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S6 E3: Smriti Mehta, Why Start a Heterodox Campus Community＞
10 Plays1 year ago
Smriti Mehta is a Ph.D. student in Psychology at the University of California Berkeley, and the co-chair of UC Berkeley’s new Heterodox Academy (HxA) Campus Community, which is dedicated to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement on their campus. I (Matt) co-chair a similar group at University of Colorado Boulder. We discuss what it’s like to start an HxA Campus Community, why it’s needed, what the hurdles are, and how we might overcome them. Smriti's podcast can be found here: Nullius in Verba | a podcast by Smriti Mehta and Daniël Lakens (podbean.com)
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Transcript
Introduction to The Free Mind Podcast
00:00:01
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.
Meet the Hosts: Matt Burgess and Smriti Mehta
00:00:15
Speaker
I'm Matt Burgess, an assistant professor of environmental studies and a faculty fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization, the University of Colorado Boulder.
00:00:23
Speaker
My guest today is Smriti Mehta. Smriti is a PhD student in psychology at the University of California Berkeley and the co-chair of UC Berkeley's new Heterodox Academy campus community, a group which is dedicated to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement on their campus. I co-chair a similar group at University of Colorado Boulder.
Heterodox Academy: Mission and Importance
00:00:44
Speaker
In our conversation, we discussed what it's like to start an HXA campus community and why it's needed. Smriti Mehta, welcome to the Free Mind podcast.
00:00:53
Speaker
Thanks for having me, Matt. It's great to be here. So we were going to do it a little bit differently today and have a conversation, more of a conversation than an interview about starting and running a heterodox academy campus community. What is that?
00:01:08
Speaker
What is heterodox academy or what is heterodox academy campus community? What is a heterodox academy campus community? I'd imagine that a lot of our listeners know what heterodox academy is. It's a nonprofit organization made mostly, if not almost entirely of academics devoted to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. I think it would be fair to say that it was founded and exists because many people in the academy think that
00:01:32
Speaker
We are not doing a good enough job at promoting those things.
Campus Culture: Challenges and Differences
00:01:35
Speaker
And that's why we need an organization. Then the Heterox Academy of Canvas Communities are the Canvas version of that, which on your Canvas, EUC Berkeley means what?
00:01:44
Speaker
I think we probably need it a bit more than other places in the country, just a little bit more. What it means, what we hope it will mean is that people will be more open. What we're trying to do is just get people together who agree that these values are important and think that we should promote them a little bit more. There is, I think,
00:02:04
Speaker
just from listening to people talking just like you know having a pulse on like what undergrads are feeling perhaps it does seem like there is this culture of self silencing a lot of people don't openly share their views on things if they disagree on some things i think a lot of people are just sort of.
00:02:21
Speaker
putting their heads down and not trying to openly disagree on things that they might disagree on. And so I think that creates a culture of that's just not very constructive. I think we're not able to sort of get to really important issues or be able to discuss important issues openly. So I think what we're trying to do is just get, I think there's a silent majority that agrees that these values are important. And we're just trying to get all those people together and just have like a presence on campus of like, no, these things are important and we should promote them.
00:02:49
Speaker
So one thing that Berkeley and Boulder have in common is that they're both cities that have national, if not international, reputations for being hotbeds of progressivism.
00:03:00
Speaker
And yet they're also flagship universities of a state system. I would say both states are bluish. Colorado is probably more purplish than California is. But because it's a flagship school for us in a purplish state, the undergraduate student body is a lot more politically diverse than people expect. Is that the same thing at Berkeley or do people self-select at Berkeley more for what it's known for in terms of its political climate?
00:03:29
Speaker
That's a great question. I'm not sure I have like an objective answer for you, but I do suspect that it is perhaps less politically diverse than students at Boulder, like the student body. I do imagine that there's some self selection going on, but I honestly, I'm not sure I have any data to back that up.
00:03:48
Speaker
I'm sure the data exists. I'm not sure that that I have data either for older specifically, certainly nationally. It's true that undergraduates are the most politically diverse group on campus. Then faculty, I think, and then graduate students and administrators are the least politically diverse, especially in some of the social science and humanities fields.
00:04:05
Speaker
Okay, so back to the, the heteros Academy campus community idea. My sense was that one of the big needs that it filled or that it's trying to fill, it just started.
Strategies for Open Inquiry at Universities
00:04:14
Speaker
We're in the first cohort is that it's one thing for a group of visible famous academics to preach from up on high in Manhattan. It's another thing to have.
00:04:24
Speaker
grassroots, tangible, campus-oriented focus that can address specific campus needs, that can build networks on campus, and it seems like that's what it's trying to address. What do you see as some of those needs at Berkeley? And would you say that there, I think people often think of open inquiry, viewpoint, diversity, and constructive disagreement as being one thing, but they're three separate things.
00:04:44
Speaker
And I think that there are some campuses and some fields where it really makes sense to consider them separately. You know, so for example, Boulder has a free speech green light rating from fire, very good free speech policies, very good open inquiry policies. And yet, you know, viewpoint diversity, I think in some, like any campus, I don't think that we're, we'd stand out in a bad way, but I think
00:05:05
Speaker
It would be fair to say that our viewpoint diversity is seriously lacking in a lot of disciplines. And that can limit the scope for constructive disagreement, right? Even if there's good open inquiry, even if, you know, we're lucky to have administrators, senior administrators at CU that are very supportive of the HXA way. I mean, our campus put out a story promoting our group and it's provided a supportive atmosphere, which I don't necessarily expect is the case in all campuses. What would you say about your campus? Is it in terms of those three things?
