This post summarizes what I see as the key takeaways, the key indicators I examined, some methodological choices I made, and what I see as the key weaknesses in my report. I also try to anticipate and address some of the concerns people will have.

Summary

Our mandate was to investigate the politicization of our fields and its impact on scholarly standards. My specific focus was the role of political considerations in the production and reception of sociological research. I acknowledge and list a variety of other challenges the field is facing, but exploring them was not my mandate.

I tried to evaluate sociology on its own terms and do so as fairly as possible with the available data, which is not as extensive as I would have liked. Specifically, I offer what I see as a sociological analysis of sociology as a field with an ecology of competing norms, incentives, and other pressures.

I have an extensive methodological discussion highlighting some of the challenges of trying to evaluate such a heterogeneous and sprawling field. (For a related earlier version, focusing on the pros and cons of, and heterogeneity across, different metrics and probes, see this post from March.) An important point is the field looks different depending on where you stand, where you look, and what standards you apply. That might sound obvious, but it gets lost in totalizing language and final diagnoses, something I really struggled with (you can say something that is true, but that true statement can be read as more widespread than you mean).

The field is heterogeneous (and good, high-quality work is produced), but at the same time there are serious problems, and they have become institutionalized. I identify three major categories:

1. deep and long-standing contestation over the mission of the field and standards and criteria that should drive research production and reception

2. topical skews and blindspots making us less than the systematic study of society

3. both hidden and high-profile episodes of informal and formal social control of scholarly production based on political considerations

The upshot is that, for many different reasons, our work is becoming less trustworthy. Indeed, my optimism about sociology declined over the course of the project. As I’ve said before, when the general report came out, I thought the field was better off than I ultimately found it. I also initially believed people who argued the lower-tier programs and journals were driving a lot of these trends. It very well might be more common in lower-status places, but the prestige venues are not immune—that’s a problem, one that is likely to have downstream effects we’ve not yet experienced.

That said, this year has been interesting with the ASA developments (a lightning rod for interest in these questions), especially after my internal report was submitted, and there may be changes afoot. I did update my report to acknowledge that, but it’s ultimately one small bit in a larger, longer story, and not necessarily a representative one (as critics on the hyperfocus on ASA often point out).

Importantly, I largely looked at lagged indicators, so things could be different in a few years. Time will tell.

Highlights

The report itself reviews the evidence I could find for understanding scholarly standards, which can be measured in a variety of ways:

• the field’s reformer and science heritages, history, and debates, which people now use as resources to support one approach or the other (or some combination)

• the little systematic data we have from surveys and interviews on how faculty view certain scholarly standards

• some recent efforts to change scholarly practices for political, moral, or ideological reasons

• various ASA activities (conference themes, presidential addresses, advocacy efforts, and recent developments that occurred after my original report was submitted)

• the little systematic analysis of sociology research that we do have but that doesn’t quite address my question (the Nature replication/reproducibility studies and the Manzi study on political neutrality, both of which came out after my internal report was submitted)

• topical skews (the hyper focus on inequality, power, and identitarian considerations and the blindspots in the field) based on systematic reviews of top journals, the field overall, dissertations, and ASA section membership

• case studies of specific underrepresented topics and theories whose unpopularity has been attributed to political considerations

• some case studies of informal and formal social backlash to scholars producing politically unpopular research.

Limitations

The evidence is limited and uneven. As I’ll explain in a moment, I primarily relied on other people’s studies and takes. I did not have time to undertake a major data collection effort, nor did I really want to ask people to take my word for it that my analyses were correct (and now I’m really glad I did that, given some early responses to the general report and other published report). Consequently, we just don’t have systematic data on the things people probably most expected me to evaluate. I focused mostly on scholarly standards, meaning the norms sociologists use, advocate, describe, enact, and incentivize. I did try to look at scholarly output, but the available metrics usually get to the question more obliquely than I would have liked. I tried to be very careful about what claims I could make in light of the evidence. A recurring theme in the report is: we know some problems are definitely there and important, but we don’t know how big they are, and more data are needed. Thus, there is a great need for more data to evaluate the field; I’m currently undertaking a few studies to do that, but I hope others will as well.

One key tension, which I address, was that the Commission’s normative assumptions about scholarly standards are not wholly shared in sociology. In the body, I go back and forth between the Commission’s standards and some Sociologists’ standards. I think that makes the report a bit inconsistent and the tone uneven, and that wasn’t something I was really able to resolve—basically, I ended up using different standards at different times or at least paying lip service to one while using the other. That’s probably my biggest regret, but I needed to finish. I did try to keep my editorializing and interpretations to a minimum, but readers should focus more on the evidence and decide for themselves what they think. In fact, I think a lot of the stuff I describe, many sociologists will think, “Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to be,” whereas a lot of non-sociologists will have a “WTF?” reaction. It’s hard to square the two.

Because I looked at “politicization” broadly, there’s definitely a moving target across the report. Basically, people have different conceptions of “the problem.” I talk about politicization generally, which manifests in ways that vary from explicit political statements to not-so-subtle skewing of the discipline. These are not equivalents by any means, but they are part of a broader category of behavior. Likewise, at times I use “activism” as a broad, diverse category of behavior unified by a commitment to use research to make social change. Not everyone who engages in politicization is a self-identified activist or should they be labeled one; on the other hand, you also have people like Bourdieu making fun of “paper revolutionaries” and then calling for “scholarship with a commitment” that uses rigorous research to challenge neoliberalism and globalization. It’s varied. People vary. So the report talks about a lot of different types of politicization and its various manifestations, some of which are just open politicizing in professional contexts and some directly impact the rigor of scholarship, including the standards by which it should be evaluated. As I explain in the report, both kinds are implied by the research question.

Finally, I don’t include a theoretical framework in the report. I think that was the right call (it’s a report, plus I tried to lean heavily on the evidence), but I can imagine some folks might have wanted one since a makeshift theory of how things unfold certainly shaped my thoughts about what evidence was relevant for the question. So here’s my makeshift theoretical framework, if you can call it that (more accurate might be my theoretical priors):

• In thinking about these issues over the last few years across different projects, I’ve been heavily influenced by Clayton Childress’s fantastic book, Under the Cover: The Creation, Production, and Reception of a Novel. (I don’t cite him in the report because I don’t want him to be blamed for the report, or anything else I’ve done, but it has heavily influenced my thinking about the creation, production, and reception of research.) Whereas he traced that process for a single novel in a broader ecosystem, I try to do it for the field as an ecosystem.

• More generally, I also think about things from the perspective of the social construction of norms and deviance, including the role of social control, as well as neo-institutional organizational theory and institutional theories more generally (see my first book, which basically offers a neo-institutional version of deviance, separate from the other forms of organizational deviance in the orgs literature). I don’t cite that material in the report either, but its influence shaped my approach for sure.

Choices

Types of Evidence

I think some folks were expecting a systematic review of published scholarship similar to what I did in the normativity piece (this comes up, for example, in Len Gutkin’s critique of Anthony Appiah’s Literary Studies report, and Gutkin could make the same critique of my report). Instead, I did more of an institutional/field analysis of norms and their enforcement. And I tried to include others’ support and critiques of the field variously as data or as claims to evaluate. In effect, where I do critique the field, I rely heavily on other people’s studies and comments rather than my own original analysis of individual pieces of scholarship. Here’s why:

1. The prompt was about scholarly standards:

   1. My research question was really about examining disciplinary standards and norms, and to some extent how they have shifted over time. Scholarly standards are actually pretty difficult to observe except in scholars’ discussions of them. You can get a sense of them based on the published record (and certainly what gets published is influential in helping interpret the norms), but you also don’t see what was upstream to get to that output. So I wanted to trace the dynamics that shape scholarly trends, the contestations, the directives, the admonishments, the structures, and the incentives (honestly, I could have done more on the incentives). As a result, my focus was more on identifying the norms people talk about and the things that shape them than on what shows up in the average piece of sociological research (although we get a little bit of that to the extent prior analyses existed).

   2. Individual examples of bad research getting published can show that standards are slipping (e.g., bad work got through), but it’s going to be hard to make that case with individual examples examined in depth.

      1. Someone might argue that a given study was just so good and innovative that the standards were relaxed (which is a long-standing practice I’ve heard of in multiple fields). If I disagree the study is good and innovative and I think the standards were relaxed because the political nature of a paper, how do we figure out who is right? Now repeat the process for multiple examples. That’s a lot of uncertainty for a lot of effort.

      2. You’re still just studying output and not the norms themselves—as noted, output does contribute to the perception of the norms, certainly, but output is a proxy. That’s not reason enough to rule it out, but it does keep it lower on the queue for me.

      3. Finally, you can’t establish how widespread politicized norms are from specific articles without a very large, systematically collected sample. Applying an AI model to articles en masse, and analyzing them over time, can help with that, although we’ve also seen people’s reactions to the use of AI. (This effort is underway, in fact, across multiple teams, but it’s not in my report.)

   3. Using individual quotations shifts the focus onto individual scholars and not the larger question of the disciplinary standards. People can get overly distracted by who is cited and miss the broader picture assembled.

2. I thought the report would be stronger if it included others’ fine-grained analyses rather than my own original fine-grained analysis.

   1. Sociology is an incredibly broad, topically and methodologically diverse field. Obviously, I’m not a subject matter expert in every subfield of sociology (I’m pretty sure no one is, although certainly some senior scholars could probably do a reasonable job). I could do a fair bit of methodological evaluation without knowing the subject matter, but I do not 100% trust my ability to evaluate work in subfields beyond my own—for regular work, it wouldn’t be as much of an issue, but in this case, I want my analysis to be as bulletproof as possible because they’ll be picked apart, as they should be in a report of this profile. I didn’t want to do an analysis and then later find out that my reading is off because I didn’t know the subtleties of that field, which would be especially likely in the more critical subfields that have some of the biggest tendencies to politicize things. Now, I could analyze a sample of sociological research from my subject areas (and I’m doing that now), but people could just say (rightly) that it’s not representative of the field. So basically, in addition to the RQ issue, analyzing specific articles randomly selected from across the field would just be the wrong method given my expertise and skillset.

   2. I knew people would suspect my qualifications (no PhD in sociology, not a well-known or well-respected scholar within sociology generally) and my motivations (many people have accused me of simply disliking the politics of the work I criticize and have made other assumptions and accusations about me). It turns out these weren’t paranoid concerns on my part: the qualification points have already come up in some of the online criticism of my presence on the Commission and the motivation points came up after my earlier writings and continue to appear. But starting out in this process, I thought that if I used peer-reviewed research or quotations from respected scholars, that would carry more weight than my own analyses, given who I am and what people assume about me. This way, I don’t have to ask people to trust me.

3. I was criticized for doing that before with my normativity piece. To the extent there will be overlap in the people saying you (wrongly) didn’t include this type of evidence and the people who criticized my normativity piece for doing just that, I’m not really sure what to say.

   1. I was told recently, in front of a large group, for example, that it wasn’t “nice.” I was accused of racism and sexism because (they said) many of my quoted scholars are scholars of color and women (as I’ve said before, I have not checked—the only group that I noticed coming up a lot were Canadians, but I don’t know the demographics of a lot or perhaps most of the scholars I cited in that piece). I don’t imagine those criticisms would be different this time around. As it is, I obviously do quote some folks, either for their critiques or defenses of the field or calls to action, so I expect to get criticized for putting these scholars on the spot.

   2. Despite including many examples in my normativity, I was still accused of cherry-picking. I don’t know how many examples would be necessary for it to no longer be cherry-picking if someone doesn’t like the finding. This type of reaction makes me think this style of analysis is going to be less convincing for some, so now we’ll see how they do with other types, like survey data or topical skews.

   3. And while this wasn’t part of my thinking at the time, it later helped me believe I made the right call: a lot of people objected to being included as examples in the general report and claimed to be misquoted, and some threatened to sue. Weirdly, someone complained that we’d not asked them for permission to use their work (which isn’t usually a practice we’d follow in scholarship). So I was happy to skip all of these issues. It might still happen, but it’s less likely than if I’d included a close analysis of ~100 articles.

4. Time limits. We had an accelerated schedule (a few months to produce the initial outlines) and original research of the kind needed would have been difficult if not impossible to produce well in that timeframe. A careful content analysis would have occupied quite a bit of the time available, taking away from the broader research, but this is true of other data I would have liked to collect (original surveys, for example, would need to be approved through the IRB and then fielded—that would take a minimum of three months most likely and then I’d need to analyze the data). After submitting the report, I’ve started my own and joint research projects to collect the data we didn’t have (surveys, systematic in-depth reviews of top-tier journal articles, and AI-assisted analyses of fields). I’ve tried to get others to do them, and I hope the report prompts more.

So for all of these reasons, I steered clear of assessments of individual articles. That’s for another project.

No Policy Recommendations

I do not offer policy recommendations in the document. We were asked to describe and assess, not more, not less. I do call for more research, including from scholars who will use different data and different conceptions of idealized scholarly standards, recognizing that mine are mostly out of step with the field. Additionally, I’ve discussed possible reforms elsewhere based on a variety of considerations, and I’ll continue that discussion in future posts. But the report does not make policy recommendations. I was not asked to, nor do I think we should make policy recommendations based on a single study.

No Real Causal Story

Just as the report doesn’t make policy recommendations, it doesn’t really offer a strong causal story. The report describes the field, using different snapshots of data taken at different times or over different periods. Simultaneously, I describe a long-standing pattern and also accelerated changes in more recent periods, but those changes are most likely really about greater visibility and becoming more explicit in high-profile settings. Implicitly, it’s a story of pressures and incentives, but I can’t actually make a strong causal story with the available data, nor was I asked to. Elsewhere, I’ve offered a broader causal story that I think affected not just sociology, but I mostly don’t discuss those factors in the report. I just describe and evaluate the field’s scholarly standards.

Anticipating Criticisms

I’m genuinely curious and apprehensive about how serious scholars and readers will evaluate the report. There’s definitely evidence I overlooked, counterarguments I didn’t think of, and generally more I could have done. There are parts of the report I would have liked to expand (like the history section and the subsection on efforts to change research practices), but I just didn’t have time to do more, and they seemed less important to develop than the other, more systematic and developed indicators that others had identified before me. I’m sure some folks will raise useful criticisms of the report that I’ll kick myself for not thinking of in hindsight. No report is perfect, and this one is no exception, but I’ll only find out just how much I blew it now that it’s out. And that process will be painfully public, but that’s what I signed up for.

But if I had to guess, beyond the criticisms I don’t see coming, based on earlier reactions to my own work and to the earlier release of the general report, these will be some of the most common criticisms:

• Who is Ashley Rubin to write this report? She’s marginal/fringe/conservative and has a chip on her shoulder.

• The report helps the Trump Administration. The report harms sociology when it’s already on the ropes. Now is not the time for this conversation.

• The report uses inappropriate standards and assumptions. [See above.]

• There’s very little relevant evidence—like so many critics, she focuses more on ASA than research produced. [See above.]

• The report is uneven (careful in some places and less careful in others)—that’s the nice way of putting it. [See above.]

• The report picks on liberals.

• The report doesn’t go far enough/pulls its punches.

• There are no policy recommendations. [See above.]

I’m now going to address those critiques I’ve not already spoken to above.

Who am I to write this report?

I know there are concerns about my standing and qualifications to write a disciplinary report on sociology for the Commission (or even be on the Commission in the first place). I understand those concerns, and I anticipated them. I am a fairly marginal sociologist at a low-R1, and I do not hold a PhD in Sociology; who am I to write a report on the field? The rest of the Commission was staffed by giants in their field, and then there’s me. 🎼One of these things is not like the other.🎼 Additionally, some people have made assumptions about my political views, which they see as disqualifying.

I would request that scholars engage the report and focus on evaluating its merits rather than my qualifications to write it. I welcome critics to seriously engage the report: find holes in my analyses, data I missed, and faulty interpretations. If I have erred, or if there are omissions in the report (as there likely are), I would like to know this. Correcting the record, or adding other perspectives, will help us get a better sense of the state of the discipline. I hope that the report becomes a conversation starter. And I hope we see more data collection efforts to get fresh data on the central questions it raised and that I wasn’t able to answer or answer completely.

Timing

I know there are concerns about the timing of these writings—the piece of mine that first got a lot of attention came out in July 2025 and I was accused then of helping the Trump administration (which seems a bit doubtful). The Commission could be more fairly accused of that because it’s actually a high-profile report. And then, this week’s DOE letter mentioned the Commission’s report and the Yale report. For what it’s worth, the Commission was extremely careful in what we wrote in the general report and tried to anticipate misuses of the report. Neither critics nor supporters seem to have taken those subtleties and caveats seriously; ironically, the only exception seems to be conservative critics of the report.

Moreover, Sociology is obviously very fragile right now. And yet I chose to publish my disciplinary report. I don’t know if sociology’s critics will see the report as a letdown or as adding fuel to the fire—I can imagine both outcomes and it probably will be both. However, as I’ve said before, we should not shy away from research because of its possible political implications. Not undertaking a project for that reason, in my view, is a dereliction of our duty as scholars. I recognize many of my colleagues disagree with me on that, but that’s how I feel and how I’ve long felt.

More importantly, we will never fix our problems—or our reputation—if we don’t zealously discuss them. Personally, I see the external challenges as an opportunity to address tensions and problems that have been building in the field and that have rendered the field not just untrustworthy but unhealthy and narrow, rather than a thriving, diverse discipline that lives up to its relevance and importance today.

The Report Picks on Liberals

The focus of the report is the politicization of the production and reception of scholarship with respect to scholarly standards. I also focus on what norms have been institutionalized. In sociology, the politics at play tend to come from what gets called the left or liberal direction. I cite in passing the concern over “academic copaganda” and I mention the conservative politics of some biopsychosocial criminologists. These were the only sociological or adjacent fields about which I’ve heard allegations of conservative politics holding sway that weren’t simply related to a willingness to study a topic or disagreement over whether someone put too much emphasis on nature over nurture. Indeed, more often, studies that do study certain topics—IQ, genetics, evolution, etc.—are dismissed as “not sociological,” which is interesting.

If I missed other examples of whole sociological subfields that scholars claim have been corrupted by a commitment to conservative politics—not defined as a willingness to study certain topics or test certain theories, but where, for example, there’s a refusal to study certain topics or theories, or where traditional scholarly standards are being overridden to serve some political purpose, please feel free to share.

There’s another point that bears noting. In the report, I tried to explain that it’s not clear to me it’s even liberal politics, so much as a certain performative, narrow, and sometimes authoritarian approach to certain progressive issues. Just as real activists get offended by calling scholarship “activism,” I think real liberals should be offended that some of this stuff is getting called liberal or even progressive since it’s not clear to me it actually upholds those values. This was not my intention, but one could just as easily read the report as an effort to ensure sociology is still useful for advancing liberal causes (as others have argued), which I do not believe it is doing in any meaningful sense, just in superficial ways that are unlikely to accomplish any meaningful social or political change. But that’s unlikely to be how the report is read.

The Report Pulls its Punches

Yes. This is accurate. The report is not supposed to be a polemic or my personal diatribe. It’s supposed to be a scholarly assessment of the state of the field. As much as possible, I limited my discussion to the evidence and my interpretation of it, methodological considerations, and some broader context. I didn’t want to rest too heavily on my interpretations and editorializing; instead, I wanted the available evidence to speak for itself. Some will read the report and come away happy with the field and others will read the report and come away horrified. My gloss won’t change that. If anything, it would probably undermine the report.

So, if I did not feel I had sufficient data to make or evaluate a claim, I said so. Where I had an interpretation that moved a bit farther from the evidence into my personal opinion based on the evidence, I removed the discussion of it. Not consistently across the 100+ pages, and not in the executive summary, but a fair bit.

Conclusion

Hopefully this post has provided a useful CliffNotes to the report as well as some context for my thought process. I know the report is going to cause a stir and I know there’s going to be criticism. I wanted to at least try to address some of the concerns I know are coming. I also want to emphasize that the report is the start of a long-overdue conversation, not the final word.

P.S. As always, I welcome comments to this post. But I’m not going to respond to them for a little while. (I will read them and I will respond eventually, at least to those with thoughtful engagement, including disagreement and criticism.) I’ll also like or restack some things, but I’m mostly going to try to keep my head down and try to stay off social media this month.

Key Principles for Academic Reform

1. A commitment to scholarly standards rather than political considerations. Don’t replace one politicization with another. The solution to woke isn’t anti-woke; it’s sticking to rigor at the individual and field levels. The one thing we should all be able to agree on is our job is to figure out the truth—as challenging as that is. That should be the guiding principle for all that we do.

2. Embrace pluralism and competition in reform efforts. Let market wisdom prevail.* Use a laboratory of democracy mindset or a let a thousand flowers bloom approach. That is, try out multiple proposals and see what works. Avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. The honest answer is we don’t know what will work ahead of time, so let’s try a bunch of things out and see how it goes, then reassess and regroup. Additionally, different folks are concerned with different problems; they’ll come up with proposed solutions for their problems. If we allow for this decentralized approach, and avoid a narcissism of small differences mindset, we might actually get somewhere. *Just clarify, by market wisdom, I don’t mean privatization; I mean look at supply and demand—like what classes, majors, and universities do students enroll in or what do funders want to reward with funding. GPT suggested evolutionary selection might be a better metaphor.

3. Build up alternatives rather than destroy the dead wood. Create alternative structures that can sit alongside existing structures, then let the market decide which to reward. This principle is an extension of #2 and rests on the commitment to competition. But the idea is that we don’t need to cull the faculty or curriculum; we just need to offer competent, viable alternatives to what’s available and then let students, faculty, policymakers, funders, and others see which ones they want to flock to and support. (Yes, there are limits to this principle—market logics sometimes overlook crucial parts. But I think this will be a bigger problem after an initial round of reforms have gone through and we’re in a new status quo. But for a reform period, I think this is a second-order problem. Also, I want to acknowledge that building alternatives is more time consuming and resource intensive than working with what you have, but sometimes working with what you have is just not going to be productive.)

4. Always prioritize incentives over punishments (carrots, not sticks). Incentivizing good behavior is a powerful way to get people to behave better. I think a lot of us are much more responsive to carrots over sticks. Plus, few of us want to be in the business of policing others’ behavior (barring extreme circumstances); if nothing else, it’s time-consuming, not productive, and deeply uncomfortable. And it’s hard to do well and consistently and you have to deal with slippery slope issues.

5. Keep things voluntary rather than compulsive. #5 is really an extension of #3 and #4. Coercive strategies feel gross and will create resistance. Better to open a pathway to people and give them the chance to walk through it. Downstream, if the option has been around for a while, it’s well publicized, and people are consistently choosing not to walk through it, then we start to run into #2: if there’s a market for what they are doing, great; if not, well then market forces will create problems for those who want to stay the course.

GPT’s Contributions

(I saw that Substack is asking authors to be transparent about their use of AI, so I’ve added this section in. Plus, GPT raised some interesting points. This might be better in an appendix, but it’s more relevant here.)

I wrote out three of these as a brain dump and then I asked GPT to read my Substacks and my research journal (where I keep a lot of these notes), and see what it thought my principles were; that yielded an initial list that didn’t quite match what I wanted, so I gave it my three, then it gave me another list, which led to me adding two more to my list. In the process, GPT summarized my approach: “Build institutions that reward good scholarship rather than institutions that try to impose correct politics.” And: “Academic institutions should evolve through selection rather than central planning.”

When I gave GPT my draft post, it criticized the list structure. Okay pot. But it did have an interesting alternative organization: it suggested that the scholarly standards principle is essentially a key goal, from which everything else follows, whereas pluralism + competition and building alternatives were “methods” and incentives and voluntary reforms were more about “implementation.” It’s an interesting reorganization, but I like my list.

Finally, GPT says that one of my underlying principles is “Treat reform itself as an empirical process.” I don’t disagree, but for some reason I want to keep that in a separate pile. Or I just feel like the competition approach speaks to that idea, except that it’s emphasizing the importance of empirically identifying the problem instead of just assuming we know what the problem is. Again, very important, but for some reason I feel like that’s less important to say.

Some Key Proposals

Over the last six or so months, I’ve been making small efforts at concrete suggestions for academic reform, that reflect these ideas: 1) the decadal survey that lays out key research priorities for the field for the subsequent decade, 2) a voluntary professional society that signals and verifies scholars’ commitment to rigor and scientific/scholarly standards, and 3) interdisciplinary social science departments that become islands of refuge for scholars from social science departments that want to balance politics and science (or who prioritize politics over science) and that can become sources of rigorous engagement and scholarly production.

For administrators and those in positions of power, my central message is often: you need to take stock—are most people in the field on board with rigor or not? (Yes, it’s a spectrum, but the question remains.) The next steps will differ depending on how many people are committed to rigor and how captured the field is. In a field with problems, if people want change, your job is much easier. If at least some people want change, you have something to work with. But if a lot of people don’t want to change, that’s where working in parallel and letting competition drive matters is going to be key.

Conclusion

Other lists of academic principles will include things like pursuit of knowledge or truth, open inquiry/viewpoint diversity, academic freedom and autonomy, institutional neutrality, civil discourse/respect, public responsibility or responsiveness, etc. Those are all important things that we do and principles we should live by as academics. But they are key for running a university well. Right now, we’re in a situation where those principles aren’t shared, or they don’t mean the same thing to different people, or they are losing their legitimacy (or at least our legitimate claims to them). The standard principles don’t necessarily tell us how to get out of the quagmire we’ve gotten ourselves into—a quagmire in which these ideas have actually fallen to the wayside or are inconsistently applied/respected. It’s not clear that just doubling down on these principles is enough or will actually achieve the desired result. This question of how to get out of this mess is the conversation we’re having. And I hope reform efforts follow these principles of prioritizing scholarly standards, embracing competition across efforts, creating parallel/alterntative structures, prioritizing carrots over sticks, and allowing for voluntary adoption of reforms.

Despite that shared commitment, the diversity of thought was great. I fully agree with a comment at the closing session that only by being in a space like this can you fully appreciate how narrow the set of views you’re usually exposed to is. It was lovely to hear from people with different politics, views, and orientations, some of which I agreed with and some I didn’t. I also appreciated the robust Q&As where a speaker might say something I thought was reasonable, but an audience member might ask a good question that got to some vulnerability in the claim, but then the response provided another layer of analysis that showed how complicated or interesting an issue was. I can’t say enough good things or sufficiently express my gratitude for being included.

In this post, I want to highlight what I saw as some of the recurring themes across speakers. Interestingly, and perhaps reflecting my own bias, some of these themes reflect things I’ve said elsewhere. That suggests that there’s a strong possibility that I’m unconsciously selectively focused on those ideas that simply resonated more with me and maybe left off some other themes. That is to say, this is not a careful analysis from systematically collected notes that I systematically coded—instead, they were themes I wrote in my notes while listening to talks and realizing a parallel to something someone else had said (prompting me to label the point with an underscored “theme” and then enumerating them after the last session).

One more caveat: I’m putting these themes in my own words; some are a bit more bluntly worded than any speaker said, even though we had some wonderfully blunt speakers. I’m also not going to attribute ideas to specific folks, with one exception where they’ve said the point previously. I’m also going to be very brief (uncharacteristically so) because I’m pretty sleep-deprived at this point (literally, I have blurry vision) and once again writing very quickly and not bothering to run it through GPT for a coherence check. [Actually, I elaborated more toward the end.] My goal is just to write these thoughts down. If any attendees plan to elaborate on these ideas, I’d love to see it!

Is “woke” over? Is the tide of intolerance receding? No, but a renaissance may be coming.

Several speakers either showed data on this question or offered their impression. I could say more about this, but I didn’t take extensive notes on this question (partly because I already thought this). But the upshot is buckle up, dig in, keep at it, but understand that we’re in it for the long haul. Several times, people talked about “short-term” plans that would take 10-20 years to enact or realize while longer-term plans were more like a 100-year project.

Reflecting the dominance of orthodoxy and its negative impact on knowledge production, several folks referred to our current period as one of intellectual “dark ages.” But after the dark ages comes the Renaissance, and that too is coming. (See below.)

No One is Coming to Save Us Except Us

Relatedly, there was a recurring recognition that no one is coming to save us except us. We extensively discussed the pros and cons of internal v. external reform. I think almost everyone wanted internal reform, but we differed in terms of how optimistic we were that internal reform would fix anything or fix anything on a reasonable time scale. But there were also quite a few folks who, even if skeptical internal reform wouldn’t work, were also skeptical that external reform would work. I’m going to skip over the reasons for the skepticism, partly because I’m really tired and partly because they were numerous and would make for a longer post (maybe I’ll write a separate post on this complicated and very sensitive question). But the upshot and rallying call was, look, we can’t wait for others to fix things for us; we have to do it ourselves. How?

Stop Bitching and Get to Work on Phase 2

If Phase 1 was proof of concept—doing empirical work that critically interrogated intellectual trends, academia, and academic research itself, ultimately showing the prioritization of activist logics over scientific logics and the resulting gaps and taboos—Phase 2 is undertaking the substantive work of filling in the holes left by the orthodoxy.

(I should note that, in parallel, there’s a renewed call for more Phase 1 research from multiple important actors who are still interested in trying to engage those who don’t believe the problems are real. Heterodox Academy John Tomasi has publicly called for more reports like the Vanderbilt-WashU report. As I’ll note in my internal report, and echoing his rationale, no one should proceed on the basis of one study. [And yes, friendly critics will say it’s not just one study, to which I’d say I’m speaking to the folks who will be tempted to act on the basis of one report, which will be the only thing they’ll have read. Meanwhile, there will be plenty of skeptics who will dismiss anything I say and therefore reject the report, which will be the only one they’ve heard of in sociology.] We do need more Phase 1 research on other fields that are mostly being ignored despite problems there too. There are also cross-cutting themes or methodologies that appear in multiple fields that can be examined. Likewise, these questions about the health of fields can be explored from multiple perspectives, research designs, and methods. We need to be thorough and rigorous in exploring the issues we’re discussing. We also need to do our due diligence to help inform discussions about reform. Some of the proof of concept papers don’t get to causation because that’s not the research question, so we also need more work in that direction to help come up with good policy recommendations. But all of this will take a while, but a lot of folks already immersed in Phase 1 research are feeling like “enough already!” We don’t need yet another study (we saw a lot of studies at this conference alone, and we have a growing list of other studies we can point to). The similarities across fields are ridiculous, so there’s a certain sense that we’ve reached saturation and it’s time to move on—at least for those of us who have already done these studies.)

So what does Phase 2 look like? I’ve called for a decadal survey in a previous Substack and at the end of my latest Theory & Society article. Borrowing the idea from astrophysics, I want to see a panel of respected scholars in each field lay out a research agenda for the next decade, paying attention to important but understudied topics. Some of these will be “core” parts of the field that have fallen into disrepute because they are considered “conservative,” others will be theories that few people are testing but that need to be examined (if only to know if they are right or not), and some will be new topics that weren’t previously explored but that are now pressing issues that the field could shine light on if they were willing to study them.

Similarly, Kevin McCafferee has been talking about the Hilbert problems, a list of 23 unsolved math problems. By calling attention to these problems—gaps in the field—Hilbert got folks to study them and now a lot of them have been solved. Likewise, we need to think carefully about what unknowns exist—let’s generate a list of key questions that we should be throwing resources at.

While we can tackle these areas and unknowns on our own as part of our research agendas, key will be simply identifying them so that we can give direction to funders (universities, government, and donors) of what should be prioritized. There is so much same-old, same-old—lots of areas that don’t need incentives because people will study them anyway. We do need to incentivize the less obvious topics and theories, many of which will simply be ignored due to bias and blindspots that we all have (but given the homogeneity of academics, become structural blindspots or even taboos).

Phase 2 research is what will get us out of the intellectual dark ages.

We Need to Build Infrastructure and Support Structures

Another theme was the personal and professional, emotional and social costs of doing this research or of speaking up when you see orthodoxy trumping the university mission, the work of applied science, or simply scholarly standards in research and teaching. This is another theme I was happy to see since I have something in progress on this topic.

But the point wasn’t to have a pity party, but to see this challenge as something we need to address collectively: we need to build, support, and protect social/support networks and community for heterodox scholars. It’s hard to overstate the sustenance I get from attending conferences or even just zoom sessions—these are like islands where, for a time, I can be surrounded by people who are committed to open inquiry and just trying to figure things out, who are willing to push back in ways that ultimately either sharpen or poke holes in our claims, people who just like knowledge for its own sake. I always feel buoyed after being in these spaces, whereas so often I just feel dejected. Hearing other folks who are optimistic and energetic is a balm.

It also helps to offset the gaslighting many of us get from folks who call us bad names for things that should be uncontroversial (and that are often supported by public opinion). Indeed, as someone noted, the heterodox label is misleading because so much of what we discuss is actually pretty mainstream, just not in academia, so it’s a little weird to feel like we’re the deviants, which is a highly context-dependent status. But having that status, it can be helpful to be around folks who share that fundamental value of openness—even if they have different politics, study different topics, or disagree with you on any number of other issues.

I emphasized the emotional and social support aspect of this point, but part of the infrastructure also includes more practical things. Journals—spaces where people can have a fair hearing on their ideas—are something we increasingly have available thanks to the hard work of heterodox scholars running them. We need to keep supporting them so people can do the good work, especially that Phase 2 work, in case there isn’t sufficient interest in mainstream journals.

But another part of the infrastructure we require is departments and centers—places where scholars can get jobs after they do their heterodox research and become persona non grata in their fields. I’m increasingly interested in the idea of building interdisciplinary social science departments: particularly in universities where you have a majority of departments populated almost entirely by activists, activist-adjacent faculty, and activist-tolerant faculty who also do politicized research but don’t seem to realize it, making new departments that can rescue those faculty from those departments and sticking them together would be a lifesaver. As long as you have a shared commitment to open inquiry, science, and rigor, you don’t need to share the same field (indeed, sometimes we have more in common with folks in other departments than our own, even topically). This conference was a nice example where I learned of theories and findings that were relevant to my areas of interest, but that I’d never heard of. I’d rather be around scholars with that commitment than around scholars who work on my specific topic but who don’t share that commitment. Having that interdisciplinarity and shared commitments, these centers or departments would probably produce even better research than we’d get in our silos (even without the echo chamber problem).

Closing

It was exciting to see these themes come up across the speakers, including folks coming at these issues from different disciplines and fields, types of practice, political orientations, etc. Sometimes we saw different paths that brought folks to the same conclusion. There was something really neat in that: like we each took a different path, but we all ended up in the same place. (Not all as in all attendees; I mean the several folks who echoed each theme.) Personally, it was also neat to see folks thinking along the same lines as I’d been thinking when it comes to practical next steps. (Incidentally, this might be a sign that we need an even more diverse crowd of folks with different ideas so we can generate even more creative next steps! But I’m focusing on the agreements, not the disagreements. I don’t want to leave the impression that it was an echo chamber! Maybe on some things, but not on most!)

I was making small chat over zoom with the organizer of a talk I was about to give on my first book when he asked me a question I didn’t expect. (Not an exact quote but very close:) “I was surprised you cited Harry Elmer Barnes. Can you tell me your thought process for citing him?”

HE Barnes is a prison historian who wrote two extremely detailed histories of the early prisons in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. (My first book was on the early US prison history with an extensive case study of eastern Pennsylvania with special attention to New Jersey and Rhode Island.) Like many historians of the time, Barnes’ books were virtual encyclopedias that also compiled a lot of source material I would only be able to find in archives, some of which I later was able to look at and others I only had access to from his books (some sources disappear over time or are in obscure archives off the beaten path). They were essential and made my work much easier. Additionally, he was one of the few scholars who had taken a stab at answering something close to my research question. In other words, he was an essential citation. But I didn’t understand the question—what was the problem? Why wouldn’t I cite him?

My host explained HE Barnes was a holocaust denier and antisemitic (which I confirmed after our call ended). A decade or two after Barnes had finished writing about the early prisons (mostly published in the interwar period), he went off the deep end. Oh. Shit.

After a moment of surprise, I explained, you know, at the end of the day, if someone has a good idea that’s relevant, I need to engage it; if someone produces work I rely upon, I need to cite them. It doesn’t matter how I feel about them personally. I think I even mentioned, as another example, there’s a major scholar in my field who is notorious for stealing junior scholars’ work—I still have to cite him (at least when he’s offering his original ideas) both because it’s an expected citation and because if I’m actually using his work, I need to give him attribution. Basically, we have to separate the person from the ideas. It would be unethical of me to use someone’s work and not give them credit, and it would be malpractice (in my view) to avoid someone’s relevant and (as far as I know) accurate and thorough work because I don’t like them personally or I find their views abhorrent.

Jump forward to this month. I’m currently in the UK at a conference that some scholars on bluesky are referring to as “a nazi bar.” I found out that they were criticizing me for attending a conference where Chris Rufo, MP Suella Braverman (a UK politician, someone I didn’t know about before this week), and some other folks (whose names I didn’t recognize but who, I take it, are conservatives or far right) were speaking.

The common theme connecting the apparently objectionable people were twofold: (1) that they were politicians at a social science conference and (2) that they are members of the far-right and held hateful views (e.g., Rufo has been involved in some pretty aggressive and, to many, harmful educational reforms; Braverman has apprently expressed “anti-immigrant” views, something the speakers noted was hypocritical given that her own parents were immigrants; the others were also conservatives with similar sets of views the writers didn’t like).

In the process, I was both accused of being a hypocrite, given my strong stance against incorporating politics in research, and of covertly being sympathetic to far-right views (echoing and apparently vindicating a roughly year-old argument that I’m actually prejudiced against vulnerable groups, including transpeople, immigrants, and ethno-racial minorities and more generally that I’m conservative, a Nazi-sympathizer, a Trump supporter).

The second concern is similar to the Barnes case: how can you attend a conference with people with despicable views? The first raises a more interesting question about how academics should engage different non-academic groups (to politicians, we could add practitioners, NGOs, and community groups). But there’s also an underlying assumption in some of the criticism of the conference that I want to make explicit: conservatives are bad—their views are bad—and anyone who hangs out with them are also bad. There are illegitimate political views, the logic goes, and we need to snuff those out of academia.

An overlapping group of commentators apparently got mad because I retweeted a comment by another academic that I agreed with. It turns out the academic (allegedly) has problematic (racist, transphobic, or something) views. I have not confirmed this. I don’t know them. I don’t follow them (as far as I know). I’ve not read their work. Frankly, I don’t care if it’s true. It’s not relevant. If someone makes a good point, I’ll occasionally repost it without first investigating whether they are a “baddie” because I don’t care—if someone makes a good point, that’s what I’m engaging. I’m going to give them credit. Anyway, this too was evidence that I’m prejudiced in the various ways.

(I’ve decided not to post screenshots of these criticisms because, even if I black out the name, a motivated reader could search for exact quotes, find the posts, and then confront the speaker, which I think would be unnecessary and unhelpful. It was a dog pile, not serious engagement; the correct response is to ignore the individual comments.)

Perhaps most surprising, there was an extensive discussion in our Heterodox Sociology group about whether or not it was okay to attend this conference and how it would reflect back on HxA, with some folks arguing that since some of the attendees themselves had engaged in censorship, it was not consistent with HxA principles to attend a conference that gave them a platform. Others pointed out that HxA is getting associated with conservative viewpoints and that is delegitimizing to the whole heterodox movement and efforts at academic reform (which themselves are already rigth-coded).

