NOTE:
I have summarized a paper that required a 39 page pdf file. These carefully selected quotes resulted in a longer article than usual here, but my summary is more interesting than reading the whole paper, in my humble opinion. Not that I'm biased !
https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202009.0197/v1
This is the most important subject
discussed here since 2014, when
I launched this blog. The suppression
of non-leftist views by the mainstream
media, is why this free, no ads, blog exists.
And the suppression is getting worse!
The media have published 50 years of
wild guess, always wrong, predictions
of a coming climate crisis. This blog
summarizes recent studies and articles
on climate science. Wild guesses of
the future climate, and 50 years of
failed predictions of a climate crisis,
have nothing to do with real science.
September 6, 2020
Scholarship Suppression:
Theoretical Perspectives
and Emerging Trends
Preprints (www.preprints.org)
NOT PEER-REVIEWED
doi:10.20944/preprints202009.0197.v1
For a special edition of Socius:
Sean T. Stevens
The Foundation for Individual
Rights in Education
Lee Jussim and Nathan Honeycutt
Rutgers, The State University
of New Jersey - New Brunswick
"Abstract:
This paper explores the suppression of ideas within academic scholarship by academics, either by self-suppression or because of the efforts of other academics. ...'
"The suppression of scholarship is well-documented throughout human history. Scholars have faced censure, or worse, because they were unpopular with political and/or religious authorities, challenged majority public opinion, or researched a taboo idea. For example, in 399 B.C. Socrates was found guilty of “corrupting the youth of Athens” and sentenced to death. Galileo was declared a heretic by the Catholic Church in the early 17th century for his support of helio-centrism and ordered to abstain completely from teaching, defending, or even discussing it. He was later convicted of heresy a second time and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.
Other forms of scholarship suppression are more subtle, and are driven by fear of the social consequences one may face for pursuing controversial scholarship. Nicolaus Copernicus and Charles Darwin both delayed the publication of their most influential work (Copernicus, till after his death; Darwin for decades), presumably to avoid sanction and punishment. ...
External scholarship suppression occurs when the attempt comes from forces outside the academy (interest groups, the government, religious groups, etc.). Internal scholarship suppression occurs when the attempt comes from elements within the academy, either from students, other scholars ...
... this paper is primarily focused on how internal academic forces can foster the development of a culture of self-censorship among scholars, hindering the investigation of certain topics that are widely considered controversial or taboo. We consider internal suppression the most dangerous, most toxic form of research suppression ... the power (e.g., to fire, punish, retract an article) always rests with insiders; the key actors and decision-makers are the insiders, not the outsiders. ... academic success hinges on the views of other academics, whereas external efforts to suppress are unusual events and can thus be considered outliers.
... the First Amendment protects a group of Black Lives Matter activists on the campus of a state university who silently protest an academic panel on the limits and downsides of identity politics by holding up signs during the discussion or turning their backs on the speakers. However, if any members of the group loudly shouted down the speakers so that they could not continue their discussion, the university would be expected to intervene so the discussion could continue. This latter form of protest behavior is referred to as the heckler’s veto, and courts in the U.S. consistently rule that such behavior is a violation of the First Amendment rights of the shouted down speaker or speakers (Greenberg, 2017).
... since the mid-20th century university faculty in many countries have possessed some degree of academic freedom, a protection that grants scholars the freedom to research, teach, or communicate facts or ideas without fear of suppression or censure, job loss, or imprisonment.
...The First Amendment applies to all citizens and affords them protection from government restrictions on their expression. The concept of academic freedom is more narrowly focused on protecting the ability of faculty and
students within academia to engage in the free and open inquiry of their individual scholarly interests and pursuits, with little to no restriction. Faculty are also granted considerable latitude in how they teach, provided they demonstrate professional competence and avoid introducing controversial material that is not related to the course.
... In scholarship and science there is a difference between suppression and rejection. Suppression occurs when the fear of social sanctions prevents ideas from being explored or empirical findings from being presented in scientific or public forums. In science, rejection occurs when an idea has been explored and the evidence has been found wanting.
