A College Without Guaranteed Idea-Freedom Isn’t A College At All

There is some philosophical sense of what a college or university should be, with college as a unique kind of postsecondary educational entity distinct from independent academies. There is not a universal or consensus idea of what this is. The purpose of a college is defined by its mission statement, which is defined by either the college or the government that controls the college. However, we can find elements that are unique to colleges vs other institutions, organizations, and so on. In this essay proposal, I will present a truncated version of my thesis that the idea-freedom is the centrally unique feature of colleges and that every other function can be perfomed by some other institution.

The main reason students attend college, above and beyond all else, is to increase income prospects. But this is not necessarily central; trade schools also increase income prospects. Further, there are some good reasons to believe the value of a college degree is inflated or overvalued. Adjusting for income background, choice of major, cognitive ability, and a host of other factors reveal that the actual effects on income imparted by a college degree may be quite minor, and may be just a certification that continues to justify itself because so many people have obtained it already and contributed somewhat to its sense of importance or necessity relative to solely a high school diploma.

Other students attend college for social reasons; to meet people who they would not otherwise. One Yale protester, during Halloween, loudly asserted to a college administrator that college should be “a home.” This is vague, but I take it to mean some kind of exposure to people you would have difficulty meeting otherwise. While college certainly helps to meet people you would not meet otherwise, there are numerous outside-college functions that introduce one to the same or similar groups of people, so this cannot be said to be unique.

Finally students attend college for knowledge itself. This can be because teaching the subject requires unique equipment, or unique social settings, or because the knowledge is simply too uncommon such that only a small subset of professors know it. This is certainly justified, but not necessarily different than a non-college academy or trade school. Further, many majors, with better standardization of their fields, could allow for certifications that can be obtained independently of colleges through self-study. The NSCA’s CSCS certification does exactly this -- the knowledge of an entire bachelor’s of science in Exercise Science is presumed to be a prerequisite, and the NSCA’s CSCS textbook is used in first-year graduate courses in Exercise Science, so the certification can be said to be roughly equal to that.

So with these functions replaceable in some way, I argue that the only unique feature left that’s worth pursuing is an idea-battleground, or idea-laboratory, or whatever else. This feature and idea of needing idea-freedom is so strong that it forms the conceptual basis for tenure. There are no equivalent places in non-college society where people are granted the time, inclination, and social environment to say ideas that may be taboo or controversial or shocking or whatever and test how true they are. Some controversial ideas turn out to be completely wrong, and others become axioms of new fields.

The free speech feature is so central to a college that if a college cannot do this, I can’t say it deserves to be recognized as a college. Something else perhaps -- a certification granting environment, or a job training environment, or whatever else. But what makes a college uniquely a college is this feature centrally.

Effects of College

If it could be shown that colleges have a unique effect on income above and beyond trade schools and certification programs, such that college was uniquely income-boosting, censorship of colleges could be justified under the premise that colleges provide an income increase that lifts its students out of poverty or enhances their life prospects. However, it’s not clear that college degrees in general do this anymore, and if anything data points toward the opposite: that college degrees do not provide that much income increase for students.

The Brookings institute, in “a college degree is worth less if you are raised poor”, analyzes the effect of college degrees on students below 185% federal poverty level and above; a graduate who is above 185% federal poverty level can expect an early-career gain of $25,000 annually. Meanwhile, those below can expect about a $10,000 boost. The mid-career peak of those 185% above the federal poverty level is also double the peak of 185% below. To what extent can we attribute this to being in wealthier employment networks is unknown, but the demonstrated effect of a college degree on income mobility of poor graduates is not radical enough to say it justifies extensive censorship of colleges.

In “The Great College-Degree Scam”, published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Richard Vedder and a group of researchers were able to say this: “approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled—occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less.” Further, “while 132,000 cashiers possessed college degrees in 1992, by 2008, 365,000 cashiers were college graduates. As with waiters and waitresses, 20% of new cashiers since 1992 are college graduates.” As Vedder mentions, the college degree is being used as a screening device rather than a legitimate credential.

