UPDATE: a commenter points out that the survey was not very trustworthy.]
Relatively conservative professors valued academic rigor and knowledge advancement more than did relatively liberal professors.
Relatively liberal professors valued social justice and student emotional well-being more so than did relatively conservative professors.
Professors identifying as female also tended to place relative emphasis on social justice and emotional well-being (relative to professors who identified as male).
Business professors placed relative emphasis on knowledge advancement and academic rigor while Education professors placed relative emphasis on social justice and student emotional well-being.
Regardless of these other factors, relatively agreeable professors tend to place higher emphasis on social justice and emotional well-being of students.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen (see the Rolf link). See also Sumantra Maitra.
This relates to what I call the Road to Sociology in economics. The economics profession is rapidly increasing its number of females and also rapidly moving to the left. This is not a coincidence.
Knowledge isn’t free. Students who are serious about getting educated are always looking for heuristics for determining who the good instructors are. Thomas Sowell tells the story of the first university class he taught, which was well before affirmative action took hold. Students were flocking to sign up. He asked an experienced professor why so many people were enrolling in a class taught by an unknown, first-year professor. His colleague explained that, because he was black, they figured that he must really be something to have gotten a teaching gig at an ivy league university. Post Affirmative Action, the heuristic became somewhat different.
Now, in woke America, the heuristic will be to pick out a conservative, male, professor of business or engineering.
I have seen some of this at my own place at work. I work at a coding bootcamp and the admin and management team skews female and place a high priority on emotional well being and wholistic wellness, but much less emphasis on the rigor of the curriculum.
I’m one of the higher rated teachers where I work, and I think part of it is because I try and push my students into interesting work and go out of my way to develop interesting assignments that can be fairly time consuming.
Reason with her crown and Constancy alert behind a helm.
They are all retired now, consigned to a Florida for tropes.
Justice is there standing by an open refrigerator.
-Billy Collins
One has to wonder how much of wokeness and social justice is really a redistributionary scam in Cowen’s “Average is over” world by women and minorities, where they know they can never match the skills of the braniac 1% earning millions at Big Tech, so they choose this grifter route instead: “We’re not earning anywhere as much as you, so you must be sexist and racist against us.” That sentiment isn’t limited to them of course, it’s also the driving force of the mostly white alt-right that Trump tries to appease with walls and tariffs, ie they blame immigrants and foreign competition instead.
The truth is the elites they rail against aren’t that bright themselves, and are paralyzed by how all this technological change could rip them from their perches at any moment. There is a lot of foment yet left in this internet revolution, and the roller coaster of change is only getting started, eg there won’t be an “economics profession” for very long.
The greater wealth, opportunity, and liberal attitudes of western countries has resulted in more gender stereotypical career choices for women, not less. IE, it’s allowed women to make occupational choices that indulge their care/nurture instincts, such as in healthcare and education. It’s worth asking if there isn’t a similar political phenomenon at work here, where women and men stratify politically, also, as greater wealth allows for women (and some men of course) to indulge their collectivist or communitarian impulses, driven by high empathy levels, aversion to competition, etc.
I hate to be the guy…but this study is “an online survey created via Qualtrics. Of
the 177 participants who started this survey, about 140 completed the survey in its entirety.”
“The researchers distributed the Qualtrics survey link in various online venues. Public
groups and pages that were in any way affiliated with academic faculty from a university or college within the United States were reached out to on Facebook. Additionally, the researchers disseminated the Qualtrics link to academic faculty members from various universities and colleges throughout the United States. Faculty members’ email addresses were randomly selected from open faculty directories.”
That means it’s an indication of the opinions publicly stated by participants who care about the topic enough to participate without compensation, and it’s a small n survey at that. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large portion of the effects measured are the difference between ‘people who respond to a random survey in e-mail’ vs. ‘people who know the authors and respond to the survey as a favor’, given numbers that small. Or simply the result of how the questions were framed. Or the particular facebook groups the authors identified to advertise in. Or, well, a million confounders.
I wouldn’t trust any findings on any other topic from an online survey set up this way, no matter how much statistics were done on the resulting data. I don’t think that should change just because the results presented sound plausible to me.
good point
Both good points.
The issue is like quantum mechanics: when you observe the observed changes.
Even if the sample were more in size, determined to provide greater diversity, the issue is in academia are people willing to ensure that their revealed and stated preferences are same. So best bet is to take all this with a pinch of salt.
I am skeptical of that given the pressure for conformity to values in academia as reported in media. Anyways, are “values” common across all human populations even?
Arnold – my 2 cents: you would do yourself a service by writing such blog posts with clear mention that “this blog post is based on a survey results of 140 respondents out of 167 participants out of possible 100000 participant”. To bring rigor.
Arnold, I suggest paying special attention to Blake Smith’s article in today’s Tablet:
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/hannah-arendt-judgment
It ends with these words: “… it is vital that we consider Arendt’s errors as well as her insights, and ask how (or whether) we could protect our lives from irresponsibility and inauthenticity, and our politics from violence and persecution.”
Smith reviews what he calls the three modes of mental activity that Arendt identified in her work, in particular, he focuses on what Arendt called judgment. To discuss and judge “academics” we should be clear about the relevant mental activities that have defined “academics” in history and particularly today. My impression is that finally the Academy is being diluted into the Greater Intellectual Area, the one in which all modes of mental activity are “commingled” and that totalitarians want to control.
“Academics who are less attached to rigor”
Your bias is showing. These values are independent. An ability to see substantive value in fairness has no negative impact on rigor whatsoever. If anything, being a jerk only induces a reduction in the rigor of others.
This is why diversity actually has value. Perhaps it isn’t so bad for our geniuses to have a clue about other people in addition to being spectacular at one thing, and maybe the world will get far more out of them because their ideas aren’t suppressed by otherwise repellent behavior that doesn’t get corrected by the previous generation of jerks.
Hmm. Perhaps that’s your bias showing.
How much rigor and knowledge advancement are you willing to sacrifice to accommodate social justice and student emotional well-being? How much to accommodate other types of “diversity”?
I don’t like how the issue has been framed because rigor and knowledge advancement have a quite different value for education and research. If we are talking about education, I’m willing to consider that to some extent, they may have to be sacrificed to some types of “diversity” in the selection of issues and approaches (as well as in deciding the organization and funding of courses). In research, however, I don’t see any reason to accommodate the particular type of “diversity” suggested in Geher’s work or any other type, although there may be some relevant types at the stage of deciding the organizing and funding research programs or projects.