Obviously, I’m mixing a lot of different reactions together, but to me, they have some commonalities.

Reflection

What struck me about these recent reactions—beyond the shock of the personal accusations, which I’m still not used to, even though this has been going on for a while now, repeated anytime someone doesn’t like something I say or do—is their rejection of basic principles necessary for open inquiry. It’s the underlying assumption that there are people we can and cannot engage with, and those who do engage with them need to be ostracized for doing so.

There’s been a growing throughline lately in which scholars increasingly judge other scholars not for their ideas, but for what (the critics believe are) their personal views. Some of these are broadly conservative views, some are specific policy positions, and others are biases or prejudices against vulnerable groups (prejudices against conservatives, of course, are A-okay).

I’ve been particularly interested in the increase in ad hominem attacks, in part because I’ve been subject to a lot of them, but more generally because this seems to be more common in how people engage with politics. It doesn’t matter if an idea is good or bad, coherent or not, evidence-based or not, what matters is who uttered it, what their possible motivations are, and with whom they are affiliated. We also see a growing juvenility in political commentary (that I see as related) where people make fun of one’s appearance (ICE Barbie, Big Orange Brother) or refer to them in dehumanizing language (goons, fuckers). Instead of doing the hard thing of laying out why an idea is incoherent or doesn’t match the evidence, we’re seeing school-yard tactics and tribalism. That’s not how we’re supposed to exchange ideas and do our work, nor is it healthy in society.

Another throughline is the emphasis on withdrawing from conversations and refusing to engage people who offer arguments one doesn’t like or whose politics are different from ours (more than just different, but viewed as catastrophic). I’m reminded of how at last ASA, during the opening presidential plenary on the state of sociology, two of the speakers declared they weren’t interested in engaging the question about what is the appropriate role of advocacy in sociology and how should, if at all, we draw a line between scholarship/research and advocacy. The refusal to even have the conversation—or sometimes to chide people for even asking the question—is an odd and disturbing trend, in my view. This trend is one we’ve been seeing brewing for a while.

One of the earliest moments that should have been a massive wakeup call (and for some was) was the infamous Halloween debacle at Yale. Most are probably familiar with the case, so I’m going to skip the details, but you can read about it in the linked article. I really want to focus in on one particular moment that I found most disturbing and most reflective of things to come, borrowing from Len Gutkin’s wonderful reporting:

When Nicholas tried to talk to a group of protesting students, one student told the others to “walk away.” “He doesn’t deserve to be listened to,” another student said. Another yelled at Nicholas — “Be quiet!” — before explaining what she took to be his pastoral duties as master: “It is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman. You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”

This idea that at a university of all places, someone doesn’t have the right to speak or be heard is chilling, and yet we’ve seen more of that with invited speakers’ talks getting interrupted or simply shut down by protestors. Those are the extreme cases. The less extreme cases are the informal sanctions that come from saying unpopular things—the accusations of racism (without evidence) as a means to undermine a speaker/writer, the accusations of harm as a justification for censorship, the larger idea that we have to like what someone is going to say if we are going to listen to them or even to let them speak. These are disturbing trends because they violate fundamental expectations of intellectual exchange, not to mention free speech and academic freedom.

Let me steelman their argument for a moment though. When might someone’s identity, rather than their ideas, prompt caution? If the person has committed fraud or shady research tactics, that might be a reason to not waste one’s time or at the very least to treat what they have to say, or their research, with greater skepticism. If someone is notorious for not respecting the rules of fair debate—they are known for interrupting their debate partner, they are known for making ad hominem rather than substantive arguments, etc.—that might be a reason to decline an invitation or skip watching a debate. If the person has no relevant standing, we might just not have a reason to engage with them—usually, we engage with someone because they are a fellow researcher, a relevant policymaker or practitioner, someone with “lived experience” relevant to our topic, a journalist who has special insight to a situation. But notice what I’m not saying: it’s not their demographics, their political beliefs or voting history, details of their personal life, or whether they were seen cavorting with the enemy. It’s also not something they previously wrote that I just don’t like: if anything, that might be a good reason for me to engage them so I can check my own biases and limitations and give them an opportunity to do the same.

Getting Meta for a Moment

Now, before moving on, let me turn the lens back on myself: One thing that I always struggle with is where is the line? If I’m a supporter of heterodoxy and pluralism and open inquiry, is it hypocritical to condemn those who oppose open inquiry and who don’t respect academic freedom? Are those viewpoints not equally viable? That, of course, is the underlying challenge to heterodoxy. (And I’m skipping over the larger question of strategy that was also raised in our HxA group.)

The way I think about this is: there are certain fundamental values that we have to agree on to do our shared work. It’s like if you want to play a game with someone—you both have to agree to the rules of the game ahead of time and you can’t change them in the middle of the game (unless, perhaps, if you both agree to the changes).

For me, the rules of the game are things like open inquiry, academic freedom, and free speech (we also have scholarly standards and rules about what’s believable research, but those have always been contested and they have become far more contested in recent years). If we can’t agree to engage respectfully, to evaluate ideas and not people, and to agree that we each have our right to our own views, we can’t engage period. But more importantly, we have to agree to our respective right to engage.

(The steelman critique of this point is if someone doesn’t respect those values elsewhere, they don’t get to benefit from them. Fine, but if I’d like to engage with them, I should still be able to without being slandered—not just criticized, but getting accusations of bias through this guilt-by-association process.)

None of these rules is absolute—they come with some restrictions (academic freedom is really about protections that come with obligations), but they are the presumptive expectations. We can’t change them unless we all agree, or else we can’t do our work—or we can’t do it well (an issue that comes up in justifying viewpoint diversity—no positions can be off limits). And if you want to change them, the way to do it is to make substantive arguments, not condemn the people following the rule you don’t like or casting aspersions about their perceived politics.

So I am going to criticize, hopefully in a substantive way, this viewpoint, which says who can and cannot engage, in violation of a commitment to open engagement, and which criticizes people for engaging in open inquiry. I’m not going to criticize the critics’ politics (which, to be fair, I don’t know) and I’m fine with them choosing to opt out of conferences if they want (I’m not sure that’s great, but forcing people to do things also seems like a problem). I’d also be happy to have the conversation with them and give them the chance to offer a better case for why they think I’m doing something bad by attending this conference, and I’d hope they would listen to my take and then come up with something better than I’m hanging out with racists, therefore I must be racist and/or I’m a bad person for being around racists. That is, I’d still engage with them if they could agree to have a civil exchange and not devolve into name-calling and casting character aspersions. Maybe I’d learn something, perhaps learn more about the limits of open inquiry, and, given sufficient logic and evidence, change my mind. But name-calling and superficial moral condemnation, while upsetting, isn’t changing my mind.

Addressing the Complaints

In the case of the recent conference reactions, there’s also both folly and hypocrisy. Hypocrisy, because we’ve long invited non-academics (including advocates and political appointees) to conferences, but they tend to be members of more left-leaning groups. I don’t recall anyone complaining when we’ve brought advocates from progressive NGOs to conferences (although I have sometimes seen criticism when, at criminology conferences, police officers or prison wardens were invited to serve as discussants on panels where they could provide an assessment of how the research matches their on-the-ground or “lived experience.” Likewise, years ago, my home organization, the Law and Society Association, brought then-Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. to be the keynote speaker. This year in May, they invited the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence to perform a “blessing” for the conference, to great applause. At the last HxA national meeting (last summer), Sociologist Steve Brint and Mark Bauerline, an academic and DeSantis-appointee to the board of trustees of Florida’s New College, debated each other on points about academic reform—where academia’s problems lay and how to fix them, with Brint advocating internal reform and Bauerline government-led reform.

Incidentally, Rufo (who appeared via zoom) and Braverman (who attended the panel and then I think left) were part of a debate (yesterday) with Anthropologist Mike Jindra, an advocate and leading voice for internal academic reform, with the conference organizer Eric Kaufman moderating, asking tough questions of each participant. There was also a robust Q&A with the audience.

This was an important opportunity for academics who agree we have serious problems, and who generally would prefer we not have (or even deeply oppose) externally imposed reform, to make the case (for example) for why external reform is harmful and how we might reform from within. It was also an important opportunity to hear directly from people trying to reform academia through government-imposed reform, to learn more about not just how they justify their reforms but also how they respond to our best arguments against it, and even to get some insights they share that are actually really helpful for rethinking strategy. Honestly, it was really enlightening and interesting, and I’m glad I had the experience. People may choose to opt out of such debates for principled reasons, but it is unacceptable (undemocratic and against the spirit of open inquiry) to smear those who choose to attend such events, listen to our opponents, engage them seriously and thoughtfully, and try to make our case.

Let’s go a step further. Let’s say Rufo has attacked academic freedom and therefore he’s a baddie that I shouldn’t engage. I can at least see someone making that argument, even if I don’t agree with it. I’m not going to argue against it, but just accept it for the time being so we can get to the implication: am I then supposed to opt out of a whole conference with a fantastic list of speakers because it’s also platforming someone who’s a baddie? Let’s also move on to Braverman. Let’s just assume she has said awful things (again, I don’t follow UK politics and I’ve not looked her up). Let’s take for granted that I should avoid the conference because of her, this person I’d not previously heard of and only heard about because of criticism I received for attending the same conference. This assumes that I should do background searches on everyone who is platformed at a conference on the off chance that one of the 30-40 speakers has said offensive things and I should avoid their presence. That just seems ridiculous—both impractical and, again, inconsistent with open inquiry.

Finally, there’s a certain folly or, at best, motivated reasoning for criticizing someone for speaking at a conference where politicians (or generally people one doesn’t like) are also speaking. Setting aside the lack of commitment to open inquiry, let’s just think this through. Usually, when we get an invitation to speak at an event a few months or even a year ahead of time, the organizer is still assembling the program. They might have the headliner nailed down or a few other speakers—in smaller panels, they might share who they are hoping to get. You don’t know who is planning to attend until a preliminary program is shared some weeks or months in advance, nor do you actually know who is attending until you get there (there are always last-minute drop-outs and those who weren’t on the program or who get swapped in at the last minute). Again, in my view, it would be against the spirit of open inquiry if I dropped out of a conference because I didn’t like that one of the speakers was attending. (It would also be a first for me: I’ve been on lots of panels and at lots of conferences with people whom I viscerally don’t like or whose politics or behavior I find personally reprehensible, or who have even said terrible things about me, but I go, because that’s what you do.)

I’ve also been to a lot of conferences with explicitly political (but liberal/progressive) conference themes. If I opted out of every politicized conference, I’d have to go to a lot fewer conferences. I’ve also been on explicitly political panels, but they tend to be about advocating for penal reform or abolition; as far as I know, I’ve never been criticized for that.

More importantly, as speakers, we rarely have control over the framing of the conferences or panels at which we present, and I don’t refuse speaking opportunities because I don’t like the dominant politics of a panel or conference. It’s always a chance to hear from people with whom I may or may not agree on a range of issues—perhaps I’ll change my mind on something if I’m confronted with a good argument or compelling data I didn’t know about—and for them to hear what I have to say, in turn. If I do not think I will be able to speak and be heard, that’s the only reason I wouldn’t participate. Even then, I usually still go because I want to give people the chance rather than make assumptions about how they will behave when the time comes.

I don’t say any of this to defend my decision to attend what has so far been a really stimulating conference where I’m seeing old friends and meeting new people. Instead, I say all this to highlight some deep logical problems with the criticisms themselves.

Conclusion

For me, these questions and criticisms raise a fundamental question about what it means to be a scholar today and what type of scholars we want to be. I want to respect academic freedom, the principles of open inquiry, and the right of every person to have their own views, whether or not I like them, but to also treat them the same as everyone else. I want to exchange ideas with a broad array of people, and I want to be exposed to a broad range of ideas. I want to evaluate the ideas and not the people holding them. I want to engage and cite people and arguments and books or articles without having to look up whether they were a morally righteous person in every dimension that might matter. And I want to try to figure things out together, because scholarship and inquiry are stronger when they are part of a collective enterprise. And when we do disagree on things, I’d like to see substantive takedowns, not unproductive moralization, name-calling, and other personal attacks.

My posts are inspired by Jesse Smith’s excellent recent post on VPD, which in part responds to my earlier post about why VPD isn’t the reform that will save academia and a post on a few alternative recommendations to supplement some of the other more visible recommendations out there. I’ve also posted resources on the conceptual debate over VPD for those who want to read more deeply.

In the end, Jesse and I agree on a lot and the more we discuss, the more it seems like we’re narrowing the scope of where we do disagree. But where we agree and disagree comes down to how we’re each using the term VPD in different contexts and arguments, so that’s what I’m digging into here. In a followup post, I’ll talk about my views on the different versions of VPD and get to some larger issues.

(I also need to make a caveat, which is that I’m sleep-deprived and hopped up on a lot of caffeine. I’m writing quickly and have not run my post through GPT to have it spot stupidity on my part, as I sometimes (but not always) do.)

What do we actually mean by VPD?

One risk of the debate over VPD is we (collectively) simply mean different things by the term. On its face, VPD very simply means a context characterized by many different viewpoints. But as a reform/policy recommendation, people usually mean one of three things, which I enumerate below.

To simplify things, I’m going to focus on VPD as it relates to faculty. As I’ve mentioned on twitter, we tend to exclude students in this discussion (with some exceptions like Steve Teles and others working on pipeline projects), and they are also really important to bring into the conversation, and yet I’m going to go ahead and exclude them for the most part (except when I get to the pipeline question).

So what do we actually mean by VPD?

1. VPD in faculty representation and/or hiring practices.

   1. This category can actually be broken down further:

      1. hiring practices designed to encourage a greater diversity of views/perspectives or topical interests

      2. hiring practices designed to increase political diversity, aka begin to undo the underrepresentation (both discrimination and opting out) of conservatives, moderates, libertarians, and others and to move away from the predominance of the progressive left among faculty

      3. an assessment of the status quo or cross-section of the faculty (of a given department, university, field, or faculty nationally) based on how well it reflects the political diversity of the locale or nation

   2. The motivations behind these effors can also be distinguished:

      1. efforts to achieve either greater diversity (let’s make sure we have all the flavors of the rainbow) because having that diversity will make for better scholarship/teaching (better topical diversity, better steelmaning of a range of arguments and theories, and ultimately better quality work produced)

      2. efforts to ensure representativeness between the faculty and the people footing the bill for higher education (our students and the tax-paying public) either as a moral right (i.e., it’s just the right thing to do) or as a legitimacy strategy (i.e., if we want to keep our free lunch, we need to play ball)

2. The level of diversity of the theories, topics, questions, and slants/perspectives in scholarship and teaching. Again, we can further break this down:

   1. At the level of course/study topics and the slants in covering those topic, or

   2. Within courses/studies, how well the scholar provides steelman versions of an array of views/perspectives/arguments

3. A norm entailing respect for different views, an unwillingness to censor because we don’t like the content, and a commitment to open inquiry and allowing oneself or one’s colleagues to pursue the data wherever the answers may lead, come what may.

I could be leaving something out, but these strike me as the major operationalizations of VPD. Because we often are talking about different things, it can look like there’s more disagreement than agreement when we use the same term to mean different things.

I didn’t really go into much detail about the extensive discussion of viewpoint diversity. I alluded to its many different definitions, and the different rationales or goals it is supposed to achieve. But I didn’t feel like I did due diligence in directly engaging with the growing literature on the subject (a good chunk of which I’ve read). So I spent a few days making a syllabus for viewpoint diversity readings, which is now this post. I’m hoping that those who want to read more widely or deeply on the subject can start here and then check out my earlier post.

This syllabus is not comprehensive—there’s so much written on the topic and on related topics. As I learned, there’s also a bit of periodization one could do, with the current VPD debate really getting underway in the last few years, but there was a much longer intellectual trajectory about intellectual diversity and threads on perspectival diversity that earlier helped institutionalize DEI, as well as long-standing general arguments for the importance of open inquiry. I prioritized more recent discussions, but I also included some earlier sources. (I was inconsistent in including dates….) I decided to skip the discussions about “brave spaces” and training undergrads on debating and respectful conversations since I’m more interested in faculty hiring discussions, where I think the VPD plays the biggest role and has the most potential for the thing I’m concerned about (academic research). I’m sure I’m missing lots of readings, but again, comprehensiveness wasn’t my goal. But if there’s something that’s really, really important or useful or unique that I’m missing, please add it in the comments!

Finally, my organization for the syllabus could probably be improved. I start off with the core definitions, then I move into objections, then (probably confusingly) I move into more positive cases for VPD and relatedly for hiring more conservatives or getting more conservative viewpoints, sources for other specific developments, and then more general readings that felt relevant (and a list that GPT suggested).

Key Questions

• How is VPD defined? What type of diversity (political, ideological, moral/ethical, epistemic, methodological, experiential, demographic) is intended?

• How is VPD related to “open inquiry” and “academic freedom”?

• What is its value? At what level of analysis/practice (teaching, research; classroom, department, college, university, field, academia) is it valuable?

• What are the arguments against VPD as a policy or a quality?

• Is it something universities should encourage or require? If so, how? If not, why not?

Core Definitions, HxA Sources, and Responses

Radcliffe Institute https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/news-and-ideas/intellectual-diversity-and-the-mission-of-higher-education “Intellectual Diversity and the Mission of Higher Education”

HxA’s definition of VPD https://heterodoxacademy.org/issues/viewpoint-diversity/

HxA’s longer version, excerpted from their book: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/the-heterodox-view-of-viewpoint-diversity/

[Edit: Adding in this amazing resource, the HxA Chatbot https://cdn.botpress.cloud/webchat/v3.6/shareable.html]

Tomasi and Schweizer https://www.amazon.com/dp/1949846911?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback Viewpoint Diversity: What it is, Why we need it, and How to Get it

John K. Wilson (IHE) https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/debatable-ideas/2026/03/23/viewpoint-diversity-and-john-tomasi “‘Viewpoint Diversity’ and John Tomasi – A closer look at the Heterodox Academy president’s essay in a new book.”

John K. Wilson (IHE) https://www.insidehighered.com/opinion/columns/debatable-ideas/2026/03/20/book-review-viewpoint-diversity “Book Review: ‘Viewpoint Diversity’ – The book includes many thought-provoking ideas, although some of them are deeply flawed.”

HxA event Uses and Abuses of VPD:

Justin McBrayer (Free the Inquiry) “Where does Viewpoint Diversity Matter the Most? – Answer: Anywhere our identities are at stake.”

Free the Inquiry

Where does Viewpoint Diversity Matter the Most?

It’s now widely (though not universally) conceded that improving viewpoint diversity on campus would improve university teaching and research. Faculty on American campuses are overwhelmingly cut from the same ideological cloth, and this homogeneity has harmful effects on all aspects of the professoriate, including…

Read more

2 months ago · 20 likes · 4 comments · Justin McBrayer

The AAUP JHU Chapter President’s Letter and Responses

Lisa Siraganian https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/fall-2025/seven-theses-against-viewpoint-diversity “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity – The problems with arguments for intellectual pluralism.”

Jussim and Horowitz “Truth, Trust, and the Case for Viewpoint Diversity – Misplaced arguments against intellectual pluralism”

Unsafe Science

Truth, Trust, and the Case for Viewpoint Diversity

Mark Horowitz, PhD is an associate professor of sociology at Seton Hall University. He teaches and carries out research in the areas of sociological theory, political psychology, social movements, and the sociology of knowledge. He as published, among many other things, the following…

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7 months ago · 39 likes · 16 comments · Lee Jussim

Peter Berkowitz (RCP) https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/10/26/seven_faulty_theses_against_viewpoint_diversity_153450.html “Seven Faulty Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity”

Tyler VanderWeele. https://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2026/03/100366/ “Responding to Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” March 3, 2026

Other Opponents to Viewpoint Diversity

Wrong Goals/Unnecessary

Bret Stephens. (Sapir) https://sapirjournal.org/diversity/2025/viewpoint-diversity-up-to-a-point/ “Viewpoint Diversity — Up to a Point – The central aim of education must always be the pursuit of veritas” (March 2025)

David A. Hollinger (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-false-flag-of-viewpoint-diversity “The False Flag of Viewpoint Diversity – The insistence on more points of view misunderstands the structure of scholarly knowledge.”

Chris Haufe (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-viewpoint-diversity-debate-misunderstands-science “The Viewpoint-Diversity Debate Misunderstands Science” January 16, 2026

Jeanne-Marie Jackson (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/viewpoint-diversity-misses-the-point “Viewpoint Diversity Misses the Point” November 20, 2025

Political Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Stanley Fish (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/intellectual-diversity/ Intellectual Diversity February 13, 2004

Lisa Siraganian (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/viewpoint-diversity-is-a-maga-plot “Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot” October 10, 2025

Amanda Anderson (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/when-viewpoint-diversity-means-conformity “When Viewpoint Diversity Means Conformity” October 7, 2025

Jessica Riskin (AAUP) https://stanforddaily.com/2026/02/04/aaup-viewpoint-diversity/ “AAUP: Academic freedom on the line | “Viewpoint diversity” isn’t about viewpoint diversity” February 2026

Conservative Cases for VPD

Benjamin Storey, Jenna Silber Storey (AEI) https://www.aei.org/op-eds/five-reasons-viewpoint-diversity-makes-academic-sense/ “Five Reasons Viewpoint Diversity Makes Academic Sense”

Jennifer Schuessler (NYT) https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/14/arts/viewpoint-diversity-universities-conservatives.html?eafs_enabled=false “Should a ‘Diverse’ Campus Mean More Conservatives? – Republicans are demanding colleges embrace “viewpoint diversity.” They aren’t the only ones who are concerned.”

Jon A. Shields (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/hire-conservatives-not-republicans “Hire Conservatives, Not Republicans – An intellectual tradition, not a partisan movement, is what the academy needs.”

Jesse Smith “‘DEI for Conservatives’ is the Wrong Way to Think About It – Calls to hire conservatives are about truth-seeking, not bean-counting.”

The Next Turtle Down

"DEI for Conservatives" is the Wrong Way to Think About It

Though it wasn’t my plan, it is fitting that my first piece on The Next Turtle Down should be on a topic that has been central to both my academic and popular writing: the need for more conservatives in the academy…

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3 months ago · 26 likes · 17 comments · Jesse Smith

Jesse Smith’s (T&S) call for a conservative paradigm in sociology https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11186-025-09654-y

Mixed But Mostly Sympathetic Takes

Len Gutkin (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/four-scholars-agree-disagree-and-agree-to-disagree-on-viewpoint-diversity “Four Scholars Agree, Disagree, and Agree to Disagree on Viewpoint Diversity – Is the movement to increase intellectual pluralism a genuine reform effort or a partisan power grab?”

Michael W. Clune (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/professors-can-be-ignorant-thats-why-we-need-viewpoint-diversity “Professors Can Be Ignorant. That’s Why We Need Viewpoint Diversity.”

Duarte et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain-sciences/article/abs/political-diversity-will-improve-social-psychological-science1/A54AD4878AED1AFC8BA6AF54A890149F “Political diversity will improve social psychological science”

VanderWeele https://www.thecrimson.com/column/council-on-academic-freedom-at-harvard/article/2024/2/12/VanderWeele-harvard-viewpoint-diversity/ The Harvard Crimson. “Higher Education Has a Viewpoint Diversity Problem. Here’s How to Respond.”

Hess and Howell conversation https://www.aei.org/events/how-can-policy-schools-promote-free-inquiry-and-intellectual-heterodoxy/ “How Can Policy Schools Promote Free Inquiry and Intellectual Heterodoxy?”

Eppard et al. (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/higher-ed-needs-checks-and-balances “Higher Ed Needs Checks and Balances – If we don’t promote viewpoint diversity from the inside, it will be imposed from the outside.”

The Checks and Balances Proposal https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oq2RpuuwrgsrDpdlBe7KkO5Cr4fNitqj-ZzFYyMLHx8/edit?pli=1&tab=t.0

Takes on Getting More Conservatives into Academia (and their Absence) and Responses

HxA’s meta-analysis of faculty political diversity https://heterodoxacademy.org/reports/how-politically-diverse-are-university-faculty/

Gabriel Rossman (City Journal) https://www.city-journal.org/article/academia-conservatives-universities-ideological “How to Get More Conservatives in Academia – Universities’ ideological tilt presents an intellectual problem”

Steven M. Teles (National Affairs) https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/beyond-academic-sectarianism “Beyond Academic Sectarianism”

Steven M. Teles (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-are-there-so-few-conservative-professors“Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors? – The facts are beyond dispute. The causes and solutions are not.”

CHE https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-professoriates-politics-problem “The Professoriate’s Politics Problem – Conservatives are rare in academe. Does it matter?”

Rose Horowitch (Atlantic) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservative-professors-dei-initiatives/682944/ “The Era of DEI for Conservatives Has Begun”

David Randall (Minding the Campus) https://mindingthecampus.org/2026/06/16/a-fig-leaf-for-the-regime/ “A Fig Leaf for the Regime – So long as conservatives are treated as moral outcasts, intellectual diversity will remain a façade.” June 16, 2026

D Horowitz https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEHorowitzAcadBillTable.pdf “Academic Bill of Rights”

Bielski (RCI) https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2026/07/15/inside_elite_universitys_campaign_to_bring_conservatives_to_campus_1194546.html “Inside Elite University’s Campaign To Bring Conservatives to Campus”

Civic Centers and Civic Education Movement

HxA https://heterodoxacademy.org/issues/civics-centers/

Diep (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-conservative-hiring-boom “The Conservative Hiring Boom – Right-leaning academics are in demand. Does that amount to intellectual diversity?”

AEI-JHU Civic Thought Project https://www.aei.org/civic-thought-project/

Official Political Documents or Statements that Kicked Things Off

The July 2025 Manhattan Institute “Manhattan Statement on Higher Education” https://manhattan.institute/article/the-manhattan-statement-on-higher-education

HxA’s Response to the Manhattan Institute’s Statement https://heterodoxacademy.org/announcements/what-the-manhattan-statement-gets-wrong-on-university-reform/

Trump Administration April 2025 Letter to Harvard https://www.harvard.edu/research-funding/wp-content/uploads/sites/16/2025/04/Letter-Sent-to-Harvard-2025-04-11.pdf

Project 2025 https://whatisproject2025.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf

Other, Related Works

Tim Urban, What’s Our Problem

Musa Al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke

Banout and Ginsberg, The Chicago Canon on Free Inquiry and Expression

Das Acevedo, The War on Tenure

Berrey, The Enigma of Diversity

[Edit: The Yale Report (2026) https://president.yale.edu/sites/default/files/2026-04/Report-of-the-Committee-on-Trust-in-Higher-Education.pdf]

GPT’s Recommendations

I asked GPT to give me a list of the ten most important things to read on VPD. It focused more on foundational texts. I then gave it my list and asked it what I was missing. This list is a combination of those two queries. They’re more a broader look at the narrowing of inquiry and why that’s suboptimal, from various moral or pragmatic perspectives.

JS Mill On Liberty

K Popper The Open Society and its Enemies

F Hayek The Constitution of Liberty

Lukianoff and Haidt The Coddling of the American Mind

J Haidt The Righteous Mind

T Sowell Knowledge and Decisions

J Zimmerman Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn

S Page The Diversity Bonus

K Whittingham Why Universities Must Defend Free Speech

C Sunstein Why Societies Need Dissent

[Edit] Student-Centered Arguments

My focus above is really on the faculty debate, but some of the arguments around students also raise some novel arguments that are worth considering.

Hollis Robbins https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/what-ai-changes-about-viewpoint-diversity “What AI changes about ‘Viewpoint Diversity’ -- Reviewing a book in which I appear”

Hollis Robbins (CHE) https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-noxiousness-of-civic-discourse-platforms “The Noxiousness of Civic-Discourse Platforms -- Higher ed’s latest obsession forsakes its mission.”

Hollis Robbins https://hollisrobbinsanecdotal.substack.com/p/none-of-your-beeswax “None of your beeswax! -- The lost art of keeping your opinions to yourself”

The main theme of my advice is to organize around academic excellence (teaching and scholarship, but I’m mostly going to focus on scholarship). Yes, I know some folks cringe at the expression, so choose your own: I generally use scholarly standards, but it’s really about the output—we need to see our output as the goal (where output is the knowledge—whether that’s in the form of publications, innovations/patents, medical treatments, artwork, talks/lectures, testimony, etc.).

Incentives and Support

I think one of the best tools we have available is incentives—we need to incentivize and support the outcomes or behavior we want. Mandating things creates resistance. Doing things that threaten people’s jobs or status (or really is perceived to, whether or not that’s the intention) creates resistance. Both feel kind of gross. But I believe in carrots. And carrots can be empirically tested to see if they actually work as intended.

The Decadal

My most concrete suggestion on carrots is one I’ve given before: convene a diverse group of scholars (and maybe not just scholars) in a given domain (discipline or topically defined interdisciplinary field) to identify a set of key research questions or areas that we need to see more research on. Philanthropic organizations, government, universities, and professional associations can then each divert resources to encouraging research in these topics either by funding the research directly or by funding faculty or fellowship positions to study and teach these areas. Repeat every 5-10 years. The questions and topics aren’t meant to become the new core of the field, but to rebalance the field for when fads and fashions pull it too much in one direction. (Ideally, this “decadal survey” would complement a general effort to also bolster the core of a given discipline or area study, where the core would also be re-evaluated on the same timescale.)

In theory, this will help us get to the blindspots and taboos that VPD and political rebalancing proposals are also designed (at least in part) to address, but this is less ad hoc and more structured.

Reward Good Work

Another suggestion is to incentivize good/high-quality research: One of my major complaints is that the quality of work produced today is just not that good. That’s always been true to some degree and it’s true not just in academia—90% of everything is shit. But it does seem like the ratio has gotten a lot worse recently. Now it feels more like 99%.

We need better—higher-quality, more trustworthy, better-justified—research. So, reward things like a well-motivated research question, a sufficiently complete literature review, a research design that is clearly set up to answer the research question and takes into account (maybe even addresses) its limitations, solid execution of the study (including the analysis, use and review of evidence, awareness of gaps, discussion of alternative explanations), careful conclusions, and clear writing.

Incentives can happen before, during, and after the research via grant proposals, publication, and awards. Obviously, publication and awards should be based on quality, not results. It’s demoralizing to see bad work published in top journals or receive prestigious prizes because it happens to have politically palatable results on a hot topic or uses rhetoric that inflates righteous anger.

While publication and awards help shape the trajectories we aim for, the before-stage incentives have a bigger, direct impact on generating good work (and saving people the time and heartache of producing shitty research without realizing it). We need to build (more) structures that encourage setting up good research. Preregistration is one strategy that makes sense for quantitative research (I’m still undecided how well it works for qualitative research, especially the dirtbagging variety). But more generally, encouraging people to vet their research questions and research designs is really important. Grant proposals are kind of a nice way of formalizing that process, but in a way that sometimes forces a person to fit their actual study into the values of the funder—let me show you how my study of xyz helps advance inquiry on abc! Sometimes that works well and sometimes it doesn’t. But we could also create more routine versions of vetting research, including through our professional associations or websites where you could post your proposal and get feedback—the giving of feedback would also have to be incentivized and care would need to be given to avoiding folks scooping scholars’ work. (And no, I don’t think the IRB is a good way to do this. You need area experts to evaluate the RQ and RD on specific issues that the IRB should not be evaluating.)

(We actually tried a version of this as editors of Law and Society Review. We held office hours. We met with prospective authors and discussed their research while it was still in progress. We actually sometimes made interventions early enough. We also helped with the writing process. Our published editors’ notes were epic. In some cases, we heard back from scholars who’d been rejected but who went back and did more research, fixed the problem, and got published elsewhere. It’s time-intensive, but it did make a tiny difference. I’ve also held workshops on qualitative methods since (I think) the spring of 2019. I also did office hours with a lot of those workshops where I’d discuss students’ work in prep, one-on-one. Most were receptive when I made an important intervention; some weren’t, usually because they had a specific thesis they were trying to set out to prove….)

Community Building

Another suggestion is to incentivize community building among scholars doing what they’re supposed to be doing. It’s rare enough to find scholars who just want to know what the answer is, but don’t really care what the answer is—and who at least agree we shouldn’t force the answer. Building structures that help us to find other like-minded scholars (in the broad sense, since we still disagree a lot!) who work in similar areas is really nice. Substack has actually been that for me, as has our lovely HxA Sociology group. They create the much-needed intellectual sustenance many of us don’t get elsewhere. The really nice thing about these communities is we don’t all have to agree about things—we are pluralistic in our politics, our stances on various policies for academic reform, even our diagnoses of the problems facing academia, but the magic is agreeing on a certain baseline that we can disagree and that’s okay because our goal is to be able to have the necessary conversations that will (hopefully) let us figure things out. But communities take work—email groups need to be moderated (thank you, Jukka!), substacks need to be writen and read and responded to. This also takes time.

Time and Space to Do the Work

So now switching from incentives to actual support: funders and universities can help academics carve out space and time for intellectual exchange and productivity. I don’t know how well this has been measured, but it definitely seems like since the pandemic, we’ve all had more administrative stuff to do—ever more trainings on this or that, more paperwork, more regulations, more responsibilities, more committee meetings, etc., plus a higher-level of mentorship or supervision for grad students than was common previously. (But there also seems to be a different attitude such that some folks are putting up more barriers and keeping work to work hours and there was also the whole “quiet quitting” phase that may or may not be going on—since I’m not on bsky, I don’t know where the discourse is on this anymore.) The point is, it seems like we have less time and space for the very things many of us came to academia for—deep intellectual work.

Having less time and space to do intellectual work is obviously going to impact the quality and quantity of our work. We need time to engage in reading groups and paper exchanges. If that’s too tall an ask given our current schedules, then funders and universities can give us the gift of time (fully funded, of course) with fellowships (ideally with a cluster of similar folks), writing retreats, and workshops/conferences where we can get away from our normal commitments and just immerse ourselves in research and discussions.

I recently got to spend a week at the Chicago Forum where I did my research and attended talks and got to talk with folks one-on-one. It was magical. We don’t need a full year-long fellowship to get a little break, although that would be nice, too. Going somewhere even for a week where you can immerse yourself in a topic or work on one project is hugely rewarding. A few years ago, I spent two weeks in Paris while my husband had a short-term fellowship. I worked in their communal breakroom and I focused on getting one article done. I was amazingly productive, and it wasn’t just because I had access to an espresso vending machine (with better coffee than I get in the US).

Going somewhere where you can just get laser-focused on your work for a short period—and even better if you can also vet your ideas with folks—is the sort of thing that can supercharge us. Going somewhere where you can do that and also go for a hike or do yoga on the beach, or walk along the Seine and eat croissants and people-watch for an hour, is even better.

A More Direct Intervention

Okay, moving beyond incentives to more hands-on approaches. There are active proposals for fixing pipelines to recruit and support non-progressive-liberal academics, revising gen ed curricula, doing workshops on better syllabi, and such, and I think those are good, but I’m going to suggest some other ideas I’ve not heard folks talk about. I’m also thinking bigger and aiming at things funders can do or that universities can do.

Pick one department and fix it

There are a lot of dysfunctional departments around. And there are a lot of types of dysfunction. Sometimes it just comes down to 1-2 people who ruin it for everyone else, in part because no one stands up to them. But there are a lot of departments that need an intervention. Maybe you start with one department in one discipline at a good university—a uni that has resources, but has gone off the rails a bit. Pour funding into it and make it the training destination for good grad students in that discipline and a haven for faculty in that field. Folks have to be recruited based on the quality of their research and their commitment to scientific or scholarly process (knowledge exploration), not politics. (Note: I suspect that doing this for real will actually yield a politically diverse faculty because it will be like a dinner bell for those of us who are having a difficult time in our field because our commitment to basic research has butted up against a politicized party line. The key is you need to be serious about this commitment and the applicants also need to know you’re serious and you’re not going to discriminate. This can’t be business as usual.)

Fixing an existing department is different from the new civics centers and PELP departments cropping up, which are also great initiatives; here, you’re rehabbing an existing department. You could even find one that’s having a civil war—you could let it split up, let the pro-science faculty move into a new department and then hire new faculty to supplement so you build it up into a thriving department.

If you want to think bigger—say you have a small university whose entire colleges of humanities and social sciences are dominated by politics: you can create other conglomerates (like PELP, but more inclusive than just those topics/disciplines so you can bring all the refugees from the corrupted departments). I keep lusting after the idea of building a “Social Science” department for all the refugees from across the social sciences whose departments are cooked. Social science gives high school vibes, so another idea is a “Society and Social Policy” department—you don’t have to be a policy scholar, but you do need to study society or social policy.

The key is: you don’t need many of these departments. Pick a few disciplines in disarray like sociology or anthropology and just remake one department each at one university and show what is possible. Hypothetically, you’d attract insanely talented people and generate a rich, nurturing environment that becomes an idea lab, not an echo chamber. If it works, these departments would be profiled and visited as a model of how to do better. If it doesn’t work, well, then we’d know—and we’d need to switch tactics.

That’s pretty pie in the sky, though.

Other Problems, Different Solutions

Moving away from academic excellence to the secondary things that make it possible (like strong protections for VPD), one of the challenges is dealing with folks who aren’t committed to academic excellence and makes the lives of those who are a lot harder.

We have to figure out how to deal with the 5-20% of people causing the most harm in our departments, getting our universities and disciplines farther off track. These are the folks who who get away with unacceptable corrosive behavior either because they threaten to sue, call you racist if you oppose their arguments, file a grievance when you make legitimate suggestions, or (less true today) they can call a posse to dog pile you, or because they’re good at staying within the rules because they’re extremely good at bureaucrat mode or they’ve internalized the CIA’s guide to sabotage, or because they have a blank check since everything they do is ostensibly in favor of social justice. We probably won’t/shouldn’t get rid of these folks, so we need to figure out how to navigate them and stop them from doing the harm they are doing.

Cultivate Leadership

I don’t just mean leadership as in provosts and deans. I mean leadership as the quality of an individual who leads in everything they do. As faculty, we all need to be leaders to some degree and we could all benefit from actual leadership training. (I know I just complained about all the trainings we have to do. This would have to be legit training that’s actually useful and it would have to be incentivized, not just mandated or encouraged without taking something else off our plate.)

What sort of leadership training? How to navigate difficult personalities, how to cultivate relationships, how to navigate and encourage tough conversations. Yes, there are initiatives around the country on brave spaces and such, but mostly that’s about the classroom. I’m focused on the type of leadership we need for the administrative side of our job.

Just offering trainings for how to deal with people who want to behave badly might actually make a difference. Think about the colleague who derails a contract renewal discussion because of personal animus and the committee chair who doesn’t know how to navigate that situation. Think about a new department chair trying to run a faculty meeting that just gets taken over by a colleague who has their own agenda. Think about the faculty mentor who doesn’t know how to advise a student who is getting bullied by their fellow students for their lack of commitment to activism. All of these situations can be paralyzing to an unprepared researcher who was selected to become faculty because of their commitment to research excellence but maybe are not so socially adept. Or who just don’t want to offend their colleagues. Or who don’t want to be seen as an asshole.

I call it leadership training, but it might have other names, but the basic idea is a bootcamp for navigating toxic workplaces and toxic personalities and basically getting more assertive when you need to. Or basic training for anyone in an authority position about what we’re actually allowed to do. (For example, Robert’s Rules of Order can be really helpful here: oh, does anyone second that? Okay, let’s have a vote. Oh, it lost, okay, let’s move on. Sorry, no, that motion was already called for a vote, moving on). (Personally, I think this needs to be in person and have role-playing designed to toughen up those of us who are way too likely to roll over at the first sign of aggression. Yes, I mean me.)

