Noah Carl fights back after dismissal from Cambridge

Dr. Noah Carl is a young, conservative academic whose existence was relatively anonymous before he became the target of the illiberal intelligentsia and later lost his research position at Cambridge University. Now, he’s over halfway to his crowdfunding target to take the university to task for its cowardly dismissal.

Last November, Carl was chosen out of 943 candidates for the prestigious Toby Jackman Newton Trust Research Fellowship at St Edmunds College, part of Cambridge University. Carl, who grew up in idyllic Cambridge in an academic family—both his parents are architectural scholars—lost his position in May, after 1,400 academics denounced his views and his work in a letter published a few months ago: “A careful consideration of Carl’s published work and public stance on various issues, particularly on the claimed relationship between ‘race,’ ‘criminality’ and ‘genetic intelligence’, leads us to conclude that his work is ethically suspect and methodologically flawed.”

And further:

    We are deeply concerned that racist pseudoscience is being legitimised through association with the University of Cambridge. This fellowship was awarded to Carl despite his attendance at, and public defence of, the discredited ‘London Conference on Intelligence’, where racist and pseudoscientific work has been regularly presented. Carl’s work has already been used by extremist and far-right media outlets with the aim of stoking xenophobic anti-immigrant rhetoric. In a context where the far-right is on the rise across the world, this kind of pseudoscientific racism runs the serious risk of being used to justify policies that directly harm vulnerable populations.

These alarmist claims could easily be refuted, and were, both by Carl in this FAQ and by several notable academics, like Cass R. Sunstein and Jonathan Haidt, who wrote in a piece by Quillette that  “the “open letter” denouncing Carl is just a list of vague assertions and charges of guilt by association. If the signers think we should condemn anyone who gives ammunition to “extremist and far right media,” they should write a new letter condemning themselves.”

Reading the letter, you would be forgiven to think that Carl must hold suspect views on race and that his work furthers a racist agenda. But his “crimes” weren’t nearly as sinister, although he has studied links between population groups and crime, as in this paper on how British stereotypes of different groups of immigrants correlate to the types of crimes they commit. He has also defended the right of academics to research the correlation between IQ and different population groups, but not partaken in this type of research himself.

After an investigation by the college and months of protests, Carl, who has a PhD in Sociology, was dismissed on May 1:

    The poor scholarship of this problematic body of Dr Carl’s work, among other things, meant that it fell outside any protection that might otherwise be claimed for academic freedom of speech. The panel found that, in the course of pursuing this problematic work, Dr Carl had collaborated with a number of individuals who were known to hold extremist views. There was a serious risk that Dr Carl’s appointment could lead, directly or indirectly, to the College being used as a platform to promote views that could incite racial or religious hatred, and bring the College into disrepute.

This cowardly stance, full of virtue-signalling buzzwords and accusations of guilt by association, shows how the protection of the perceived status of the college takes precedence over what a university is meant to foster, namely knowledge and truth. Knowledge isn’t racist; it’s neutral. It’s not up to the academic to decide how that knowledge will be used, but simply to offer his or her research. If there is a correlation between crime and different population groups, surely that knowledge deserves to be taken seriously, rather than swept under the carpet? Ignoring facts doesn’t solve anything. Just look to Sweden, where a crime wave—including numerous explosions, no less – among certain parts of the immigrant population has become an open secret, yet is still dismissed by the left, to see where going down that road will take us.

How did thought control and condemnation of wrongthinkers, rather than open inquiry and respect for different viewpoints, become an obsession for academics in the humanities departments? By now, we’re almost becoming used to countless deplatformings of speakers and rescindments of scholars, such as the appalling treatment of Dr Jordan B. Peterson only a few months ago. The left wing types dominate the social sciences, a trend which started in the 1960s, as Carl himself has pointed out—less than 12% of academics lean right in British universities, compared with 50% of the population— and with the increasingly polarized public debate, their authoritarian streak is becoming more obvious. “There is no such thing as free speech” is the excuse they espouse, but they forget conveniently that THEY are very free to hound whomever THEY disagree with, and THEIR views—those of the liberal elite, who preach for open borders, endless genders, and all the other politically correct causes—are usually met with acclaim. Whereas conservative views – such as being a Brexiter, like Carl—are mocked and vilified.

“This isn’t about whether you agree with my research or my political views,'” Carl told Toby Young in an interview for the Spectator. “This is about protecting freedom of speech, and standing up to the activists who are trying to control our universities. (…) Let’s show St Edmund’s College that they can’t get away with this.’

Carl told me in an email that he hopes to continue to publish scientific articles and will continue to read around in the literature. His advice to young academics is to apply to an institution that has a reputation for upholding free speech and open inquiry. “So far as the UK is concerned, Oxford has shown itself to be much better in this regard than Cambridge. In the US, I understand that Chicago has a good track-record,” says Carl. His best advice? “Never apologize for anything unless you genuinely believe you did wrong.”

