"Some people are clearly more altruistic than others. But even these super-cooperators can’t do all the heavy lifting alone."

"Haphazard or individual-level efforts to be helpful are rarely sufficient to keep cooperation going in a larger population. For one thing, a cooperator surrounded by noncooperators will usually stop being helpful—for who wants to be a chump? Yet devolving to an 'every man for himself' dynamic is injurious to all. That’s no way to fight a plague.... We also practice punishment and ostracism, both of which can, in the right circumstances, foster cooperation. Shunning transgressors comes naturally to us precisely because, in our ancestral past, it was useful for our collective survival.... Indeed, President Joe Biden announced a broad series of interventions last month, including requiring all employers with more than 100 employees to mandate vaccination and doing the same for federal workers and others.... We do not need to see these actions in a negative or even authoritarian light. They are not simply the workings of our political system. They are rooted in our ancient past, helping us survive. Seen from an evolutionary perspective, putting our thumb on the scale of the COVID-19 response allows our natural impulse toward goodness to flourish. And such efforts are in keeping with our fundamental instincts to be altruistic and cooperative in the first place. As Albert Camus argued in his novel The Plague, 'What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men and women to rise above themselves.'" 

From "Sometimes Altruism Needs to Be Enforced" by Nicholas A. Christakis (The Atlantic).

"Harvard Betrays a Law Professor — and Itself/Misguided students believe that defending Harvey Weinstein makes Ronald Sullivan unfit to be their dean. Apparently the university agrees."

An op-ed by Harvard lawprof Randall Kennedy (in the NYT).

In addition to his work as a professor and a lawyer, [Ronald] Sullivan, with his wife, Stephanie Robinson, has served for a decade as the faculty dean of Winthrop House, an undergraduate dormitory where some 400 students live.

As a faculty dean, Mr. Sullivan is responsible for creating a safe, fun, supportive environment in which students can pursue their collegiate ambitions. Winthrop House is meant to be a home away from home; faculty deans are in loco parentis. Mr. Sullivan and Ms. Robinson are expected to attend to the students as counselors, cheerleaders, impresarios and guardians....

Let's be clear what we're talking about: Sullivan is a law professor, but nothing is changing in his role as a law professor, and the students are not law students. These are undergraduates who were offered a special, welcoming, comforting living environment with Sullivan and his wife as their substitute parents. This wasn't about having their ideas challenged in class. This was about their home life. This was the university's idea of offering something like love and support to teenagers leaving their parents for the first time.

Students responded to this lure, and some of them got a man who has made it his work to construct legal arguments to further the ends of someone who they have reason to see as a human monster. Of course, in our system, the monsters get legal representation and their lawyers are doing difficult and ethical work, but meanwhile, these kids had a promise of a home, and Sullivan and his wife must have represented themselves as lovingly parental or they wouldn't have been given this position — or at least that's what Harvard entitled the students to think.

On Saturday, [dean of Harvard College, Rakesh Khurana] announced that Mr. Sullivan and [his wife Stephanie] Robinson would no longer be deans of the college, citing their “ineffective” efforts to improve “the climate” at Winthrop....

The upshot is that Harvard College appears to have ratified the proposition that it is inappropriate for a faculty dean to defend a person reviled by a substantial number of students — a position that would disqualify a long list of stalwart defenders of civil liberties and civil rights, including Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall.

It doesn't appear that way to me. I'd say it just appears that the special parental role of the faculty dean requires some fact-specific analysis. Kennedy sets up the category "a person reviled by a substantial number of students" as what is disqualifying (and then names 2 great men who fit his category). [CLARIFICATION: By "fit his category," I meant to say that, like Sullivan, they defended  persons in the category.]

But what is the fact-specific analysis? Did the college cater to doctrinaire snowflakes? Or were the students justified in objecting to Sullivan as their counselor and substitute father? I'm just relying on the details as Kennedy presents them — that students said "they would not feel safe confiding in Mr. Sullivan about matters having to do with sexual harassment." Kennedy says he wishes the college would push the students to think hard about why they feel afraid and whether there's any indication that Sullivan has failed in performing his duties.

"One would hope, in short, that Harvard would seek to educate its students and not simply defer to vague apprehensions or pander to the imperatives of misguided rage," Kennedy writes.

The phrasing of that sentence is cagey. Kennedy doesn't and probably can't say that Harvard failed to try to educate its students or that it simply deferred or pandered to imperatives. And he doesn't say that the students' apprehensions were vague or that their dissatisfaction rose to the level of rage and that the rage was misguided. You see the intro "One would hope," and if you go to the op-ed, you'll see that this sentence is in a paragraph with hypotheticals, and the hypotheticals are not even about sexual violence. (He asks about atheist students objecting to a Christian faculty dean and conservative students objecting to a big leftist.)

