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- [Upbeat Music] 

 

MATT BURGESS: Welcome back to the Free Mind Podcast, where we explore topics in western history, politics, philosophy, literature, and current events with a laser focus on seeking the truth and an adventurous disregard for ideological and academic fashions. I'm Matt Burgess, an assistant professor of Environmental Studies and a faculty fellow of the Benson Center for the Study of Western Civilization at the Â鶹ӰԺ. My guest today is Smriti Mehta. Smriti is a PhD student in psychology at the University of California Berkeley, and the co-chair of UC, Berkeley's New Heterodox Academy Campus Community, a group which is dedicated to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement on their campus. I co-chair a similar group at Â鶹ӰԺ. In our conversation, we discussed what it's like to start an HxA campus community and why it's needed. Smriti Mehta, welcome to the Free Mind Podcast. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Thanks for having me, Matt. It's great to be here. 

 

MATT BURGESS: So, we were going to do it a little bit differently today and have a conversation, more of a conversation than an interview about starting and running a Heterodox Academy Campus Community. What is that? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: What is Heterodox Academy or what is a Heterodox Academy Campus Community? 

  

MATT BURGESS: What is a Heterodox Academy Campus Community? I'd imagine that a lot of our listeners know what Heterodox Academy is. It's a nonprofit organization made mostly, if not almost entirely, of academics devoted to promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement. I think it would be fair to say that it was founded and exists because many people in the academy think that we are not doing a good enough job at promoting those things, and that's why we need an organization. Then the Heterodox Academy Campus Communities are the campus version to that which on your campus, UC, Berkeley means what? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I think we probably need it a bit more than other places in the country, just a little bit more. What it means, what we hope it will mean is that people will be more open. What we're trying to do is just get people together who agree that these values are important and think that we should promote them a little bit more. There is, I think, just from listening to people talking, just having a pulse on what undergrads are feeling perhaps, it does seem like there is this culture of self-silencing. A lot of people don't openly share their views on things if they disagree on some things. 

I think a lot of people are just sort of putting their heads down and not trying to openly disagree on things that they might disagree on. And so, I think that creating a culture of that's just not very constructive, I think. We're not able to get to really important issues or be able to discuss important issues openly. So, I think what we're trying to do is just get, I think there's a silent majority that agrees that these values are important and we're just trying to get all those people together and just have a presence on campus of like, no, these things are important, and we should promote them. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, one thing that Berkeley and Â鶹ӰԺ have in common is that they're both cities that have national, if not international reputations for being hotbeds of progressivism, and yet they're also flagship universities of a state system. I would say both states are blue-ish, Colorado probably more purple-ish than California is. But because it's a flagship school for us in a purple-ish state, the undergraduate student body is a lot more politically diverse than people expect. Is that the same thing at Berkeley or do people self-select at Berkeley more for what it's known for in terms of its political climate? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: That's a great question. I'm not sure I have an objective answer for you, but I do suspect that it is perhaps less politically diverse than students at Â鶹ӰԺ, like the student body. I do imagine that there's some self-selection going on, but I honestly am not sure I have any data to back that up. 

  

MATT BURGESS: I'm sure the data exists. I'm not sure that I have data either for Â鶹ӰԺ specifically. Certainly nationally, it's true that undergraduates are the most politically diverse group on campus. Then faculty, I think, and then graduate students and administrators are the least politically diverse, especially in some of the social science and humanities fields. Okay. So, back to the Heterodox Academy Campus Community idea, my sense was that one of the big needs that it filled or that it's trying to fail, it just started, we're in the first cohort, is that it's one thing for a group of visible, famous academics to preach from up on high in Manhattan. It's another thing to have grassroots, tangible, campus-oriented focus that can address specific campus needs that can build networks on campus. And it seems like that's what it's trying to address. 

What do you see as some of those needs at Berkeley, and would you say that they're, I think people often think of open inquiry viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement as being one thing, but they're three separate things and I think that there are some campuses and some fields where it really makes sense to consider them separately? So, for example, Â鶹ӰԺ has free speech, green light rating from fire. Very good free speech policies, very good open inquiry policies. And yet viewpoint diversity, I think in any campus, I don't think that we're stand out in a bad way, but I think it would be fair to say that our viewpoint diversity is seriously lacking in a lot of disciplines and that can limit the scope for constructive disagreement, even if there's good open inquiry, even if we're lucky to have administrators, senior administrators at CU that are very supportive of the HxA way. 

I mean our campus put out a story promoting our group and provided a supportive atmosphere, which I don't necessarily expect is the case in all campuses. What would you say about your campus? In terms of those three things. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Can you first tell me how you would describe open inquiry? Are we talking about academic inquiry or just in terms of what you're studying or just being able to ask questions of administration like, oh, why, or just having more transparency. In what terms are we thinking about that? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah, that's an excellent question. I think mainly the main part of open inquiry is that people can study what they want without fear of retaliation or retribution. People can say what they want, be that in a context of their research, be that in the context of campus affairs or be that in the context of off campus speech, including political speech. I think a secondary part, which is somewhat tied to viewpoint diversity is you can have a great climate for open inquiry on your campus, and yet you could still have a chilly climate for open inquiry in your discipline. So, it could be that your campus is quite willing to let you study anything and defend you in the face of studying anything but the journals, the peer reviewers, you know, can say the wrong thing and 2000 of your colleagues will sign some petition saying that you should be excommunicated. There are those aspects of it too. And then of course without viewpoint diversity, there's going to be some things that people just don't think to study. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: So, in terms of those three things, I mean opening inquiry, I definitely think that at Berkeley, and I actually, I should preface all of this by saying that I am a graduate student and so there are some sort of maybe administrative, what's happening at the faculty level that I'm not privy to some things that are happening. So, I can only speak to my experience as a graduate student. I think in certain social sciences and certainly my discipline was just Psychology, and within Psychology, social psychology, I think things are a lot worse. There's a lot less sort of even open inquiry is not right. There's certain topics that I just know people will just not study in our discipline or in our department. I really doubt somebody will openly say that they want to study Intelligence. That will just not happen even if people are openly curious about things. 

I have also heard people say things that they found stuff in their data that they just will not share with the public because of how it might be construed. So, it's not even just that they're not asking certain questions that I think I have seen some people be sort of careful about the kind of results that they're putting out in the world. I'm not sure that that's such a big issue in other disciplines yet anyway. I think a lot of the STEM disciplines are maybe less likely to fall prey to some of this. But it's definitely, I think in terms of open inquiry, I have seen it to be an issue in the social sciences and there's this sort of leaning towards even being careful about the kind of questions that ask and how you frame your research. I mean, it's hard to say whether there's viewpoint diversity or not. 

There's no open viewpoint diversity. I think there's certainly a lot of ... So, the culture at Berkeley, as far as I can tell is, and it's all well-intentioned, is that we don't want to hurt people's feelings and we don't want to offend, and we don't want to cause anybody harm. And so, I do think people sort of conflate disagreeing with people with being, attacking others. Even in terms of the kind of research, if you criticize people's research, or even in my discipline, if I'm criticizing certain research based on scientific rigor or the quality of the evidence, that's almost seen as, if the topics are certain contentious topics, then it's almost seen as like, oh, you're not on our team, sort of a thing. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, this is fascinating. I have a couple of follow-up questions because I think social psychology is an especially fascinating case study for this for a couple of reasons. The first one, which comes up with something you just said and is broader than social psychology, is this notion that criticizing certain people or certain dogmas or even asking a scientific question in the wrong way is considered harmful. And we all know that impact is what matters and not intent. Is there any introspection about the fact that the movement of police demonization has led to about 6,000 extra murders a year? The long-term lockdowns under COVID and then schools have been one of the biggest hits to educational preparedness, especially among disadvantaged communities for a long time. 

