Category: Free Speech

Boghossian May Be Punished for Exposing the “Faulty Epistemology” of Grievance Studies

(p. A15) A massive academic hoax has taken a surprising twist. Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy, faces disciplinary action at Oregon’s Portland State University. The accusations against him raise constitutional questions about federal regulation of academic research. They also implicitly acknowledge that the prank had a serious point.
Mr. Boghossian–along with two confederates, neither of whom has an academic affiliation–set out to expose shoddy scholarship in what they call “grievance studies.” They concocted 20 pseudonymous “academic papers,” complete with fake data, and submitted them to leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals in fields like “queer studies” and “fat studies.” The Journal’s Jillian Melchior discovered the deception last summer and broke the story in October, by which time seven of the phony papers had been accepted for publication and four published.
“It had to be done,” Mr. Boghossian tells me. “We saw what was happening in these fields, and we were horrified at the faulty epistemology that these people were using to credential themselves and teach others.” The effort drew praise from some well-known public intellectuals, including Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson and Steven Pinker.
. . .
A hastily formed university committee recommended that Mr. Boghossian be investigated for “research misconduct”–that is, purposely fabricating data. That case would seem to be open and shut, but the investigation has stalled.
More serious are the sanctions against Mr. Boghossian announced Dec. 21 on behalf of Portland State’s Institutional Review Board for conducting research on “human subjects” without submitting his research protocol to the IRB for review as required by the federal National Research Act of 1974. The “human subjects” in question were the editors and peer-reviewers of the duped journals. Portland State ordered Mr. Boghossian to undergo “human subjects research training,” and its letter warns that “further actions may be required,” with no elaboration.
. . .
Philip Hamburger, a law professor at Columbia, argues that the National Research Act and the HHS’s regulations violate the First Amendment, infringing on scholars’ freedom of expression. Mr. Hamburger has likened IRB vetting procedures to the Star Chamber’s licensing of publications that prevailed in 17th-century England–which the Constitution’s drafters were eager not to replicate. “Licensing . . . prohibits generally, and then selectively permits what otherwise is forbidden,” Mr. Hamburger wrote in 2007.

For the full commentary, see:
Charlotte Allen. “A Hoax and Its ‘Human Subjects’; An Institutional Review Board disciplines an academic prankster. But is it constitutional?” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, Jan. 29, 2019): A15.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipsis internal to last paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 28, 2019.)

Li Rui Stood Up to Mao and Xi

(p. A8) BEIJING — While alive, Li Rui was a decades-long headache for China’s ruling Communists — a former aide to Mao Zedong who became an obdurate, sharp-tongued critic of the party. And the controversy did not stop in death, even for his funeral.
Hundreds of people gathered in Beijing on Wednesday to say goodbye to Mr. Li, four days after his death at 101. But the funeral revealed tensions between the government, which wanted a brisk Communist ceremony, and mourners who celebrated Mr. Li as a renegade — one who, even as he lay dying, railed against the authoritarian policies of Xi Jinping, the party’s leader and China’s president.
. . .
A few paid tribute to Mr. Li by holding up handwritten signs, or by making brief speeches that praised him as a freethinker who had stood up to Mao — opposing the calamitous excesses of the Great Leap Forward — and pressed Mao’s successors to take China in a more liberal direction. Police officers and officials kept watch, and tried to keep foreign reporters from talking to mourners throughout the morning.
“He was someone who had the guts to speak up for the people,” said Sheng Lianqi, a retired worker in his 70s, who said he never met Mr. Li but admired his writings.
He held up a handwritten sign that read in part: “Li Rui’s name will live in eternity. The ordinary people have sharp eyes and clear minds.”
. . .
These days, the party restricts criticism of Mao. But Mr. Li seemed determined to have the last word. He donated many of his papers — including notebooks and letters from his decades in the party, and a diary he kept for more than 80 years — to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where scholars will eventually be able to study them, said his daughter, Ms. Li.

For the full obituary, see:
Chris Buckley. “A Red-Banner Funeral in Beijing for a Critic of the Party From Mao to Xi.” The New York Times (Thursday, Feb. 21, 2019): A8.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Feb. 20, 2019, and has the title “In Beijing, a Communist Funeral for an Inconvenient Critic.”)

