Two items today:
- How conservatives are steering education to the classics of the ancient Greeks, as if only ancient “knowledge” is valid
- How some modern institutions prioritize identity and D.E.I. over objective science
NY Times, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, 4 May 2023: Why Conservatives Can’t Stop Talking About Aristotle, subtitled “The 2,500-year-old roots of Ron DeSantis’s education plan.”
Well, at least the conservatives are consistent in their veneration of ancient texts over modern knowledge. The trouble with venerating ancient texts, even those of the Greek philosophers, is that most of them have turned out to be *wrong* in all the specifics. The early Greek philosophers *speculated* without bothering to check their ideas against the evidence of the actual world. And their speculations on the meaning of life, or the proper role of government, should have no more precedence to modern life than those of any other thinkers over the past two millennia, especially those many of them (compared to the number in the past) who are alive today. Don’t conservatives understand the notion of cumulative wisdom? The ability to learn? We’ve learned from the Greeks, and have moved far beyond them.
To the article/interview:
Maybe you’ve heard the term classical education. It’s an old idea that’s newly in favor, especially among conservatives. The organizing principle is that education should be rooted in the Western canon, the great books of the Western world, usually starting with the ancient Greeks.
In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis has championed classical education. In Tennessee last year, Governor Bill Lee threw his weight behind opening a network of classical charter schools in partnership with Hillsdale, a conservative Christian college. And it’s all caught the attention of Fox News, which ran an entire series recently about the educational model.
The interviewee, Jeremy Tate, supports the idea.
Lulu Garcia-Navarro:
Jeremy, I appreciate you saying that your fear is that it’ll become a red state test and it will split education in half. But you told the “Washington Examiner,” and I’m quoting here, “the College Board is a radical, left-wing institution.” And you went on to say that students are not leaving an AP US history class saying, I love America. They’re seeing America as the oppressor, as the big, bad guy. I mean, is that how you see it?
Jeremy Tate:
I do see the College Board as politically biased. I mean, there’s no question about that, and I think at times, pretty heavy handed. An education that’s focused on the here and now is inherently going to lend itself to being political in a way, whereas an education that’s focused on antiquity, what our ancestors cared about, texts that have proven to be timeless — I think Aristotle is going to be relevant in 500 years in ways that contemporary texts are not going to be relevant in 500 years. These texts that have staying power, I think that that makes it inherently less political. So CLT does not want to be a conservative option to a politically biased College Board. We want to be an apolitical option to a politically biased College Board.
He says education focused on the “here and now” — i.e. what humanity has learned and matured into over the past two millennia — is political. And he says things like
That is what — I’m a Christian, so I believe in a fallen human nature. And so if in a fallen world where humans do bad things and have an immense capacity for both good and evil, every good thing is going to be misused.
Which is simplistic religious drivel.
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NY Times, Pamela Paul, 4 May 2023: A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up.
This piece is a sort of bookend, at the opposite extreme of, to the piece above. If conservatives think our ancestors got everything right, at least the important stuff, millennia ago, some academics think nothing can be understood as true today without the filtering of potential bias based on the identities — racial, religious, cultural — of the researchers. This is the left end of the ‘woke’ spectrum, that prioritizes diversity and inclusiveness — not necessarily bad things — over objective facts and reasoning.
Jerry Coyne promoted this article in his blog today, because he is one of the couple dozen authors of the paper under discussion.
So I agree with Coyne that, from the evidence shown, some universities are going overboard in promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion (abbreviated D.E.I.) as a remedy for perceived past injustices. This NYT article opens:
Is a gay Republican Latino more capable of conducting a physics experiment than a white progressive heterosexual woman? Would they come to different conclusions based on the same data because of their different backgrounds?
For most people, the suggestion isn’t just ludicrous; it’s offensive.
Yet this belief — that science is somehow subjective and should be practiced and judged accordingly — has recently taken hold in academic, governmental and medical settings. A paper published last week, “In Defense of Merit in Science,” documents the disquieting ways in which research is increasingly informed by a politicized agenda, one that often characterizes science as fundamentally racist and in need of “decolonizing.” The authors argue that science should instead be independent, evidence-based and focused on advancing knowledge.
This sounds entirely reasonable.
Actually this echoes the post-modernism movements of the 1990s, in which some academics claimed that nothing existed except as a cultural construct, even some seemingly incontrovertible things as physics and chemistry. And recently, as again Jerry Coyne has been following (see this blog post), the country of New Zealand seems to be ceding its scientific institutions to the traditions of the native (though only by a thousand years or so) Maori and their “indigenous knowledge” and “other ways of knowing”. (Knowing what? I’ve asked.)
The NYT piece discusses “positionality statements” and “citation justice” and statements that job applicants for research position must write describing their commitment to D.E.I..
These are noble goals that in practice, however, can amount to discrimination, and such statements strike many as a kind of political litmus test. At the University of California, Berkeley, for example, in the hiring cycle from 2018 to 2019, three-quarters of applicants for a set of five faculty positions in the life sciences were eliminated on the basis of these statements alone. (Grant programs also often require applications for funding in the sciences to include D.E.I. goals.)
Of course, nobody wants to hire a racist. But that’s not what we’re talking about. For a prospective faculty member to say he is determined to treat all students equally rather than to advance diversity initiatives can be enough to count someone out of a job.
This strikes even me as extreme, a kind of over-thinking the nature of a supposed problem by creating an actual problem that undermines the point of the institutions.
“What’s being advocated are philosophies that are explicitly anti-scientific,” Anna Krylov, a chemistry professor at the University of Southern California and one of the paper’s authors, told me. “They deny that objective truth exists.” Having grown up in the Soviet Union, where science was infused with Marxist-Leninist ideology, Krylov is particularly attuned to such threats. And while she has advocated on behalf of equal treatment for women in science, she prefers to be judged on the basis of her achievements, not on her sex. “The merit of scientific theories and findings do not depend on the identity of the scientist,” she said in a phone interview.
The NYT writer notes that several authors of the paper “are politically conservative, as are some of the researchers they cite.” And concludes,
But to deny the validity of this paper on that basis would mean succumbing to the very fallacies the authors so persuasively dismantle.
One needn’t agree with every aspect of the authors’ politics or with all of their solutions. But to ignore or dismiss their research rather than impartially weigh the evidence would be a mistake. We need, in other words, to judge the paper on the merits. That, after all, is how science works.
Two plus two equals four, and water molecules are made up of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom, no matter your sex, gender, race, nationality, religion, or whatever. The truths of mathematics and science do not change based on any of those things. Though some religious people would apparently disagree.
