Neither conservatives nor liberals trust universities — they’re dishonest
Josh Barro is a writer on politics and the economy.
Over the past few years, conservatives have rapidly lost trust in higher education. From 2015 to 2023, Gallup found that the share of Republicans expressing “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education fell by 37 points, from 56 to 19 percent.
As conservatives have come to look negatively at these institutions, Republicans have engaged in political attacks on the sector, most recently in the fact-finding and pressure campaign that caused Claudine Gay to resign as president of Harvard.
This decline is something close to common knowledge. Less discussed is the fact that public confidence in colleges has fallen significantly across all ideological groups since 2015. Though Republicans’ confidence cratered the most, Gallup found that it fell by 16 points among independents (from 48 to 32 percent) and nine points among Democrats (from 68 to 59 percent, not far from where Republicans were nine years ago).
Often, when an issue becomes polarized, you’ll see thermostatic effects in public opinion, as when Democrats became more liberal on immigration in response to Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants. But while liberal figures on campus like to talk about themselves as a vanguard in the fight against conservative know-nothings who would take down expertise, no pro-college backlash among liberals is apparent in the polls.
So the champions of truth at our nation’s top-tier universities should probably be a little less entitled and whiny, and a little more introspective about why everyone seems to like them less than they used to. One explanation is that these institutions are dishonest.
I personally have also developed a more negative view of elite universities over the past decade, and my reason is simple: A lot of the research coming out of them does not seem to aim at truth, whether because it is politicized or for more venal reasons.
The social-justice messaging they wrap themselves in is often insincere. Their public accountings of the reasons for their internal actions are often implausible. They deceive the public about the role that race plays in their admissions and hiring practices. And sometimes, especially at the graduate level, they confer degrees whose value they ought to know will not justify the time and money that students invest to get them.
The most recent debacle at Harvard, in which large swaths of academia seem to have conveniently forgotten what the term plagiarism means so they don’t have to admit that Claudine Gay engaged in it, is only the latest example of the lying that is endemic on campus.
For me, the problem starts with the replication crisis. I was a psychology major at Harvard, and graduated in 2005. Most of my coursework was in social psychology. And something I keep seeing in the news since I graduated is that a decent amount of what I was taught in Harvard’s social-psychology courses was just wrong. When I was a student, there was a vogue for research about how “priming” and little behavioral nudges can materially affect attitudes and behavior, but the studies I learned about in class keep getting debunked: Replications have failed, and many of the studies were p-hacked or even based on fraudulent data. The widespread research dishonesty in psychology stemmed from poor incentives—interesting findings are published, and being published gets you funding and job security and notoriety and sometimes even corporate consulting contracts, and it’s easier to produce an interesting finding if you juke your data—and was made possible by lax practices that prevailed until recently, including researchers not being expected to share their raw data for review by others.
Universities’ level of interest in addressing widespread research dishonesty in behavioral science has been mixed. Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics famous for studying dishonesty, of all things, has been accused of serial academic misconduct, but he remains at Duke. A lot of the work in cleaning up the field has been done as a side project by three professors who write Data Colada, a blog about data integrity. Harvard Business School, to its credit, aggressively investigated data-fraud allegations against Francesca Gino that Data Colada first raised, ultimately suspending her last year and thus enduring a lawsuit and the de rigueur allegation that taking action against her was sexist. But if the Data Colada team hadn’t done this sleuthing in its spare time, neither HBS nor the journals that published Gino’s research would ever have noticed a problem. And in a preview of the defenses we’ve seen in the Claudine Gay case, the Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig looked past the ample evidence of data fraud to tell The New Yorker that he rejected the allegations against Gino because of who she is: “I’m convinced about her because I know her,” he said. “That’s the strongest reason why I can’t believe this has happened.”
I’m not under the impression that the replication crisis in the social sciences looms as large for others as it does for me. But research dishonesty in universities goes beyond the social sciences. In the humanities, it has taken a different form—postmodern research that aims at “my truth” instead of truth.
The commentator Matt Yglesias wrote a few weeks ago about a paper by Jenny Bulstrode, a historian of science at the University of London, who alleges that a moderately notable metallurgical technique patented in England in the late 1700s was in fact stolen from the Black Jamaican metallurgists who really developed it. The problem with Bulstrode’s paper is that it marshals no real evidence for its allegation — not only failing to show that the Englishman Henry Cort was aware of a Jamaican metallurgical technique similar to the one he patented but failing to show even that such a technique was ever used in Jamaica.