00:05:35
Speaker
Can you first tell me how you describe open inquiry? Are we talking about sort of academic inquiry or just in terms of what you're studying or just being able to ask questions of administration or just having more transparency? In what terms are we thinking about that?
00:05:50
Speaker
Yeah, that's an excellent question. I think mainly the main part of open inquiry is that people can study what they want without fear of retaliation or retribution. People can say what they want, be that in a context of their research, be that in the context of
00:06:06
Speaker
you know, campus affairs or be that in the context of, you know, off campus speech, including political speech. I think a secondary part, which is somewhat tied to viewpoint diversity, is you can have a great climate for open inquiry on your campus, and yet you could still have a chilly climate for open inquiry in your discipline.
00:06:25
Speaker
So it could be that your campus is quite willing to let you study anything and defend you in the face of studying anything. But the journals, the peer reviewers, you can say the wrong thing and 2000 of your colleagues will sign some petition saying that you should be excommunicated. There's those aspects of it too. And then of course, without viewpoint diversity, there's going to be some things that people just don't think to study.
00:06:49
Speaker
So in terms of those three things, I mean opening an inquiry, I definitely think that at Berkeley, and I will actually, I should preface all of this by saying that I am a graduate student. And so there, you know, there are some sort of maybe administrative what's happening at the faculty level that I'm not privy to some things that are happening. So I can only speak to my experience as a graduate student.
00:07:06
Speaker
I think in certain social sciences and certainly my discipline, which is psychology and within psychology, social psychology, I think things are a lot worse. There is a lot less sort of even open inquiry is not right. Like there are certain topics that I just know people will just not study in our discipline or in our department. Right. Like I really doubt somebody will openly say that they want to study intelligence or, you know, that will just not happen, even if people are openly curious about things. I have also heard people
00:07:33
Speaker
say things that they found, you know, stuff in their data that they just will not share with the public because of how it might be construed. So it's not even just that they're not, you know, asking certain questions is that I think I have seen some people be sort of careful about the kind of results that they're putting out in the world. I'm not sure that that's such a big issue in other disciplines yet anyway. Like I think a lot of the sort of STEM disciplines are maybe less likely
00:08:00
Speaker
to fall prey to some of this. But it's definitely, I think, in terms of open inquiry, I have seen it be an issue in definitely the social sciences. And there's this sort of leaning towards even being careful about the kind of questions that you ask on how you sort of frame your research. There isn't, I mean, it's hard to say whether there's viewpoint diversity or not. There's no open viewpoint diversity. I think there's certainly a lot of
00:08:22
Speaker
So the culture at Berkeley, as far as I can tell is, and it's all well intentioned, is that we don't want to hurt people's feelings and we don't want to offend and we don't want to cause anybody harm. Right. And so it does, I do think people sort of conflate disagreeing with people with sort of being like attacking others, even even in terms of like the kind of research, like if you criticize people's research or even in my discipline, if I'm criticizing certain
00:08:50
Speaker
research based on scientific rigor or the quality of the evidence that's almost seen as, if the topics are certain contentious topics, then it's almost seen as like, you're not on our team sort of a thing, right? So this is fascinating. I have a couple of all the questions because I think social psychology is an especially fascinating case study for this.
00:09:11
Speaker
for a couple of reasons. The first one, which comes up with something you just said and is broader than social psychology, is this notion that criticizing certain people or certain dogmas or even asking a scientific question in the wrong way is considered harmful. We all know that impact is what matters and not intent. Is there any introspection about the fact
00:09:35
Speaker
that the movement of police demonization has led to about 6,000 extra murders a year. The long-term lockdowns under COVID and in schools have been one of the biggest hits to educational preparedness, especially among disadvantaged communities in a long time.
00:09:51
Speaker
And there's new stuff. Musa Algarbi had a good review of this recently in American affairs that the, not maybe the main driver, social media is probably the main driver, but a significant contributor to the mental health crisis seems to be these kind of coddling of the American mind, kind of bad ideas, catastrophism, mind reading, and it's caused the mental health to diverge among liberals and conservatives, especially among women. So there's been surveys that have found
00:10:18
Speaker
that more than half of under 30 liberal identifying women say they've been diagnosed with a mental health condition. So it seems like, you know, if impact matters more than intent, it seems like there should be some serious reckonings about these things. And my guess is they're not, but maybe you'll tell me that's wrong. I mean, not I've not seen that kind of reckoning happening. I think now people are starting to get a little wary of them because I mean, you know, people who have been the campus that has been quite against policing and sort of
00:10:47
Speaker
almost to the detriment, I think, of the campus community. We have this massive homeless population in Berkeley. Things have gotten a lot worse in terms of we've had robberies and crimes and all of these things happening. So I think people are becoming aware that some of this anti-police and wanting less policing is affecting people negatively. The other side to that, of course, is that people want to be
00:11:11
Speaker
sensitive towards the homeless and be, you know, mindful. There is that tension, but I haven't seen like an open dialogue or people sort of being openly introspective about these things or even the sort of things you bring up in terms of mental health. I mean, of all people, psychologists should be the ones that, you know, should be at the forefront of thinking about this or being introspective about it, which I have not seen that happen on campus.