Kennedy asserts that "Harvard officials are certainly capable of withstanding student pressure," but they just "don’t want to" because they think — or at least "have an affinity for the belief" — "that Mr. Sullivan’s representation of Mr. Weinstein constituted a betrayal of enlightened judgment." I think it's fair to characterize that as an accusation that the Harvard officials were being politically correct. Kennedy adds the very insulting, "Others have simply been willing to be mau-maued."

I'm not taking a position on the outcome here. I don't know enough about it. I think the "faculty dean" system is interesting. What does Harvard tell incoming students they'll get from it? Do the students arrive with an inappropriately inflated sense of entitlement or did Harvard give them this entitlement? If Harvard gave it, if the students accepted an offer to feel extra-safe and enfolded in the loving arms of a father figure, Harvard needs to follow through somehow.

But I don't know all the details. I'm not surprised to see professors championing their colleagues, and it's too easy to scoff at the students and their expectations. I'd like to get to the origins of the expectations and the role of faculty in creating those expectations.

ADDED: After writing this, I checked to see if I was consistent with what I wrote when a similar matter arose at Yale:

Language deprivation — "The Forbidden Experiment."

From Wikipedia:

According to Herodotus, the Egyptian pharaoh Psamtik I carried out such an experiment, and concluded the Phrygian race must antedate the Egyptians since the child had first spoken something similar to the Phrygian word bekos, meaning "bread"....

An experiment allegedly carried out by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in the 13th century... encouraged "foster-mothers and nurses to suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for he would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which he took to have been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. But he laboured in vain, for the children could not live without clappings of the hands, and gestures, and gladness of countenance, and blandishments."

Several centuries after Frederick II's experiment, James IV of Scotland was said to have sent two children to be raised by a mute woman isolated on the island of Inchkeith, to determine if language was learned or innate. The children were reported to have spoken good Hebrew....

That was doubted by Sir Walter Scott: "It is more likely they would scream like their dumb nurse, or bleat like the goats and sheep on the island."

ADDED: I got interested in this topic because it came up in Joe Rogan's conversation with Nicholas Christakis:



There's lots of interesting stuff in that long video. Christakis was the Yale professor who resigned from his position as a housing master after he and his wife were yelled at by students protesting for the right to be protected from Halloween costumes (blogged by me here). The discussion with Rogan is mainly about Christakis's new book "Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society."

"[P]eople choose friends who resemble themselves, right down to the moment-to-moment pattern of blood flow in the brain."

"The tendency toward homophily, toward flocking together with birds of your inner and outer feather, gives rise to a harmonious sense of belonging and shared purpose, to easy laughter and volumes of subtext mutually, wordlessly, joyfully understood. But homophily, researchers said, is also the basis of tribalism, xenophobia and racism, the urge to 'otherize' those who differ from you and your beloved friends in one or more ways... One recent study from the University of Michigan had subjects stand outside on a cold winter day and read a brief story about a hiker who was described as either a 'left-wing, pro-gay-rights Democrat' or a 'right-wing, anti-gay-rights Republican.' When asked whether the hypothetical hiker might feel chilly as well, participants were far more likely to say yes if the protagonist’s political affiliation agreed with their own. But a political adversary — does that person even have skin, let alone a working set of thermal sensors? 'Why must it be the case that we love our own and hate the other?' Nicholas Christakis of Yale University said. 'I have struggled with this, and read and studied a tremendous amount, and I have mostly dispiriting news. It’s awful. Xenophobia and in-group bias go hand-in-hand.... In order to band together, we need a common enemy'...."

From "Friendship’s Dark Side:'We Need a Common Enemy'" by Natalie Angier (NYT).

This is important and useful, but watch out for the idiots who will seek to ban friendship. We're already seeing some efforts in schools to break up "best friends." This is from a column in U.S. News last January, by the psychologis Barbara Greenberg:

I am a huge fan of social inclusion. The phrase best friend is inherently exclusionary... A focus on having best friends certainly indicates there's an unspoken ranking system; and where there is a ranking system, there are problems. I see kids who are never labeled best friends, and sadly, they sit alone at lunch tables and often in their homes while others are with their best friends.

My hope is that if we encourage our kids to broaden their social circles, they will be more inclusive and less judgmental. The word "best" encourages judgment and promotes exclusion....

"Are we all O.K. with this transfer of power? Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity — in your capacity — to exercise self-censure, through social norming..."

"... and also in your capacity to ignore or reject things that trouble you?... Is there really no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious?”

Wrote Erika Christakis last fall, reacting to a Yale Intercultural Affairs Committee memo warning students about potentially offensive Halloween costumes. Christakis was an Associate Master of Silliman College— the word "master" has been changed since then — but her comments outraged some students. Protests ensued. And now the news comes that Christakis and her husband, Professor Nicholas Christakis, who'd been the master head of Silliman College, are stepping down from their position.