And there's new stuff. [inaudible] Al-Ghazali had a good review of this recently in American Affairs that, not maybe the main driver, social media is probably the main driver, but a significant contributor to the mental health crisis seems to be these kind of coddling of the American mind, kind of bad ideas, catastrophism, mind reading, and it's caused the mental health to diverge among liberals and conservatives, especially among women. So, there's been surveys that have found that more than half of under 30 liberal identifying women say they've been diagnosed with a mental health condition. So, it seems like if impact matters more than intent, it seems like there should be some serious reckonings about these things. And my guess is there are not, but maybe you'll tell me that's wrong. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I have not seen that kind of reckoning happening. I think now people are starting to get a little wary of some, because the campus has been quite against policing and almost to the detriment, I think of the campus community. We have this massive homeless population in Berkeley. Things have gotten a lot worse in terms of the fact that we've had robberies and crimes and all these things happening. So, I think people are becoming sort of aware that some of these anti-police and wanting less policing is affecting people negatively. The other side to that, of course, is that people want to be sensitive towards the homeless and be mindful. There is that tension, but I haven't seen an open dialogue or people being openly introspective about these things or even the sort of things you bring up in terms of mental health. I mean of all people, psychologists should be the ones that should be at the forefront of thinking right about this or being introspective about it, which I have not seen happen on campus. 

  

MATT BURGESS:  And just to be clear, none of this is to say that there's anything wrong with criticizing police brutality, which is a real phenomenon. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Of course. Yeah. 

  

Matt Burgess: It definitely should be criticized and should be cracked down on heart. So, just to make that clear. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: But this sort of anti-police stance, I mean it affects the people that we want to help the most. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's exactly right. Yes. All those things, all those examples I gave, it seems like we have made at the same time as we've made helping disadvantaged communities and student wellbeing are top priorities. We've done some of the maybe most damaging things to both of those objectives in decades. Back to social psychology for a second. So, I have often heard, I'm not a social psychologist, but I interact with them occasionally. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Good for you, Matt. Yeah. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Some of my recent research, I've done some social psych type of experiments recently in the context of climate change polarization, which involves collaborating with Social Psychologists. And one of the things that as just an outsider seems interesting to me about social psychology is that I always hear that it's one of the most politically homogenous, potentially censorious disciplines, and yet it has also produced some of the biggest giants in the so-called Heterodox Community, including most of the founders of Heterodox Academy. So, what's that about? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Well, wouldn't you think that if you're in an environment where some of this stuff is the worst, that it would compel people to do something about it? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Well, I think that's a fair hypothesis, but then why is it that social psychology is so different in that respect from say English or say ethnic studies or rhetoric? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Why is it lean more leftist than other disciplines? 

  

MATT BURGESS: No, why are there so many ... If social psychology is one of these model disciplines for all the viewpoint diversity censor, chilly climate problems in academia, it seems like there's many disciplines that are identified in that way. History, English, classics being some examples besides social psychology. And yet it seems to me that social psychology produces an unusually high number of Heterodox, famous Heterodox people compared with other disciplines. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: It's a great question. Not something I thought of before, but I do now that I think about it. One of the reasons could be, and this is what really amazes me sometimes, is that I think that of all people, in some discipline, if people should really be cautious about things like group thinking, it should be social psychologists, right? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: We do look at these sorts of interpersonal and dynamics and how, yeah, group processes. I mean that is one of some of the original studies. Some of the really classic studies in psychology are lean towards this way in social psychology, lean this way. Like group processes conformity, the effects of conformity and group think and how groups affect the individual sort of thoughts and behaviors. So, yeah, I think if you're in touch with the history of the discipline, then all of this should worry you. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, let me ask the flip side of the same question. Why doesn't it worry more people? How do people who are okay with the sensory-ness, the chilliness, the lack of viewpoint diversity, how do they deal with the cognitive dissidence of that in contrast to what the lessons of the history of the field are? If I'm hearing you right. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah. Well, because they don't know about the research behind cognitive-ness because they don't read actual old stuff. They just listen to what's being said nowadays and just go with it, would be my cynical take on it. When agreeing with people and just going along with what's being said and disagreeing with, standing up to a majority is difficult. And if you're just being introduced to the discipline post, I would say, maybe yeah, 2014, 2015, which is what people say, a lot of the woke stuff started happening, then there are no incentives to actually challenging what you're being told. There isn't, as far as, and I mean it does break my heart to say this, but even at Berkeley, the amount of digging that we do into the history of the discipline and actually studying classic theories and stuff like that, it's very minimal. There's this culture of sort of not putting your head up and not thinking critically about the discipline as well. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Selectively thinking critically about the discipline., 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Selectively thinking critically about the discipline. So, sort of challenging the research that you don't agree with and really being questioning the things that you think are either, might lead people to draw conclusions that you don't agree with. Those are challenged a bit more. And then stuff where since I've been here, I mean the amount of confirmation bias that happens in my discipline is just, it's staggering where you can tell so many people are not even trying to ask real questions. They're simple, they have an idea about how things should be and then they just go about trying to prove that right. And I think- 

  

MATT BURGESS: Advocacy research. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Exactly. 

  

MATT BURGESS: You're stealth advocacy. Let me steel man your discipline or I'm going to help have you steel man your discipline. Just in the interest of the HxA way. There have been some areas where the push towards more diversity and more inclusion as is defined by the campus cyclist, has maybe been consistent with or aligned with viewpoint diversity. One example I can think of would be the whole weird thing. We used to assume that western undergrads were representative psychologically and cognitively of everybody, and it turns out they were actually uniquely unrepresented. Weird, which is western educated, industrialized, rich and democratic countries are, Joe Henrich just has a whole book on this called The Weirdest People in the World, about how not only are we not representative, but we're also we are the outliers in many respects. So, that would be, I think, an example of were pushing for more non-weird samples, it's clearly to the good, clearly in the interest of viewpoint diversity and better science. Can you think of any other examples? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: There are so many. I mean, I love psychology. I wouldn't be here if, and I mean think about the way we treat mental illness or the way we used to treat mental illness and the way that has shifted in the past hundred years. I do think we owe all of that to psychology as a discipline. Mental health issues is a big one. I mean education research, psychological research that informs, I think education is also extremely beneficial. I'm not sure if that's answering your question exactly. 

  

MATT BURGESS: No, I think that's a great example. And there's an example that's personally relevant to my family. So, my grandfather was a Justice on the Canadian Supreme Court. And in the late 1980s, he asked for a short leave of absence to treat depression, and the Chief Justice at the time forced him to resign. And then more recently there was a Justice who just disappeared for I think several weeks and turns out he was suffering from some kind of mental illness, and it was completely different. He was treated with compassion; he was allowed to keep his seat. So, I think that's an anecdotal illustration of the way in which what you just described has benefited. 

Whereas I do think that there's something to the critique of the modern discourse that it crosses over sometimes from de-stigmatizing to valorizing and fetishizing mental illness in a way that I think is harmful to people's mental health. I do think it's also the shift from stigmatizing to not stigmatizing has been right for the better, and I'm glad to see that. I think other shifts, society's attitude on LGBT rights has changed- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Of course. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Enormously in my lifetime. I remember, I'm not that old, but I remember being in high school and having to feel brave or feel like I had to steel myself to stick up for people against that, against homophobia in the same way that I sometimes feel like I must steel myself to be a moderate in academia. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah, no [inaudible]. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Unapologetic unspoken one. Back to the HxA Community, what do you hope yours will accomplish? What are your HxA Community's goals? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Again, I think what we're hoping to accomplish is providing a hub for people on campus who would want to speak openly about things or try to have conversations. I mean, there's so many important discussions we need to have as a campus, what to do about people's park or the homeless situation or should we or should we not accept the SAT and the GRE in our admissions? These are really, important questions that we just are not having open discussions about. And so, I think it would just be a hub for people to have maybe just offer some kind of moral support to know that we're here if people need to discuss these things. We have faculty members that there's sort of massive overreach with a lot of the DEI Bureaucracy in certain departments in terms of their hiring processes and stuff like that. 

And one thing we would want to do is also just figure out what this DEI Bureaucracy can and cannot do in terms of their interference in departmental matters? Because I think a lot of faculties don't even know. I think if somebody from DIE tells them something, I don't think people know, is that okay, is that not okay? What is their purview? And so, I think just making that more transparent or just giving faculty more resources about how to deal with that would be something we want to do. And then if something's that happen on campus where, I mean thankfully haven't had anything egregious happen on campus lately in terms of violating free speech or trying to get people canceled or fired and stuff like that. 

But if something like that does happen, we want to have just a support network of people who could back people off if that's needed. But more than anything's- 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's great. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I think trying to make it okay to openly share your viewpoint, not be afraid of speaking up and not feel like you will be vilified for just sharing your thoughts. And I mean, you asked this question of, oh, what are the students, what is the political orientation of the students? And my question to you, Matt, would be, isn't college the place where people should come to figure that out? 

