Open Inquiry and Academic Freedom in Colleges By Request of Pano Kanelos - Part 1

On November 8th, 2021, Pano Kanelos, former President of St. John's University as well as a litany of other academics, think tank thinkers, CEOs, and media personalities announced they were forming a new University of Austin. The goal of this university, according to the official announcement is the “pursuit of truth,” which the university founders believe is no longer the goal of many universities in America. In this announcement, they bemoaned the current state of affairs on college campuses in the following terms.

“Universities are the places where society does its thinking, where the habits and mores of our citizens are shaped. If these institutions are not open and pluralistic, if they chill speech and ostracize those with unpopular viewpoints, if they lead scholars to avoid entire topics out of fear, if they prioritize emotional comfort over the often-uncomfortable pursuit of truth, who will be left to model the discourse necessary to sustain liberty in a self-governing society?

At some future point, historians will study how we arrived at this tragic pass. And perhaps by then we will have reformed our colleges and universities, restoring them as bastions of open inquiry and civil discourse.”1

Don't worry Dr. Kanelos, the future is right here. Let us delve into the history of censorship in higher education in America to answer your question: How did we arrive “at this tragic pass?”2

Let us start by clarifying what exactly the “tragic pass” is by parsing through the evidence Dr. Kanelos presents in his study, one by one.

“Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. “

The citation here is to a study by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology (CSPI), an innocuous-sounding name for a think tank. When evaluating evidence, one of the first things to look for is the credibility of the source. Does this source tend to be reliable? Does it have an agenda? An unreliable source that has an agenda should be looked at very critically.3 A quick look through the CSPI website immediately raises red flags as to its credibility and neutrality. It has a clear agenda opposed to what it calls the “Great Awokening,” “Safeyism,” “risk aversion,” “scientism,” and “Bureaucratization.”4 It has already reached a number of conclusions about each of this categories such as that positions endorsed by white liberals have moved far to the left in recent years (notice the subtle language choice that excludes nonwhites), that during the Covid-19 pandemic, “we saw the inability of public health officials to consider the tradeoffs between physical safety and personal freedom,” and so on. CSPI argues that stereotypes are largely accurate,5 that COVID-19 will become mostly harmless, 6 and that lockdowns were an inappropriate response to the pandemic. 7 Thus, despite the neutral name of the organization, it is clear that this think tank has a right-wing agenda centered around academia and culture war issues. It should come as no surprise, then, that their research found the conclusion that Dr. Kanelos presents; it is in line with the assumptions this think tank accepts.

Let's turn to the methodology of the study that Dr. Kanelos cites. The study that was conducted was done through, “survey data of academics and PhD students at universities in the United States, Britain, and Canada.”8 Since the result that Dr. Kanelos cites regards American institutions, and not Canadian or British, we need to be sure we are evaluating the American responses to this survey. Survey response rates for America were 2-4%, that is, only 2-4% of the people who were given the survey actually took it. This is a significant methodological problem; low survey response rates reduce the extent to which a sample population is representative. This means generalizing results from the survey to the population being studied at large is not warranted. To give context on what an acceptable response rate is, one medical journal won't accept papers without a response rate of at least 60%, and prefers 80% in some cases.9. This alone is sufficient to discount the conclusions CSPI drew from this study, but they insist that their findings are in line with other, more representative studies. They write, Though response rates to the North American and British mailout surveys are only around 2-4%, the data they provide tell a very similar story to the non- selective YouGov and Prolific surveys (with 61-87% response rates), and to previous questionnaires fielded by other scholars. The result is a triangulated body of replicated knowledge on political discrimination and chilling effects that has not been contradicted and thus should no longer be seriously disputed.”10 There is no citation here, so I cannot assess either the surveys of the scholar's questionnaires. The problem is compounded through the entire article because the authors flip through eight or so different sets of responses — and the online survey which makes up the data from which they draw most of their important conclusions is an amalgamation, so it seems, of both a general email survey and a Prolific platform questionnaire. It's hard to tell sometimes which data set is being referred to.

