unique CV of being the leftist gadfly, the left, who was once canceled by the right.
00:31:46
Speaker
Yeah, and I managed to fail upwards to Columbia, but that's not the normal trajectory. But yeah, but so the advice that people often give is, you know,
00:31:55
Speaker
keep your head down and don't do anything risky or controversial until you get tenure. Then when you think about that, if you spend four years in undergrad keeping your head down and avoiding doing anything controversial so you can get into a good grad program, and then you spend six years in your PhD program, keeping your head down and avoiding until you get tenure,
00:32:21
Speaker
Until you get a job and then you get a job and then you spend another six years keeping your head down by the end of this you're talking about like two decades basically of keeping your head down and not saying anything to and people always Deceive themselves thinking that at the end of this process then they'll really be you be you but like by the time you get through that process
00:32:41
Speaker
two decades of doing this, you're no longer the kind of person who goes pew, pew, pew. You're the kind of person who keeps your head down and avoids saying anything controversial. That's your habitus now. And chances are with your own grad students, you'll advise them to do the same because it worked for you and you have a job and you have tenure. And so you'll probably tell your own grad students the same well-intentioned advice that what they need to do is keep their heads down and avoid saying anything controversial.
Is there political discrimination in tenure decisions?
00:33:09
Speaker
Yeah. So that's totally right. And, uh, with one caveat, and that is, I think that the people often talk about tenure as being the line of like, when you can take risks, I actually think it's when you got a job. Right. Cause it's actually in most schools, um, pretty hard, certainly in public schools to fire. If you're productive,
00:33:34
Speaker
If you're research productive and you have good teaching evaluations, it's pretty hard to fire or not tenure a tenure-track faculty for political reasons without making it fairly easy to win a lawsuit. Contingent faculty is a different story. Obviously, as you know, but you cannot hire somebody for all kinds of
00:33:54
Speaker
shady reasons. I do think that there's some truth to the idea that if your goal is to stay in academia, that there's a stronger incentive to avoid controversy, not necessarily to avoid ambition. There's lots of risky research projects that are not controversial and are risky for other reasons.
00:34:20
Speaker
Now the upside, the thick right tail, so the upside of risk taking, I think still exists throughout, but I think as a postdoc or a grad student, it exists as much or more outside of the academy as inside, right? So for example, when I was a postdoc, I was at Santa Barbara and Colin Wright was there at the same time.
00:34:42
Speaker
We didn't really know each other that well and maybe met him once or twice or something. I think he's a good example of somebody who had potential to have a good academic career, probably was pushed out of the academy, at least in part due to his politics and his public writing.
00:35:00
Speaker
And yet, I would say from a standpoint of having symbolic capital, and I don't know what his income is like, but I imagine it's decent, he's landed on his feet. Jordan Peterson is maybe an even more famous example. He was just a normal psychology professor when I was an undergrad at the University of Toronto.
00:35:18
Speaker
But, you know, he has said that he jokes often that he monetized social justice warriors. But he did. It is true that his academic career suffered for his controversy. So I think you can fail up.
00:35:33
Speaker
I think you could fail up even as a grad student and as a postdoc, but if you want to pursue controversial research as an academic, I do think that there's some truth to the idea that you want to keep your head down a little bit until you get your first job and then worry maybe a little bit less than some people say about tenure or not. That at least has been the strategy that I've followed, which so far has been fine. I've yet to be canceled.
00:36:01
Speaker
Well, I think there's some tension. I mean, paradoxically, the more elite the institution, kind of the higher the level of censorship. And that's in part because schools like MIT or Harvard or Yale or whatever actually don't tenure their professors. Right. They're hard to get tenure in. That's a good point. That's a very good point. And so it makes it because there's such a high fail rate for tenure, and they can deny you actually for a lot of reasons that will seem less. I mean, this is how a lot, as you know, this is how a lot of political discrimination
00:36:29
Speaker
operates anyway in many cases as they, what actually led them to not want you around might be very different than what they formally used to justify. Right, that's true. And I think, yes, from what I've seen, nefarious tenure decisions do tend to occur in marginal cases, right? So if you're of a marginal case on productivity grounds, absolutely,
00:36:55
Speaker
how much people like you is gonna matter, right? More than it should. Yeah, it's terrible. Well, that was at Columbia, I'll give you. We had a professor in the department, Carla Shett, who was one of the, she wrote this great book called Unequal City, which I highly recommend people read. And she was one of the most requested people. When people applied to the department, she was one of the people who was most requested that people wanted to work with. Unequal City, one,
00:37:23
Speaker
All of the, like most of the big awards in the field, it sold pretty well. But when she was up for tenure, they denied her tenure because Unequal City was published by the Russell Sage Foundation instead of one of the top university presses. And so even though it had a lot of citations and it did really well, it won all of the scholarly awards in the discipline. She was still denied tenure because
00:37:49
Speaker
She didn't have enough points based on the fact that the book was not published by University Press and so on. And in her case, again, because she's an amazing scholar, she found another school that hired her immediately. And she's doing really well now. But this kind of crap is normal in elite schools where you can get tenure denied to you, even if you are a very prospective scholar
00:38:16
Speaker
even if you have glowing teaching evaluations and students want to work with you, even if you're winning disciplinary awards and stuff, they can still deny you tenure, and they do. And so a lot of people in elite schools, especially, are the most cowardly of the bunch because they do deny tenure so much and an often kind of capricious and obscure grounds. Yeah, for that reason. Okay, so this brings me to, it wasn't the follow-up question that I was originally going to ask you, but we'll come back to that.