The history of science is replete with rejected ideas, such as a geocentric solar system, young Earth, explored and rejected because the evidence available overwhelmingly disconfirmed them. In contrast, suppression prevents an idea even from being explored. Historically, this has occurred for a wide variety of reasons, including that the idea constitutes religious heresy (Moore, 1987/2007), political anathema (Honeycutt & Jussim, 2020), or premature canonization of the wrong idea (Jussim, Krosnick, Stevens & Anglin, 2019).
Premature canonization refers to widespread scientific belief in a false conclusion which leads to suppression masquerading as rejection. A classic relatively recent case of premature canonization involves the scientific identification of causes of ulcers. In the 1950s and 1960s the medical establishment had converged on the conclusion that stress caused ulcers, and a huge, lucrative pharmaceutical industry was built around treating ulcers by treating stress. When Barry Marshall came along in the 1980s producing study after study showing that bacteria, not stress, caused ulcers, he was generally dismissed as a crank and had difficulty getting the work published or treated seriously at medical conferences (the history is told in Levitt & Dubner, 2014).
This is suppression, not “rejection” because no one ever actually refuted his research. Although the medical community was eventually persuaded by Marshall’s work (indeed, he received a Nobel Prize for it), it took decades because his early work was effectively suppressed. Loeb (2014) presents several examples in which premature canonization of erroneous claims unnecessarily delayed progress in astronomy.
To recap, rejection means science has extensively examined some claim or hypothesis and determined it to be false. In contrast, suppression means an idea either cannot be explored, or, if explored and empirically supported, is blocked from communication with the scientific community or public.
... The production of ideas and knowledge in academia generally hinges almost entirely on the subjective evaluations of one’s academic colleagues. This renders academics highly vulnerable to professional social approbation: ... All or nearly all academic incentives are fundamentally social, rather than objective:
● Admissions to graduate school?
Letters of recommendation are required and important.
● Peer review? The evaluation of your work by peers.
● Grants? Usually obtained by peer review.
● First job? Peer reviewed publications and letters of recommendation, preferably from famous faculty.
● Tenure? Peer reviewed publications, grants, and letters of support from prominent faculty.
● Further promotions? Peer reviewed publications, grants, and letters of support from prominent faculty
Because social evaluations are so central to success in academia, it is easy to induce fear of social sanctions for expressing the ideas that, though not necessarily shown to be factually or scientifically wrong, are widely unpopular or disapproved.
... Eminent and prestigious scholars are often gatekeepers (editors, society officers, etc.) and can have outsized influence on which ideas are cultivated, ignored, or outright blocked. For example, one of the sources of psychology’s Replication Crisis is that failures to replicate famous scientists’ work often ran into difficulty getting published (Funder, 2012).
... Typically, however, the replication attempt would be sent to original authors for review, because the original authors would be viewed as highly expert in the research area and specific methods having already published on that topic using those same methods. However true that may be, this process also creates a built-in conflict of interest: If a scholar’s success and prestige hinged in part on the accolades and respect from colleagues that accrued as a result of the original paper and findings, and if they are sent a paper that failed to replicate their original findings, they have ample incentives to suppress the failed replication, e.g., by producing a scathing review to the editor rejecting the paper.
... few editors indeed are likely to be willing to accept a paper over the adamant rejections and intense criticisms of famous, eminent experts. Doing so might put their own careers at risk!
... Anytime research produces either findings or conclusions that some large interest group in that field opposes, a similar dynamic can function to suppress those findings. The same dynamic can play out with respect to grants ... one needs to usually receive favorable ratings from almost every reviewer to get funded.
... The basic recipe for this conflict in academic, or other contexts, is simple. First, someone schedules an event (e.g., a conference; an invited talk), publishes an article (peer-reviewed or op-ed), or states something that another person, or group of people, considers offensive or harmful.
