New NAS Report on the Irreproducibility Crisis of Modern Science

The National Association of Scholars has published a report on the irreproducibility crisis in modern science.  The report is written by David Randall and Christopher Welser. As well, NAS president Peter Wood has coauthored a Wall Street Journal op-ed with David Randall on the topic.  Irreproducible research is another term for junk science.  Wood and Randall point this out:

In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 “landmark” studies in hematology and oncology. The company could only replicate six. Are doctors basing serious decisions about medical treatment on the rest? Consider the financial costs, too. A 2015 study estimated that American researchers spend $28 billion a year on irreproducible preclinical research.

As the Randall and Welser report emphasizes:

Incompetence and fraud together create a borderland of confusion in the sciences. Articles in prestigious journals appear to speak with authority on matters that only a small number of readers can assess critically. Non-specialists generally are left to trust that what purports to be a contribution to human knowledge has been scrutinized by capable people and found trustworthy.  

The glorification of peer review by wide-eyed, incompetent journalists contributes to the junk science problem.  The problem is probably worse in the social than in the physical sciences, but the report suggests that it has become increasingly worse in the physical sciences too.  

Much research involves fishing for significant correlations that may be statistical artifacts and then playing them up. He who plays up best is most pleasing to the elite journals and is hence best at getting published in those journals.  

Many years ago, with respect to the management field (related to my own field of industrial relations), Lex Donaldson wrote a book American Anti-Management Theories of Organization, in which he describes how the gamesmanship associated with the publication process had led to junk management theories.  The Randall and Welser report is a broader discussion of the same problem.

 Here are the first few of Randall and Welser's recommendations: 

1. Researchers should avoid regarding the p-value as a dispositive measure of evidence for or against a particular research hypothesis. 

2. Researchers should adopt the best existing practice of the most rigorous sciences and define statistical significance as .01 rather than as  .05. 

3. In reporting their results, researchers should consider replacing either-or tests of statistical significance with confidence intervals that provide a range in which a variable’s true value most likely falls.  

4. Researchers should make their data available for public inspection after publication of their results. 

5. Researchers should experiment with born-open data—data archived in an open-access repository at the moment of its creation, and automatically time-stamped.

These recommendations are sensible to anyone who has done research in the social sciences, and I assume the same is true of the natural sciences. 

Astonishingly, tendentious left-wing bloggers (see Cory Doctorow's blog here and Michael Schulson's piece on Wired here) aim to turn these recommendations into a smear campaign against the National Association of Scholars.  

Indeed, the reactions of tendentious "progressives" like Doctorow and Schulson offer evidence as to why university science has deteriorated in quality.  

Peter Wood's New Campus Anti-Americanism

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, has a great piece in Minding the Campus on the decline and fall of higher education, which he attributes to the "new camps anti-Americanism." Wood notes that a Pew poll "showed 58 percent of Republicans saying that they now view American higher education as having negative effects on the country." (The other 42 percent are uninformed.) He adds, "Then a Gallup poll in August offered the even more troubling picture that 67 percent of Republicans and Republican “leaders” had only some or very little “confidence on colleges and universities.” The figure for 'all adults' regardless of political affiliation was 56 percent." Wood says that administrators have been complacent, and their anti-Americanism will result in further declining public support for higher education. Wood is optimistic that the public will insist on reform.

I'm not so sure. The Republicans need to wake up to the partisanship of elite academia. The left ideology prevalent on campus is a market signal, i.e., a selection device that provides a screen, for Democratic Party affiliation. I know that sounds strange, but which party funds universities? May we not expect the party that funds universities to expect the institutions that they fund to support them? Which party are leftists most likely to support?

This claim is supported by the following: There is a strong tendency for academics to be left wing in ideology, but there is an even stronger tendency for academics to be Democratic in party affiliation. In many elite colleges the proportion of Republicans is not significantly different from zero. In contrast, Pew finds that about 38% of the highly educated are now Republican--and that number is endogenous because it follows a generation of campus indoctrination of the highly educated.

Since the New Deal, the Democrats have relied on universities to propagandize on behalf of their programs. The Republicans have been slow to recognize that universities have been playing a partisan role, and if the faculty is predominantly left and entirely Democratic while elite young are turned into US-hating, Gramscian transgender activists, how nice for the Democratic Party.  The Democrats have funded the universities; the Democrats will benefit from a youth indoctrinated into left ideology at those universities.

The solution is ending government subsidization and cartelization of higher education.

