"Benjamin Robinson, an Indiana University professor, is one of those under the new microscope. In his class on the history of German thought..."

"... he touches on Kant, Hegel, Arendt and Nietzsche, connecting the thinkers’ big insights — 'the aha moments' — to real-life experiences and contemporary politics. In late 2024, a student anonymously complained, saying that Dr. Robinson — who has been vocal about his pro-Palestinian views — had spoken negatively about Israel, mentioned personal experiences like being arrested at a protest at the Israeli consulate in Chicago and 'repeatedly spoke against Indiana University' during his classes. The university found in favor of the student and reprimanded the professor, citing a recent state law meant to improve 'intellectual diversity' and prevent students from being subjected to political views unrelated to the course...."

From "Professors Are Being Watched: 'We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance'/Scrutiny of university classrooms is being formalized, with new laws requiring professors to post syllabuses and tip lines for students to complain" (NYT).

"Dr. Robinson, who is Jewish, acknowledged that he referred to Israel’s conduct as a genocide in class but he insisted that he never asked students to agree with him. He said he brought up his personal experiences of activism during a discussion of Kant and the philosopher’s distinction between private and public stances. 'If I can’t appeal to people’s intuitions, what it’s like to publicly use reason versus to have a private feeling of conscience,' he said, 'if I can’t evoke what that feels like, I can’t possibly teach Kant.'"

"Ted Pellegatta... did odd jobs his whole life and lived in a studio apartment attached to a vacant barn."

"He often stood outside a local restaurant hawking copies of his self-published books of poetry and photos to supplement his $1,000-per-month Social Security check..... But Pellegatta died a happy man when he succumbed to metastatic cancer last month at the age of 85.... He was a MAGA guy who was beloved by liberals. He was an old Marine, waiter and farmhand who made friends with all classes, ages and colors.... His signature achievement was the coffee klatch he convened at the local coffee shop, Before & After, just about every morning for the past 10 years, and in other locations before that. Day after day, he’d sit in the front of the shop, wearing his cowboy hat... over his wild silver hair, and serve as the unofficial chairman.... Anybody who walked in was welcome in the discussion. The ground rules were simple: Show interest in one another... and refuse to fight.... If an argument got too hot, he’d shut it down with a 'meow.' If somebody was pontificating, he’d drop his head and snore. If the conversation annoyed him, he’d get up and leave — then start again the next day...."

From "A dying man said he found the key to happiness. Science backs him up. Ted Pellegatta was a MAGA supporter beloved by liberals in Sperryville, Virginia, whose friends transcended political allegiances" (WaPo)(gift link).

The article — by Dana Milbank — mentions Charlie Kirk, but only like this: "Last week’s gruesome slaying of conservative leader Charlie Kirk was followed predictably by finger-pointing and cries for vengeance in many corners of the United States. But not at Before & After...." I wanted it to mention Charlie Kirk as a model for communication between people who disagree. Anybody who walked in was welcome in the discussion. 

"Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting 'Sickness?'"

"Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!"

Said Donald Trump (on Truth Social).

That message follows the news: "The Trump administration says it will freeze $2 billion in funding after Harvard refuses its demands" (NYT).

The demands — in the words of the NYT — are "that the university reduce the power of students and faculty members over the university’s affairs; report foreign students who commit conduct violations immediately to federal authorities; and bring in an outside party to ensure that each academic department is 'viewpoint diverse,' among other steps."

"[Ron] DeSantis, 44, is not the first Republican politician of his generation to rail against his own Ivy League degrees while milking them for access and campaign cash."

"But now, as he seeks the Republican presidential nomination, he is molding his entire campaign and political persona around a vengeful war against what he calls the country’s 'ruling class': an incompetent, unaccountable elite of bureaucrats, journalists, educators and other supposed 'experts' whose pernicious and unearned authority the governor has vowed to vanquish...."

From "How Ron DeSantis Joined the ‘Ruling Class’ — and Turned Against It/Over the years, Mr. DeSantis embraced and exploited his Ivy League credentials. Now he is reframing his experiences at Yale and Harvard to wage a vengeful political war" (NYT).

