In this post, I defended the research of four psychologists on the psychological determinants of conservatism. After reading the actual article in question, a response, and their response to the response, I am convinced I was in error in defending their work as not being politically motivated. The authors’ response to the critical response is particularly awful. Anyone who can make the following statement with a straight face is clearly partisan:

Sticking with contemporary American politics, it has been observed that Republicans are far more single-mindedly and unambiguously aggressive in pursuing Democratic scandals (e.g., Whitewater, the Clinton–Lewinsky affair) than Democrats have been in pursuing Republican scandals (e.g., Iran Contra, Bush–Harken Energy, Halliburton). (authors’ response, 391)

Iran-Contra resulted in prison terms for many its participants; with the exception of some peripheral figures (most notably, the self-martyring Susan McDougal and the otherwise-corrupt Jim Guy Tucker), Whitewater and Monicagate combined produced none. The authors also somehow forget about the Watergate scandal, doggedly (and rightly) pursued by Democrats, which brought down Richard Nixon and contributed to the defeat of Gerald Ford in 1976. Furthermore, citing Paul Krugman’s NYT op-eds twice as an authority on whether conservatives are more dogmatic than liberals doesn’t pass the laugh test.

More generally, I return to my previous criticisms based on the press release. They repeatedly use single indicators to represent latent constructs. They aggregate across nations without regard for contextual factors. They present bivariate correlations as evidence of causation (just having a bazillion similar correlations does not demonstrate causation). They dismiss exceptional cases out-of-hand, rather than attempting to explain them in terms of their research design (although they do make a half-hearted effort to do so in their response to the critics). They make no effort to integrate any of the previous hypotheses into a well-specified model.

And, to top it all off, most of the research is based on student populations, who are almost certainly atypical of the public at large in terms of their level of political socialization (an important explanation of conservatism in their half-baked theory). Anyone who thinks conservative extremists are less integratively complex than liberal extremists hasn’t had the dubious pleasure of reading both FreeRepublic.com and DemocraticUnderground.org (two popular cesspits for extremists on the right and left respectively, in case you haven’t had the pleasure). Coupled with a lack of any serious understanding of any of the research done on ideology outside psychology (Converse barely rates a footnote, while nothing newer than McCloskey and Zaller, a 1984 piece, is cited from the political science literature), this turkey doesn’t fly.

One hopes, not knowing the journal hierarchy in psychology, that the Psychological Bulletin is the intellectual equivalent of toilet paper among the APA’s journals, but somehow I doubt that. The editor and reviewers who allowed this garbage to be published ought to be embarrassed.

John Jay Ray, a well-published political psychologist in his own right, has been savaging the piece at Dissecting Leftism.

InstaPundit approvingly links to a post by the Angry Clam, who is “pissed off” about a study conducted by psychology professors at Berkeley, Stanford and Maryland that purports to describe the psychological determinants of conservatism.

I’ll admit that the press release linked to by the Clam makes the research seem rather simplistic, and some of the editorializing by assistant (i.e. untenured) professor Jack Glaser seems inappropriate. And, frankly, I think the researchers are really describing what Virginia Postrel calls “staisism” rather than conservatism. Say what you will about the Contract with America and the post-1994 Republican majority, but planning to roll back decades of creeping socialism is hardly a conservative position (in their terms); the neo-liberal policies of Britain’s successive governments since 1979 are not exactly “conservative” either, even though many of them were pioneered by the political right. And, as a political scientist, I’m not entirely sold on the idea that J. Random Psychologist is qualified to do research on political concepts, just as I’d have serious concerns if a political scientist tried to perform psychotherapy. To top it all off, I generally despise meta-analysis as a research technique, but that’s neither here nor there.

At the same time, though, the research itself, rather than the stupid commentary it was dressed up with in the press release, doesn’t seem (from its description) excessively political. I’d rather read the article (which appeared in the May 2003 Psychological Bulletin, according to the table of contents) and draw my own conclusions, thanks.

I’d been wondering all day how to introduce myself. Fortuitously, Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber gave me the perfect segueway, by reporting that the job market for philosophers is not as bad as I thought.

You see, I’m a philosophy grad school dropout. I have an ABD from the University of Rochester. I was in a PhD program from 1992 to 1997. In May of 1997, faced with a dissertation going nowhere, the loss of my funding, and a bleak outlook on the job market, I left Rochester and returned to Memphis, where I had attended Rhodes College as an undergrad. There, a friend of mine hooked me up with a job at a Mom and Pop ISP doing web page design and tech support.

And now Brian has gone and made me wistful for what might have been. I really can’t complain, I suppose. I really enjoy being an all-purpose computer geek, and I certainly make more money than I would in Academia. But I do miss the intellectual stimulation, the esoteric conversations that lasted late into the night. And I regret that I left just a few weeks before the death of Professor Lewis White Beck. I was one of his last students.

Anyway, check out my philosophy page if you’re into that kind of stuff. All the papers there date from grad school. And if you’re in Memphis, and feel like sitting around, drinking beer, and discussing philosophy, drop me a note.