00:38:45
Speaker
So one of the thoughts I've often had about the etiquette-y versions of campus wokeness is that they're related to the increasing competition within symbolic professions,
Why did wokeness rise among junior academics?
00:39:03
Speaker
right? So, you know, I started
00:39:06
Speaker
I started grad school in 2009. I finished in 2014. I got my first faculty job in 2018. So I was kind of, you know, my grad student to postdoc years were kind of, you know, span the years where wokeness basically didn't exist to where, you know, it was the dominant force on campus.
00:39:26
Speaker
And some of it, you know, obviously some, a lot of it was sincere. I'm going to push you in that a little bit in a second, but one of the things that I also found was like, you know, the years that I was a junior scholar, at least in my field, were also the years where, you know, the idea that you came to a PhD program thinking that the faculty position was a reasonable default to where it wasn't anymore.
00:39:54
Speaker
changed, right? And one of the things that often struck me was you could be the hardest working, most conscientious person in the department and still not be good enough on your research because you're picking the wrong questions, because of bad luck, you know, and other things. And then around 2015,
00:40:23
Speaker
For some people, this backdoor became available of, if I'm the most pious in this new ideology, then I can get a job. And if you're a person who, as you talked about earlier, are extremely conscientious,
00:40:40
Speaker
and extremely risk averse, that's a good deal, right? Because I have complete control over whether I'm the most pious person in the department, right? And my conscientiousness will only amplify my piousness or my ability to kind of be conscientiously pious. And so, you know,
00:41:01
Speaker
And I don't think that it was consciously cynical for, you know, people that I encountered who seem to fit this pattern. But I wonder if the competition effect, you know, encouraged basically the creation of etiquette as a way to kind of circumvent the competition. And then by the way, this exists outside of wokeness too. The example you gave of, you know, tenure formulas that are not, um, that are not
00:41:30
Speaker
Bended in obvious cases where the prestige of the scholarship merits it I think is another example, right? There's there's you know economics my field is Not famous for being woke right, but it is But it is famous for being insular right and for having these kind of these these norms, you know, your job market paper is is Just as much showing off the skills, you know you have as it is answering an interesting question And I think those
00:42:00
Speaker
You could characterize that in the same way, couldn't you? If you sort of create artificial rules of etiquette and norms that are kind of independent of who's doing the most important, best, most rigorous work, you can kind of rent-seek. Is that... Yeah, so one of the things that I... So on the sincerity question, I'll just briefly note that sometimes people have this kind of dichotomy in their head where either
00:42:31
Speaker
people are pursuing their self-interest or they're sincere believers.
Are beliefs aligned with self-interest?
00:42:34
Speaker
And to my mind, based on my read of the empirical literature, that's actually kind of a bad way to think about thinking. In truth, our brains are oriented towards, and our cognition in general is oriented towards kind of serving our interests and furthering our goals.
00:42:51
Speaker
And so a belief that's convenient for us to have is actually a belief that we would be more likely to uphold sincerely and actually want to convince other people to hold sincerely as well. So sincerity and interest serving aren't contradictory. They're actually typically complementary. The more interest you have in believing something, the more likely you are to sincerely believe it and espouse it to other people. And then on the question though of whether precarity leads to the rise of
00:43:21
Speaker
of wokeness. That's actually one of the key arguments of the book. So what I show in the book is that the kind of rapid shift in norms and discourse that we see among knowledge economy professionals after 2011 is actually a case of something. And in fact, there were three other periods, similar periods of wokening, using the same measures, the same kinds of measures that you can look at now, shifts in symbolic economy outputs like newspapers.
00:43:51
Speaker
shifts in protest activity or political alignments, shifts in how people talk and think about social justice issues, and so on and so forth. Looking at these same kinds of empirical, you can see that there were three previous awakenings. There was one in the late, in the mid-1920s through early 30s, one in the
00:44:14
Speaker
mid 1960s through early 70s, one in the late 1980s through early 90s. That's the last time we have these big blokes about political correctness. And then one that started after 2011, and by comparing and contrasting these cases, you can get insight into questions like under what circumstances do these awokenings come about? When and why do they end? How does one influence the next and so on? And so on this question of when and why do they come about?
00:44:42
Speaker
As I show in the book, there, there seem to be two factors basically that predict when an awakening will happen.
00:44:50
Speaker
The first one, probably the most important, is that they occur during periods of elite overproduction. That's the term by Turchin and Jack Goldsmith as well, which is when society is producing more people who have this vision of their life of being elites, who feel entitled to elite lifestyles and so on, then we have capacity to absorb them into the power structure. We have a lot of people who are planning their whole lives on coasting into an elite,
00:45:19
Speaker
position and then that doesn't happen.
What happens during periods of elite overproduction?