00:11:35
Speaker
And just to be clear, none of this is to say that there's anything wrong with criticizing police brutality, which definitely is a real phenomenon. Of course. It definitely should be criticized and should be cracked down on hard. Just to make that clear. But this sort of anti police stance, I mean, it affects the people that we care, you know, that we want to help the most, right? That's exactly right. Yes. All of those things, all those examples I gave, right?
Youth Activism and Its Impact
00:12:00
Speaker
It seems like we have made
00:12:02
Speaker
At the same time as we've made helping disadvantaged communities and student wellbeing are top priorities, we've done some of the maybe most damaging things to both of those objectives in decades. Back to social psychology for a second. So I have often heard, I'm not a social psychologist, but I interact with them occasionally. Some of my recent research, I've done some social psych type of experiments recently in the context of climate change polarization, which involves collaborating with social psychologists.
00:12:31
Speaker
And so one of the things that is just an outsider seems interesting to me about social psychology is that I always hear that it's one of the most politically homogenous, potentially censorious disciplines. And yet it has also produced some of the biggest giants in the so-called heterodox community, including the most of the founders of heterodox academy. So what's that about? Well, wouldn't you think that if you're in an environment where some of this stuff is the worst that it would compel people to do something about it?
00:13:01
Speaker
Well, that's I think that's a fair hypothesis. But then why is it that social psychology is so different in that respect from say English or say ethnic studies or rhetoric? Like why is it more like lean more more leftist than other disciplines?
00:13:15
Speaker
No, why are there so many, you know, if social psychology is one of these model disciplines for all of the viewpoint diversity, censoriousness, chilly climate problems in academia, it seems like there's many disciplines that are identified in that way, history, English, classics, you know, being some examples besides social psychology. And yet it seems to me that social psychology produces an unusually high number of heterodox, famous heterodox people compared to other disciplines.
00:13:44
Speaker
It's a great question, not something I thought of before, but I do, now that I think about it, one of the reasons could be, and this is what really amazes me sometimes, is that I think that of all people, in some discipline, if people should really be cautious about things like groupthink, it should be social psychologists, right?
00:14:05
Speaker
We do look at these sort of interpersonal dynamics and how, yeah, group processes, I mean, that is one of the sort of some of the original studies, like some of the classic studies in psychology are lean towards this way in social psychology, lean this way, right? Like group processes, conformity, right? The effects of conformity and groupthink and how groups affect the individual sort of thoughts and behaviors.
00:14:26
Speaker
Yeah, I think if you're in touch with the history of the discipline, then all of this should worry you. So let me ask the flip side of the same question. Why doesn't it worry more people? How do people who are okay with the sensoryness, the chilliness, the lack of viewpoint diversity, how do they deal with the cognitive dissonance of that in contrast to the lessons of the history of the field, if I'm hearing you right?
00:14:50
Speaker
Yeah, well, because they don't know about the research behind cognitive dissonance because they don't read actual old stuff. They just listen to what's being said nowadays and just go with it. This would be my cynical take on it. You know, when agreeing with people and just going along with what's being said,
00:15:08
Speaker
And disagreeing with, you know, standing up to a majority is difficult, right? And if you're just being introduced to the discipline, you know, post, I would say maybe, yeah, 2014, 2015, which is what people say, like a lot of the woke stuff started happening, then there are no incentives to actually challenging what you're being told.
00:15:27
Speaker
There isn't as far as, and I mean, it does break my heart to say this, but even at Berkeley, like the amount of sort of digging that we do into the history of the discipline and actually studying classic theories and stuff like that, it's very minimal. There's this culture of, yeah, sort of not, you know, putting your head up and not thinking critically about the discipline as well.
00:15:47
Speaker
selectively thinking critically about the discipline. Selectively thinking critically about the discipline. Yeah. So sort of challenging the research that you don't agree with and really being, you know, questioning the things that you think are either might lead people to draw conclusions that you don't agree with. Those are, you know, challenged a bit more. And then stuff where since I've been here, I mean, the amount of confirmation bias that happens in my discipline is just it's staggering where you can tell so many people are not even trying to ask real questions. They're simply they have an idea about
00:16:17
Speaker
How things should be and then they just go about trying to prove that right? And I think. Let me steal man your discipline or I'm going to have you steal man your discipline just in the in the interest of the H X a way there have been some areas.
00:16:33
Speaker
where the push towards more diversity and more inclusion, as is defined by the campus zeitgeist, has maybe been consistent with or aligned with viewpoint diversity. One example I can think of would be the whole weird thing.
00:16:50
Speaker
We used to assume that western undergrads were representative psychologically and cognitively of everybody and it turns out they were actually uniquely unrepresentative, right? Weird, which is western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic countries are, you know, Joe Henrich just has a whole book on this called the weirdest people in the world about how, you know, not only are we not representative, we're kind of, we are the outliers in many respects.
00:17:12
Speaker
So that would be, I think, an example where pushing for more non-weird samples, it's clearly to the good, clearly in the interest of viewpoint diversity and better science. Can you think of any other examples?
Psychology's Role in Society
00:17:23
Speaker
There are so many, you know, like, I mean, I love psychology. Like I wouldn't be here if, and I think, I mean, think about the way we treat mental illness, right? Or the way we used to treat mental illness and the way that has shifted in the past hundred years, right? I do think we owe all of that to psychology as a discipline. Mental health issues is a big one. I mean, education research, psychological research that informs, I think education is also extremely beneficial. I'm not sure if that's answering your question exactly.