That Dr. Kanelos should have cited this study uncritically despite its methodological flaws, and that it should be believed without citation, is an example of “evidence by citation,” a well-known phenomenon which occurs when academics cite a source uncritically, others cite that academic, and so on until whatever was claimed becomes widely believed even though there was no evidence (or weak evidence, or incorrect interpretation of evidence) to begin with. An example of this concept would be, as I've noted previously in this blog, the erroneous belief that left-leaning Americans are more likely to support censorship or censorious practices than right-leaning Americans. Indeed, I'll go further and argue that almost all of the argumentative edifice of contemporary arguments about cancel culture, political correctness, wokeness (or whatever term is in vague three months from now), is based on this web of mutual citation without ultimate evidence. One explanation for how this occurs is that we all, psychologically, tend to seek out evidence that supports our views. If we find it, we tend to take it more uncritically than evidence that challenges our views. Case in point, I'm not writing this blog post about something I agree with. CSPI, actually, is fully aware of this phenomenon — which they refer to as “idea laundering”11. Their error, which is a very widespread phenomenon, is assuming that psychological distortions apply to other people, but not to themselves. They still apply, even if you are calling them out in others.

Dr. Kanelos is just as guilty of this as guilty of this as I am and as you are. He cherry-picked data from the CSPI study that re-affirmed his beliefs. One of their findings was that, “deplatformings or dismissals affect only a tiny minority of academics.”12 That tiny minority, according to their chart is 0.03%. That would certainly challenge the notion that, as he put it, “illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life.” Only 9% of academics said they would even support a dismissal campaign at all. But these are not the citations he pulled, and he doesn't expect his readers to point this out. His tone suggests he assumes a friendly audience that will take his ideas uncritically. Note the wording here: “The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles.” He said “anecdote you've read,” or “heard within your own circles.” These anecdotes aren't in my headlines and they aren't discussed as gossip within my circles. I'm not the target audience here. He knows his friendly audience will be nodding along as they read, and he could bet that a more antagonistic reader wouldn't bother to actually look at his citations, which is a pretty good bet. It's even more ridiculous, because CSPI in the very same study they write, “However worrying the trend in no-platformings and dismissals, this is merely the most visible manifestation of a deeper and more pervasive problem in academia that rarely makes the headlines”12 They've ignored their own results which found that deplatforming and dismissals are rare, let alone establish a trend that such rates are increasing. That'd be hard to do, given that dismissals, firings, and failure to renew employment for academics for political reasons is an old phenomenon.13

What the CSPI study also found was that, “By and large, most right-leaning academics feel a hostile environment or self-censor in some form or another. “ They feel a hostile environment. In this case, we are meant to feel sympathy, whereas if a left-leaning student feels they are in a hostile environment, well, you know what they say, “The sacralization of physical and emotional safety is a worrying trend.”4 When they feel uncomfortable it's bad. They are the ones with psychological distortions, not us who want only to pursue truth. Our motives are good and pure; theirs are bad and corrupt. There's a word for that kind of in-group, out-group thinking, I'm sure of it...

The CSPI study assessed these feelings of a hostile environment in North America by sending its survey to both professors and Ph.D. students, but the methodology is bizarre. Because of the low sample rate, the study author's pull data from elsewhere and make extrapolations that are unwarranted. The authors introduce a separate study conducted by the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) in Britain. The study, which compared academic freedom in the UK to EU countries, asked respondents about the extent to which they suffered disciplinary action (or the threat of disciplinary action) because of what they taught, wrote, or said both inside the university and outside it. Because the study did not breakdown the results by ideology, which is all the CSPI authors are interested in, they copied the wording to their own survey. The apparently did not read the UCU study's conclusion that, “it appears that the use of disciplinary action, or the threat of such action, is relatively rare”14, nor that the academics which the UCU study explicitly mentioned as having been disciplined were not disciplined for espousing right-wing views but for doing research on terrorism and exposing data manipulation by Procter & Gamble. No matter. The study's authors did their own research which apparently found that right-wing academics were more likely to mention that they had suffered some kind action. I can't tell if this is the same 2-4% survey response rate study as began this paper, but if it is, then those results are not at all generalizable. I'm guessing that it is the same study since the number of respondents according to their graph was 43. When it came to Ph.D. students, the authors had such low survey responses that they conducted a completely separate study of the National Association of Scholars, a right-wing academic group, and found that 13-28% of those who responded to their survey reported that something had been done, “on any given dimension,” which seems to correspond to the criteria in the UCU study. This is, of course, completely bad statistics, and the authors admit as much in their footnote, “Note that the NAS is expressly concerned with questions of academic freedom, thus there may be a self-selection effect in the data.” Yes, obviously there was, so your results are not generalizable to the broader academic population. 15