  

MATT BURGESS: I think that's a great question. Now, I believe studies done by HxA and others find that- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: People's political orientation doesn't change. 

  

MATT BURGESS: They don't change for the most part. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: But that's a failing, right? That's a failing. Okay. So, I grew up in India, and when I went to the US and started college, I remember somebody at some point asking me, I've recently been reflecting on just how apolitical my upbringing was. So, somebody asked me, are you a progressive? Or people use so many labels in this country. And I'm generally just not, I don't believe in labeling myself. And somebody asked me, are you liberal? Are you this or that? And to me, it sounded like they were asking me, what's your favorite baseball team? I'm like, I don't have one. I just don't have an affiliation in that sense. And I think that can be very liberating. I do think that college should be the place where you're not coming in with though like I'm already X, Y, or Z, but be exposed to ideas so you can figure out what speaks to you or which ideas you want to adopt or not adopt or adopt after adopting in some way, right? 

  

MATT BURGESS: I completely agree with that now, and I think that you're clearly ahead of the curve for most people in figuring that out. I maybe started that journey towards the end of my college, but I do understand the appeal of a tribe because to be honest, I was somewhat of a kind of card-carrying progressive activist when I was in high school. So, I mean, it was a different time. So, what it meant and what it looked like was different. But for example, I was quite involved in this organization, which I think is a great organization called Free the Children or Kids Can Free the Children. 

At some point it changed the name from the latter to the former, started by this Canadian guy, Craig Kielburger, who was I think 12 at the time that he started it. And the premise was to raise money to build schools and developing countries and to fight against child slavery and child labor again, especially overseas, like the sweatshop stuff. So, that was great. I got involved in that. I co-founded a chapter of that in high school, and then I founded a chapter of it in CEGEP. In Quebec, where I grew up, there's this weird school in between high school and college- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Interesting. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Called CEGEP. And so, I went to, I mean, honestly, mostly what I did was campaigns to raise money and to kind of raise awareness about the issues on the campuses that I was on. I occasionally went to protests, and there was one time where I got to go to a Canadian youth activist conference. It was called Grasping Globalization. That was the big social justice issue in 2001 or whatever year it was. And I remember that was actually, I think that conference was really formative for me in terms of both understanding the appeal of those kinds of activist communities, but then also understanding the problems with them. 

So, it was like, you get into this room with like-minded young people who are ambitious and energetic and smart, and you do these team building things about how you speak passionately and you write each other warm fuzzies that you put in these little brown bags that you take home afterwards. And I think it's people these days who kind of talk about it as John McWhorter, for example, as a quasi-religious experience. I think that's accurate. And I think that is part of what became a nagging concern about it. And then also just I was like, the thought that I continue to have this day is like, okay, so we are these passionate young people who can identify these problems that people haven't solved yet. And yet we still are in some of the societies that have come the closest to solving those problems of any societies in history by a lot. 

And if you talk to adults, it's not like they're saying, you're wrong, child slavery is good. They agree with you on the basic moral premise of what you're about. And so at some point, you can be as hotheaded of a young person as you and I was a decently hotheaded young person going on a decently hotheaded middle-aged person. Even I was like, there's something a little bit illogical to the notion that a couple of teenagers who haven't been to college yet have some special insight into how to solve the deeper issues. 

I mean we can definitely, and we should call out blatant wrongs like child slavery and child labor, and we definitely can and should do things like raise money for important causes. When it comes to things like how much globalization is the right amount, you're probably not the people who should be asking. It kind of reminds me of now that you're working in climate, one of the discourses that bugs me on both sides is the discourse about Greta Thunberg. Conservatives will say, Greta Thunberg, her ideas about economic policy are so bad, to which my response is, of course they are, she's 16 and doesn't go to school. That's not her job is, I know she's older than 16 now. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: To be a hotheaded young person. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Her job is to raise awareness about climate change and she's crushing it. She's maybe the single most effective person at that in the history of the world recently, or at least one of the top five. Now, to be fair to her conservative critics, I think it is true that sometimes people on the other side take her more seriously than they should on policy. And so again, if you are a climate expert and you're listening to Greta Thunberg on Climate Policy, I question how sincerely you believe you're a climate expert. And to be fair, it's largely activists and not experts who do kind of say, "We should listen to Greta Thunberg policy." And also, to be fair, Greta Thunberg herself when often when she testifies, she'll say, read the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), when she wrote her book called The Climate Book. She had a bunch of experts write. So, I actually think that some of the criticism of her elevation is kind of like a quasi-religious totem for the movement is fair. But I think that there are some important nuances and some of them are not fair. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I mean, you raised some very, very, very interesting things here. I mean, one would be even the fact that you were discussing issues like child labor, which is not, it might happen in the US or I'm assuming it's much less than in other parts of the world. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yes. I think that's fair to say. I'm not an expert in the specifics. I think it's fair to say that it probably does happen in the US particularly in some of the, there's been some stories about this child sex trafficking in the context of undocumented immigrants in LA. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Probably not nearly as bad as places like India and China.  

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah, not nearly. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Or even climate change. And I think I do sense a lack of global context on campus as far as I can tell. The kind of issues people are fighting now I feel like are things that only affect them. There's this weird narcissism of, oh, microaggressions against this, and we had a strike last semester for graduate students, and they just seem to fight against ... I think graduate students, at least on our campus as far as I can tell, think they're the ones who are oppressed. So, it's not even this activism that's for the benefit of somebody else or some bigger causes. It's a lot about just sort of this naval gazy way of trying to be an activist. I think that's one thing. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Just before you go to the other thing, that really resonates in the ... I think climate change is one of the most frustratingly visceral examples of that. You hear messages that sound like climate change is going to kill us all, and the solution is we should focus on our feelings, and we shouldn't talk to anybody else who's different from us. It's kind of some way you're like, are you sure the thing you care about isn't your feelings? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: And I feel like it just comes from this sense of not having a understanding, a world history or even what's going on in the rest of the world here we're talking about ... I mean, there's pronouns everywhere. I have never stated my pronouns once. I'm like, I don't care when I'm in a classroom. I'm a student, I'm a teacher who cares about my gender. And if you honestly cared about things like that, think about what's happening in Afghanistan right now. Women are being denied in education. There are women around being shot in the head for not wearing a headscarf. If you honestly cared about gender issues, you would not be worried about your pronouns. You would be worried about those things. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Okay, let me steel men for a little bit. I agree with you that there's too much, this kind of always state your pronouns at the beginning of everything. I agree with you that on balance, I don't agree with it for the main two reasons being, it encourages people to think that their gender identity is the most important thing about them, which I think is backwards. And then also in my experience, I encounter lots of people on campus who have non gender conforming or non-binary gender identities. And there's a lot more diversity in that community than people think about what they want. There are some people who don't necessarily want to have to talk about their minority gender identity as the first thing that they say when they meet somebody, but just as steel man, I think to your point woman in Afghanistan- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Can I try steel manning this time? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah, please do. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: The only argument I have ever heard in favor of using pronouns that has seemed to hold some weight for me is that it might make somebody else that you're around feel more comfortable sharing their pronouns if they're pronouns are different than what you would expect them to be. That's the only argument that I've ever felt has some credibility, like, oh, you should share them just because it would make other people comfortable. But to that, I would say there are so many more ways that you can make other people feel comfortable around you doing something like that. I see people all the time where they will state their pronouns and not even bother to learn the names of anybody around them. And it's like if you honestly cared about people as individuals, maybe bother to get to know their names and start with nouns first and then we'll move on to the pronouns. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah, I think you raised a good point, and I actually think that as an instructor, there's a very good way, at least the best way I've thought of so far to walk that line, is that always just once in the first class, I'll say, if you have nickname or pronoun information, for example, I go by Matt, my pronouns are he, him, his feel free to send me an email or there's a little thing you can do on our system where you can change it. And then I see it on my class list. But then I don't go around saying, "Okay, now everyone in the class tell me your pronouns." And I kind of think that's a way to do the thing that you were talking about, about making people feel okay, sharing it if they want to share it without making everybody re-share it. 