00:17:53
Speaker
I think that's a great example and actually there's an example that's personally relevant to my family. So my grandfather was a justice on the Canadian Supreme Court. And in the late 1980s, he asked for a short leave of absence to treat depression and the chief justice at the time forced him to resign. And then more recently,
00:18:14
Speaker
there was a justice who just disappeared for I think several weeks. It turns out he was suffering from some kind of mental illness and it was completely different. He was treated with compassion, he was allowed to keep his seat. So I think that's an anecdotal illustration of the way in which what you just described has benefited. Whereas I do think that there's something to the critique of the modern discourse that it crosses over sometimes from de-stigmatizing to valorizing
00:18:42
Speaker
and fetishizing mental illness in a way that I think is harmful to people's mental health. I do think it's also, you know, the shift from stigmatizing to not stigmatizing has been for the better and I'm glad to see that. I think other shifts like, you know, society's attitude on LGBT rights has changed enormously in my lifetime. I remember, you know, I'm not that old, but her being in high school
00:19:05
Speaker
you know having to feel brave or feel like i had to steal myself to you know stick up for people against that against homophobia in the same way that i sometimes feel like i have to steal myself to be a moderate and yeah no not apologetic one back to the hsa community what do you hope yours will accomplish what are your hsa community's goals
00:19:25
Speaker
Again, I think what we're hoping to accomplish is providing a hub for people on campus who would want to, you know, speak openly about things or actually try to have conversations.
Promoting Open Discussions on Campus Issues
00:19:38
Speaker
I mean, you know, there's so many important discussions we need to have as a campus, like, yeah, what to do about people's park or like the homeless situation, or should we, or should we not accept the SAT and the GRE in our admissions?
00:19:49
Speaker
These are really really important questions that we just are not having open discussions about and so i think it would just be a hub for people to have maybe just offer some kind of moral support to know that we're here if people need to either discuss these things you know we have.
00:20:06
Speaker
faculty members that there's sort of massive overreach with a lot of the DEI bureaucracy in certain departments in terms of their hiring processes and stuff like that. And so one thing we would want to do is also just figure out what is this DEI bureaucracy can and cannot do in terms of, you know, their interference in departmental matters, because I think a lot of faculty don't even know, right, if I think if somebody from DEI tells them
00:20:31
Speaker
something I don't think people know, is that okay? Is that not okay? Like what is actually their purview? And so I think just making that more transparent or just giving faculty more resources about how to deal with that, I think would be something we want to do. And then if some things happen on campus where, I mean, we thankfully haven't had anything agree, just happened on campus lately in terms of like, you know, violating free speech or, you know, trying to get people canceled or like, you know, fired and stuff like that.
00:20:55
Speaker
But if something like that does happen, we want to have like just a support network of people who can back people off if that's needed. But more than anything, I think trying to make it OK to sort of openly share your viewpoint, right? Not be afraid of speaking up and not feel like you will be vilified for just, you know, sharing your thoughts. And I mean, you ask this question of like, oh, what are the students, you know, what is the political orientation of the students? And my question to you, Matt, would be
00:21:22
Speaker
Isn't college the place where people should come to figure that out? I think that's a great question. Now, I believe studies done by HXA and others find that- People's political orientation don't change.
00:21:34
Speaker
they don't change. But that's a feeling, right? That's a feeling. Okay, so I grew up in India. And when I went to the US, you know, and started college, I remember somebody at some point asking me, I have recently been reflecting on just how apolitical my upbringing was. Like, so somebody asked me, like, are you a progressive or people use so many labels in this country? And I'm generally just not, I don't believe in like, labeling myself. And somebody asked me, like, are you liberal? Are you this or that? And to me, it sounded like they were asking me, like, what's your favorite baseball team?
00:22:00
Speaker
I'm like, I don't have one. Like I just don't have like an affiliation in that sense. And I think that can be very liberal, right? Like it's like, I do think that college should be the place where you're not coming in with the, I'm already X, Y or Z, but like be exposed to ideas so you can figure out what speaks to you or which ideas you want to adopt or not adopt or adopt after adopting in some way. Right.
00:22:23
Speaker
I completely agree with that now. And I think that you're clearly ahead of the curve for most people in figuring that out. I maybe started that journey kind of towards the end of my college, but I do understand the appeal of a tribe because to be honest, I was somewhat of a kind of card carrying progressive activist when I was in high school.
00:22:43
Speaker
So it was a different time. So like what it meant and what it looked like was different. But, you know, for example, I was quite involved in this organization, which I think is a great organization called Free the Children or Kids Can Free the Children. At some point it changed the name from the letter to the former.
00:22:57
Speaker
started by this Canadian guy, Craig Kilver, who was I think 12 at the time that he started it. And the premise was to raise money to build schools and develop the countries and to fight against child slavery and child labor. Again, you know, especially overseas, the slant shop stuff. Yeah, so it was great. I got involved in that. I co-founded a chapter of that in high school. And then I founded a chapter of it in Ségép, which is this weird
00:23:20
Speaker
In Quebec, there's this where I grew up, there's this weird like school in between high school and college called Seja. And so I went to, I mean, honestly, mostly what I did was campaigns to raise money and to kind of to raise awareness about the issues on the campuses that I was on. I occasionally went to protests and there was one time where I got to go to a Canadian youth activist conference. It was called grasping globalization. That was the big social justice issue, you know, in like 2001 or whatever year it was.
00:23:49
Speaker
And I remember that was actually, I think that conference was really formative for me in terms of both understanding the appeal of those kinds of activist communities, but then also understanding like the problems with them. So it was like, you know, you get into this room with like-minded young people who are ambitious and energetic and smart, and you do these, you know, team building things about, you know, how do you speak passionately?