00:45:22
Speaker
So when you have these periods of elite overproduction that grow especially pronounced, that's the first predictor. But the problem is elite overproduction itself isn't usually enough to predict when an awakening will happen because there's this kind of counter cyclical
00:45:44
Speaker
tendency between the fortunes of elites and non-elites. So that is, as my advisor Seamus Kahn showed, when times are really good for elites, they tend to be bad for ordinary people. And on the flip side, when times are bad for elites, they tend to be pretty good for ordinary people. And so in many cases where there's elite overproduction or elites are otherwise suffering, it's really hard to get other people to care.
00:46:16
Speaker
But there are some moments where these trajectories are collapsed when things have been kind of bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while and then all of a sudden they're bad for elites too. And those are the moments when awakenings tend to happen. Like the 2010s. Like the 2010s. And the same is true in all the previous cases. And so yeah, it's absolutely the case that
00:46:38
Speaker
And so what you have during these periods, kind of frustrated elites or people who are really anxious about their ability to reach the elites or people who are excluded from these positions and so on and so forth.
00:46:51
Speaker
try to leverage social justice discourse to indict the existing people at the top in order to purge them and make room for people like themselves. As they say, those people are corrupt. They're too cozy with, you know, they need to be overthrown by people like me, basically. It's the kind of crass tweet length. A description of what's going on. Elites fighting elites, you know, both using the language of the masses, right?
00:47:20
Speaker
Yeah, and so when you look at, and they can use the language of the masses more effectively in those points because when the masses are actually suffering. And yeah, and so, and this kind of tendency to leverage social justice discourse in these power struggles is itself really interesting. And it's tied to the fact that a lot of that most of the symbolic professions from the outset, from their creation, again, back in the interwar period,
00:47:49
Speaker
were defined themselves as altruistic in nature or serving the common good and the
How do symbolic professions justify their power?
00:47:55
Speaker
greater good. So for instance, lawyers are supposed to, again, kind of
00:48:02
Speaker
the legal profession is defined explicitly in its legal and its organizational codes and things like this as being altruistic in nature and not supposed to be. Profits either supposed to serve all of their clients, no matter who they are to the best of their abilities and so on and so forth. Doctors are supposed to serve
00:48:23
Speaker
Scholars are supposed to follow the truth wherever it leads. Journalists are supposed to hold the powerful to the count and be the voice for the voiceless and so on and so forth. So all of the kind of power that we enjoy, the pay, the unique pay that we enjoy, the unique autonomy that we enjoy, the prestige that we enjoy has always been justified on the grounds that you give these things to us because we serve the common good and especially the least among us. And the fact that our
00:48:50
Speaker
our kind of social position and our pay and all of this has always been tied to those kinds of narratives is part of what lays the groundwork for this unique form of inter-elite struggle within these professions. And there's varying degrees of cynicism in how that's applied, right? So in terms of professional status, I would say at the high end of that citizen is
00:49:16
Speaker
you know, charity endeavors of large corporate monopolies, right? Or basically want to be liked enough to avoid the antitrust suits, right? Whereas doctors, I would characterize as less cynical. It's true that doctors do very well, but most people I know who go into the medical profession, you know, do really want to help people. So is there a dynamic back to this question of how sincere are the symbolic capitalists?
00:49:43
Speaker
Well, actually, is there a spectrum there where some are pretty cynical? I remember in 2020, or after 2020, one of the things that I found about this recent awakening is that a lot of older academics were just, in my perception, just kind of caught off guard by it and didn't really understand
00:50:07
Speaker
took the sincerity almost too seriously and kind of didn't understand. You have conversations with them where you say, look, somebody spent the last two years pushing long-term lockdowns and getting rid of the police, which are two of the worst things that have happened to some of our most disadvantaged communities in decades, and they're telling you that hurting their feelings is dangerous. You might want to consider the possibility that what they actually care about is their feelings.
00:50:29
Speaker
So that's kind of, I don't know, a cynical take. But do you see, is there a similar spectrum among the symbolic capitalists of some that are very sincere but maybe blind to the self-serving nature of some of their stuff versus ones that are fairly cynical?
00:50:49
Speaker
I think outright cynicism is a little rare in part because, again, it's just cognitively difficult for us as human beings to truly engage in bad faith behavior and still feel good about ourselves. And so because of how weird my life is these days, I've gotten to meet and consult with politicians and millionaires and billionaires and CEOs and heads of
00:51:17
Speaker
corporation, you know, of these major nonprofits and so on and so forth. And I'll say to a person, they all seem very sincere, very sincerely committed to egalitarian and all of this. I don't, I don't think that they're, if you want, and in fact, this is one of the things, like, so for instance, Hillary Clinton is widely viewed as this kind of duplicitous politician, a lot of people view her as immoral and
00:51:42
Speaker
There's actually all these news reports for people who work for Hillary Clinton who see her every day and interact with her very closely, almost all of them to a person come away from their interactions with Hillary Clinton thinking she's a gifted, profound, sincere person.
00:51:59
Speaker
with a genuine desire to improve the social world and people, and she has a bad rap. And so this is, and I think this is this kind of experience that this kind of dynamic you see with Hillary supporters is actually true down the line. I think there are very few genuine cynics. One of the problems though, is that there is a lot of non-self awareness. So there's this phenomenon where people who are elites,
00:52:26
Speaker
from historically marginalized or disadvantaged groups conflate their own interests, their own values, their own goals with those of say black people writ large or women writ large or whatever, when in fact, they're not representative. They themselves are not particularly representative of the groups that they've reported. Okay, let me stop you there because there's a perfect segue into something I wanted to ask you.
