Dear Colleagues:

I'm the youngest of six children, from a rather conservative family in Virginia. Full disclosure: all 5 of my older siblings and my almost 90-year-old mother voted for Trump. I'll come back to this.

In thinking about Gregg's paper on groupthink and the example of the dynamics of his own university, I can't help but think about similar dynamics on the right. The psychologists on this list know better than I, but the fundamental processes that are operating almost certainly apply equally that produce extreme choices as a result of the group members interacting with each other in their own echo chamber. The sound reverberates and only grows louder (metaphorically, if not literally). It shouldn't matter in the least what the underlying ideology or even general idea might be that's being disputed. I'm thinking of the scene from the old movie West Side Story when we see the Jets meeting to decide what they think the rules should be for the proposed rumble - and how quickly the issue escalates to an evermore violent proposal.

Interestingly, two of my older brothers (educated at UVA and JMU) are far to the right on the political spectrum and highly critical of higher education. They gleefully sent me the following Jordan Peterson video to support their argument that universities these days are essentially "liberal reeducation camps":

https://www.prageru.com/videos/dangerous-people-are-teaching-your-kids

In response, I tried a conciliatory approach. I acknowledged that there are indeed post-modernists and radical Marxists in the university - and some of them are certainly activists & certainly fit Peterson's characterization. I mentioned something about normal distributions and how within any organization or institution (universities, businesses, sports clubs, politics, etc.), you're bound to find extremists in terms of certain characteristics, traits, or beliefs at the tail ends of the distributions. But most of the area under the curve falls in between.

I then pointed out that what tends to make the news are the most extreme examples of behavior, such as the 2017 Berkeley protest or the Middlebury response to Charles Murray. What's NOT newsworthy, however, are the countless thousands of speeches, public lectures, sponsored debates, etc. that occur regularly across universities that go off without incident (yes, more leftist, but certainly many right-wing sponsored events too). But the critique is that the dominant narrative is one of left-wing extremism and that we are all complicit as members of the academy of undermining Western civilization, etc., etc.

So, to combat that thinking, I then drew an analogy with my own work on terrorism. I pointed out that by any reasonable definition, there have been various terrorist attacks in the U.S. since 9/11. This is something, like homicide, for which we have pretty good data. To be sure, there's some debate about what constitutes "terrorism," but let's just focus on politically-motivated, indiscriminate mass killings of civilians or non-combatants. Does that happen in the U.S.? Absolutely. Is it horrific every time it happens? Of course. But, most people do not seem to know that the last 10 years have seen the lowest number of terrorist incidents in the U.S. for a 10-year period than in any other decade previously dating back to 1970 (that's the earliest year for which we have reasonably reliable, comprehensive data). Even fewer know that there were fewer deaths to U.S. citizens on American soil due to terrorism between 2006-2015 than there were deaths due to lightning strikes over that same period. And yet a 2016 national poll by Pew found that fears about terrorism were two of the top four fears that Americans cited. 

My point was simply that there are indeed extreme examples of intolerance and violence - and these certainly should be reported. On the other hand, we need to be careful to understand that these are the extremes and not the norms. Yet for staunch believers, like my brothers, they only look for confirmatory evidence and absolutely refuse to entertain any notion that they might be misinformed about what's really happening on college campuses. They know, because they've seen the news reports on Fox and, even more powerfully, from watching Prager U videos like the one I've included. Can you spell "groupthink"? 

Anyway, my point to this group is that I'm a pretty open-minded, understanding, and forgiving individual who happens to love science. I listen to my brothers and try to understand their perspective, but then, as with any issue like higher education, I share some different perspectives and evidence intended to show them that the issues are more nuanced and there's a lot of basically routine, institutionalized and, quite frankly, corporatist stuff that we do on an everyday basis. Heck, I've spent at least 100 times more time in committee meetings dealing with enrollment issues, state (provincial) funding, tuition fees, budgets, capital fundraising campaigns, and student disciplinary issues (e.g., plagiarism) than I have responding to unruly, disruptive, radical protest movements on campus. But that's all they see. And when I try to point all this out, they merely characterize me as a left-wing liberal defending our radical universities. So, if I cannot make any inroads with my brothers (I always try to acknowledge where I agree with them), my question is how can we possibly create long-term change, engage in constructive dialogue, and salvage the notion of a "liberal education" in the best sense of that term - where both liberals and conservatives could agree on the core values? I mean, sheesh, I never thought of myself as a "dangerous person" or my colleagues as "dangerous people" teaching our kids. But a great many people, including my brothers, think that's exactly the way things are in universities, i.e., we're all a bunch of nutcases espousing "dangerous nonsense." 

Yours kindly, -Joe