The paper, because it fit into the fashionable category of “historian finds yet another thing that is racist,” garnered credulous press coverage. And when people pointed out that the paper didn’t have the goods, the editors of the journal that published it came out with a “what is truth, anyway”–type word salad in defense of the article, including this:
We by no means hold that “fiction” is a meaningless category — dishonesty and fabrication in academic scholarship are ethically unacceptable. But we do believe that what counts as accountability to our historical subjects, our readers and our own communities is not singular or to be dictated prior to engaging in historical study. If we are to confront the anti-Blackness of EuroAmerican intellectual traditions, as those have been explicated over the last century by DuBois, Fanon, and scholars of the subsequent generations we must grasp that what is experienced by dominant actors in EuroAmerican cultures as ‘empiricism’ is deeply conditioned by the predicating logics of colonialism and racial capitalism. To do otherwise is to reinstate older forms of profoundly selective historicism that support white domination.
This ideology-first, activism-oriented, the-truth-depends-on-who’s-looking approach leads me to suspect that a lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research—it’s social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality so long as it has the right ideological goals. Of course, this is not what all (or even necessarily most) professors in the humanities are up to. And I see arguments like this one in The Atlantic from Tyler Austin Harper, a professor at Bates College, that faculty in the humanities generally aren’t even pleased with these changes—that it’s administrators at the top of these institutions pushing departments in politicized directions. He writes:
The reigning assumption is that scholars of color are disproportionately represented in activism-oriented fields such as “decolonial theory,” which means that deans—always seeking more brown faces to put on university websites—are more likely to approve new tenure lines in ideologically supercharged, diversity-rich disciplines. It is often faculty who are trying to safeguard their fields from the progressive machinations of their bureaucratic overlords. But faced with a choice between watching their departments shrink or agreeing to hire in areas that help realize the personnel-engineering schemes of their bosses, departments tend to choose the latter.
So this is another form of dishonesty. Because using racial quotas in hiring is illegal, universities can’t explicitly admit to setting positions aside for candidates from underrepresented minorities. Instead they use ideological screens and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statement reviews as a proxy for race. This approach has many drawbacks—in addition to involving a concealment of the university’s true objectives, it is of no use to Black and Hispanic candidates who are not interested in “ideologically supercharged” areas of study, and sometimes it leads to the hiring of white candidates anyway, if they know best how to include the magic trendy words in a DEI statement.
Yet another distortion of academic output is subject-matter specialists using the guise of expertise to impose their policy preferences on the public. This phenomenon exploded as a huge problem early in the coronavirus pandemic, and it wasn’t limited to universities — some of the public-health professionals who fought to turn transmission estimates into policies that closed schools, offices, and places of worship were on faculties, some were at hospitals, some worked for the government, and some just posted a lot on Twitter. But I’ll say that several years of hearing “science says” prior to claims that weren’t science as such but rather were applications of scientific claims through a specific value framework I didn’t share — part-communitarian, part-neurotic, part-left wing — made me feel more negatively about experts. I’m far from alone in that sentiment.
The dishonesty at elite universities extends beyond their research output to how they describe their admissions processes. Like many universities, Harvard has long used race as a factor in college admissions, producing a class that is less Asian and more Black and Hispanic than it would be if it did not consider race. Throughout the litigation over this practice, the university’s representatives didn’t just defend the appropriateness of race-conscious policies to promote diversity; they denied that they were discriminating at all. They played word games—similar to the “what even is plagiarism?” bit deployed by Gay’s defenders—arguing somehow that race could be used as a positive factor for admission without ever being a negative one, a mathematical impossibility when awarding a fixed number of admission slots.
Affirmative-action policies prefer personnel of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds as part of an effort to alter the institution’s demographic balance—this is the point of affirmative action—but apparently it’s racist to admit this is what’s happening (or sometimes it would constitute an admission of illegal activity), so there’s a bunch of obfuscatory fudging of what the universities are really up to when they look at race. And since the Supreme Court’s ruling last year prohibiting race-conscious admissions practices, institutions across the country have been obvious about their search for ways to flout the law. It’s dishonest, and in the past few years, it’s been all over the news, which can’t have been good for public trust.