Youth Activism: Personal Experiences and Perspectives
00:24:13
Speaker
And you write each other warm fuzzies that you put in these little brown bags that you take home afterwards.
00:24:18
Speaker
And you know i think it's people these days kind of talk about it as as you know john mcworter for example as as a quasi religious experience i think that's accurate and i think that is part of what became kind of a nagging concern about it and then also just i was like we are the thought that that i continue to have this day is like. Okay so we are these.
00:24:39
Speaker
passionate young people who can identify these problems that, you know, people haven't solved yet. And yet, you know, we still are in some of the societies that have come the closest to solving those problems of any societies in history kind of by a lot, right? And, you know, if you talk to,
00:24:57
Speaker
Adults, it's not like they're saying, you know, you're wrong. Child slavery is good, right? They agree with you on the basic moral premise of what you're about. And so at some point, you know, you can be as hotheaded of a young person as you like. And I was a decently hotheaded young person, going on a decently hotheaded middle-aged person.
00:25:14
Speaker
even I was like, you know, there's something a little bit illogical to the notion that a couple of teenagers who haven't been to college yet have some special insight into how to solve the deeper issues, right? I mean, we can definitely, and we should call out blatant wrongs like child slavery and child labor, right? And we definitely can and should do things like raise money for important causes. When it comes to things like how much globalization is the right amount, like,
00:25:41
Speaker
Probably not the people who should be asking. It kind of reminds me of now that you're working in climate. One of the discourses that bugs me on both sides is the discourse about Greta Thunberg. Conservatives will say, Greta Thunberg, her ideas about economic policy are so bad, to which my response is,
00:25:58
Speaker
Of course they are. She's 16 and doesn't go to school. That's not her job. I know she's older than 16 now. Her job is to raise awareness about climate change, and she's crushing it. She's maybe the single most effective person at that in the history of the world recently, or at least one of the top five.
00:26:15
Speaker
Now, to be fair to her conservative critics, I think it is true that sometimes people on the other side take her more seriously than they should on policy. Again, if you're a climate expert and you're listening to Greta Thunberg on climate policy, I question how sincerely you believe you're a climate expert.
00:26:34
Speaker
And to be fair, it's largely activists and not experts who do kind of say we should listen to Greta Thunberg in policy. And also, to be fair, Greta Thunberg herself, often when she testifies, she'll say, read the IPCC, you know, when she wrote her book called The Climate Book, she had a bunch of experts write. So I actually think that the some of the criticism of, you know, her elevation is kind of like a quasi religious totem for the movement is fair. But I think that there are some important nuances and some of it is not fair.
00:26:57
Speaker
I mean, you raised some very, very, very interesting things here, right? I mean, one would be even the fact that you were discussing issues like child labor, which is not, it might happen in the US. I assume it's much less than in other parts of the world. Yes. I think that's fair to say. I'm not an expert in the specifics. I think it's fair to say that it probably does happen in the US, particularly in some of the, there have been some stories about this, like child sex trafficking and the conduct of undocumented migrants in LA, but not in India.
00:27:24
Speaker
Or even climate change, right? And I think I do sense a lack of sort of global context on campus, as far as I can tell. The kind of issues people are fighting now, I feel like are things that only affect them. There's this weird narcissism of like, oh, microaggressions against, you know, this. And, you know, we were like, we had a strike last semester for graduate students and they just seem to fight against, I think graduate students, at least on our campus, as far as I can tell, think they are the ones who are oppressed.
00:27:51
Speaker
Right? So it's not even sort of activism that's in the benefit of somebody else or some bigger causes. It's a lot about, yeah, just sort of this navel-gazy way of trying to be an activist. I think that's one thing. Just before you go to the other thing, that really resonates in that I think climate change is one of the most frustratingly visceral examples of that, right? You hear messages that sound like climate change is going to kill us all. And the solution is we should focus on our feelings and we shouldn't talk to anybody else who's different from us.
00:28:20
Speaker
That's kind of some way you're like, are you sure the thing you care about isn't your feelings? And I feel like it just comes from this sense of like not having like a understanding of world history or even what's going on in the rest of the world. Like here we're talking about, you know, I mean, people keep like there's pronouns everywhere. I have never stated my pronouns once. I'm like, I don't care when I'm in a classroom. I'm a student. I'm a teacher who cares about my gender. And if you honestly cared about things like that, think about what's happening in Afghanistan right now. Right.
00:28:47
Speaker
women are being denied an education, right? They're women around being shot in the head for not wearing a headscarf. Like if you honestly cared about gender issues, you would not be worried about your pronouns. You would be worried about those things. Okay. Let me steal men for a little bit. I agree with you that there's too much, this kind of, you know, always state your pronouns at the beginning of everything. I agree with you that on balance, I don't agree with it for, you know, the main two reasons being
00:29:12
Speaker
It encourages people to think that their gender identity is the most important thing about them, which I think is backwards. And then also, in my experience, there's, you know, I encounter lots of people on campus who have, you know, non-gender conforming or non-binary gender identities. And there's a lot more diversity in that community than people think about what they want, right? There's some people who don't necessarily want to have to talk about their minority gender identity as the first thing that they say when they meet somebody, but just a steel man, I think,
00:29:43
Speaker
The only argument I have ever heard in favor of using pronouns that has seemed to hold some weight for me is that it might make somebody else that you're around feel more comfortable sharing their pronouns if their pronouns are different than what you would expect them to be.