Then, the authors wish to make a comparison between these rates of “victimization” towards left and right academics. How is this done? Despite the fact that the UCU study did not indicate the political affiliation of those who suffered some sort of disciplinary action, since most of the respondents in that study indicated they were on the left, the CSPI study authors treat those numbers as standing in for “authoritarianism” against the left. They compare that, not with the 43 right-wing professors who responded to their survey, but to the NAS survey, which, as they themselves noted, suffers from selection bias. They are not comparing equivalent samples, or samples from the same study using the same methodology, nor even the same populations! When on the next page we are given the breakdown of how different kinds of authoritarian actions are meted to different groups, we find, unsurprisingly, that the self-selected, non-representative sample of the NAS is notably higher than the assumed left-wing sample of the UCU. The other surveys — the 2-4% respondent surveys that this study was presumably about — are completely absent. The UCU study found that higher rates of restriction on academic freedom were significantly related to gender, ethnicity (though with some caveats about these two, and disability. These metrics are entirely excluded in the CSPI study, and it therefore excluded important metrics that might change how one interprets date regarding threats to academic freedom. Even what data, as bad and limited as it is, that the CSPI study does have, is limited to self-reports of assumed prejudice — the assumption that “authoritarianism” occurred because of one's political beliefs. Take this testimonial as an example.

“I had heard from a peer that one of their close friends had been in the program the year prior to ours, and halfway through his department head sat him down and told him he ‘wasn’t cut out to be a teacher,’ and that he was being cut from the program. My peer believed it was because he expressed strong conservative views in class, perhaps not very diplomatically or respectfully.”16 [Emphasis Mine]

And the vast majority of actions taken against conservative academics, according to the study, falls under “bullying by colleagues” and “psychological pressure.” Now, my inclination is to say that that matters; we should have a workplace environment where people feel safe. But that is not the inclination of CSPI. One of their explicit goals is, “Progress in ethics and politics is impossible without emotional risk. Yet, society and government seem to be becoming more risk-averse. CSPI welcomes work investigating the origins, nature, and effects of safetyism. We are also interested in policies and practices that reduce risk aversion or encourage better cost-benefit analysis.” If a right-wing academic feels uncomfortable because a colleague uses “psychological pressure,” then that's an example of “authoritarianism,” but, let's say, if a left-wing student feels uncomfortable because they don't want to hear their professor make derogatory jokes, then they need to “reduce” their “risk aversion?” If you're right-wing, your grievances are legitimate; if you're left-wing then you need to understand that “progress...is impossible without emotional risk?” It's the same double-standard as before.

Another example of the same double-standard, this time with transphobia:

““A professor who declined to refer to a student by a false pronoun (a male wanted to be called ‘she’) was visited by the diversity people and had all of his work and his lab scrutinized. He was placed under specific administrative guidelines for how he was to deal with this student.”

Beyond the gross, dehumanizing attitude represented by this student, note the framing here. The student, who no doubt feels immense psychological pressure having to suffer under a transphobic professor, has no agency. Their suffering does not matter. The transphobic professor, on the other hand, is the real victim because, reading between the lines, he was told to be respectful of all of his students, not just cis students (Here, we might remark, too, about the imbalance of power between the professor and the student). Again, a double-standard. Right-wing professor feels “psychological pressure” or threatened because of his “views,” based on his treatment of a female student? That's “authoritarianism!” A female student doesn't feel comfortable in a classroom where her teacher, and apparently her peers, don't respect who she is? Well, you got to learn to take emotional risks. I'll bet this will be the same double-standard applied at the University of Austin. They profess to want “civil discourse.”17 If a professor wants to mock his students or misgender them or deny their humanity? We must pursue truth! But if a student or colleague wants to call out that professor for their bigotry? That's psychological pressure. We must be civil!

So CSPI is not a reliable source and the methodology of its study is poor. That's the context for looking at Dr. Kanelos' statistic: “Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences.” Let's note a few things. Again, I'm only looking at the American numbers here since that's his citation.18

  1. The study did not ask right-wing respondents these questions. Only left-wing respondents, which is going to make it seem like only left-wing respondents support expulsion campaigns.

  2. The study did not ask respondents about a colleague's opinion; It asked them instead questions about colleague's research findings. This is an important distinction. If I “found” that gravity didn't exist in a study using Physics Department funds, I'm not sure I sure be expelled, but the department might not want to fund my research. Your research, which is publicly funded, is not the same as your opinion, which is not. Indeed, on the immigration question — the only one framed as question about a colleague's opinion, respondents were least likely to support efforts to fire them. The CSPI study authors jump over an alternative explanation for why some academics might support campaigns to fire a teacher and jump straight to “illiberalism.” Dr. Kanelos worsens this error by erroneously conflating opinion and research. Part and parcel of evidence from citation. This is also true for the question on women and minorities, which might indicate that a colleague has biases that show up in other ways too (such as in dealing with students).