Just quickly back to the point about women in Afghanistan and other places have it much worse. I think that's a good point, but I think a steel man counterpoint to that would be we don't really have control over what happens in Afghanistan. Some people may disagree with that, but I think that the two most common counter arguments to that that I've heard are, one is you can walk and chew gum at the same time, so we can call out injustice here and there at the same time, and those are not mutually exclusive. And then the second one would be we have more control over, this came up in the context of the post George Floyd a lot. So, this horrific murder happened in Minneapolis. Why are we talking about non-police related issues here? And one of the common answers to that, or preemptive answers to that was we have agency here. We have more control over our environment than we have over some other environments somewhere else. Sounds like you're going to disagree with that, so please do. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I love how you can tough on my face. Okay. I disagree with that in the sense that, well, a couple of things. I mean, we don't have control over most things, and I certainly don't count myself as an activist, and I don't think if you're a researcher or a scientist, you should. But I mean as a social psychologist, I mean, I see this sort of hyper focus on these black and white issues now. So, for example, if you care about prejudice and you care about stereotyping, you could study it in a more global context. There are things that you could study in a way that can be generalizable to other places. If you really cared about sexism in instead, for example, we read papers that are about, oh, there's bias in academia and it's mostly focused on American context, or there's bias in evaluations of how men and women, their idea of sexism is, oh, we're getting 0.03 points less women are being evaluated more negatively 0.03 on average than men. That's their idea of trying to find and [inaudible]- 

  

MATT BURGESS: Using American categories too, right? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Exactly. Exactly right. Where you could be doing that same research taking a broader context, and I do think that especially as social psychologist, I do think it's incumbent upon us to do that. Instead of just focusing on a very ... And I mean your idea that we don't have control over that. I kind of disagree with that, Matt. I think the US has an outsized influence on the rest of the world, and it should be thought of as a responsibility. I'm not saying we can change things in a year or two, but it does, the things that happen here. And unfortunately, even I think the American academies have an outsized influence on American culture, and that should be thought of as a responsibility. I'm not saying we can stop people from killing each other in Afghanistan right now, but certainly it's something that we can think about in the long term, and I think broadening our perspective is one way to at least try to get there. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah. So, I think a really interesting point that comes out of that is the following, and by the way, I don't completely agree with the notion that we can't influence over there either. I was just raising that as a steel man. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Right. Yeah, okay. 

  

MATT BURGESS: But I think you're right. One of the ways that we can, I mean there's two broad types of ways we might be able to influence. One is direct or indirect. And I think that the last 20 years have shown that the ability of the US or any other country to directly by force change another society is more limited than we thought. That even if we wanted to go and purely export democracy, which some people would argue we shouldn't want to do, but even if we did want to do, I think the last 20 years have taught us that it's really hard to do that. The second indirect way is by influencing through culture, and here's where I think there's actually a really interesting points made by the left and the right where it would be great if they talk to each other more is I think that the left says basically one way to basically turn that argument into an argument for focusing on issues at home is we get our own house in order. 

We role model what a justice society looks, and that influences the rest of the world. Now, I think the conservative critique of how that's practiced today often is that if we do so in a way that is sometimes, not always, but sometimes extremely and sometimes overtly self-hating and kind of questioning our own legitimacy and questioning the degree to which, maybe questioning is the wrong word, not acknowledging the degree to which our society has made enormous and largely historically unprecedented progress in a lot of issues that progressives would identify as justice. Not recognizing that and not being proud of that and not recognizing the uniqueness of that. I think out of fear of it coming across as or being internalized as western supremacist in somehow or colonialist or whatever, also then erodes our legitimacy to influence other countries. If we ourselves say we don't have any moral, we're no better than anyone else. In fact, we're uniquely rapacious and oppressive, but you should change your gender norms. The obvious response to that is why when you just said you don't have the authority to tell us anything. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah, I mean, this is such a fascinating thing because there's so many threads, we can pull on here. Well, first, how do you help somebody else without thinking that you're in a position to be able to help somebody? It does come from the sense of, I don't want to use the word superior, but you do think that, oh, you're in a position to be able to help others. The other thing, of course, is that I do sincerely think that charity begins at home. That's kind of what you're saying that we get our things in order first before we go around helping others. The problem with that, of course, is that if you're only focusing on your own context, and at some point, it goes from fighting racial inequality and the civil rights movement to now microaggressions are this massive thing that everybody's talking about. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Or bringing segregation back. One of my biggest concerns, I mean racially segregated graduations. A lot of rec centers have racially segregated yoga classes and things like that, racially segregated faculty affinity groups. The more we become intolerant on both sides of people who disagree with us, the more we segregate socially and even institutionally in terms of right is ... One of the visions that seems to be being put forward now for how you deal with the lack of political diversity in academia is build conservative Academias. To be clear, I don't think that's what UATX is doing, but there are definitely ... I mean the New College of Florida, people saying they want it to be Hillsdale of the South. What is Hillsdale? Hillsdale is a, I think explicitly conservative institution. And so, is that Fox News versus CNN, FoxU and CNNU? 

Is that a happy future? The other thing that just really worries me as an economist is there's a lot of research in economics and in political science that suggests that a key political precursor to social safety nets is social solidarity. So, for example, there was a study of Sweden that found that, in Sweden that found that Swedish immigrants' willingness to support safety nets for other Swedish immigrant's dependent on how much they identified with the Swedish society. There's a study of, I think it was mostly European countries that found that the cultural solidarity between the degree to which the rich identified culturally and socially with the poor was a good predictor of how much they'd be willing to support safety nets spending. There's also work by a lot of progressive scholars, and I don't know that the people who wrote those first two studies aren't progressive, just to be clear. 

But one of the foci recently, for example, is a good book on this called The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee. It talks about how the support for social safety nets among white Americans fell after the Civil Rights Act is sort of an example of the way that the book talks about it, which I think it is a reasonable way to think about it, is that racism is in effect harmed poor white Americans too. But I think the kind of social political lesson from all of those studies is if we are pursuing reductions in inequality that at some level are going to have to be supported by policy and by the body politic, and we're doing that in ways that are intentionally dividing people, I think we're just making it harder to actually have those policies. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: The fracturing is just not healthy. Even things like, microaggressions. I mean, what really bothers me is that if the goal is to get people who are different from each other to talk to each other, that is not- 

  

MATT BURGESS: It's the opposite. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: It's exactly the opposite. If you're constantly worried, and I've certainly seen it happen, people are less likely to ask each other sort of personal questions or just engage or joke with each other because they're worried things will be taken. And I have seen it. I mean, I will just joke, and I try to be myself around people, and you do see people just taking offense to things that are just sort of totally benign. And it's like it creates this environment of everybody walking on eggshells all the time. And the thing is, if you're talking to people who are different than you, that communication takes time and effort. When you have people that come from all kinds of- 

  

MATT BURGESS: And trust. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Different backgrounds and trust, you must trust that the other- 

  

MATT BURGESS: And trust is not, go ahead. Yeah, it sounds like you're going to say what I was going to say. So, you say it. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: We all bring these lenses to any context. So, we might be using the same words, but we might mean certain different things. And I think people don't even ask each other, what did you mean by that? If they think something is being said that they don't agree with, it's just people just shut out. And so, I think it's just creating the exact opposite of what people really want. If you really want a more inclusive and welcoming environment, you want people to be able to engage with each other freely without being worried about, oh, am I going to offend X, Y, and Z? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah. One of the things I noticed on campus in the last couple of years, and I think it has actually gotten a little bit better in the last year. But since 2020, so first there was this movement of don't offend anybody, prosecute every offense, however small. And then to your point, one of the big responses or consequences of that was mass disengagement. And then sometimes the same people who were arguing for more judicious prosecution of offense were then saying, why is there no community? At some point it gets to the point where people don't even want to have that conversation. Because what's the point? I can just find some other community and then that really degrades the- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: But and that does lead to the. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Vibrancy in the workplace. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: That leads to self-segregation, right? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: You will end up only talking to people that are exactly like you, because then you don't have to worry about being taken out of context or being misinterpreted. 