Carl says a possible way forward to increase viewpoint diversity may involve online universities, which Jordan Peterson has advocated, or withholding public funding for universities that refuse to comply with free speech. It could also involve collective defense agreements to preempt attacks by activists, he added.

I don’t think that even as recent as five or ten years ago we could have predicted, with any gravitas, that freedom of speech would come under attack in our liberal democracies. In Britain, as in the rest of the modern world, free thought and the expression of it has resulted in countless advances in science and culture, and ever since John Stuart Mill defended freedom of speech in On Liberty in 1859:

    In this age, the mere example of non-conformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time.

This has echoed in every generation since. We have all tended to agree that silencing opinion is wrong, regardless of the opinion’s truthfulness, because when truth collides with error, knowledge arises. This “marketplace of ideas” has been a long standing pillar on which our society is built. When it crumbles, we’re in trouble. And more and more evidence is piling up pointing to this fundamental value being eroded, bit by bit. It is dissidents like Carl who are the heroes in this climate of coercion. I, for one, support Carl in his quest for justice and wish him a fulfilling and interesting career in the years to come.

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Educate the Educators!

North Carolina schools have a serious literacy problem; most likely, that means it has a teacher education problem. The University of North Carolina system is exploring ways to correct the situation—yet questions remain whether they can effect much improvement.

The 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) showed that less than 40 percent of the state’s fourth graders are reading at grade level. Furthermore, despite having the highest graduation rate in the state’s history, only 41 percent of graduates meet minimum college-readiness standards.

And despite costly statewide efforts to boost K-12 public school students’ learning outcomes, little, if any, progress has been made. For instance, the $150 million initiative “Read to Achieve” has produced few positive results since its launch in 2012.

Since the UNC system is the single largest source of teachers in the state, some UNC system policymakers view these trends as due, in part, to a failure of teacher preparation. During a recent policy meeting, Anna Nelson, UNC Board of Governors member and chair of the Committee on Educational Planning, Policies, and Programs, commented:

I think one of the most important things we do in service to the state of North Carolina is to prepare excellent teachers. We are the number one resource for teachers in the state of North Carolina…We do this well, but we need to do it better.

Actually, the university system was already on the case. In February 2018, it released a report on teacher education entitled Leading on Literacy. Although the report sought ways to improve teacher preparation in general, it had a particular focus on improving literacy instruction. It also noted that the content teachers learn often does not match up with what K-12 students are expected to know. To address this and other related issues, the report recommended that an advisory group be created to head a system-wide effort in teacher education reform. As a result, the Educator Preparation Advisory Group was formed and first convened in late 2018.

On May 21 of this year, associate vice president of PreK-12 strategy and policy, Julie Kowal, gave an update of the Advisory Group’s goals and strategies to a committee meeting of the UNC Board of Governors. Kowal reported that, in February, the Advisory Group defined and approved a set of goals and strategies.

Kowal then explained that each strategy would be addressed in depth by its own “community of practice,” a committee of education professionals and representatives from select UNC institutions. The first community of practice, the Coalition for Early Learning and Literacy in Teacher Preparation, was launched in March 2019 with the aim of analyzing the latest research in early childhood learning and seeing how well UNC programs incorporate that research into their teaching methods. The Coalition will meet over a course of six months. The Advisory Group plans to launch another community of practice in 2019, with others to follow in 2020.

Terry Stoops, education analyst at the John Locke Foundation, told the Martin Center that he hopes the Advisory Group’s efforts to reform teacher education are successful, but has some doubts as to whether they will lead to significant changes in student learning.

Stoops noted that it is difficult to ensure changes that happen at the UNC system level trickle down into actual K-12 classroom practice. “There’s this multi-layer issue of having to take any recommendations at the UNC system level and making sure that they persist through multiple layers of teacher preparation and practice,” he said.

But the opposite problem might also be true. Current trends in educational outcomes are almost assuredly due, in part, to programs created from prior research produced by schools of education. Looking toward more recent research by the same sources that caused the situation in the first place may mean a continuation of the problem, rather than a cure.

Two of the Advisory Group’s key proposed solutions are to “recruit, select, and support a highly-qualified pool of teacher candidates” and ensure that, once admitted, they “attain essential pedagogical content knowledge.”

But doing so will not be easy. For the first solution, if UNC schools only admit high-achieving students into teacher education programs, they will have far fewer students and not produce enough teachers to satisfy the state’s demand.

So far, UNC officials have only paid lip service to setting high standards. They’ve done so by stating that they will evaluate “candidates’ mean scores on college entrance exams” and “pass rates on pre-professional skills tests.” However, they have not yet defined what test scores students will need in order to be considered “highly qualified.”