  3. As the study authors acknowledge, the vast majority of academics do not, under any of the circumstances they asked about, support campaigns to fire colleagues. Only 7-18%, depending on the question, supported the campaign. Actually, four of the five campaigns showed 7, 8, 8, and 8 percent support with one showing 18%. You could show that as a mean of 9.8% with a mode of 8% but showing it as a range makes the numbers look much higher. Only 2% supported four (minus the immigration question) dismissal campaigns. Why did some academics support one or two dismissal campaigns but not others? If it's because of “left-wing authoritarianism,” as a social psychology phenomenon as the introduction to this section, suggests, or because of “illiberalism,” on questions of justice, then that drop-off shouldn't happen — academics should support firing campaigns across the board. What that drop-off tells me is that academics are making distinctions on other factors — but acknowledging that flies in the face of the narrative CSPI is trying to construct.

  4. The numbers here are coming from a non-representative, small sample with a 2-4% survey response. Although, the number in figure 9 indicates 706 respondents for US academics.

  5. The first three questions — on diversity, empire, and parenthood — are phrased differently than the fourth question, which has more possible answers. Though they also refer to it as “binary,” when it is not.

  6. If only 7-18% of academics supported firing campaigns based on colleague research findings, then where did Dr. Kanelos get his “nearly a quarter” from? The study authors took the first four questions — ignoring the immigration question which demonstrated the least support for firings which would make the results not conform as much to their preconceived notions — and gave each a value of 1 (support) and 0 (opposition). How were questions coded? “Support” is 1, sure. and “Oppose” is 0. But what about “neither,” or “I don't know?” How was the question on women and minorities reduced from six to two options? The study doesn't say. If they put everything but oppose as 1, they could have easily inflated the numbers. The same sleight of hand could be accomplished by simply discarding the other responses. However they did it, 24% of American academics gave at least one 1 value, but this is specious for reasons I just laid out and for the following reason.

  7. 18%. That's an interesting number. It's also a fabrication. Notice that “support” for that question is 10 percentage points higher than the other four questions. Why? It was worded differently and had different options including TWO support options — one to sign the open letter calling for the staff member to be fired, and a second to support the views expressed in the letter privately. I'd bet that option one got 8% again, consistent with the other questions, but that option two got 10%. Option two is ambiguous. Does it mean they support vocal opposition to their colleague's views? Firing (but uncomfortable about saying so publicly)? Both? Doesn't matter. The authors put together those responses, it seems, to get a higher number. They then elided the fact that some academics might challenge their colleague's views, and agree that challenging them is good, without supporting firing them — a deeply ironic elision — and presented the 18% as if it indicated support for firing.

  8. So if the 18% number is inflated, it follows that the 24% number, which is partially derived from it, is inflated too. The number is wrong, but so is Dr. Kanelos' variable. The 24% number didn't refer to those who, “endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences.” Rather, they study authors excluded the immigration question which showed the least support for firing campaigns.

To conclude: Dr. Kanelos, a former president of St. John's university, cherry-picked a value that reinforced his own views from a study by a clearly non-reputable source which contained numerous methodological errors, false equivalencies, shoddy use of statistics, and a non-random, non-representative sample survey with a 2-4% response rate — a value which was inflated using statistical sleight of hand — and referred to a different measurement (research findings without the immigration question) than he said (opinions with the immigration question).

To be clear, I don't doubt that some right-wing students feel uncomfortable on campuses. I don't doubt that a few (2% by their study) left-wing academics seem to think censorship is a good strategy to promote goals they believe in. I don't doubt that there are real examples of a conservative professor or Ph.D. student who has been wrongly maligned. But perspective is everything here and increasingly the anti-woke, anti-PC, anti-cancel culture, whatever you want to call them, crowd has lost all perspective. They've begun to set up double-standards where conservative grievances aren't given enough consideration, while grievances of other students are taken too seriously. They've robbed terms from “authoritarianism,” and “illiberalism,” to “censorship,” and “truth” of all meaning. They've ignored facts which are inconvenient for their narrative — a narrative that one cannot challenge without being part of the PC police or the woke mob or whatever meaningless term comes next. They've adopted in-group/out-group thinking whereby they are good and follow the truth and everyone else is bad and only seeks to deny reality. They have, in other words, become the very thing that they claimed they were setting out to destroy. The only difference I can tell, beyond the valance of the dialogue (“anti” instead of “pro”) is that they have vastly more resources at their disposal than any political correct college student in interpretive dance could ever dream of. They have indeed a whole network of wealth and power to fight their holy war.