Is the diploma divide heritable?
00:52:50
Speaker
Which is, you know, we talked about a few minutes ago about how class and the diploma divide are becoming more important, right? But also the diploma aspect, you know, maybe more heritable, right? And the habits and the family structures and that come with that.
00:53:05
Speaker
And so in that, I actually do see a tension that's maybe more sympathetic to the, you know, Claudian gays of the world who had a relatively privileged upbringing, you know, quite unrepresentative of other African Americans, right? Which is that, you know, on the one hand, if the big divide is the diploma divide, then, you know, we shouldn't be doing things to magnify that, you know, even if it diversifies
00:53:33
Speaker
who has a diploma, right, is kind of one crude take. But on the other side, if having a diploma and the wealth and the social capital and the lifestyle benefits that come with that are somewhat heritable, then isn't that also kind of an argument for worrying more about the diversity of who has a diploma? Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the
00:54:00
Speaker
So my advisor, one of the people I worked with closely, he wasn't actually technically my advisor, but he had a big influence on my thinking. This is sociologist Gil Iyal, and he has this great book called The Crisis of Expertise. And the main argument of that book, or aiming argument of that book, is that
00:54:19
Speaker
When you look at everything, policymaking, increasingly a lot of decisions, a lot of things that shape people's lives are determined by experts. So you have expert committees that often advise judges in court cases about policy matters or that lobby senators to adopt one thing or another and so on and so forth. Expertise is increasingly
00:54:47
Speaker
valued in this growing scientization of politics, as he puts it, is related to the growing politicization
00:54:56
Speaker
of science. So the more science is intimately tied to political processes, the more political processes also affect and influence. And so what a lot of the contestation around expertise is fundamentally about, I all argues, are questions about who gets to be an expert? Whose interests do they actually represent? And when people don't perceive
00:55:26
Speaker
that people like them are represented in institutions when they don't think their values are represented, when they don't think their interests are represented, the natural thing that people do, and this is true of institutions across the board, not just knowledge-oriented institutions, but institutions across the board, the kind of natural response people have to being excluded from institutions, or especially when they think those institutions are hostile towards people like them.
00:55:51
Speaker
is that they try to marginalize those institutions or villainize or delegitimize them or deconstruct them if they have the power to defund them and so on and
Why do minority groups distrust institutions?
00:56:01
Speaker
so forth. And that's what we're seeing. And that's often explained as like in terms of anti-intellectualism or those people being stupid and whatever. But the reality is even when you look at things like vaccine, like which slices of America
00:56:21
Speaker
got the COVID vaccine versus which ones that didn't. This is often described in red and blue ways because we like to tell those kinds of stories, we being knowledge economy professionals. But in truth, it was people with sociological distance from experts were the least likely to get it. So that included people who are younger, who live in rural areas and small towns, people who are not white, people who are religious minorities and so on and so forth.
00:56:48
Speaker
And we like to map it onto red and blue because then we can go, oh, Republicans, they let them die, ha, ha, ha. But when we see that it's the people who are actually dying are religious minorities and ethnic minorities and poor people and people who live in more remote areas and so on and so forth. Then the kind of brutality of these arguments and their eugenicist tinge becomes more clear. So we don't talk about it that way. Okay, good. This is the perfect segment of the last topic I wanted to talk about.
00:57:18
Speaker
and that is diversity in the academy. I recently published a chronicle of higher education piece
00:57:27
Speaker
called, let's stop, something like it's time to stop the devil talk about diversity hiring. Sorry, I can't remember the title because the editor changed on me in the last day. It was a good title. Basically, it was born of long-running frustrations I've had with the lack of willingness of educated society to grapple with obvious but intractable trade-offs.
00:57:53
Speaker
and let me lay out a couple and get your thoughts. And I want to talk to you about this because you are an exception. You have been willing to publicly grapple with these intractable trade-offs. And you maybe reach slightly different conclusions than I do, but at least it's an honest conversation, so let's have it. Okay, so on the one hand, as you said, and I completely agree with you, and I think there's good empirical evidence for it,
00:58:22
Speaker
People who don't think institutions have their interests don't trust those institutions, and thinking institutions have your interests isn't completely related to demographics, but it is partly related to demographics.
00:58:39
Speaker
and kind of from both directions, right? People are homophilic, people like people who are like them. And so, you know, for example, conservatives not seeing conservatives in the academy makes them think partly because of just tribalism homophily, the academy must not have my interests. Partly the academy really doesn't have their interest in some cases, right?
00:59:00
Speaker
Because of tribal homopoly on the other side. And you can make the same arguments about underrepresented minorities. You've done some interesting writing about who's underrepresented in the academy is sometimes who you think and sometimes not.