Then the aggrieved person or group of people organize in some way (e.g., by petitions, letter, social media, or email campaigns, etc.) to exert public pressure on authorities (e.g., journal editors, colleagues, university presidents or provosts) who can sanction or punish the offender.
Frequently enough, these organized campaigns manifest as petitions making some call to action (e.g., cancellation of an event; calls for termination; dis-invitation of an invited speaker; retraction of a published peer-reviewed groups may only be loosely organized and often feed off of one another’s outrage, denunciations, and moral grandstanding on social media platforms, such as Facebook or Twitter (Grubbs, Warmke, Tosi, James & Campbell, 2019). On rare occasions an outrage mob may resort to more drastic tactics such as shouting down a speaker at an event, verbally threatening the offender or getting physically aggressive with them (see Jussim, 2018 for a summary of such events).
... However, even if punishment is “unsuccessful” ... (the target is not fired, de- platformed, their paper is not retracted), it may nonetheless be highly effective at suppressing ideas for several reasons:
... 1. Defending one’s self from such attacks is potentially time-consuming, emotionally exhausting, and, in some cases, may be quite expensive if lawyers get involved (e.g., Gottfredson, 2009).
2. The time and effort spent defending one’s self from such attacks is time not spent engaging in scholarly activities; therefore, the productivity and ability to influence discourses and canons in the field in which the target works are reduced.
3. The targeted scholar, even after successfully fending off the attack, may decide that whatever constituted the basis for the attack, and anything like it, is just not worth the grief that comes with pursuing it.
4. Others, especially younger scholars seeking jobs or tenure witnessing the event may reach similar conclusions and decide “Maybe I should just work on something else.”
5. The attack may successfully sully the target’s reputation, even if the target is not otherwise punished. Given that academia is a social reputational system, this can be quite enough to mcreate formidable obstacles to getting ideas platformed, published or funded.
Self-suppression occurs when people do not pursue certain ideas or try to publish certain findings because they fear punishment or prefer that the findings do not see the light of day. Self-suppression is notoriously difficult to empirically assess because there is mostly an absence of evidence (if the idea is suppressed, it cannot usually be found).
... This raises the following unanswerable questions: How many other unpublished studies providing quality data relevant to important social issues and controversies are out there that have gone unpublished because the researchers feared repercussions, did not see the value of reporting it, or themselves did not want the results to become widely known? How many published papers have buried results (either their own or, in the case of reviews, others) in order to avoid highlighting findings that conflict with preferred narratives? The answer is currently unknowable but it almost surely exceeds that described.
Examples
(see Jussim, 2020 for more details):
● Alessandro Strumia, physicist working for CERN, fired (technically, not renewed, in 2018-2019), after presenting a data-based talk arguing that women were not discriminated against in physics. Although multiple issues may have contributed to his non-renewal, he was denounced primarily for his ideas.
● Noah Carl, social scientist, had accepted a postdoctoral position at St. Edmunds College (United Kingdom), which was ultimately rescinded in response to a petition denouncing him on these grounds: “A careful consideration of Carl’s published work and public stance on various issues, particularly on the claimed relationship between ‘race’, ‘criminality’ and ‘genetic intelligence’, leads us to conclude that his work is ethically suspect and methodologically flawed.” We note that the petition did not actually identify any methodological flaws and that the commission of inquiry tasked with evaluating his scholarship reached this conclusion: “Dr. Carl was ... an extremely strong candidate ...
● Allan Josephson, Professor of Psychiatry at University of Louisville was fired after being denounced or making this comment at a conference: “When treating children with gender dysphoria, medical professionals should first seek to understand and treat the psychological issues that often cause this confusion" ...
● Susan Crockford, University of Victoria. She had an unpaid affiliation with the University for 15 years, which was not renewed in 2019, after she published a book arguing that, contrary popular environmental narratives at the time, there was no ongoing devastation of polar bears, leading to her denunciation as a “climate denialist.” It is interesting to note that polar bear population estimates have gone from 20,000-25,000 in 2012 (Unger, 2012) to 22,000-31,000 in 2019 (World Wildlife Fund, 2020).