As they discuss what the minimum standards should be, UNC officials should take into account recommendations made by the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ).

The NCTQ recommends that North Carolina’s teacher education programs require a minimum GPA of 3.0 or limit admission to “those who have scored in the top half of all college-going students on tests of academic proficiency.” Right now, none of UNC’s schools of education require a 3.0 GPA, and the required testing scores often are not specified.

As important as high admissions standards for teachers are, even more pressing is what they learn once admitted. It might seem obvious that, in order to really be effective, teachers need to have a solid basic understanding of American history, literature, science, and mathematics.

But, according to E.D. Hirsch, Jr., the founder and chairman of the Core Knowledge Foundation and professor emeritus of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, many schools of education do a poor job of teaching those subjects. “It is true that many American teachers are ill-informed about the subjects they teach, and it is also true that this reduces their productivity in the classroom,” says Hirsch. He explains:

So-called low teacher quality is not an innate characteristic of American teachers; it is the consequence of the training they have received and of the vague, incoherent curricula they are given to teach, both of which result from an ed school de-emphasis on specific, cumulative content.

Hirsch has long written on how the lack of cultural knowledge passed on by teachers to students hurts low-income students more than their more affluent peers. Higher learning often builds upon a student’s base of cultural knowledge, and students with well-educated parents start with a much greater share than their less-fortunate peers. If low-income students don’t gain the requisite background knowledge in the classroom, they are quickly left behind.

According to Hirsch, many education schools are more preoccupied with instilling teachers with “naturalistic and formalist ideologies” than instructing them in concrete knowledge:

Teaching subject-matter knowledge in history, science, literature, and the arts (to the extent that it is considered to be needed at all) is an imprecisely defined task that education schools assign (without guidance) to the other departments of the college or university.

As a result, teachers have a weak handle on key subject matter. This knowledge deficit, according to Hirsch, impacts their students’ abilities to master reading comprehension. In his book Cultural Literacy, Hirsch argues that knowledge of specific and cumulative content— such as history or literature— is directly tied to “literacy itself.”

Given North Carolina’s dismal fourth-grade literacy levels—and the direct correlation between student literacy and the content knowledge they learn—it’s not surprising that UNC system teachers are themselves poorly educated in content knowledge. In its 2018 Teacher Prep Review, the NCTQ graded education programs according to how they measured up to their content knowledge standards. Based on NCTQ’s criteria, the following UNC system schools’ undergraduate elementary teacher programs received an “F” grade in how they teach content knowledge:

UNC Greensboro
UNC Wilmington
UNC Pembroke
Winston-Salem State University
Western Carolina University
Appalachian State University
North Carolina State University
And the following schools received a “D” grade:

East Carolina University
North Carolina Central
UNC Charlotte

That means, according to NCTQ, 10 of 12 schools of education in the UNC system that teach elementary education at the undergraduate level are extremely deficient. Clearly, UNC officials need to take a close look at their education programs’ curricular requirements.

There is some possibility that they will do so. According to a UNC system press release, the Advisory Group will consult research by a national education non-profit organization, Deans for Impact, when making its policy decisions. In the report entitled The Science of Early Learning, Deans for Impact noted the importance of content knowledge:

Children should read texts that are rich in content, not just about familiar, daily life contexts. Even young children benefit from learning about science, history, geography, and other cultures, and from reading classic stories that may be referenced in other works…reading comprehension strategies alone cannot compensate for lack of vocabulary or content knowledge.

Of course, children won’t be able to learn “rich content” unless their teachers are immersed in it first—which is why UNC’s policymakers, if they are serious about the state’s illiteracy epidemic, will have to address their own teachers’ deficits in knowledge. That will likely require a thorough revamping of the curriculum to ensure that teachers graduate with a deep understanding of the liberal arts.

Only time will tell whether UNC’s efforts will only result in bureaucratic platitudes or if those involved in the reform process will actually implement meaningful changes. The political fight to effect change may very well be more difficult than the pedagogical one; education schools used to acting independently may not be eager to take lots of direction from above. And, even if the education schools can change, the K-12 establishment may not be happy about UNC taking the lead on its own turf. Resistance is to be expected.

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The Diversity Distortion

Crap courses are designed to be taught by minority faculty

In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics, submitted a hoax article to Social Text, a journal of postmodern cultural studies, which published it. Last year, in what became known as the Sokal Squared hoax, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian created 20 fake papers that they submitted to several cultural studies journals. Seven of them had been selected for publication at the time the hoax became public.