  

MATT BURGESS: And there was actually a study I was reading yesterday that documented this. They were looking at between 2015 and 2017, there was an increase in social segregation among- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Homophily. Yeah. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Every type of line you can imagine. So, politics, race, et cetera. Who does that harm? That harms the people with the least social capital. It's like a tragically ironic, perverse effect on the very communities that we're supposed to be trying to help. There are two broad topics that I wanted to get your take on related to the HxA Campus Community. So, our HxA Campus Community at Â鶹ӰԺ has three broad objectives. One is to role model the HxA values on campus. Partly, I think a point you made earlier, you phrased it slightly differently, but the way I would phrase it and have sometimes phrased it in private conversations is we want to make it normal to be normal. Again, I'm a politically unaffiliated moderate Canadian who's like anti-gun and pro state healthcare. I shouldn't be an edge lord conservative passer on Â鶹ӰԺ's campus. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: But who decides what normal is mad? I think it's if white supremacist to say that your we are normal is normal. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's actually a fair critique mean with obviously a very probably unfairly, racially charged undertone. But I think your point is right about, so the definition of normal is basically modal. If you ask Andrew Yang in his book, The War on Normal People. A couple of responses to that, I think that it should be, anybody of any view should be free and feel comfortable to civilly engage and express their views. I think in the context of an institution that is supposed to be creating a meeting space for people from all walks of life and all different views, I think that a modal person, a person with kind of roughly modal politics, if they seem extreme or strange, that's a problem. That's a sign of a problem. It's not that modal political people like me have any righter than anybody else to express our views in it. 

So, I'm glad that you've kind of raised that challenge. But I think if the climate is so extreme that what's modal seems fringe, we have a very distorted force field that's probably going to severely limit our ability to constructively discuss things. And it's not just the idea that the median voter is a, or the modal political person is an upper middle class white man, which I happen to be. Is it not actually true? The median voter in the US is Christian, middle class, suburban, non-college educated, working class person even probably is privilege in some ways, but not a paragon of privilege. In other ways it is also the case that the most racially and economically diverse political groups are the moderates. The extremes are the richest, whitest and most educated on both sides. I think people kind of know that that's true or guess that's true about the right on campus, but most people are surprised to learn not on the left. So, for example, white Democrats were much more supportive of defunding the police than black Democrats. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Right. Because they're not ones who have been affected by less policing, right? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Exactly. If you are somebody who's disadvantaged, politics is visceral to your life. If you are a privileged educated pundit, politics is a shirt that you wear and you want to make sure that your shirt is nicer and more attention grabbing than everyone else's shirt. Maybe even you want it to be different from everyone else's shirt, so people notice you, which kind of tends you towards being extreme. So, I guess what I would say is I don't think that moderates have any more of a right than anybody else to feel at home, but I think that if moderates feel fringe, that's a sign of a larger pathology. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: That's a problem. 

  

MATT BURGESS: But I would also reject the notion that worrying about moderates is worrying mostly about rich white people. Because again, it's almost the opposite of that. And I think about it in terms of religion. How many students do we have on campus who are from non-white backgrounds, who are from working class religious backgrounds and probably have a lot of discomfort and a lot of unease around the kinds of etiquette we preach. One of the least well understood facts about American polarization is that the median voter is a social conservative and an economic progressive. People on campus sometimes think it's the other way around. The fiscal conservative is social liberal. Yeah, that's a very small group who disproportionately elites. And the two heuristics I use to get people to understand that or to think about that one is describing the median voter as I did earlier. It's a non-college Christian working-class person. The other is just think about, okay, if the median voter is not rich, it's kind of working class, what do you think they prefer? Policies that help the working class or policies that enforce the etiquette of the rich class. 

When you put it that way, it's kind of obvious. But the other heuristic is most people would agree that the average American is not elitist. Okay. If you think about economic elitism, do you think of the right to the left? Most people would say the right, if you think about social cultural elitism, most people will say the left. Model HxA values on campus just again, make it led by example, make it more for more people to kind of come out as Heterodox, which is unfortunately a common term that I've heard. Two, create a forum for our members to discuss issues related to the mission. And some of that is through public events probably, but some of that is private. So, after our first organizational meeting, our first event was a private discussion for HxA members on campus to talk about DEI statements, should we require them in hiring, et cetera. 

And so, kind of basically creating a safe space to co-op terminology to discuss these kind of changes issues. And then lastly is, which echoes something you said about your group to support HxA members at CU Â鶹ӰԺ, if needed. And again, I think we're pretty lucky in terms of policies for free expression. I'm not super worried about people getting canceled here, at least by the university. But we could have somebody who has a 2000-person petition from their field, which happened to, not in our campus, but in social psychology. I think there were a couple of people on our campus who signed that petition. So, of those three things, is there anything I missed? Is there anything different or additional to that that you're doing on your campus. Modeling HxA values, providing a forum both for private and public discussions and supporting HxA members publicly if necessary. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Would you say that role modeling HxA values includes being okay with coming out as a moderate or like I said, I don't agree with the labels, but yeah, as somebody that's Heterodox, that doesn't sort of agree with the- 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Okay, then I guess no, then I think that covers it. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Now I think the next thing I was going to ask you was about have you noticed any effect of your HxA Community on your campus yet? And just if you wanted me to seed your thinking. I would say for our campus, the biggest thing, it's early days. The biggest thing I've noticed so far is there's a difference between, I think the threshold for coming out locally and for coming out super visibly publicly are different. And I think that the biggest thing that I've noticed that's positive from HxA Community is it's brought some people out of the woodwork who would not probably be comfortable being like you and me, having these kinds of podcasts, being part of the writing group, et cetera. But are comfortable being outspoken in faculty meetings and in faculty assemblies and just in kind of day-to-day conversation. And I think that makes a big difference to the point of showing that it's actually not a minority view to want to push the HxA values, open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement. Those are not and should not be kind of edge lord values. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: That's a great question because that brings me to a question I wanted to ask you. I mean, we haven't had much of an impact yet because it's really hard to get people out of the woodwork at Berkeley, is what I'm seeing. I've spoken to so many people who agree with these values like HxA values, but will not come out openly to support them. And somebody said, because what it sounds like what you're doing is creating a safe space for racists. That's how it will be perceived, is what you're trying to do. So, what I'm facing is this issue of- 

  

MATT BURGESS: Well, hang on, let me unpack that. So, the first thing that this person said to you was, you're creating a safe space for racist. And then the second one was, it'll be how they perceive. Those are different things. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Not that we're creating a safe space for racist, but that on campus it will be perceived that way, that starting this campus community will be perceived as trying to create a safe space for racists. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah. See, my response to that is not so much about these things specifically, but I've certainly heard that argument before against this kind of thing. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Or I mean, other things I've heard is people will say, oh, it's like HxA, and then somebody will say, oh, that right wing organization. Somebody said that, oh, when you talk about Heterodox Academy, people are like, oh, that hate group, like Jonathan Haidt, [inaudible]. So, like the hate group. I mean, a good pun, I can appreciate that. But it's all these negative associations that I'm seeing that I think just makes people really unwilling to openly, even though they agree with the values and would be for, they will not openly associate their name with that. 

  

MATT BURGESS: I'm really glad you asked me that because I actually have had a lot of time to think about what the answer to that is. And I think I have a pretty good answer that I would love to share and spread. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah. That's why I thought you'd be a good person to ask. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, I think one of the biggest misconceptions that feeds polarization is that the answer to one extreme is the other. It's the opposite. So, if you stigmatize expressing huge majority views, so for example, we were talking earlier about how defund the police has probably contributed to the spike in murders, which has literally killed thousands of people. I don't know of anybody who's been canceled for supporting that. I do know somebody who was disinvited from a big public lecture for saying that he was against affirmative action. Which that's opinion of 75% of Americans including 55% of black Americans. So, a huge, huge, huge majority opinion. If you stigmatize a broad majority's views on contentious issues, you do two things. Number one, you empower actual racists because do you know who's not going to care if they're called a racist? Somebody who is one? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Do people who are racist openly acknowledge that they are and they're okay with that? 

  

MATT BURGESS: Probably. I mean, they're really, really fringe people like Richard Spencer, but I think that maybe if you replace racist with extremists, it's easier to understand. So, for example, there's a group of people who include, for example, the activist Chris Rufo and other kind of leaders of the anti-woke movement who are spending something like a month in Hungary at the Danube Institute, which has, I think some kind of connection to Orbán's Government talking about and learning about how great Orbán's Government is. Orbán's Government and Orbán's view goes far beyond banding gender studies, which I believe he did. He was somebody who's, I believe said publicly that he was against the mixing of the races, and one of his staffers resigned because they said, that's right out of the Nazi playbook. If you are going to create a climate where people can't express non-prejudiced nuanced majority views, you create a vacuum for those views that's going to be filled by people who actually are extreme, at least in some of the ways that you support. 