... ● The National Association of Scholars, perhaps the last right-leaning academic organization in all of U.S. academia, held a conference in 2020 titled “Fixing Science.” It was denounced as a shill for conservative and corporate interests promoting climate change denialism. There were also social media and email campaigns that pressured invited speakers not to attend. Although most did attend, two early career scholars withdrew. Whether this was because they earnestly believed in the validity of the denunciations, or were simply intimidated and feared for their careers, or some mix of both, remains unclear.
● Stephen Gliske, a neuroscientist at University of Michigan, published a paper presenting a new theory of the development of gender dysphoria. It offended trans activists and their academic allies, who launched a retraction petition that was ultimately successful.
● Ted Hill, Math professor, Georgia Tech, wrote a paper offering an evolutionary explanation for the male variability hypothesis (the idea that human males are more variable than human females on many attributes). It was accepted for publication at a journal; this evoked protests and outrage, which had the effect of pressuring the accepting journal to “un-accept” the article. He then had it accepted at another journal, which evoked more outrage, and it was again unaccepted (Hill, 2018). The paper remains unpublished as far as we know.
● Kathleen Lowry, a feminist professor of anthropology, lost her position as undergraduate vice chair in 2020 for claiming that biological sex exists and is important, on the grounds that “it was not in the best interests of the students” for her to continue in the position.
... ● An academic outrage mob petitioned (July, 2020) to have Professor Steven Pinker, Psychology, Harvard, removed from the Linguistic Society of America’s list of distinguished academic fellows and their list of media experts. There were a variety of vague allegations. This petition failed. It was so obviously filled with falsehoods and misrepresentations that numerous sources were able to debunk its charges.
● Philosopher Rebecca Tuvel (2017) published a paper in Hypatia, a leading feminist philosophy journal, titled “In Defense of Transracialism,” in which she argued that people could choose to identify as whatever race they preferred. She drew on common postmodernist ideas suggesting that race is not an essentialist or biologically determined category and that it is socially constructed. Just as people can, according to this view, identify as any gender, she argued that the same perspectives would mean they could also do so for race. The paper was denounced by hundreds of academics who signed an open letter calling for retraction, including the claim that Tuvel caused “harm and violence.” Hypatia’s board of directors stood firm, and refused to retract the article.
● Littman (2018) published preliminary evidence for “rapid onset gender dysphoria,” which referred to the idea that, for some adolescents, identifying as a different gender seemed to have been something that emerged suddenly, more or less “out of the blue,” rather than from a
longstanding history of identifying differently than the sex one was assigned at birth. The paper was quickly denounced by transgender activists claiming the paper caused “harm” and “denied their identities.” From here, the story took some strange turns.
The journal publishing the paper (PLoSOne): 1. Instituted post-publication review; 2. Apologized for their handling
of it; 3. Persuaded Dr. Littman to revise the paper; and 4. Published the revision as a “correction.” Although Dr. Littman was fired from an ancillary consulting position, this paper was not retracted. Thus it is included here as an example of an authority (in this case, the editors) resisting an outrage mob’s call to retract, although the incident is plausibly considered an intermediate case, because she was made to jump through extraordinary hoops that, as far as we know, no other author has ever had to jump through at PLoS journals.
● Dr Abigail Thompson (2019) published an editorial criticizing the use of mandatory diversity statements in academic hiring. This triggered an academic outrage mob denouncing her and petition calling for removal from her position as vice president of the American Mathematics. According to the AMS website us/governance/officers/officers), as of September, 2020, she was still listed as vice president. Thus, although we have no inside information, the AMS did not cave to mob outrage. An interesting epilogue is that she has also received a Hero of Intellectual Freedom Award from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA, 2020).
... Conclusions
... A most pressing question, unaddressed in this paper, is what should be done about this state of affairs? We conclude our paper not with answers, but with an attempt to begin a conversation about how to address this emergent social problem."
NOTE:
Jussim, L. (2020).
"The threat to academic freedom ... from academics.