And so that takes me to where this current news kerfuffle started: the congressional hearing last month, where Representative Elise Stefanik bested the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. The presidents were right on one of the points that was officially at issue in their exchange: If a university’s policies on expression are designed to follow the First Amendment, then even a call for genocide will be prohibited only in certain specific circumstances. The problem, in my view, is that the university presidents weren’t straight about the if part of that statement: They do not, in practice, take a hands-off approach to all kinds of speech. Universities find ways to extend forbearance to speakers who break rules in the process of expressing favored ideas, and they impose sanctions on those who express disfavored ideas, often through process-as-punishment.
Gay herself was responsible for one such breach of neutrality discussed at the hearing: the firing of Ron Sullivan as a faculty dean at Harvard College over his legal representation of Harvey Weinstein. Officially, that’s not why Sullivan was fired—the university laundered students’ complaints about his legal activities through the notion that his behavior was disruptive to the “climate” inside Winthrop House, and Gay continued that laundering in her testimony. The case of the evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven also shows that a claim as banal as saying that there are only two human sexes (note sexes, not genders) is unprotected in practice at Harvard.
Gay’s detractors have correctly identified Harvard as hostile to certain kinds of speech, but they had a variety of other complaints too — they want restrictions of certain kinds of speech about Israel, and they have broader objections to DEI. But what they found, when searching for dirt on her, was unrelated to all of this: She plagiarized, repeatedly, in her academic work. She copied paragraphs of text nearly wholesale, without quoting the scholars whose text she used, and sometimes without even citing them. Anyone who went to college knows you’re not allowed to do that. It’s not just a rule — it’s a rule that universities beat into students’ heads. If I had copied like Gay did when I was a student, and if I got caught, I would have expected the university to require me to withdraw.
And that’s why it’s been so jarring over the past month to watch some academics and journalists announce a new, more lax standard for plagiarism that was unknown to us when we were students. What seems to be happening here is they are suffering from Christopher Rufo Derangement Syndrome. That is, they know conservative activist Christopher Rufo is a bad guy, and therefore the only way they can analyze a question on which he has opined is by assuming that the opposite of whatever he said was true. If Rufo says Gay plagiarized, then she must not have plagiarized, regardless of whatever near-duplicate paragraphs we can see with our own eyes. In addition to being a terrible approach to learning the truth, this mental model endows Rufo with tremendous power: If you have Christopher Rufo Derangement Syndrome, all Rufo has to do to make you look like a total idiot is be right about something, once.
So we got a lot of idiotic statements. Gay was merely guilty of “duplicative language,” the Harvard Corporation said, back when it was still defending her. We were told that everybody does it: “Claudine Gay has resigned on the basis of a plagiarism charge that could have been leveled at anyone we know via the power of text mining applied without sound standards of how to assess the results,” wrote Jo Guldi, a history professor at Emory. (Really? Anyone we know?) The columnist Charles Blow even wrote in The New York Times that the expectation that the president of Harvard should not plagiarize (or should not be the subject of “questions about missing citations and quotation marks,” as he more verbosely described plagiarism) constitutes a “Wonder Woman requirement” in which Black women in positions of power “are trapped in prisons of others’ demands for perfection.”
The demand that we should define academic honesty down in order to address the fact that Harvard’s first Black female president is a plagiarist is insulting to academics of all races who don’t copy other people’s works. And the insistence that this is how it’s always been, that actually this kind of copying is a standard industry practice, is just gaslighting. I went to college. I know that’s not true.
Eventually (belatedly), the Harvard Corporation realized that nobody was buying these defenses, and that Gay’s position was untenable — that it would not do to have a university president stay in place when she’d done things the university kicks ordinary students out for doing. But that Harvard’s first instinct was to lie and obfuscate — to say there was nothing to see here — is reflective of the university’s overall posture of dishonesty and nontransparency. In fairness to the members of the corporation, they usually do get away with it.
And all of this colors the conservative “war on higher ed.” Liberals in academia, including Gay herself, are very agitated about it. But it’s not clear to me exactly what one is supposed to be defending and why. I’d much rather see this industry do some introspection about why it’s losing public trust — not just among conservative — and what it could do to be more deserving of it. After all, if the strategy is simply to polarize views about universities and turn them into a liberal cause célèbre, that strategy is failing.
JANUARY 12, 2024
This article was adapted from a post on Josh Barro’s Substack, Very Serious.