The University Does Not Produce Non-Conformists, and Here Is the Checklist

The university describes itself as the place where received opinion goes to be questioned. Students arrive believing what their parents believed and leave, we are told, having learned to think for themselves. Employers complain about it. Politicians complain about it. The complaint is the institution's best advertisement.

I want to test the advertisement against a short list. On each item below there is a position the evidence supports fairly clearly, and a position the university as an institution holds. Where the two coincide, fine. Where they do not, I want to ask what the institution is protecting.

The pattern I find is that the university follows the evidence exactly as far as following it costs nothing, and stops where it would cost the institution something. That is not what a producer of non-conformists looks like. It is what any organisation looks like.

Religion

Every relevant department knows the state of play. Historians know the Exodus did not happen as written. Biblical scholars know the Gospels were composed decades after the events by people who were not there. Philosophers know that the arguments for God have been answered. Neuroscientists know what religious experience looks like on a scanner.

And the university, as an institution, says none of it. It hosts a divinity school. It employs chaplains. It schedules around religious holidays without comment, and it treats a professor who says plainly that the central claims of the major religions are false as having committed a breach of manners.

I have written before about the asymmetry in how historians handle religious causes. The point here is that it is one instance of a general rule: the knowledge is present, and it is kept in the departments where it cannot embarrass anyone.

Free Will

The psychology and neuroscience departments have spent fifty years documenting that decisions are made before the person is aware of making them, that the reasons given afterwards are constructed, and that behaviour is predicted by variables the subject has never heard of.

The law school, three buildings over, teaches a doctrine of criminal responsibility that assumes none of this. The philosophy department maintains a position called compatibilism whose main function is to let everyone carry on as before. Nobody convenes a meeting.

A non-conformist institution would notice that two of its faculties hold incompatible views about the same fact and would treat that as the most interesting problem on campus. The actual institution treats it as a matter of academic jurisdiction.

Darwin, Stopped at the Neck

The university will defend evolution against creationists with real energy. It will not teach evolution's implications for the species that is doing the teaching.

Apply natural selection to human behaviour, human cognition, human social arrangements, and the tone changes at once. Evolutionary psychology is treated as a slightly disreputable cousin. The suggestion that our moral intuitions, our political instincts, and our religious tendencies are adaptations with a history is met with the demand for a standard of proof that no other explanation in the social sciences is asked to meet.

The evidence is defended with vigour right up to the point where it starts describing us. Then it becomes controversial.

Male and Female

Behavioural genetics and endocrinology have a great deal to say about average differences between the sexes, in interests, in the distribution of certain abilities, in risk-taking, in what people choose when they are free to choose. The findings are replicated and they are large.

The institution's official position is that these differences are socially constructed, and it enforces that position with hiring statements, training sessions, and the occasional dismissal. A researcher who publishes the numbers is not refuted. He is investigated.

I have written elsewhere about why the taboo exists and why the discomfort is not an argument. Here I only note where the taboo lives: in the building that claims to have no taboos.

Why Some Cultures Succeed

Ask why some societies are rich and others poor, why some produce science and others do not, why institutions transplant well to one place and fail in another. There is a literature. Some of it points to geography, some to institutions, some to history, and some of it points to culture, meaning the beliefs and habits people actually hold.

That last category is not permitted. Any explanation that locates the difference in what a population believes and does is filed as prejudice before it is read. The result is that the university holds, as an institutional position, that culture affects nothing, while employing thousands of people to study culture.

What the List Shows

Look at what the five items have in common. In each case the institution is not ignorant. The evidence sits in its own libraries, produced by its own staff. In each case the institution nonetheless holds, publicly, the position that offends nobody with power over it: donors, governments, religious communities, its own students, and the press that covers it.

That is conformity, and it is conformity of the most complete kind, because it is conformity by people who know better.

A student who spends four years there learns the lesson perfectly, without anyone stating it. You may know a thing, and you may say it in the seminar, and you may not say it in public. That is not training in independent thought. It is training in discretion, which is the opposite, and the university has been very good at it.