workforce
read so much about the diversity initiatives – they all had to do with
race, ethnicity and sex. None of them had to do with the kinds of
individual differences like mental disorders and personality traits
that I was studying. I thought, there’s a double standard here. Like
academia is very welcoming to people from different racial groups,
both sexes, but they’re not making any accommodations for
Aspies, nerds or geeks, or anybody with any of the other disorders
I mentioned.
I was going to ask what you feel you can’t teach or say, but like you
said, you can’t really talk about that stuff.
Well, let me give you one example that’s only semi-controversial.
So, with the #MeToo movement, there’s a view that we live in a
rape culture and that the burden is on young men to learn how not
to do anything sexually coercive or inappropriate; that if we make
any suggestions for young women about – just in the interest of
prudence – “Here’s how to avoid situations that could lead to sexual
coercion or date rape, or trouble”, that’s viewed as very un-PC,
that’s viewed as victim blaming.
What do you feel will be the learning outcomes, or the future for
academia if it is true that this is happening?
I think it has terrible effects on student learning. For example,
I teach human sexuality because I think human relationships
are a huge source of wellbeing and pleasure, and pain and
heartbreak, even apart from people’s careers, and if I can give my
students tools to have better relationships, marriages and ways of
understanding their partner, that’s a huge win. If I have to handicap
how I do that, if I have to give half the useful advice and insights
that I could give, it really harms them.
It also inhibits research. It means we can’t do good research on
lots of socially important topics. We can’t challenge a lot of the
dominant areas for what causes certain kinds of social problems
like prejudice, crime or terrorism.
And it threatens funding for academia. A lot of conservatives
and centrists in America are so pissed off with universities being
leftist and indoctrination camps that they basically want to defund
universities completely. They’re like, “Why should my tax payer
dollars be indoctrinating my kids into political values that are
actually contrary to everything I stand for?”
You’ve mentioned the left quite a lot, but does it work the other way?
Especially in your topic, I can’t imagine conservatives want to talk
too much about sex in universities?
There are conservative approaches to sexuality. It’s an interesting
issue: Would more young conservatives go into sex research if sex
research wasn’t so leftist? I think more of them would. They might
study things like successful Christian marriages and how they
operate, and how the Church supports certain kinds of intimacy
and sexuality, and commitment. They would do very different kinds
of studies on abortion or premarital sexuality.
But then they might totally ignore gender identities which, whether
you believe in it or not, is a huge part of sexual studies.
It is now, but you could imagine a kind of sex research that pays as
much attention to the 80 per cent of Americans who are Christian
as it does to the 0.1 per cent who are trans. But that would be
considered a pretty radical change compared to the standard leftist
sex research.
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What in your mind is free speech? Is there anything that we can’t
discuss in academia or society? Or is there anything we shouldn’t be
allowed to?
Free speech is just the way society helps overcome its own self-
deceptions, taboos, biases and unspeakable topics.
So, there should be very few limits on free speech, with some
key exceptions. I think the key exceptions are quite informative
because they help recalibrate us in terms of, “Oh, what’s really bad
to share?” So, designs for nuclear weapons should not be covered
by free speech. You should not be able to share this. You should
Academia is very welcoming to people
from different racial groups, both sexes, but
they’re not making any accommodations for
Aspies, nerds or geeks.
not be able to share genetic engineering information about how
to create airborne bio-weapons, or engineered pandemics. These
are huge existential threats to civilisation – nuclear winter and
pandemics. These are big deals.
In your Quillette piece, you mention John Stuart Mill. I’m
paraphrasing here, but my understanding of Mill is you can say
whatever you want as long as it doesn’t harm others, and society
will decide that. So, if PC speech or thought is the prevailing theory,
surely that’s okay, in a liberal sense?
The question of harm is tricky. The nuclear bomb issue is clear
harm. Saying something like, “One ethnic group differs a little bit
from another ethnic group on some trait, and here’s the evidence,”
might hurt some people’s feelings, but new research tends to.
New research on human behaviour tends to hurt some people’s
feelings, because they have a model of the world that needs to be
updated, which is painful.
If enough people think it’s not acceptable to talk about, then what
do you think?
I think those people have to suck it up and deal with it.
This issue doesn’t seem like it’s going to go away. How do we strike a
balance in academia with keeping free thought but also not causing
harm to others?
The main way to fix the problem is to just let go of the whole
model that there’s a trade-off between free speech and the
wellbeing and safety of people. That model is the problem. The
notion that hearing ideas that we don’t like is similar to physical
harm or violence – that idea is the problem.
I think it’s bullshit. It’s the way that all repressive regimes
throughout history have clamped down on free thought. They
never say, “That idea is taboo.” They’re always saying, “Oh, how
dare you! That hurts people’s feelings. That offends our sense
of the sacred. That undermines the progress towards the great
communist utopia,” or whatever it is.
We have to draw a clear line between actual physical damage
and the verbal expression of ideas. ■