I see no problem with a young person taking advantage of elite education and then rejecting its values. Who better to challenge the "ruling class" than someone who's had a direct experience with it? If education is any good it equips you to go on to pursue your own goals. Does the NYT think the students are supposed to absorb indoctrination and then go on to be loyal to the elite?

"It honestly seems like it was written by a teenage Tumblr user who, having come into contact with some new and exciting ideas about social justice, seeks to impose them widely and lecture perceived wrongdoers gleefully."

Writes Jill Filipovic, in "Hamline University’s Controversial Firing Is a Warning/Insistence that others follow one’s strict religion is authoritarian and illiberal no matter what the religion is" (Slate). She's talking about a statement written by Hamlin University President Dr. Fayneese S. Miller. 

Filipovic continues:

"Despite my accomplishments, if I were a young person today, I would have difficulty graduating from high school because I could not pass algebra."

"It was too abstract, with no visual correlations. This is true for many of today’s students who get labeled as bad at math, students who might otherwise pass alternative math courses such as statistics that would also apply to real-life work situations. There is too much emphasis in school on testing and not enough on career outcomes. The fact that I failed the SAT in math prohibited me from getting into veterinary school, but today I am a university professor in animal sciences and I am invited to speak to groups of veterinarians to advise them on their work.... [W]e need a neurodiverse work force. Complementary skills are the key to successful teams.... In Italy and the Netherlands, for instance, a student at about age 14 decides whether to go the university route or the vocational route. The vocational route is not looked down on or regarded as a lesser form of intelligence. And that’s how it should be everywhere...."

Writes Temple Grandin in "Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All" (NYT).

"The University of Wisconsin System’s free speech survey, which was set to go out Thursday to all undergraduates, has since been pushed back to fall 2022...."

"The survey asks about self-censorship, opinions toward viewpoint diversity, perceptions of campus climate, knowledge of the First Amendment and consequences of expressing oneself.... Tyler Katzenberger, press secretary of Associated Students of Madison, said... 'We get what the survey’s trying to address and we think it's an important cause to discuss, but why is there not a survey addressing diversity issues in the System?... Why are we prioritizing this over other more pressing diversity issues?' Katzenberger said ASM additionally questioned the legitimacy of the survey because it received an exemption from UW-Stout’s institutional review board, which protects the rights and welfare of human research subjects. However, Eric Giordano, executive director of the Wisconsin Institute for Public Policy and Service, said in a statement that representatives from most other campus institutional review boards (IRBs) also 'reviewed the project and determined that the research did not qualify as human subjects research.'..."

The Capital Times reports.

Interesting that the student leader speaks of "diversity issues" repeatedly, apparently without noticing that the survey is about an issue that is labeled "diversity": "viewpoint diversity." Maybe for students, "diversity" is a term of art, and it only means diversity of identity groups and has nothing to do with the life of the mind. 

Anyway, they're censoring the censorship survey. 

"There are students and faculty who complain that they don’t want to express centrist or right-wing views because they fear being criticized or stigmatized."

"They may not see themselves as hypersensitive, but they do crave some protection from students and colleagues whom they perceive as demanding leftist ideological conformity. Those who complain of such conformity should recognize that their fear isn’t the fault of anyone’s wokeness or hostility toward free expression. It is a sign that they need more courage — for it requires courage for students, or anyone, to stay engaged with difference. Whatever your political position, embracing intellectual diversity means being brave enough to consider ideas and practices that might challenge your own beliefs or cause you to change your views, or even your life.... In the current climate of political pessimism and manufactured outrage, we can work with students to reject the tired tropes of the past and embrace what many in the older generations have forgotten: how to engage with and, yes, debate people who have a variety of points of view and who imagine the future with a mix of hopes sometimes very different from their own."

From "Anxiety About Wokeness Is Intellectual Weakness" by Michael S. Roth (NYT).  Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, wrote a book called “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses.”

This is the top-rated comment (from a reader in NYC):

When my daughter was in high school, the teacher and the students of color in her psychology class all agreed that there is no such thing as free will for young black men. That when young black men commit crimes, it is out of the desperation brought on by lack opportunity compounded over generations. My 16 year old daughter argued that individuals always have a choice and the opportunity to exert free will. She was loudly called a racist. The teacher allowed that comment and encouraged discussion of her racism. How much more courageous should she have been? How many more similar stories does this author need to hear before they're no longer dismissed as "anecdotal,["] and instead seen a portrayal of life in "progressive" institutions?