“The Key Is Freedom”

(p. A17) . . . Ronald Reagan, in the last year of his presidency, delivered one of his most magnificent speeches . . . before a packed auditorium of students at Moscow State University.
. . .
Reagan’s ultimate aim was to plant the seed of freedom in the newly receptive furrows of a cracking totalitarianism.
. . .
Reagan delivered his Moscow speech standing before a gigantic scowling bust of Lenin and a mural of the Russian Revolution. He incorporated them as props in his address. “Standing here before a mural of your revolution,” he said, “I want to talk about a very different revolution,” a technological and “information revolution” that was transforming the world. How much progress had already been realized! But progress was not foreordained. “The key,” Reagan said, “is freedom–freedom of thought, freedom of information, freedom of communication.”

For the full commentary, see:
Roger Kimball. “‘When Reagan Met Lenin.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, May 31, 2018): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 30, 2018.)

North Sentinel Hunter-Gatherers Defecate on Anthropology

(p. A13) T.N. Pandit, an Indian anthropologist who visited North Sentinel several times between 1967 and 1991, said their hostility is simple: They want to be left alone.
“They are not wanting anything from you. We are coming to them,” he said. “They suspect that we have no good intentions. That’s why they are resisting.”
. . .
In the years since India won independence from the British, groups of anthropologists have tried to study them.
But no one has managed to get through. Several times, Mr. Pandit said, the Sentinelese have turned their backs on anthropologists and squatted down, as if they were defecating.

For the full story, see:
Kai Schultz, Hari Kumar and Jeffrey Gettleman. “‘Tribe That Killed American Has History of Guarding Island’s Isolation.” The New York Times (Friday, Nov. 23, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 22, 2018, and has the title “Sentinelese Tribe That Killed American Has a History of Guarding Its Isolation.”)

Tracking the Rosenbergs Was About Catching Spies, Not About Suppressing Dissent

(p. 18) In writing about the events and the back story surrounding the espionage case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Howard Blum, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, seems at first glance to be going over well-trod territory. But “In the Enemy’s House” is not a mere rehash. Instead, it is an account of the two men who were principally responsible for tracking down the Rosenbergs: Robert Lamphere, an F.B.I. counterintelligence agent, and Meredith Gardner, the most experienced and able code-breaker working for the United States government.
. . .
Blum’s book is especially valuable in rebutting the dwindling few who still believe the Rosenberg case was about the government seeking to curb the civil liberties of dissenters. Suppression of dissent, Blum demonstrates, was the furthest thing from the two men’s minds.

For the full review, see:
Ronald Radosh. “Catching the Rosenbergs.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, April 15, 2018): 18.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 10, 2018, and has the title “In This True-Life Spy Story, It’s America vs. Russia, the Early Years.”)

The book under review, is:
Blum, Howard. In the Enemy’s House: The Secret Saga of the FBI Agent and the Code Breaker Who Caught the Russian Spies. New York: Harper, 2018.