The NYT reports the news with the headline: "Yale Professor and Wife, Targets of Protests, Resign as College Heads." I'd like to protest the headline. It seems to me that it was the wife's trenchant speech that stirred up this controversy in the first place. The husband became involved in the controversy, and, it's true, the husband is the one whose tweet announcing the resignation appears in the NYT, but I think Ms. Christakis deserves better position than "professor's wife." She is the director of the  Human Nature Lab at Yale, and her statement was premised on her expertise in the psychological development of the young. The husband is a sociologist and physician. I admire them as a couple and would like to see them talked about as equals.

When I blogged about this controversy last fall, I noted the video of Yale students yelling at Mr. Christakis and saying:

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman... You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?... Who the fuck hired you?”

This student told Mr. Christakis he should resign because his role as master is “not about creating an intellectual space” but about “creating a home.” At the time, I said:

To be fair, I'd like to know more about what representations Yale made to the students it lured into matriculating. Was a "safe space" promised?... A vibrant "intellectual space" sounds exciting to me, but is that what they were told they'd get if they came to Yale? Maybe some other schools offered a challenging intellectual environment and they passed on it, preferring a caring, nurturing setting. Were they deceived?

Yesterday on this blog, we were talking about Nathan Heller's excellent New Yorker article "Letter from Oberlin/The Big Uneasy/What’s roiling the liberal-arts campus?" The Yale disturbance appeared first on a list of incidences from the past year that showed liberal arts campuses were "roiling with activism that has seemed to shift the meaning of contemporary liberalism without changing its ideals." Heller writes:

Such reports flummoxed many people who had always thought of themselves as devout liberals. Wasn’t free self-expression the whole point of social progressivism? Wasn’t liberal academe a way for ideas, good and bad, to be subjected to enlightened reason? Generations of professors and students imagined the university to be a temple for productive challenge and perpetually questioned certainties. Now, some feared, schools were being reimagined as safe spaces for coddled youths and the self-defined, untested truths that they held dear. Disorientingly, too, none of the disputes followed normal ideological divides: both the activists and their opponents were multicultural, educated, and true of heart. At some point, it seemed, the American left on campus stopped being able to hear itself think.

I read that "true of heart" as sarcasm. Is "true of heart" an expression? I associate it with David Eggers, "A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius," which begins:

First of all:
I am tired.
I am true of heart!

And also:
You are tired.
You are true of heart!

"I will not be teaching at Yale in the future," said the lecturer who told students the university didn't need to protect them from Halloween costumes.

Erika Christakis had emailed: "Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious … a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?"

Recently, 49 faculty members wrote their own open letter defending Christakis against allegations of racism. Douglas Stone, a colleague who wrote the open letter, told Business Insider that “aggressive tactics” used against Christakis spurred her to decide to stop teaching....

The Christakises received support from Yale’s administration in November, after nearly a month of escalating tension. President Peter Salovey and Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway sent an email to students affirming that they “fully support” the Christakises, YDN reported. But Stone was disappointed with the platitudes, rather than direct support, that Salovey and Holloway used in their email.

“I was disappointed that the President Salovey and Dean Holloway did not defend Erika’s email explicitly, but restricted themselves to general expressions of support for free speech,” he said. “I think Erika’s email was a useful and important contribution to campus discourse.”

Ironically, "useful and important contribution to campus discourse" is also a platitude and also not direct support.

Some Yale students are hopping mad at 2 faculty members who didn't see the exquisite importance of repressing Halloween costumery.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education explains the multilayered outrage.

This email from Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis is the main source of irritation. She had the nerve to address Yale students as intellectuals, drawing on her expertise — she teaches a class on "The Concept of the Problem Child" — and saying things like:

At the first link there's video of Yale students yelling at Erika Christakis's husband Nicholas:

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman,” one student says. “You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”

When Christakis disagreed, the student proceeded to yell at him. “Who the fuck hired you?” she asked, arguing that Christakis should “step down” because being master is “not about creating an intellectual space,” but rather “creating a home.”

To be fair, I'd like to know more about what representations Yale made to the students it lured into matriculating. Was a "safe space" promised? Part of the "marketplace of ideas" that the Christakises champion is the marketplace of colleges where students get their choice. What did the Yale packaging say? I can't really judge the anger and the urgency of these students without knowing what other offers they had and what they were led to think they were buying when they picked Yale. A vibrant "intellectual space" sounds exciting to me, but is that what they were told they'd get if they came to Yale? Maybe some other schools offered a challenging intellectual environment and they passed on it, preferring a caring, nurturing setting. Were they deceived?

There's a lot that could be said here, but I'll just say one more thing. Halloween is childish fun. If you're grimly serious about it, you've aged out. Maybe some of your classmates are still playing around, vacationing from their daily worries, indulging in this annual childishness. If you're too adult to join them, then do the adult thing and stay home and read. Complaining to the authorities is another form of indulgence in childishness — not childish fun but childish whining and tattling.