I belabored the citations here not just to prove that good evidence and reasoning is absent in Dr. Kanelos's argument (I'd say “increasingly among the right-wing,” but I'm not going to commit the same error they made; it wouldn't be true anyway) but also to show how the parts of this reactionary behemoth intersect. A former university professor works with dozens of other highly-educated elites to get millions in funding19 for a private university. He announces it on the social media platform of another like-minded person. In that message he cites a study from a think tank designed to generate statistics for arguments just like the one he wants to make. The think tank, staffed with highly-educated elites, which apparently receives enough private funding to maintain a staff, moves funds to research projects they think will forward their agenda.20 They cite data collected from organizations with similar attitudes (such as FIRE), which is also funded by wealthy elites. This, from one single citation in a single message.

The amount of wealth and power that backs this message is staggering and vastly dwarfs what some college student, or even a group of college students, have. It shouldn't come as any surprise then that this right-wing narrative is everywhere and constantly repeated. There aren't whole networks of institutions dedicated to promoting facts that challenge that narrative like how a third of Republicans thought it was okay that Gianforte body slammed a reporter, or how Pew found that college students were less likely than those without a college degree to support censorship, and so on. Media on the right, and even the left-wing media I consume, still puts everything in the narrative of “evil PC college leftists hate free speech and the right wing loves it.” That narrative is why, here in Virginia, when the Republican candidate Glen Youngkin spent his campaign trying to silence teachers and censor books and the ideas in them, he was framed as being anti-woke and anti-PC. By what alchemy did that happen? Why isn't that vast machine that can generate reports like the CSPI report on a whim jumping on his campaign to make their case about the erosion of free inquiry and free speech in schools? Where is the Atlantic article about the coddling of the Virginia high schoolers who are too sensitive, apparently, to learn about the realities of sex and racism (which, let's be honest, is a reality they know all too well)?

But, we're getting ahead of ourselves. The next three statistics that Dr. Kanelos uses in his article are all from CSPI. Given the poor methodology and invalid conclusions we saw in the first citation, we have strong reason to be skeptical of these statistics, too. The next three citations come from Heterodox Academy, the Challey Institute, and Freedom and Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). A quick perusal of each of their sites shows their ideological biases and agendas and I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to work through them as I have through the first citation. This isn't to say that the data they collected is necessarily wrong because of their agenda — although given what we've just seen in the CSPI study I'd wager it is wrong — but you'll note how all the statistics Dr. Kanelos uses here to make his case come from organizations which push the same point of view. He is not interested in this article in making a strong case for his interpretation of political correctness, or wokeness, or whatever it is called now, on college campuses. He found sources that already aligned with his viewpoint, regardless of the quality of the research they contained — which readers of this blog will know counters what less agenda-driven pollsters have found. It's classic confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, and because he seems to expect that the audience for his message is friendly, he assumes this will go unchallenged.

He detours next through some selected headlines that he thinks reinforces his view, and then detours further into a general attack on higher education — complaining about administrative costs, college tuition costs (I wonder if he supports efforts to eliminate student debt?)21, and various other complaints, few of which are actually defended with sources. It would be difficult to measure some of the variables in an actual study — how would one operationalize “intellectual grit?”

Every now and again, if you let people talk long enough, they usually say something very revealing, such as they following:

“We believe human beings think and learn better when they gather in dedicated locations, where they are, to some extent, insulated from the quotidian struggle to make ends meet...”

This is an interesting quote because, as those of you like me — and everyone else I've known that's gone through college — you still have to deal with “quotidian struggle[s]” despite also trying to earn a degree. I worked two part-time jobs as an undergrad and then scraped by as a Graduate Assistant while working on a dual Master's. But that aside, Dr. Kanelos has given us another double-standard. Just a few paragraphs before this, he wrote:

“At our most prestigious schools, the primary incentive is to function as finishing school for the national and global elite. Amidst the brick and ivy, these students entertain ever-more-inaccessible theories while often just blocks away their neighbors figure out how to scratch out a living.”

At his prestigious private school, good students are isolated from mere quotidian struggles so as to learn better, while at already-existing prestigious schools, bad students (probably those illiberals) learn about “theories” while others just a few blocks away barely survive. The only difference here is his diction. He uses words that sound bad to describe current schools while using words that sound good to describe his school, even though he is describing the exact same phenomenon of students learning without having to worry about income. This is intellectually dishonest and I wonder how students can expect to be taught intellectual honesty by such professors.