Actually Enforce the Existing Rules

Related to leadership training, universities need to actually enforce their rules. In her epic book, The War on Tenure, Deepa Das Acevedo covers a bunch of arguments both for and against tenure. A lot of the anti-tenure arguments sound familiar and, as much as I like tenure, I’m sympathetic to some of them. For example, what if you do have the colleague who made it to full but just makes everyone else miserable and they aren’t pulling their weight in the department and/or they aren’t really that productive?

Das Acevedo argues tenure isn’t the problem there: the problem is universities just aren’t enforcing rules, the violation of which would lead to appropriate sanctions; as a result, people think tenure is protecting people when it’s just our wishy-washy commitment to our very own rules. We are actually required to be productive, to pull our weight, to not be uncollegial asssholes, etc. There are rules in place, but leaders lack the courage of their convictions to enforce those rules. Leadership training might help with this, but also maybe boards of trustees or university presidents need to send strong messages to their underlings to enforce the rules—and maybe make consequences for not doing so. And every supervisory level below needs to make a similar message.

Let’s take a very small example of this. Imagine an in-person department-wide HR training on appropriate procedures for hiring. You’ve just covered the section on protected categories and what things you can’t bring up or use as a criteria, one of which is someone’s political views. Now a faculty member publicly asks how they should behave if they happen to see a hypothetical candidate’s social media posts and don’t like what they see. The HR person needs to say in no uncertain terms, “ignore it,” and then emphasize that a candidate’s politics are their business and that you absolutely cannot take that into account in the hiring process. Moreover, if you can’t separate those things, you’re off the hiring committee. Now repeat that process. Remind faculty that their discretion is contingent on following the rules; if they can’t follow the rules, they don’t get the discretion. If department chairs make excuses for faculty who consistently don’t do the required levels of teaching, service, or research, the chair needs to lose their evaluation powers. Our very privileges depend on responsibilities and duties; if we can’t do them, we lose our privileges. There are so many areas where if we enforced the rules, we wouldn’t have the problems we have now. But now we do, and we need to get ourselves out of it.

There, I started with carrots and ended with a few sticks.

Closing

In a previous post, I argued VPD won’t save us and that we need to focus our strategies around what our actual goal is. For me, that’s producing good research (and teaching). It’s getting back to the central mission of the university as a place for the preservation, dissemination, and expansion of knowledge. Part of our challenge is we’ve brought on a lot of folks who don’t think that is or should be our mission. If funders and university leaders want to get (back) to a place where that really is what we do, they need to incentivize and support good work. Advance those who are doing what they are supposed to. And remind, gently and with incentives, others what they are supposed to be doing. If they want to be more aggressive, they can try to create a few model departments in established areas. Finally, they need to deal with the barriers to getting back on track: they need to deal with the hangers-on who don’t believe in the university’s mission (as I understand it, and as I think a lot of people understand it), which they can do indirectly by giving the rest of us better training for dealing with them in our administrative capacities (which we all have, not just the actual administrators) and by enforcing the existing rules.

Post-Script

I do worry that some of this is rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic and there are bigger issues afoot. That is, research isn’t the raison d’etre of even the research university; student training is. There are numerous undergrad-specific issues like job market considerations, the idea that everyone should get a college degree (but then we don’t really provide enough support for folks we’ve expanded to meet where they’re at), or more generally just the many issues (challenges and opportunities) AI presents for teaching/grading, the job market, and student readiness. There’s a likely massive contraction of higher ed and all sorts of visions of what that will look like from consolidation (merging campuses) to unbundling (undoing the Clark Kerr multi-functional uni). And there’s the long-term trajectory of external political issues, from how higher ed used to be a bipartisan issue with bipartisan report and then it drifted away from that and now regularly gets attacks from politicians (mostly covered from the right, but with some major interventions from Obama and Biden, too). (For a better overview of external politicization, see this great piece.) I’ve got my focus on research issues, the causal problems for which also affect the quality of teaching we produce, certainly. But it’s worth acknowledging that we also need to have these bigger conversations, which are arguably more important and probably have consequences for the future of academic research. And there are some really exciting possibilities, like greater partnerships with industry, think tanks, government, NGOs, and communities. So take this post with the caveat that there’s probably bigger game afoot and I’ve mostly got blinders on to those larger issues because I just really, really care about research.

I’ve previously written about solutions to this problem of internal politicization, like how to fix a field, with some additional field-level ideas at the end of a recent Theory and Society article. But in this series, I want to write about how to fix academia on this dimension.

For starters, I’m going to make a bold claim that might upset some friends and folks I really respect: I don’t think we should hitch our star to viewpoint diversity. In this essay, I use organizational sociology and sociolegal studies to explain my skepticism.

The GPT summary of what I say in this post: “Viewpoint diversity is a good academic norm but a poor institutional reform strategy because organizationally it is too ambiguous, too process-oriented, too politically coded, and too burdened with multiple goals to survive implementation.” Or: Viewpoint diversity is not wrong; it’s just the wrong vehicle for reform.

No, I’m not Anti-Viewpoint Diversity

I’m picking on viewpoint diversity because it’s getting a lot of attention—and funding. And I’m sometimes asked about what should we do to improve viewpoint diversity. It’s very tempting to dive right in to answer that question because viewpoint diversity is so important.

I mean, really, who would make the argument that viewpoint diversity is a bad thing? Lots of academics, actually. Usually, this takes the skeptical form of a question like why we should admit flat-earth theory and creationism to our pantheon, as though that’s what viewpoint diversity proponents are demanding. Or that viewpoint diversity is a smokescreen for conservative ideology. Rarely does someone who actually understands what viewpoint diversity means oppose it on its own grounds.

I’m also a member of an organization (the Heterodox Academy) devoted to promoting viewpoint diversity on college campuses. So just to be clear, I’m not actually anti-viewpoint diversity and I do support it, strongly. I’ve even taken the HxA oath!

So let me be really clear in what I’m arguing here by repeating my above thesis statement in different words: viewpoint diversity isn’t what saves us from internal politicization. Obviously, this is speculation and only time will tell. I do think it’s entirely possible that I’m wrong and I do think there’s really good evidence that suggests viewpoint diversity, even the narrow version of political rebalancing, could fix a lot of our problems. Even so, this isn’t where I’d place my money if I was a betting man. You can evaluate the logic of my argument and (eventually) my alternative suggestions and then tell me why I’m wrong if you disagree.

Why Viewpoint Diversity Won’t Save Us

Viewpoint Diversity Means Too Many Things to Different People

For a variety of complicated and sometimes silly reasons, viewpoint diversity sits at a disadvantage precisely because it’s such a compelling and important idea. Viewpoint diversity is catchy and has become faddish, so now it means far too many things, everything from DEI for conservatives (i.e., hiring initiatives) (apologies, Jesse—please read his excellent article on why I’m wrong even though this is how other people see read these initiatives) to creating structures to nurture and protect open inquiry to efforts to encourage high-quality heterodoxy. While organizations like Heterodox Academy very carefully define their term, others like the AAUP [edit: a chapter president of the AAUP publishing in the AAUP’s magazine, not the whole AAUP] only look to politicized efforts to encourage viewpoint diversity and read them in a negative light and then oppose the entire concept of viewpoint diversity.

One consequence of this proliferation of viewpoint diversity’s meanings is, at this point, viewpoint diversity is super right-coded, which instantly brings more resistance than necessary. Note: I’m not saying viewpoint diversity is a conservative concept—I’m not a political scientist and current politics are so weird I have no idea where anything sits on the political diamond anymore. I’m saying enough academics and academic leaders think viewpoint diversity is a conservative idea, is only supported by conservatives, or—my favorite—is a conservative plot to hijack higher ed. The really good and necessary idea is now tainted.

Viewpoint Diversity: Process or Outcome?

Another problem is I’d say—and I think many viewpoint diversity supporters would say—viewpoint diversity is a means to an end, not the ultimate goal. I love this quote from HxA: “The most vibrant universities are not echo chambers dominated by groupthink, but arenas where ideas are tested, refined, and replaced.” Yes! Viewpoint diversity is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for getting there—“Viewpoint diversity keeps the frontier of scholarly inquiry open.” Also, yes! This is super important. But notice: the goal is vibrant universities with stimulating teaching, solid research, and the expansion of knowledge to new frontiers. The goal is not that we have intellectual diversity on campus; that’s a means to an end. (Some folks argue intellectual diversity on campus is the goal and is a good thing. I agree it’s a good thing, but for me, it’s a means to an end.) Viewpoint diversity efforts, though, are often about increasing viewpoint diversity, protecting viewpoint diversity, or setting up structures that allow for (encourage and protect) viewpoint diversity. It’s a procedural focus—if we adopt these procedures, we’ll get to a thriving university.

In all of these conversations, we’re talking about fixing a problem—we’re looking for reforms. The problem with reforms that emphasize procedure and not outcome is: it’s really easy to get hijacked by symbolic compliance.

Symbolic compliance is a concept used in organizational theory and law and society (and pioneered by the late Laurie Edelman) to understand why legal reforms fail to achieve their stated objectives. The concept describes situations where organizations make a big deal of adopting formal structures (official language and policies, build new offices or hire new officers, etc.) to show how they are complying with a legal mandate. Symbolic compliance is paired with a concept called loose coupling: those formal structures are loosely coupled with actual practice, or said in regular language—the new policies and practices don’t change how the organization does things. The organization is safe on compliance because look at those policy statements, look at that new office devoted to this issue, look at all the things they are doing to show how much they are complying with the new law. In practice, nothing meaningful changes. The generalizable lesson: You can require that procedures are fair, but if you don’t require the preferred outcome, you’re not going to achieve your goal. This goes double for ambiguous phrases like “affirmative action” or “viewpoint diversity” (in fact, we first learned these lessons about symbolic compliance from corporate compliance with the Civil Rights Act). So process-oriented + ambiguity = recipe for symbolic compliance.

So you take a concept that already has multiple meanings (see above) and is kind of fuzzy (how many viewpoints do we need? I hear critics asking) and you focus on procedures rather than outcome (viewpoint diversity rather than, say, solid research), and you’re going to get symbolic compliance. And universities, like other large organizations, are great at symbolic compliance: open up a new office of viewpoint diversity, have some seminars, issue some formal statements, and go back to business as usual.

A third factor for predicting symbolic compliance rather than substantive compliance is laws with no enforcement mechanisms. In some states, we are seeing enforcement mechanisms, but the ambiguity is causing problems there; moreover, I’m really thinking about universities in states where they don’t have these laws and it’s more a response to either a zeitgeist or funding pressure. In those circumstances, I don’t expect enforcement mechanisms because we don’t really do enforcement mechanisms, except for things that actually keep the lights on or where we actually might get sued. And what does enforcement look like: folks will go for the easiest metrics (like how many liberals do you have and how many conservatives do you have) because proper evaluation of research is really hard, time consuming, and insanely controversial.

Too Many Goals, One Tool

But there’s another problem with viewpoint diversity: among those who support it, the reasons for their support differ because it’s a powerful tool that is being asked to solve many problems at once. Two of the most central problems it solves: 1) asking for viewpoint diversity is basically a baby step toward ameliorating discrimination against and hostile work environments for “conservatives” (that is, conservatives, moderates, libertarians, and those faculty or students simply believe are conservative) 2) viewpoint diversity is thought to pave the way for good basic research and for stronger educational environments for students (especially by filling in blindspots, biases, and taboos and doing the bare minimum of our job to present and evaluate all sides of an issue, not just offer our preferred side in the best possible light). There are others, like civil revitalization, or generally helping students (citizens and next-gen leaders) to learn to get along in a diverse society and respect people’s rights to have different beliefs instead of refusing to talk with one another because that person’s belief makes them sub-human and disqualifies them from basic respect and decency.

Of course, one of the most powerful arguments in favor of viewpoint diversity understood as a political rebalancing of universities is that even well-meaning, pro-viewpoint diversity liberal faculty won’t do a good job emulating conservatives or otherwise presenting conservative viewpoints, and certainly not in an energetic/enthusiastic way. This is huge for teaching. The research version is we’re not very good at vetting different ideas equally—we have blindspots, so even if we try to be attuned to multiple perspectives, we will give the edge to those ideas that are more similar to our own beliefs. Instead of organized skepticism, we’ll engage in systematic discrimination of those ideas that we find foreign or distasteful. And you can see this in the echo chamber of our syllabi, the topics of our leading journals, and at conference presentations.

Honestly, checkmate. That’s the hardest argument I have to overcome on the political rebalancing version of viewpoint diversity (at least one version of which I generally oppose—any preferential hiring based on one’s political affiliation/beliefs or that commits a person to a particular viewpoint in their research, as opposed to, say, their willingness to evaluate particular hypotheses, certain variables, or certain theories). I simply can’t refute it—I’m mostly convinced. I don’t want to be (because I’m worried that the only way to solve it really will be to hire for political diversity, which I oppose because I think all extracurricular characteristics should be off limits for hiring and promotion), but I am. Mostly.*

*Why am I only mostly convinced, despite the really strong evidence? 1) I think you can have different politics from other folks and still be so immersed in an echo chamber that you will be just as flawed at evaluating things as someone with different politics. So politics here wouldn’t be sufficient to fix the problem. I also think a lot of really cogent critiques of academia are coming from liberals, even hard-core liberals. So politics here wouldn’t be a necessary issue. 2) I think the dominant issue isn’t actually your core politics but the normalization of not doing basic steps—and not training folks to do them, much of which is correlated with the further leftward tilt. 3) I suspect that if you selected academic jobs based on a love for research and not for social change, you’d course correct in a hurry. 4) I’d say the argument for political diversity also misses the fact that it’s not even just liberals v. conservatives but a very narrow range of far-left views that have come to dominate the overall culture of academia, and much of that is coming from folks who believe they have a political mission. 5) I think a lot of this happened because people were given license to do so when we broke our own rules—at some point, it became okay to say some arguments are not acceptable or desirable, so we can’t even have that conversation. And around the same time and for similar reasons we said our one and only goal isn’t about knowledge but social justice, narrowly defined. That’s not a viewpoint diversity issue, that’s a violation of the basic conditions for knowledge exchange. In Tim Urban’s usage, we went from idea lab to echo chamber. And then it snowballed. And it spread beyond academia to the elite sectors of society. I don’t think adding in conservatives and stirring will fix things if we don’t fix that first or also—it will just be window dressing while the train keeps rolling. Instead, we need to prioritize hiring people who are willing to ask questions and provide answers regardless of their politics. I suspect that will actually fix a lot of the habits we’ve normalized. I’m going to add 6) even though it’s less about the empirical research of political bias in research evaluation I’m talking about that gives me the most pause and gets more to one of the arguments in favor of political rebalancing (it will help us get to under-explored topics). I don’t think we actually need conservative hiring initiatives for that, we just need to incentivize people to do that work. My decadal survey suggestion or a more recent suggestion to incorporate the American people and ask them to weigh in on what we’re missing (as well as policymakers, business people, NGO staffers, practitioners, and scientists in for-profit labs) would also help us figure out those blindspots.

But this bit of doubt doesn’t change my argument about why viewpoint diversity won’t save us: it is still trying to solve too many problems at the same time. (You could entirely pivot and say, look, we need political rebalancing for this one reason, and we’re going to adopt it in order to solve this one problem, but stop there. Don’t add other things that it’s trying to fix—that way ruin lies.)

To be fair, this is a common problem in coalition building: you get people who sign on to a project for multiple reasons. This is how legislation gets watered down so that you can bring more people on board. I sign on for this reason, you sign on for that reason, and now the thing we signed on to has a lot to accomplish. The more diverse the coalition, the more things in needs to do in either different directions or in more watered down versions.

We see this with punishment all the time (a major theme of my entirely written but on-hold book on the history of American prisons). Prisons are frequently supposed to solve several crime-reduction-related goals (deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation), some justice-related or moral goals (retribution/“punishment”), and it’s also supposed to be cost-effective (or sometimes even generate revenue, historically at least) while being humane and not killing or torturing its prisoners and also making sure everyone (prisoners, staff, and visitors) are safe and secure. But it turns out humane treatment is expensive, as is a truly rehabilitative prison, and the most secure prison is not necessarily going to be the most humane or cheap; meanwhile, a truly rehabilitative prison might not be the best deterrent or retributive prison, while retribution, incapacitation, and deterrence can also sometimes be at odds as they are with other justice related issues of equal treatment based on one’s commission crime. It’s very messy when you actually try to balance these competing goals. More importantly, when you get these tensions across goals, there’s always a hierarchy: some goal is going to take precedence over the others. Also very important: different people subscribe to different goals or they have different hierarchies—so someone is going to be disappointed when invariably one goal is prioritized over the others. Under these conditions, it’s very easy for prisons to “fail” according to their stated goals—we simply created an impossible set of conditions for them. (This isn’t a new development, but something we’ve faced since the very beginning of prisons. And we don’t just do it for prisons, we do it for courts, too, as Malcolm Feeley argued in the 1970s and 1980s.)

Now, prisons are an extreme case, but this challenge arises in all sorts of organizations from universities to hospitals. Just think of all the competing considerations universities face of fundraising, academic excellence, research excellence, student life, avoiding litigation, etc. Hospitals increasingly face a balancing act with legal demands, medical considerations, and the wants and needs of families and patients. You have a lot of different goals or criteria of evaluation; they are in tension with one another; something gets prioritized; and someone is disappointed.

Now come back to viewpoint diversity: if some people think viewpoint diversity is about undoing anti-conservative discrimination, and some people think it’s about ensuring norms of open inquiry, and some people think it’s about restoring under-explored theories, and some people think it’s about restoring the university to its basic mission, someone is going to be disappointed when one of those goal is prioritized over the others. Or each one is going to get watered down until it doesn’t actually achieve any of those goals and we go right back to symbolic compliance because we couldn’t agree on what the actual goal is, or how to get there, so we asked for all of the above.

Pick Something With More Staying Power

Since viewpoint diversity is basically a fad right now, and because of the particular political moment, it has some power to get passed into law, adopted for legitimacy concerns, or advocated for and incentivized by funders. But I suspect that as soon as Democrats are back in power at the national level, viewpoint diversity will be asked to move off stage. This goes double because the term is right-coded and already getting resistance from the very groups we need on board. So even if we get symbolic compliance in the short-term, I expect any initiatives that get passed will go unfunded and disappear in another political moment.

Instead, choose something with more staying power because it’s even more fundamental, based on a very clear goal, and is less controversial—something like good teaching and good research. Yes, I said that’s hard to evaluate, but I think there will be more enthusiasm and creativity invested in that than in figuring out something as controversial and nebulous as viewpoint diversity.

Closing

For these reasons, I don’t think viewpoint diversity is going to be the thing that saves us from internal politicization. We should definitely think about viewpoint diversity as a necessary academic norm, but not necessarily a viable strategy for reforming academia.

If not viewpoint diversity, what will work? I’m going to be a broken record on this front: We should organize around excellence in knowledge production/dissemination rather than around political or discursive balance. The bonus is I do think the former will achieve the latter, if done carefully. For example, one of the things one will look for is paying attention to counterarguments and alternative perspectives, which is arguably viewpoint diversity in teaching and research (but of course it’s not the only thing that makes for good teaching or research). But we can’t set out to achieve that goal, or else we risk piling on too many goals.

In another post, I’ll offer some concrete and fuzzy suggestions along those lines since I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

However, there’s a danger in releasing this post, which is that some folks will think it is the extent of the internal report. So, for the record, my internal report on sociology, summarizing all my research, was 100 pages. It later (after completion in February) grew to 120 pages as more work came out or I learned about other pieces; I’m now working on cutting it back down after circulating it for feedback/informal peer review. Also, even more stuff has come out since I drafted this post and I’ve not had time to add it in. So, this post is not a summary, just some highlights of the types of things I discuss in my report, and what’s not in my report, that I’m most interested in. And I absolutely hate “tell, not show” writing, but that’s basically what I’m going to do here; I cite to some studies, but I’m not actually even really giving my findings, just the headlines. So stay tuned for the full actual report.

My task on the Commission was to evaluate scholarly standards in sociology. I produced an internal report that did just that, which then informed our general Report. My report primarily relied on others’ published research and commentary on these issues. (Sociology was by far the most studied field, so my job was mostly to search and synthesize.) There is other quantitative data that I wasn’t in charge of that will come out separately, later, and that I’m really looking forward to being public because it’s fascinating and systematic and large scale, and it asks questions I wouldn’t have thought to ask. Since submitting my report, I’ve also started other research projects to try to get at some of the questions I couldn’t answer based on the extant research.

In this post, I give a little taste of my report’s findings, but I focus more on the tensions, challenges, and limitations with the available evidence. This is not a summary, but more a methodological reflection.

Heterogeneity in Metrics

As I mentioned previously (and as the Report notes and as I try to say every time I discuss our findings), fields vary in terms of the magnitude of the problems they face. Within each field as well, there’s heterogeneity. But the problem also manifests to different degrees in different metrics. There is clearly good research produced across all the fields examined. There’s also a clear commitment to politics and an explicit rejection of certain scholarly standards many folks take as bedrock. Both can be true. But this actually presents an interesting methodological problem: how do you generalize about the scholarly standards of a whole field when it’s heterogeneous? My solution, which I’ve discussed before, is to be clear about the different metrics and the different findings associated with them. In light of all the evidence, what I can say is: scholarly standards are clearly corrupted, but we can’t say how much this is manifesting in worse research output, just skewed and biased* output.

*How skewed, how biased? Well, that depends and varies. In my view, though, the number itself doesn’t matter—bias in 10% of work would be too much, and we’re very likely past that point. What matters is you don’t always know which 10% because traditional markers—a job in a top program, a journal pub in a top journal, an award-winning article or book—are no longer indicators of quality because sometimes obviously low-quality work gets through. And then there’s the dark figure of how much good work is getting held back because it goes against the political grain.

To emphasize again, a key finding was the strength of the evidence varies by metric sort of inversely to the importance of the metric.

In sociology (as in other fields), the most superficial (but visible) metrics (explicitly activist or social justice professional conference themes and presidential addresses, public political statements from departments and professional associations) tend to show the strongest evidence of politicization supplanting a knowledge-seeking outlook. But these superficial indicators may not be representative of sociologists’ views (as a group) or actually tell us about the state of research produced. Indeed, it is an empirical question to what extent these high-profile episodes shape scholars’ views of the field. (Given some changes in the literature around the same time, it’s plausible they had an effect, but it’s also confounded because many things changed around the same time as some of the earliest, most explicit, and most discussed statements. Additionally, anecdotally, I certainly saw folks use some presidential addresses to justify moves that I don’t think they would have gotten away with before. So I think it had an effect, we just don’t know what size an effect or whether it was the dominant factor amidst multiple factors.)

The most substantive metrics (those relating to the production and reception of research) are harder to find because they are labor-intensive (e.g., careful reviews of the quality of articles published in top journals) or the requisite data isn’t readily available (confidential T&P or hiring proceedings). We do have LLM studies, but they only measure certain things, not the full range of quality checks.

Most of the research is in between: there is decent data about what is actually produced topically and about scholarly norms, and both are actually pretty strong on the politicization question. For me, these data are key, but they are adjacent to what I most want to know: the quality of specific output, especially the relationship between politicization and quality.

Lingering Questions

Let me jump to what I don’t know (or at least questions I had when I was done with my report back in February and that I’m now working on [or will resume when I’m done with revising my report]):

1. While there are clear negative consequences to the political biases in the field, we do not know to what extent this manifests in the quality of research produced. Where we do have some data on quality, it’s fieldwide and not stratified by journal prestige. But 90% of everything is shit, so what does this tell us. (The overtime analyses are actually helpful on that front, but even so, the objection remains.) We can point to individual articles that probably shouldn’t have been published in those top venues (and likely wouldn’t have a decade earlier). My subsequent (and still preliminary) research (not in the report) is showing that even in top journals, we’re seeing on average declines in quality, including previously common expectations about what should be in an article. But none of this is sufficiently systematic to be able to say how widespread these issues are. More research is needed. We also have good quantitative findings about topics covered, which show pretty widespread patterns in blindspots (even in top-tier journals), but again we don’t know how that relates to quality of the remaining topics. Some folks argue it has quality impacts, but we just don’t have good data to know for sure.

2. Is the commitment to activism, especially in combination with the rejection of scientific values like neutrality and (aspiring to) objectivity, consistent across the field or more common in/mostly restricted to lower-tier departments? (My top-tier colleagues claim it is. I think they are wrong. But we just don’t know.) Survey data on opposition to objectivity and a commitment to politics in research is pretty widespread in its coverage, but we don’t have survey answers stratified by program status (even though the surveys are usually R1 faculty, that’s still a huge mix). There are some obvious cases of individual faculty in top-tier programs doing questionable work, but identifying high-profile individuals (which I don’t do in the report) is not the same as systematic representation in good programs. In theory, good programs shouldn’t hire questionable scholars at all, so any examples are pretty bad, but we don’t know empirically what sort of damage they cause or how widespread they are.

These are my two most burning questions. I have others, but they are secondary and mostly related to additional areas where more research is needed (we have a lot of high-profile examples of horrifying situations, but only the worst cases get publicized and written about, so again questions of representativeness and about chilling effects remain open, which I discuss below).

A Survey of the Evidence

In recent years (and at times even going back several decades), the American Sociological Association, the field’s primary professional association, has been explicit in its commitment to social justice advocacy and activism in its conference themes (going back more than a decade), presidential addresses, and public statements on political topics such as the war in Gaza. This is the superficial, high-profile evidence that tells us about the state of the field, but not the state of regular research. However, I would argue it’s also important because it legitimizes what sorts of research is appropriate and encouraged by powerful actors in the field—literally our professional association—who are also telling us what it means to be a sociologist. As a proponent of field theory, I tend to find this sort of symbolic behavior influential, but we just don’t know how influential it is and for what subset(s) of the field (that’s one weekness of field theory: individual actors do have agency and can resist field-level pressures—the question is when and how can they do that).

The most systematic and relevant evidence we have is on research norms, coming from survey and interview data with sociologists. These studies suggest deep contestation in the field over the standards of research production, especially over topics like whether objectivity is not just possible but even desirable, whether scholars should separate advocacy or activism from their research, and whether it is acceptable for scholars to ask certain research questions or evaluate certain explanations (Akresh 2017; Gross 2013; Horowitz et al. 2018). These data are now out of date and I would love for someone to update them, since I suspect we’ll see movement just based on high-profile commentaries by big-name scholars at good places as well as the willingness of a lot of folks to publicly say things I don’t think a lot of folks would have said publicly just ten years ago.

However, there are fewer systematic studies evaluating the quality of research produced in the field.

Again, the best evidence on this front comes from more superficial measures: the research produced tends to skew, and has become more skewed, toward topics related to power and inequality, especially relating to race, gender, and sexuality, specificially the traditional minorities of each category (Altman and Cohen 2025; Heiberger et al. 2021; Keskintürk 2023; Moody and Light 2006), while overlooking other topics central to the systematic study of society but that have become either taboo (off limits) or are simply blindspots (it doesn’t occur to most to study these, there’s little interest in studying them, or there’s little demand/incentives in funding or hires for them). For example, scholars have pointed out sociologists’ reticence to study biology and evolution (e.g., Bearman 2008; Heuveline 2004; Horowitz et al. 2014; Whitmeyer and Hopcroft 2025); religion, especially beyond a narrow focus on “Christian nationalism” (Heiberger et al. 2021; Pearce 2023; Smith 2024); and some topics like socialization (Guhin et al. 2021) associated with allegedly conservative values of order and stability. Similarly, scholars have pointed to explanations and theoretical frameworks considered taboo, including sociology’s shunning of cultural explanations for racial disparities (Horowitz et al. 2018; Patterson 2014); a focus on racism instead of classism in explaining racial disparities (Horowitz et al. 2018; Iceland and Silver 2024; Wilson 2011); and the rejection of structural-functionalist theoretical frameworks as conservative (Iceland 2025). Scholars have also described a negativity bias in sociology to some extent traceable to the field’s focus on “social problems,” but to some extent to ignoring (likely unintentionally) contrary evidence of improvement or simply failing to sustain an applied wing or explore the conditions under which certain positive outcomes occur (e.g., Best 2001; Iceland 2025; Martin 2016; Rojas 2025).

However, beyond pointing to high-profile examples or collecting examples from across the field of bad work that shouldn’t have been published (or published in its final form) or received certain awards, we do not currently have clear, systematic evaluations of the quality of the research produced. Indeed, we cannot determine, based on available studies, the extent to which efforts like citation justice or decolonizing the field have corrupted the research produced. We do have some systematic reviews of research, however, that cover some important topics. Recent studies have documented the extent to which research across fields is not politically neutral (Manzi 2026) and fails to replicate or reproduce (but it is not clear whether these problems are related to the authors’ political biases or not). However, a common question remains whether those and other quality issues are inversely correlated with journal prestige: that is, are these documented problems field-level problems, but not problems in the top journals?

The most difficult area to explore systematically involves the formal and informal sanctioning of scholars for producing taboo work, precisely because such sanctioning is rarely publicly documented. Thus, while it is not the case that scholars are never able to publish controversial work or have successful careers after doing so, several high-profile cases have been documented of scholars being ostracized for their work^[1] or fielding challenges to their tenure cases.^[2] While some scholars have discussed various forms of self-censoring (LaFree 2025), reviewer criticism using activist standards (Rubin 2025), and retraction (Savolainen 2024), we do not have systematic data on how widespread (if at all) such cases are. Here, survey work would be welcome.

One area where I’d really like to see future research would be investigating how much of a chilling effect high-profile controversies had (and how long they lasted, in the case of fields where those controversies have died down). My own speculation is that these sorts of episodes don’t have to be widespread for folks to self-censor or write in a way that anticipates and tries to stave off political critiques. I suspect the latter itself helps to further shift the norms in the field about what is appropriate and inappropriate to say or write in one’s research.

Another tricky possibility to investigate is that we could have a Keynesian beauty contest going on: people base their behavior on what they think other people are thinking. Folks could do surveys asking folks what they think the majority of scholars (or their friends) think, which is sometimes more effective (accurate) than simple polling on what the surveyed person thinks. The question is whether we are in that scenario—that is, is the majority just adjusting to fit an ideal very few people prefer—or if folks aren’t adjusting, they’re just there already (or if it’s a mix—folks are halfway there, but they keep adjusting because the field keeps moving and they’re trying to keep up). At this point, we’re all embedded in different, nested or overlapping populations; when I ask folks what they think, I get wildly different takes on the answer to this question.

Now for my speculation: my own sense is that some (most??) high-quality scholars continue to have high scholarly standards, but the majority of scholars (even some really good scholars) have let their standards erode (and that’s at least consistent with some survey data, as well as what I saw as an editor for a journal in a cognate field). But as I’ve mentioned before, that’s pretty endogenous—the folks I call good scholars are those who espouse and follow what I view as scholarly standards (except that you do see some formerly “good scholars” who have relented on some of these issues, so there is some drift even at the top). More concretely, I’m fairly certain there is a strong generational divide with academically older (i.e., more years since the PhD) faculty preferring, on average, the high scholarly standards of yesteryear and newer scholars and grad students, on average, preferring activism (political impact), and folks in my generation are more a mix. Again, heterogeneity. And that makes it really difficult to generalize and easy for folks to say, well that’s never happened to me so it must be wrong, while others think what I call scholarly standards are “problematic” or inherently political. [So prescient….]

The Not Clearly Political Issues

Now for the other stuff. There is a longstanding discussion about disciplinary fragmentation/siloing and theoretical stagnation in the field (too many to cite here). I went back and forth about writing about this in my report, and whether I needed to include a COI (which I ultimately did). I think the political stuff did exacerbate these issues, but I’m not sure I can support that with evidence (I’ve also speculated about this in my own published work). But say we do eventually strip away all the political stuff; we’ll still need to deal with this central issue—the field is siloing itself and with siloing comes theoretical stagnation. Obviously (see Heyer et al. 2023, 2025, 2026, Rubin and Shalaby 2025), I think this is a pretty important issue, and it’s not limited to sociology. And as I’ve written before, I do think it’s related to an erosion of scholarly standards—some of which has been justified on moral/political grounds (e.g., inclusion, anti-gatekeeping, a redistribution mindset), but some of it is also just structural or practical (and Alena and I enumerated some of the reasons for this).

I also have a whole section on other issues the field is facing that I mention in passing. I mention a lot of them in this earlier post, so I won’t rehash them here. One I don’t mention in that post, but I do in the report, is sociology’s gender skew issue and refusal to talk about it, which Phil Cohen has written about here and here. There are a few other issues, including some that I added after my report was done. Others have certainly argued that these issues are directly related to the field’s politics, but I’m not convinced by the evidence that they are (which isn’t to say they aren’t, just that I don’t think we have the evidence—also, I suspect these other issues are overdetermined and a monocausal account will be insufficient).

Summary

So, like we say in the Report, things are mixed. Sociology is no exception. There’s enough evidence to say there’s a problem, and that problem seems to be worse in sociology than the humanities we looked at, but how extensive the problem is in sociology, and how it manifests, is more complicated and requires more research. [And godspeed to whoever undertakes it because hell’s coming with you.]

Next Steps

I want to close by talking about what I don’t discuss in my report (and what we don’t discuss in The Report). Solutions.

Solutions require that we have a clear causal model for the problem. But at this stage, we are still trying to outline the problem (which only some of us academics agree is a problem). We’re not yet in a position to say with certainty what caused it in any given field and thus how to fix it. My time as an editor gave me a lot of ideas. My work on the commission gave me some other ideas and fixed some misimpressions I had (I, too, had blamed the humanities for problems in the social sciences; now I don’t—I learned that good humanistic research upholds solid standards and the humanities are much stronger than I thought going into this).

The only policy recommendation I feel like I can make is pretty simple: we have to uphold (encourage, incentivize, teach) scholarly standards. I have lots of thoughts on how and why they came to decline—and why people feel so emboldened to openly reject them.

Folks with other policy recommendations have other causal models in mind. I don’t know if they are right about either the causal models or their recommendations (and, for all I know, they could be right). But I can’t say they are right based on my research, which is to say the published research and commentaries out there.

So my policy rec is the minimum one I can make, but it’s also one that roughly half or 60% (at least—again, outdated numbers) would instantly reject. The empirical question is whether it’s enough that the good ones agree with me.

References

Akresh, I. R. (2017). Departmental and disciplinary divisions in sociology: Responses from departmental executive officers. The American Sociologist, 48(3):541–560.

Altman, M. and Cohen, P. N. (2025). The state of sociology: Ev-idence from dissertation abstracts. Working Paper posted on ArXiv https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/a8uyp_v1.

Bearman, P. (2008). Exploring genetics and social structure. American Journal of Sociology, 114(S1):v–x.

Best, J. (2001). Social progress and social problems: Toward a sociology of gloom. The Sociological Quarterly, 42(1):1–12.

Gross, N. (2013). Why are professors liberal and why do conservatives care? Harvard University Press.

Guhin, J., McCrory Calarco, J., and Miller-Idriss, C. (2021). Whatever happened to socialization? Annual Review of Sociology, 47(1):109–129.

Heiberger, R. H., Galvez, S. M.-N., and McFarland, D. A. (2021). Facets of special-ization and its relation to career success: An analysis of U.S. sociology, 1980 to 2015. American Sociological Review, 86(6):1164–1192.

Heuveline, P. (2004). Sociology and biology: Can’t we just be friends? American Journal of Sociology, 109(6):1500–1506.

Horowitz, M., Haynor, A., and Kickham, K. (2018). Sociology’s sacred victims and the politics of knowledge: Moral foundations theory and disciplinary controversies. The American Sociologist, 49(4):459–495.

Horowitz, M., Yaworsky, W., and Kickham, K. (2014). Whither the blank slate? a report on the reception of evolutionary biological ideas among sociological theorists. Sociological Spectrum, 34(6):489–509.

Iceland, J. (2025). Beyond conflict: recovering the sociology of social progress. Theory and Society, pages 1–17.

Iceland, J. and Silver, E. (2024). When all you have is a hammer: how social justice distorts what we know about racial disparities. Theory and Society, 53(5):1073–1092.

Keskintürk, T. (2023). Sociology’s inequality problem. Turgut Keskinturk (Blog) (October 10). https://tkeskinturk.github.io/blog/inequality/.

LaFree, G. (2025). Understanding what violent street crime, globalization, and ice cream have in common. Criminology & Public Policy.

Manzi, J. (2026). The ideological orientation of academic social science research 1960–2024. Theory and Society, 55(2):25.

Martin, C. C. (2016). How ideology has hindered sociological insight. The American Sociologist, 47(1):115–130.

Moody, J. and Light, R. (2006). A view from above: The evolving sociological landscape. The American Sociologist, 37(2):67–86.

Patterson, O. (2014). How sociologists made themselves irrelevant. Chronicle of Higher Education (December 1). https://www.chronicle.com/article/ how-sociologists-made-themselves-irrelevant/.

Pearce, L. D. (2023). One hundred years of religion in social forces. Social Forces, 101(4):1633–1643.

Rojas, F. (2025). Sociology of the good society. Temple of Sociology (Substack) (April 23, 2025). https://templeofsociology.substack.com/p/ sociology-of-the-good-society.

Rubin, A. T. (2025). Normativity is not a replacement for theory. Theory & Society, 54(5):795–850.

Savolainen, J. (2024). Unequal treatment under the flaw: Race, crime & retractions.

Current Psychology, 43(17):16002–16014.

Smith, C. (2014). The sacred project of American sociology. Oxford University Press.

Smith, J. (2024). Old wine in new wineskins: Christian nationalism, authoritarianism, and the problem of essentialism in explanations of religiopolitical conflict. Sociological Forum, 39(4):328–340.

Whitmeyer, J. and Hopcroft, R. L. (2025). What makes a good social science theory, and why the evolutionary model of the actor is one. Theory and Society, pages 1–20.

Wilson, W. J. (2011). Reflections on a sociological career that integrates social science with social policy. Annual Review of Sociology, 37(Volume 37, 2011):1–18.

Young, C. and Cumberworth, E. (2025). Multiverse Analysis: Computational Methods for Robust Results. Analytical Methods for Social Research. Cambridge University Press.

^[1] For example, James Coleman’s experience discussed on this webpage and this blogpost.

^[2] See the case of Mark Regenerus described in Smith (2014). See also a recent reanalysis of his work in Young and Cumberworth (2025). Note that there was also an effort to retract Regenerus’s study. For some commentary from sociologists on the research and tenure case, see https://scatter.wordpress.com/2012/ 06/23/bad-science-not-about-same-sex-parenting/,https://orgtheory.wordpress.com/2012/07/29/comments-on-regnerus/, and https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2018/03/06/mark-regnerus-to-be-promoted-to-full-professor-at-ut-austin/.

In this post, I’ll share some reflections on the commission, summarize the report, provide my takeaways from my work on the commission as well as some limitations with the work and the report. In a second post, I’ll focus on the types of evidence I used for the sociology portion of our analysis, which will also illustrate some of the themes I discuss here. Before I do, let me say: please read the report. No summary or meta-commentary will do it justice.