00:59:19
Speaker
Christians are underrepresented, conservatives are underrepresented, straight people are actually underrepresented. That was probably the one that you found that surprises most people I talked to. Obviously there's some fields now where men are underrepresented. And so there's that dynamic which trades off with the fact that turnover in the academy is super slow, especially if you're talking about professors. So an example that I gave in my article was
00:59:45
Speaker
Imagine, which is based on a real example, imagine you have a department with 40 people in it, 25 of them are white guys. People say, that's too many white guys. Wouldn't it be nice if we only had 15? Well, that department gets to hire once every three years, it would take 30 years of no white guys allowed to get there. And nobody's willing to say either we should do that.
01:00:09
Speaker
or we should tell our activist students that we are not going to diversify anytime soon. But those are the choices. And then secondly, the other tension that I think your earlier comments brought up, which I think is somewhat related, is that the trust in
01:00:29
Speaker
the academy and other symbolic professions is somewhat related to the services that they provide. And so if we make it explicit that we care more about politics than the truth, and we make it explicit that we care more about the color of your skin than what your research is, that's going to cause us to lose trust too. But again, that may exist in tension with
01:00:58
Speaker
a desire to be representative, which also our trust is somewhat vested in. And like you said, with experts, one of the comparisons that people who oppose affirmative action often make is to athletes. Nobody cares about the diversity of 100 meter sprinters, which is lacking because we want the fastest people to be sprinting for us. Is medicine really less important to us than sprinting? And I think that's a pretty powerful argument in some contexts. But as you say,
01:01:29
Speaker
If people are homophilic, sprinters do not make public policy decisions about my life. And thank goodness they don't, right? Not because of the demographics, but because they're not experts. It's not what they do. But to your point about how they interact with the homophily, the more we become technocratic, dependent on experts, the more maybe we should care about the homophily and certainly their examples of
01:01:48
Speaker
you know,
01:01:58
Speaker
instances where, like, black patients' pain is, on average, discounted. And maybe that has something to do with stereotypes and homophily. All right. So you got all these trade-offs, right? How would you advise a university leader to navigate them? Like, what is Moussa Algarbi's faculty diversity policy?
What are the trade-offs in faculty diversity efforts?
01:02:22
Speaker
Okay. Well, I think the number one thing to understand is that, as you said, there's trade-offs all the way down.
01:02:28
Speaker
So there's no universal, there's no obvious solution that will fix all of these problems and not include downsides for anyone else, except for maybe. So as you said, if you have
01:02:46
Speaker
a certain constitution of faculty that currently exists and you have internal versus kind of slow, the options are either, you know, again, higher pretty consistently on the basis of something that you're explicitly not hiring on, or
01:03:04
Speaker
There is a third option in principle, which would be hire a bunch more people, like grow the pie or whatever, but that's not realistic. And universities are declining demographics. Or force people to retire. There's actually some merits for encouraging a lot of
01:03:21
Speaker
less productive senior people to retire. Yeah, and the disservice would like that too. And speaking of the sincere people not realizing their self-interest, a couple of times I've had
01:03:35
Speaker
Once in particular, in my previous job, there's a faculty meeting where an older white male senior faculty was waxing poetic about how white men needed to be magnanimous and give something up, and it was time to hire more in the base of the race. And frustrated and unfiltered as I am often, I raised my hand and said, do you know what I've never seen?
01:03:57
Speaker
I've never seen an older white male faculty say, I'll retire in the condition that you replace me with a minority. What I've often seen is older white male faculty say, I had it easy to discriminate against the young guys and promote me up the chain because I'm such a virtuous, magnanimous white guy.
01:04:16
Speaker
So one thing that is the case is that homogeneity in a field or a lack of certain people not taking part in knowledge production does often adversely impact. There's not a one-to-one correspondence between people's demographics and their views.
01:04:35
Speaker
And in fact, not even anything close to that. If there was, we actually wouldn't need diversity so much. We could just have one black person who could represent all the blacks, right? It's precisely because we can't predict people's... And sports are a good analogy here too, right? So, you know, a hockey team that is entirely composed of right-wingers isn't going to be a very good hockey team, right? Even if they're the best right-wingers in the world.
01:04:59
Speaker
Well, and so, and you can see this, you can see there's lots of cases of this. So for instance, before women were involved in the field of psychology, scholars had a hard time understanding women as competitors, as agents, as sexual beings, and so on and so forth. The idea was that women were passive, and we didn't really, and that it was men who are competitors, it's men who are
01:05:26
Speaker
and so on. And as we got more women involved in the field of psychology, they completely transformed our understanding of human competition. It turns out that men and women have importantly different modes of status seeking and competition. And in fact, men's inability to flourish in a lot of more female characteristic forms of status seeking and competition.
01:05:53
Speaker
partially explains why a lot of men are struggling to succeed in increasingly feminized professions. And concern is in climate. I've seen a similar kind of dynamic where there's a lack of diversity, but the people who point out trade-offs with avoiding energy poverty and development and how fast we mitigate climate change,
01:06:18
Speaker
in my experience are disproportionately libertarian centrist or right leaning. Well, and so, yeah, so this is an example. And some people from the developed developing world where they see these things viscerally, and that's another kind of lack of diversity issue. So yeah, totally diversity does make teams better. It makes teams better. It improves. And in fact, even often diversity is kind of
01:06:43
Speaker
Concern about diversity is kind of put into juxtaposition with meritocracy or making decisions based on merit. But the reality is basically no one is hired purely on the basis of merit. So you have some kind of meritocratic threshold. There's usually many candidates that are the finalists for a position are usually roughly equivalent in their merits.
