As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been reading and enjoying Jason Riley’s Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell.
One particular passage about the weird nature of academia stood out. It fits so much of my experience. I’ll quote from the book and then tell my own similar story from early in my career.
Riley writes:
“I doubt seriously if I would have written Basic Economics if I were still part of an economics department,” Sowell told me. “People would have said, ‘What the hell is Sowell doing writing a book about things any decently trained economist already knows? He’s supposed to be advancing the frontiers of knowledge.’” Basic Economics has sold more copies than any other book he has written, but his fellow faculty members likely would have shrugged—or worse. “I remember at UCLA sitting among the senior faculty deciding the fate of a junior faculty member, reviewing contracts and granting tenure,” he said. “And I remember one fellow being considered, and someone said he’d written a couple of very good textbooks. And then one of my colleagues said, ‘I don’t regard that as evidence of scholarship. I regard it as negative evidence of scholarship.’”
I’m pretty sure I know who the junior faculty member was. The main reason is that the person I have in mind is the only assistant professor who wrote two textbooks during that era. Each was path-breaking in its own way, but especially the macro text. I learned a ton by TAing for this assistant professor in his very rigorous introduction to macro class. I’ve written him. He replied that if the event happened in academic year 1972-73, then yes, it was he. The person I have in mind is Chuck Baird, whom, coincidentally, I posted about earlier this year.
Now to my own story that’s similar to Tom Sowell’s. I was an assistant professor at the University of Rochester’s Graduate School of Management from 1975-79. The faculty really cared about hiring and junior faculty were listened to. We had each received a pile of CVs and were discussing how to winnow them down. One promising candidate had listed on his CV an op/ed he’d written for the New York Times. My sense, by the way, was that although many of the faculty on ideological grounds did not favor the NYT, what I’m about to tell you is not about ideology. I think the faculty member’s reaction would have been almost as strong if the job candidate had had an op/ed in the Wall Street Journal. Also, it wasn’t about content because no one at the meeting had actually read the op/ed.
Here’s the line I remember crystal clearly from one of my colleagues:
How strong a negative weight should we put on the New York Times op/ed?
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Oct 27 2021 at 6:04pm
And we wonder why economics is not widely appreciated by the public.
If one hides one’s light under the basket, one shouldn’t complain no one can see their light
David Henderson
Oct 27 2021 at 6:59pm
Well said.
michael thomas
Oct 27 2021 at 6:56pm
I think this sort of thing is common in many domains. People tend to undervalue “the basics” out of hand. Yet any preliminary inquiry reveals that those same people have only the vaguest knowledge of that basic knowledge.
I’m on a school board, and I made the seemingly non-controversial point that educating students and hiring and retaining excellent faculty should be at the top of the list of goals for our head of school. There was an exceptional amount of push-back, mostly centering around the idea of “well, of course, it doesn’t even need to be said”.
But my point was: No, not ‘of course’. Educating people is extremely difficult, and takes an incredible amount of focus and discipline to do well. How many among us are excellent, world-class at writing? Math? Reading? or any other “basic” discipline of knowledge?
There’s always further to go in the fundamental domains of knowledge. The “basics” are elusive. But very few people seem to appreciate that point.
(It might be obvious to anyone involved in education for the last two years what was, in fact, put at the top of the list… but that’s another topic…)
George Selgin
Oct 27 2021 at 8:05pm
In 25 years I spent at UGA, I don’t believe there was a single thing I’d written that some faculty member or members didn’t think should either not count at all, or count as a “negative” publication. It was _always_ the more mediocre faculty members who played this game–people with a very small number of publications in the “right” journals, who invariably did very little once promoted to, assuming indeed that they hadn’t Petered out before that. The concept of “negative publications” thus had as its counterpart that of the “clean vita.” This may sound like satire. But as David and Tom Sowell’s experiences suggest, such people may be found in many if not most economics departments, where they are the bane of other faculty members, and young ones especially, who are actually passionately devoted to the subject.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Oct 28 2021 at 8:07am
Sean Carrol (“Mindscape” podcast, etc.), a theoretical physicist, tell a similar story about his experience at the U of Chicago.
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 28 2021 at 8:13am
Nice post. With respect to academic infighting, Sayre’s Law is highly relevant.
The other thing that gets me these days is all the deference to ‘trigger events.’ We just had the big dust up at Yale Law where the student sent out a post about an upcoming happy hour and the administration reacted to a bunch of emails saying that this was a trigger event because he is a member of the Federalist Society. The same goes for all the students who in recent years have prevented Charles Murray from speaking. We are now seeing this creep into Board of Education elections as the bogeyman of ‘Critical Race Theory’ is being used without any understanding of what it is (and I confess that I’m not terribly sure about a valid definition either).
robc
Oct 28 2021 at 8:45am
I am pretty sure there is no valid definition.
Which is intentional.
The biggest problem with CRT, whatever it is, is why is it being taught instead of the basics (to get back on topic)? How about focus on reading and math? Once those scores are top notch, we can discuss what to add to the curriculum.
MarkW
Oct 28 2021 at 9:54am
We are now seeing this creep into Board of Education elections as the bogeyman of ‘Critical Race Theory’ is being used without any understanding of what it is (and I confess that I’m not terribly sure about a valid definition either).
Oh, c’mon. Anybody who’s paying attention understands what is meant. We’re talking about a collection of concepts like ‘white privilege’, ‘equity’, ‘systemic racism’, ‘antiracism training’, ‘white fragility’, and so on that have been promoted by Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and others. The question at hand is whether such highly controversial and politicized concepts should be part of public school curricula and instruction and what recourse parents who object to such teaching should have.
