Hooven and Harvard

Below is a letter that will be sent to Harvard President Garber asking that Harvard bring Carole Hooven back. If you would like to sign, please email John B. Londregan <jbl@princeton.edu> by Friday, June 19th.

Dear President Garber,

We write to you at a time of great challenge to academic freedom, with threats both to the freedom of the faculty and also to the independence of the universities themselves, with a constructive proposal. Let us provide a bit of background. Some years ago, James Q Wilson (Professor of Government at Harvard) noted that the most effective anti-crime policies didn’t involve draconian interventions by large numbers of over-armed paramilitary police, with searchlights and helicopters flying overhead--Brazil actually tried more or less this policy in advance of the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, yet to this day the Carioca Aqueduct remains the frequent site of robberies and muggings. Instead, Wilson noted that a simple and straightforward approach of mending broken streetlamps, replacing the shattered glass in windows and scrubbing away graffiti was a much more effective means of reducing crime. It works because whereas street predators are emboldened to more heinous deeds by the evidence that a site is not being looked after, they are daunted into good behavior by evidence the rules are in force. Mending broken windows and clearing the streets of “squeegee pests” was the work of New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, and while the policies were in effect they brought the streets of New York back to life.

A similar dichotomy faces academia today, and it is particularly severe for the elite universities. A decade or more of cancel culture has cleared the intellectual public square of students and faculty eager to “think out loud” and experiment with unconventional and unpopular ideas. One need not imagine the voice of Tomas de Torquemada from beyond the grave declaring, with benefit of instant translation, “We should not allow people to express unconventional and unpopular ideas when we know that those ideas do harm!”, for his spiritual affines are everywhere on campus asserting just such a point of view.

One school of thought holds that the remedy for this ailment is for government to extend its long arm and mailed fist to cut funds and dictate the curriculum, clearing the intellectual favelas. Another point of view holds that the response to intellectual vandalism is to repair the damage, to send the signal that canceling those one disagrees with won’t work, without destroying the intellectual culture of the university in order to “save” it. This approach, which appears to offer a great deal of promise, requires a bit more than simply saying “there were excesses”. Just as William Bratton had to start enforcing the laws that were actually on the books, and just as street lights needed to be replaced and graffiti scoured, so too the damage done by cancel culture needs to be repaired. Our students, and the public, notice when a small but loud band of rule breakers are able to cow the university into de-naming institutions and canceling dissident thinkers. They also notice when, for all the professions of having turned over a new leaf, the same institutions fail to repair the damage.

We note that, like many elite institutions, Harvard has had its share of cancellations and de-namings. One particularly egregious and easy to repair bit of intellectual vandalism was the cancellation of Carole Hooven, a promising evolutionary biologist. While some Harvard faculty, notably Stephen Pinker, came to her defense, she faced a hostile work environment on campus and her erstwhile popular course was the target of an open campaign to cancel her for her views. Faced with a tsunami of ostracism, she left campus.

We the undersigned believe that Harvard would send an important signal that it has learned from the mistakes of the recent past were the university to bring Hooven back. Of course, given the hostility with which she was hectored from Harvard her work has turned in the direction of public policy precisely with the goal of combating the sort of anti-intellectualism that mauled her academic career. We believe that offering to bring her back full time to Harvard campus, either as an evolutionary biologist, or as a now seasoned expert on public policy, would send an important signal that the banks of the Charles are not a hospitable place for intellectual vandalism.

Robert George
McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence
Department of Politics
Princeton University

Dorian Abbot
Professor Geophysical Sciences
University of Chicago

John Londregan
Professor of Politics and International Affairs
Princeton University