01:07:05
Speaker
And so how we arrive at the candidate, we ultimately choose between the candidates who, the finalists who are all roughly okay on their marriage, like roughly equivalent in their marriages.
01:07:18
Speaker
We make choices based on fit, which is often a euphemism for homophily, as Lauren Rivera showed in her book, Pedigree. Okay, good. I was agreeing with you for the whole hour and this was getting boring. We found an area where, I don't know if disagree is the right word, but maybe emphasis. Everything that you said is true as stated to a point, however,
01:07:47
Speaker
a couple things. One, I think people see, so while it is absolutely true that in the context where diversity improves teams, that sometimes demographics, in a broad sense, which includes politics, upbringing, race, whatever, can be a genuine plus factor from the perspective of merit. Number one. Number two, it is also true
01:08:17
Speaker
that the number of people that meet the bar in a faculty search is large enough that you can make demographic decisions and still have somebody who meets the bar. But here are the two buts. Number one, people sometimes perceive that affirmative action and faculty hiring juxtaposes diversity with merit.
01:08:42
Speaker
because to be candid, I think in my experience, sometimes it does, right? So, for example, if somebody says, we shouldn't hire this person that we all think is the best because he's not black enough, which is an instance that I'm aware of at a previous institution I won't name. And actually, when I've told that story, several people have said, oh, I have heard a similar story, right?
01:09:11
Speaker
I reckon that we are sacrificing merit for something else. Before you do, and this is the but that I think is more challenging to your argument. Remember how we were talking before in the context of risk preferences that the output of academics is extremely right skewed, right?
01:09:36
Speaker
For example, when I started my first faculty job, the top two most cited members of the department had way more citations than the rest of us combined. That means that in academia, the difference between the 99th percentile and the 98th percentile might actually be big, not small. That means that assuming that your top four candidates, they're roughly equal, so we're going to pick on demographics.
01:10:05
Speaker
You might actually be, in the long run, making a big sacrifice. And one of the challenges is that, particularly in some fields where people come right out of their PhD, right, to be in the phallic job, you can't necessarily see that well the difference between the 95th and the 99th percentile.
01:10:26
Speaker
Well, but for that very reason, because you actually can't see it, then what we ultimately choose for in the absence of considering diversity is also something other than
01:10:41
Speaker
Whether they're gonna be the 98th or the 99th because as you said, we can't know that So what we ultimately end up choosing based on usually the default is fit. Who's a good fit for this department? But in some fields you can right so it's true that there are fields like economics where most people are coming out of grad school with no pubs and they have this job market paper and they have letters and and totally there's all kinds of funny business that can happen, you know that that is you know,
01:11:06
Speaker
not just about diversity, not just not about diversity, but, you know, biased in all the ways that DEI appropriately worries about, right? But there are some fields, you know, like, you know, many biology fields, you have five years or more of postdoc, right, before you get a job. Psychology, people publish it, you know, at a pretty high clip. And I will say, whereas I have seen searches where
01:11:36
Speaker
the differences were small and sometimes decisions may have been made on fit that probably do have unconscious biases of the traditional variety and some may have been made on diversity where maybe you're making a sacrifice or maybe you're not and maybe you don't know. I have seen searches where the differences were enormous.
01:11:59
Speaker
and yet demographics were still prioritized. And I think those are the cases that motivate people to talk about diversity versus merit. And I think it's a little bit like the science is political, right? Saying that politics has always been
01:12:17
Speaker
affecting science is true, but that doesn't mean that all politicization of scientists should go. I think basically the same thing applies to what you're talking about. That it's too easy to say, well, fit always is a thing that's biased, so we shouldn't care about any kind of non-meric criteria that we use.
01:12:41
Speaker
Well, what I think, I think there's a couple of things to bear in mind. One of them that I think is really important to bear in mind is that historically, I'm concerned for, I wrote an article about this, for heterodox Academy, it's called something like diversity and merit need not contradict or something like you can just look at it. Yeah, I'm sure I read it, but it came out for the readers for the listeners. But for, uh,
01:13:10
Speaker
But what I argue in that piece is that when you look at historically, concern about merit as we currently understand it and concern about diversity actually arose in tandem. So before, like all the way until the 1990s, for instance, faculty typically
01:13:34
Speaker
Departments didn't even list their positions publicly. They didn't even have to list. It was in the old boys club. It was just someone in your network. They'd give the job to someone without even posting it, without competition, without all of the... It was only as we had a growing diversity of people going on the PhD market and there was growing contestation around the question of, well, who gets to be a professor or not? That we started seeing this move
01:14:02
Speaker
to make things more transparent, more metrics-oriented, more genuinely competitive, and so on and so forth. So it's actually only because of diversification of the professorial or of people who aspire to the professorial that we started seeing these kinds of meritocratic, is increasingly transparent, formal, metrics-based, et cetera, kinds of evaluation for hiring and promotion. That just wasn't the case. People have a hard time understanding
01:14:31
Speaker
just how different hiring and promotion was as late as the 90s. Let me try to end by continuing this glass half full optimistic thought train in the following way. One of the things you talk about in your book is how woke overreaches provoke backlash that can be harmful to disadvantaged groups.