Even more controversially, but still relevant, is the effect of IQ on income. On page 568 of The g Factor, Arthur Jensen attributes IQ to about 16% of the variance in explaining income outcomes. Further, the relationship increases with age – which many studies do not account for – and peaks at middle age. In A Question of Intelligence, Daniel Seligman attributes 25% of the variance to IQ. Regardless of whether you consider IQ a legitimate metric of intelligence, the predictive value of IQ as it relates to income is clear. And if IQ did measure intelligence at least partially, it’s not at all implausible that this could explain some income differences; after all, we are not attempting to explain, say, how one person made $100,000 annually and another $30,000; rather, we are attempting to account for an increase in merely $10,000 starting income of graduates 185% below the federal poverty level. If 20% of this income increase is explained by IQ, we’re left with just about $8,000 to account for that is due to the effects of a college degree. Keep in mind, this is also with student loans that may burden the student for $30,000 or $40,000 or more.

I should note that Charles Murray was shouted down at Middlebury for this very subject, for speaking about IQ data that is relevant to the previous paragraph about income; were this always the case, I would not even be able to make my full argument that colleges should be idea-laboratories.

I should also note that this data is comprised of averages; some majors will earn more, and some majors will earn less. But if even 30% of college majors had income boosts of much smaller amounts, such as $5,000 or $4,000, it would be increasingly difficult to say those students are justified in going to college. In fact, with student loan debt, they may come out owing more than they’ve earned – at $4,000 extra annually with a $40,000 student loan, the student can expect to receive a return on their college education after ten years.

So with so much of the income explained by existing family wealth, existing family connections and IQ, can colleges really justify such a modest increase in income for their graduates at the expense of the only place America has to openly test ideas versus one another? I don’t think it can. It seems clear that whatever effect college has on income is modest; meanwhile, the effects of colleges on producing groundbreaking ideas has been demonstrated for centuries.

Effects of Censorship

There are some doubts that open speech is not necessary for a fully truthseeking enterprise. In other words, if we are to be a knowledge-creating society and value truth and knowledge to the degree many college mission statements claim to do, some censorship of ideas will not be that harmful and we can get at all of the knowledge we would have otherwise with this censorship.
This thesis has not been as tested as would be desirable, but has been largely accepted by censors anyway. Many of the arguments against college censorship focus on the direct effects of censorship – the removal of ideas themselves -- rather than the secondary effects. This is understandable, but not the whole picture. Human beings, when they navigate rules, undergo “games.” Human beings who make strategies in response to known rules navigate “metagames.” The metagame, i.e. meta-strategy, in response to censorship is to blot out entire categories of thought. When someone is aware that an environment is censor-prone, they are not just aware of the specific thing being censored – they are aware that a whole host of things could be censored that are not yet currently censored.
Research on self-censorship suggests this is true.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/29/researchers-sexism-fears-putting-womens-health-risk-scientist/

Lydia Willgress writes in the Telegraph about neuroscientists who claim that progress has been stalled due to self-censorship about seeming sexist. Specifically:

“One example Prof Cahill gave was Alzheimer’s, where apoptosis - the process of programmed cell death - occurs differently in men and women. Scientists looking into the process and coming up with drugs to deal with the illness “would damn well be aware of the differences”, he added.
It was added that in some drugs testing cases, these generalisations may have instead put men’s health at risk. Lazaroids, a rejected stroke treatment, may have worked for men but was deemed as no longer working after being used on both sexes.”

Keep in mind that this is acknowledged self-censorship. In other words, the self-censorship could be worse. I argue that this is easily imagined to be the case in comparison with a modern office environment fully equipped with human resources departments; by comparison, academics seem extremely unhinged. Some offices constitute environments where politics, religion, and such topics are systematically avoided and any controversial conversation at all can mean loss of career:

https://hbr.org/2013/01/the-price-of-incivility

The Harvard Business Review first published about “The Price of Incivility” in 2013. From the introduction: “Rudeness at work is rampant, and it’s on the rise. Over the past 14 years we’ve polled thousands of workers about how they’re treated on the job, and 98% have reported experiencing uncivil behavior. In 2011 half said they were treated rudely at least once a week—up from a quarter in 1998.”

