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or depression. It would cover people with post-traumatic stress
disorder, or just for my purposes, almost anything that would make
it hard to understand what other people find offensive, or hard
to inhibit saying things that they might find offensive. Whether
it’s something you truly believe, like if you have a weird kind of
schizotypal paranoid conspiracy, or whether it’s just that you tend
to blurt out profanity, like some people with Tourette’s syndrome.
So, I use neurodiversity quite broadly to mean anybody who
has brains that work a little differently and where that might
affect their ability to follow speech codes, or to inhibit politically
incorrect speech.
You’ve pointed out that a lot of brilliant people, a lot of academics,
tend to be on that spectrum, and that political correctness has a
chilling effect on these people. Can you explain that?
Almost all of the scientists I really respect, almost all of the mentors
who’ve been great to me have been Aspie. They’ve been geeks and
nerds, and unusual people with eccentric interests who just don’t
respect or follow mainstream politics, ideologies or religions. Many
of them have learned to cope with the politically correct academic
environment, but some haven’t. Some find it really aversive and
they get into trouble, or they leave voluntarily.
My thought experiment for this paper was, what if Sir Isaac
Newton had time-travelled to the present, given how weird,
eccentric, Aspie and ornery he was?
I have to say I love that term – ornery. I’ve heard you use it a few
times. It’s a very American term.
Yeah, I’m pretty ornery – punctual but ornery. Newton would
have almost certainly gotten into trouble if he’d been a standard
tenure track professor in any American – or Australian or British –
university. Some folks might say, well, good riddance, if you drive
people like that out of academia. But the problem is, who do you
have left in science, technology, engineering and math if you
do that?
If you get rid of all the geeks, nerds and eccentrics because they
don’t toe the line politically, then you don’t have a university any
more. You don’t really have the hard sciences, the behavioural
sciences – you’re just going to nuke your talent pool. That’s one of
my concerns.
Going back to the piece you wrote, you mentioned you have
examples like social and management settings, and teaching
settings, which are the places where you feel that. Do you think it
affects your writing and the things you chose to research as well?
For sure. I’ve researched a lot of unusual or taboo topics in my life
that I probably wouldn’t have had the – I wouldn’t say the guts –
but I would have had better judgement in career management if I
hadn’t been Aspie. I would have done some kind of mainstream,
cognitive psychology or social psychology that was inoffensive or
politically correct.
Because your area of expertise deals with sex?
I do a lot of sex research. I work on behaviour genetics, the
inheritance of behavioural traits. That is subject to a lot of political
reaction from the left [of politics]. I’m currently researching
polyamory and open relationships, which are heavily stigmatised.
But as a sort of ‘Aspie systematiser’, who’s just interested in
understanding behaviour, I’m willing to go to those places. I think
workforce
we need people who have that sort of contempt for social norms
to push the boundaries of behavioural research.
Do you think then that’s something ‘neuro normative’ people lack,
because they’re worried about political correctness, not offending
people, or damaging their chances of climbing the management
chain?
Absolutely. I think the ‘neuro typical’ or the ‘normies’ can be much
more successful in controlling for IQ and hard work, because
they choose research that’s less offensive and more fundable.
They get along better with their colleagues and administrators.
They don’t offend their students as much. They sometimes have
easier relationships with the people they’re mentoring, if they
have political disagreements with them. They also have easier
interactions with the media and the public. We academics are
expected to reach out and engage with the public – a lot of
universities prioritise that. But if you push Aspies to do that, some
friction will develop, because Aspies think a lot of the political
values held by the general public, or journalists, are kind of dumb.
Can you think of times when you’ve thought about censoring your
teaching?
Oh, I do censor my teaching. There are several topics I just avoid,
even when I’m teaching human sexuality, even when I try to scare
away on the first day the students who might have the worst
reactions to controversial materials. Still, there are certain issues
that I know could just too easily lead me into trouble. And it’s not
just me, it’s everybody I know who teaches human sexuality or
anything related to it, in any behavioural scientist department. I
can’t even tell you what those topics are, because I’d even get into
trouble for revealing which ones are controversial.
You’re coming at this from a totally different viewpoint than is
typical here in Australia, especially as it’s normally a very politically
loaded, left/right thing. At what point in your career did you start
noticing this creeping in?
It was really early – as soon as I got interested in evolutionary
psychology, early in grad school, circa 1989. I’m 53 now, I’ve been
in academia for a long time. But as soon as I got into grad school
and I got interested in human evolution, genetics, sexuality and all
of that, it became clear that, number one, my career track would
be much harder – in terms of getting jobs and funding – and
number two, that I’d have to learn to be really careful in talking with
colleagues about these issues.
I think it’s been an ongoing struggle for everybody who works in
my field, evolutionary psychology. But I think it got worse with the
culture wars in America in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Then things
kind of calmed down a bit in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Then
you’ve got this more recent wave of political correctness about
the last five or 10 years. That’s become much more intense than
anything we saw before.
When did you start coming to the realisation that it maybe had
something to do with you being Aspie or on that spectrum?
I always knew I was a socially awkward nerd, and I always loved
the company of nerds, both as male friends and as girlfriends. So,
I knew that was a personal challenge for me, but I didn’t really
connect it to the free speech issue until a few months before I
wrote this Quillette piece last year. I just didn’t see those dots, but I
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