That can be done by ending tax exemptions for the social sciences and humanities and using the tax revenues to provide tax credits to students who pursue STEM-related subjects either in universities or in proprietary colleges. As well, business and professional education should be treated as proprietary and put on an even playing field with proprietary training.

Congress Should Defund Colleges with Diversity Oaths

My good friend George Leef wrote a piece about a new trend in higher education:  Some universities now require professors to take diversity oaths, loyalty oaths about their commitment to diversity ideology. That is neofascism. I contacted Republican congressman John Faso, who represents my district. I am going to a breakfast with him on April 13 in Kingston, NY, and I am hoping to bring this up if I have the opportunity.

American universities have been indoctrinating college students in far-left ideologies for decades. I have been reviewing websites of leading liberal arts colleges for the past few weeks, and the absurdity of the course offerings at places like Amherst has gotten me to thinking that it is time that tax exemption for liberal arts was brought to an end. I do not see a good reason for subsidization of the blatant ideology that masquerades as education at many of the leading liberal arts colleges. They are engaging in fraud and indoctrination--not education.

Meanwhile, I have written the following letter to President Donald Trump.

Dear President Trump:

The James G. Martin Center has this morning published an article by George Leef concerning the recent adoption of diversity oaths, similar to loyalty oaths of the 1940s, at Carnegie Mellon, the University of California, and Virginia Tech. Whereas the campus left objected to loyalty oaths to the United States, they have no trouble with ideological loyalty oaths. Leef’s article is based on a piece that was written by a member of the Oregon Association of Scholars.

According to Leef:

In 2015, Oregon State instituted a required statement from faculty on their “contributions to equity, inclusion, and diversity.” Among other things, individuals are expected to discuss their plans to spend time “advocating for normative and policy change.” The message delivered is quite clear: show that you are an enthusiastic diversity supporter if you value your job.

At Portland State, the school’s Diversity Action Council has a list of 44 questions that are to be asked of faculty applicants including “the role of diversity in shaping your social style,” and how he or she will combat “the pervasive belief that diversity and excellence are somehow in conflict.” Obviously, any candidate who answers that diversity and excellence actually can conflict has painted a target on his back.

The purpose of these statements is to exclude from university faculties Republican scholars and anyone else who is unwilling to conform to left-wing ideologies. I’m certain that these are only the beginning, and eventually the amorphous supposed ethical dimension in the diversity oaths will evolve into oaths of loyalty to procrustean principles of equality. These institutions aim to ban from teaching any of your supporters, any Republican, any libertarian, and anyone who believes in liberalism.

Isn’t it time to end the anti-intellectual intolerance at Carnegie Mellon, UC, Portland State, Oregon State, and Virginia Tech?

Leef suggests an idea that I have advocated since the election of the Republican Congress: The National Association of Scholars, led by Peter Wood, has proposed freedom-to-learn amendments to the Higher Education Act, which require that the First Amendment apply to all universities that sup at the federal trough. The bill requires universities to file First Amendment reports. They also require that rights of invited speakers must be respected. I have personally witnessed the violation of such rights.

I do not see how students taught to be intolerant of those with whom they disagree can participate in democratic processes. Funding to Carnegie Mellon, UC, Virginia Tech, Portland State, Oregon State, and all other institutions with ideological oaths should be brought to a screeching halt.

The full text of the proposals of NAS is at  https://www.nas.org/articles/the_freedom_to_learn_amendments_2.0





Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.

13th General Meeting of the National Association of Scholars

The National Association of Scholars (NAS) held its 13th general meeting at the Washington Marriott this weekend. I just returned. Steve Balch, who founded NAS in 1987, did an outstanding job in organizing the conference and attracting speakers, who included Ward Connerly, Victor Davis Hanson, Herb London, Greg Lukianoff, Anne Neal, Abigail Thernstrom and Congressman Thomas Petri. The conference had many high points, to include Ward Connerly's and Victor Davis Hanson's two talks each (all of which were phenomenal). For me, the most poignant discussion was that of Greg Lukianoff, director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Greg outline a litany of abuses involving speech codes since 2007. It is depressing that today's colleges and universities continue to suppress speech.

Also excellent was the debate between Peter Wood of NAS and Cary Nelson of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which represents the left-wing viewpoint. Wood got the better of Nelson, but Nelson is to be complimented for his integrity in participating in the debate and the entire conference. I was glad to see that the AAUP was interested enough to send a speaker.

Steve Balch is retiring this year, and he deserves considerable praise for founding and making the NAS a vibrant reality.