So, to put a finer point on it, a good question to ask somebody who gives the argument is, do you think the climate that you want to create on campus is giving Chris Rufo more power or less? My view would be that you're giving him more power. The version of that to the right. I was speaking to somebody in the summer of 2020 who was a conservative Trump skeptical Republican who had voted for Gary Johnson in 2016. So, this is before the election, Trump's still president. And he said to me, he's like, "I'm thinking of voting for Trump." And I asked him why. And he said, "Well, I'm so scared of all this woke stuff." And my response to him was, "Let me get this straight. It sounds like you're saying that you think that if Trump was president, we wouldn't have this woke stuff." I think it's like if academia just more piously criticized DeSantis, he'd be like, okay, I'll stop. Like no. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I don't disagree with you, Matt, but the question is how you even know what the majority view is if you have echo chambers, which I think is what's happening definitely on campus. I think- 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's a good question. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Because I don't think people know what the majority is because nobody shares if there's distancing views, they're not getting shared. So, it's sort of this group thing that's leading people to extreme and they think, oh, if all you hear are these really, leftist views, then you think that is the majority. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Okay, that's a great point. So, it sounds like then the viewpoint that you're asking me to try to argue against is a viewpoint where you think the majority of Americans are racist. Well, so suppose if the, take affirmative action, if I say to somebody, most Americans oppose affirmative action and I show them the data, I'm assuming that there's some people, that most people, even if they didn't know that beforehand, accept that. Now they may still say, that's a racist view, most Americans are racist, which is a ideologically coherent statement. My response to that would be in a democracy, if you really think that 90% of Americans are backwards, then what's your theory of change in a democracy that doesn't involve persuasion? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: No, I'm actually saying the exact opposite. I think most people, at least on my campuses, would think that, oh, everybody ... Actually, I'm not sure if most people think that everybody's racist, but I do think they think that the kind of opinions that you and I would think are mainstream, data suggest are mainstream. I'm not sure how many people on campus think that they are mainstream. So, to express them would be considered an extreme viewpoint in their eyes. 

  

MATT BURGESS: I think the response to that is data. And if the data isn't convincing, then the response to that is anecdotes. If it's extreme to not be the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, why do they lose primaries in New York and Minneapolis and lose DA races to Republicans in Seattle and get recalled in San Francisco. If it's really a popular view, that shouldn't happen. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah, and here we're talking about political things, but if you have other, my side of it would be sort of more social psychological issues that you can bring up. And there you do see the sort of imbalance and how rigor is applied to research, where a lot of that stuff will get questioned on, oh, how valid is it? How rigorous it is. If you have stuff that's looking at IQA or something like that, people will be like, oh, this is bad research. These are bad [inaudible]. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Sure. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Whereas the same kind of evidence that's on some race issues that people agree with will not get the same kind of questioning. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, pick on your discipline. My favorite example of this is there was two papers published by the same lead author in the same journal who happens to be a woman of color junior from a developing country, Al Shebli. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Al Shebli. 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, one of her papers showed that racial diversity made scientific teams better. It's been a while, so I can't remember the exact nuance, but it was something like that. And then the other paper, again, same journal, same methodology, showed that. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: [inaudible] communications, yeah. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That sometimes women who had female mentors were not doing as well as women who had male mentors. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: And that wasn't ... Yeah. 

  

Matt Burgess: And the latter papers got retracted. That's great for its flimsy methodology. That's a great controlled experiment. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: That wasn't part of the central paper. That was an exploratory analysis, Matt. In my first year I started a podcast with [inaudible]- 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's even worse. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: It's even worse. The main point of that paper was that we did an episode on it. The main point of that paper was that what they were trying to look at, whether having a more eminent mentor lead you to have better outcomes as a researcher later. So, that was sort of the focus of the study. 

  

MATT BURGESS: And then probably the answer was yes. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Right, exactly. But then in an exploratory, they just found that having a female mentor influenced your outcomes, and that became this whole thing. Oh, it was awful what had happened. And so that happens. And the other thing is right, these kinds of arguments, if you say, Matt, oh, we can share the data, and the answer is the data. People who don't come to believe things based on rational assessment of the situation will not be persuaded by rational arguments. You and I will be persuaded by them, but there are a lot of people that, there's nothing else to do, except do that. But I do worry that- 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, let me ask you a follow-up question about that, because I think one of the most important tensions in the kind of HxA world, not pertaining to HxA as an organization, but if they just think people I know who are in the orbit of that world that one of the things that they struggle with, two related things that are kind of similar or analogous. So, one is there was a study I read a while ago that was a modeling study. So, I could be wrong. It didn't have empirical data in it, but one of the things they found in their simulations was a key driver of reducing polarization was not everybody becoming more tolerant, it was moderates becoming more intolerant. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Oh, we become less tolerant of extremes. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Right. If the extremes are more intolerant than the moderates, then there's an incentive to be extreme because the moderates aren't going to punish you if you're not moderate. Now, I find that depressing. Now it's a model. It could be wrong. I find that depressing if it's true, because that's in some ways the opposite of what civil diff scores moderates preach. But I think it's a debate going on. And then relatedly, I don't know if you watched the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference. I didn't go, but I watched online. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I did, yeah. Yeah, I did. 

  

MATT BURGESS: And there was one of the speakers, he was an older professor who was zooming in one of the first panels, and he said something to the effect of that he was pessimistic about academia because you can be a scholar and if you're a scholar, I'm paraphrasing a bit, so I apologize to him if this isn't exactly what he said. Something like, you can be a scholar. And if you're a scholar, one of your load stars is curiosity and openness to new ideas, or you can be an activist. And if you're an activist, then one of your load stars is not openness to nuance, not openness to new ideas, not openness to anything that dilutes the urgency and authority of your view. 

And he basically said that those are just completely incompatible styles. And there are so many people now in the academy who, to him, are more activists than scholars. Again, especially in the non-stem disciplines, that he basically said, I can't see this problem fixing itself unless we replace the activists with the scholars. Basically, a dramatic change in the composition of the academy. And again, I hope he's wrong, I think that's a very dystopian view, but it certainly is a view that's influential. I mean, it's definitely what Chris Rufo is trying to do in New College of Florida, right? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA:Right. And Jonathan Haidt talks about it as the Telos of the university truth or justice. Right? 

  

MATT BURGESS: So, I guess my question to you is what do you think about that? Do you think there really is a tension between what you might think of as a more hard-nosed approach to HxA values or else versus what I think HxA currently would like to do in terms of win some disruption? Or is that a false choice? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I could certainly be wrong about this, but I do think it might be a false choice. I think that most people, and again, I could be wrong about this too, but I think most people in academia, in education, in higher education, and K-12, I think. We all want to make the world a better place. Everybody wants to leave the world a little bit better than you found it. And I think that's a good value to have. But I think in the academy, I think you must sort of acknowledge that you cannot solve real problems unless you're willing to get to the truth of the matter. That should take primacy. You first have to be like, yeah, even if we think that what is the effect of having a female mentor on the outcome of your students? 

We first need to figure out what is actually happening in the real world before we can solve it, before problems can be solved. So, I think it's good to want to solve problems, and it's good to want a better world for everybody. And I care about education. At some level, there's this very, very fundamental assumption that more education is better, that we want everybody to have good access to education, and we want everybody to have the equal opportunity to get a good education, which is something I care about. But you cannot try to solve the problems that exist if you're not willing to first find out what the truth is. 

  

MATT BURGESS: The Al Shebli paper is an interesting example of both that, and I think the nugget of truth that I would pull out of a steel man of what you might think is the opposite view. So, I think that paper should not have been retracted, full stop. However, I think it is fair to have the discussion before you publish that paper. And when you're thinking about what the press release is going to look like, are there misinterpretations of these data. So, interpretations of these data that are not accurate and potentially harmful? And I think one such interpretation in that instance would be don't have a female mentor, which is not what Al Shebli was calling for, obviously. But I think it would be reasonable to worry about that. Now here's where I think though it illustrates your point. A truth focused curiosity, I think would ask what is the cause of those data? 