The Commission

Vandy and WashU commissioned us to inquire into the state of the humanities and humanistic social sciences, especially looking at the extent to which internal politicization was affecting the state of scholarly standards. We examined anthropology, history, literary studies, musicology, philosophy, and sociology; I was in charge of conducting the research on sociology and I’ll separately publish a report on the basis of my research for the commission next month.

State of Scholarship Report Summary

The report takes a middle ground on the question we were asked: every field has significant problems, but no field is entirely lost. As such, things are neither as bad as some critics say, nor as good as some defenders say. My gloss: There are problems, and we need to acknowledge them—and hopefully address them.

The report takes great pains to avoid being misread (although, as expected, it is being misread by academia’s defenders and critics alike). It emphasizes that the humanities are valuable and should remain part of universities. It also emphasizes that if administrators are concerned, they should do their own careful self-studies (involving faculty) rather than rely on a report based on national trends and basically a bird’s-eye view: problems at the field level are not necessarily problems in your local department. The report acknowledges that politicization from outside of academia (typically from conservative politicians) also happens and is a big problem for academic standards and freedom, but our focus is on politicization from within. Finally, the report spends a lot of time explaining what isn’t the problem: liberal professors, scholars who are activists on their own time or who personally have social justice motivations and agendas, an expanded canon to cover previously underrepresented topics and people, and critical scholarship generally. It’s fine—good, even—that all* of that exists and a necessary consequence of an open approach to scholarship.

*The report notes the liberal skew of the professoriate is itself not the problem; the problem is replacing scholarly standards with political/ideological ones. Hypothetically, even with this skew, if we all stuck to scholarly standards for admissions, hiring, tenure/promotion, publishing, awards, etc., we would not have to write this report. My own sense is that neither would such skew exist as strongly as it does if we stuck to scholarly standards, instead of incentivizing subpar but politically satisfying work. This is why I emphasize, when asked, that university officials and researchers in evaluative positions (hiring, T&P, awards committees) need to take their thumbs off the scale and stop rewarding work more for its politics than for its scholarly quality. (Jesse Smith writes wonderfully about why I’m wrong. He very well may be right. We may both be right. It may be there are different formulas for reaching a better future. I hope we get a chance to evaluate these speculations in practice in real-world settings.)

Instead, the report highlights several problematic themes we saw across the disciplines—we summarize them as ways in which scholarly standards of knowledge creation and dissemination are being subordinated to political goals and values. The themes are:

1. scholarship being redefined to serve political ends or disciplines adopting political missions rather than knowledge-based missions;

2. fields that treat some answers as settled, or some findings as forbidden, or some topics as unacceptable to analyze such that we start to get censorship or ostracization for some otherwise fine work;

3. the postmodernist or relativist rejection of objectivity and a knowable reality (more than acknowledging challenges to objectivity or the knowable reality and trying to confront our limitations, but rejecting such efforts as undesirable or impossible);

4. bad (incoherent, unintelligible) writing in the style of some twentieth-century French philosophers who (and whose style) became influential across the humanities and social sciences over the last several decades.

While we were charged with looking at the humanities and humanistic social sciences, the issues we discuss are not unique to these fields and are even showing up in STEM fields and STEM-adjacent fields like psychology. (Speaking from my own perspective, this warning is consistent with my reading of both high-profile episodes in various STEM fields and a growing number of studies on the same issues, especially in psychology. These issues come about both from the top-down (e.g., institutionalized norms at the level of publishing or professional associations) and bottom-up (e.g., grass-roots efforts to change the field); they meet in the middle, the average researcher (where most academic research is produced), but that layer is less visible or analyzed, and the size of the portion who are essentially unaffected is unknown.) Additionally, we suspect that these issues are bigger in interdisciplinary fields in the humanities and social sciences, which we did not explore systematically. (Areas for future research!)

How did we come to our conclusions? We don’t talk about that in the report very much—it’s a very high-level report written for high-level administrators rather than for our colleagues. As we note, we wrote internal reports for each discipline. I’ll be making a revised version of my report public in July. Since my colleagues will want to know what evidence we reviewed before then, in another post, I’ll describe what evidence I looked at (and then my more specific findings will come in my official report). But first…

My Takeaways from the Commission

Just to be clear, I am no longer summarizing the Report, but my gloss on it. What I take away or emphasize is not necessarily what other commissioners would emphasize.

1. Whatever else we do in this report, it represents an interdisciplinary group of scholars standing up for scholarly rigor and not letting political goals corrupt the research enterprise or the standards by which research is evaluated. This alone is a powerful statement. I’m sure it will be criticized by those who disagree that the pursuit of knowledge should not take a backseat to the pursuit of political goals (I wrote this last week; it’s already happening and it’s providing further evidence about the problems we are facing—the personal attacks simply for writing a very tepid, careful report that are quite something). But personally, I’m thrilled to be part of such an impressive, cross-disciplinary group of scholars making a strong endorsement of basic, fundamental standards of scholarship.

2. As we note in the report, although all of the disciplines examined were affected to some degree, the disciplines varied in how much internal politicization has affected their scholarly standards. One big caveat: our goal was not to systematically compare the disciplines against each other to see which was worse off. Moreover, we used evidence that makes sense for each field, some of which overlaps across each field and some doesn’t. That said, it was pretty clear that Anthropology and Sociology were at one extreme (heavy politicization), while (analytic) Philosophy was at the other (little politicization), with literary studies/English and History were in the middle. I was pleasantly surprised, since my stereotype was that the humanities were far worse off than the social sciences in this respect, but on many measures, that did not appear to be the case. Indeed, sociology and anthropology were worse than I expected. So the findings were actually quite surprising to me.

3. There’s also variation internal to each discipline. As we say in the report, there is good research in every field. But fields are incredibly heterogeneous. From my perspective, two findings on this front were particularly interesting:

a. First, there’s significant variation over time—some disciplines had their fight with these issues years ago and seem to be doing okay now, while others are still ramping up with no clear sign of slowing. Again, this was really surprising to me: I thought the humanities were just entirely cooked. They aren’t. The humanities are actually doing pretty well these days. A lot of the worst examples from the “humanities” are coming from interdisciplinary scholars and fields in the humanities, but not the core disciplines, nor are they taken seriously by serious scholars in the disciplines. Essentially, the reputational damage to the humanities is mostly coming from outside the core disciplines that get most of the blame. Sociology and anthropology, by contrast, appear far worse off. In sociology (and I expect a number of interdisciplinary fields), we are inheriting a lot of work from decades ago that has only recently gone mainstream in our fields. What we don’t realize is that this stuff that’s getting imported isn’t respected in what we think of as their home fields and/or we don’t see how adaptations in our fields are missing important nuances that entirely change their utility in ours.

b. Second, even within a given field, the answer to the question of how much politicization affects scholarly standards massively depends on which metric you look at. This is a really important point (and one I’ll say more about later). The most superficial markers tend to show the most politicization—conference themes, presidential addresses, high-profile scandals. Actually evaluating the quality of research produced in every field (as I’ve written here before) is difficult and there are not a lot of existing studies on this question, at least in sociology. (This isn’t surprising: it’s difficult to do, it is not incentivized, and it is badly discouraged.) The easiest analyses to run tend to be a bit superficial: variation in what topics are explored and what words are used in the work. These can show topical and political skew (which are important), but not necessarily quality issues—there may just be a lot of good work that uses particular words associated with politicization. In reality, the topical and word choices are correlated with the sorts of things we were investigating, but we can’t actually say more than that (although new LLM-based analyses keep coming out—even though I’m generally open to the approach, I was really skeptical of some of the specific efforts, but after grilling folks doing the analyses, I was convinced). Additionally, we were also limited in our investigation since some things we wanted to know just aren’t well documented (e.g., tenure and promotion cases, rates of self-censorship, etc.). Finally, some fields have survey research on relevant attitudes and behaviors, which is great because it’s one of the few measures that gives us systematic data on what we really want to know, but their availability varies by field, and you still have to worry about response rates and representativeness. So, evidence on the central questions is mixed in its availability and has different limitations, but as I’ve said before, you need to triangulate, and if you do, you do see some differences in your results and some patterns across them. The hardest question is figuring out the extent or depth of these trends in part because of the variation.

So it’s important to understand that fields are heterogeneous in multiple ways. So when I say fields can be arrayed on a spectrum from how much politicization has affected their quality, it’s based on a number of different metrics overall, rather than any one marker.

I tend to think this intra-field heterogeneity is one reason why we can have such radically different views and experiences of our fields, even among those of us who think our field needs to be reformed. The other reason for such radically different views is: a lot of folks simply aren’t bothered by politicized research and don’t agree that certain scholarly standards are important. That’s a bigger problem.

Those were my biggest general takeaways. Again, in a future post, I’ll talk about sociology specifically. I’m also working on a series of responses to questions I’ve received that I found intriguing and want to talk about. So stay tuned!

First, they have a very nice, clean discussion of research: what we do and how we should do it.

Integration of theory and empirics is essential

Good science relies on an integrated approach of theory, methodology, and data. But what are the main building blocks of this approach?

Theory building

Theory building is not simply listing past empirical findings or summarising published articles and then deriving empirical expectations. It is also not coining new terms or inventing jargon. In Gambetta’s (n.d.) terms, good theory helps solve “empirical puzzles” by providing answers to why a specific outcome occurs. To many of us, this is accomplished by formulating hypotheses that link macro-conditions to the outcomes via micro-components. These micro-components often include individual characteristics, such as beliefs, desires, and actions, and their complex relationships, modelled by, for instance, dual-process approaches. Theorizing often also includes specific social mechanisms, like imitation and learning, and interaction structures, like networks or opportunities (e.g. Hernes 1976; Wippler 1978; Elster 2015; Coleman 1990; Hedström and Swedberg 1998; Lazega 2020; Kroneberg and Tutić Forthcoming). Empirical predictions should be derived from interlinked theoretical building blocks rather than simply reiterating empirical regularities (e.g. Raub et al., 2022). Our aim is to generalize theoretical insights rather than empirical findings.²

Models

Many EAS fellows are committed to a type of explanatory sociology that encourages systematic investigation, through explicit (formal or informal) modelling of the social mechanisms involved in empirical patterns (see e.g. Boudon 1979). Those “generative models” may not only help us explain empirical puzzles or regularities, but, in principle, also generate novel predictions for new settings which can be subsequently tested. Mechanisms in such models can be derived from deeper theoretical premises such as rationality (Gambetta 1998) or generated inductively by learning via comprehensive analysis of data (Merton 1987).

Today, machine learning or similar powerful algorithms are increasingly used for pattern recognition and prediction (LeCun et al., 2015). We believe the strength of sociological theory and models championed by the EAS and summarised here lies in its power for explanation (Keuschnigg et al., 2018). We think that this strength of sociology should be promoted, particularly now, to balance private industry’s focus on classification and prediction with sound explanation.

Causality

There is now a growing consensus in the social sciences as to what types of empirical designs allow for “causal inference”. Sociology should be part of this consensus to further the integration of sociology with other social, behavioural, and economic sciences. Analyses based on observational data are employing stronger statistical designs than has been the earlier state-of-the art in sociology, to better estimate causal relationships (Brand et al., 2023; Breen 2022; Gangl 2022; Morgan and Winship 2015). Experiments are specifically designed to establish cause-and-effect relationships and are now increasingly used to measure a range of sociological topics such as norms, disorder, discrimination, and trust (Barrera et al., 2024).

Although adherence to the causal inference consensus offers clear benefits for the discipline, the emphasis on causal identification must be balanced against the need to engage with substantively important questions that may not yet be amenable to causal methods. Moreover, causal estimands derived from observational data often apply only to narrowly defined subpopulations, limiting their external validity (Breen and Pan 2026). Experimental designs likewise often face external validity constraints due to non-representative samples or artificial settings. Sociological approaches to causality (see e.g. Manzo 2022) which require more than simply identifying a causal link between two variables supplement and strengthen causal research designs in sociology.

Description

Not all research could or should be theory driven or seek to estimate causal effects. Careful descriptive analyses are important for the advancement of sociological science, both for its own sake and for theory building through providing explananda (see Goldthorpe 2004). This also includes qualitative research, especially when it is linked with and leading to quantitative research (Varese 2022).

This statement does a number of things I really appreciate:

First, it has a strong discussion of theory. Some might take issue with the macro v. micro, but especially broadly interpreted, I like it. It makes clear that new terms, jargon, and strings of empirical findings are not the same as theory. It emphasizes explanation and generalizability (but goes much further). It takes a strong stance on testable hypotheses, which I increasingly appreciate as a component of theory.

Second, it makes space for things that are not quite theory (but that we tend to call theory, sloppily, in part because we don’t have good terminology for it and in part because theory is prestigious). This is the discussion of models and essentially case studies from which we might derive insights for other contexts. I also appreciate the implicit commitment to generalizability—after all, generalizability is about finding patterns across contexts.

Third, it describes the methodological challenge that is causal inference, and what it takes to make causal claims, but also notes that we don’t all have to do causal inference, especially if we’re asking questions that don’t lend themselves to experiments.

Fourth, it recognizes the importance of descriptive work.

The statement goes on to discuss open science; I’m going to skip that discussion, not because I disagree, but because I’m more interested in the other parts of the statement and I don’t want to reproduce the whole thing.

Next, they move on to politics:

Engaging with pressing social issues requires care

Many EAS fellows were drawn into sociology motivated by the desire to improve the world. Indeed, every scholar is a citizen with full rights and responsibilities to engage with the world around as everyone else. However, following Merton (1968), we find it important to clearly distinguish between academic work, that is, the processes through which sociological knowledge is produced on the one hand, and political action, aimed to make a societal change, on the other. The former should be governed by the sociological principles summarised above. The latter is not within our remit. Research has documented that values may induce biases into research designs, which may distort the measurement and interpretation of social phenomena (Borjas and Breznau 2024). Hence, while scholars may hold personal commitments on socially and politically relevant issues, even if those may be informed by their research and evolve with new knowledge, we believe it is important for integrity and transparency that the practice of sociology remains distinct from activism.

Sociology has a tradition of applied research serving public institutions. Social policy research, which empirically evaluates existing policies and proposes new ones, has become more widespread across Europe and elsewhere since EAS’s inception in 2000 (see Platt n.d). We have seen many examples during the Covid19 pandemic (e.g. Mills and Ruttenauer 2022). Such research provides a domain where social change can be studied and pursued sociologically, particularly given the development of causal approaches that more robustly connect policies and outcomes. Predicting and driving change requires linking the policy tools and outcomes with the key actors, incentives, beliefs, opportunities, and other social mechanisms. As illustrated by De Graaf and Wiertz (2019), this requires analytical theory building. Sound measurement of the social world and advanced methods of empirical testing of policy impact are also needed for sociological policy evaluation.

We maintain that sociological research need not and, in many cases, should not always be oriented toward broader public or policy debates. In our view, some of the most valuable sociological insights emerge from research driven primarily by intellectual curiosity. We also understand that policy research is not the only, or indeed the fastest way to pursue social change, if one is motivated for doing so (see Cohen 2025 for a wider treatment and alternatives). Adhering to demanding sociological standards is essential, though, not only for producing sound knowledge that can motivate change, but also to maintain the discipline’s credibility when providing independent advice on matters of sociological relevance.

This part is also great. Clear endorsement of Merton, clear separation of sociological research and political action. “The latter is not within our remit.” Yes. You do you on your own time, but don’t evaluate or corrupt sociology with politics. They’re also clear that doesn’t mean no policy work: we can be relevant without devolving into political animals. Finally, they endorse basic research—we don’t all have to chase the news cycle. I remember a common refrain on Twitter, c. 2016-2023, “If your work doesn’t try to change the world, what are you even doing?” Let’s hope that chapter has finally passed, at least with the Europeans.

Overall, it’s a very careful, reasonable, and yes, I’d say inclusive statement that is open to lots of parts of the discipline, but gets us back to focusing on the things we all care about: sociological research.

Finally, they close by noting that these are field-level considerations:

Before concluding, we emphasize that the principles that we submit to discussion should be understood as applying to the discipline as a collective enterprise rather than to prescribing or evaluating the conduct of individual sociologists. For instance, when we argue that theoretical and empirical work should be integrated, we do not imply that individual researchers must achieve such integration in each and all of their individual projects. Instead, other researchers working in the same or other fields or sub-fields should be capable of bringing together theoretical and empirical contributions that may be undertaken independently. Nevertheless, both theoretical and empirical research should be formulated in ways that facilitate such integration. For example, purely theoretical work should ultimately generate testable implications, while empirical work focused on measurement or description should ultimately enable better tests of theories. Likewise, the implementation of open science practices cannot rest solely on individual scholars. It requires structural support from institutions such as journals, funding bodies, and universities, which must establish the incentives and conditions necessary to sustain these practices.

We don’t all have to do everything everywhere all at once, but we should be translatable for others in the field and ultimately work together. And we need infrastructural support for a lot of it.

This statement is the kind of field-level invitation to further discussion (they are inviting responses) and effort to create and maintain strong norms that I’d like to see in American sociology and related fields. It’s incredibly refreshing.

Now the big question will be: how will others react to the ESA vision? What parts will they object to? Will the ASA take note and try something similar? If it does, I can only imagine a very different result since a lot of the ESA statement would be considered controversial. I hope I’m wrong.

For now, I’m going to let the report speak for itself. In the coming weeks, I’ll share some reflections about my work on the commission, summarize the report, provide my takeaways from our findings, and discuss some limitations we faced (and that any similar effort will face). I’ll also have quite a bit to say about the evidence I relied on for the sociology portion of our analysis and issues of heterogeneity. For now, I encourage you to read the report in full.

As promised for a while, this post gives my take on the different things we do with data: describe, analyze, generalize, and theorize. I think of them as a hierarchy or pyramid, reflecting both the relative commonality of each endeavor and the relative worth we place on each. But also in the sense that each step builds on the steps below it.

Each of these steps is really important—I think we tend to undervalue description and we don’t have many venues for purely descriptive work. (In criminology, how many of us use the BOJ reports that give us descriptive stats on different aspects of the criminal justice system? How controversial was the mere (descriptive) question of whether certain types of crime went up or down in various periods? In many fields, how much do we rely on basic descriptions of processes or rules or settings so we can understand and take the next steps?)

But it’s important to get clarity on what each of these components is. One of the many causes of shitty “theory” is people are not actually theorizing (see my normativity paper), but doing a variation of one of the other steps (most often description and/or analysis). Likewise, a common problem in some qualitative papers is the complete lack of analysis—that’s fine if the paper is billed as a descriptive paper, but that’s usually not the case (something I said a few years ago in my most widely read tweet).

I agree with Besbris and Khan (2017) that we might be able to get rid of a lot of bad theory if we didn’t require it for publication (as many journals do, including one I edited, carrying on a long tradition for a flagship journal). That doesn’t mean I don’t value theory or still think of it as a really important contribution—I really like theory (I’m not particularly good at it myself, but I like to read good theory) and I do think it elevates a project. But so does the simple step of generalizability (and as we’ll see, here I’m going to start to move beyond my earlier definition of theory [generalizable explanations], because I really do think it was too inclusive). But I’m getting into the weeds already. Let’s dig in.

Describe

Description entails summarizing or narrating your qualitative or quantitative data. For example, you may provide percentages, correlations or relationships, identify trends over time, impose typologies or taxonomies, or tell stories/accounts from your data. To put it a bit more concretely, we’re usually dealing with one or two variables at a time when we describe and we’re either giving detailed looks at each variable or their relationship with another variable. This is the bread and butter of what we do and it’s often the most useful, especially for society—the public (and our students) love description.

As I’ve said before, there’s an unfortunate tendency where scholars describe their data and call it analysis, and then they can’t figure out why they feel unhappy with their project or what’s missing. This is most common in qualitative work. For example, you see this a lot in qualitative content analysis: folks will code their data, describe their codes, give some examples, and say that was their analysis. That’s not analysis. It’s description. The question is what do you do with the description? What’s the next step? Sometimes, description alone makes a useful point—a previous scholar said X happened (or would happen), and you show it clearly didn’t (or vice/versa). But usually description is the first step that sets up a second step; usually, we want to provide something more.

A good key here is to go back to your research question: one problem people run into is they don’t have a research question or they don’t have a good research question, so a project can just go off the rails. Sometimes, we have research questions that really do demand description alone. That’s fine. One thing to watch out for, though: I see a lot of projects that are simply trying to convince the audience that something is good or bad, which is not good social science or scholarship more generally. It's more argument rather than RQ-driven work, which is a big no-no across disciplines. So really stick to the research question.

Most of the time, we’re asking more complicated questions that demand more than description, but some sort of explanation of a process. That requires analysis.

As I’ve said, there’s certainly a place for description, but too often, a paper that just has description and no analysis feels incomplete, like we’re waiting to read step two, but it never comes. And analysis is hard. I get it. But there are ways to move forward and make your paper stronger.

Analyze

For me, analysis can include a number of things but, in my fields, it is really about answering why or how questions, or explaining. A big question we tend to try to answer with analysis is why something is happening. Whether we’re actually able to demonstrate causality (something constrained by our data and research design), I’d say analysis is usually trying to get us closer to being able to make causal claims. To make these claims, you might use only your data or you might analyze your data with the help of extant theory. For example, you might identify key explanatory variables and how/why they work. Alternatively, you might identify and elaborate mechanisms or processes (be sure to also consider alternative explanations and discuss limitations).

As mentioned above, a key step in the research process is coming back to your research question: is it asking for description rather than explanation? If not, what is it actually asking you to explain? As you figure out what you are trying to explain (not just describe), get clear on what outcome you are trying to explain. Then ask:

• What do you think is causing it, based on your data?

• What does the literature* suggest is causing it?

*The literature can be the topically/empirically or theoretically relevant literature for your project. In general, every project will have several relevant literatures: you always need to review the topically relevant literature—if you study schools, you need to know the litearture on schools (ditto for hospitals, prisons, fortune 500 businesses, museums, etc.); if you study early childhood development or racism or criminality, you need to know the literature on those topics. This literature will often have its own set of theories related to your area of focus you need to be aware of (e.g., different theories for why people commit crime, different theories on how prisons came about or how the prisoner subculture is maintained). But if you are studying something as a case of something else (I study a prison as a particular type of organization), you also need to know the literature on that something else (I need to know the prison literature and the literature on organizations). Each of these literatures is huge, so you usually need to customize to the sets of literature relevant to your questions. For example, I’m interested in organizational legitimacy and field-level dynamics, so I don’t need to focus on the set of org theory focused on how managers inspire workers, when workers are more productive, or under what conditions inequality is exacerbated in the workplace—unless it turns out these sorts of issues become major trends in my data and it would be virtually malpractice to ignore them.

And then investigate whether that’s the case. The most important part of this investigation is looking at or identifying the mechanism(s) or process through which some factor/variable is(are) affecting the outcome of interest (either from what I can see in the data or what’s predicted)? If the mechanisms or processes are already specified in the literature, you’re basically fact checking that claim. If there is no mechanism or process specified (or there is but it’s not doing what was claimed), now you have to find the mechanism or process that is.

Mechanism here is just our fancy word for the thing that connects the cause and the effect. If rich kids get good grades, we want to know what the mechanism is: their families can afford and pay for tutors, the household discourse is higher level (e.g., better vocabulary, more sophisticated topics), teacher bias, parents who have time and inclination to check their kids’ homework, kids can pay for other kids to take their tests, rich kids have higher IQs (either because of higher parental IQs and/or better early nutrition), etc.

Process is basically just a series of steps or stages as we go from a starting position to an ending position. The research process starts with a research question (or even earlier with a research interest) and ends with publication (but involves many steps in between like reviewing the literature, collecting your data, analyzing your data, and writing and editing).

If you have no clue about how to answer your question and the literature isn’t inspiring you, more inductively, try writing memos about your data to jar some insights. (I talk about memoing in my methods book if you want more info on that. There are also slides with examples on my website in the Resources page.)

• What observations are you generating? What patterns? What insights?

• What are they telling you about how things work, not just how things are?

• What similarities and differences do you see across groups or settings, not just in your data but also across relevant groups or settings in the literature, or across literatures? [This starts to get into generalization, but it can also help just identify possible mechanisms and processes that didn’t stand out in your data, but are there. Sometimes it’s the really mundane stuff that turns out to be important, but we’re often sensitized/trained to look for the flashing red lights that usually aren’t there.]

• What’s something the lit claims about how things work (which is about cause and effect) that you see in your data or that your data are telling you is wrong or maybe more nuanced or you see a diff variable/mechanism? (But don’t just nuance things—figure out if/how the nuance matters! Way too many papers are rejected because they add nuance without substance or significance. Sometimes, we don’t need more nuance, but as researchers we can get a little over-stoked and get into the weeds that most folks don’t care about and if we can’t convince them to care, we can’t get published.)

Generalize

Now we’re getting into more rarefied air. Generalization used to be more common (at least in my memory—empirical evaluation of this is underway). As an editor, it was like pulling teeth to get folks to do this and that was for a pretty good journal. We complained about it a lot in our editors notes. So what is generalization?

At least as I define it, generalization means identifying the portable findings from your analysis. It requires you to move beyond your dataset/case/empirical context to other cases/empirical contexts (times, places, categories). Most often, this is something we see in the discussion and/or conclusion sections because you’re moving beyond your dataset (the findings section). This is where you enumerate where/when else have we seen this/might we see this, or where we would expect to see it but didn’t/don’t.

How big do you have to go? It depends on the project and the journal, but I think there are certain questions that a curious reader would just ask like where else do we see this happening or how unique is this? For example, if you talk about the experiences of a group, and there are other similarly situated groups, a natural question you should expect is do these other groups have a similar experience? If no one has done research on it, you should call for more research to replicate your study on these other groups.

Why? We actually learn more about your group (or case) by looking at other cases. For example, to take a common example, if someone argues a minority group experiences a negative outcome because of “white supremacy,” we would want to see if other minority groups similarly experience these outcomes and through the same or similar mechanisms or processes. That is, it would help us figure out if your key variable is actually doing the work you think it is. If we don’t see it, that doesn’t mean your study is wrong—if you did good work and you uncovered the breadcrumbs that link X and Y in a convincing way, you’re probably safe. But you still might be missing part of the story: this is where we get into scope conditions and intervening or conditioning variables. Maybe white supremacy affects this group, but not that group because that other group is protected in a given way by the presence of some other factor not present for the first group. So it’s not just a simple story of white supremacy causes some bad outcome, but it’s white supremacy and the absence of some protective factor (that exists for other groups) causes some bad outcome. To really flesh out the story, we need to explore across groups. And the more groups and times and places we study, the more we flesh out that story and learn about how this variable actually causes the bad outcome.

For publishing purposes, there are specific considerations (although take these for a grain of salt because publishing norms have been collapsing and are not really enforced evenly or in some cases at all anymore). For a subfield journal focused on a particular topic, you’d probably want to focus on other examples within that topic. For example, if I’m studying a prison, I’d want to show some evidence (from the larger literature that what happens at my prison happens at other prisons or explain why it didn’t happen elsewhere—but why we still would expect it to happen in some places). Depending on how general my phenomenon is or how abstracted* I can describe it, I might talk about how we actually see what I’m describing in other contexts like police departments and probation agencies. But if I’m writing for a more generalist journal, I’d want to move beyond prisons and the criminal justice system to other contexts like schools and hospitals or workplaces and neighborhoods. Doing this well often involves reading beyond your empirical/topical context either in other empirical contexts or reading theoretical literatures that can bridge empirical contexts.

*I keep using the word “abstraction” and not defining it. I have a whole post planned on “WTF is abstraction?” But basically I mean stepping up a level of generality or moving beyond the very specific data to the larger and larger categories of which they are a part. For example, instead of this prison, it becomes prisons; instead of prisons, it becomes organizations. Instead of this set of grades, it becomes grades; instead of grades, it becomes measures of performance (or aptitude or ability).

One practical way to think about how general I need to be: I want someone who doesn’t care about prisons to read and use (and cite) my piece, and to do that, I need to talk about a general phenomenon that happens to manifest in prisons but also manifests elsewhere. If I don’t care about that, then I can just publish in a subfield journal and be read by other prison scholars.

So basically, generalizability is optional and contingent on where you want to publish and what your goals are. And how generalizable you get depends—you can keep it relatively local and subfield focused or you can go wide and really stretch across subfields. I generally like generalizability and I think it’s a missed opportunity when folks don’t do it. But as people have more to read and less time, and publication pressures are higher, I think we’re seeing less of it, especially because it is increasingly viewed as optional.

Theorize

So if you’re familiar with my normativity article, you will realize that I’m changing my definition of theory here. Previously, I defined theory fairly inclusively (in the way I see a lot of folks define it now) to include explanation at some level of abstraction so it can be generalizable. (In my piece with Alena Shalaby, we focused on “Big Theory” which was theory that is really ambitious in its generalizability, really trying to get across large swaths of time and place, so usually macro-level explanations (but in theory, micro-level explanations that are also true across time and place but for a lot of people would also count.) But in this post, I’m putting theory on a separate step than generalization after analysis (explanation). Why?

As I mentioned before, I was always a little uncomfortable with my definition of theory—by my definition, my article would have been theory, but I’d feel weird calling it theory (and I didn’t in the article). I think most folks in my field are interested in explaining why things happened, but usually we’re focused on major historical events and so the explanations are pretty specific; and while we can extrapolate to other times and places, often, that’s not really what we’re setting out to do, so their generalizability is probably pretty weak. But then we call it theory anyway. Alternatively, we’re explaining a broad trend across a lot of places already making our account pretty general, but it’s basically backstopped by the set of places we look at rather than having the ability to go further. So that’s one hesitation.

The other and stronger hesitation is I feel like theory really does need scope conditions, meaning under what conditions do we see this outcome, not just X causes Y in many places. As I’ve mentioned many times, when I was new (grad student and early faculty) and still trying to figure out the differences, I used to distinguish between “theoretical framework” and “theory,” where a framework was basically the broad explanation or even a discussion of which variables were typically important and a theory was something tighter—we see Y outcome when A, B, and C co-occur or X causes Y if a is present but not b. That is, to be able to actually generate testable predictions. Basically, something more like what Merton or Black would want, but something I explicitly discounted in my article because I was trying to use a definition I thought most people would agree with (sweet summer child that I was).

So, I’d define theory as, comparing across cases (in or beyond your dataset) to identify the enabling conditions that allow an outcome type (the consistent combination of causes or consequences) and formulate testable predictions. For example, you might hypothesize the conditions under which the outcome of interest will occur or what the consequences will be.

Next Steps for Me

While I’ve been developing these ideas over time (some of the analysis came from my tweet from a few years ago and the typology came from a recent talk), I’m still mulling this over, so treat it as provisional. I basically came up with these ideas a bit inductively and from conversations and the general ether, and I’m absolutely reinventing the wheel (except that I’m trying to articulate what I think other folks would say for each of these; the key is I’ve not consulted any sources/authorities in the process). Now I want to go back and reread Merton, Black, my old methods books, my own methods book, and try to see how different folks articulated these concepts, now that I have sort of staked out what I think of as reasonable positions. If you have other recommendations, please send them my way. I don’t know when I’ll do this since my one-semester sabbatical is officially over and I’m starting my term as grad chair, but at some point, I’ll do a mini comp exam prep session for myself….

Since the panel and Q&A brought up some additional comments or questions that I’ve heard before, I’m adding a “Part 2” to my previous reflections post to add in a few more responses that I’ve now heard at least more than once, plus some other observations I’ve had about publishing this article and the response to it.

What Folks Think I Said v. What I Actually Said, or We Actually Agree on Most Things

A general observation across various responses to my article this almost-year is I actually agree with much of what people are saying. Importantly, folks often don’t realize that what they are saying isn’t inconsistent with what I said in my article. That is, there’s a common tendency for folks to criticize what they think my article is saying, not what it is actually saying. As a result, I’m not getting a lot of feedback on my actual article. Hence the “but aren’t you being normative” critique (see previous post) that assumes I’m simply critiquing normativity, for example.

Side Story on Other Ways of Knowing

As an example of the what-I-said-v.-what-they-think-I-said tension, recently a colleague told me I was rejecting “other ways of knowing.” (“Other ways of knowing” is an interesting idea that I’ve started to encounter over the last five or so years. As Nayna Schwerdtle et al. explain, it can mean a lot of different things and is invoked for a lot of reasons, some of which are reasonable—let’s be aware of other ways to figure things out than “Western” methods and other potentially valuable sources of knowledge—and some are less reasonable—to be inclusive, we must treat all ways of knowing as equally valuable and on par with science. I actually first heard the latter arguments when I was living in Canada c. 2018, which is when I added a class session on Indigenous methods to my qualitative methods seminar.)

My colleague didn’t explain their reasoning for why they think this is something I’ve said or believe, so I can only surmise that, because I was prioritizing “science” logics as integral to generating theory, they thought that I don’t support other forms of knowledge creation that aren’t science, including Indigenous techniques of knowledge formation. That requires extrapolating quite a bit from what I actually said in my article (remember, my article was about what counts as theory in peer-reviewed research, not what counts as knowledge*). Having served on a committee for ensuring we fund research using “other ways of knowing” (which, ironically, in that context lumped together Indigenous knowledge and qualitative methods), I can say I don’t actually reject other ways of knowing. I also don’t think there’s anything uniquely special about other ways of knowing, and my colleague’s example illustrates why.

*I could try to push further and tie this critique to a more common critique that I was expecting and nervous about which is: am I incorrectly discounting other types of theory because of my definition of theory, a concern that I’ve previously discussed. But I don’t think I am, even in this case. Can we find theories as I would define them in Indigenous knowledge systems? Very likely, yes. I’m insufficiently versed, but I strongly suspect Indigenous folks have generalizable causal stories. Whether they are good/believable/accurate or not is a separate question that should be reviewed on a case-by-case basis (as we do with our own theories). Can you have intersections of Indigenous knowledge and science? Absolutely! But when we’re talking about other ways of knowing in the Indigenous context, we’re not talking about theory, typically—indeed, one version of “other ways of knowing” is literally about how we come to know things, not what are the styles of conveying/summarizing that knowledge. So it’s worth noting that data collection and analysis is different from theorizing; theorizing can happen in the analysis phase or theory could motivate the data collection, but we would be conflating things a bit to liken them too much. Basically, there’s a difference between the practice of figuring things out (e.g., science) and one of the mechanisms we use for distilling what we think we know about how things work (e.g., theory). This distinction gets conflated in this conversation.

My colleague used the example of an Indigenous person doing a “rain dance,” observing that rain happens, and then passing on the wisdom about rain dances bringing rain. I don’t think this is a good example for their argument. As far as I know, rain dances aren’t effective (or if they are, they are extremely rare and must be the product of extremely skilled and spiritually connected practitioners), so as an example of Indigenous knowledge, this is a weak and kind of offensive example that would actually support my alleged argument—again, even though I didn’t say anything about rejecting Indigenous knowledge (their example) or “other ways of knowing” generally.

A better example would be Indigenous knowledge generated from generations of trial and error and close observation to develop practices of sustainability (e.g., sustainable fishing, forest management) or navigation (see the Kanaka Maoli traveling thousands of miles to what is now Hawaii). They might not have used the scientific method, but they used a lot of the same components we see as central to science. In a real sense, they collected a lot of data over time; later, they looked through generations of stories to piece together correlations; and over the years, they tried various strategies (maybe not perfect experiments, but trial and error) enough to figure out how things work. That’s entirely legitimate, especially for their contexts, where that was the cutting edge. (Because this approach requires a lot of data over long stretches of time, it’s a very stretched out process, whereas science is more accelerated because the practices are distilled to be maximally efficient. Each process is adapted to the tools available.) For me, the central point is that these are evidence-based practices that have been shown (I think—I’m not an expert in this) to be effective. Anecdotally, I’ve heard stories about how incorporating Indigenous knowledge has helped with sustainability practices, suggesting there are ways of approaching problems or questions that can be better tackled in combination with or directly through Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing (e.g., techniques that have been honed for figuring these things out, which can complement microscopes and such).

I’m not going to weigh in on whether science is superior, since that’s either an empirical question that I simply can’t answer or a values-based question that will have many answers based on individual preferences. I will say that I think, given the tools available at the time, figuring out sustainable practices and cross-ocean navigation are both incredible accomplishments. I suspect formal science with similar motivations could have accelerated the process (which I think is one reason why Europe accelerated so quickly after the Scientific Revolution and why we continue to see rapid change with further technological change), but independently figuring out how to do these things in much smaller societies is truly impressive. Moreover, I’m glad these alternatives exist in case we’re ever in a situation where all tech goes kaput (i.e., living on an island in the middle of the Pacific, I’m glad there are folks who know how to navigate under those circumstances). Finally, it’s worth noting that putting science in a bureaucratic setting and introducing other imperatives very well might be slowing the pace of knowledge creation and innovation, so it’s not like Western ways are always obviously superior.

One open question is whether we need other ways of knowing (i.e., Indigenous styles of data collection and analysis) now that we have those grounded in scientific ways of knowing. Again, I’m generally open to the idea, with the understanding that there may be substantial variation and the question should be considered on a case-by-case basis (e.g., there may be a style of observing or collecting data that is new to someone like me and would be superior). Indeed, I continue to be intrigued to know if there’s something we can learn from Indigenous knowledge about the stars that would aid astronomy and astrophysics. I suspect the answer is no because we just have different research questions, and, at this point, the tools we have developed in science to answer core questions of astrophysics are better suited. But this is an empirical question that remains open.

Despite my openness to these possibilities, I also don’t think we should prioritize other ways of knowing simply because they exist, just to be “inclusive.” As illustrated above, there is a huge variety in what counts as other ways of knowing and how much they have to offer (and how that is also contingent on place and time). I would say, to be taken seriously, we have to see that they actually have something to offer—that they have a non-trivial chance of providing some truth value (ironically, a challenge we’re running into with fields having reproducibility and replication problems, both because our instantiation of science is imperfect and because the underlying questions and data are complex). But in the same way that viewpoint diversity proponents aren’t suggesting that we need to have specialists in flat-earth theory on the faculty (as critics often suggest), I don’t think we need to platform all other ways of knowing just because they exist (if you did, btw, you’d also need to add religious cosmologies—which can actually be interestingly studied historically for seeing how some ideas about how to live life actually made sense for the time and place, or how some stories had grains of historical accuracy, but this is not the same as treating stories as perfectly accurate truth). Likewise, I do not support efforts to prioritize other ways of knowing in a move to be inclusive or respectful (again, you could make the same argument about religious ways of knowing, which are not usually included here). Instead, if you can show me value in another way of knowing, then by all means, it should have a seat at the table. And to be clear, there are some that I think do and should.

(Note: This is how you steelman an argument and then engage it, for those following along.)

The Strawman Problem

Related to folks’ tendency to confuse what I said and what they think I said is the tendency to reduce my article to making a strawman argument. Unfortunately, usually, it’s not even a strawman version of my argument, but a different strawman argument. However, I’ve also noticed a tendency on my part to respond to the strawman instead of explaining that’s not what I said and stopping there, in part because I do have thoughts on these issues and I want to discuss them, and in part because it triggers a kind of defensiveness that I’m not good at resisting. (A friend and I were talking about how this is an interesting pattern we see in other contexts where people get locked into countering a more extreme/critical, if irrelevant, characterization of a situation rather than focusing on the more directly relevant stuff.) It also seems like kind of a lame response to just say “I didn’t say that.”