Does backlash to wokeness retain progress on equity?
01:14:59
Speaker
And again, I think that that expressed literally, there are definitely instances in which that's true, right? However, my glass half full take is that the sine curve of history is long, but declines in amplitude towards justice. And what I mean by that is, for the most part, the backlash that actually succeeds to overreaches of one side
01:15:29
Speaker
doesn't take away most of the benefits that were kind of the nuggets, the grains of truth from the other side, right? So, you know, take Me Too, for example.
01:15:42
Speaker
After a bunch of the Me Too cancellations, the controversies around Obama's Title IX regulations, Betsy DeVos comes in, puts in some due process, some more due process. People talk about the backlash to Me Too, but you know what nobody was talking about? Getting Harvey Weinstein out of prison, except his lawyers.
01:16:06
Speaker
And I kind of think the same thing applies to a lot of these things. After 2020, there's been a big backlash, particularly, I would argue, against the types of wokeness that your book criticizes. The performative, the histrionic, the narcissistic, the counterproductive,
01:16:31
Speaker
And yet, correct me if this is wrong, because you know these data better than I do, but I believe it's the case that for the most part, racial attitudes, concerns about racial inequality have increased over the woke period and have not decreased very much, right? That's kind of one example. If I think about it more anecdotally in terms of the dynamics I've seen in universities,
01:17:02
Speaker
A growing number of professors have become fed up with what you might call toxic wokeness, and yet I haven't met any, even in the conservative center of circles that I've traveled in, who think that it's bad that we are now more aware of trying to minimize these kinds of nepotistic and other types of unconscious bias.
01:17:28
Speaker
So I guess what I'm saying is like the, yes, there's, you know, it can be clunky and, you know, go a little bit too far, kind of one way or the other, but.
01:17:37
Speaker
Would it be too Pollyannish to say that maybe we are iterating in a generally positive direction and that each kind of overreach backlash cycle preserves some of the best aspects of the cycle that preceded it? Or am I being a naive idiot? No, not necessarily. Okay, so I think there are kind of two
01:18:06
Speaker
trends that tend to happen simultaneously with the wokenings. And they're both important to bear in mind. So I'll give a... So I don't disagree with you. I'm not going to give you a cynical or a depressing answer. I'm going to say it's maybe more ambivalent. So on the negative side, one of the things that you see often is that
01:18:27
Speaker
So it's the case that symbolic capitalists have radically different ways of talking and thinking about moral and political issues than the rest of society. That's always the case. That's pretty consistently the case. But during these periods of awakening, the differences between us and everyone else grow because we shift a lot, but the rest of the public doesn't shift so much. So even when you look at these changes in concern about
01:18:51
Speaker
these changes in views about race and stuff, it's actually highly educated, relatively affluent, suburban. Like those are the people who shifted the most. Climate change too, by the way. White people are more polarized about climate change than non-white people are. Yeah. And so these gaps between us and everyone else grow bigger during these periods and they also grow more salient because we become more confrontational against people who disagree with us. We try to censor them, villainize them, demonize them in all of this. And so this creates an opportunity.
01:19:22
Speaker
political opportunity for typically right aligned people to
01:19:28
Speaker
campaign basically on the basis of bringing these institutions back under control, restoring them to their proper purpose, and so on and so forth. And so this kind of move you've seen with the political gains of people like Ron DeSantis and in Virginia and so on and so forth, this is actually par for the course. This is a normal thing. What happens is awakenings often devolved into culture wars and translated into right, meaning gains ballot box. But those are
01:19:56
Speaker
Those are often not permanent. The thing that's more durable is that often these awakenings also give rise to these kind of parallel knowledge producing infrastructures that are more durable. So for instance, after the late 1960s and 70s one, there was a perception in a lot of right leaning circles that academia was lost.
