It Will Get Worse Before it Gets Worse but Freedom Wins the Day

by Lee Jussim (@PsychRabble)

Before my predictions, two caveats: 

1. I have no confidence in my own ability to predict things more than a few months out.  

2. I am a social scientist. For grim views of the state of social “science” go here for a great 2 minute podcast; go here for a debunking of one of the darlings of social science, “implicit bias” by an empirically-oriented philosopher of science; and go here for my call for vastly greater levels of skepticism in psychological “science.”

So take these with huge boulders of salt.

1 year:  The progressive/woke playbook is to capture institutions and install bureaucracies.  You can see this in the installation of multimillion DEI bureaucracies at leading prestigious institutions, a process that will accelerate over the next year as second and third tier institutions follow suit.  You can see DEI standards being imposed by professional societies and in Nature’s new guidelines for evaluating submissions.  

But it’s not just bureaucracies, it is academia itself.  It has been moving left for a century, and it is now not merely left, but heavily extreme left. There is massive grassroots support for these policies, for the deployment of academic institutions and credibility in the service of progressive political action, and for the purging of dissidents and dissenters.

Within academia, it will get worse before it gets worse.  A lot of science gets done within academia, but it also gets done outside of academia.  Woke capture of tech, medicine, and many professional groups outside of academia is also proceeding apace, and also likely to get worse before it gets worse (see this chilling essay by Katie Herzog on medicine).

On the other hand… capitalism! Free enterprise! The almighty dollar!  Big pharma mass produced a Covid vaccine in about a year.  It was a stunning accomplishment.  Elon Musk!  Forget Twitter, both Tesla and Space-X are amazing accomplishments.  As long as basic freedoms are mostly protected from government interference (even if there is fraying around the edges), reality plus the rewards that come from actually building something of value may ultimately win the day.

Also, outside of academia, most people hate woke, and by “most people” I definitely mean “this goes way beyond right-wingers and MAGA.”  There does seem to be a swelling of opposition to wokism in the wider society (not always one I support, such as Florida corroding tenure; but see also recent NYTimes editorials endorsing free speech, the Washington Post firing a woke reporter for being unprofessional for calling out coworkers’ supposed bigotry, Netflix telling its woke employees they are free to find another job, etc.).  And, best of all, the Foundation for Individual Rights (formerly in Education, but now) and Expression has just scaled up its mission beyond education, and is stepping into the breach left when the ACLU went woke.

This may be all to the good, but between the installation of vast, self-serving, self-sustaining bureaucracies in academia, and its radicalizing faculty, it might make a difference elsewhere, but probably not in academia.  

3 years: DEI bureaucracy and policies in academia will expand and become firmly entrenched.  Academia will continue to become more and more a vehicle for progressive activism that demands ideological conformity and seeks to isolate and purge political dissenters.

It will get worse before it gets worse.

BUT, at the same time, within academia, dissidents will organize and create islands of integrity in a rising sea of activist-induced corruption of truth-seeking.  This has already begun (e.g., this Substack, Academic Freedom Alliance, Society for Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, Journal of Controversial Ideas, University of Austin, and Heterodox Academy seems to have recently upped its game).  These, too, will grow and emerge on stronger foundations.  But they will be refuges from the storm, which will otherwise ravage academia.

But science outside academia?  I think corporate and nonacademic science will proceed apace, and its contributions will be far less compromised by political trends. Corporate science makes money in two ways: 1. by producing something of value (like Teslas and Covid vaccines); 2. or by being sly, corrupt marketers (like sugar and cigarette companies of the 1970s), but this has always been true and has nothing to do with wokeness. Nonacademic organizations and nonprofits, such as FIRE, American Enterprise Institute, CATO & PEW may also step into some of the breach left by political corruption on the social science side.

But it is important to remember this: What goes on in academia, and science, is heavily influenced by what goes on in the wider society.  I think Trump’s presidency was an almost entirely unmitigated disaster for the country (even if he reflected and merely accelerated pre-existing trends).  His re-election might produce the dystopian outcomes Dale’s essay in this series warned about. On the other hand, the Biden administration coddles the woke beliefs, attitudes, and policies that have gotten us to this point, so if he is re-elected the main trends I described here will continue to get worse before they get worse.

However, state government policies are also in play, and are important because state universities are home to much of the science that goes on in the U.S. Democrat-dominated states, like Biden, will generally coddle and facilitate the woke takeover.  There may, however, be a backlash among Republican-controlled state governments, which could very well seek to restore political balance to universities by their power to appoint top level administrators (directly or indirectly) and by their power to fund universities.  They might also engage in dangerously extreme overreach, such as recent laws banning critical race theory and other divisive concepts from being taught in higher education (which FIRE has called “egregiously unconstitutional”).

10 years: A lot depends on whether we still have a functioning democracy or, at least, a functioning country of any sort.  The risks of this not being the case are higher than at any other time in my life.  If the U.S. becomes a failed state, all bets are off.  But my gut says our fundamental institutions will not collapse.  The U.S. survived similarly horrendous partisanship in the 1790s, a Civil War, and the Great Depression. 

The rest of my predictions are contingent on the fundamental institutions in the U.S. continuing to function at a level at least ballpark similar to where they are now (which is to say, far from perfect, but able to maintain a functioning society).

Ok, so the 10 year predictions: Academia will be mostly lost UNLESS State governments step in to reverse the decline. Then, because it will, at best, be only some states, it will be a mixed bag.

Science and social science outside of academia will thrive.  Capitalism and (mostly) free markets work amazingly well to raise standards of living and reduce poverty.  Graduate students who prioritize science and truth-seeking over progressive activism will see the writing on the wall and flock to science outside of academia (although a headwind for this will be the selection of graduate students into academic programs, in part, via political litmus tests, such as DEI statements).

30 years: I am 67 and will probably be dead.  The great thing about this is I won’t have to listen to anyone denounce me for being so completely stupid or demanding that my papers be retracted because they offend the moral fads and shibboleths of 2052.

Again, societal collapse and other societal changes important to science become very hard to predict 30 years out.  Will global warming produce mass famine?  Will dystopian predictions about insane AI’s taking over the world come true? Will democracy collapse? Will the U.S. become North America’s Balkans? Who knows?  Short of total collapse, there still will be huge societal changes that I cannot anticipate (and I doubt anyone else can), and many will probably affect both academia and science.  In 1992, the “information superhighway,” social media, smartphones and Tesla did not exist; and you did not need to take your shoes off to be permitted to fly.

But, for these predictions, I will assume none of those terrible things happen and other huge societal changes do not fundamentally change the functioning of science.

Freedom, including free market capitalism, wins the day for science. As long as people are free to chart their own paths, and rewarded for their accomplishments, there will be enough course correction for current authoritarian trends (wokism on the left; anti-democratic populism on the right; new ones that we cannot anticipate now) for people to figure out where and how they can do good science.  If academia can be saved from itself, it may be in academia.  If not, people will find other ways outside of academia, to do good, valuable and important science.