Now on to some actual critiques….

I largely cite women and people of color, which is “disturbing.”

An unspecified high number of my examples, I have been told, are studies by women and people of color. This critique overlaps with the earlier claims that I must be racist, sexist, etc., to make my claims, since this one is a veiled claim that I am racist and sexist by picking on these scholars. As I’ll explain below, I’m willing to assume the factual part of this critique—patterns of disproportionate citations—is true, although I don’t know the demographics of everyone I cited, nor did I look them up (and I suspect I would get in trouble if I did and then tried to determine the race, ethnicity, or gender of those I cited based on their name or picture). So let’s just assume they are correct that I am mostly criticizing work by women and people of color. I’ll first respond on its merits and then I’ll discuss some of the larger/second-order problems with this critique.

As should be clear when I described my sampling in my prior post, I sampled based on research markers, not people. Unfortunately, the research markers I use tend to be more common in topics and methodologies that are more often used by women and people of color, and some such scholars use these markers across their scholarship, so some show up more than once. Importantly, I cited a lot of scholars; while I know some of them, and thus I know their demographics, I do not know most of them. Of the latter large group, several included their demographics in their positionality statements; however, most of those authors identified as white (in contrast to some of the research on who uses positionality statements). While writing the article, one group that I noticed does appear* to be overrepresented in my study was Canadians, but no one seems to be discussing that.

*I didn’t count; it was just an impression I had while writing.

So now the question is: does it matter to critics if it was intentional or not? Presumably, if it was intentional, that would be far worse (and I would agree since citing or criticizing someone based on their demographics is hugely problematic and unacceptable). But I suspect the critics don’t care if it wasn’t intentional. Either way, is this actually a valid critique? I’d say no.

For starters, I find this critique problematic because it uses a political or moral consideration rather than an empirical consideration to critique my article (which is a theme). It doesn’t say my analysis is wrong, but immoral. Ironically, my new article arguing against such moves just came out yesterday.

One important thing I don’t think people are realizing is that using “your argument is racist” rather than “your argument is wrong” as a critique not only fails to evaluate an article on its merit, but it is a soft way of shutting someone down. That is, this is not a productive way to have a dialogue or debate and arrive at some approximation of truth and knowledge.

At the very least, if we collectively believe that a racist argument is also going to be wrong (that’s usually the implicit logic, in addition to the moral critique), then you should be able to show me how the alleged racism is causing me to be wrong. But if it’s purely an aesthetic argument, that’s not helpful*: I need to know if I’m wrong. And by calling people racist (or sexist or whatever) for making an evidence-based claim, we’re making it hard to have necessary conversations in the field—we’re discouraging people by making the price of speaking up extremely high. No one wants to be called a racist, even if we’re being labeled such for silly reasons, which leads most people to self-censor.

*Aesthetic arguments can be helpful if they are about communication, since part of what we need to do is communicate clearly. And arguably there are some aesthetic things we do to aid communication like how we organize our papers or how we define our jargon terms. Those aren’t about being accurate or inaccurate, but just communication. Technically, that’s not aesthetic, but since I’m distinguishing here between aesthetics and accuracy, I figure I should add that caveat.

Also troubling, this critique seems to say we need to treat underrepresented scholars differently and be careful about criticizing them. This is, of course, the converse of citation justice, which argues we should cite underrepresented scholars to uplift them. (To be fair, the earliest versions of citation justice were about correcting biases such that women and people of color were not cited when they were relevant; however, since then, the practice has turned from a plea to remove our biased blinders into a quota practice where if you don’t cite (enough) women and people of color, your work is suspect.) Moving forward, the critique seems to imply, ensure that if you write a critique of the literature, you mostly cite white men, even if they are increasingly a minority of the field.

(I don’t have data on the race and gender of published authors, nor for punishment studies specifically, but if we can extrapolate from sociology, here is the data on ASA members.)

Finally, there’s one important point I want to make about citing women when criticizing a field: at this point, we are a majority of the field. If you are going to discuss literature in the field and it’s going to be proportionately representative of the field (which my work wasn’t actually trying to be), the cited work will be around half female (if focusing on scholarship in the last decade or so) or disproportionately female (if focusing on more recent work). Interestingly, these numbers skew a bit when looking at who is doing big theory—men are pretty consistently overrepresented there relative to the field at large. But I wasn’t talking about big theory, I was talking about work that claims to be theory but isn’t because of its commitment to normativity.

Don’t we have an obligation to be normative?

Add this one to the category for what I said versus what people think I said. I can address it in a few ways.

For starters, my article was about replacing theory with normativity (and arguably about the erosion of scholarly standards when it comes to normative work—the shift in scientific to activist logics). What you do outside of your peer-reviewed research, and especially on your own time, is up to you. You can protest, donate or volunteer to causes, run for office, write op-eds, etc. You do you—I’m not stopping you. I’ve even written another paper (the same one mentioned above) to clarify some of the confusion on this front.

That caveat aside, sure, I can play.

First, if one really wants to push on this issue, on average, we are not trained in morality, ethics, philosophy, normative theory, etc. (I actually took several philosophy classes in college and grad school, where I was also a TA for a philosophy of punishment class several times. Even so, I do not consider myself a trained philosopher. I know enough to know some of the classic arguments related to crime and punishment, and even some of the most famous philosophers’ arguments, and to have a general sense about the style of philosophical argumentation, but that’s about it.)

Since I keep getting this critique/question from sociologists, keep in mind we have two central requirements in our field, typically: methods training and social theory. So if you happened to take a class on Rawls (cool, so did I), that doesn’t make us philosophers. And if we try to weigh in on issues “as sociologists,” we should stick to what makes us sociologists. This means we should probably stick to what we have learned based on theories that have been derived from and tested on data and what we know descriptively, based on systematic reviews of available data.

Second, there’s a weird arrogance in thinking our views are better than those of other people, which seems to be behind this perceived moral obligation to tell the world what we think it should be and what we think people should think. We are better informed, according to some folks, therefore, our views are better. As I’ve said before, we do not have the monopoly on expertise anymore. If we are truly good teachers and researchers, we should be able to convey the relevant information to someone to give them the chance to form their own view, consistent with their own personal (social, moral, political) priors applied to the information we supply them. If at the end of the day, they don’t agree with our personal viewpoint, that’s okay. Being an expert does not make our view better (more morally right) than theirs. But the key is providing information to help them form their views, not telling people what they should think. We’re not dictators. (And this goes triple for our students, quadruple if we’re at a public university. Our job is not to tell them what they should think but to give them the tools to create or find knowledge for themselves and how to critically evaluate it. I have too many friends who think our job is to save them from their mistaken views…. Not misconceptions of the world, but views. Views, which are the things we believe or prefer based on some combination of what we think we know about reality and what our values are.)

Now, one point I think is worth discussing is what do we owe the world? Particularly for those of us whose educations, salaries, and research are subsidized by taxpayer dollars, this is something we likely think about and, many would argue, we should think about. On some moral level, I assume we owe the world something, but as noted, I’m not trained in the details of morality (and I know enough to know there are different views on morality). As a matter of professional ethics, I think there are stronger rules about not abusing our position or substituting our own views for what the data say. Indeed, we are required to speak the truth; one funny thing about moral positions is they are neither true nor false, they are opinions. They can be coherent or defended and supported, but some of them are just feelings, so sometimes our only justification for our moral positions is: “I feel that this is right.” So when we speak as social scientists, we need to stick to the realm of reality and statements with truth value (as opposed to something that is simply our personal “truth,” which is not the same thing). When I speak about moral obligations, I speak as a regular person who has views about contentious issues, not as a social scientist.

The tricky part is, as a social scientist, I can report that one tension I’ve run into is that people (students, policymakers, neighbors) often want us to say what we think or to share our recommendation. But people are also heterogeneous. Other people think we are arrogant, biased idiots who don’t know much about the real world, so they don’t want our view and don’t trust it. It’s tricky to thread that needle, and I think we need to do it carefully if we (a) want people to listen to us and take us seriously and (b) if we want to protect our legitimacy. Gloriously, this is something we can actually empirically study, both observationally and experimentally (who wants to do a vignette study?). But in the moment, how do I thread this needle?

For me, there’s a difference between sharing my own moral view about a policy (which I do not think I should thrust on anyone else) and sharing what the evidence says, what its limitations are, and, if possible, what the evidence seems to suggest would help achieve a given outcome that the audience wants to accomplish (whether I like that outcome or not). Likewise, students sometimes ask me questions about morality and I say that’s really something they have to decide for themselves (because we might come at it from different perspectives and values), but I can give them the arguments on either side to help them make that decision. I firmly believe as a matter of professional ethics that it is not our place to tell people what they should do, believe, or feel; we can provide information to help them decide, but many of these issues we’re asked about are complicated mixtures of reality and preferences—we can help try to illuminate the reality, but people’s preferences are their own. It is going beyond our role as knowledge generators or disseminators to try to convince them to believe something else or to value something else.

How do I personally deal with what I perceive as a moral obligation to give back to society for funding my education (I’m a public college and grad school alum)? I engage in translational work, I make myself available to journalists and policymakers, and I do contract work that won’t result in publications, but that helps to fund my students and provides a service to the state or local government.

• In my translational work, I provide information and I try to generate debates by asking big questions, but I don’t try to convince people of the moral rightness or wrongness of things (although it’s been interesting to see how often I’m pushed by folks in charge to skew the message into a more moralistic one). It’s also worth noting how often just asking the big questions is viewed in a political light (until recently, most folks thought I was a prison abolitionist—and some non-academics still think I am).

• In my media work, I try to provide information and recommendations that match a variety of political perspectives (rather than my own preferences).

• In my contract work, I do data analysis, make recommendations on research design issues, and, when asked, provide policy recommendations based on the data and prespecified goals (which are not necessarily my own goals).

Importantly, these questions of how we deal with these tensions probably don’t have a right answer. We can empirically determine which strategies seem to be most effective at reaching certain goals, but since these are really about moral obligations, I don’t think there’s a right answer. To each their own. We might disagree. And on questions of morality, I do think we should live and let live—up to some extreme limits that are harmful. That’s how democracies work, and even if academia isn’t a democracy, I do think democratic principles are pretty useful and I’d even say we use a lot of democratic logics (see faculty governance).

Activist v. Scientist is a False/Unhelpful Binary / Not Everything I Talk About is “Activist”

This critique is at least getting a bit more substantive, focusing on a question of analysis rather than aesthetics, and it is about what I said in my article, rather than what people think I said. Although even there, I’m not sure I really use binaries—but I can at least see the confusion. And certainly I personally think in terms of binaries, since I’m skeptical you can combine both in research; but as that’s only a bias or a hunch, in my paper, I leave it open for future research to determine.

In my article, I talk about the transition from scientific logics to activist logics as part of a larger shift that I think explains how scholars are both getting away with making normative claims that they call theory and why they are doing it. (For an illustration of how I was thinking about this, see below.)

In talking about these logics, I’m drawing on the institutional logics literature (although the term is used more widely and rarely defined, even though it doesn’t obviously match the dictionary definition). By logics, as I say in the paper, I mean the nexus between, or a general orientation to, goals and rules for an activity in a given institutional domain. So, for example, I think of penal logics as the way the purpose or goals of punishment shape penal policies and practice—it’s like the rationale tied to how and why we do things.

In the article, I argue that the goals of scholarship have changed for a non-trivial set of scholars and, with them, a new set of rules has been introduced to help advance those goals. I discuss a number of things authors are doing that seem to discount standard scholarly or “scientific” requirements of doing research, and then I discuss the role of reviewers (and, with only indirect evidence, editors) in this as well. Essentially, you see people obeying and enforcing new rules and endorsing goals. I label these new goals and rules “activist logics” because they are grounded in achieving social or political change, which is definitionally activism, not science.

Keep in mind, these are logics. You do not have to personally identify as an “activist” or a “scientist” to use these logics. Instead, as I define things in the paper, if you make research decisions based on the question of what social or political outcome it will have, you are not using scientific logics, but you’re not necessarily using an activist logic just yet. If you are specifically basing research decisions on whether or not they advance social or political change, that would be using an activist logic. So there is actually an interesting gray area that I don’t discuss where you’re using neither activist nor science logics. Realistically, though, I’m guessing if you are actually basing things on the social or political outcome, you’re probably also concerned with what advances social or political change, so this might just be splitting hairs or a difference without a distinction.

At the panel, one of the authors I’d cited in my paper was in the audience and they disputed my labeling them an activist. Interestingly, I actually hadn’t done that. Amazingly, I recalled exactly where and how I’d cited them (and I confirmed that I had this right afterwards): I’d cited them in my description of the normative turn in the social sciences in the intro. So I’d not directly called them or their work activist. However, I think it would be fair to say that indirectly I said they were using activist logics: applying my framework, since they had specific social justice goals motivating research choices, that would be an activist logic (although interestingly this too they disputed, but they didn’t say why). This exchange raises some interesting questions: do folks openly and explicitly committed to social justice goals in their research really not see their work as scholar-activism? In departments and social circles where that label is still a bad word, I’d imagine that’s the case. Indeed, there are some Bourdieusians who absolutely fit my definition of a scholar activist, but who don’t self-identify as such. Some folks use the label of “public intellectual” instead. It would be really fascinating to dig deeper into these distinctions about how folks think about and justify their work (and how this might change across contexts) and how this self-identification is affecting current discussions about the state of academia. (That is, I suspect that a lot of folks doing scholar activism don’t think they are, and thus reject as bogus a lot of the descriptions of research corruption by the social justice wave. When we use different terms to describe the same thing, that’s where discussion can get really difficult.)

Now that I’ve explained the logics, I’ll move on to the critiques more explicitly. I’ve previously discussed the limitations of the “activist” label, but here I can talk about two things this critique adds: 1) the “science” label and 2) the binary. Since I’ve already been addressing the binary, I’ll start there.

The Binary

As sociologists, we often work with ideal types, so this is sort of a strange comment to get: there’s nothing wrong with working with binaries. Of course, we can have false or misleading binaries, which are problems. As I noted above, folks can self-identify as both scientists and activists (even though a lot of activists often criticize science). So at the level of the individual, it would be a false binary. But that’s not the unit of analysis for my paper. I was working at the field level and at the level of competing logics. Thus, in my article, I tried to explain that logics can coexist and fields can have mixtures of activism and science. I even offered some empirical questions about what happens when fields have different levels of activism (i.e., coinciding with scientific logics). Since this should all be clear from the above discussion, I’ll move on.

Science

A good friend and colleague of mine hates it when I refer to what we do as “science.” He has said that he has never done science and most likely neither have I. (My husband, who is a physicist, goes apoplectic at this statement.) This objection also puzzles me because we’re literally called social scientists. I think we have some obligation to be scientific in what we do, and it seems like the public expects this of us, too.

One problem is we don’t seem to agree on what that actually means. Indeed, my friend has also said that I don’t sufficiently define what I mean by science, which is probably part of the disagreement. (This is something I’ve worked on in my new piece that just came out, although at last check, he was still unsatisfied with my explanation in that piece.)

For example, if you define science as doing experiments, then sure, most social scientists aren’t doing science. That criteria is consistent with how we rank the social sciences: psychology, which is all about experiments, is the most sciency SS discipline; poli sci and econ are sort of tied for second, and they both are really keen to use quasi-experiments, natural experiments, and other tools to identify causal inference; then sociology, which uses the fewest experiments but still uses them; then anthropology, which doesn’t use any. (I have no idea where folks usually put Demography and Geography since they’re not often mentioned. Demography tends to be really quant focused, but I’m not sure about their use of experiments or quasi-experimental methods. So those would be an interesting out-of-sample test for the question of the correlation between use of experiments and how “sciency” people think the field is.)

But by that experiment-grounded definition, many physicists aren’t scientists. My husband specializes in a branch of cosmology (studying the history and composition of the universe) that uses a certain type of supernova (an exploding star) to better understand how much dark energy (the unknown force we think is driving the expansion of the universe) is in space, how quickly the universe is expanding, and thus whether or not it will eventually collapse in on itself. Don’t worry—in 1998-1999, supernovae gave us a surprising result: we’re not in a rubberband model of the universe that will snap back. Instead, the evidence seems to suggest the expansion of the universe is accelerating and will continue to do so. There are some new controversies about the force driving this, which we think is dark energy, but we don’t really understand it (in physics, things we don’t understand are called “dark,” or at least that’s the running joke).

Why the scintillating physics lesson? None of these findings are rooted in experiments (there are some lab-based experiments, but not using supernovae, because, you know, they are exploding stars). The field is literally called observational cosmology, distinguished from experimental cosmology. But I don’t think anyone would say my husband, or his Physics-Nobel-prize winning advisor and coauthor Saul Perlmutter, isn’t a scientist. And let’s not get started on theoretical physics, much of which is more about math than experiments (although some theorists also do some experiments). The point is, lots of “real” science doesn’t use experiments.

So why is my colleague (and others) uncomfortable with my using “science” as a label? I generally try to define my terms, but I think part of the problem is I’m uncharacteristically concise when I talk about science, in part because it’s such a big concept and I don’t want to get bogged down on something that’s supposed to be something I can mention in passing. But that’s a bad justification. I’ve also recently realized that one thing I struggle with is I conflate scientific standards and scholarly standards. Indeed, I’ve recently (since writing my article) realized that a lot of the core aspects that we (I) associate with science are just core components of scholarship generally, including in the humanities and (to some extent) law schools (surprisingly enough). So we see overlap in things like “organized skepticism,” a general openness to being wrong and needing to interrogate our claims, looking for and addressing counterarguments and contradictory evidence, grounding our work in evidence/data, asking questions and searching for the answer (rather than looking for evidence to support our preselected answers).*

*Indeed, in other contexts (forthcoming later this week), colleagues and I specifically address scholarly standards across disciplines, and those standards are largely consistent with what I noted here. There is a pretty common understanding among those who seek knowledge creation and dissemination that we should actually seek knowledge rather than letting our preferences override what we find, which is seen as preventing us from actually getting knowledge. The primary difference between the humanities and the other fields is they often explicitly deal in values, whereas the rest of us are more focused on facts. (Others distinguish between empirical and interpretative, but I think that’s actually less accurate, with too many type 1 and type 2 errors.) Obviously, not everyone agrees with these claims and distinctions, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find how these ideas transcend disciplinary boundaries, even into fields I naively thought followed different standards, as I said in my prior post, and as I’ll have a lot more to say about soon.

While those strategies are core to science and scholarship more generally, we can also look to the scientific method as a distinguishing feature of science. Some people are a bit skeptical that we actually use the scientific method, but I’d say we do and (like observational cosmologists) we have adapted it for our context, where we can’t always do experiments.

This isn’t a new argument that I’ve only recently started making. In my (2021) methods book, I argue that quantitative scholars and those qualitative scholars interested in the relationship between two or more variables tend to follow the scientific method. What about those qualitative scholars who I call “dirtbaggers,” or folks who sort of figure it out as they go along (from narrowing down their research question to adjusting their research design “in the field”) because they are working with broad research questions that don’t prespecify more than their outcome variable (if it’s even described that way)? I argue they also follow the scientific method but the rules are out of order and the process is more iterative than linear. (And I also explain that in reality, even the quants sometimes do some iterative stuff, but their process is still a bit more rigid, in part because most of the time you really do need to go along in a particular order or else it’s really inefficient or sometimes you’ve tainted your data.)

We’ve even institutionalized the scientific method in the standard layout for our articles—we motivate the research question (Introduction), we review what we think we know and what we don’t know (Lit Review/Theoretical Framework), we lay out our methods (Data and Methods), we share our findings (Findings), we discuss them in ways that link them back to the existing literature (Discussion), and then we link our findings to the original motivation in the intro and then look ahead with our larger implications (Conclusion). In the process we do standard things like discuss our internal and external validity and the limitations to our study. We don’t have to use a hypothesis test to do this, which is why this is an adapted scientific method. But along the way, whatever else we do, we’re expected to be systematic and data driven (literally the definition of empirical).

It’s also notable that in all my book talks and methods workshops, I never got pushback on this idea that we use the scientific method or that we just sometimes swap the order of the steps. Nor did I ever get pushback on the idea that empiricism means systematic and data driven, or when I distinguished qualitative methods from advocacy. During my editorship (2023-Jan 2026), I started to get pushback on the standard components of an empirical article (we were more flexible on the organization and components of theory-only pieces, where it made sense to deviate). But overall, I’d say between 2020 and 2025, at least in my experience, there was a general acceptance of these ideas and of what I have argued is necessary for “rigorous research” when I’m defending qualitative methods, especially dirtbagger approaches, as a legitimate approach to research, but not when sticking to these requirements is viewed as “exclusionary” and “gatekeeping.” In fact, I’ve had a bit of whiplash when getting criticism for making some of the points in my article and as an editor that I had made in Chapter 4 of my methods book (stuff about framing), which a lot of folks said was the best/most helpful/necessary chapter and that no one criticized in front of me.

Closing

The more I get to hear folks’ reactions to my article, the more I’m a bit surprised by what people take from it. To be fair, plenty of people who like the article simply like the conclusions or the political utility of the article. But I also find a lot of folks dislike lots of aspects of the project, often for political reasons. I’m also learning that the article basically becomes a vessel for larger debates that I tried hard not to directly weigh in on in the article and instead to be open to possibilities that I don’t generally think are accurate or appealing. And I’m learning that it doesn’t really matter how many caveats you add or how careful you try to be, some folks are just going to come after you for what they think you said and what you stand for (in the same way that lots of people now assume my politics and stances on all sorts of issues).

More optimistically and pleasantly, I’m happy folks are talking about it and that we’re at least starting to have some discussions. Most seem to ignore it, as part of the larger “I don’t have time for this question”-style response we get to questions I think the field should be discussing. But while I’m disappointed that folks often skip over what I’m actually saying in the article, I’m glad some folks are at least engaging the questions my article brings up, even the questions I explicitly tried to avoid.

I don’t like thinking about grad school as hazing, and I hear people say this all the time (see also medical and law school). But there still seems a fundamental difference between the type of hazing that frats do and what we do (putting aside obvious differences like we aren’t trying to get our students drunk or naked, or if we are, there’s a bigger problem at play).

This morning, I woke up thinking about this discussion, so I briefly wrote down my ideas, trying to further distinguish the practices, and then I looked up the definition of hazing. This short post is the result. I’m sure there’s way more that could be said about the subject, and I’m sure more has been written, but I’m in a hurry.

Colloquial Uses/Understandings of Hazing

My initial “analysis” was to just think through common things I hear about hazing, especially justifications, and compare these to common things/justifications about grad school (especially the way I think about it). My comparison case is Frat Hazing, which honestly I don’t know much about beyond what I see in movies and the news, which I’m sure is a highly biased and often inaccurate sample, but that’s also what informs collective understandings of hazing.

One general thing I hear people say about hazing is, “I did this so you have to do this.” In my view, that’s a pretty terrible justification. There are two possible justifications I can (quickly) think of: 1) camaraderie (collective experiences bind us, just like how everyone who went to Reed College (for a while) read the Illiad, giving them a common experience, regardless of major or year) and 2) a general belief that it worked out for you, therefore this is a good thing to do. I can buy 1) but not 2). But of course, there are lots of common experiences that can bind people; hazing doesn’t have to be the source of those common experiences and is probably a not very good source (I’d guess).

I also tend to think of hazing as intentionally dickish. It seems like a getting-off-on-your-power type of thing.

Finally, I think the root justification of hazing (and for the dickishness) is you’re trying to figure out who is the most committed. It seems like the logic is: if I throw my worst at you and you stick with it, you must be committed, so we’ll let you into our club. (Actually, I should add clubbishness as another component, since that also seems central to hazing. Club can be broadly construed in the same way we talk about “tribes” as a general social collection that’s not literally a tribe in a governmental sense.) So one main purpose (as noted above) of hazing, I’d say, is trying to weed people out by seeing who is the most committed.

I should note that I can’t think of a practical version of typical hazing rituals beyond some level of pliability: are you willing to strip naked and bear your no-no parts to your friends, are you willing to drink a disgustingly large amount of alcohol, are you willing to do some miscellaneous task that is really gross like eating a worm or something? Beyond pliability and commitment, these tasks (in my mind) serve no practical purpose. Even drinking or being naked—as much as we associate these with frats, it seems like once you’re in, it’s up to you how much you actually drink or when and where you’re naked in front of your dudes. So this really makes me think it’s about commitment rather than some practical/relevant-to-the-task justification.

Academic Rituals

As noted, people sometimes describe various academic hoops in grad school as a form of hazing. So what are the reasons for these hoops? How do we justify them? What are their purposes?

The main one people seem to have a problem with is comps, or the general set of exams students have to take at some point before their prospectus defense for advancing to candidacy (different programs have different requirements—in physics, you take them in week 1).

Comps are big, hard, and scary. If you don’t pass them by the second (or sometimes third) try, you’re out of the program. So they are a super-high-stakes hoop. There’s also a bit of an existential angst, I think, that goes with them: these are tests about a student’s overall knowledge in core fields of their doctoral training—if you can’t pass these, who are you? For people who typically have lengthy records of academic excellence, this is psychologically high stakes because you’re about to find out if you’re as smart as you think you are or want to be.

I put mine off until the last possible minute: I took all three of my big exams (including my prospectus defense) in my fourth year of grad school because, for years, I didn’t feel ready to take them and I finally had to do it because that was the last year I could without getting on probation or something.

Why was it so hard for me? I mostly took methods classes in grad school, and while I took substantive classes, there weren’t many offered in my area, and those that were were pretty niche rather than survey courses. Most of my formal training in my area during grad school came in the form of independent studies and serving as a TA for undergrad classes in my area. So even by my third year, I didn’t feel knowledgeable about really anything beyond methods (which we didn’t have an exam in) and my niche area of prison history, and even in those, I was plenty aware of my limitations. In the end, studying for my comp exam is really when things started to click for me and I stopped feeling like I didn’t know things. It’s when I felt like I could finally see the matrix. It was the best feeling.

As a result, I’m a huge fan of comp exams. Comps are basically the one thing I’d keep about the way we do graduate training and I tell students to start studying for them basically immediately. I strongly suspect that most students in most departments feel a bit like I did because it is rare (especially in small, second-tier programs) to be able to take classes in your area of expertise. Usually, you end up fulfilling your requirements without taking a deep bench of classes in your chosen subfield. So you kind of have to do the Oxbridge model of tutorials to get up to speed. On my website, I include advice about how to go about this.

So I totally get the fear students have about comps, but I also don’t see comps at all as a form of hazing. I see them as an extremely valuable exercise if done well. And honestly, it’s not even the exam part. Good students are often disappointed by the exam: “That was it? That barely scratched my knowledge!” That’s the sign that you are really prepared and the exam is designed to weed out really weak students, not to let the good students develop their ideas (take that energy and use it for papers!). That’s pretty much how it should be (in my view). These are hoops—they are only barriers to those who aren’t prepared (or who have crippling anxiety, which I’d argue you can overcome with preparation), but the test itself should just be a speedbump for those who are.

Okay, so now thinking about comps and whether they are hazing, based on the metrics I used above.

In contrast to the “I had to do it” justification, which implies a heavy continuity over time and perhaps a justification grounded in tradition, comps change over time. Written or oral or both, closed book or open book, take home or in person, 24/48/72 hours/5 days or 5 hours, we supply the reading list or you do. I’ve seen a lot of different models and it’s not clear to me faculty prefer their own way of doing it. I did mine in five hours, closed-book, written exam; that was fine for me, but I don’t object to a 5-day take-home open-book version.

Comps aren’t alone: grad requirements generally change over time. Recently, we’ve been doing a number of things to try to make them more humane and, as technology changes, to also try to avoid cheating. Rather than justifying their existence through a kind of intergenerational retribution (making future generations pay for the crimes committed against us), they are justified by identifying merit.

And here’s the key: our requirements are not intended to be dickish. Instead, the requirements are trying to see whether or not people are hitting the benchmarks required to move on to the next stage, to see if you’re getting what you need from your coursework and training. To put this at its most brusque, we are trying to separate the wheat from the chaff, i.e., who is good enough to keep with it. And especially in programs where you are paying for your grad students (through fellowships or TAships), this is really important because you have limited resources and you don’t want to keep paying for a student who isn’t going to graduate or is going to take 10 years to do so and even then barely get through.

This is basically the only major similarity: we’re trying to weed people out. But that doesn’t mean it’s hazing. And I think I finally put my finger on the key difference in this colloquial sense: hazing is about figuring out who is the most committed; grad school requirements is trying to figure out who hits the minimum markers of qualified.

Definitions

Okay, so once I figured out the colloquial argument, I decided to look up the actual definition of hazing. Oh boy. The way we talk about it is very different from what I found.

Okay, so some things to pull out here: 1) hazing is definitely about the process of joining a group (an initiation process) and 2) it’s definitionally not nice—abusive, degrading, humiliating, unpleasant, unsafe. What’s interesting is neither Google’s AI summary nor Merriam-Webster’s definition explain the rationale or justification for hazing (whereas my analysis really centered on justification).

In case there is more to it, I just pulled up the definition of “haze”:

So here we have a continuation of the emphasis on the badness—harassment is the core of the general definition of to haze, while an unpleasant initiation process is still core to the frat meaning.

Since these definitions lack a justification, and just focus on the unpleasantness of an initiation process, I can see why people think grad school is about hazing—if they think of the experience as unpleasant. But this is hard for me to relate to. I loved grad school. It was a major growth period in my life where I came out of my shell (a beloved professor later said I “really blossomed”—after saying she didn’t think highly of me at first). Sure, there were unpleasant parts of it—I had some asshole professors along the way, but that’s not different from most workplaces where you occasionally have to deal with bad bosses (or bad colleagues or bad clients). I don’t think we’d call that hazing.

That’s not to say folks don’t have bad experiences in grad school—obviously, there’s sexual harassment, discrimination, and other horrific things that happen. But those aren’t supposed to happen (and often they are illegal). And those aren’t the core parts of the program—they are interpersonal issues that become magnified because, as a grad student, you’re often dependent on the goodwill and basic decency of your faculty, so they can become more structural. But (to switch into org theory jargon for a moment) they are part of the “informal structure” (culture, rituals, known ways of doing things, but not really written down anywhere) not the “formal structure” (the official rules, policies, programming, naming practices, etc.). And we might even say hazing is always in the informal structure—I could buy that. If there’s a prof who is just a dick to all their students because that’s how they were trained and we need to see that you’re willing to put up with it, I’d be okay with calling that hazing. But that’s very different from comps or the requirements in the program.

Now, an interesting counter is medical school where you do internship programs where (at least historically—I think they’ve stopped doing this) you’d have 48-hour shifts and have to stay awake for most of that period. That is argubly unsafe. Likewise, folks can be pretty brusque (dickish). So is that hazing? By my colloquial analysis, I’d say no, because there’s a clear purpose to this: you’re going to have to stay awake for long periods of time (some surgeries can last more than 10 hours, medical folks have long shifts). Likewise, you will literally be in life and death situations and you will also have patients who will lose their shit on you; if you are going to crumble when your prof chides you badly for missing an answer, the story goes, you won’t have what it takes when you’re in those more intense environments.*

*I don’t actually know if that’s been empirically validated and I’d be really curious to know. I can imagine some could argue that building confidence makes you better able to handle those scary situations. Whatever the truth, it would be good to actually find out if the justifications are accurate, especially because that does seem like something where you could design experiments (you wouldn’t go into an operating room and perform on a patient, that would be unethical, but you could simulate other high-stakes outcomes, or even trick the test subjects into thinking they are working on a real person or use a computer program like they do with pilots). Alternatively, you could see across medical schools/programs that have different cultures and see how their students fare later, especially if it seems like they are well matched for comparison (there are a lot of schools, so you could probably find some comparison cases with similar students and different cultures). Or you could look at before/after major legal changes.

So my colloquial analysis would say no, but it seems like by some definitions—especially the emphasis on unsafe practices—you could probably argue it is hazing. (Unless you argue that it’s currently unsafe, but to make things safer later.) Indeed, one of the examples above is sleep deprivation. But I really feel like sleep deprivation just for the fun of it (literally on the list of types of torture) is very different from this is what is necessary based on organizational practices (shift work) and building up a tolerance for integrating into that organization.

Okay, I’ve exorcized the demons in my head—I don’t think comps are hazing—and now I can get to work.

Did I miss something? Let me know in the comments!

This Week’s Talk

In my talk, I aim to do three things (text in italics is from my conference abstract):

1.) summarize the arguments of my normativity piece, in part because there have been a lot of confusions about what I said and a tendency to conflate what I wrote in Rubin 2025 (the normativity piece) with Rubin and Shalaby 2025 (our stagnation piece) and Heyer et al. 2023, 2025, and 2026 (our editors’ notes):

A particular style of "theorizing" has increasingly appeared in sociolegal and other social science publications that, I argue, does not produce theory. Instead, these statements tend to be normative claims, meaning claims that are political or ideological, that authors call theory but that lack either generalizability or explanation (or both).

2.) talk about a way forward as a field such that theory is not required (basically endorsing Besbris and Khan 2017 but also providing suggestions for individual scholars, as in this twitter thread but with more updated thoughts, which are also overdue for a post that I previously promised):

I argue that as a community and field, we should support the publication of varied contributions to the academic literature, including projects that exist at different stages of the describe-analyze-theorize continuum, but also encourage authors and readers to be clear about what the contribution is.

3.) revisit the larger question of the role of normativity (politics, ideology, and moralizing) in research, drawing on my forthcoming T&S piece on the line between appropriate and inappropriate politicization in research and my Chicago Forum talk, the slides for which are here:

Moving beyond the theoretical context, I also discuss the varied roles of normativity, distinguishing between policy recommendations based on empirical findings and a priori normative statements that guide the research process and conclusions.

The draft notes for my 15-minute talk for this LSA panel can be found here.

Positive Responses to My Article

A funny thing happened when my article came out. People actually read it.

It became a trending article. It was covered in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Within two weeks of publication, the altmetric score got to the 94th percentile, which is roughly where it’s hanging out now (actually, it’s up to the 97th percentile). In the last year, it was “accessed” more than 4,000 times from the journal’s website. ResearchGate says the preprint had more than 400 “full-text reads” (although I doubt it actually knows if people downloading a paper are actually reading it). It’s also been cited more than 20 times. (Yes, this is all very braggy. It will get worse. I’m sorry. I’m not sure how to do this without sounding braggy. If it helps, I’m a bit dumbfounded by all of this, and you’ll soon see why. So read this in a clinical monotone with an undercurrent of “WTF?”)

Some people liked it. And they told me.

More importantly, something happened that has never happened to me before following an article publication: people reached out. And sure, I’d gotten fan mail for my methods book (which was super cool), but nothing like this. In the last year, I’ve received more than 30 emails (maybe 40 now) from scholars in sociology, criminology, history, and other fields, including what I think of as pretty inherently normative fields like women’s studies, philosophy, bioethics, and political theory. Among the sociologists who wrote to me, many were big-name scholars who, I’m pretty sure, had never heard of me before. I also heard from students and junior scholars who said things along the lines of ‘I didn’t feel comfortable writing like this, but I thought we had to.’ A few told me stories of pressure to change their words or even, in some cases, their findings. All of the emails were positive, with everyone or almost everyone expressing gratitude for writing the article. Even at conferences, I had people whisper to me that they liked my article (literally whisper).

(Now that I’m kind of “out” (between my article, my commitment to viewpoint diversity, my open criticism of sociology and “activist” research, and my twitter content), I’m also just semi-regularly hearing from grad students across the country and across fields (almost all of whom are liberal, btw) facing pushback for “conservative” findings or are otherwise having difficult times in their graduate programs because they don’t fit the current mold of student activist.)

A big lesson was if you stick your head out of your foxhole, yes, it might get blown off, but you also meet new allies.

I learned this is not a phenomenon unique to my field

In part because so many people wrote to me, I learned about a number of other related articles, either from the authors themselves or from folks telling me about the articles (or in some cases, I found people complaining about my article along with other articles). Importantly, these articles are often about other fields, not just punishment studies or criminology or sociolegal studies. I now have a collection of similar or cognate articles across fields [edit: a list which I keep updating as I learn of new ones or find others I left off originally]:

• In the law, especially constitutional law, see Tarunabh Khaitan’s article criticizing “scholactivism” (this article generated a lot of responses defending scholactivism, for example, see here)

• In psychology, see Jussim and Honeycutt’s article on “propaganda scholarship” claiming to be science (plus an earlier article by Gambrill and Reiman creating an index for identifying propaganda in science and an article by Clark et al. on self-censorship and fear among psychologists for discussing controversial subjects)

• In economics (!), see this critique of the literature on degrowth, much of which involves critical and especially environmental justice frameworks, offering “opinions” rather than “analysis”

• In chemistry (!), see Krylov and Tanzman’s critique of how social justice is affecting scientific publishing as well as Krylov’s other piece on similar themes

• In biology (!), see Coyne and Maroja’s Skeptical Inquirer piece on the ideological subversions of the field (covering a lot of the same topics that are hot wires in sociology)

• In medicine, see Huddle’s piece here and his Chronicle piece with Satel here (but see also the somewhat critical response by Len Gutkin here)

• In political theory, there’s a forthcoming article on how a lot of normative theory fails to actually be theory

• In American Studies, see Kahlenberg and Lin’s review of their field’s lead journal’s political slant

• In punishment/criminal justice studies, see Justin Tetrault’s critique of decolonizing claims in critical prison studies that differ from what Indigenous folks want

• In philosophy, see Paul Boghossian’s critique of relativism and “different ways of knowing”

• Across several fields, see Nayna Schwerdtle et al.’s critique of the call to different ways of knowing

• See Len Gutkin’s roundup and analysis of departmental and professional associations’ statements about political causes here

• In sociology, see John Iceland’s critique of the field’s negativity bias, both affecting what’s not studied but also downplaying actual findings of social improvement — Indeed, there are a lot of critiques of sociology’s ideological and activist commitments like this one (by Smith), this one (a volume edited by Leroux et al.), and this one (a special issue of Sociological Research Methods debating these questions).

• And for folks discussing the lack of conceptual clarity on left-leaning scholars’ favorite concepts, see Jesse Smith’s piece on “Christian nationalism” and Justin Sola’s piece on “neoliberalism” (full disclosure: the latter was the last article I processed as coeditor of that journal, and I’d learned about it at an LSA conference a few years before my article came out)

There are even more articles more generally talking about the role of political biases in academic research—too many to list here. [Edit: I forgot that Lee Jussim has a post with over a hundred sources on this point. A lot of folks have written about it from different fields and different perspectives with different data and arguments.] Manzi’s recent evaluation of different disciplines, documenting the lack of political neutrality in a plurality of articles, is also really interesting.

Even folks in normative fields agreed with my critique

But perhaps my biggest takeaway from these conversations was not that punishment studies isn’t alone in seeing this issue. I suspected that already and wrote about this in the article (in the framing). I mean, punishment studies covers criminology, sociology, geography, anthropology, political science, history, various interdisciplinary fields like women’s and ethnic studies, and others. Sitting in an interdisciplinary field lets you get a peak of what’s going on in other fields. So that part was not so surprising.