01:20:21
Speaker
So you saw the proliferation of think tanks as an alternative for academia, starting with the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation and then kind of expanding to a broader. In the 90s one, there was a perception that the news media was gone. It was lost. There was nothing you could do that. And so they actually created Fox News. And in the contemporary moment,
01:20:41
Speaker
You see things like the anti-woke takeover of Twitter or the creation of TrueSocial or Parler or Rumble. They're creating these parallel infrastructures of online. They're being much less important than the former. There's very few people on a national scale on TrueSocial. Right now. For instance, if you look at Fox News, they're eating everyone else's lunch consistently for decades. What's more important,
01:21:08
Speaker
is that these institutions, these new institutions that are created, they have an existential stake. How they get listeners or readers, how they get money, how they continue to exist is by basically perpetuating the culture wars and villainizing
01:21:24
Speaker
the mainstream institutions. So Fox News differentiates itself, gets viewers money by constantly saying the mainstream media is corrupt and biased and blah, blah, blah. And the same thing with a lot of these think tanks and the same thing with a lot of these alternatives. And so we to the extent that we actually do embody
01:21:41
Speaker
the caricatures of us during these periods, we actually kind of create our own grave diggers. So you do see this kind of enduring, one thing that does endure is these parallel infrastructures and you often do see a persistently diminished trust in experts or in institutions after these awakenings. But are we letting ourselves off too easy there? Are we letting ourselves off too easy there, right? Because like there's a
01:22:08
Speaker
I'm trying to remember if it's Keith Whittington or somebody else, but one of these famous free speech scholars has an article in Reason that came out around the time DeSantis, his reforms in the new college were starting, and it was called something like, instant karma is gonna get you. And basically his argument was, what DeSantis is doing in Florida is not good for academic freedom granted, but you have to understand,
01:22:33
Speaker
that the argument, well, what happens when the liberals have the governor's mansion isn't going to work because the way conservatives see it is it's not just that the liberals have the governor's mansion in the ivory tower. It's like the way left Marxist that can't even win democratic primaries who control the academy. And so if your choice is that, or we flip back and forth between
01:23:00
Speaker
red or blue person who is broad enough appeal to win the governor's mansion in Florida. It's an easy choice for conservatives to choose that. Where I'm going with this is, when these parallel institutions form because of bias, I think the counter argument to what you said or the rejoinder to what you said is, they're sometimes not wrong about the bias. Sometimes I agree that there's a diversity of these institutions and some of them are
01:23:29
Speaker
mostly destructive or entirely destructive, right? But to give a more positive example, I think the rise of substack, for example, has been a clear net positive
01:23:46
Speaker
in terms of the ability to find information. And maybe it's that I'm just an unrepresentatively engaged reader. But I think, for example, public news has been criticized a lot for being kind of like a Foxy type sub-stack.
01:24:09
Speaker
I think it's fair to say that they definitely have an angle and they sometimes have an axe to grind. They've written a lot of articles about Kamala Harris recently. But on the other hand, sometimes they break stories that nobody else is going to break. I think that you could apply that same argument to some extent to Fox.
01:24:35
Speaker
So at what point is saying that there are negative aspects of this really a counter argument to my claim that kind of it's an iterative process that is broadly leading in a positive direction? Well, the problem is for some of these parallel institutions, I think there are clear upsides. It's better that we do have academic, if academics are driven out of conservative and religious people feel like either feel or just in practice don't.
01:25:03
Speaker
have an avenue in academia, it's good that think tanks exist and stuff in my opinion. But it's also the case that a lot of these institutions do have a different set of interests that diverge from those of mainstream academia or mainstream media or whatever.
01:25:22
Speaker
And one of those key interests is that they have an existential necessary interest in sowing distrust in mainstream institutions. And they also have an existential interest in kind of fomenting the culture wars indefinitely. And those are maybe intention with goals that we might desire them to have, like telling the truth wherever it leads or whatever. Now- Should we bring up the earnest doctrine?
01:25:52
Speaker
I think the fairness doctrine in a sense, so that's of course the bill where it used to be the case that if you had air time for one party or one view, you were basically obligated to try to have... You were obligated to try to be balanced, yeah. And then that went away. It was also criticized in some cases where maybe it was being misapplied and creating false balance, like with climate change in the early 2000s.
01:26:19
Speaker
Former colleague who you know has some famous work on that But should we bring them back? I mean is that a solution to sort of say okay like we're gonna use the fairness doctrine to define trustworthy news and then and enforce that and then if people want to Say their crap outside of that they could go for it But at least we have some kind of a label that people can use I think
01:26:42
Speaker
The problem, on the one hand, so the problem, one of the things that people didn't like about the Fairness Doctrine is that, as you said, there's not always two sides to a story if you're trying to tell the truth. Like sometimes it's just the case that bleh.
01:26:55
Speaker
So that rhetorical ploy is also overused, right? Yes. And so the idea is like, oh, well, why don't we let the experts, the knowledge producers, the journalists, the academics, whoever, make those determinations. And in cases where there's genuine ambiguity, they would feature a diversity of views. And in cases where it's just the truth is blah, then they'll just not. The idea is that people like us should be able to do that.
01:27:24
Speaker
But in reality the reality is we often don't we have been incentives We have mental incentives ourselves and kind of mental biases ourselves to view a much broader range of cases as Cases where the truth is just blah
01:27:39
Speaker
than might actually be the case. So there are many issues upon which there are areas of reasonable disagreement or things that we're not really considering or wrestling with, and maybe we should, that if you just leave it to the mainstream folks to decide, then you'll end up with these systematic patterns of blind spot and bias. And so I think something like the fairness doctrine can be useful
01:28:03
Speaker
for mitigating that tendency, but it does leave you, leave you, leave you, of course. So again, it's just trade-offs all the way down. Yeah, so in a short time, on that unsettling note, let me just say, let me just say that trade-offs are real. Glasses that are half full, by definition, are also half empty. And Moussa Algarbi, thank you so much for coming on the Free Mind podcast. Everybody should go buy your book. We have never been woke.
01:28:30
Speaker
It's available for pre-order by the time this airs, it will be available for real. Please buy it, it's good. And thanks so much for coming on and we'll see you soon. Thank you so much for having me. The Free Mind podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the University of Colorado Boulder. You can email us feedback at freemind at colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu slash center slash Benson.
01:28:59
Speaker
You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center. Our Instagram is at TheBensonCenter. And the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.