Chernobyl Was Due to “Bureaucratic Incompetence,” Not Due to Technology

(p. C6) Dr. Medvedev’s study of Lysenko was not approved for official publication in the Soviet Union, but samizdat, or clandestine, copies circulated among the intelligentsia. In 1969, the book was translated into English and published as “The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko.”
Dr. Medvedev was fired from his job at an agricultural research laboratory, and within a few months was summoned to a meeting with a psychiatrist, on the pretext of discussing the behavior of his teenage son. Instead, Dr. Medvedev was taken to a holding cell, where he managed to pick the lock and walk away.
Soon afterward, on May 29, 1970, as Dr. Medvedev recounted in his book “A Question of Madness,” he was confronted at his home by two psychiatrists accompanied by several police officers.
“‘If you refuse to talk to us,’ one of the psychiatrists told Dr. Medvedev, ‘then we will be obliged to draw the appropriate conclusions . . . And how do you feel yourself, Zhores Aleksandrovich?’
“I answered that I felt marvelous.
“‘But if you feel so marvelous, then why do you think we have turned up here today?’
“‘Obviously, you must answer that question yourself,’ I replied. “A police major arrived. “‘ And who on earth might you be?’ Dr. Medvedev asked. ‘I didn’t invite you here.’ ”
“He protested, to no avail, that the homes of Soviet citizens were considered private and inviolable to the forces of the state.
“‘Get to your feet!” the police major ordered Dr. Medvedev. ‘I order you to get to your feet!’ ”
Two lower-ranking officers, twisted Dr. Medvedev’s arms behind his back, forced him out of his house and into an ambulance. He was driven to a psychiatric hospital.
The preliminary diagnosis was “severe mental illness dangerous to the public,” and Dr. Medvedev was repeatedly warned to stop his “publicist activities.”
Meanwhile, his brother, Sakharov and other activists for greater openness in the Soviet system sent telegrams and published open letters calling for Dr. Medvedev’s release. One of his friends, the novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then still living in the Soviet Union, condemned Dr. Medvedev’s detention with a bold and blistering statement.
“The incarceration of freethinking healthy people in madhouses is spiritual murder,” he said. “It is a fiendish and prolonged torture . . . These crimes will never be forgotten, and all those who take part in them will be condemned endlessly, while they live and after they’re dead.
“It is shortsighted to think that you can live constantly relying on force alone, constantly scorning the objections of conscience.”
Solzhenitsyn received the Nobel Prize for Literature later that year.
. . .
In 1990, Dr. Medvedev wrote an account of the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, which he considered inevitable, with the Soviet Union’s history of scientific and bureaucratic incompetence.
“In the end, I was surprised at how poorly designed the reactor actually was,” he told the New York Times in 1990. “I wanted to write this book not only to show the real scale of this particular catastrophe, but also to demolish a few more secrets and deliberate misconceptions.”

For the full obituary, see:
SCHUDEL, Matt. “‘Scientist exposed agricultural fraud and Soviet incompetence.” The Washington Post (Sunday, Sept. 6, 2018): C6.
(Note: ellipses between paragraphs, added; ellipses internal to paragraphs, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 4, 2018, and has the title “‘James Mirrlees, Whose Tax Model Earned a Nobel, Dies at 82.”)

The books by Zhores Medvedev that were mentioned above, are:
Medvedev, Zhores A. The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.
Medvedev, Zhores A., and Roy A. Medvedev. A Question of Madness: Repression by Psychiatry in the Soviet Union. London: Mcmillan London Ltd., 1971.
Medvedev, Zhores A. The Legacy of Chernobyl. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Musk Jabs the SEC as “the Shortseller Enrichment Commission”

(p. B1) Elon Musk risked reigniting a battle with federal securities regulators on Thursday when he appeared to openly mock the Securities and Exchange Commission only days after the Tesla Inc. chief executive settled fraud charges with the agency.
Seemingly without prompt, Mr. Musk sent a tweet in the early afternoon that suggested the SEC was enriching investors betting against the electric-car maker. “Just want to [say] that the Shortseller Enrichment Commission is doing incredible work,” Mr. Musk tweeted. “And the name change is so on point!”

For the full story, see:
Tim Higgins and Gabriel T. Rubin. “Tweet by Elon Musk Takes Jab at the SEC.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, October 5, 2018): B1 & B4.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 4, 2018, and has the title “Elon Musk Tweet Mocks the Securities and Exchange Commission.”)

“Eye-Popping” Lack of Ideological Diversity in Universities

Cass Sunstein, the author of the passages quoted below, was the head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs from 2009 to 2012 during the Obama administration. He is currently a professor at the Harvard Law School. His spouse is Samantha Powers who he met while advising the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. She went on to be appointed by Obama as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

(p. 7B) In recent years, concern has grown over what many people see as a left-of-center political bias at colleges and universities. A few months ago, Mitchell Langbert, an associate professor of business at Brooklyn College, published a study of the political affiliations of faculty members at 51 of the 66 liberal-arts colleges ranked highest by U.S. News in 2017.