ADDED: Lots of other comments over there — the highest ranking ones all disagreeing with the op-ed. I'll give you a bunch of them:

What's going on at The Wall Street Journal?

I'm reading "A Note to Readers/These pages won’t wilt under cancel-culture pressure" on the editorial page (boldface added):

We've been gratified this week by the outpouring of support from readers after some 280 of our Wall Street Journal colleagues signed (and someone leaked) a letter to our publisher criticizing the opinion pages.

There's not link to the letter, so we have to infer what it says (or go looking for it, which I will do in a minute).

But the support has often been mixed with concern that perhaps the letter will cause us to change our principles and content. On that point, reassurance is in order.

In the spirit of collegiality, we won't respond in kind to the letter signers. Their anxieties aren't our responsibility in any case.

Good! Nice professional distancing.

The signers report to the News editors or other parts of the business, and the News and Opinion departments operate with separate staffs and editors. Both report to Publisher Almar Latour. This separation allows us to pursue stories and inform readers with independent judgment.

That's how it should work.

It was probably inevitable that the wave of progressive cancel culture would arrive at the Journal, as it has at nearly every other cultural, business, academic and journalistic institution.

So the letter is an exemplar of "progressive cancel culture" — signed by people who work at The Wall Street Journal but don't understand or don't wish to follow its professionalism.

But we are not the New York Times.

Oh! A short hard punch at The New York Times.

Most Journal reporters attempt to cover the news fairly and down the middle, and our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today's media.

The NYT was singled out, but the rest of new media were attacked with even less respect, namelessly.

As long as our proprietors allow us the privilege to do so, the opinion pages will continue to publish contributors who speak their minds within the tradition of vigorous, reasoned discourse. And these columns will continue to promote the principles of free people and free markets, which are more important than ever in what is a culture of growing progressive conformity and intolerance.

Nice!

I found the text of the letter easily:

This week, The Wall Street Journal reported that nearly 300 WSJ staffers signed a letter to the publisher pointing out flaws and errors in Opinion articles and asking for changes. https://t.co/TFOX3KdzOR

Below: The letter in full. pic.twitter.com/v6hZvDcXl3

— marc tracy (@marcatracy) July 23, 2020

And here's Joe Pompeo at Vanity Fair, "“I’VE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS”: WALL STREET JOURNAL STAFF ERUPTS OVER RACE AND OPINION/Reporters and editors are pressing management on newsroom diversity, coverage of race and inequality, and the accuracy of Opinion pieces—including Mike Pence’s recent contribution. As one predicts, 'this is not the end'":

Various Journal staffers I spoke with all made a point of noting that the latest letter to management is different than what’s been going on at the New York Times, where a series of convulsions involving its Opinion pages—culminating in a problematic Tom Cotton op-ed that advocated for sending in federal troops to contain protests—recently led to the ouster of editorial page editor James Bennet. “My takeaway,” one of them said, “is that I’m really happy and impressed our staff has remained so sane compared to the rest of media right now. I was worried a letter on the Opinion stuff would turn into something like the New York Times, where anyone with a conservative thought is awful and should be silenced. But the letter made clear how we respect diversity of views and don’t want to tell Opinion how to run their shop.”

Another journalist at the paper said, “It definitely feels like there’s sort of a moment right now where management is a little more open to hearing concerns. There’s more of a window to make asks for things.” And as a third pointed out, “I suspect this is not the end.”

"With the slogan 'Silence is Violence' being used at the law school, there will be enormous pressure for student groups to go along. Not to do so would be deemed an act of 'violence.'"

Writes Professor William Jacobson about an effort by some students at Cornell Law School to get student groups to sign a letter that seems — I don't have access to the letter — to be accusing Jacobson of racism and urging students to boycott his classes.

This is an attempt not just to scare students away from my course, but to scare students away from speaking their minds, and to create a faculty and student purity test.

I have received numerous emails from students telling me I have a lot of “quiet” support at the law school, but that students are afraid to speak out for fear of career-ending false accusations of racism....

This toxic atmosphere didn’t need to take place. At a time when the law school desperately needs an adult in the room, so to speak, we have faculty and a Dean who denounce me.