The authors do not provide much in the way of concrete examples or strictly delineated criteria, but their thesis is that incivility or rudeness has a cost on profit. This is probably true; profit is a reflection of value, and if a culture does not value brutal honesty, this will not be rewarded. However, profit is not the same thing as knowledge or truth. It could very well be the case that what is rude in an office setting is not just important but standard practice in some academic field or another. Notably, philosophy addresses fundamental human questions but often involves disagreements an ordinary person would consider outrageously persistent, such as the Skeptical Hypothesis or arguments for metaethical systems. And if this is true, all of philosophy could be rude by incivility standards.

The authors do mention, however: “Think of the manager who sends e-mails during a presentation, or the boss who “teases” direct reports in ways that sting, or the team leader who takes credit for good news but points a finger at team members when something goes wrong.”

While taking credit for accomplishments would fall under the academic dishonesty policies of most universities, teasing does not. It might be that teasing, in an office setting, is truly unprofitable and worthy of elimination. But from a college and research point of view, if teasing cannot be allowed, then more severe criticisms are almost certainly not allowed. How would a devastating-but-necessary criticism of another author’s paper proceed if there was persistent concern for the effect of rudeness on the author? Remember that anything as simple as a mere correction can be counted as rudeness, or argument in general, to the general population. Simply suggesting someone else is wrong can be rude in an ordinary setting.

This workplace incivility code, if imported to academic research, could be disastrous. It stands in contrast to contemporary academia where some-but-not-all ideas would be prohibited, and contemporary academia is itself under fire for censorship. The case for some censorship broadly leads the way for the case for much more censorship. It’s unclear where, exactly, the line is going to be drawn and how rigorously the line will be applied, so it’s not hard to imagine academia becoming as censored as a modern office and suffering as a result. We are worse off to the extent this happens.

In “Thinking Fast and Slow”, Daniel Kahneman elaborates on the effects of thought-restriction on cognitive load, the term for brainpower taken up by exerting willpower on the brain:

“It is now a well-established proposition that both self-control and cognitive effort are forms of mental work. Several psychological studies have shown that people who are simultaneously challenged by a demanding cognitive task and by a temptation are more likely to yield to the temptation. Imagine that you are asked to retain a list of seven digits for a minute or two. You are told that remembering the digits is your top priority. While your attention is focused on the digits, you are offered a choice between two desserts: a sinful chocolate cake and a virtuous fruit salad. The evidence suggests that you would be more likely to select the tempting chocolate cake when your mind is loaded with digits. System 1 has more influence on behavior when System 2 is busy, and it has a sweet tooth.

People who are cognitively busy are also more likely to make selfish choices, use sexist language, and make superficial judgments in social situations. Memorizing and repeating digits loosens the hold of System 2 on behavior, but of course cognitive load is not the only cause of weakened self-control. A few drinks have the same effect, as does a sleepless night. The self-control of morning people is impaired at night; the reverse is true of night people. Too much concern about how well one is doing in a task sometimes disrupts performance by loading short-term memory with pointless anxious thoughts. The conclusion is straightforward: self-control requires attention and effort. …”

As Kahneman notes, Roy Baumeister has taken an inventory of tasks affected by cognitive load in this way. Among them are:

avoiding the thought of white bears
inhibiting the emotional response to a stirring film
making a series of choices that involve conflict
trying to impress others
responding kindly to a partner’s bad behavior
interacting with a person of a different race (for prejudiced individuals)

“Making a series of choices that involve conflict” is termed “decision fatigue” by cognitive psychologists. Startup founders such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg famously wore the same outfits every day to minimize decision fatigue by minimizing their total choices. The thought goes that this frees up their total brainpower as a result. To what degree this is true is unknown, but the popularity of uniform clothing (like suits) among self-made billionaires is probably not an accident either.

