My ACTA "Hero" acceptance speech

by Dorian Abbot

NB: I gave this talk on April 7 to accept the “Hero of Intellectual Freedom” honor from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA).

This talk has three parts. First I would like to thank people. Then I will outline the positions that have gotten me in trouble. Finally, I will make some recommendations for defending academic freedom.

First and most importantly I would like to thank my wife, Tamara, who is a tough Ukrainian woman. She was not the least bit intimidated by the tactics employed against me and has been a significant source of strength.

Next I would like to thank ACTA and its president, Michael Poliakoff. It’s important for an award like this to exist as a kind of counterbalance to the grief you get when you try to speak the truth plainly on many campuses right now. Additionally, I would like to thank Representative Murphy and Professor Klainermann for their remarks.

I would also like to thank a number of people who have supported me. Toby Young and Colin Wright organized a change.org petition to support me when I first got in trouble in the fall of 2020. It was signed by 13,000 people and helped me understand that I wasn’t crazy. Lee Jussim, Joshua Katz, Robert George, and Pamela Paresky reached out to me at that time and provided support. This sort of informal cancellation mentorship is very important and we should all try to do it when we can.  Robert George also hosted a replacement lecture for my canceled Carlson lecture in the James Madison Program at Princeton that was remotely attended by 3,000 people, and I am very grateful for that. In addition, I had support from many colleagues including Eli Tziperman, Hezi Gildor, Douglas MacAyeal, Michael Foote, Harald Uhlig, Daniel Fabrycky, Wendy Zhang, and Ivan Marinovic.

One thing I’d like to mention is that there are many people who could have gotten this award, and it is mostly happenstance and accidental notoriety that led to me being chosen. I would like to highlight three colleagues who are bravely fighting for intellectual freedom. Anna Krylov is a chemist at USC who wrote the famous article, “The Peril of Politicizing Science” and has been very active in this area, organizing collaborative articles, participating in panels, giving lectures, and helping to run the Heterodox Academy’s STEM group. Harald Uhlig, who is here today, is an economist and my colleague at UChicago who helped found the faculty group UChicago Free and was elected to the Council of the Faculty Senate at the same time as I was. We’ve been working together to advocate for free expression, academic freedom, and political neutrality on campus. And finally Lee Jussim is a psychologist at Rutgers who has been tirelessly advocating for academic freedom and rigorously challenging questionable contemporary claims in the peer-reviewed psychological literature. He also has a popular Twitter feed where he discusses issues that may be of interest to you under the moniker The Dark Pirate Jussim.

Next I would like to point out that it’s much easier to be brave if you are a tenured faculty member at the University of Chicago. When the mob came for me, former President Zimmer issued a statement defending the right of faculty to freely argue as they please, and I haven’t had any official trouble from the University since. Hundreds of people in less secure positions have emailed me saying they would like to advocate for intellectual freedom, but are worried about losing their jobs. That concern shouldn’t be lightly dismissed in the current climate. I have similarly heard from hundreds of students and postdocs who are being pushed out of science by non-merit-based selections and the general intolerance toward free thinking that prevails at modern universities. That’s an absolute travesty and we should all remember those young people and how much we are losing when we lose them. So I would like to make a statement of privilege. Of course I don’t mean privilege based on my arbitrary immutable characteristics like the ideologues would have it. Instead, my privilege as a tenured professor was hard-earned through decades of work and the demonstration of skill in my field. Nevertheless I do have the privilege to speak relatively freely and it’s important to remember that not everyone does.

Finally, I would like to thank everyone who has attacked me over the past two years. I am reminded of what Joseph said to his brothers: “You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good…” Without your tireless Twitter activism, your meticulously crafted letter of denunciation, and your lovingly organized Struggle Sessions, I most certainly wouldn’t be standing here today. Yes, you more than anyone else have helped me get my message of truth and fairness out. Thank you especially for making your views known as widely as possible, which has immeasurably helped my cause. I am particularly grateful for the immortal quote you provided for the New York Times article about my situation, “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated.” When your enemies make arguments like that, who needs friends? 

Now let’s move on to what I’ve been advocating that has caused so much controversy. My position is best summarized by the following quote from my Wall Street Journal Op-Ed:

“I believe that every human being should be treated as an individual worthy of dignity and respect. In an academic context, that means evaluating people for positions based on their individual qualities, not on membership in favored or disfavored groups. It also means allowing them to present their ideas and perspectives freely, even when we disagree with them.”

This position puts me squarely at odds with the powerful DEI lobby. DEI means diversity, equity and inclusion, but don’t be fooled by those innocent sounding words. As Ivan Marinovic and I wrote in our Newsweek Op-Ed, DEI is being implemented in a way that is extremely damaging to the university:

“The words "diversity, equity and inclusion" sound just, and are often supported by well-intentioned people, but their effects are the opposite of noble sentiments. Most importantly, "equity" does not mean fair and equal treatment. DEI seeks to increase the representation of some groups through discrimination against members of other groups. The underlying premise of DEI is that any statistical difference between group representation on campus and national averages reflects systemic injustice and discrimination by the university itself. The magnitude of the distortions is significant: for some job searches discrimination rises to the level of implicitly or explicitly excluding applicants from certain groups.”

