You Get What You Pay For

I've just finished reading a superb book, Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson's Until Proven Innocent, the definitive account of the Duke lacrosse rape case. The parts of the book that I found most interesting revolve around the widely publicized "send them to the gallows" reaction of a sizable chunk of the Duke faculty. There is one very revealing passage at the beginning of the book, the consequences of which reverberate throughout the story:

...Duke sought to join the Ivies, Stanford, and MIT among the nation's leading institutions. It chose to do so, however, on the cheap: bypassing the sciences (where the combination of salary and lab costs for a new hire ran around $400,000), the school focused on bringing in big-name humanities professors, for whom the only startup cost was salary. Politically correct leftist professors were in vogue nationwide, and the leftward slant of Duke's humanities and social sciences faculty accelerated...

Why is it that this trend so afflicts the humanities and the "soft" social sciences? An easy answer would be that these fields lack a well-defined theoretical framework and have little attachment to (or understanding of) the scientific method--making the professors highly susceptible to the latest fads sweeping the intelligentsia. 

But this can't be the whole story. If true, ideological extremism and irrelevance should have also characterized earlier generations of professors in those fields.

Duke has already paid dearly for their initial stinginess. But the costs will mount. The tenured humanities and social sciences faculty are going to be doing a lot of hiring in the next 20 years, and one would not lose money by betting that the hiring process will lead mainly to new hires who have the ideological seal of approval.

Comments

[T]

"Why is it that this trend so afflicts the humanities and the "soft" social sciences? An easy answer would be that these fields lack a well-defined theoretical framework and have little attachment to (or understanding of) the scientific method--making the professors highly susceptible to the latest fads sweeping the intelligentsia."

I think the causal order is reversed. I think sociology and the humanities were the fields where people who already had assumptions could go and push their views-- perhaps due to a lack attachment to the scientific method--instead of going into those fields and then being swept into those fads.

And if you have radical ideas on how to change society, you go into fields like the humanities and social sciences in the first place whereas other fields might not be as likely to attract those people.

The Duke case was pretty wretched to put it mildly.

[George Weinbaum]

The sciences are subject to "the ballast of empirical verification". They work as follows: theory, experiment, theory experiment, etc. Eventually an experiment disproves the theory and it is thrown out. The humanities have no experiments. Unless you call Stalin's USSR and Mao's China experiments. What experiments do economists do? How can economists control all the variables? The long and short of it: humanities attract people who like to talk a lot. Economics is closer to being a science than the humanities. At least economists can look at history. We can see that if the central bank prints a lot of money, whatever that is, you get price increases in many things. We can see that incresing tarrifs reduces trade. The humanities professors engage in "scientism" to ape the prestige of science, when they know nothing. Law school professors are amongst the worst. Most lawyers are innumerate. How many Richard Posners are there?

[jimbino]

The scientist doesn't necessarily need to do experiments. Science can also be done by observation; witness the science of astronomy, where experiment is virtually precluded.

I am a physicist who has taught and is often drawn to it, and if I lived in the time of Socrates or Archimedes, I might continue. Certain aspects of teaching as practiced in Amerika are distasteful to me as a libertarian, such as tenure and socialist "benefit" packages, the need to bed down with the government for financing (especially in physics), and, nowadays, all the fingerprinting, drug tests and background checks to protect our ignorant youth.

[A. Zarkov]

“The scientist doesn't necessarily need to do experiments. Science can also be done by observation; witness the science of astronomy, where experiment is virtually precluded.”

That’s absolutely true, but at least astronomers and astrophysicists have laboratory-tested laws of physics to fall back on. In economics we don’t have anything as powerful as the conservation laws of physics. Moreover the laws of physics don’t vary from country to country, the way economics does. In the US many economists seem willing to give up the law of supply and demand when it comes to labor and immigration, except for the good professor here.

[Brian Moore]

It's also dispositive that many of these clowns don't publish much. And if and when they do it's overloaded with humanities jargon, which is another issue altogether.