What was shocking was hearing agreement from law profs, analytical philosophers, bioethicists, women and gender studies scholars, feminist criminologists, Indigeneity studies scholars, and political theorists—fields I think of as inherently normative and where I assumed the commitment to activism was just standard. And no, that doesn’t mean everyone in those fields will agree with me. Far from it. My point is: I expected the least agreement from these groups, but they gave me discipline/field-specific arguments for why this naive normativity (or activism generally) shaping scholarship is simply wrong.

I learned how, even by the (conventional) standards in their fields, the type of work I was describing—and that they are seeing in their fields—is not what is traditionally considered good work, but it’s getting through anyway. (See below on the question of whether it’s the normativity or the way the normativity is produced.) Now, there are debates in these fields about these issues, but the point is that normativity replacing theory, or activist logics replacing scientific (or scholarly) logics, is something that folks were raising an eyebrow at in these normative fields.

That took a lot to wrap my head around. Hearing philosophers decry theories as slop and drivel that are de rigeur in sociology broke my brain. I thought the problem was that scholars were importing philosophy and humanities stuff into the social sciences, and that was the source of the problem. (And that’s what some folks accused me of misunderstanding, as I’ll note below. That’s almost the critique I expected.) Instead, the theories and approaches that originated in philosophy and some other humanistic disciplines are not respected in those fields. (Relatedly, learning that “historian” Saidiya Hartman’s “creative confabulation” technique does not pass muster among good historians was unexpected, but also a relief, as was learning that she’s not actually a historian—although I couldn’t actually find what field her PhD is in.)

Thus, the problem is not the humanities infecting the social sciences, but bad work getting imported from those fields, and then people in the social sciences not understanding that it’s not good work. Importantly, one critique I was worried about getting—that to be truly inclusive and interdisciplinary, we have to change (read: lower) our standards—is wrong. Scholarly standards are actually pretty consistent across fields. Some of the details vary, but basic things like defining your terms, writing clearly, letting the evidence drive the argument, starting from a position of curiosity rather than commitment to an answer, considering alternative evidence, and acknowledging the limitations of your project are key. Few good scholars actually think you should try to write like Derrida or that the narrative is more important than the truth. In fact, a lot of folks in the humanities see the battles we’re fighting in the social sciences as a war they already fought and won in the 1990s; we’re now dealing with the tidal waves of those long-ago skirmishes hitting our distant shores.

People recognized the article as a risky move

This is probably one of the more uncomfortable things to report on (because it really sounds like I’m tooting my own horn, but honestly it’s embarrassing to talk about this): a lot of the folks who wrote to me (or later spoke with me in person) called me or my article “brave” and “courageous.” At first, I thought it was a little strange—it’s scholarship, we produce scholarship, we tell the truth—these things shouldn’t be associated with words like brave or courageous. (And I’ll explain shortly, I was scared shitless when I decided to move forward with publishing my article. I wasn’t brave or courageous. I was nervous. And I was frustrated and I was basically giving up, but with one last attempt to intervene or, more accurately, intervene on my way out.) But this was a pretty common reaction. I think the important thing is that it tells us something about how people feel about speaking up and criticizing the field, especially in the way I did. (For the record, only one person reached out about the stagnation article, which also criticized the field; no one called it brave or courageous. So the comparison speaks, I think, to the nature of the critique, not the fact of critique.) The fact that people think an article like mine was brave or courageous tells us the field really isn’t healthy, nor is the state of open inquiry and viewpoint diversity. And this corresponds with survey data on self-censorship in research in various fields and broader research on academics (including students) about self-censorship in discourse.

I didn’t get canceled (at least not to my face and not on a mass scale)

I’m under no illusions that everyone likes my article. Far from it. I assume most don’t. There was obviously huge selection bias in who wrote to me. Just because I didn’t get any nasty/angry emails doesn’t mean people aren’t angry or think I did wrong. In addition to the folks who only privately conveyed praise, I also noticed some people who privately said they liked it went on to publicly only express criticism. I also saw some negative social media posts (and I did get some comments directly online). Some were pretty nasty; some of it got weirdly personal. Some comments just didn’t make sense or I couldn’t code them one way or another—so I honestly can’t tell if they were criticism or agreement. And some bad stuff happened I can’t talk about publicly yet. Below, I’ll talk about some of the critical feedback I did get. But honestly, I thought it was going to be a lot worse (except the stuff I can’t talk about, which was pretty bad). I fully expected I was going to get canceled.

A colleague made an interesting comment about the lack of overt criticism early on: he pointed out that most people don’t read and probably just aren’t even aware of my piece. I think that’s fair. I also sent it to folks, though, both before it came out and after. I wanted people I respected to know I wrote this (I didn’t want to hide it) and I said I was open to critical feedback and looked forward to their thoughts if they wanted to share. Of course, that was just folks in my orbit—I sent it to a few folks I’d never met, but respected and thought they’d be interested, too, but only two or three folks. So I imagine most folks in my fields of law and society, punishment and society, and sociology, or across the social sciences, have never heard of it. I’m not a household name and folks tend to read selectively in their areas, so there’s no reason they should have heard of it. (Even our editors’ notes were rarely read, even though we really tried to get people to read them since we were giving advice, announcing new policies, and were trying to make the journal’s norms more explicit.) So it’s possible this lack of paying attention is one reason why it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected.

What I Thought Would Happen

To be completely honest, I thought of the article as my career suicide note: I was basically explaining why I was walking away from my fields, which is what I assumed I’d need to do. I really thought people would call for my resignation as co-organizer of our punishment and society collaborative research network, and I’d made arrangements to do so if it happened. (I ended up voluntarily resigning two months ago; I finish out my role at this LSA.) The article also came out a little earlier than I expected, but I mostly timed it to align with my lame duck period as co-editor.) I also thought a number of folks wouldn’t talk to me, but a lot did (we’ll put that to the test next week, since that will be my first time seeing some folks). And as I mentioned above, I met a lot more people instead.

Before continuing, though, I should explain my headspace before publication. (I have a longer post drafted about why I wrote my articles and what I wanted to accomplish, but this one covers the relevant points.)

I was pretty frustrated before writing my article. For the last decade or so, I’d become increasingly frustrated because conferences felt increasingly lame, I wasn’t enjoying reading work in my field, and there was less and less good work getting published. I’d written various interventions before (which I discuss in the article). I was having a lot of conversations with trusted friends who were similarly frustrated and demoralized. Alena and I wrote about the general lack of big theory in our fields in our article, but it wasn’t just that: it was also all the normativity in what people did produce. Serving as coeditor of LSR didn’t help; the normativity issue wasn’t as bad there, but it was an issue (although drowned out by some other issues that my co-editors and I wrote about in our editors’ notes). As I’ve said before, it’s the overlapping combination of boring, biased, and bad. (That’s not to say there’s no good work at all, but the amount of work I have to do to sift through the bad stuff to get to the good, combined with the fact that I don’t want to cite bad work that others apparently think is good, is not worth it.)

So in ~2024, I was pretty close to walking away from my fields, which is weird to say since at the time I was a co-organizer of a ~400-person collaborative research network for punishment scholars and a coeditor of the flagship journal for my field of sociolegal studies. For a while, I even looked into starting over and doing astrophysics (my husband’s field). But who am I kidding? I’m not smart enough for that, and it seems like a waste to throw my training away; instead, I started moving toward more applied work and away from the topics I had come to academia to study (and that I used to be judgmental about). In 2024, I started my crime lab, doing more contract-based work, and consulting. I’m continuing to move away from my old fields, which no longer seem viable. I know most in those fields don’t agree with that, but I just don’t trust or like the majority of what’s in these fields; to keep publishing and stay active, I’d need to keep reading and even citing work I don’t like or trust. I just can’t do that. More recently, I started realizing I had to reevaluate everything I thought I knew about my areas of expertise (and that I teach about), but that aren’t things I’ve directly studied with original research—and even there, there are fieldwide assumptions that colored my thinking. I have a few more pieces to finish up, but that might be it, unless the field changes.

While writing my article, I moved from on the fence to out the door.

Originally, I’d written my article as a commentary with a handful of examples that I’d mostly anonymized. I wrote it after ASC 2024; at the time, I thought the issues I described were still a pretty marginal, if growing, trend—something not very good scholars did and mostly in lower-quality journals. However, my colleagues who read the piece, as well as each of the reviewers, said I had to provide more evidence and not anonymize. I thought: no way can I do that, I’d be a pariah. Plus, I’m guessing I’m mostly discussing junior scholars, which would be punching down.

But at the end of the day, two things swayed me to name names, as requested: First, we have to tell the truth, consequences be damned. Second, if my field doesn’t change, I’m walking away. So I went back and did a more systematic analysis and entirely rewrote the paper—I went from commentary to empirical study. At that point, I realized the trends were more pervasive than I thought. So in the end, I had a lot more examples I could use and I consciously included many examples. (This part is a bit controversial, but there were a few reasons for it: 1) some reviewers thought I was exaggerating and that this wasn’t really happening, so I wanted to include a lot of examples of what I was describing); 2) to avoid seeming like I was only picking on a few folks or a few topics, and 3) (this might sound weird but) to help those I was citing to show they weren’t alone in doing the stuff I was criticizing.) And I said consequences be damned.

Critical Responses to My Article

While the social reception was mostly positive, I did get critical feedback. The critical feedback has mostly come in the form of early readers’ responses, verbal criticism at public talks or private conversations, and some bits I’ve seen on social media. There are also two formal responses that I know of. I’ll discuss all of these below.

At some point, I might write a formal reply to the various criticisms I’ve heard, complete with page numbers and examples. I especially want to do a careful response that addresses them with quotes from my piece because one of the annoying things about some of the criticism I’ve gotten (both from formal and informal feedback) has been the misconceptions or misrepresentations. Indeed, in both formal critiques of my article, there’s a tendency to conflate the arguments made in Rubin and Shalaby (2025) and Rubin (2025) (and sometimes the Heyer et al. editors’ notes). It’s annoying when this happens because it’s sloppy (there’s a way to talk about the overlap of these pieces while still recognizing that they make separate points with different definitions of theory, etc.). And because it’s not quite evaluating the work on its own terms. In fact, in general, when there are these sorts of misconceptions, it’s disappointing not just because I hate being misunderstood, but also because I’m not getting the type of useful, substantive critique that I was hoping for, the kind that would generate a productive debate. Instead, it just leads to a kind of tit-for-tat bookkeeping-type response that is pretty boring. I’ll (mostly) avoid that here.

Formal Written Responses to My Article

So far, there has been one direct response to my article, but it’s not published yet; if and when it is, I’ll go ahead and write a response, but in the meantime, I don’t want to try to hit a moving target. A second response is more indirect: Barker (2026) just published a piece on the state of the field of punishment and society that is also a critique of Rubin and Shalaby (2025) and Rubin (2025).

Barker’s primary critique of my article seems to be my myopic focus on US developments with secondary points essentially disagreeing with my takes on the problematic role of normativity and what is theoretically good or interesting. I’m not being particularly careful here in my summary because I’ve only done a quick skim; at some point, I’ll try to do justice to her critiques and lay them all out.

My main response to Barker, for now, is (a) agree to disagree on some key points re: the acceptability of normativity and the value of big theory and (b) the critiques of Rubin (2025) as being myopically focused on US scholarship seem to overlook the international scholarship cited in my piece (in fact, a lot of the scholarship cited was from non-US scholars). The latter is an okay critique of Rubin and Shalaby, except that we explicitly stated our focus on the US field. So in either case, the myopia critique seems unfair.

That said, Barker is absolutely right that there are some exciting developments on the theory front in Europe—I was at a prison history conference in Rome in February 2026 where folks are doing exactly the sorts of synthetic big theory we were calling for in Rubin and Shalaby. I was completely unaware of that work in part because a) it’s still in prep, b) we publish in different journals, and c) these scholars often don’t publish in English. AI might really help with that in the future, although I’ll need to figure out how to search for that work since I can only translate what I find, but I’m unlikely to find work that isn’t in English. For now, networking is helping with the identification effort.

The critique of Rubin and Shalaby I’m most worried about is whether we were actually missing obvious examples of good big theory. But (without having read all the examples Barker cites as evidence of non-stagnation in P&S) I think she was citing examples of what she considers good/exciting research (to show the field is not stagnated) on new topics or showing good empirical research, which is not something we were criticizing—we were criticizing the lack of big theory in the field, which is how we’d defined stagnated. We were very careful to say that it’s weird to call the field stagnated when it’s bigger, more diverse, and more topically expansive than ever, but that success makes the lack of big theory even more startling.

Of course, Barker makes other points sort of indirectly responding to my arguments, but here I’m just focusing on the direct critiques. I look forward to thinking through all of her points more thoroughly and reflecting on them.

Light, Mostly Useful Criticism

In this section and the next, I shift into the critical feedback I’ve gotten from multiple sources, focusing on the most common or recurring critiques. Because there’s a lot of it, I sort of want to distinguish between friendly criticism and not-so-friendly criticism, but honestly some of the points overlap and the difference was more how it was delivered (i.e., as constructive feedback versus criticism intended to delegitimize or dismiss my arguments). Maybe “light criticism” is more accurate than “friendly criticism.” Ironically, while most of the light criticism seems somewhat superficial in some respects, it was actually really generative and useful.

Normativity?

Several pieces of feedback I got early on were related to the question: is normativity really the issue?

One version of this critique was: is “normativity” even the right word for what you discuss? Don’t you really mean “polemic”? That’s an interesting point. I’d say polemic really does describe some of what I was describing. But I’m also not sure it’s sufficient. For about two decades, I’ve used the word “normative” to distinguish what we do in social science from other endeavors like philosophy. I couldn’t tell you where I first heard it, but I do remember in grad school explaining to undergrads that as social scientists, we don’t tell you what you should do or should think, but (what we think) is or was—we describe and explain rather than evaluate. We might describe philosophical debates and then try to figure out why some people gravitate more toward one side or the other, or under what historical conditions are some ideas (e.g., certain justifications of punishment) more popular than others. But we don’t weigh in on which ideas are better. We can evaluate (with evidence) the truth value of some of their assumptions, but there are still moral considerations that our tools just aren’t equipped to evaluate. So I still prefer normativity and the larger point about when authors’ normative preferences start to supersede the evidence or, more generally, the scientific project of trying to identify some underlying truth (that we don’t know ahead of time).

Another version of this critique was: is it the normativity (or more generally the deference to activist logics) that is the problem, or is it that the work cited is just so bad (low quality). That’s a tough one. I’m willing to admit that there is high-quality work that also incorporates the author’s normative opinions. That said, I tend to take the hardline stance that we shouldn’t let our views on our topics under study shape our analyses or really openly share our points of view (which is different from policy recs, which aren’t necessarily our personal preferences); for me, letting our personal preferences drive our research (beyond suggesting a research question) is bad research. However, it also seems that my hardline approach is in the minority of a lot of academic fields (although it seems to be more consistent with what is expected of us from non-academics). This is something I think we need to have more discussions about, so my forthcoming T&S piece tries to start that conversation a bit more. But for now, I’ll represent it this way:

A third version of this critique was: what about normative theory? Well, I’d never heard of normative theory, so that was news to me. My response was basically a combination of a) theory means different things to different people and I defined what I mean by theory, b) I expect there are other kinds of theory in other fields, but I think my definition fits most common kinds of theory in my fields, and c) I don’t think normative theory is a thing in my field or at least I don’t recall anyone explicitly referring to it. As it happens, after my article came out, I spoke with someone who specializes in normative theory and their take was basically the problem isn’t normativity per se—you can produce normative theory—but the stuff I’m describing in my article isn’t that, nor is a lot of the content being produced in political theory under that name.

Aren’t you being normative?

Another critique that I got, even before publication from colleague readers and reviewers (and myself while writing), but also after publication, was: isn’t your article doing exactly the thing you are challenging? Aren’t you basically saying, hey, there’s this bad thing—aren’t you muckraking or being normative? There are actually two versions of this critique—are you being normative yourself, the thing you criticized, and aren’t you doing the exact same thing as you are criticizing?

The critique I get most often is: “by criticizing normativity, you are being normative.”(Super inappropriately, every time I hear this critique, I imagine the big brain/Wojak meme, probably because someone used that one to criticize something I said on Twitter.) This one is pretty easy to address: This is a scholarly intervention; that’s very different from weighing in with my personal politics and beliefs about the social world. Hopefully, you can’t actually figure those out from the article (and I’d say you can’t, or if you think you can, you’re reaching—for years, people thought I was a prison abolitionist based on my writing, and now people think I’m right-wing based on my writing, so proceed cautiously with interpretations).

To the extent that it’s normative to debate or criticize scholarship and scholarly standards—we use “should” statements and criticism after all—then yes, my article is normative. In the same sense, my methods book is normative because it tells scholars how they should conduct and evaluate qualitative research.

But are either my methods book or my normativity article normative in the sense I used in my article—embracing or discussing my own partisan politics, morality, or ideology? No, unless you want to argue that positivism and science are ideologies—in which case, sure, go for it. But I see them as preconditions to doing empirical and theoretical scholarship: we have to be willing to believe you can observe and understand the world (even while recognizing our limits to do so); if you don’t, what’s the point of research? You’re just doing intellectual masturbation at that point. This is something we can debate and disagree about, but at the end of the day, it’s an intellectual or methodological position, which is something we are allowed to discuss in our work (I’d say we’re not generally supposed to talk about our own politics, morality, etc., any more than we should be discussing our personal religious beliefs or sex lives in our scholarship).

So, no, I would not say reiterating my understandings of what constitutes good theory (or good methods) is normative in the sense I mean in my article. If, however, I evaluated theory based on its ability to achieve particular social outcomes—as some of the critiques I cited in my piece did—then you could say I was normative. Indeed, I’d say the closest my article gets to normativity is in the Discussion where I discuss the broader implications and suggest that, pragmatically, making activist statements in peer-reviewed research is not going to help us win public trust or sustain our claims to expertise. But that’s the section where we discuss implications, not the section where I analyze my data. In the analysis, the substance of my argument was descriptive and analytical, not normative (i.e., here are the ways people mistake normativity for theory and here’s why it’s understandable that they could make each mistake).

I should add another version here, although it technically belongs below, which is a general misunderstanding of the article as simply criticizing normativity and not just discussing the replacement or mistaking of theory with normativity. Since this falls into the you’re doing what you criticize/you’re being normative, too, category, I’ll discuss it here.

This point bears emphasis: until the Discussion section, I was actually really careful to avoid explicitly criticizing normativity per se. Sure, you can guess that I don’t think it’s good/appropriate/acceptable for scholars to include normativity in peer-reviewed research (and I’ve said this publicly in interviews and I intimate it in the Discussion section). But I actually tried really hard in the piece not to explicitly criticize the normativity itself (the bad inferences and scholarship, I definitely did). In hindsight, using “muckraking” as a label was fairly critical, but I still can’t think of a better term for what I was describing.

More importantly, in my article, the core thing I was documenting and criticizing was not normativity but the replacement of theory with normativity—how people were mistaking normative claims as theory, the different forms this took in the literature, and how it was being allowed and encouraged, while deviating was being policed. In the opening sections of the paper, I described the rise of normativity (or the normative turn); in the main analysis, I looked at the normativity in what people were calling theory; and in the second half of the analysis, I discussed the role of reviewers and editors.

Am I doing exactly what I criticize? My article does not mistake normativity for theory. I use empirical examples from the literature that I systematically collected (bolstered by a few quantitative checks on word usage as a small sanity check) to describe a trend in the literature. I then use scholarly standards to evaluate whether or not the claims made constitute theory. Finally, I offer an explanation for why this seems to be happening. Along the way, I tried to offer counterarguments for my specific claims and interpretations and acknowledged possible limitations.* And I mention that the normative turn is happening in other fields—i.e., that this is a generalizable trend not unique to punishment studies.

*There’s a much larger historical/causal argument that could be made about why this is happening—and I think there, we could explore multiple competing explanations (and I have a piece under review doing this)—in part because it’s overdetermined (i.e., I don’t think there is a single-variable explanation; indeed, I think a lot of things caused it, any one of which could be removed and it would still happen—as evidenced by its long genealogy combined with various moments where it got more common).

Notably, I never actually claim to theorize, even though I do provide an explanation and identify the generalizability. As I’ll discuss more below, I used an extremely broad, inclusive definition of theory, but I’m actually not comfortable even calling what I did theory. I see explanation and generalizability more as necessary rather than sufficient parts. This paper was more of a proof of concept than a theory of what’s going on. At best, we can say it was a meta-theory critique/intervention into the literature, except that for something to be meta-theoretic, it needs to be about theory, but I explicitly argue that the material I was reviewing wasn’t theory, so I’m not sure meta-theory works either.

Finally, the big brain response of you’re doing what you criticize. As noted, this was a concern I had while writing the paper. That’s why during the drafting process, I inserted this little bit breaking through the fourth wall (my one example where I will quote from my piece):

This is also why I couldn’t split up the paper: if I stopped at the first half, I would be mirroring some of what I criticized (again, even though I wasn’t claiming to theorize, the parallel would have been too uncomfortable). (I’ll discuss more in a future post (and my LSA talk) the difference between describing, analyzing, generalizing, and theorizing; my article described, analyzed, and generalized, but I wouldn’t say it theorized.)

Stop Calling it Activism

One of the more interesting critiques I’ve heard relates to my larger argument about the replacement of scientific logics with activist logics. A number of folks who are active in organizing, social movements, and the like either asked why I was calling this work “activist” or flat-out told me not to use the term because it’s not activism. The general theme in their comments is that this is performative nonsense that doesn’t accomplish anything, therefore it’s not activism. (My take is that sounds like activism to me—I have some activists in the family.) This critique echoes a critique I’d heard from students who were criticizing some professors who identify as “activist scholars” as “armchair activists.” Since then, I’ve heard a few other fun labels like “barricade scholarship” (c/o Len Gutkin citing Jacob Mackey’s Classicism and Other Phobias). Bourdieu of all people writes of “paper revolutionarism” and “campus radicalism” (in his article calling for using social science to fight neoliberalism).

As much as I find this critique both accurate and amusing, I still use the term activism because that is the most common term my underlying population uses for this broader shift in goals and rules that I’m describing, where normativity replacing theory is only one manifestation. In fact, ASA President Mary Romero’s (2019/2020) presidential address is all about scholar activism. And while the term is certainly contested in its meaning, it’s also clearly widely used, as the linked review article demonstrates. For fun, we can see the relative popularity of “activist scholar” and “scholar activist” over time in English-language publications in this n-gram:

But the critics do have a point: at the end of the day, a lot of this activist scholarship is neither activism nor scholarship, failing to achieve the minimum standards to be properly called either.

I Disagree

One category of “light” feedback (it actually goes in both categories, but the first version was from a friendly reader) was basically “I disagree that normativity is bad” or generally that normativity invalidates theory (or the like). Sometimes, these critiques can lead to useful conversations where we can discuss the reasoning for one perspective or another. But at the end of the day, it reduces the discussion to a matter of opinion and perspective, which everyone is entitled to have, but jumps over the specific claims in the paper (especially when the disagreement is with a strawman version of my paper). As a result, though, I don’t find this set of responses particularly useful because it doesn’t really move us forward—if we’re coming at this from different perspectives, neither of us might budge.

A more useful version of this take would be more than a difference of perspective. In my piece, I tried to be analytical and explain my reasoning, for example, distinguishing concepts from theory or how jargon is important but not itself theory, and pointing to prior authorities on these issues. I’d want criticism to be similarly analytical. Tell me where I’m wrong, not that you don’t like the argument. You’re allowed to not like it (we can agree to disagree), but I want to know if and where I’m wrong. Tell me that I’m misapplying my definition or that the examples I cited are the sorts of things you think are useful contributions to our collective knowledge. Give me a counterargument to my point that this work operates under different epistemic standards, and when those standards displace explanation and generalization, we lose the ability to produce cumulative, testable knowledge. If I’m misunderstanding something or making an unconvincing argument, I need to know that so I can re-evaluate my argument or improve it.

But the justifications I usually got in this category were typically grounded in normative arguments or just declarative statements with no explanation. I’d say this is actually the piece of feedback that I found most uncomfortable because there’s no clear way to resolve differences of opinion other than relying on majority rule: but if the field is shifting such that people who care about a certain set of standards are in the minority, well, that’s what led me to write the article in the first place—an attempt to speak up and stop the erosion of scholarly standards. There’s also the question of whether majority rule makes sense: I think my perspective is more common among good scholars, but that is something we can collect data on, and I can find out if I’m wrong—admittedly, even how I decide who is good becomes a bit endogenous with the thing I’d be measuring, but not necessarily.

I have more thoughts on disagreement in the field, but I’ll save them for another time.

Heavier, but Less Substantive Criticism

I genuinely thought I’d get more and more substantive criticism. I wanted to start a conversation and learn—I’m not going to learn what I don’t understand if I don’t start the conversation (or if I do, it will take a much longer time). Again: if I’m wrong about stuff, I want to know. And I’m fine with making it part of the public record, since I know I’m not the only one thinking this stuff, so it’s useful to document the back and forth.

Most of the above “light” criticism was actually the most generative—thinking about whether normativity really was the right word, thinking about the harder cases that I’d avoided, thinking about whether there was a better way to write the article that doesn’t look too similar to the format I’m critiquing (despite my caveats), trying to understand what set of authorities govern when standards are in dispute. The heavier criticism, by contrast, was generally less substantive and more aimed (it seemed to me) at trying to discredit rather than provide substantive disagreement.

The funny thing about the heavier criticism I’ve gotten is it seemed to sort of follow a trajectory of escalation, as in the following meme:

I think this is more an issue of my perspective than any real trajectory, though. I mean, the first version of each critique really did come in roughly this order, but subsequent people have also made these critiques, so there’s no strict timeline. But for organizational purposes, I will arrange the critiques in this order (although step 1 and 2 are merged and I split step 4 into two varieties).

You’re cherry picking examples / I’ve never heard of these people / this isn’t representative of the field

Very early on, I got different versions of this critique: these are obscure, cherry-picked examples and not representative of where the field is at. I thought this was an interesting cluster of critiques for a few reasons. First, it shows that the critics think these are embarrassing examples, so their obscurity or rarity is seen as insulating the field from the larger critique. Second, it ignores the caveats I gave in my piece where I said this trend isn’t representative of the field at large or my efforts to quantify the trend. Again, during the revision process, I realized the trend was far more common than I initially thought. But even so, my take at the time in my article was: this is a non-trivial plurality of the literature (and in the less extreme version, probably a majority of conference presentations in my field), but I did not have the tools to actually investigate how common they were or how much they varied by journal. (This is something I’m now doing, although one recent commentator who liked my article said I didn’t need to do this and that they were convinced and they thought all reasonable readers would recognize what I was describing. However, I think it’s still controversial enough that quantifying it, and also being able to identify its historical trajectory, variation across journals, and correlates, will be productive.)

Substantively, I found the general version of this critique—“you’re cherry picking, i.e., selecting a handful of unrepresentative examples”—predictable but also sort of surprising. I gave a lot of examples on purpose, precisely to avoid this criticism (and to avoid picking on a few folks, as noted above). My references section is 12 pages long (out of 50+ pages). Moreover, I explicitly noted that many of the examples I used were influential or widely read or cited articles, so I’m not sure “cherry picking” obscure examples is a fair critique.

In my paper, I aimed for both breadth and depth. As an example of depth, when I discussed the expansion of “carcerality,” I covered a lot of examples (which I collected for a recent talk):

carceral state, carceral logics, carceral capitalism, carceral web, carceral feminism, carceral futures, carceral sensibility, carceral experiences, intimate carceral violence, coercive carceral care, intimate carceral labor, carceral fatherhood, decarceral motherwork, carceral production of transgender poverty, ongoing violence of carceral seepage, carceral habitus, hegemonic carcerality, carceral injustice, genocidal carcerality, carceral apartheid, carceral colonialism, neoliberal-carceral university, carceral migrations

To get at the breadth, I also gave multiple examples purposely selected from a variety of strains of thought—from decolonization to racial/carceral capitalism to carceral state to prison/police abolition to run-of-the-mill critical stuff to studies using positionality statements to studies talking about “lived experience.”

To me, it was surprising that many of these studies were published, given their myriad problems. So the fact that I’d found so many of them speaks to a fairly significant trend in the field. I’m not sure if it’s literally dominant in a quantitative sense yet (that remains to be empirically examined). I suspect in a journal like P&S, there’s still enough international and topical variation that it may not be, but within certain topics or stratifying by scholars from the US or Canada it would be. But it’s definitely normalized and influential, even more so than it was last year, especially among US scholars.

Another version of this critique was “I’ve never heard of the people you cited” or something like “Well, it’s not like David Garland does this.” On the first point, there are a few big-name and rising-star scholars in there that readers in my field should have heard of. The critics are correct, though, that the trend is more common among junior scholars or established folks who haven’t quite made a name for themselves outside of niche circles. But they are still getting published, even in good venues (for my field.) On the second point, at the time of the writing, I don’t think David Garland had written anything I’d put in my article. However, if I was writing the article today, unfortunately, I could use examples from his new book, including casual references to the “prison industrial complex.” Indeed, in the almost-full-year since I finished writing the piece, there are a lot more examples across the field, including from folks I like and respect. I think the style of writing I criticized is just normalized now—and as I noted in the article, you get called out for not doing it, so some (good) scholars are giving in to the social pressure.

A better version of this critique that I’ve not gotten actually would have to do with selection bias or sampling. (I’ll say more about my specific sampling technique below.) For the first section of my findings, I looked at studies that both claimed to be theoretical and were explicitly and aggressively normative and then traced how that normativity was interfering with their theoretical aspirations (either by mistake or replacement/abandonment). I tended to focus on the most obvious cases where folks claimed to theorize but didn’t, and were normative instead. (I did actually include a few examples from otherwise good articles that also added in normativity, but they were not dominant in the piece.)

There are actually three versions of this critique one could make of my sampling strategy:

First, I did not fully address the situation (mentioned above) of the interplay between actual theory and normativity, which would have let me properly theorize the relationship/correlation between the two instead of a more historical transition research design (the qualitative analog of a regression discontinuity design). A broader, more diverse selection would be required to figure out which of the following two possibilities are more accurate for the question: are normativity and theory inversely correlated in any given paper? That is, are normative papers less likely to have theory and non-normative more likely to have theory (conditional on the papers claiming to use theory—or perhaps not even conditionally)? We can visualize these scenarios thus:

But my research design wouldn’t enable that sort of determination, nor do I make that sort of dynamic claim. I was more in a 2x2 world than a relational model. Toward the end of the paper, I make some speculative hypotheses about field-level dynamics based on the second half of my analysis, but I don’t try to make that sort of dynamic causal claim.

What do I mean by a 2x2 world? As noted above, I sampled studies that were explicit normative and claimed to be theory and were the obvious cases. That is, I was interested in the lower right quadrant of the following 2x2 table—explicitly normative, claiming to be theory.

Before explaining my third criteria, I’ll emphasize that other studies could look at the other quadrants. So the second critique is I should have sampled from all four quadrants or from the bottom two quandrants and done a proper comparison.

The third critique is that I should have focused on all the papers in the lower right quandrant. Of that lower-right quadrant, I was interested in the misfires. The trend I was most interested in was the one I documented—it’s the low-hanging fruit, the obvious cases, the “how the fuck did this get published” examples. The harder cases are the mixtures, papers that are more successful in balancing their aggressive normativity with theory development—and there I’m a bit ambivalent. I’d need to review some high-quality examples where work is both properly theoretical and normative, and while I believe such works exist, I’m not sure how common they are. (Every time someone sends one to me as a counterexample, it’s a bit embarrassing to respond and say, yeah, no, that’s not a good article or if it is, I’m not a fan of those standards.)

So in all three versions of the critique, you could argue that my selection should have been more systematic and broad—that I should have engaged with more edge cases and not just the cases of not-theory-claiming-to-be-theory. And you could argue that to properly answer my research question in a less historical-shift, and more correlational and theoretical, way, I would need to look at a broader range of articles. But instead I sliced off one chunk of my question and answered it in the way that seemed more natural (and what I’m realizing is more natural for a first, proof-of-concept paper). Remember, the paper was 50+ pages and highly controversial, so I think I can be forgiven for narrowing my focus and doing one thing really thoroughly.

There’s nothing wrong with the work you cited / this is what good work looks like

A less common, but still sort of second-wave critique I got was defenses of the examples I included. To be honest, I was worried about this type of critique. When I anticipated what sorts of critiques I expected to hear from my piece, one was that I misunderstood theory and I was defining it too narrowly and the other was I was just too stupid to understand the super dense, jargony prose, which is actually evidence of good writing. Someone said basically this was work in the humanistic wave and I was just being closed minded to beautiful text. Now that I’ve met a number of top-notch humanities scholars, I’m pretty sure these critics were wrong. I mean, to each their own and all, but by conventional scholarly standards, I think they are wrong. This is a fundamental problem with importing techniques from other fields—you don’t know when you’re importing those fields’ trash (as folks like Jonathan Culler and Stanley Fish have argued, even while defending interdisciplinarity or noting its promise).

You’re racist, colonialist, transphobic, etc. / you just don’t like their conclusions

I suppose this one was predictable, even though I’d tried to preempt it in a few places by making clear I wasn’t challenging the existence of racism, etc., or the possibility that some of the claims were correct/accurate even if they weren’t empirically substantiated. Nevertheless, a common critique was basically that I’m biased in various ways against various groups and the reason I was criticizing this work was not because I care about research integrity and quality, but because I am a bigot and/or because the standards themselves are racist, colonialist, etc.

Putting aside the accusation and making it personal, I have a few problems with this set of critiques on their own terms, so I’m going to get normative here.

First, I’m not sure how the standards-are-biased argument isn’t actually offensive since it seems to imply that such minority groups can’t produce good research and we need to lower our standards in order to not be racist, colonialist, etc., but this is a common trope in the social sciences, especially since c. 2008: science is white supremacist, etc. There are some parts of the larger argument I think are interesting and have some truth value (and certainly there are examples where some forms of scholarship claiming to be science has had bias problems in ways I’d say violate scientific standards). But the more common, knee-jerk varieties (those that paint with a broad brush and say, e.g., that, because science has a history of being used for bad ends, it’s inherently racist) are pretty bad. I got the same critique as co-editor, as I’ve written about before: insisting on a standard organizational scheme and framing for a large audience the journal tries to target is exclusionary, especially for underrepresented groups.

Second, I don’t understand how it’s not considered super problematic to claim to help groups or speak for them, but then try to promote policies that are not actually vetted and just reflect the author’s preferences. For example, criticizing scholars for not openly endorsing defunding the police when that’s not actually what the groups most affected said they wanted (in the study) seems extremely problematic morally, because it elevates the critic’s preferences above the people in the study, and empirically, because it’s contested on the metric presented (and that’s putting aside the research on the effects of police on crime). Obviously, I prefer admitting what we don’t know and acknowledging the limitations in what we can know, and proceeding accordingly. Assuming our preferred policy is going to solve some complex social issue and insisting on it without vetting it just seems irresponsible. Sociologists defending a scientific/neutral approach have been making that argument since the 1960s.

I could go on, but I won’t. I will say the most unfortunate part of this critique is how many grad students now think this of me on the basis of their interpretation of my article rather than looking at my actual behavior over the years.

You’re helping the Trump administration

This is a favorite of mine. I’ve gotten different versions of this critique. Different from the general assumption that I must be conservative, which is more the previous critique, there’s the general criticism that it’s not okay to air our dirty laundry and doing so will only help our conservative critics. This is, of course, a common complaint about anyone criticizing academia in this moment, as has been covered in a number of Chronicle articles lately. The most explicit version of this critique, using these words or very similar, came from a colleague in my department during a panel held about my article. (After the panel, I later learned, the colleague then proceeded to make fun of me to a crowd of grad students because, during the panel, I’d promoted viewpoint diversity, which is also conservative, you know. Then again, this colleague had been telling students for years that I was conservative because I didn’t sign our department’s BLM statement, so I’m sure the article just solidified my bona fides for them.)

What is particularly interesting about this critique is, like the first one, it seems to be saying: you have a point, this is embarrassing, so don’t say it right now. (I suppose an alternative interpretation is that I’m wrong, but conservative critics won’t know that and even if I’m wrong it will add ammunition to their efforts. But I’ve definitely heard the first version from folks.)

Interestingly, there are other versions of this critique that are a bit more nuanced, but also less often about my article than the genre of which it is a part. For example, I got another, very similar version of this critique, but it was about a talk I’d given about these sorts of problems across the disciplines, especially in sociology. This time it came from a heterodox colleague at an academic reform conference, which was a bit of a surprise. In addition to the basic you’re hurting the field critique, the extended version was that I also need to talk about the good work being done in the field, not just the bad. But the main concern was that I am helping conservative critics by making these critiques. (An even more extreme version of this critique—again, not directed at my article, but any criticism of academic fields for being politicized from within and thereby corrupting the knowledge produced—is simply that we’re drinking right-wing koolaid. For a mainstream sociologist’s take on this point, see this thread. But this also starts to circle back to the earlier category of critique that it’s just conservative to criticize bad scholarship that has leftist politics.)

Related to this critique is that you’re only using left-leaning examples. Yes. I believe this is both because of my sampling technique and just the overall politics of my field.

Sampling: In looking for articles, I did a combination of search terms, looking up influenial articles (i.e., the most commonly downloaded or cited articles), convenience sampling (books and articles I knew about and that had stuck in my head), scanning recent TOCs, and snowball sampling (finding articles that cited articles I’d found, so more like a contagion analysis). The search terms were words I associated with normativity, which in my field tends to be left-leaning politics (e.g., criminal legal system, carceral, abolition, etc.) As I note in my article, there are certainly articles that use these words that aren’t actually normative, but using these words is often a signal of normative commitments, making them a good place to look. Just as Krista Luker explains qualitative sampling when you’re on a voyage of discovery: if you are doing search and rescue in a city, you look under crumpled buildings; by contrast, if you’re trying to do a census and get a representative sample, you follow S&R protocol when you have a lost person in the wilderness situation and you do a grid search. I was looking where I expected to find examples; in my current study where I’m trying to figure out how common these trends are and what their correlates are, I’m looking at a complete corpus and doing the grid search. Both are systematic, but for different purposes. Given the political bent of the common indicators, I’m turning up more left-leaning work. If there are common indicators (in punishment studies) that are properly right-coded and are associated with scholars claiming to theorize but aren’t, let me know.

Field features: My field leans left. That’s not a secret. As I say in my article, David Garland wrote about that back in 2018 and called for more viewpoint diversity. Given the political tilt of academic research, any widespread critique of how politics is impacting research will necessarily focus on examples that lean left. I’m sure you can find other fields where it is more mixed or subfields that are more right leaning.

The key is I would write the same article if my field had right-leaning politics, but that’s not the problem in my field right now. (Although I’m a little worried that fields that have that reputation actually aren’t right leaning, it’s just how we’ve defined certain topics as inappropriate to study so just studying those topics is right-coded. As long as the work is prioritizing scientific protocols—question driven and and letting the data drive the analysis rather than letting one’s priors drive the analysis or conclusions—I don’t care what topics they study.) And just to be explicit, I don’t care which type of politics it is: we should not allow our own politics to supersede data or the research process. And this also means we shouldn’t let the possible political consequences of our work convince us to censor our work.