For those of you who know classical history and philosophy, you'll get a good chuckle in this paragraph, too:

“This core purpose—the intrepid pursuit of truth—has been at the heart of education since Plato founded his Academy in 387 B.C. Reviving it would produce a resilient (or “antifragile”) cohort with exceptional capacity to think fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively. Such graduates will be the future leaders best prepared to address humanity’s challenges. “

I laughed deeply when I read this. Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher, is here being held up as one who engages in the “intrepid pursuit of truth.” This is deeply ironic because his most famous work, The Republic spends a great deal of time arguing in favor of rather widespread and very specific censorship. At least one major interpretation of his work classifies it as totalitarian. Plato was not at all a free speech advocate. I'm sure those classicist who are on the board of the University of Austin will be kind enough to correct this silly error in his rhetoric. You'll note, too, that the same double-standard from the CSPI article shows up here again. Dr. Kanelos is very concerned about the way conservative students feel. Their concerns and feelings are legitimate. But other students? Well, they need to be made “antifragile.”

It's quite clear that Dr. Kanelos doesn't actually believe what he is saying, or doesn't really understand the significance of his own words. If he did, he wouldn't be building a school where conservative students will be given a safe space from evil, illiberal professors. Instead, to build their resilience, he would report the findings of the CSPI report with happiness. Yes, conservative students might feel uncomfortable and unsafe but they need to feel that way — that's the path of truth, resilience, and an exceptional capacity to think.22 But, I hear you saying (very politely saying. I appreciate that), the students at the University of Austin will have their ideas challenged! That's the promise of the institution! On the one hand, I doubt that. I think the ideological orientation of the school is quite clear, despite its claims to the contrary. But even if I'm wrong about that, Dr. Kanelos has made it quite clear that the school will have many unquestioned orthodoxies.

(1) Every single faculty member, Dr. Kanelos suggests, is hostile to things they consider, for lack of a better word, “woke.” (2) That the main goal of the university will be truth, defined, as a clear absolute from falsehood and thereby endorsing, I'd guess, a correspondence theory of truth to the exclusion of other epistemological theories. That is to say, the glittering generality of the word “truth” will not seriously be questioned, despite long-standing epistemological debate. There will be no one there to espouse an alternative or even to point out that the university's faculty are working off of debatable assumptions. This will be one of the “unchallengeable” things the university will not challenge. (3) That learning needs to take place outside of the “quotidian struggle to make ends meet,” rather than in the context of one's experiences, what we in education call “culturally relevant” education. (4) That “discourse” is “necessary to sustain liberty in a self-governing society.” This will probably also be one of the “unchallengeable” things the university will not challenge. Notice, too, that liberty is the assumed good here, above and beyond, say, equality, happiness, human rights, or even knowledge which elsewhere seems to be the highest goal. I wonder, given the reference to Plato, when the “timeless” idea of restricting liberty in pursuit of knowledge will come to permeate the university student body. After all, if the pursuit of truth is the most important thing, and it apparently cannot under any circumstances by compromised, we might not want human rights, internal review boards (IRBs), a constitution, and so on which will get in the way. I mean, what's really more important? Human autonomy and self-ownership or medical knowledge? If truth is the only thing that matters, and the dominant good which takes precedence over all others, then it follows that forced medical experimentation to determine, let's say, the nature of identical twins or conditions like heterochromia iridium, would be justified. It seems the students will need to reach that conclusions, or else acknowledge justifiable ethical limits on the pursuit of knowledge, which would make the whole endeavor of the university look rather silly. (5) That “human flourishing” requires “meaningful employment.” I take this to mean, in context, employment in a capitalist economy. Those who would argue against capitalist employment as meaningful, or against employment whatsoever as meaningful will probably not be invited to give guest lectures. (6) The following: “Our students will be exposed to the deepest wisdom of civilization and learn to encounter works not as dead traditions but as fierce contests of timeless significance that help human beings distinguish between what is true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Students will come to see such open inquiry as a lifetime activity that demands of them a brave, sometimes discomfiting, search for enduring truths.” Note here the strict absolutes of “true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly,” as if these are simple, obvious categories and things only need to be sorted into them. Notice too that the model of approaching “truth” will be antagonistic. The idea that we might better come to truth through listening, compassion, compromise, and cooperation — the model, one might say, of a serious professional community — rather than “fierce contests,” will likely not be entertained or demonstrated. Arguments that texts from thousands of years ago might only have limited relevance to us now, and might indeed be “dead traditions” in serious need of updating, will not likely be entertained. Another wonderful irony here is that the “pursuit of truth,” keeps moving forward finding more “truth,” yet ancient works (I'm guessing they are mostly referring to classical works of Greece and Rome), never need to be updated by what that “truth” finds. Truth is both timeless, eternal, and has been known for millennia and also out there, still waiting to be discovered — and those two bodies of knowledge never deal with one another. Dr. Kanelos, of course, doesn't actually mean this — I doubt students will spend their time learning the “timeless truths” of Ptolemaic epicycles or phlogiston. It's just a nice sound phrase — another glittering generality.23 (7) That debate and discussion leads to truth — the oft-repeated idea of a “marketplace of ideas,” in some form or another. That debate and discussion could just as well reinforce prejudices as lift them, give students a false, inflated sense of their own capacity to reason, or might not be able to adequately broach every topic, or that debate and discussion are not the primary means by which truth is discovered will certainly not be presented nor taken seriously.