00:29:59
Speaker
That's the only argument that I've ever felt like has some credibility, like, oh, you should share them just because it would make other people comfortable. But to that, I would say there are so many more ways that you can make other people feel comfortable around you doing something like that. Right. Like I see people all the time where they will state their pronouns and not even bother to learn the names of anybody around them. And it's like, if you honestly cared about people as individuals, like, you know, maybe bother to get to know their names and, you know, start with nouns first and then we'll move on to the pronouns, you know? Yeah, I think.
00:30:28
Speaker
I think you raise a good point. And I actually think that as an instructor, there's a very good way, at least the best way I've thought of so far to walk that line is that I always in the just once in the first class, I'll say, you know, if you have nickname or permanent information, you know, for example, I go by Matt.
00:30:45
Speaker
My pronouns are he, him, his. Feel free to send me an email or there's a little thing you can do on our system where you can change it and then I can see it on my class list. But then I don't go around saying, okay, now everyone in the class, tell me your pronouns. I think that's a way to do the thing that you were talking about, about making people feel okay sharing it if they want to share it without making everybody share it. Just quickly back to the point about
00:31:11
Speaker
women in Afghanistan and other places have it much worse. I think that's a good point, but I think a steel man counterpoint to that would be, you know, we don't really have control over what happens in Afghanistan. Some people may disagree with that, but I think that the two most common counterarguments to that that I've heard are, you know, one is you can walk and chew gum at the same time, so we can call out, you know, injustice here and there at the same time, and those are not mutually exclusive. And then the second one would be we have more control over
00:31:39
Speaker
This came up in the context of the post George Floyd, right? A lot. So this horrific murder happened in Minneapolis. Why are we talking about nonpolice related issues in here? And one of the common answers to that or preemptive answers to that was we have agency here.
00:31:59
Speaker
We have more control over our environment than we have over some other environment somewhere else. Sounds like you're going to disagree with that, so please do. I love how you can stop on my face. Okay. I disagree with that in the sense that, well, a couple of things, right? I mean, we don't have control over most things. And I certainly don't count myself as like an activist. I don't think if you're a researcher or a scientist, you should. But I mean, as a social psychologist, right? You could, I mean, I see this sort of a hyper focus on these black and white issues now.
00:32:25
Speaker
So, for example, if you care about prejudice and you care about stereotyping, you could study it in a more global
Gender Bias and Global Influence in Academia
00:32:31
Speaker
context. There are things that you could study in a way that can be generalizable to other places. If you really cared about sexism, for example, we read papers that are about, oh, there's bias in academia and it's mostly focused on American context.
00:32:47
Speaker
bias in evaluations of how men and women, like their idea of sexism is, oh, we're getting 0.03 points, less women are, you know, being evaluated more negatively, 0.03 on average than men. That's their idea of trying to find... And using American categories, too, right? Exactly. Exactly, right? Where you could be doing that same research, taking a broader context. And I do think that, especially as a social psychologist, I do think it's incumbent upon us to do that, right? Like instead of just focusing on a very
00:33:14
Speaker
And, I mean, your idea that we don't have control over that, I kind of disagree with that, Matt. Like, I think the US has an outsized influence on the rest of the world, and it should be thought of as a responsibility. Like, I'm not saying we can change things in a year or two, but it does, you know, the things that happen here. And unfortunately, even I think the American academies have an outsized influence on American culture, and that should be thought of as a responsibility. I'm not saying we can stop people from killing each other in Afghanistan right now.
00:33:42
Speaker
Certainly, it's something that we can think about in the long term, and I think broadening our perspective is one way to at least try to get there.
00:33:48
Speaker
Yeah. So I think a really interesting point that comes out of that is the following. And by the way, I don't completely agree with the notion that we can influence over there either. I was just raising that as a steel man. But I think, I think you're right. One of the ways that we can, I mean, there's two broad types of ways we might be able to influence, right? One is direct or indirect. And I think that the last 20 years have shown that the ability of
00:34:15
Speaker
the US or any other country to directly by force change another society is more limited than we thought. Even if we wanted to go and impurely export democracy, which some people would argue we shouldn't want to do, but even if we did want to do, I think the last 20 years have taught us that it's really, really hard to do that. The second indirect way is by influencing through culture.
00:34:38
Speaker
And here's where I think there's actually a really interesting points made by the left and the right where it would be great if they talked to each other more is I think that the left says, you know, basically one way to basically turn that argument into an argument from focusing on issues at home is we get our own house in order. We role model, you know, what a just society looks and that influences the rest of the world.
00:35:00
Speaker
Now, I think the conservative critique of how that's practiced today often is that if we do so in a way that is sometimes, not always, but sometimes extremely and sometimes overtly self-hating and kind of questioning our own legitimacy and questioning the degree to which, maybe questioning is the wrong word, not acknowledging the degree to which our society has made enormous and largely historically unprecedented progress in a lot of issues that progressives would identify as justice.
00:35:28
Speaker
not recognizing that and not being proud of that and not recognizing the uniqueness of that, I think out of fear of it coming across as or being internalized as Western supremacist in somehow or colonialist or whatever, also then
00:35:43
Speaker
erodes our legitimacy to influence other countries, right? If we ourselves are saying, we don't have any moral, you know, we're no better than anyone else. In fact, you know, we're uniquely rapacious and oppressive, but you should change your gender norms, right? The obvious response to that is, why? When you just said you don't have the authority to tell us anything.