One final caveat: I’ve been saying left/right (or sometimes liberal/conservative). In my view, these words are increasingly meaningless and are incredibly contested. They are rough approximations, but I’m not sure they really match any historical meanings anymore. There are some tropes that persist over time that we can trace in academic writing, but in the larger political sphere, the parties keep flipping on core issues (not all of them, of course). This happens occasionally throughout history, but it’s weird to live through. So take the left/right distinctions with a grain of salt. I do not think these are accurate labels in any intellectually rigorous sort of way, but they roughly map onto the divisions we are seeing now (which, again, are not necessarily the historical divisions).

Updated Thoughts About My Argument

Defining Theory

One of my biggest concerns in writing my article was about my definition of theory (and this was definitely something reviewers and early readers paid attention to and weighed in on—the biggest feedback I got early on was to say more about what I meant by theory). As I mentioned in the article, there are many definitions out there. But I was still worried that I was using the wrong definition of theory or an overly narrow definition of theory. There are certainly theory-adjacent components like concepts, hypotheses, and variables; even if they aren’t theory, they are theory-ish. Brint talks about high-leverage concepts in his piece; interestingly, he also prioritizes generalizability or the ability to traverse subfields (something we also emphasized in our editors’ notes). I later learned that some folks talk about “theorizing” rather than “theory.” But basically, I was worried that my definition of theory was causing me to mistake normativity for not-theory. It felt like the paper’s biggest vulnerability. I gave a few talks recently and wrote a previous post on the question of theory (and I got some really nice suggestions from folks for more things to consider that I’m still digesting).

My tentative conclusion is still that I used a fairly common (in my fields) definition of theory and so I stand by it (with one big caveat I’ll discuss soon). It’s pretty common to hear people ask about mechanisms or causal pathways and generalizability when someone claims to offer a theoretical contribution. Likewise, Brint’s analysis of sociology’s main theory journals, which found very little theory in them, was similarly focusing on generalizable explanations (and comparing its frequency to other kinds of “theory” cataloged by Abend (2008)).

I also came to the conclusion that I used a pretty broad and inclusive definition of theory. I’d only required two things: generalizability (which requires a degree of abstraction, or stepping outside of the unique empirical context) and an explanation. I saw these components come up elsewhere, which is part of why I felt confident(ish) in using it. And I said it could be inductive or deductive, etc.

Here’s the caveat: The problem is I still worried that it was an incomplete definition. That is, I do think proper theory needs to specify conditions, which lend themselves to testable hypotheses. I’d explicitly said that was a bridge too far and wasn’t quite reflective of the consensus. But, as evident in my own unwillingness to say my article presents a theory even though it’s a generalizable explanation (I lay out a few hypotheses, but they are more asides than properly generated hypotheses), I don’t think my definition of theory was accurate.

The interesting thing is, I think my incomplete definition over-includes rather than under-includes. I was worried about the latter. So I think it’s telling that even by this larger, inclusive definition of theory, the pieces I discuss still fall outside of that definition. Then again, I think if we used the proper definition of theory with scope conditions (something along the lines Merton or Black would recognize), almost nothing in the literature would satisfy those requirements outside works that do theory/hypothesis testing or applies existing theory to make sense of settings (broader sociology probably has it, but not much in punishment studies).

Finally, I am unapologetically using a positivist version of theory (as critics point out). But now that I’m actually a bit more familiar with other forms of theory, I don’t think the stuff I’m talking about in my article constitutes theory even by the other definitions of theory (e.g., jargon and dense verbiage does not equate theory). GPT tells me some theoretical traditions do treat critique, interpretation, and normative diagnosis as theory, but I’m not sure that’s super dominant in my fields, and I’m still not clear on why that would be called theory—maybe because it’s abstract? In fact, it’s telling most criticism hasn’t been that I define theory too narrowly and thereby making type 2 errors (falsely excluding examples); I suspect it’s because the examples I give wouldn’t really satisfy good theorists in the critical traditions, although I think Barker might disagree with that take.

I still need to work through all of the alternatives to theory to think about how helpful they are (I’d meant to do that for my upcoming talk, but it’s been an insanely busy two months). So I will at some point have some updated thoughts on these alternative ways of even thinking about theory and decentering theory per se in favor of things like theorizing—relatedly, I have my two posts coming up on the describe-analyze-generalize-theorize spectrum, wtf is abstraction, and tips on improving your analyses even if you don’t care about theory.

Fields Embracing Activism

Probably the weirdest thing to happen since my article came out is how the field has noticeably changed. When I first wrote my article (that is, when I was rewriting it in early spring 2025), it was pretty controversial to say anything like activism was taking over academia or, less bombastically, that activism was becoming popular in scholarship. Yes, there were the protests on campuses and such, but those were actual protests, not research. And they were mostly students. And it was a moment that was probably going to pass. I felt like I had to include a lot of evidence because most folks seemed completely oblivious to what I was seeing, so just claiming this was a phenomenon was going to be a heavy lift. As I keep saying, the article is like 50 pages. It’s a beast. I don’t think I could have written a much shorter version and been convincing. (I thought about splitting it in half between the trend and the explanation, but that would have been unsatisfying and, for reasons mentioned above, problematic.)

But within months of the article coming out, it felt like things had changed: people were openly embracing the combination of scholarship and activism. At ASA (August 2025), an opening presidential panel on the state of the field approached a question about tensions in the field, especially blending normative goals with scientific goals. I was really excited by this question and I wanted to hear how some pretty illustrious panelists would respond—where they saw the lines of appropriate and inappropriate conduct and learn more about the norms of the field as they understood them. Two of the panelists basically dismissed the question as uninteresting, as panelist Daniel Laurison later documented. At that conference as well, UC Press was giving out buttons saying “activist scholar” (or “scholar activist,” I can’t remember which). In late September 2025, my department had a panel about my article (mentioned above); my colleagues pretty openly disagreed that we can and should keep normativity and research separate or that it was a problem to make normative claims as theory. At ASC (November 2025), people were talking openly about the “divide” between the “activists” and “scientists.” After the conference, someone posted a video describing the divide (from the activist viewpoint).

So basically what was a pretty controversial idea—just the descriptive statement that this style of research was becoming more common—is no longer controversial; what is controversial is how people feel about it. But I’d say I’m pretty squarely in the minority. However, that empirical question is also in dispute: in talking with colleagues at some top-level departments, I’m told we’re in the majority. In my department, I’m the only one (or at least the only one who says so openly) and I was publicly told my views represent an outdated paradigm. Who’s right?

At least in 2018, among sociologists, I would be in the minority (at least judging by several ways of operationalizing my views). Horowitz et al.’s survey results are pretty shocking:

Keep in mind that those results are from 2018. I’m sure the field has moved even further away from these numbers since then (and away from my own stances on research). I’d love it if someone would update Horowitz et al.’s study so we could find out. (And for a comparison, see Akresh’s interview study with department heads/chairs and Gross’s book on multiple disciplines including sociology, also using interviews but also other data.)

How do we reconcile the differences in perception? I suspect that most scholars I consider to be good scholars generally agree that we should keep the two separate, whereas most of the scholars I consider to be not so good disagree. The majority of any field will be disproportionately less good (90% of everything… and all that). So I suspect if you stratified the survey results by some sort of quality indicator, you’d see correlated differences. Of course, one problem is good departments have been hiring shockingly not so good scholars because of the political appeal of their research, and likewise good venues are publishing shockingly low-quality research because of its political appeal. So finding a reliable quality indicator is tricky these days. You might be tempted to define it by agreement with scientific standards, but, as noted above, that makes the whole thing endogenous. Another way you could do it would be really hard but interesting: get a panel of trusted scholars to evaluate folks’ research for quality and politicization (treat them as separate variables), then survey the authors on their views. Now that would be interesting.

To be clear, I think this is a bad idea, but I also think we’re in a pretty seriously bad situation and so we have to seriously consider bad ideas—it might be that all we have are bad ideas and we have to choose the least bad option. But it’s also a useful exercise sometimes to think through bad ideas because sometimes they can bring other points to the surface—and that’s what I hope this post does.

Ultimately, I’m talking about some serious concerns (the funding structure of universities, the gap between what work we prize as academics and the knowledge non-academics care about, the fragility of academic independence/freedom) and using a cartoonish hypothetical to think through these issues. To be fair, this is probably my weirdest post so far, but I like to think through crazy ideas and this is a crazy one. Buckle up!

Funding Structures and the Attraction of Patronage

So let’s start with why I like this idea before getting into the serious problems with this idea.

Most obviously, it’s an issue of funds. When the Trump administration made a bunch of cuts to the agencies that fund a lot of academic research, it was a big reminder that we rely way too extensively on a single source of funding: the federal government. That model worked out great for a while and made us the envy of the world with our amazing research universities and giant corpus of knowledge. But at least since the Civil Rights Act (probably before, but that’s the case I know about), we’ve also had a model where the federal government can sort of force its will on organizations in exchange for business contracts or funding. You want to contract with us, show us that you are taking steps to not discriminate. You want money to build prisons in your state, adopt a truth-in-sentencing law. It’s a useful model. But when the government asks you to do things you really don’t like (or decides you’re doing something it doesn’t like or has no need for), and that’s your main source of funding, that’s when it becomes a clear problem. As folks who know more about this than I do have pointed out, Obama’s “Dear Colleague” letter showed us the writing was on the wall. And some of the excesses in the DEI requirements the NSF had even for STEM grants were really pushing things. All of that was before the current administration, which has given us the most obvious examples of how the federal government can politicize funding.

States are another source of funding, but a lot of time, their funding also comes from the federal government with similar strings. Additionally, their federal funding for many of the things academics research was cut around the same time. Ditto a lot of NGOs and standard philanthropy organizations, whose budgets tend to pale in comparison to the federal government. Some unis have entrepreneurship programs and get money from faculty patents and such (Gatorade was great for UF, but smaller patents also work). Increasingly, they also have real estate and other ventures that generate revenue. Tuition dollars are, of course, another source and the one most people focus on, but there are limits to what you can charge and university budgets are quite large—I’m not sure tuition can ever cover it.

So the question becomes: where else can we look for funding? Well, billionaires are under attack; maybe they’d like to buy some goodwill by funding some academics? Or maybe they could entertain themselves by competing over who is sponsoring the best academics, just like families of old competed over who had the best court musician or painter. It’s a little hair-brained, but I also kind of like it. I’d like to hold the Elon Musk Chair of Sociology.

But then there is the reasonable question of why would anyone wealthy enough to do this actually do it? A lot of folks don’t like academics right now. But also a lot of folks care about universities and want to see them improve. So maybe they would be motivated to get some skin in the game and sponsor academics they see as doing good work. Musk saw that space engineering companies were extremely badly run, founded SpaceX, and basically fixed space exploration. Maybe he’d be interested in fixing academia (realistically, the SpaceX equivalent is University of Austin, so the metaphor doesn’t entirely hold—then again, I doubt Musk would want to run a university, but sponsoring academics feels a bit more like a sport I could see him getting in on). But again, to quote a friend of mine on twitter, why would Elon ever sponsor a sociology professor?

I’ll come back to the dark side of this idea in a moment, but first, it’s intriguing to think of a world in which we have to justify ourselves to non-experts. We’re so used to evaluating ourselves against academic criteria and being judged by other academics. But we’ve also gotten pretty insular and echo-chambery. It might do us some good to have more contact with the outside world. And as uncomfortable as it is, it makes sense that we should at least consider a model where, at least some of the time, we need to justify our existence instead of assuming our existence is obviously justified (which it clearly isn’t).

Thinking About Our Relevance

Over the last few years, I’ve been thinking more seriously about this question of my own relevance—I’m a professor at a public university. Most of my funding comes from public sources in combination with tuition dollars. Beyond teaching, what is my utility to the people of Hawai‘i or the US more generally? When I was more junior, in consoled myself by saying I did the kind of work that someone doing actually impactful work will use for background. Basically, I’m a beta, not an alpha, and that’s okay because we need the betas who do the basic research that isn’t directly but only indirectly useful. But post-pandemic, that answer no longer felt sufficient.

So what do I do now? Occasionally, journalists reach out to me and I give them content and context for their articles. I started going to events for policymakers to see if I could be a useful resource for thinking through designing laws in ways that would let us evaluate their impact. I also created my “crime lab” in which students help me collect and analyze publicly available crime data, which we then write about on our blog to analyze the trends and explain whether we’re seeing blips or real trends (in contrast to the “crime is up/down by x%” which sounds either great or scary unless you understand how crime rates work). This academic year, I was actually approached to help with some legislation where I would have been the designated person to collect and analyze some state-level data (the bill didn’t pass). These were some small ways that I could be more useful to my community. But at the end of the day, they were side gigs—they weren’t what my research is on and none of this stuff was going to show up in a peer-reviewed journal article.

Frankly, there seems to be a pretty big disconnect between a lot of what we do as academics and what normal folks [this always gets me in trouble: “normal” is not an insult; academics are the abnormal folks, the weirdos, to be clear] expect us to do. Pointing out this gap isn’t to say that normal people should be the final arbiters of our work’s importance. But it should cause us to look inward.

For example, a few years ago, I was talking with a lawyer and the questions he wanted to know about criminology weren’t really the sorts of things most criminologists work on. They weren’t even things we spend a lot of time talking about in our intro to criminology courses. They were applied, practical things that a lot of academics look down on, but that are actually really important for policy and daily decisions. And when I tried to find work on these areas, most of it was coming from advocacy organizations—some of it good and some of it absolutely awful. Likewise, some of the academic work that is done on these questions isn’t entirely trustworthy, either because of research design issues, statistical interpretation problems, or limited scope (maybe you get one really good study, but it’s not clear it would generalize because it’s so unique).

This irrelevance issue is one that I’ve long worried about for my work because I do history. I’m often asked to use history to weigh in on contemporary debates—something I resisted for years because there are important differences in the period I study (so we shouldn’t extrapolate too much) and because that’s not the point of history for me—I want to understand the past, not use it to understand the present a la Foucault. But I eventually caved in part because, I don’t know, it’s what the people want—I should be able to at least try to answer their questions—but I try to be strategic and careful in how I do it. There are some questions we just can’t answer with historical data (at least not my data)*, so instead I give a good deal of thought to what I can say that would be useful and interesting. Most often, I’ll focus on contrasts and just explaining to people what life was like and how we used to do things because it’s pretty exotic and interesting.

*There’s also an interesting limitation that sometimes the questions people want answered are the ones we simply cannot answer with our available tools. For example, I write a lot about the failure of different designs of prison, but the obvious question (that wasn’t so obvious to me) is, okay, so what does work when it comes to prison design? I tend to be more interested in where the designs come from rather than evaluating them. I’m also great at explaining how designs can go wrong (because this is heavily studied), but I had to really think about when they go well. (It’s funny—the negativity bias strikes again.) More importantly, I could speculate based on some historical examples, but I’d be far more reticent to say “you should follow this recommendation and it’s going to work” than I’d be to say “oh, that’s something that has failed repeatedly.” Partly that’s because to make a positive statement like “this will work” feels like I need a higher threshhold of evidence, but partly it’s a failure of focus. Likewise, we’re often good at explaining why things happened in retrospect, but we’re terrible at predicting things. (Partly that’s a failure of theory: we might have case specific “theories” but for them to truly be theories, they need to be generalizable, in which case we should be able to test them against reality via prediction.)

But even with history, we see the disconnect: the most popular topics I’m asked about are the scintillating details, not the esoteric questions of interpretation and theory that are fundamental to our peer-reviewed research projects. For example, we rarely discuss escapes from Alcatraz in the prison history literature, but every time I’m asked to talk about Alcatraz, I’m asked about the escapes (and the famous prisoners). It’s far more entertaining. I can convert that discussion into something we care a bit more about by talking about the role of the famously successful escapes in helping to close the prison, but I also have to be clear that that was only one factor—the prison was out of touch with the dominant penology of the time and it was extremely expensive to run, so the escapes were just the nail in the coffin. But for our more academic purposes, we don’t need to know the details of the escape (how the men tied together lifejackets to make their getaway boat); popular audiences, however, love that information (because it’s fun). But it’s interesting to contrast the drama and mystery of a good story with our more boring questions of interpretation. (And keep in mind one of the most common questions I’d get when I was in grad school trying to talk to non-prison sociologists was “So what would Foucault say about your work?” No one outside of academic circles cares about that and most, hopefully, haven’t even heard of Foucault.)

I suspect that the truly best work is something that can combine what popular audiences want to know with questions that academics also care about. Usually, that means combining a sexy topic with an important theory. (As I warn in my methods book, the problem is sexy topics are entirely contingent and don’t always have staying power, nor can you always predict what will prove to be that year’s sexy topic.) But it’s noteworthy how rarely theory comes up in the types of questions we get from non-academics, so even if a study like that goes wide, you know it will be the empirical stuff that folks will focus on. (Yes, there are some obvious exceptions, but at least in my experience, the ratio is something like 9 to 1, empirical details to theory. People care more about fun factoids and the more theoretical stuff gets cut in the editing process.)

How This Goes Wrong: Our Structural Vulnerabilities

Okay, so far my pitch for patronage has been about alternative revenue sources and taking seriously the question of our relevance—the question of why would anyone actually pay for the work we are doing (and how that forces us to rethink a bit what we are doing). And I raised the problem of how our relevance is sometimes our entertainment value.

In this alternative universe, you can imagine Elon Musk being like, “Yeah, look at my ‘demic go. Look, she’s on ABC now…. Such an entertaining speaker. So many factoids.” Or more substantively, “My ‘demic produced another book this year and it was a good one. She got an award this time.” And I don’t know, maybe he’s competing with Zuckerberg who’s like, “Yeah, well, my ‘demic published two books this year. Your ‘demic’s book was trash.”

Okay, that seems pretty unrealistic. You might think it would have to be something more like “my ‘demic is curing cancer” versus “my ‘demic is figuring out the composition of Mars so we can set up the boring company when we get there.” But realistically, Musk would have his own people doing anything for the Mars project and Zuckerberg would have folks in a Zuckerberg hospital.

That’s why I think this thought experiment makes more sense for humanities and social sciences and the basic research parts of STEM fields: it’s got to be the somewhat useless (practically speaking) but aesthetically pleasing work, in the same way that artists were prized, to get the kind of conspicuous consumption I’m imagining fueling all of this.

If we can suspend disbelief and imagine for a moment that the super-rich would actually spend money on this type of conspicuous consumption, we can start to imagine pretty quickly how it would go wrong. Maybe our billionaire sponsors only sponsor work that they find politically palatable and drop the sponsorship as soon as you produce something that they don’t like. Even if your work isn’t explicitly political and doesn’t use political terminology, the topic or finding is just too unsettling, so you’re out. That’s the very basis of why we have academic freedom: we don’t want funding to be contingent on the political alignment of our work. Except usually we’re talking about the state and federal governments: we don’t want them to say, “ah, you lose your tenure because you published a study we don’t like (and if your university doesn’t fire you, your university loses its funding).”

Alternatively, let’s say that we go along with it: Billionaire A funds politically conservative research and Billionaire B funds politically liberal research. Researchers sponsored by each Billionaire stick within their lanes and keep their jobs, but at the end of the day, we can’t trust the work either camp produces. Now everyone loses.

You would really need billionaires choosing to sponsor academics who are aggressively neutral and even cheer when they produced findings they didn’t like because then that would be bragging rights for the billionaire to say, “See, my ‘demic can publish something that challenges my political beliefs because they know I care more about their neutrality and adherence to scholarly standards than to pleasing my ego.” But you could also imagine this going wrong in at least two ways: either the sponsored academics are now incentivized to actually be critical of their billionaires to show how independent they are, which could distort their research and also get old really quickly for said billionaires, or said academics could be so aggressively neutral that they pull their punches when it comes to making claims to avoid appearing political at all.*

*Less cartoonishly, you can imagine versions of this not from billionaires but from organizations. Last week, I saw a call for law review papers from FIRE. Part of the call made very clear that they weren’t looking for papers with specific conclusions, but rather they wanted a range of approaches and arguments. And this model also works great for consulting: smart organizations will say don’t tell me what you think I want to hear, that everything is great and I’m perfect; tell me what I do well but also find my vulnerabilities. If you are a lawyer, you don’t want to go into court unprepared because your consultant said you had no problems but you really do have problems. Likewise, I used to tell my students whom I’d ask to read my work: find the places that don’t make sense—if you find them now, I can fix them; don’t be afraid of offending me; rather, it’s a gift to me because if I think my text is great when it’s not, I’ll be really embaressed when I find out the hard way it’s super confusing. But this strategy really only works for a narrow set of projects rather than the kind of open-ended research we tend to do.

Very quickly, you can see how the patronage model worked a lot better for art (and especially artists who cared about realism rather than protest art), where it was really clear who was a great artist who could accomplish amazing things, than for other disciplines, like an astronomer who accidentally challenged fundamental beliefs in Christianity.

Of course, I’m using billionaires as an example, but these are precisely the same issues we run into when it comes to state funding, private donors, or tuition dollars when they start to be contingent on the political appeal of academic research (and teaching). We could say the correct answer is for folks to stop using politics as criteria, but I think that horse has left the stable—I suspect it will be a while before our state of polarization calms down. Moreover, there have always been strings attached to funding (understandably) and often some of those strings have been political in ways that challenge our independence.

So now what?

I don’t think there’s a clear takeaway from this post, but I’ll try to gesture at two issues I’m still mulling over and that are underlying these ideas.

First, I’ve been troubled by thinking about the funding landscape for universities for a while. The recent cuts from the current administration brought this to the fore, but I think it really highlighted a longer-standing issue than a single administration. With the benefit of hindsight, I was pretty angry at our universities for being so dependent on federal funding. And to be fair, not all of them are—some seem like they were actually pretty good at diversifying their portfolios. And therein lays the answer, or at least what I think is the best answer: given the fragility of our dependence on funders to come in and say how we should do things, the best answer seems to be independence through diversification. Basically, we should have a variety of revenue streams, which means we can walk away from some revenue sources when they get corrupted. Maybe universities should have more R&D wings, more contracts with state and local government to do practical/applied work, partnerships with local media outlets where they can speak with experts on demand in exchange for a fee (although news media isn’t doing great, either), other business ventures (yes, including real estate—although for a lot of unis, that ship has perhaps sailed since land prices are so expensive), etc., in addition to our more traditional sources of research grants, tuition revenue, and alumni donations.

I’m sure higher-level administrators are already on this, but at some point, I think we as faculty will also need to be part of this discussion and contribute to revenue generation beyond the venues we are currently doing. We also can’t have a system where only some sections of the faculty in specific departments or colleges are bringing in revenue and others aren’t—that’s a freerider problem (and that became an issue when the mostly humanities and social science folks brought a lot of negative attention on the universities that led to large cuts for a lot of STEM faculty, many of whom weren’t doing such politicking).

And there are a lot of ways we could do it that can fit how we’re already doing things. For example, a lot of folks have podcasts; universities could provide recording spaces and help promote the podcasts but also arrange for advertisers. Or they could arrange for more contracts with state and local agencies by arranging meet and greets between faculty and those agencies. And of course, doing activities that have some fundraising element can be added to our evaluation metrics in the same way that publications, grants (sometimes), and teaching is already part of it. Incentives matter. Shift the incentives and we’ll start to see a shift in behavior.

Second, we need to have some really uncomfortable but important conversations about what it is we do and should be doing. Honestly, I’m not sure I’ll like the answer to some of these questions, but I do think we need to be introspective.

As I’ve said before, I think my preferred vision of the university as a place of liberal arts education where students learn how to be informed, capable, well-rounded citizens is not the model anymore. There are probably still liberal arts schools where they are doing that, but we are embedded in a larger environment where students, their parents, and politicians look to college as the thing you do to get a good-paying job and a respectable middle-class existence. That model is very clearly under strain. And the tension between the different visions is causing strain.

Likewise, the model of professors getting to do basic research is also under strain. The whole bargain we struck that the government will stay out of our business if we agree to leave politics out of ours by sticking to scholarly standards is increasingly rendered void as neither side is clearly sticking to that bargain.

And we can talk about AI and competition for expertise from think tanks, journalists, and knowledge influencers (social media darlings, youtubers, podcasters) such that we no longer have the monopoly on expertise.

For a variety of reasons, our understanding of ourselves (or perhaps just speaking for me, my understanding of my role and how I understand the university) doesn’t really match the reality anymore.

We could call it a crisis, or we could look at it as an opportunity for reinvention and expansion. I prefer the latter. It’s nice to be able to do work that matters—it’s probably one reason why so many scholars are turning to normativity in their research: they feel like they are helping in some way. It would also be nice to know that universities have solid funding streams so we’re not dependent on any one source and effectively dealing with patronage politics while pretending like we’re not. It’s also a lot more empowering to think about a crisis as an opportunity. Instead of trying to fight a losing battle, we can try to find our openings to shape the future in ways we’re okay with and that can be more pallatable to the people who pay for our existence.

But whether we see it as a crisis or an opportunity, we really do need to have these hard conversations about what the university is for and what should we be doing. We’re going to disagree on some things and maybe we’ll agree on others. Maybe the answer will be a proliferation of different models (as I’ve suggested before). Maybe we will self-sort into those different spaces. Or maybe we can fit a lot of different models under one roof—I think that would probably be the most robust, as long as we can agree to some ground rules (otherwise, it might get a little too chaotic and dysfunctional). But before we figure out what the solutions are, we should probably get on the same page about what it is we are supposed to be doing.

[Edit: Post-script: I’d intended to include this above but forgot during drafting and editing. Elsewhere, while brainstorming ideas for the future of academia, I was also riffing on an idea I’d heard at last summer’s HeterodoxAcademy annual meeting on prediction markets. That person’s recommendation was using two things prediction markets offer—the wisdom of the crowd and the practice of putting claims to the test—to improve research. Basically, scholars would have to make clear testable claims in their research and place bets that they will come true. I won’t do justice to the idea, but I remember thinking it was an intriguing out-of-the-box idea. But, relevant to this post, it might be interesting for universities to turn to prediction markets as another revenue source. You’d need to ensure that the claims are tested by someone else, not affiliated with the university, to avoid corruption. But it would be a way of dealing with the politicization of research findings (as the original author, whose name escapes me, argued): at a certain point, you can’t just repeatedly make claims that are false and get away with it, and prediction markets would essentially create a record and get some skin in the game. If universities formalized it, it could be a way for them to get money—if their ‘demics are good. And it would force us to be more careful and thoughtful about our claims.]

Where is this Coming From?

My very first conversation that involved “anarchy” came up because I was trying to figure out what someone’s politics were—what is it called when you simultaneously oppose borders/any immigration control, “the nation-state,” and… taxes. I get that opposing immigration control of any kind has increasingly taken center stage in the Democratic platform over the last decade. Basically, in lockstep with Trump’s wall rhetoric, it became increasingly fashionable to criticize (retroactively) Obama’s immigration policies and record numbers of deportations—and to support all immigration, including illegal immigration. Likewise, I don’t entirely get it, but I can at least recognize that opposition to the very concept of statehood, nationhood, etc., is, for some folks an outgrowth of an open-borders mindset or alternatively an anti-racist mindset that views states as inherently racialized/ing and racist, but I’ve also started to realize that “nation-state” is not just a jargon word, but a shibboleth to signal a certain set of radical political credentials (what exactly they are, I’m not clear on, but something radical). But opposition to taxes left me scratching my head. Aren’t liberals supposed to be generally pro-tax? I mean, look at the current calls to tax billionaires dominating Democratic discourse? I was really confused by that combination when my interlocutor said, “Oh, they’re an anarchist.” (In hindsight, anti-government might have been more accurate, but the nation-state is only one form of government—maybe they agree with global governance or local and state governments. But as it turns out, anarchist fits quite well.)

I always thought of anarchy as a kind of no-rules mentality, but also c/o the Anarchist Cookbook, certainly with an anti-government bent. Because I like to look up definitions—my understanding of a term is not always accurate, so I always want to check—I looked up the definition of anarchism. Currently, when I google “anarchy define,” the AI summary (citing Reddit and others) explains,

“a political philosophy that seeks to abolish all forms of involuntary, hierarchical authority—primarily the state (government) and capitalism. They advocate for replacing these systems with voluntary, decentralized, and cooperative associations.”

Okay, I guess that fits what I know of these folks’ politics—they’re hard-core anti-capitalism and clearly anti-government. The reference to “decentralized cooperative association” sounds close enough to the kind of communism I think they support. So I think this actually fits their politics pretty well, as surprising as that is to say about grown adults employed at universities (some taking state funding). In fact, it fits a lot of the politics that seem to be undergirding some of the more radical claims scholars have included in their academic articles and books (which are super anti-capitalist and weirdly utopian—like, super unrealistic utopians).

Jump ahead a few weeks: I had several talks with folks about my normativity piece and the general decline in academic standards, and this idea of anarchy (in the no-rules, free-for-all, tear-it-down sense) kept coming up, characterizing some of the trends, begging the question: Is anarchy a useful framework for describing the quality downturn in academic rigor, specifically for political purposes?

Obligatory Caveats

I have to do my standard caveat that when I’m talking about declining standards, that doesn’t mean the complete absence of value or quality. When I criticize trends, I’m not saying everything is bad, just that there are clear strands of concerning developments and a general trajectory in what I’d say is the wrong direction.

Likewise, I want to acknowledge that there are many, many reasons why research (my particular focus) is becoming lower-quality, more incremental, and more biased. Alena Shalaby and I summarize a lot of those reasons in our article, including publication pressures, which I think are really important, especially in a time when service and admin obligations are increasing. Arguably, expanding academia is another important factor—at a certain point (after initial expansion), expanding from below is hard to avoid. Misaligned incentives and failures to institutionalize checks on data and methods integrity have been the focus of the replication and reproduction crises facing quantitative research. Elsewhere, I also talk about the role of social media in creating an incentive structure for a particular style of scholarship. I write a lot about the political factors, but it’s important to acknowledge many other factors, including structural factors.

Finally, I want to emphasize: this post is very much a brainstorm and my early attempt to try to think through what this idea of “academic anarchy” means. I’m going to think through some examples and then pressure test them, like why anarchy and not libertarianism, or is the redistributive mindset a better framework for describing what we’re seeing. And because my thoughts are still early, I’m using “framework” extremely loosely in the sense of “can we put a frame around this set of phenomena and see if it holds water or not.” Lest I be called a hypocrite, I’m not trying to theorize, just label and describe. To the extent that there’s an implicit causal argument going on, keep in mind that I don’t find single-variable explanations convincing, so this post is not intended to be the one-size-fits-all explanation for all that has transpired—far from it. Maybe I can explain some of the variance, but I’d hope for a proverbial R^2 of .33 or .4, but, honestly, I’d be happy with .25, which seems plausible.

What is Academic Anarchy?

Central to my understanding of academic anarchy is the rejection of (traditional) rules of behavior, scholarship, and teaching. (I’m undecided on whether it’s all rules or just traditional rules. I keep coming back to traditional rules, though.) It also involves the rejection of hierarchy (particularly hierarchies rooted in traditional markers of status) in favor of a kind of flattening and redistributive mindset (“everyone gets one” instead of “only the best”).

I’d say we can point to some clear cases of a rejection of hierarchy and rules in teaching, research, and mentorship.

For example, “ungrading” has been popular among this crowd, particularly during and post-pandemic. Ungrading has different versions, but as I understand it, it dispenses with traditional grading practices; one common version involves narrative evaluations; the one I remember seeing a lot was getting the students to grade themselves and sometimes their cohorts. (I tried it myself—it didn’t work well (my students wouldn’t give out bad grades to others, but would give themselves bad grades, even when they didn’t deserve it, whereas the ones who probably did deserve it didn’t give themselves the lower grades).) There are some appealing components of ungrading: getting students to seriously reflect on what goes into a grade, about what they aspire to versus what they were able to achieve, why they think that is, and maybe what else they would need to do to improve if they did the assignment again. (For some examples of advocates’ descriptions, see here, here, here, and here.) These examples are clear in their rejection of traditional approaches to grading, especially numeric scores (Stommel defines ungrading as “raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice”). They also clearly support ungrading not just because of its pedagogical possibilities to help students focus more on learning than on grades, but also because of its “equity” and incorporation of student “autonomy” (Columbia) and to counter the “bias” inherent in traditional grading (Stommel). So clearly there’s a social justice bent to the justification, which helps explain why it went so viral in the pandemic and after (even though it was on the rise before 2020). In terms of the anarchy framework, ungrading is a more cooperative system that involves the students and decenters the authority of the professor to give grades, traditional markers of hierarchical distinction.

In research, I’d say we see this in a lot of areas involving the rejection of certain research methods and standard norms and outlines for social science articles (traditional authority be damned). In their place, we see the rising popularity of alternatives, such as autoethnography, especially those that purposely use informal language and misspelled words to maintain their authenticity (no rules, more voluntary). To be clear, autoethnographies are still rare in peer-reviewed settings (but less rare in dissertations and some manuscripts I’ve read as a reviewer or editor), but they are becoming more common, including in mainstream journals (for examples, here and here). In other cases, we see the rise of “decolonizing” methods and theories that reject standard approaches as “Western,” “racist,” and “colonizing.” But we can also see it in the general resistance even on the part of reviewers and editors to insist on standard expectations—that there is an introduction that frames the study for the journal’s audience, a research question, a literature review, a complete data and methods section, a finding section with clear evidence (and complete citations to the data), a discussion that puts the findings in conversation with the relevant literature, a conclusion that puts the study in conversation with the broader literature. As long as there’s something in there we like, the rest doesn’t matter—the rules don’t matter. (Seeing this firsthand as a journal editor—how often reviewers were willing to publish an article with obvious problems—was pretty shocking. )

Relatedly, we also see academic anarchy in the decline of professionalism. As I’ve written before, there’s been a shift in the last decade or so away from discussing appropriate behavior and presentation of self in ways that comport with a professional demeanor to a “you be you” attitude. I’ve certainly benefited from this shift and I think some of it has been positive and healthy. But there’s also been a kind of resistance to and abdication of our responsibility as advisors to prepare our advisees for professional spaces, either out of fear of formal complaints or out of a superficial politics of inclusion. But here, too, we see a rejection of traditional rules and expectations (you wear a suit at your interview v. wear what makes you comfortable), hierarchy (those who choose to present a particular way over those who don’t), and authority (who are you to tell me how to dress/speak/be).

Is it Anarchy or Something Else?

As these examples indicate, there are other frameworks folks have offered to describe or motivate these trends: social justice/inclusion/equity. In fact, to the extent that some examples of academic anarchy are part of a rejection of meritocracy (because, you know, meritocracy is a lie and the system isn’t fair, so we can’t trust grades/formal evaluations/rankings/hierarchies because they are built on unfair foundations), one question is whether this is anarchy or just a redistribution mindset?

As co-editor of an international and interdisciplinary journal, my editorial team and I insisted on standard components of a social science article, but we were often criticized for being colonizing, US-centric, Western, racist, etc., because of those expectations. Keep in mind, we also wrote in our editors’ notes detailed descriptions explaining the components and how to set up an article with them, instead of just assuming people were familiar with them. We also held office hours, both online and at the major annual conference. To insist on these components, however, we were being exclusionary, we were told. By rejecting these components, the logic went, scholars from the Global South would be better able to publish their work. (The irony was that we actually published quite a few pieces from scholars from the Global South. Quite often, it was US-based and some European scholars who failed to follow the standard structure. We also introduced a policy in which scholars could publish translated versions of their articles so people in the countries under study could read the work in their native language. But, you know, we’re super exclusionary, so we just roll that way.)

In fact, in conversations and even reviewer comments, it became clear that scholars in the field increasingly saw publication as a thing to distribute. As someone put it quite clearly (in a social media exchange), since junior academics need publications first to get a job and then to get tenure, we shouldn’t stand in their way—withholding a publication was holding back their career. (There was no realization that if they can’t get published in a good venue, perhaps they shouldn’t have this career.) This is very clearly a redistributionist mindset rather than a meritocratic one. But it’s not just that: it’s redistributive specifically by rejecting existing rules, by not sticking to standards. It’s not inclusive in the sense that we are open to everyone who has merit; it’s inclusive in the sense that there’s a seat for everyone who wants it, whether or not they have met the criteria for entry.

It’s this combination of rejecting rules in favor of redistribution that strikes me as especially anarchic—as though there’s no way to be inclusive without tearing down existing structures. But then is all redistribution anarchic? Doesn’t it always reject existing rules when it’s introduced? I don’t know, maybe. I’d need some more examples of the redistribution mindset. One that comes to mind is in funding agencies that reject blinded evaluations of applications because they don’t want the “good” schools to get too many grants so the low-ranked schools aren’t left without grants, and they give extra points if you’re at one of those schools. To the extent that there’s a whole bureaucracy built around this and a point structure to ensure a flatter outcome, that strikes me as less anarchic and more basic redistribution. So maybe there’s a large overlap but redistribution and anarchy are not entirely the same thing.

Ditto for equity. I think (and others have argued) there are less free-for-all approaches to equity than some policy changes. For example, one case of academic anarchy is getting rid of SAT and GRE/LSAT scores for college and grad/law school admissions. What takes the place of the scores? Who knows? A closer reading of the other components of the application, it seems (which, ironically, seems to introduce even more bias). There’s still likely some sort of rubric and it’s not just vibes, but most of the conversations I’ve seen have been about what’s removed, not what’s added. So here, the way that it’s a rejection and tearing down rather than a building up of something new strikes me as more anarchic than simply equity. Something like adding in extra mentorship for folks who come from schools that didn’t prepare them as well would seem more equitable and less anarchic.

So I think I’ve tentatively convinced myself that while there are elements of social justice, inclusion, equity, and a redistribution mindset in these practices, the rejection of traditional rules and the sort of tearing-down or don’t tell me what to do mentality makes it more anarchy. I’m curious if I’m applying that consistently (for example, you could argue that some of the alternative methods are building up and not just tearing down, but I think the clearest examples of academic anarchy in those areas are the ones that reject any formal structure—which won’t be all autoethnographies or instances of ungrading, for example, just some of them). Maybe in a few years, there will be enough of these approaches that there will be a new set of rules and then I’d have to re-evaluate if it’s still anarchy.

What Happened When I Googled “Academic Anarchy”

So, any time you talk about a jargon term, it’s always a good idea to check: has anyone else written about this? I’m guessing other heterodox-minded folks have and I’ve just not come across it. So I googled it.

Well, someone definitely uses the term… and it seems to be supportive rather than analytical. And pretty similar to what I’ve laid out (but certainly with more components). Google’s AI summary below:

That’s kind of interesting. Of course, this summary goes further than what I’ve described, but it also overlaps with some of the work I’ve criticized as mistaking overt normativity for theory. So I think I independently diagnosed something that some folks are leaning into.

There are some other references to the phrase “academic anarchy.” There are several references to David Graeber’s book Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology and several other references to Sidney Hook’s 1968 address, “Academic Freedom and Academic Anarchy,” about the chaos at Berkeley. From my skim of some of the (mostly conservative) websites referencing the latter, they seem to focus on the apparent lawlessness at colleges, including the lack of curtailment of students who went beyond protesting to actual rule violations, including property destruction and kidnapping (or preventing people from leaving a building or car). Those citing the former seem to be focused on the question of whether or not there are (many) self-identified anarchists in the professoriate (mostly from folks who are supportive of anarchy). These two references are sort of swamping my Google results. I’m guessing someone else has written about academic anarchy in the way I’m using it; if you know of some, please let me know!

Why Does it Matter?