Having analyzed the quality of the main arguments of Dr. Kanelos's announcement, we are now in a better position to understand the question of how we arrived at this “tragic pass.” Dr. Kanelos has given his understanding of what that “tragic pass” is — increasing illiberalism among the student population and among professors is the crux of it — but as we've just seen the evidence he presented for this is quite poor. Of course, just because someone uses a bad argument in defense of their position, it doesn't necessarily follow that that position is wrong, though we might treat it more skeptically. There might be other, better evidence that defends his point-of-view. There is, as I mentioned earlier, however, ample evidence that his view is quite false, despite the number of times it gets repeated. I'll refer the reader here to numerous other posts in this blog that have looked at much stronger statistical studies that have found that (1) free speech is widely supported among all parts of the political spectrum; (2) that there exists ample evidence of “illiberalism” (as Dr. Kanelos calls it) among right-wingers, making the focus on leftists in college deeply myopic; and (3) where there is support for limiting speech, it tends to be of a fairly limited scope. There is also the problem of the historical word, “increasing.” Absolutely none of what he cited here demonstrates change over time; the evidence he presents has only to do with the present.

So Dr. Kanelos is guilty of what is known as a complex question — a question that makes an assumption that is unwarranted. A common example of this kind of question is: “Why do you hit your spouse?” which implies that you do, even if you don't, and puts you in a no-win situation because any answer you give validates the assumption that you do indeed hit your spouse. Dr. Kanelos's (incorrect) assumption here is that we are at this “tragic pass” when we are in fact not. There's no historical argument that can be made to explain something that does not exist. It's not logically possible.

But it is worth asking how we arrived at a tragic pass: How did we arrived at a point where a public discourse around incredibly vague terms like “woke,” “politically correct,” “free speech,” and so on has dominated the public conscious in the way it has? How and why did the contemporary media narrative around free speech and college campuses come to be a dominate narrative within that discourse?

This are questions I keep coming back to but have never really done the research to answer. But, Dr. Kanelos has requested that future historians investigate the matter, and I won't shirk that call. The future is now.

Okay, in a week. Give me some time.

  1. https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/we-cant-wait-for-universities-to
  2. This post is, of course, pointless in that it will never be persuasive to Dr. Kanelos or anyone else at the new “University of Austin.” That is made clear by the end of the article when he writes that: “We expect to face significant resistance to this project. There are networks of donors, foundations, and activists that uphold and promote the status quo. There are parents who expect the status quo. There are students who demand it, along with even greater restrictions on academic freedom. And there are administrators and professors who will feel threatened by any disruption to the system.

We welcome their opprobrium and will regard it as vindication.”

