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.

Walter E. Williams Covers "Homogeneous"

In his syndicated column, Walter E. Williams covers my recent Academic Questions article "Homogeneous," which is on the political affilitions of liberal arts college professors . Williams's column is carried in 140 newspapers around the country.



Williams writes:

Just within the past week or so, some shocking professorial behavior has come to light. In the wake of Barbara Bush's death, California State University, Fresno professor Randa Jarrar took to Twitter to call the former first lady an "amazing racist." Jarrar added, "PSA: either you are against these pieces of s—- and their genocidal ways or you're part of the problem. that's actually how simple this is. I'm happy the witch is dead. can't wait for the rest of her family to fall to their demise the way 1.5 million iraqis have. byyyeeeeeeee."

In New Jersey, Brookdale Community College professor Howard Finkelstein, in a heated exchange, was captured on video telling a conservative student, "F—- your life!" At the City University of New York School of Law, students shouted down guest lecturer Josh Blackman for 10 minutes before he could continue his remarks. When Duke University President Vincent Price was trying to address alumni, students commandeered the stage, shouting demands and telling him to leave.

None of this professorial and student behavior is new at the nation's colleges. It's part of the leftist agenda that dominates our colleges. A new study by Brooklyn College professor Mitchell Langbert — "Homogeneous: The Political Affiliations of Elite Liberal Arts College Faculty" (http://tinyurl.com/ycfomjy6) — demonstrates that domination. (By the way, Academic Questions is a publication of the National Association of Scholars, an organization fighting the leftist propaganda in academia.) Langbert examines the political affiliation of Ph.D.-holding faculty members at 51 of the 66 top-ranked liberal arts colleges according to U.S. News & World Report. He finds that 39 percent of the colleges in his sample are Republican-free — with zero registered Republicans on their faculties. As for Republicans within academic departments, 78 percent of those departments have no Republican members or so few as to make no difference.

Raquel Okyay's Piece about Homogeneous

Raquel Okyay just wrote a fine piece in the Liberty Beacon about my recent article Homogeneous.

Affluent Technology, Squalid Human Capital

Technology is a multi-edged sword, or better, a mace with unpredictable effects.  One of the effects is that the technological medium has become the message. Marshall McLuhan  published his claim in 1964, the same year that the IBM 360 was first sold,  but it has become increasingly true in an era of addictive, distracting, and mind-wrenching iPhones, social networking sites, and fake news.

Attention spans deteriorate, interpersonal skills become frayed, and the ability to focus on sustained objectives wanes. Garbled, ad hoc acronyms and misspellings that would have been disgracefully illiterate a generation ago replace the English language, and they do so in a way that reduces comprehensibility. 

The deterioration in America's human resource endowment follows generations of increasing human resource investment. In 1958, more than a decade after the GI Bill was passed in 1944, John Kenneth Galbraith complained of private affluence and public squalor, but education spending as a percent of GDP had been increasing since the 1940s, and by the 1970s it had increased five- to six-fold. 

However, there does not appear to have been improvement in popular scientific, historical , English writing, reading, or mathematical ability or knowledge.



As well, interpersonal skills have not improved as public morality as measured by out-of-wedlock birth rates, which have more than doubled since 1970, has deteriorated.  

Rich technology will not compensate for the iPhone generation's lack of focus, troubled interpersonal skills, and lack of basic knowledge.  The impoverishment of human capital comes at a time when American resources are stretched.  Federal indebtedness is 105% of Gross Domestic Product, and economists Reinhart and Rogoff argue that indebtedness over 90% will result in sluggish future growth.   They write:

The relationship between government debt and real GDP growth is weak for debt/GDP ratios below a threshold of 90 percent of GDP. Above 90 percent, median growth rates fall by one percent, and average growth falls considerably more. We find that the threshold for public debt is similar in advanced and emerging economies.  Shortfalls in Social Security and public pension plans will also strain resources.  

As well, the higher education system has generated $1.3 trillion in student loan indebtedness, much of which has not created value.  Colleges have resisted measuring the extent to which skills are acquired from education, so discussion about any value that higher education creates is purely speculative. It is likely that much of it is pure waste.  Arum and Roksa find that one-half of graduates do not gain cognitive skills in college.

Strains from indebtedness come at a time when the prerequisites for successful industrial enterprise--interpersonal skills, focus, clear goals, communication skills--are weakened.  The claim that technology alone can produce growth is illusory.  Without human capital, growth is impossible, but government-funded educational institutions have failed. Spending on valueless education is like spending on drug addiction. If a drug addict inherits $5 million, he can fund his $500 per day habit for decades. Eventually, though, the addict will find his way to the streets.