My main objection to DEI is moral: I am simply not willing to go along with discrimination on the basis of group membership or with treating human beings instrumentally, as a means to an end, no matter what utopia is being promised this time. Again from the Newsweek Op-Ed:

“DEI violates the ethical and legal principle of equal treatment. It entails treating people as members of a group rather than as individuals, repeating the mistake that made possible the atrocities of the 20th century. It requires being willing to tell an applicant `I will ignore your merits and qualifications and deny you admission because you belong to the wrong group, and I have defined a more important social objective that justifies doing so.’ It treats persons as merely means to an end, giving primacy to a statistic over the individuality of a human being.”

To finish up, I would like to read a slightly modified short essay I recently wrote with my prescription on how to deal with the current crisis in academic freedom: 

The purpose of a university is the discovery and transmission of knowledge, which requires the free and open exchange of ideas. However, complete academic freedom has ceased to exist at most universities, threatening their main mission. The solution is to adopt and enforce policies at universities that ensure: (1) free speech, (2) neutrality of the institution on social and political issues, and (3) merit-based hiring and promotion. The help of alumni and the public will be necessary to effect this solution.

The purpose of a university is the discovery and transmission of knowledge, which requires the free and open exchange of ideas. According to the UChicago Kalven report, “The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge.” As outlined in the UChicago Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, the source of the famous Chicago Principles, this requires that the university guarantee, “all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” Any restrictions on freedom of expression necessarily restrict our ability to discover and transmit knowledge, undermining the purpose of a university. 

Complete academic freedom has ceased to exist at most universities. The majority of students and faculty do not feel comfortable expressing themselves on campus and are self-censoring. “From 2015 through mid-October 2021, FIRE [the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education] identified 471 attempts to get professors fired or punished for their constitutionally protected speech, with almost three-quarters of them resulting in some type of sanction.” According to a 2021 report by Eric Kauffman, this represents a cancellation attack on about 3 per 10,000 faculty members per year. The relatively small number of cancellations, however, has a tremendous impact on free expression. For example, a typical university might have about a thousand faculty members, which means we should expect one of them will suffer a cancellation attack every few years. This is roughly consistent with what I’ve observed at UChicago over the past decade (1 against Dario Maestripieri, 2 against Rachel Fulton Brown, 1 against Harald Uhlig, and 2 against me, so 6 in 10 years). These attacks are seen by everyone, making clear the cost of stepping out of line. Moreover, according to the Kauffman report, 70% of US centrist and conservative faculty report a climate hostile to their beliefs and 91% of Trump voting faculty say that a Trump voter would not express his/her views or are unsure. Similarly, after a major academic freedom incident in the fall of 2021, MIT polled faculty at two faculty forums and found that approximately 80% are “worried given the current atmosphere in society that your voice or your colleagues' voices are increasingly in jeopardy” and more than 50% “feel on an everyday basis that your voice, or the voices of your colleagues are constrained at MIT.” The problem extends to students, more than 80% of whom self-censor on campus according to a 2021 FIRE survey. Clearly, the discovery and transmission of knowledge is severely hindered under these conditions.

The solution is to adopt and enforce policies at universities that ensure: (1) free speech, (2) neutrality of the institution on social and political issues, and (3) merit-based hiring and promotion. At the University of Chicago these principles are contained in three reports: (1) the Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, or the Chicago Principles, (2) the Kalven report, and (3) the Shils report. According to the Chicago Principles, “..it is not the proper role of the University to attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive... concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community.” According to the Kalven report, “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic… It is a community, but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research… Since the university is a community only for these limited and distinctive purposes, it is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness.” This principle is absolutely critical for academic freedom because it allows space for dissenting faculty and students to speak openly without fear of official sanction. According to the Shils report, “There must be no consideration of sex, ethnic or national characteristics, or political or religious beliefs or affiliations in any decision regarding appointment, promotion, or reappointment at any level of the academic staff.” This is obviously essential for ensuring academic excellence directly, but it is additionally important because non-merit-based decisions are inherently political and involve the university taking a position on the issues of the day. Policies such as these need to be adopted and enforced at every university. Students and faculty should receive training on them, including the motivation for them, the moment they step on campus and the administration should always look to them first when making any decision.  

The help of alumni and the public will be necessary to effect this solution. Although faculty can and should form academic freedom lobby groups, many faculty are so focused on their research that they will not participate. Even worse, there seem to be entire departments full of faculty who are antagonistic to free expression. So ironically we can’t count on the faculty to robustly defend their own academic freedom. Administrators often have incentives that are not aligned with the university’s mission, and cannot be relied upon either. In contrast, alumni are already forming groups to withhold donations and pressure universities to defend academic freedom and academic excellence. This should be continued, encouraged, and supported. Additionally, the public provides massive funding for universities through tuition and research grants. Conditions should be put on this funding requiring that institutions which receive it adopt and enforce the principles outlined here. Finally, all of us who care about universities need to speak openly, including to journalists of all types (including scary conservatives), about the danger they are in so that word gets out to alumni and the public, who are most likely to solve the problem. Although this is uncomfortable for many academics, including me, it is absolutely necessary.

Thank you all for listening, I would be happy to take your questions, and I hope you have a wonderful day!