Kieran Healy is looking for feedback on a paper he plans to present at the August meeting of the American Sociological Association. The paper’s definitely worth a read, even if you’re not a sociologist or an open source geek.

Kieran Healy laments the quantity (and quality) of scholarly works at popular and collegiate bookstores. I completely sympathize; our on-campus bookstore (outside of the textbook section) is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from a mainline Barnes and Noble—except that the selection sucks. And that's despite the competition from Square Books.

Kate Malcolm makes a great point about academic legal writing (and, consequently, about academic writing in general):

Many scholars get away with loads of stuff that makes little to no sense simply because the reader’s [sic] have been conditioned to believe that such incoherence is a sign of higher-level thinking. WRONG. If it doesn’t make sense, it sucks.

A common failing of academic writing in general—and I say this as someone who’s been up to his neck in political science journal articles for the past five years, which often manage to combine the excessive verbosity of a Faulkner novel with the impenetrability of an economics paper—is that people confuse saying a lot with saying something worthwhile. This is particularly pronounced in political science, where the norm seems to call for repeating one’s points ad nauseum in a discipline where journal space is at a premium.

That being said, one of the virtues of the dissertation process is that since you normally have to explain what you’re doing to someone who doesn’t study your discipline (the outside reader) is that the opposite temptation—to assume your reader knows what you know about the discipline as a whole and where your work fits into it—is tempered considerably, which helps in coming up with a coherent explanation of why your research matters (the “rodent sphincter test,” as an ex-colleague colorfully described it).

The Invisible Adjunct has a fascinating discussion ongoing about an article that shows 1 of 5 entering history grad students come out with a tenure-track job (just the sort of article, by the way, that will have my parents throwing themselves in front of trucks, even though the odds of someone who’s been through grad school and has Ph.D.-in-hand getting one are much, much better).

Do grad students get properly warned of this at the outset? I don’t know. Certainly one of my more vivid memories of my first seminar was a professor telling us to look at the person to our left and the person to our right and ourselves, and realize that only one of us was going to last. In the case of my incoming class, the attrition was even more pronounced; of the dozen or so students in my 1998 incoming class, one colleague and I are ABD and one other colleague was attending another institution, last I heard; the rest have disappeared, without even an M.A. between them.

At the end of a blistering attack on Paul Krugman’s latest New York Times op-ed (and Krugman’s subsequent defenses of portions thereof), Donald Luskin says:

At the end of the day, what is most striking to me about this whole affair is what it says about the so-called “science” of economics, aside from what it says about Krugman. It shows that highly credentialed (but politically biased) economists can use their reputations as scientists to offer to the public egregious errors-cum-lies. And then they can defend themselves, when caught at it, by twisting the infinitely elastic theories of their “science” into whatever shape is required to justify the lie after the fact. In terms of its long-range impact on human well-being, the “science” of economics may well be the most dangerous fraud ever perpetrated.

John Lott’s critics have said much the same thing about his use of econometrics (via Tim Lambert).

Now, I’m not going to pronounce either way on these issues. But I will say that I’m glad my little corner of academe has absolutely no bearing on the real world, Perestroika movement be damned.

Ok, it’s a slight exaggeration. But nobody’s going to be arguing the merits of a federal tax plan or the Second Amendment or anything else that’s particularly important based on my research, at least until I have tenure. And at least they’re economists… I don’t have to claim them as my own.

Holy Mini-Instalanche, Batman!

At Critical Mass, Erin O'Connor reports on yet another blackface incident, this time at the University of Texas. Leaving aside the legal questions (I tend to agree with critics like O'Connor who think the real harm in these incidents is often vastly overstated), the larger question is: why do fraternities seem to choose this particular meme? I've never had the urge to go out in blackface, and I honestly can't say I understand the appeal. Surely one can make social commentary about rappers, or even African Americans in general, without covering one's face with shoe polish. Plus, you'd think after the publicity surrounding other fraternities getting in trouble for it (not only with public university administrators, where there's a clear First Amendment issue, but also with national fraternity officials, where there normally isn't one), eventually frats would get the message that doing stuff in blackface is just asking for trouble.

Susanna, Jane Galt, Kevin Drum (CalPundit) and the Volokh Conspiracy (principally Eugene) have been posting about the Texas Tech professor, Michael Dini, whose policy is not to write letters of recommendation for students who refuse to acknowledge the Theory of Evolution. Or, as Dini explains:

If you set up an appointment to discuss the writing of a letter of recommendation, I will ask you: "How do you think the human species originated?" If you cannot truthfully and forthrightly affirm a scientific answer to this question, then you should not seek my recommendation for admittance to further education in the biomedical sciences.

Now, there are a few questions to be asked here:

1. Does Dini have the right to set this condition? Yes. He's a professor, and he has the sole right to decide who he wants to write letters of recommendation for; it's not like he's promising to go back and give the students an “F” in the class.

2. Is it a valid condition? Well, the Theory of Evolution is pretty fundamental to modern biology. On the other hand, I'm not convinced you need subscribe to the Theory of Evolution to be a successful doctor or dentist. But, it's Dini's condition, not mine, so he's the appropriate judge of the relative merits.