And I would guess two of the causes might be, one is just the demographics, gender demographics of faculty have changed over time. And so, on average, women are more underrepresented among older faculty and eminent faculty skew older. Therefore, there may be a correlation there that's kind of under controlled for and somehow is affecting your perception of women. I think the second thing is there's evidence from other studies I believe that women are on average more likely to want to select mentors who are women because they're women, at least in part. They're more likely to prefer female mentors, all else equal than men are. And that I think if that's true, I don't know, that's not my area. I don't know if it's true. But if that's true, and it's certainly plausible, and it certainly is the case in every department I've ever been in, that female professors have higher fraction of female students than male professors. 

There is one study, at least in ecology that, I think it was in ecology, that I saw a few years ago that suggested that the main driver of that was choices by female students. That female students are seeking out female mentors. So, if it's true that female students are sometimes seeking out mentors on some basis, other than how much they'll help their career that might have a cost on average to their career. That's good information to know. That was kind of my mom's reaction. She is really interested in taking some of these things. And one of the things that she said to me was, I think it was in the context of that study or something like it's true that there are specific types of things where you really want a female mentor. 

So, for example, she said, when you're trying to think about how do I balance childbearing with career, especially the beginning when there's a physical aspect of it that's not just like how do you divide the roles of the family? It's just easier for female mentors to relate to that than male mentors. But she was saying there's other things where she almost felt like it was the opposite. On average, imposter syndrome, lack of self-confidence is on average lots of individual variation, but on average, that's more common among women than among men. If you have that problem, maybe you want a mentor who's going to be your overconfident hype man. The last question that I wanted to ask you is- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Sorry, before I just wanted- 

  

MATT BURGESS: No, yeah. Okay, good. Ask you something before. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Sorry. I just want to make a small point about the sort of misinterpretation thing, because how could you ever know how your research would be? I'm not saying you shouldn't be cautious about what you're saying in your research, because we're talking about the Al Shebli paper and how things could be misinterpreted, and I'm like, yes, but that's always a risk with any research. Anybody could take things you're saying out of context. And the other thing we must remember, of course, is that these are people in Abu Dhabi to expect them to be aware of what's happening in the American academia and that people will take offense to something that's at the end of your paper as a footnote- 

  

MATT BURGESS: There's an ironic- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: How are you supposed to know. 

  

MATT BURGESS: There's an ironic neo-colonial aspect of that story, for sure. Okay, let me clarify what I mean, because I don't think I said you should think about it. I don't think you shouldn't publish it. I think you should still publish it, but it's more anticipating it so that you can respond to it if it comes up. And I think that there are limits too. Sometimes people take it so far to say you're responsible for refuting anyone's interpretation of your research ever. I don't agree with that. But let me give you a specific example where this did come up for me in my research. So, I have a series of papers that have come out now. One of the implications is that the hot climate change scenarios that are used by an enormous fraction of climate impacts research are unrealistically hot. The first of those papers. 

Now, the field mostly agrees with us like David Wallace-Wells who wrote the book, the Uninhabitable Earth, published an article last fall in 2022 basically saying that we're right. I think the title was something like Beyond Catastrophe, A New Climate Future is Coming Into View or A New Climate Reality Is Coming to View. But that wasn't the case at the beginning. At the beginning we were sort of expecting this to be a not necessarily widely held opinion. And I remember shortly before the first of those papers, shortly before we submitted the first papers, this is early 2020, we had a lab meeting to discuss it. And somebody said, "I think this is an important thing to raise, should you be concerned about this being misinterpreted and misused by climate deniers?" And it was not an unfounded concern. 

So, for example, I don't know if you remember reading about this, but shortly before he left office, so January 2021, the Trump Administration put out these kind of quirky pamphlets on climate change that were full of, included some things that were questionable at the very least in their interpretation, and a few things that were questionable in their science. And at least one of those pamphlets did cite this paper of ours. So, anyway, I thought about it. I'm glad that I thought about it. 

My response ended up being, it's much worse for the enterprise if we don't publish it than if we do, because it's fair to worry that people are going to pile on to climate scientists for probably misusing this scenario for a few years. It'd be even worse for climate science though, if it came out that somebody figured out that this scenario was unrealistic and buried it for political reasons. That would be much, much worse for the integrity of the field. Secondly, if someone like Donald Trump called me to testify about climate change, that is good. I'm going to tell them that it's a really serious problem that we should address. I may also tell them that there's too much catastrophism sometimes, but if they don't call me, who else are they going to call? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah, no. And thinking about it is grace. I think, and being aware that it could be misinterpreted, is also great. You could even have, in your paper, you could also be explicit about, hey, we don't want it interpreted that way because we don't think that the data can support that interpretation. If you really think that there's some clear, terrible interpretation that could be taken out of context, you could be really careful in how you phrase things. But again, to expect everybody to think of all the ways in which things could be misinterpreted, and again, these are people that are not in the American context, I'm not sure how much you can expect. It's sort of unreasonable to expect everybody around the world to have thought of every possibility of how things could be ... Again, thinking about it is great. 

  

MATT BURGESS: I'm not saying that Al Shebli did anything wrong. I'm just saying that I think it is fair to ask researchers to consider those things and think about them in advance. I don't think it's fair to make those a pre-condition for publishing. We're almost out of time. So, I do want to make sure I get to this last question, because I think it's one of the most important questions for our younger listeners. So, I like to think of myself as pretty uninhibited, pretty outspoken. And yet I will admit that I was much less outspoken when I was a graduate student and a postdoc than I am now. Part of that is that the world changed around me. So, I was a grad student mostly, in fact, entirely before 2015. So, if you'd asked me in 2012 say, what's the biggest problem in environmental science? I'd be much more likely to say climate denial than toxic focus. 

Because that was just the way it was in 2012. And so, I didn't feel especially Heterodox when I was in grad school, but certainly I started to feel Heterodox when I was a postdoc. And I would say I was pretty open about it in private with people I trusted, but I wasn't super outspoken, or at least I didn't think I was. I had a blog that nobody read. Maybe I was more than I thought. There was a colleague recently who said to me, "Oh no, we knew what when we hired you." The point being though, I did make an intentional decision to be more outspoken once I became faculty. And the reason is that I think even though the canceled culture is a problem for faculty in some schools, especially at my school, there's a green light rating from fire. It's pretty hard for somebody to cancel you when they've already hired you. 

It's pretty easy though to not hire you. So, I have to say, I really admire you and other early career scholars who are outspoken. And so, I just wondered to what extent is that something that you've thought of? To what extent is that something, do you notice a difference between the faculty and the students that you talk to in terms of their willingness to speak out for these reasons? Or is it different? And the only kind of counterpoint I would offer that maybe you've thought of too. One reason why I'm outspoken, even though I don't have tenure, is that I think that if you play a stupid game, you win a stupid prize. If I keep my head down, my reward is 30 years of academia that I have issues with. How do you think about it? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I will say, you have said it. And other people have said to me, oh, you're very courageous for, even when I started on podcast with a friend and we were talking about things that I think people were worried about, talking about things like these retractions and things that we couldn't probably openly speak about in our department. And people called us courageous, and I honestly don't feel that. I'm not humble in any way. So, if I honestly thought that I would own it. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Why not? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I've given it some thought. So, I think one of the reasons why I don't think is because I have nothing to lose. It's only courageous if you have something at stake. There's just nothing to lose. I don't have a reputation to lose if I was a big-name faculty or something like that, oh, then you would be worried about people calling you X, Y, and Z. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's really interesting because I actually think you've hit the nail on the head for why more very senior people are not more outspoken. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah. 

  

MATT BURGESS: If you're like a full professor. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah. Why aren't you saying something? Yeah. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Yeah. There's like, what could anybody do? But you're totally right that my impression is that it's- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Reputation. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That you can only go down if you're already the president or the chancellor or the Dean or the former professor. You don't really have that much more to gain, but you have lots to lose. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Exactly. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Versus if you're an early career person, although I don't, well, maybe you do think of it this way. But I do think that people generally, in especially their early career, people do overestimate risk or underestimate the benefits of risk. So, academia has a right skewed productivity distribution. There's a long right tail at the top, the 99th percentile academic is much, much, much more productive than the 95th percentile. So, risk is good when you have a long right tail. And you can think about, one of the ways that I put it that's kind of less wonky, sometimes my students is like, if you want to do paradigm shifting research, you're going to have to break somebody's paradigm, and that person's going to be probably famous and upset up with you. 

