Biases in Social Science

 Madeline Kearns of National Review has written an excellent interview with Musa al-Gharbi of Heterodox Academy. It is frustrating to read about the biases in fields like sociology and social psychology.   My take is that there are three fallacies in the broad conversation, which includes most of what the academic reform movement has  been conversing about for the past 30 years:

First, social science is not science, and there will never be a scientific approach to hypothesis testing in subjects like sociology.  Economics is value free on the microeconomic level, but it will never be on the macroeconomic level.

The early days of social science were focused on problem solving,  and amateurs played the chief role until the late nineteenth century.  The establishment of professional social science coincided with the first research universities at places like Johns Hopkins and the Wharton School.  Social science struggled to become value free in the early twentieth century, but it never succeeded. In the late nineteenth century the Wharton School was founded to advocate for tariffs.  In the early days of professional sociology there were struggles between the advocates of a moralizing social work approach and a value free approach. The value free approach won, but never completely.  The half victory was largely overturned after the 1960s.   

 In the early days of the Harvard Business School, Edwin F. Gay advocated a case study approach to studying business. Until the 1950s the business schools did not tend to emphasize scientism.  The scientistic approach resulted from a push in the form of two major books, one by Gordon and Howell and the other by Pierson, funded by the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation.

Second, the academy is not reformable.  Colleges were chiefly Christian, with some engineering and practical, land grant institutions (which were also Christian), until the late 19th century. The establishment of Johns Hopkins led to an interest in adoption of the research university model, and Harvard soon followed.  The Carnegie Foundation and the General Education Board provided significant funding for colleges to professionalize along the lines of the research university model. In doing so, Abraham Flexner and his colleages at the foundations advocated and provided financial incentives for adoption of a principle of hierarchical emulation.  A few high-quality institutions would dominate, and other institutions would imitate. The principle of peer review precludes deviance, and that means political disagreement is foreclosed.  Departments and learned societies have evolved so that their cultures are rooted in political ideology. They view their political beliefs as moral.

Much of the conversation about university reform has assumed that universities can be changed as political candidates are changed. They cannot. They are rigid organizations that are difficult to change. Once the left-wing culture was instituted in the top-tier institutions, the cultures were set. The institutions will need to die rather than change.

It probably wasn't Flexner's or the foundations' intention to institute an ideologically left-wing university system, but from the 1920s, that was the effect, and the effect had to have been evident to the foundations. Burton Clark, in his classic The Distinctive College, notes that the colleges that were receiving support from the General Education Board had left-wing faculties, and the same institutions received the lion's share of media attention.  This was so even in the case of Reed, which was a brand new institution that received GEB funding and adopted a left-wing faculty from the inception.  The effect of de-Christianizing the colleges led to the hiring of mostly left-wing faculties.

Perpendicular control coupled with scientism fates university social science to be locked in a narrowly defined ideology.  It could have gone differently: The ideology could have been that of James Burnham or Ludwig von Mises, but it wasn't.  It is unclear  but probably not the case that the Carnegie Foundation and the GEB consciously preferred left-wing academics, but in aiming to de-Christinaize the colleges that was what they did.

Third, as result, incremental reform is unlikely.  The perpendicular structure of journal editorships and the cultures in most social science departments prohibit it.