00:36:01
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, this is such a fascinating thing because there's so many threads we can pull on here. First of all, how do you help somebody else without thinking that you're in a position to be able to help somebody? It does come from the sense of
00:36:20
Speaker
I don't want to use the word superior, but you do think that you're in a position to be able to help others. The other thing, of course, is that I do sincerely think that charity begins at home. That's kind of what you're saying, that we are things in order first before we go around helping others. The problem with that, of course, is that if you're only focusing on your own context and at some point it goes from fighting racial inequality and the civil rights movement to now microaggressions are this massive thing that everybody's talking about.
Social Segregation and Political Divisiveness
00:36:49
Speaker
or bringing segregation back, right? One of my biggest concerns, I mean, you know, racially segregated graduations. A lot of rec centers have racially segregated yoga classes and things like that, racially segregated, you know, faculty affinity groups. The more we become intolerant on both sides of people who disagree with us, the more we segregate socially and even institutionally in terms of right is one of the visions that seems to be putting being put forward now
00:37:14
Speaker
for how do you deal with the lack of political diversity in academia is like build conservative academia's. To be clear, I don't think that's what UATX is doing, but they're definitely, you know, I mean, the new College of Florida, people saying they want it to be Hillsdale of the South, right? What is Hillsdale? Hillsdale's, I think, fairly explicitly conservative.
00:37:34
Speaker
institution. And so is that like Fox News versus CNN? FoxU and CNNU, is that like a happy future? The other thing that just really worries me as an economist is there's a lot of research in economics and in political science that suggests that
00:37:50
Speaker
a key political precursor to social safety nets is social solidarity. For example, there was a study in Sweden that found that Swedish immigrants' willingness to support safety nets for other Swedish immigrants, depending on how much they identified with the Swedish society, there's a study of
00:38:11
Speaker
I think it was mostly European countries that found that the cultural solidarity between rich, the degree to which the rich identified culturally and socially with the poor was a good predictor of how much they'd be willing to support safety net spending. There's also work by a lot of progressive scholars, and I don't know that the people who wrote those first few studies aren't progressive, just to be clear, but there's one of the foci recently, for example, is a good book on this called The Sum of Us by Heather McGee. It talks about how the support for social safety nets among white Americans
00:38:39
Speaker
fell after the Civil Rights Act is sort of an example of the way that the book talks about it, which I think is a reasonable way to think about it is that, you know, racism is in effect harmed poor white Americans too. But I think the kind of social political lesson from all of those studies is
00:38:55
Speaker
If we are pursuing reductions in inequality that at some level are going to have to be supported by policy and by the body politic and we're doing that in ways that are intentionally dividing people, I think we're just making it harder to actually have those policies.
00:39:11
Speaker
Yeah, no fracturing is just not healthy. Even things like microaggressions. I mean, what really bothers me is that if the goal is to get people who are different from each other to talk to each other, that is not the opposite way you it's exactly the opposite, right? Like if you're constantly worried and I've certainly seen it happen, right? People are less likely
00:39:28
Speaker
to ask each other sort of personal questions or just engage or joke with each other because they're worried things will be taken. And I have seen it. I mean, I will just like joke and I try to be myself around people and you do see people just taking offense to things that are just sort of totally benign. And it's like, it creates this environment of like everybody walking on eggshells all the time. And the thing is, right? Like if you're talking to people who are different than you, that communication takes time and effort, right?
00:39:52
Speaker
When you have people that come from all kinds of different backgrounds and trust, right? You have to trust them together. Go ahead. Yeah. It sounds like you're going to say what I was going to say. So you say it. Like, you know, we all come from, we all bring these lenses to any context, right? And so people, you know, we might be using the same words, but we might mean certain different things. And I think people don't even ask each other, like, what did you mean by that? If they think.
00:40:11
Speaker
something is being said that they don't agree with. It's just people just shut out. And so I think it's just creating the exact opposite of what people really want. If you really want sort of a more inclusive and welcoming environment, you want people to be able to engage with each other freely without being worried about, Oh, am I going to find X, Y and Z? And yeah, one of the things I noticed, you know, on campus in the last couple of years, and I think it has actually gotten a little bit better in the last year.
00:40:35
Speaker
But since 2020, so first there was this movement of don't offend anybody, prosecute every offense, however small. And then to your point, one of the big responses or consequences of that was mass disengagement.
00:40:51
Speaker
And then sometimes the same people who were arguing for more judicious prosecution of offense were then saying, why is there no community? At some point, it gets a point where people don't even want to have that conversation, right? Because what's the point? I can just find some other community, and then that really degrades the vibrancy and workplace. That leads to self-segregation, right? You will end up only talking to people that are exactly like you because then you don't have to worry about being taken out of context or being misinterpreted.
00:41:20
Speaker
And there was actually a study I was reading yesterday that documented this. They were looking at between 2015 and 2017, there was an increase in social segregation among every type of line you can imagine, right? So politics, race, et cetera. Who does that harm? That harms the people with the least social capital. It's like a tragically ironic perverse effect on the very communities that we're supposed to be trying to help.
00:41:44
Speaker
There are two broad topics that I wanted to get your take on related to the HXA campus community.
HX Academy at Boulder: Values and Support
00:41:51
Speaker
So our HXA campus community at Boulder has three broad objectives. One is to role model the HXA values on campus. You know, partly I think a point you made earlier, right? You phrase it slightly differently, but the way I would phrase it and if sometimes phrased it in private conversations is, you know, we want to make it normal to be normal again.