"Ever since I started Legal Insurrection in October 2008, it’s been an awkward relationship given the overwhelmingly liberal faculty and atmosphere."

"Living as a conservative on a liberal campus is like being the mouse waiting for the cat to pounce. For over 12 years, the Cornell cat did not pounce. Though there were frequent and aggressive attempts by outsiders to get me fired, including threats and harassment, it always came from off campus.... Not until now, to the best of my knowledge, has there been an effort from inside the Cornell community to get me fired. The impetus for the effort was two posts I wrote at Legal Insurrection regarding the history and tactics of the Black Lives Matter Movement: The impetus for the effort was two posts I wrote at Legal Insurrection regarding the history and tactics of the Black Lives Matter Movement: 'Reminder: “Hands up, don’t shoot” is a fabricated narrative from the Michael Brown case ,"  "The Bloodletting and Wilding Is Part of An Agenda To Tear Down The Country."... My clinical faculty colleagues, apparently in consultation with the Black Law Students Association, drafted and then published in the Cornell Sun on June 9 a letter [with] absurd name-calling, distorting and even misquoting my writings, to the extent it purports to be about me.... None of the 21 signatories, some of whom I’d worked closely with for over a decade and who I considered friends, had the common decency to approach me with any concerns.... We are living in extraordinarily dangerous times, reminiscent of the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution, in which professors guilty of wrongthink were publicy denounced and fired at the behest of students who insisted on absolute ideological orthodoxy. It’s a way of instilling terror in other students, faculty, staff, and society, so that others shut up and don’t voice dissenting views."

From "There’s an effort to get me fired at Cornell for criticizing the Black Lives Matter Movement" by William Jacobson (at Legal Insurrection).

"At a time when both public and private universities are shifting resources away from the humanities... conservative state legislators and donors like the Koch Foundation and BB&T Bank... have stepped in."

"They have funded new professorships in topics like 'the history of capitalism' and poured money into speaker series and academic programs that propagate libertarian policy ideas. The organization UnKoch My Campus has tracked 'undue donor influence' in conservative philanthropy at schools such as George Mason University and Florida State University.... In some cases, conservative funders are, indeed, buying academic platforms to promote policy interests. The case of Arizona State is different. Its foundation was partisan to a troubling degree, but the outcome is a Great Books-style program that is not particularly oriented toward policy — instead, it emphasizes 'old-fashioned' intellectual methods. 'A big thing I like, as opposed to other political science courses I’d taken, is that they focus on teaching through classic literature, reading entire primary texts rather than textbooks or fragments of texts with other people’s analysis,' [one student] said.... [T]his approach is not inherently loyal to Republican ideology and can be an empowering course of study that liberals neglect at their peril. They often forget that plenty of Great Books are among the foundation stones of their own political tradition. Progressive heroes ranging from Jane Addams to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were indelibly shaped by Great Books educations...."

From "Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?/Politicians and donors want to impose one set of solutions. Schools around the country are trying to find their own way" by Molly Worthen (NYT).

"Openly disagreeing with people here is like pooping in the pool."

From "Leaving the 'liberal bubble'/Iconoclastic history professor John Sharpless retires" (Isthmus).

Sharpless taught American history, specializing in statistical methods, comparative demography, and exploration. Political science was never part of his official syllabus, but since 1975, his classroom has been a space for safe political discussions between both left and right leaning students.

“I think it’s more about how I treated students generally,” says Sharpless, 73, who gave his final lecture on Dec. 11. “I treated them as adults whose opinions should be respected and I was always truly interested in what each person had to say. I still am.”...

“These labels have put people into their own bubbles, which is hard for those of us who are really just a bundle of ideas,” says Sharpless. “We tend to talk to people we know agree with us to reinforce what we already believe. I tell my students to get out of their bubbles but I realize it’s extremely difficult because if you push too hard against the walls of that bubble, the people who are in there with you might turn against you.”

"The more conservative students receive greater opportunities — opportunities to consider more ideas, because they know what they hear/read plus what’s in their heads!"

"After graduation, who’s going to be better-equipped to go out in the world and interact with intellectually diverse groups of people?"