And if you're not willing to do that, then you may not be willing to do productivity research. So, there is that. And maybe with academia ... I mean, I don't know. I think a good example maybe of both sides of this coin would be somebody like Colin Wright. I kind of briefly crossed paths within Santa Barbara when he was a grad student, and I was a postdoc. I didn't know him super well. But my take on his path is that he took some huge risks as a graduate student. It almost certainly did hurt his academic career. It almost certainly did. It significantly affected his chances to become a professor. But it also opened the doors for him outside of academia that he's following now. And I think that there's sort of some people who are more okay with that, well, if I'm outspoken and people like what I'm doing, even if some other people don't like what I'm doing, then I'm going to land on my feet. And there's some people who are like, no, I really want to be a professor and probably accurately perceive that there's risks to being too outspoken. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: One of the issues is I think there are a lot of people in academia who are just career risks. They care less about truth it might be easier for somebody to sort of compartmentalize if they're in another discipline. But it's much harder to do in my discipline because we do talk about things like implicit bias and all these things come out of my discipline. So, when I see something that I don't agree with, I hate politics. I really just care about my own ... I just want to put my head down and talk about deep philosophical questions like what is a P-value? That's my orientation. But when I see people say things that I think are just patently not true or that are not, people on our wings, I feel the need to speak up. And then if I just keep my head down and just play the game, I don't know if I could live with myself. 

  

MATT BURGESS: I have somewhat of a similar thought sometimes, which is like, I don't conflict, but I find subordinating my integrity as an academic, as an intellectual and as a person to somebody else's dogma. So, humiliating that that's worse than conflict. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I will say, people call me courageous and I'm not really. "Look at me, I'm an immigrant woman of color", not terms I would use for myself. But both I think stops people from, or maybe gives them a pause before they can, I mean, they can level like, oh, he's just a white guy kind of criticism to you, or even to my co-host Paul, who I started [inaudible]. 

  

MATT BURGESS: You don't say. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah, but they can't do that to me. So, it both is a little bit of, I think in some ways I'm less courageous than a lot of the other people who are speaking up because I think people would be cautious about, or not cautious maybe, but hesitate a little bit before criticizing me openly on that. And then that's why it does feel like a responsibility for me to speak up because a lot of it people [inaudible]. 

  

MATT BURGESS: That's interesting. Yeah. Okay. So, one last thing on this topic, and this is just advice that I'm going to give to our Heterodox and client listeners. One thing that I think has helped me a lot, I mean, I'm sure there's some academics, I know there's some academics who don't like me. I think that I'm more accepted, certainly including by the administration in my university who treated me extremely well. And I think one reason is that in addition to sometimes speaking out against the things that I think are problematic, I also recognize in the context of climate change, and this is one of the reasons why I study polarization of climate change and I've become involved in outreach and engagement on this issue, is as a Heterodox person, I am maybe uniquely placed to engage with, reach and maybe bring to the table conservatives on this issue. 

And honestly, I feel somewhat of a duty because I'm passionate about that issue. I think we need to solve the climate problem. I feel, we've been talking about our positionality for the last two minutes, just like you may find your positionality as a woman of color, Heterodox academic gives you kind of an ability and duty to be Heterodox. I think my positionality as a moderate, conservative, friendly, Heterodox, person who studies climate change gives me a pretty unique position in the academy to help reach out to and help bridge the divide on that issue. I think it gives me insight into what questions to ask, research questions to ask that would be helpful in that. And I will say that even some of the people in the field, in my field, kind of on my campus and other campuses are uncomfortable with or dislike my Heterodox stuff a lot, an awful lot of them see the value in that. 

They see the fact that I'm Heterodox is why I have that value in that. And so, it's not like you can have one without the other. And so, I have to say that I've gotten a lot more positive reception in kind of what you might say, inclusion than maybe you might expect for a Heterodox person in a left-wing field. Because I think that they and I both recognize that I have a opportunity to make a difference in both the science and the politics of this issue that we all think is important. And so, it's kind of the reduce intergroup conflict by cooperating towards a shared goal. And so, I would encourage Heterodox people to also think about, like Tyler Cowen had a good, I think even this is at the Stanford Active of Freedom conference. He had a good speech it was kind of saying a similar thing. 

He's like, "If you want to be accepted by your colleagues, don't spend all your time trashing them. Also help raise money and help do you know initiative? You think there should be more constructive dialogue on campus? Go make it." I made spaces for that in our campus. So, anyway, I think that there is something to that advice that it's one thing to be, I think it is important to draw attention to problems in one's institution that are problems, but also to do so from a position of wanting to make the institutions better and not just wanting to tear them down. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's a hundred percent. And that's something that we worry about a little bit on our campus because I think there's this overlap on people who are okay with disagreeing but also disagreeable. And I think that's a problem. We should be teaching people in colleges how to disagree respectfully. I think that's a problem. We can all agree that there's problems that need to be solved, but instead of tearing things down or being disrespectful or being very antagonistic when you're challenging other people's viewpoints or their ideas, I think to do it in a way that's sort of respectful so that you bring everybody on board. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Let me finish with a controversial statement. I agree with you in principle. Everything you just said. However, I think in practice we have to be realistic about the fact that academia needs contrarians to function well. It needs people to challenge the received wisdom who are going to be overrepresented among people who challenge received wisdom as people who don't give shit what anyone thinks about them. And what personality traits are also overrepresented among people who don't care what people think about them, it's willingness to offend, willingness to be edgy, maybe even sometimes willingness to be mean. I don't think it's a coincidence that a field with a right skewed distribution where risk is good and where contrarianism is beneficial and often rewarded if it's good contrarianism, is also a field where people often say jerks are overrepresented. I think those things must go together and we have to decide how to strike the balance between them. Unfortunately, I wish that wasn't true, but I think it probably is. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Only thing I will say is that in that pool of people who are also overrepresented are narcissists, and we don't want those. There are some people that are just trying to do it because they enjoy being a contrarian. And I think what we need are more people who maybe care about what other people think of them, but have principles that they're willing to stand up for. 

  

MATT BURGESS: I think you're right in principle, but I think in practice you just have to draw a line. Imagine if somebody showed me data that said movies got a little bit less good when we put Harvey Weinstein in jail, my response would be great. I don't care. Put him in jail. Because what he did was so bad, I don't care. Or the Unabomber, I think was one of the youngest people ever tenured in Berkeley's math department before he was the Unabomber. We shouldn't reinstate him. So, obviously you have to draw boundaries and police bad behavior. But I think that if you're talking about norms, stricter and stricter etiquette norms, I don't think you're talking about that. 

But I think it is a fact that narcissistic, quirky, insensitive people are overrepresented among useful contrarians. And I think that we can and should still draw bright lines around really, really problematic forms of narcissism and insensitivity. But I think we should also recognize that if we draw those lines too narrowly, we are going to drive people out who are disproportionately going to be the innovators in the field. And again, I wish that wasn't true. I like to think that I'm not any of those things and still contrarian. But I recognize- 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: The jury is out. 

  

MATT BURGESS: Our listeners will decide. What would be your advice to graduate students who are Heterodox, who feel unsettled by what we perceive as the orthodoxy and the betrayal of Open Inquirer, Viewpoint Diversity and Constructive Disagreement. What advice would you give such a person? 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: I honestly am not sure I'm the best person to give anybody any advice. I think it's very difficult to have well-formed opinions on things unless you're willing to say what's on your mind and have that be challenged. 

 

MATT BURGESS: That's a great concise eloquent million way to end the podcast. Smriti Mehta, thanks again for coming on the Free Mind podcast, and I hope that our listeners will go check out your podcast, which will be in the show notes. 

  

SMRITI MEHTA: Thanks for having me. This was fun. 

  

MATT BURGESS: The Free Mind Podcast is produced by the Benson Center for the study of Western Civilization at the Â鶹ӰԺ. You can email us feedback at freemind@colorado.edu or visit us online at colorado.edu/center/benson. You can also find us on social media. Our Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube accounts are all at Benson Center. Our Instagram is at The Benson Center, and the Facebook is at Bruce D. Benson Center.