It’s worth stepping back and asking why it matters if the trends we’re seeing are anarchic—as opposed to, say, libertarian or redistributive. Each is an ideology and we might take a stance that no ideology is better or worse than others, so why does it matter which one it is. (Personally, I would disagree—some ideologies are clearly better than others. But when it comes to what other people believe, I don’t really care what their personal views are. So, for all intents and purposes, when it comes to other people’s ideologies, they are basically interchangeable—it’s their behavior that matters to me, not their reasoning.)

Anarchy can certainly sound scarier, and likely conservative critics of academia would perk up at the framing as anarchic as opposed to just inclusive. (I mean, few people ever seem to argue against inclusivity. It’s always the operationalization that’s the sticking point, not the goal to be inclusive.) But that’s a side effect rather than a reason to motivate the analysis.

For me, I think it’s the way the anarchist tendencies help explain some of the stuff that really bothers me the most, in part because they don’t make sense—the rejection of rules and things that smack of authority, even when they make sense and exist for good reasons, even when they are actually beneficial.

There’s a strong tenor of hypocrisy and superficial performativity in a lot of the trends affecting academia that really gets to me. The rejection of rules is a special case of that (and one that, as I’ve explained before, really bothers me personally because I really need clear rules and norms to help me figure out how to navigate social and professional situations—getting rid of rules is the opposite of inclusive for me). In the case of professionalization, the performative rejection of professional standards and shouting down the “white, cis, hetero, male, upper-middle-class culture” that guides norms of professionalization does not help students navigate spaces where they are still expected to manage some level of professional decorum, whether people admit that or not. In the case of rules governing how to lay out an article, these aren’t arbitrary choices that we do just because our forebears did it; they actually aid the act of communication, which is fundamental to writing and, by the way, important for inclusivity (bad writing is not inclusive writing!). And ignoring variations in applications and choosing instead to admit everyone who wants to be in a program, without doing anything to aid the less qualified, is far from inclusive and arguably a form of exploitation (especially in programs that charge tuition or put students to work, e.g., grading). But if you care more about rejecting rules and performative rejections of traditional authority than actual social justice, it kind of makes sense.

I also think the anarchy framing helps make sense of the general mentality of “don’t tell me or others what to do” combined with this sort of tearing things down mentality (who remembers the common refrain “burn it down, burn it all down” that was so popular c. 2020?). That is, I think it helps capture some of the emotional valence that describing this stuff as part of a call for inclusive, redistributive, or social justice practices doesn’t quite capture.

Perhaps there’s more to it, but for now I’m satisfied with my initial foray into this topic: I think there’s something there, I think it’s epsilon more useful than other popular framings/summaries of what’s driving at least certain trends (but by no means all of them), and it seems like it’s consistent with what some advocates are even calling for. It would be interesting to develop this further (e.g., examining correlations between scholars’ actual politics and their support for academic anarchy, whether scholars support academic anarchy across realms or just in research or teaching or mentorship), but for now, I can move on to something else.

In this post, I move away from diagnosing the problem (as I see it) and turn toward one solution. In doing so, I turn to the tools of mindfulness; since that will certainly too woo-woo for some readers, the goal is to discuss a set of tools for achieving clinical detachment. As noted previously, these posts were motivated by a question I received about how do we maintain our commitment to science and avoid giving into our normative commitments when we do our empirical work on topics that are inherently normative—meaning that we are going to have strong views on.

Getting Back on Track

So far (in the previous post), I have named a phenomenon and tried to contextualize and explain it. Now the question is what do we do about it (assuming, like me, you’re not in favor of this shift)? How do we reverse the deprofessionalization of sociology in this sense—that is, giving up on the need for disinterested, dispassionate, arm’s-length analyses in favor of impassioned, motivated, arguably biased analyses?

That’s actually a huge question that we could address across multiple levels of analysis. Because my motivation was really to respond to a question regarding individual-level behavior, I’m going to take a narrow view here and talk about one strategy (or tactic—I always get these confused) that individual researchers can use. So I’m not going to talk about the need for professionalization in grad seminars (although I think that would be a good idea) or advice and training (that we could all use) about appropriate decorum on social media. Instead, I’m thinking about this question (as I often do) with the mindset of asking how I would update my methods book for the current context and working through some tips and tricks for conducting research. So this post is more pedagogical in focus than the last.

For this intervention, I’d argue we can take a page from mindfulness meditation. (If that immediately gets your hackles up, calm down and hear me out. Remember, we likely share the same goal.)

What is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness is about noticing the world around you and being present—basically, getting out of your head and intense feelings/thoughts. What does that actually mean? You become an observer instead of a participant in your emotions and feelings. For example, you take a step back (metaphorically) and observe yourself like an impartial observer. When you start to feel anxious or upset, you work to notice and observe what you are feeling instead of getting caught up in the feelings. Essentially, you move from the intensity of feeling to a calmer state of awareness and curious watchfulness. One strategy is to identify or even narrate how you physically feel your anxiety—a tightening in your chest, a quickening of your breath and heart rate, the feeling of heat on your upper back and neck. This is a strategy or practice called “noting.” But you don’t have to be on your way to a panic attack to use it.

Noting is often used in mindfulness meditation, where you either focus on your breathing, your fingertips, your heart rate, or a simple count (to 10 or 20, repeatedly). When your mind interrupts that focus—you think of something you have to do, you feel a sudden sharp emotion, or you remember a happy memory—instead of hopping on the planning/worrying/feeling freight train, you let the train pass by and say, oh hey, there goes the worry/thought train. (Headspace uses the analogy of cars or clouds, but for me it’s a freight train because that shit moves fast when it takes you with it.) More concisely (since you get a lot of these interruptions), you might say, “I observe a planning thought” (or just “planning”) or “I observe a feeling” (or just “feeling”) or even “I observe a pain in my lower back” (or just “sensation”).

Importantly, in noting or mindfulness generally, you’re supposed to acknowledge and describe these interruptions/thoughts/feelings non-judgmentally: you’re not supposed to get angry that you had these thoughts or see them as a diagnosis that you are failing at meditation. (Indeed, that’s why meditation fails for so many people—feeling like you’re failing is stressful.) Obviously, that would be counterproductive. You’re not even supposed to code your thoughts as happy or sad—you’re supposed to treat all thoughts equally. Instead, you’re being clinical about it—you’re acknowledging what is happening without getting swept up in what is happening (you’re not hopping on the train to crazy town); you’re realizing you are having these feelings without dwelling on what you are feeling.

By taking on the mindset of a curious but impartial observer, noting ostensibly gives you a way to treat your emotions and anxious thoughts more productively. Practitioners argue that by naming the feeling, it creates distance in ways that help you reduce the feeling’s intensity. It also helps you to avoid spirals. It lets you get the focus back on simply being and giving your mind a rest from anxious thoughts or painful feelings—you’re not suppressing them, but just not letting them take over. (This break for your mind is important for reducing your allostatic load, which you can think of as the mind-equivalent of giving your muscles a rest after intense training. It’s similar to why we sometimes get creative ideas when we go for a walk or take a shower—taking a mindless, or really mindful, break is a bit like defragmenting our computers in the old days. It helps performance.)

Importantly, the more we practice mindfulness—such as with a ten-minute session on an app—the more it trains our brain and we get in the habit of not dwelling or getting caught up during the day when we’re interacting with family, colleagues, drivers on the freeway, and others. An app I particularly like called FitMind emphasizes that each time your mind wanders, and you come back to the practice, you’re doing the equivalent of a rep (repetition), as you would when doing curls or dumbbell press—you're making your mindfulness muscle stronger. I find this practice has also been helpful for improving focus when reading, when I otherwise get distracted by random ideas and thoughts.

Now, I’m not an expert on any of this (I’ve read a bit about it and used a lot of meditation apps, but that doesn’t make me a mindfuless expert) and I’m not going to guarantee this works for mental health stuff (this post is not medical advice!). Instead, I want to use mindfulness—or more specifically, the noting strategy and the general orientation of being a detached observer—as a metaphor for how we can do good social science research.

Applying Mindfulness to Research

In my reading, mindfulness practice is pretty similar to the old-school scientific stance held in the foundation of our disciplines at a time when the social sciences tried to model themselves on the natural sciences like biologists going out into the field observing nature or a chemist in the laboratory conducting an experiment.

To take an example that might get me canceled, think of the anthropologist who travels to an obscure village and observes with curiosity and interest but avoids judgment. Their goal isn’t to condemn a group for (let’s say) practicing cannibalism, but to understand where the practice came from/how it started, what purpose it serves (is it just a source of food or does it have some social/cultural purpose as well?), how it is sustained, what its rules are (whom are you allowed to eat and whom should you not eat), how objections and resistance are overcome, how people make sense of what they are doing (particularly if that has consequences for its maintenance or social/cultural function). To do that, the anthropologist would have to set aside their judgments about the practice and aspire to be an impartial observer, just as one does with their own thoughts during mindfulness meditation.

Just as we’re not supposed to beat ourselves up for having an anxious thought during meditation, we’re not supposed to condemn this group for its practices. It would be unseemly and unprofessional if the researcher came back to their university and said, “Oh my god, guys, can you believe it! It was so gross! They were so primitive! How backwards! This is an excellent justification for colonization! Let’s enlighten them.” Although certainly some people might use a scholar’s research for that purpose, the important thing is that such an outcome is orthogonal to the scholar’s purpose of understanding and not judging. Setting out to undermine the group or choosing to condemn them would be at odds with the quest to understand, because it would color the analyses.

To take a less cancelable example, think of Becker’s famous study of how people learn to smoke marijuana—a highly deviant act at the time (early 1950s). Judging from his article, his goal wasn’t to shame his subjects, nor to vindicate them, but to understand them. You could argue it was to vindicate them in the sense that he was challenging existing theories of deviance, which saw deviance as inborn, inherent, and dispositional. But importantly, he doesn’t say he’s trying to vindicate them; he frames his study as an engagement with the literature. And it’s a fantastic study that makes a great point: it turns out (and I don’t know if this is still true, especially given the higher potency of current street drugs, but at least back in the early 1950s), getting high isn’t easy and one has to be taught the techniques or try it several times, which can (apparently) be an unpleasant experience. According to Becker, there’s a certain socialization that must take place, and without it, one is less likely to stick with their foray into marijuana use. (There’s also more about looking at the social structuring of even physical experiences.)

The point of his study is not, a “ha, these people are great, stupid, evil, etc.” Nor does Becker rail against the injustices of drug user stereotypes. Instead, he gives us a case study of a process (learning to become a marijuana user) that helps us to think through deviant behavior and stress-test some of our existing theories. It won’t apply to all types of deviant behavior (certainly there’s some stuff that might be more attractive and pleasurable from the beginning, such that one doesn’t mind the experimentation, and some stuff that might just be more straightforward and so doesn’t require the socialization). But he notes that it was a form of deviance a lot of people were talking about and making some assumptions that were wrong in ways that had consequences for our ability to understand and theorize deviance. But to do that, you have to take an arm’s length approach—you have to get past your biases about drug users as inherently immoral gross people (as they were thought about at the time), and you also have to not glorify them either (acknowledging their unseemly sides when relevant). You have to be curious and open, allowing the data to lead you, even to destinations you might not expect.

(And sure, back in the day, there were debates about objectivity in anthropological and other ethnographic fieldwork and especially the question of how embedded in a new culture/subculture one should get and whether that colors your objectivity. It’s not that it was a monolithic mindset—but the fascinating thing was that scholars did have these debates rather than rejecting the importance of objectivity or the question of how best to be an impartial observer!)

Scholars aren’t the only ones to take this approach, either. If you’re going to profile and catch a serial killer, you have to understand their motivation or how/why they got started; to do that, you have to get past some of your disgust and hatred for them—you have to take a step back from your feelings and reactions and just observe the available evidence, often humanizing the killer, as uncomfortable as that may seem. If you’re a parent with a misbehaving child, you’ll do a better job if you don’t just focus on how you feel personally offended and you think everything they do is purposely trying to piss you off (or conversely that you feel like a failure as a parent). Stepping outside of those emotions and reactions lets you focus on the bigger picture and see what’s actually going on—or at least get a lot closer to the truth and figure out what other questions you need to ask or what data you need to collect.

The Weirdness of Clinical Detachment

Now, I have to acknowledge an important argument against this approach—it weirds people out—and for that, I’m going to be a bit autobiographical.

Adopting this clinical detachment is actually a lot easier for me than most, and it gets me into trouble—I’m often curious about figuring out the explanation or outcome for things that are generally really emotionally intense for people, which is apparently offputting. When I realized that, I started to think about it like I’m a mad scientist watching an experiment unfold, rubbing my goatee and murmuring, “fascinating.” But since “the experiment” involves real people and real stakes, it upsets people when my reaction seems to be one of curiosity rather than horror, overt sympathy, or advocacy one way or another. Apparently, we’re not supposed to look at an upcoming execution using a new execution method by saying, “I’m so curious to see what happens.” Likewise, we’re not supposed to look at a homicide case during sentencing and clinically evaluate the perp’s chances of recidivism (especially if they are low) without acknowledging the moral outrage of murder. As a professor once told me in college, my interest in punishment is fairly “goulish.”*

*Yes, I still have emotional reactions, but it seems to be around a narrower range of issues—it is most common when I read in gory detail about physical injuries, whether these are self-inflicted or the result of a punishment, and sexual violence. There are some descriptions that don’t bother me for some reason and I’m able to keep a certain clinical distance (possibly because I’ve just read similar descriptions so many times that they no longer have the original impact), but others where the description is either too sharp that it makes my skin crawl, at least initially (e.g., reading about prisoners cutting their achiles tendons to avoid work detail), or goes on for too long that it finally just gets me and I have to take a moment to process (which might just be stepping away for a moment or quickly writing a note of my reaction in my fieldnotes). But after acknowledging that reaction, I move on. Then I’m able to record and analyze without getting swept up in the feelings of horror I first have and focus on the task at hand.

So if this approach to our work gives off “mad scientist” vibes, keep in mind that other people use the metaphor of sports fans watching a game play out—I don’t like that metaphor though, because that can sound like you have a particular side you’re hoping will win. At best, that metaphor works if you’re wearing a shirt saying, “I just hope both teams have fun,” or maybe if you’re the bookie taking all the bets and you get a cut of the winnings regardless of who wins. That’s a lot of metaphors, but I suspect different metaphors resonate differently for different folks. The key is that we’re not taking sides, but we are interested in closely observing how things unfold.

From Horror to Advocacy, Mindfulness Still Works

I offered this mindfulness/noting metaphor to a colleague who asked about what we’re supposed to do as researchers when we are studying something (we find) horrific. I think the subtext was something along the lines of “don’t we have a moral obligation to call it out, or perhaps simply to acknowledge that it’s horrific?”, or maybe just “how do we describe something horrific without calling it that?” My goal was to emphasize that we need to put our own judgments aside and focus on the task at hand: and that task isn’t about morally categorizing what we observe, but observing and explaining it (and hopefully coming up with generalizable insights that can accumulate over time, thereby advancing human knowledge). It’s in this context that we observe things that, with a less mindful mindset we might find upsetting, but, rather than riding our emotional reaction, we’re choosing to simply describe (and explain) such things.

Consequently, so far my examples were of groups or practices that we might feel disgust and anger toward and using this clinical detachment or mindfulness/noting practice to overcome them. But these days, the feelings we might be trying to overcome are often the opposite.

I’m going to briefly step aside from the mindfulness metaphor (before returning to it in the next subsection) to offer another explanation for why detachment is important, even when we’re rooting for our subjects.

If you are studying a group you feel similar to or that you are rooting for, you won’t understand them and the related social processes you are studying if you turn a blind eye to the embarrassing things they do. We all have friends, family members, or people we respect who sometimes do really stupid things (we also do them ourselves). We can admit that—and when we are sufficiently clinical about it, we can admit it in a rather calm, unemotional way rather than screaming, crying, or cutting the person out of our lives (assuming it’s not something truly unforgivable and there’s no coming back from it). We can say, I really wish they didn’t do that since that’s going to have bad consequences for them (or for others), and still have a conversation with them or work with them (literally, one of the hallmarks of professionalism). We can also disagree with some of their values and preferences, even while we still feel a great fondness for them. When we are sufficiently detached—not so detached that we walk away but not so carried away with our emotions that we can’t see/think clearly or act responsibly—our love and respect for those people often means we do see them as whole people rather than as two-dimensional stereotypes. But when we reduce the people we study, even those whom we want to see succeed, to those two-dimensional stereotypes, we’re not respecting and loving them—we’re turning them into props that fit our preferred narratives.

Reveling in Complexity as a Curious Observer

In the case of punishment studies, we often see descriptions of prisoners in hagiographic terms and descriptions of prison staff and administrators (sometimes even penal reformers) almost as cartoon villains. Certainly, this isn’t all the literature, and I’m not even sure what the portion is—there are many good studies of correctional officers, for example, that don’t assume they are saints or villains. But some of the most high-profile work for a while was doing this. Heather Ann Thompson’s multi-award winning book about the Attica prison riot did this, as I wrote about elsewhere. Studies of marginalized groups have done this as well (I give several examples in my normativity piece).

And as I discussed in my piece on prisoner resistance, there are both empirical and normative reasons for not imposing our own preferences on prisoners. Since the prison literature in my fields is usually pretty pro-prisoner in a narrow sense, it seems weirdly hypocritical to silence their agency by imposing our own interpretations of their behavior instead of letting them tell us what they were intending through the available data. (This doesn’t mean deferring to their explanations at the expense of the data; it does mean deferring to the data, rather than our own normative priors.) Likewise, it seems weird to celebrate prisoner behavior as acts of agency only when they are violating the rules, implying prisoners are not being agentic when they obey the rules of the prison, of society, or the capitalist order that many writers seem to decry.

By contrast, when we maintain a clinical, nonjudgmental detachment toward our subjects, we can acknowledge that they are complicated, often contradictory people who do a mix of things we find both good and bad; the key is not to judge but to observe so we can try to understand. As I’ve argued before, we won’t understand our subjects if we don’t acknowledge their full complexity.

For me, this was particularly clear when researching the mid-nineteenth-century prison administrators of Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia. Certainly, I spent enough time with these men through their writings that I felt like I knew them—I felt like I could anticipate them at times. But they were also so confounding—and that made my project really difficult.

The dissertation and later book sought to explain how Eastern was able to maintain its exceptional and highly criticized approach to incarceration at a time when most (and eventually all) other prisons followed a different model (the famous Auburn System), in contrast to our theoretical expectation that organizations will become homogenous under the conditions that reigned at the time. Pretty quickly, it became clear that the prison administrators were the ones who kept the “separate system” going, against the attacks of national and local-level reformers and legislators (including colleagues, friends, and family). The question that occupied much of my time was what motivated them—I needed to know this to answer my larger question of how the system was able to continue.

One issue that made this question so difficult, and what struck me about the data, was how the prison administrators who were the most seemingly committed to the separate system often did things that jeopardized it. They’d let their personal ambitions or petty squabbles interfere—one warden even embezzled from the fragile prison he had helped bring into existence and ran for ten years (Eastern was often criticized for its expense, so this was a doubly harmful act). Likewise, despite their proclamations that the separate system was the best system in existence and their efforts to prevent any formal change, they would privately violate it, often in ways reformers were calling for. If I had simply painted these men—as other historians have done in their cases—as true believers committed to the cause, as self-interested bad actors, or as rational managers trying to make their lives as easy as possible, I would have been downplaying the more complicated truth. I would have missed key parts of the story—especially the distinctions between their front-stage and back-stage behavior and what (I think) they really cared about more than anything. That is, if I had been too concerned with presenting them in a positive or negative light, I would have presented an incomplete and misleading account. Instead, I approached the data from the standpoint of a curious observer, just as I did when studying prisoners who also turn out to be complicated people and not the two-dimensional stereotypes often described in the literature.

As this example hopefully makes clear, the mindfulness framework also incorporates some of the critiques of objectivity, but without treating those critiques as always and everywhere accurate. For example, some critical scholars argue that neutrality and objectivity are simply ways of reinforcing existing power structures. But it’s not as though as a detached observer you ignore bad actions on the part of the powerful. What you don’t do is only focus on those actions, only assume bad motivations on their part, or try to convince people that they are evil. What you do is try to be open to everything in your dataset, the “good” and the “bad.” Being a cheerleader for the powerful is just as biased as being a cheerleader for the powerless. The point of objectivity is to not take a side, to not rely on your normative priors, but to treat people, processes, and events as they are visible in your data (while also addressing biases in your data).

Mindfulness is Not a Substitute for Standard Research Protocols

There’s an important caveat I have to address here. The mindfulness metaphor as a pathway to detached observerhood is really a strategy for enacting one’s commitment or orientation to research as a scientific enterprise. It is not a substitute for rigorous, systematic data collection and analysis. (In fact, I’ve not really talked about data collection or analysis in general.) So this post should not be read as saying we can dispense with standard protocols simply by adopting a mindfulness approach. Nor should I be read as saying mindfulness guarantees objectivity; it doesn’t. Plenty of people can say they are upholding scientific and scholarly ideals and then shit all over them (see, for example, this piece by Bourdieu). (I worry about this for myself—honestly, I’m terrified that I’ll do something that makes me a hypocrite.) Indeed, for many of us, mindfulness in our work will be a necessary, but not sufficient, practice. Mindsets and orientations only take us so far—sticking to solid research protocols carries us further, and then peer review and post-publication debates take us even further.

But mindsets are important. In academia today, we have to constantly work to remind ourselves of the scientific mindset to offset other, contradicting mindsets. For example, so many people encourage scholars, especially students and junior scholars, to take a stance, to weigh in on public debates, and to straddle the activist-scholar identity by merging the two in our work. Indeed, many of us are working on issues where either we have strong feelings or other people have strong feelings, and we’re often asked for our own position on these issues or what advice we have for others. There’s a sense in which a lot of loud voices don’t want us to be impartial, detached observers. So I’m hoping this mindfulness orientation can help provide an alternative model or heuristic. (Elsewhere, I’ve suggested other strategies like trying to imagine how I would interpret the data from different political perspectives. That is a conscious choice and actual practice rather than an automatic instinct. Some folks are good at being equal opportunity skeptics; the rest of us need tips and tricks to buttress our efforts and counteract our biases.) Indeed, the idea that it’s something we constantly have to work at and remind ourselves about is quite fitting because, just as we keep doing reps in mindfulness meditation to bring our focus back to the meditation and away from our distracting thoughts, we need to constantly work on correcting our biases, our strong opinions, and other tendencies that might knock us off track and fail to understand the things we’re trying to understand.

Coming Up

This post has been about trying to adopt a general orientation toward our research as a detached but curious observer, and I use mindfulness meditation, especially noting, as a model. Just as in mindfulness, where you’re supposed to acknowledge your thoughts and feelings but not get carried away by them, so too in research we can observe the social world in a non-judgmental way, emphasizing our curiosity—our job to explain and analyze rather than critique and condemn (or celebrate and uplift). For me, this clinical detachment is one of the hallmarks of professionalism and it’s one basis for our claims to expertise, especially why people can or should trust us.

In writing this post, however, I realized I actually need to write a third post. The third post will be about what we actually do with our reactions/feelings/judgments, focusing on the research process. I need to write this additional post because there’s a sense in which it seems like I’m suggesting we should simply suppress our emotional responses to our data and subjects, which isn’t really possible or advisable. I also need to write this post because the present post is going to seem like a major contradiction to my advice about fieldnotes in my qualitative methods book and workshops, which emphasizes the importance of reflexivity. It turns out the advice here and there are actually pretty consistent, but ironically, my fieldnotes advice is actually very much like the mindfulness noting advice, but taken literally rather than metaphorically. We’ll see how, when collecting and analyzing your data, you shouldn’t actually suppress your emotions (just as you don’t suppress them in meditation), but use noting to prevent them from unconsciously structuring what we see in the data and how we interpret it and as an indicator for where we need to collect more data and pay more attention. So that’s coming up at some point. But for now, the point is to make a conscious choice not to judge but to try to observe calmly and with a clinical distance—this orientation lets us understand whatever it is we’re studying more fully than if we come in trying to judge it.

In this first post, I discuss expertise, objectivity, and professionalism, offering my take on what they are and how they are related, but also their decline in recent years. This first post is focused on diagnosing the “problem”—the decline of objectivity, as a subset of professionalism, and with it our claims to expertise. In the second post (forthcoming), I’ll focus on one possible solution (for individual researchers to adopt).

As I’ll explain more in the second post, this reflection was motivated by someone asking me essentially what do we do when we do feel strongly about what we are studying and how do we maintain objectivity when we’re not personally objective about a topic. But before I get to the answer (my advice), this first post steps back to reflect on the larger context, including why this type of advice is so rare in my fields.

Professionalism, Objectivity, and the Foundation of Our Expertise

One of the marks of professionalism is a level of detachment in our work. In the case of social science, there’s a sense in which we are supposed to be detached observers, watching phenomena unfold at arm’s length with a kind of disinterested orientation. We want to observe, understand, explain; to do that, we need to be equally skeptical and empathetic. We want to understand our subjects’ point of view, but we also want to understand where their ideas come from (reality, bias, etc.)—this includes pressure-testing their ideas rather than simply assuming they are accurate. And this is true whether we are dealing with the most marginal or the most powerful people in society. We open ourselves to a variety of possibilities and let the evidence help us distinguish truth from perception, to let a systematic analysis slice through our preconceptions.

This focus on taking into account and critically examining multiple possibilities and perspectives is why a systematic, rigorous scientific study commands greater respect and influence than one person’s “lived experience.” Our broader aperture (gleaned both from years of methodolgoical and substantive training, along with a continuing review of the literature, and from our empirical (systematic + data-driven) studies on topics within our specializations) is, ostensibly, what makes us “experts” and lay people “inexpert,” however much life experience they have. We are supposed to examine an issue from all sides, look at different probes/datasets/indicators, and create a holistic picture of a situation or phenomenon that one can’t see when they are in the middle of it all. We are supposed to step outside of the fray and analyze it.

In recent years, however, a large share of academics (including especially sociologists) have abandoned this idea—not only the approach of systematically analyzing and reviewing a phenomenon from all sides, but also doing things impartially/objectively.

Sociologists’ Views on Objectivity: What the Data Say

(One might argue that arms-length/disinterested analysis is somewhat different from objectivity: the former might be a kind of orientation or mindset, whereas the latter might be the actual reality of whether that orientation is followed through on. That might be an artificial distinction (you can also use an objective mindset). Either way, I’m going to treat them as strongly related, if not entirely interchangeable, though. My main focus is the orientation/mindset one uses as a way to ensure our work is as objective as it can be, so I’ll discuss objectivity since I think it’s relevant: if you don’t believe in objectivity, you’re not going to bother with the mindset of trying to be objective, while people who don’t believe in objectivity also seem to lean into their priors and preferences.)

In his 2013 book, Neil Gross wrote about the divide in sociology in how scholars thought about objectivity. (He had conducted an interview study of 57 social scientists, including sociologists, and a broad sample of 1400 academics, but on pp. 198-200, he discussed the sociology results.) Interestingly, he used the “professional” v. “activist” labels (mirroring Burawoy’s (2001) professional v. public v. critical v. applied sociologist labels). Gross explained,

“Among sociology interviewees, nearly two-thirds said they did think critically about the notion of objectivity, but only one-third told us objectivity is an illusion. The latter tended to be in either the humanistic or activist camp or both and were remarkably similar in their epistemological views to professors of literature—the difference being that their perspectives seem informed more by ‘standpoint theories,’ arguing that scholars’ views on the social world are inevitably shaped by their race, class, and gender, than by more philosophically sophisticated intellectual approaches.” (Gross 2013, 198-199)

He went on to say that objectivity is generally viewed as an ideal to strive for, but that sociologists also understood the difficulties in perfectly achieving it (200).

Akresh (2017) interviewed 27 sociology department chairs/heads. While the author hadn’t directly asked about objectivity, the chairs/heads said enough that they appeared divided across three broad categories: 3 departments were generally oriented against positivism (meaning the department was one where most would general agree “that objectivity is either not possible or not desirable”), 11 were generally positivist in their orientation (meaning the department was one where most would general agree “research should be objective”), and 13 were mixed (the interviewee did not specify which orientation was preferred).

In a survey of sociologists published in 2018, only 47% of sociologists polled agreed that a “Dispassionate attitude in research [is] important for accuracy” (a whole 39% disagreed, and the balance neither agreed nor disagreed) (Horowitz et al. 2018, 468). Even higher numbers thought that sociology should have a moral and political mission: “Sociology should analyze and transcend oppression” (59% agree, 21% disagree); “I support Marx’s dictum to change the world” (62% agree, 15% disagree). Comparable numbers also thought these goals didn’t interfere with good research: 51% disagreed (and 35% agreed) that “Sociology [is] undermined by excessive activism” and only 44% thought “Advocacy and research should be separate for objectivity” (and 43% disagreed). In a podcast about the article, one commentator thought these numbers were surprising—they thought more sociologists would agree that researchers could be advocates and that having a moral mission wouldn’t be incompatible with research. In the time since, I think the field has, on the whole, radicalized even further and I suspect we’d see even lower numbers supporting the importance of researching at arm’s length.

I would argue that by giving up on disinterested observation and analysis, we are giving up on one of the hallmarks of professionalism and retreating from professional sociology. And at this point, I suspect that view is not controversial with a sizeable plurality of the field—the one that would cheer the demise of objectivity and “professional sociology”—while another sizeable plurality might actually argue that you can be both a professional sociologist without being impartial, objective, dispassionate, etc., and that you have a moral obligation to do so. I’d say they are wrong.

Professionalism and Stepping Back

Similar to those who refer to “professional sociology” in distinction to activist versions of sociology, I’ve increasingly been thinking about professionalism as an antidote to the sorts of biases that can reduce the credibility of our work and our expertise more generally. But first, what do I mean by professionalism?

A few months ago, I was interested in understanding a late-19th C state statute that stated that prison guards should maintain professionalism while meting out corporal punishment (e.g., whipping). What does it look like to maintain professionalism when you’re carrying out a fairly intense punishment (both to give and receive), particularly when it’s not something ordered by a court but determined by a guard, who serves, in this case, as judge, jury, and executioner for a given infraction. I suspect the case the statute is trying to avoid is a guard, carrying a whip, gets pissed at a prisoner for breaking some rules and suddenly starts whipping him; perhaps in his anger, he whips the prisoner excessively (either harder than he should or more lashes than are appropriate). This could be contrasted with another situation the prisoner would be taken to the warden, the warden would determine the prisoner should be whipped based on his infraction, and then the guard ordered to carry it out. I’ve also written about the professionalization of prison administrators in the nineteenth century, and the meaning of professionalization was more about expertise rather than how punishment was carried out. I was curious to figure out what it meant in this context.

Reading several takes from the time, I came away with the understanding that what contemporaries meant was a guard shouldn’t visibly or audibly enjoy the act of whipping. No matter how much a prisoner had been annoying or threatening or even causing injury, the guard should carry out the punishment without glee, taunting, or an obvious sense of revenge. This makes a lot of sense: on the one hand, it’s practical (you don’t want a guard to get carried away, thinking about how they were wronged and then going too far in meting out their justice); on the other hand, it’s also sensible (since the Enlightenment (or thereabouts), there’s been something unseemly about the idea of taking pleasure at another’s misery, especially their physical pain; plus, doing so in this cultural context can reduce legitimacy, which could undermine the viability of incarceration as a form of punishment).

We see this same commitment today. At modern execution rituals, the witnesses (including the crime victim’s family) are discouraged from shouting things like, “Burn in hell!” at the last minute. It’s supposed to be a somber affair guided by law, not emotion. (Indeed, the condemned’s family is not supposed to mourn too loudly, either.) Even when judges hand down the sentence, they are supposed to be serious and not shout or scream at the person (including the emotive personal statements judges sometimes add); if they do, it’s something to comment on and even question because it’s not part of the courtroom decorum and what’s befitting the professionalism of a judge.

This analogy holds up in all sorts of contexts: A professor shouldn’t gloat when failing a student who was a pain in the ass; instead, it’s supposed to be a solemn, unfortunate occasion that feels like a collective failure. When we do fail a student, we are doing our job, not indulgently exercising power within our little fiefdom—that’s pretty gross and illegitimate. A medical professional dealing with a refractory patient who hurls epithets at them is not supposed to say something clever and mean and jab a needle into their arm when they need to sedate them; instead, they’re supposed to maintain professionalism, administer the dosage as they would with any other patient, and deal with their emotions privately, after they have left the room. To take a more low-brow example, look at the reaction when Tyra Banks, host of and judge in America’s Next Top Model, yelled at a contestant after eliminating her from the show. It didn’t fit the calm/serious/somber persona she had cultivated during the cutting phase of the episode. It doesn’t matter that Tyra had a point (the would be model wasn’t taking her opportunity seriously), that wasn’t the way to deliver that message. It wasn’t professional.

In general, professionals are supposed to keep their emotions in check when they are doing their jobs. Indeed, I’d say there’s a general sense that if you can’t maintain that professionalism in some context, you shouldn’t be the one to do that part of the job, and you should remove yourself from the situation (and if you don’t, someone else should remove you); if that act is central to your job, you shouldn’t do the job. Yes, we all have bad days and maybe even lose our shit from time to time (hopefully not); but when that does happen, usually, it breeds censure (formal or informal) and, if it repeats, job loss.

(Un)learning Professionalism as Academics

This detachment, this clinical stance, is something we’re not trained in as academics or researchers beyond maybe getting assigned Weber’s essay on objectivity (if you’re lucky). Many of these soft skills are things we are “socialized” into, essentially copying what we see around us, or hopefully taking cues from those we respect when they nudge us (gently or curtly) in different directions if we misstep. For a while, there were some efforts to make explicit this “hidden curriculum,” but my impression is that wave has passed (or maybe it’s just because I’m don’t scroll bluesky and the folks remaining on twitter don’t talk about such things—I don’t know).

But even among those older efforts to teach the hidden curriculum, we didn’t see a lot of talk of professionalism. Instead, professionalism was sort of avoided at that time because it was associated with allegedly (race, gender, and class) biased understandings of self-presentation that were generally viewed as incompatible with progressive values. For example, telling a grad student they needed to dress up for a conference was considered tone deaf if your student either doesn’t have money to buy fancy clothes or didn’t come from the type of background where people dressed up and finds formal wear uncomfortable. Instead, the advice was to “dress comfortably” rather than “dress the way you are expected to.” Likewise, if you had unnatural hair dye, tattoos, piercings, etc., the advice was “you be you” in contrast to the older advice of temporarily re-dying your hair to a natural color, covering up the tats, and removing visible atypical piercings (just as there were conversations about whether or not to wear a wedding ring, depending on your sex) to increase your chances of a job offer. (Now, the culture has shifted sufficiently that for many departments, that advice really is unnecessary, which I tell my students when they ask for this advice.) To take another example on this front, my (continued) advice to students from modest backgrounds who are nervous about making a misstep at a job talk dinner (when they are not used to eating at fancy restaurants) is to be agentic and watch YouTube videos about how one is expected to behave at a restaurant (e.g., what fork do you use) or to go on a practice dinner. However, I’ve been told this is not good advice—some students appreciate it, but I’ve been informed that the better advice was to rage against the inequalities in academia, which is set up for cishet white men with housewives and upper-class upbringings.

In this context (of the last decade or so), saying you need to be more “professional” was increasingly viewed as a dog whistle for white, heterosexual, upper-class values. So you can imagine that talking about what was necessary for “professional sociology” wasn’t going to go over well.

While professionalization advice was largely absent, the opposite advice was becoming popular. Indeed, the socialization process generally took a turn when social media became such a big part of our lives and academic culture c. 2014-2023+ (it’s arguably a smaller part now since a lot of people permanently logged off in 2023, but I’d say it’s still pretty well institutionalized and influential in large segments of the field). For those of us Very Online People (yes, including me), publicly emoting became all the rage—and it was often rewarded not just with likes and retweets, but expanding your professional network and getting the sorts of goodies we seek. A viral post could land a radio interview or an introduction to a famous person. There were even a few high-profile cases of academics getting jobs or side gigs after becoming social media darlings within their fields.

This period was also very powerful in shaping a common culture among the Very Online crowd, where we were trained to think and talk in particular ways (and publicly or privately chided accordingly when we deviated—once I got a DM because my use of very progressive terminology was not progressive enough). The idea that groups aren’t a monolith and that your demographics do not dictate your views was a celebrated trope, but not always one that people followed in practice. Instead, there was One Right Way to refer to groups of people (who have diverse views about how they want to be called) and One Right Way to be an ally to groups of people (who have diverse views about what they want and need). And the emotional register inched up and up as new ideas became sacred and deviants had to be collectively condemned to show your rightness and membership in this crowd (in a classic Durkheimian pattern).

I’d argue this process has continued even in our more low-key era of social media. When I’ve sampled posts on bluesky, I’ve been struck by how many faculty engage in public namecalling, including about people’s appearances (e.g., “Fuckers,” “Goons,” “Big Orange Brother,” “ICE Barbie,” “Agent Orange”). Expressing outrage in this way seems to be the modal stance for some—and yes, I often use my social media to express my discontent, shock, confusion, disillusionment, and occasionally joy, but I try to mix in analysis and I avoid (or I hope I avoid) ad hominem attacks and namecalling. But back to the point….

Just as peers are stronger influences than parents, the social media landscape became a more powerful influence than an academic advisor (although many advisors were also getting and giving the same influence). It was a time when many of us had far more contact with people online than we did with our local colleagues in person (many of whom we interacted with more on social media than in person)—and this is still true, too; it’s just this era (c. 2012-2023) was the time when that really shifted to become the new reality. And the lesson we were taking away from this common culture was largely to fight for “social justice” (defined narrowly), mostly by calling out and expressing our outrage at injustice (as we defined it).

This trend of online socialization maps neatly onto the growing focus on “woke” topics in publications (a trend that started well before but that picked up over the last decade and then even more in the last five years as activism became even more socially acceptable in research among academics) and the growing explicit normativity and APOV statements in publications. (See prior posts for various measures of this in AJS publications. See my normativity piece for a more qualitative data looking at punishment studies. See books by Musa Al-Gharbi, Bradley Campbell, and Tim Urban for multi-disciplinary and cross-society examples of the institutionalization of this style of thinking.)

That doesn’t mean social media was the only cause of this shift—I’m sure you could find people who weren’t active online who also gave into these trends—or even the main cause. Indeed, there are other causes we could discuss, including the polarization of society and politics more generally as both political parties became increasingly reactionary, taking stances that were the opposite of whatever Obama wanted or the opposite of whatever Trump wanted. We could also talk about the changing selection mechanisms for who went to college, grad school, and went on to become a faculty member. But I do think social media is probably the most salient explanation and a really important factor in explaining the rapid cultural changes in sociology, accelerating trends that had already been in play long before social media.

Summary and Coming Up

This post introduced the relationship between objectivity and professionalism, how objectivity or a kind of clinical distance is the source of our expertise as social scientists, the low status of objectivity in sociology, what I mean by professionalism (and how it involves a kind of clinical distance), and the decline of professionalism in sociology (and likely other social sciences) and with it the clinical distance that gives us status as experts. (I’m not sure if my slipping back and forth between objectivity, clinical distance, and professionalism is sufficiently coherent, but it made sense to me at the time.) In my next post, I’m going to offer my advice to researchers on how to introduce that clinical distance into their research, even when they have strong feelings about what they are studying.