Writes my son John (on his blog), commenting on a WSJ collection of essays about whether there's a free-speech crisis on college campuses.

Let's talk about The Atlantic firing Kevin D. Williamson — immediately after hiring him.

Here's Adele M. Stan at The American Prospect last week, "The Atlantic’s Gigantic Stumble/When a 'thought-leader' magazine hires the misogynist Kevin Williamson, that’s some kind of leading from behind":

The thing for which Williamson is most famous is his (since deleted) tweet advocating the execution by hanging of every woman who has an abortion. [Jessica] Valenti notes that this would encompass approximately 25 percent of U.S. women.

Williamson’s second-most famous comment is in his contemptuous depiction of a nine-year-old African American boy, which is basically a litany of racist stereotypes strung together, complete with a description of the boy making a gesture Williamson describes as “the universal gesture of primate territorial challenge.”...

So Williamson got the boot.

Here's "By Firing Kevin Williamson,The Atlantic Shows It Can't Handle Real Ideological Diversity/Williamson's rhetoric is inflammatory, but his views on abortion are not beyond the pale" by Katherine Mangu-Ward (Reason). Excerpt:

But the thing that cost him the gig was a remark he made on a podcast well before his firing and in a tweet (since deleted):

And someone challenged me on my views on abortion, saying, "If you really thought it was a crime, you would support things like life in prison, no parole, for treating it as a homicide." And I do support that. In fact, as I wrote, what I had in mind was hanging.

The Atlantic is obviously caving to pressure. They had to know when they hired Williamson that he maintains that abortion is murder, and the fact that he would treat it the way he'd treat any murder is just standard, mundane adherence to principle and resistance to pragmatism. There's nothing to be shocked about. Why hire him if that wasn't what you wanted?

"It’s striking to me how many of the architects of [libertarianism] seem to be on the autism spectrum — you know, people who don’t feel solidarity or empathy with others, and who have difficult human relationships sometimes."

Said Duke history professor Nancy MacLean, quoted in "Duke students rebuke prof for saying libertarians are autistic" at Campus Reform. MacLean, who has written a book on the libertarian economist James Buchanan, was giving a long lecture when she was asked if she thought Buchanan was motivated by “personal greed” or “malevolence.” She gave what might have sounded, in context, like an empathetic understanding of his sort of mind — that he, like other libertarians she's observed — seems to be somewhere on the autism spectrum.

“My initial response was that I wanted her to be punished,” said Hunter Michielson, president of the school’s Young Americans for Liberty (YAL) chapter. Michielson realized that punishing the professor was "hypocritical for him as a libertarian," but he decided to do something else that I'll call hypocritical, petition the university to put out an official statement:

“I don’t think it’s too much to ask that the university stand with conservative, libertarian, and autistic students and community members and say that just because you are a libertarian doesn’t mean you are autistic and just because you are autistic doesn’t mean you lack empathy,” Michielson remarked. “College should be a place where you confront difficult opinions,” he added, saying that despite experiencing classroom discrimination for his views, having liberal-leaning professors has been a welcome component of his education given his conservative background.

I'd say, forget the petitions and the official statements and set up a debate or a panel discussion on politics and empathy or human psychology and political preferences. Let's get deep and scientific on what's really going on, rather than take offense and try to scare the person into shutting up.

It seems to me that MacLean is contributing to the marketplace of ideas. It's awkward to drag people with autism in as if you are disrespecting them, but some of that disrespect is coming from Michielson, who says: “I struggle to accept that she actually believes libertarianism or conservatism is the result of autism."

First, MacLean said "seem to be on the autism spectrum." A lot of people — including people we encounter in everyday life who are not overwhelmingly disabled — seem to be on the autism spectrum. It may be a bit offensive to say that, mostly because it sounds disparaging toward people with autism. But MacLean was not "speculating that support for individual liberty might actually be the result of a mental disorder" — as Campus Reform puts it. She was trying to understand Buchanan, after somebody else speculated that he was afflicted by “personal greed” or “malevolence.”

And, frankly, I suspect that libertarians are reacting out of recognition that — however possibly offensively MacLean put it — there is some truth to her observation.

Note: I've incurred the wrath of libertarians for daring to talk about their psychology. Here's a good starting point if you want to examine my motivations.