Since the motivations of anyone opposing their project, or even raising questions about it, is suspect (logically, this is the fallacy of “poisoning the well https://www.thoughtco.com/poisoning-the-well-fallacy-1691639), all evidence they present (including any I present here) can be discounted as well. Now, that a university dedicated to the “pursuit of truth” should be announced, and that that announcement should include such obvious logical fallacies, calls into question how sincere that “pursuit of truth” is. But, for the purpose of this blog, I won't be repeating Dr. Kanelos's clear error, rather I will assume not only that he is sincere but that the evidence he has to present is worth considering. Still, his post presents many educational opportunities for students and others who are interested in logical fallacies and how to accurately and critically assess evidence. 3. This is not to say that the evidence presented by a source with an agenda must be incorrect. It could be the case that the evidence they've gathered holds up under scrutiny. Additional scrutiny is necessary though, especially when bold claims that run counter to prevailing evidence and expertise is presented. The most effective tool is to look at the source's methodology and assumptions. The methodology of a study could be flawed, or might not lend itself to the conclusions that are drawn. Assumptions, which are inevitable, can be twisted to guarantee outcomes that the study's authors desire. 4. https://cspicenter.org/ 5. https://cspicenter.org/reports/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-data-and-implications/ 6. https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/why-covid-19-is-here-to-stay-and-why-you-shouldnt-worry-about-it/ It is worth noting that none of the people listed as working for CSPI are epidemiologists, doctors, or medical scientists. See: https://cspicenter.org/about-us/ 7. https://cspicenter.org/blog/waronscience/the-case-against-lockdowns/ 8. https://cspicenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/AcademicFreedom.pdf. Page 7. 9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2384218/. It is worth noting here, as well, as that the CSPI study is NOT peer-reviewed. No one with knowledge in fields relevant to this study double-checked results, offered suggestions, caught errors, suggested additional sources to consult, and so on. Peer-review is the gold standard of all scientific research, and even those who publish in the social sciences and humanities are still subject to peer-review. Peer-review is not without its limitations, but it is epistemologically preferable to no peer-review at all. 10. Page 8. 11. https://cspicenter.org/reports/the-accuracy-of-stereotypes-data-and-implications/ 12. Page 13. Page 15. CSPI 13. For example, in 1950: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1950/6/20/3-professors-dismissed-at-washington-college/ 14. http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/id/eprint/26811/3/26811%20UCU%20Academic%20Freedom%20Study%20-%20Final%20Report%20for%20Publication.pdf. Page 46. For more on the Nottingham Two, see: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2011/may/04/nottingham-university-row-after-lecturer-suspended and for more on the Procter and Gamble case, see: https://www.bmj.com/content/339/bmj.b5293 15. Page 190 CSPI 16. Page 18 CSPI 17. https://www.uaustin.org/our-principles 18. Pages 20-24. Some additional words are due here. In the study authors' introduction to this section they left-wing authoritarianism as follows, “The underlying orientation is a preference for using power or violence to upend the current moral order and replace it with a new regime that compels people to conform to new principles. This orientation is characterized by moral absolutism, intolerance of dissent, and a preference for censorship, exhibiting considerable overlap on many psychological measures with right-wing authoritarianism.” The study cited here is not open-source and therefore I couldn't read it but the abstract points out that, “Relative to right-wing authoritarians, left-wing authoritarians were lower in dogmatism and cognitive rigidity,” (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34383522/) which would indicate that it right-wing authoritarians would be more “absolutest” and intolerant of dissent — but that fact doesn't fit the narrative. 19. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Austin and https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-11-09-protesting-alleged-liberal-bias-in-higher-ed-scholars-announce-a-university-of-their-own 20. https://cspicenter.org/blog/cspi/cspi-grant-recipients-qanon-beliefs-and-impact/ 21. His private university lowered tuition costs from $50,000 a year to $35,000 per year — hardly pocket change, but I suppose cheap for those wealthy elites who go to private colleges. They did this by having rich alumni and philanthropists donate the difference. One can only assume that these wealthy, generous individuals will be demanding the government raise taxes on them to ensure that every student, not just those wealthy enough to attend a private college, will be able to do so for free. I'll assume that Dr. Kanelos doesn't mean his donors when warns about the evil “networks of donors” that will come after his brave institution. See: https://www.thedenverchannel.com/education/amid-student-debt-crisis-many-colleges-are-making-big-cuts-to-tuition 22. An astute reader might remark that this is not a double-standard, arguing instead that, when dealing with left-wing students they are simply unable to handle arguments which oppose them, while right-wing students are being threatened, which is not an argument. I don't buy that. I fail to see how disrespecting a female student by not using her correct pronouns is an argument, but calling a right-wing student or teacher out for racism, sexism, etc. is not an argument but instead a threat or psychological pressure. It's a double-standard and a recurring one in this annoying public discourse. 23. An astute reader undeterred by my previous footnote might remark that Dr. Kanelos is referring to the timeless truths of classical works in philosophy and similar humanities, rather than in hard sciences. The hard sciences have been updated since ancient times, but philosophy and the humanities? Well, those timeless fields have made no progress whatsoever. After all, how could there be a final answer to questions like, “what is the right thing to do?” “what is the nature of knowledge?” or “what is bullshit?” There must be a final answer because in Dr. Kanelos's epistemological ontology there is no unanswered or unanswerable questions. There is only true and false, good and bad, beauty and ugly. If there were no final answer to questions like that, it might follow that multiple answers can be about equally justified, depending, for example, on one's starting assumptions and the extent to which they achieve internal cohesiveness, and we don't take kindly to coherence theories of truth around the good ol' University of Austin.