A secret initiation for newly-appointed assistant professors in the social sciences

Saturday, May 27th, 2017

In his more paranoid moments, Charles Murray envisions a secret initiation for newly-appointed assistant professors in the social sciences that goes something like this:

Over the last few decades, a number of books on public policy aimed at a lay readership have advanced conclusions that no socially responsible person can abide, written so cleverly that they have misled many gullible people.

Unfortunately, the people who write such books often call upon data that have some validity, which confronts us with a dilemma. Such books must be discredited, but if we remain strictly within the rules of scholarly discourse, they won’t be. What to do? Recall Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development: At the sixth and highest level of morality, it is permissible to violate ordinary ethical conventions to serve a higher good (Kohlberg, 1981). Such is the situation forced upon us by these books. Let me offer six strategies that you may adapt to the specific situation you face.

As you consider these strategies, always keep in mind the cardinal principle when attacking the target book: Hardly anyone in your audience will have read it. If you can convince the great majority who never open the book, it doesn’t matter that the tiny minority who have read it will know what you are doing.

Read the whole Screwtape-y thing.

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