"The [James Damore] lawsuit claims that numerous Google managers maintained 'blacklists' of conservative employees with whom they refused to work..."

"... that Google has a list of conservatives who are banned from visiting the campus; and that Google’s firings of Damore and the other named plaintiff, David Gudeman, were discriminatory... The company’s workforce, like much of the rest of the tech industry, is overwhelmingly white, Asian, and male.... But the Damore lawsuit purports to expose a cultural bias toward promoting diversity and 'social justice' that, the suit claims, has created a 'protected, distorted bubble of groupthink.'... Internal posts discussing the debate around diversity at Google, such as a meme of a penguin with the text 'If you want to increase diversity at Google fire all the bigoted white men,' are filed as an appendix to the lawsuit under the heading 'Anti-Caucasian postings.'..."

From "James Damore sues Google, alleging intolerance of white male conservatives/Class-action lawsuit led by fired engineer includes 100 pages of internal documents and claims conservatives are 'ostracized, belittled, and punished'" in The Guardian.

Worse than excluding conservative speakers: "the profound alienation of professors who don’t hold the mainstream political views and are treated as outsiders as a result."

A NYT op-ed by Arthur C. Brooks, who's looking at a book "Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University." From the op-ed:

Generally, [conservative] professors fear they have little hope for advancement to leadership roles. Research backs up this fear, suggesting that intellectual conformity is still a key driver of personal success in academic communities....

Several top-tier private universities — notably Princeton, Harvard, Stanford and Chicago — have made important commitments to protect intellectual diversity on campus. And a new coalition of academics called Heterodox Academy, directed by the New York University psychologist Jonathan Haidt, has formed to foster this movement.

Notably, more than 40 percent of the members of Heterodox Academy are liberals or centrists. And this brings me to a point I want to make to progressive academics: It is up to you to make campuses more open to debate and the unconstrained pursuit of truth. This is partly because liberals are in an overwhelming majority on campus. But more important, the task fits perfectly the progressive movement’s ethical patrimony. American liberalism has always insisted it is the duty of the majority to fight for the minority, whether or not it suits one’s own private interests.....

I would expect some progressives to argue that it's fine to make conservatives feel like outsiders because: 1. Conservatives make those in groups that have historically felt like outsiders feel like outsiders, 2. Conservatives can take it, they're not all about feelings, 3. Conservatives should follow their own ideology and take responsibility for their own condition and fight for success, not look for others to blame, and 4. Conservatives actually have weaker minds, deserve their lack of success, and cannot credibly beg for affirmative action.

"It’s been over 7 months since Trump was elected, yet my professors show no signs of putting their political digressions on hold."

"Because my English professors at Yale are largely liberal, the political message in my classes is always the same: Trump is a demagogue, American society is doomed, and English literature is our refuge. Liberal professors and students increasingly feel that it is their duty as professors and humanists to promote their vision of the political good. Meanwhile, the remaining campus conservatives have become less outspoken and remain fearful that they may suffer academically as well as socially for their views...."

Writes Finnegan Schick, who says he's "center-left, voted for Hillary Clinton, and... dislike[s]" Trump.

"Haidt is fearful not only for the country but also for himself. His default intellectual style is provocation."

"He used to relish posing questions like, 'List all the good things Hitler did,' and he even invented a game, 'Racist Jeopardy,' in which he names a stereotype and asks students to identify the ethnic group it describes. 'It was very uncomfortable,' he says, adding that he no longer plays the game because he’s worried about running afoul of NYU’s bias-response team. He’s already been the subject of at least two student complaints. 'I’m used to skating on thin ice, but I knew how thick the ice was,' he says. 'Now I have no idea.'"

From "Can Jonathan Haidt Calm the Culture Wars?" in The Chronicle of Higher Education, which passes along Haidt's assurance that he's "never voted for a Republican, never given a penny to a Republican candidate, never worked for a Republican or conservative cause."

Haidt is a social psychologist (at the NYU Business School), and he observes the strong bias against conservatives in psychology departments: "If you say something pleasing to the left about race, gender, immigration, or any other issue, it’s likely to get waved through to publication. People won’t ask hard questions. They like it. They want to believe it... [It's] a real research-legitimacy problem in the social sciences."