The point of the Sokal Squared hoax was to highlight the lack of rigor in what the authors of the hoax called “grievance studies,” academic programs addressing issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, and identity. But in the uproar over the hoax, a more fundamental question has been overlooked. Why are there so many such programs? What accounts for the rapid proliferation of university departments devoted to the study of minority cultural identity?

Raising this question is not a disguised criticism of the existence of such departments. The cultural changes of the past four decades make African American, feminist, and LGBTQ studies legitimate and important fields of inquiry. The advent of such departments is a natural reaction to interesting new questions that need to be addressed to advance the university’s mission to seek truth and generate understanding. Whether the current programs are doing a good job of addressing these questions may be debated, but the study of cultural identity is a legitimate field of academic inquiry.

Nevertheless, in a time when academic resources are stretched thin and many traditional academic departments are facing retrenchment, it is reasonable to ask whether the continued expansion of these departments is justified. Is there something beyond their inherent academic value that is driving the growth of cultural studies programs at the expense of other departments and, perhaps, the overall health of the university?

The answer is yes. It is the contemporary university’s quest for a diverse faculty.

Almost all elite universities make it a top priority to increase the number of minorities and women on their faculty. Yale is pursuing a $50 million initiative to enhance faculty diversity; Brown has committed $100 million to hiring 60 additional faculty members from historically under-represented groups; Princeton committed funds to support 15 to 20 diversity hires.

The problem is that universities cannot simply go out and hire the desired minority and women faculty. Doing so would be a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, something that is not well understood by many advocates of faculty diversity.

Stimulated by the Supreme Court’s decisions in the cases of Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger in 2003, the past fifteen years have seen much discussion of the legality of pursuing student diversity in higher education. Grutter held that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment permits public universities to consider an applicant’s race in their admission decisions for the purpose of promoting a diverse student body.

Title VI of the Civil Right Act of 1964, which prohibits discrimination in programs that receive federal assistance, applies the same standard to (almost all) private universities. Thus, institutions of higher education in the United States may consider sex and minority status in order to increase the diversity of their student bodies. But none of that is relevant to the question of faculty diversity.

Grutter and Title VI are concerned with the admission of students, but this has nothing to do with whether universities can consider race and sex in deciding whom to hire. Faculty hiring is an employment decision and employment decisions are governed by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Title VII does not permit employers to make any hiring, promotion, termination, or other employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It applies to public and private universities alike.

Under Title VII, universities may undertake strenuous affirmative action efforts to assemble the most diverse pool of applicants possible. They may specifically recruit African Americans, women, and other minorities to apply for faculty positions. Once the selection process has begun, however, Title VII prohibits any consideration of a candidate’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. This limitation on the use of race and sex in the selection process is reflected in the typical ads for academic positions that state that the university or college is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer and that women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply.

These legal restrictions mean that to diversify their faculties, universities must create new positions that would appeal only to women or minority scholars or for which women and minority scholars are likely to be the most qualified candidates. The surest way to do this is to increase the number of positions in women’s studies, critical race theory, LGBTQ studies, and other cultural identity-based programs. To a significant extent, the growth of what the Sokal Squared authors derisively refer to as grievance studies is a by-product of universities’ efforts to obtain a more diverse faculty.

This would not be not harmful if, in fact, the university’s most urgent academic need is in the cultural studies area. But it can be quite damaging to a university if this is not the case.

Diversity, both in the student body and the faculty, is a means, not an end in itself. It is usually justified on the ground that it improves the quality of higher education. Advocates of diversity claim that studying with people of differing backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives enhances the learning experience of all and generates greater understanding of the material under discussion.

This is an empirical claim that is open to challenge, but let’s assume for now that it is correct. If so, then a diverse learning environment would help the university attain its end of generating and transmitting knowledge.

But to attain this end, universities must make complex decisions about how to allocate resources among many disciplines. They must decide how much to spend on STEM, how much on the social sciences, how much on languages, how much on the humanities, and how much on cultural studies. They must determine how many faculty positions are needed by each discipline to optimize the generation of knowledge and its transmission to the next generation of students.

To the extent that a university lets its desire to increase faculty diversity drive this decision, it converts the means into the end. The drive for diversity now diverts the development of the university’s curriculum away from the path dictated by its educational values, needs, and goals. In a classic example of the tail wagging the dog, the university’s academic mission becomes subservient to its drive for diversity.

Call this the diversity distortion. When the quest for diversity drives the proliferation of cultural studies programs beyond their academically justified level, it distorts universities’ curricula in ways that are detrimental to their educational missions.

Contrary to the contention of the Sokal Squared authors, the great danger in the growth of “grievance studies” programs is not the erosion of academic standards for scholarly publication. Instead, it is the destructive effects of the diversity distortion. Sadly, in their obsession with faculty diversity, many university administrators appear to have lost sight of the purposes their institutions were created to serve.

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