00:42:09
Speaker
I'm a politically unaffiliated moderate Canadian who's anti-gun and pro-state healthcare. I shouldn't be an edgelord conservative passer. But who decides what normal is mad? I think it's sort of, it's quite supremacist to say that your normal is normal. That's actually a fair critique. I mean, with obviously a very, probably unfairly racially charged undertone.
00:42:32
Speaker
But I think your point right about like, so, you know, the definition of normal is, you know, basically modal, right? If you ask Andrew Yang in his book, they're more on normal people. A couple of response to that. I think that it should be anybody of any view should be free and feel comfortable to civilly engage and express their views. I think in the context of an institution that is supposed to be
00:42:56
Speaker
creating a meeting space for people from all walks of life and all different views, I think that a modal person, a person with roughly modal politics, if they seem extreme or strange, that's a problem. That's a sign of a problem. It's not that modal political people like me have any more right than anybody else to express our views in it, so I'm glad that you've raised that challenge.
00:43:20
Speaker
But I think if the climate is so extreme that what's modal seems fringe, we have a very distorted force field that's probably going to severely limit our ability to constructively discuss things. And it's not just, you know, the idea that the median voter is a, or the modal political person is like an upper middle class white man, which I happen to behave. Is it not actually true?
00:43:42
Speaker
The median voter in the US is a Christian, middle class, suburban, you know, non-college educated, working class person. He probably is privileged in some ways, but not a paragon of privilege in other ways. It's also the case that the most racially and economically diverse political groups are the moderates.
00:44:02
Speaker
The extremes are the richest, whitest, and most educated on both sides. I think people kind of know that that's true or guess that that's true about the right on Canvas, but most people are surprised to learn that on the left. So for example, white Democrats were much more supportive of defunding the police than black Democrats. It's hard to imagine why. Because they're not the ones who are being affected by less policing, right? Exactly.
00:44:20
Speaker
If you're somebody who's disadvantaged, politics is visceral to your life. If you're a privileged, educated, pundit, politics is a shirt that you wear and you want to make sure that your shirt is nicer and more attention grabbing than everyone else's shirt. Maybe even you want it to be different from everyone else's shirts so people notice you, which tends you towards being extreme. I think the idea that
00:44:42
Speaker
So I guess what I would say is I don't think that moderates have any more of a right than anybody else to feel at home, but I think that if moderates feel fringe, that's a sign of a larger pathology. But I would also reject the notion that worrying about moderates is worrying mostly about rich white people, because again, it's almost the opposite of that.
00:45:01
Speaker
Think about it in terms of religion. How many students do we have on campus who are from non-white backgrounds, who are from working class religious backgrounds, and probably have a lot of discomfort and a lot of unease around the kinds of etiquette we preach? One of the least well-understood facts about American polarization is that the median voter is a social conservative and an economic progressive. People on campus sometimes think it's the other way around, right? The fiscal conservative is social liberal. That's a very small group of disproportionate elites.
00:45:28
Speaker
And the two heuristics I use to kind of get people in to understand that or to think about that, you know, one is describing the median voter as I did earlier, right? It's a non-college, Christian working class person. The other is just think about, okay, if the median voter is not rich, you know, it's kind of working class, what do you think they prefer? Policies that help the working class or policies that enforce the etiquette of the rich class?
00:45:54
Speaker
When you put it that way, it's kind of obvious. The other heuristic is most people would agree that the average American is not elitist. Okay. If you think about economic elitism, do you think of the right to the left? Most people would say the right. If you think about social cultural elitism, most people would say the left. Okay. There you go. Uh, okay. So, so yeah, model, let's just say values on campus. Just again, make it lead by example, make it more okay for more people to kind of come out as, as heterodox, which is unfortunately a common term that I've heard.
00:46:20
Speaker
to create a forum for our members to discuss issues related to the mission. And some of that is through public events probably, but some of that is private, right? So after our first organizational meeting, our first event was a private discussion for HXA members on campus to talk about DEI statements.
00:46:36
Speaker
Should we require them in hiring, et cetera. And so kind of like basically creating a safe space to, you know, co-op terminology to discuss these kinds of issues. And then lastly is which echoes something you said about your group to support HXA members at CU Boulder, if need. And again, I think we're pretty lucky in terms of policies for free expression. I'm not super worried about people getting canceled here, at least kind of by the university. I, you know, but you know, we could have somebody who has a 2000 person petition from their field, you know, which happened to not at our campus, but in social psychology.
00:47:05
Speaker
I think there were a couple people on our campus who signed that petition. So of those three things, is there anything I missed? Is there kind of anything different or additional to that that you're doing on your campus? Modeling HXA values, providing a forum both for private and public discussions, and supporting HXA members publicly if necessary.
00:47:21
Speaker
Would you say that role modeling HXA values includes being okay with coming out as a moderate? Or like I said, I don't agree with the labels, but yeah, like as somebody that's heterodox, right? That doesn't sort of agree with the, okay, then I guess no, then I think that covers it.
00:47:37
Speaker
Now, I think the next thing I was going to ask you was about, have you noticed any effect of your HXA community on your campus yet? And just if you wanted me to see your thinking, I would say for our campus, the biggest thing, it's early days, the biggest thing I've noticed so far is there's a difference between, I think the threshold for coming out locally and for coming out super visibly publicly are different.
00:48:04
Speaker
And I think that the biggest thing that I've noticed that's positive for more righteous community is it's brought some people out of the