Alan Goldhammer
Oct 28 2021 at 10:45am
Other than a curiosity in some universities, can you cite any municipal school district in America that is teaching CRT as per Kendi? The problem as I see it, it’s morphing into a nonsensical debate to prevent the honest teaching and discussion of this country’s racial history. One cannot look at the original Constitution and all the debates at the state and national level prior to the Civil War and not understand the role of slavery. Our former house had a racial covenant in the deed and a bathroom in the basement for the ‘colored help’ (that was the term used in those days). There are numerous other things that can be mentioned as well. Does the teaching of this constitute CRT? Will laws banning CRT be used to impact such teaching?
I spent the majority of my working career in the private sector and was witness to both racial and sexual harrassment. Two of these were high profile, one ended up in litigation. We had mandatory training every two years on this matter.
David Henderson
Oct 28 2021 at 11:08am
I met with a local activist woman in Monterey County last month who showed me the teaching materials from Salinas that she had to obtain with a FOIA request. There were heavy doses of Kendi and DiAngelo.
David Q
Oct 29 2021 at 5:23pm
Is there a link we can click to see the items from the FOIA request?
Related: I haven’t read Kendi and DiAngelo. Should I?
zeke5123
Oct 28 2021 at 12:13pm
It is funny — I hear people on the “CRT isn’t really taught in school, people just don’t want history taught” side of the argument seemingly focus on a sole aspect of history (i.e., slavery in the US).
But to bring it back to Sowell, he wrote that if one looks at history what wasn’t unique was American (or Western) slavery. What was unique was that the West ended slavery and took great pains to try to end it globally. Sowell connects this desire to end slavery as arising from Western values. He finds it peculiar that despite ending slavery, the West (and the associated political history) are often assailed with the slavery sin despite that sin being universal.
MarkW
Oct 28 2021 at 2:58pm
The problem as I see it, it’s morphing into a nonsensical debate to prevent the honest teaching and discussion of this country’s racial history.
I have the sense that you haven’t looked very closely. Here’s something you could do to look a little closer. Try googling:
Anti-racism in _____ education
And then successively fill in the blank with ‘Math’, ‘Science’, ‘Art’, ‘Physical Education’, ‘English’, ‘Music’, etc. For virtually every subject taught in K12 this search produces plenty of results by advocates and those offering strategies and instructional materials. CRT is meant to be systemic — to be included in all classes and throughout the curriculum.
Also far-fetched is the idea that slavery and black history have been ignored in schools and society until very recently. ‘Black History Month’, for example, has been around since the 1970s (about the time that ‘Roots’ was a massive hit).
zeke5123
Oct 28 2021 at 1:00pm
On the one hand, the professor is likely correct that publishes textbooks is not scholarship in the sense of creating (directly) new ideas. But on the other hand, it seems that the purpose of scholarship is both creating and transmitting ideas. Drafting two excellent textbooks is a great way to accomplish directly the second and indirectly the first (e.g., maybe a talented student gets enamored with economics because of the textbook and discovers something really cool).
Somewhat of a banal comment, but obviously the UCLA professor evidently disagreed.
Michael Rulle
Oct 28 2021 at 4:30pm
Conflation is rampant in so many discussions of so many topics.
In grammar school we learned about the history of racism in the 1960s—–it was literally impossible not to, as it was the peak of the civil rights movement. We learned about Rosa Parks, saw Medgar Evers murdered, and MLK and Malcolm X were in the headlines every day.
We were taught about G. Wallace trying to battle Eisenhower—– everyone when I grew up with half a brain and even a mere dash of morality understood how wrong this was. We were taught about the Civil War and the admission by the founders that slavery was wrong etc.
CRT is not the teaching about racism—it is the teaching of racism—and mixed with some very amazing and bizarre concepts of human psychology.
Monte
Oct 28 2021 at 5:28pm
And as if CRT wasn’t enough, now this:
Southlake school leader tells teachers to balance Holocaust books with ‘opposing’ views
Can someone PLEASE help me understand how there can be an opposing view of the Holocaust?
nobody.really
Oct 29 2021 at 2:12pm
What do people on hiring/tenure committees care about? Clearly, they care about excellence as judged by their specialized world view. And they may also care about LOYALTY to to their specialized world view.
When a hiring/tenure committee observes that a candidate had focused attention on speaking to/currying favor with those who do not share the committee’s specialized world view, the committee finds evidence of the candidate’s mixed loyalties. When push comes to shove, will this candidate support retaining and growing the department’s budget, or will the candidate support allocating funds to competing objectives? These are the institutional imperatives that hiring/tenure committees face.
Likewise, each member of the committee may have an incentive to signal to the other members of the committee their own unalloyed loyalty to the group’s specialized world view. This also occurs in anyone seeking an advocacy role–union leadership, legal representation, real estate agency, lobbying, and increasingly, political party nomination: You strive to present yourself as the most zealous true-believer in the group. Even people who do not share your zealousness will want you for their advocate.
What percentage of people citing in church pews are fully committed to their faith? Doubt is the human condition. Yet I suspect most church-goers derive comfort from hearing people who are fully committed–and so clergy learn to present themselves as such.
David Henderson
Oct 29 2021 at 5:35pm
David Q asks above:
I don’t think so. She showed me a hard copy.
David Q asks:
I don’t know.
Richard Ebeling
Oct 29 2021 at 5:52pm
David,
I considered Chuck Baird’s Micro textbook to be excellent. I recall, especially, thinking that his exposition of “Say’s Principle,” (drawing upon Robert Clower’s articles) to be outstanding for students to understand the concept and it’s relevance.
David Henderson
Oct 29 2021 at 6:37pm
Thanks, Richard. Your comment motivated me to look for my copy. I thought I had lost it in my fire in 2007. But I just found it. The reason must be that I had it in my campus office and so, when I retired, I brought it to my downtown office.
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