3. Is the Theory of Evolution a “belief”? I don't think so, in the sense that like all scientific theories, it is falsifiable; the presence of evidence to the contrary, like evidence that humans existed before other mammals existed on Earth, would show it to be invalid. Creationism, however, isn't falsifiable; any piece of evidence against it can simply be rationalized as something created by God (to what end, however, is a mystery: why would God deliberately create evidence that would place doubts in the minds of men about the biblical account of creation?).

The bottom line, for me at least, is I'm glad I don't teach biology; it's hard enough trying to explain the scientific method when you're talking about political science, which has no theories anywhere near as politically controversial as evolution. (We have our own internal debates over whether or not people who call themselves “political scientists” ought to use the scientific method, but nobody outside the discipline cares.)

I somehow forgot to link to Mark Kleiman's excellent discussion. And my personal policy on the matter — not that I get a lot of requests for recommendations — is equivalent to that expressed by Mark:

My job as a teacher is to supply my students with the facts, the skills, and the ideas required for them to be able to form serious opinions on whatever it is I'm trying to teach them about. It's not my job to make their opinions coincide with mine. That's the difference between a university and a fundamentalist seminary. And I happily write enthusiastic recommendations for students whose political beliefs differ radically from mine.

It also happens to be representative of my teaching policy in general. I've shot down students who've spouted pure ignorant drivel on essay exams (I vividly recall a particular student who alleged that blacks were treated equally in the U.S. before the 1960s, but then started demanding all sorts of special privileges), but only because they've been factually wrong.

Kevin Drum (CalPundit) thinks Erin O'Connor stretches to consider the case of Jendra Loeffelman, an elementary school teacher fired for expressing what O'Connor charitably describes as “controversial views,” to be another in a long line of P.C. outrages. Those controversial views were in expressed when she told her class “that she disapproved of interracial marriage,” according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, because she believed that the children of such marriages are subject to persecution.

Leaving aside whether or not one can oppose interracial marriage without being a racist (Kevin certainly considers it a racist belief, and it's hard to argue that point), the larger point that I think O'Connor misses is that Loeffelman's audience was eighth graders. While kids of that age certainly are capable of some independent thought, it's one thing to bring up one's personal beliefs when teaching a college seminar, and quite another to do it in an elementary school or junior high classroom. From the published accounts it appears Loeffelman was asked a direct question, but she still could have deflected it or avoided the question entirely.

O'Connor believes avoiding the question would send the wrong message, but the implicit message to the mixed-race children in the room — in essence, “I don't think your parents should have married each other” — is hardly the right message either, and one that most parents would rightly be appalled by. It's the equivalent situation to asking your teacher what he's doing this weekend, and him announcing he's planning on marching at a Klan rally or going to smash the windows of a few SUVs to protest the administration's failure to support Kyoto. Loeffelman wasn't fired for “refusing to pander” to anyone's sensibilities — she was fired for making a virtual endorsement of returning to Jim Crow, and for contributing to the air of persecution that she used to justify her beliefs in the first place.

Erin O'Connor has a followup, in which she summarizes my viewpoint as believing “[Loeffelman's] students are only in eighth-grade, and are therefore too young to cope with her opinions.” (I'd characterize my viewpoint not so much as one of whether or not they can cope, but whether or not they are capable of critically thinking about what a teacher presents in class. The critical thinking skills of many college undergraduates are woefully poor; I'd imagine that 99% of eighth graders take whatever a teacher says as gospel truth.)

While I agree that Loeffelman has some rights under the First Amendment in this case — which wouldn't apply if she was a private school teacher — the question obviously becomes: to what extent can she exercise those rights in her position teaching a class? Does she have the right to teach whatever she wants? More to the point, where's the line between teaching and just expressing one's opinion? If I'm standing in front of my class lecturing, I'm teaching; if two students come by my office and ask me about my personal beliefs, I'm probably not; if I talk to one at the drive-thru at Burger King, I'm definitely not.

The case of the homosexual volleyball coach that O'Connor cites appears different, in that the coach was subject to a broad injunction beforehand of dubious constitutional standing and did not discuss her sexual orientation with an entire class, but rather with an individual student, apparently outside a classroom situation. Fundamentally, there's a “reasonable time, place, and manner” argument to be made in Loeffelman's case, and that's where this case is going to be decided.

Jane Galt has a post on this as well, asking “if the teacher was black, would she be disciplined or fired?” Kevin Drum has a followup comment at Jane's site:

For what it's worth, I think disapproval of interracial marriage is disgusting no matter who it comes from. I know that many blacks disapprove of it too, and I don't like it. I don't like state policies against interracial adoptions, either.

However, there's also a considerable difference between saying something as a private citizen and saying something as a government employee. High school teachers, as agents of the state, simply don't have the right to say things in a classroom that would be protected if they were saying them as private citizens. Loeffelman had been a teacher for a long time and surely knew this.

Having said all I've said, I'm surprised that the school district actually fired her — most would have probably moved her to some job in administration or shipped her off to another school, rather than court controversy.