The findings are eye-popping (even if they do not come as a great surprise to many people in academia). Democrats dominate most fields. In religion, Langbert’s survey found that the ratio of Democrats to Republicans is 70 to 1. In music, it is 33 to 1. In biology, it is 21 to 1. In philosophy, history and psychology, it is 17 to 1. In political science, it is 8 to 1.
. . .
. . . , the current numbers make two points unmistakably clear. First, those who teach in departments lacking ideological diversity have an obligation to offer competing views and to present them fairly and with respect. A political philosopher who leans left should be willing and able to ask students to think about the force of the argument for free markets, even if they produce a lot of inequality.
Second, those who run departments lacking ideological diversity have an obligation to find people who will represent competing views — visiting speakers, visiting professors and new hires. Faculties need not be expected to mirror their societies, but students and teachers ought not live in information cocoons.
John Stuart Mill put it well: “It is hardly possible to overrate the value … of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar. Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress.”

For the full commentary, see:
Cass Sunstein. “The problem with All Those Liberal College Professors.” Omaha World-Herald (Sunday, May 1, 2018): 7B.
(Note: the ellipsis internal to last paragraph was in original; the other ellipses were added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date April 30, 2018.)

“An Insular Fortress of Thought Coercion”

(p. A3) WASHINGTON–A day before Google’s chief was set to meet with high-ranking Republicans, critics in a congressional hearing accused the internet giant and other tech firms of being “insular” and dismissive of the free-speech rights of conservatives.
. . .
At Thursday’s House subcommittee hearing, Rep. Steve King (R., Iowa) warned that tech companies’ alleged bias is beginning to be noticed by the public. “Americans are beginning to recognize this quiet trend in our society in which one group or another systemically silences another’s beliefs with which they disagree,” he said in his opening statement.
Harmeet Dhillon, an attorney representing a group of conservative Google employees claiming employment discrimination by the company, directed lawmakers to media reports concerning its alleged blacklisting of phrases, articles and websites, and the blocking of conservative YouTube videos.
“Big Tech has become an insular fortress of thought coercion and vindictive behavioral control,” she said.

For the full story, see:
McKinnon, John D. “Tech Firms Face Political Bias Accusations.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, September 28, 2018): A3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 27, 2018, and has the title “Tech Firms Face Bias Accusations at Congressional Hearing.” The online version includes additional paragraphs, but the passages quoted above appear in both the online and print versions. The formatting above, follows the print version.)

Wrecking Ball for Bureaucracy That “Is Killing the Country”

(p. B4) America’s big tech companies are facing some of their toughest political challenges as they flirt with or surpass trillion-dollar valuations. Before lawmakers try to rein them in, Reid Hoffman argues government officials better be careful what they wish for.
Mr. Hoffman was chief operating officer of PayPal while it was still a small payments startup before he co-founded the professional social-network LinkedIn.
. . .
WSJ: You’re vociferously opposed to President Trump and even commissioned an anti-Trump card game. Does Silicon Valley have a problem with liberal bias?
Mr. Hoffman: I do think that there is a reflexive bias to liberalism that causes discomfort. I think you have that kind of left bias within the Silicon Valley culture, too, which is, “I’m so convinced that’s idiotic, I’m not listening to anything about it.” And that’s the problem. The problem is not actively listening. But that’s human. It’s not only here. Part of the reason [for strong negative reactions] to Trump is the flat-out lies.
WSJ: When you talk politics with Peter Thiel, PayPal’s co-founder and a well-known Trump supporter, what are those conversations like?
Mr. Hoffman: He’s a friend of mine, but we’ve disagreed about politics since we were college undergraduates. One thing we argue about is how much does Trump lie? I’ve been trying to advance him the case that there’s always been some lying around politicians, but Trump is one or two orders of magnitude worse than ever before. He says Obama is a bigger liar than Trump–based on, for example, the claim that under Obamacare you’d be able to spend as much time with your primary doctor as you did before Obamacare.
Peter thinks that the bureaucracy is killing the country and that you need a wrecking ball to shake it up, and maybe Trump is the only wrecking ball you get. His pro-Trump arguments are that someone needed to stand up to China. Trump at least is, [while] everyone else gave it lip service.

For the full interview, see:
Rolfe Winkler, interviewer. “A Silicon Valley Warning.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added; bolded and bracketed words in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sept. 26, 2018, and the title “LinkedIn’s Co-Founder Warns of Perils in Regulating Big Tech.” The last question and answer quoted above, is included in the online, but not the print, version of the interview.)