In other words, by amplifying cognitive load in one way – to restrict thought in some domain – the human brain takes away resources it could be using to think about other things. This is more obviously true in the case of, say, a bartender who is avoiding all of the thoughts irrelevant to the drinks they must serve, since intrusive thoughts may interrupt their memory of orders.

By censoring ideas, colleges increasingly amplify how much cognitive load must be used to maintain ideas. It’s very easy to imagine how many implicit “don’t think” commands the brains of academics could send to themselves before they are overloaded on the sheer amount of things they must not say.

This is doubly problematic because there is some evidence that not saying ideas, or not voicing thoughts, could be more harmful than whatever harm they cause by saying them or voicing them.

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/marc-andreessen-take-ego-out-ideas

I argue that collegiate censorship is committing a grave and quantifiable error with human knowledge in the sense that an error of omission is a grave and quantifiable error with investment, by analogy to the Error of Omission.

Stanford Business summarizes errors of omission as such: "Errors of omission — not investing in the first place — will scar you for life. “Every highly successful VC has made mistakes of omission, really big ones, of companies that they had the chance to invest in, they should’ve invested in, they didn’t invest in,” Andreessen says. “Take the bet, lose 1X. Don’t take the bet and possibly miss on 1,000X.” Why do we make those mistakes of omission so often? “It’s almost always because we have some theory for why something’s not going to work,” Andreessen says. “You develop an idea, and then you look for all the evidence that supports it and ignore all the evidence that disproves it. You get locked into your ideas.” That mindset works against you, Andreessen warns, because what didn’t work in the past might work now. “Just because MySpace didn’t reach Facebook levels of scale didn’t mean Facebook wouldn’t be able to. So you have to be ruthlessly open-minded and constantly willing to reexamine your assumptions,” Andreessen says. “You have to take the ego out of ideas, which is a very hard thing to do.”

Self-censorship is an error of omission by having never considered an idea at all. This is taking a gamble with what may be true and can shut society off from whole categories of thought, posing a real and quantifiable risk for the future of human knowledge. Imagine if, for example, the idea of the transistor had never been considered – it’s absurd to think about an idea like the transistor generating so much controversy, but nonetheless if it were possible we would all be worse off substantially.
It’s also important to note that we don’t know what ideas will be controversial in the future, and the longer we make ideas taboo, the less we have active capacity to think about them. Researchers would not have dreamed that in the 2010s scientists might be failing to notice key Alzheimers developments due to fears of being sexist. Nor would researchers in 1960 have predicted that intelligence quotient could be so controversial. Nor would researchers in 1980 have predicted that climate change’s cause would be the subject of political TV debates. If we try to come up with a system of morality that accurately accounts for everything that could be controversial, we will fail. We are far better off to hold our research to standards of truthseeking and evidence-gathering while leaving everything else alone.
Methods of Censorship

By far, the predominant argument for censorship in colleges is some extension of the term “hate speech.”
Censorship of ideas can come in several forms:

1. censorship by volume
2. censorship by force (as in, vandalism/punching/weapons/etc)
3. censorship by hate / emotions / force of substance
4. denying platform / outright prohibition by the college

I believe that colleges fail to do this when they do not ensure speakers will be protected from (1) or (2). Colleges can invite whomever they want to speak, but once they do so, they’ve made a commitment to ensure a central function of what colleges are remains intact: namely the idea-lab feature of colleges. Recently, I think colleges failed to do this in the case of three speakers: Milo Yiannopoulos, Charles Murray, and Peter Singer. All were cases of (1) or (2) kind of censorship, not (3) or (4).

And the removal of federal funds for colleges is not unfounded. Colleges may have portions of their funds removed already for research fraud, for failure to ensure students are not discriminated against in admissions, for failure to protect students against sexual harassment, and others. It’s not clear that the knowledge or job training obtained by colleges worldwide will always be so unique or valuable that so forcefully ensuring the students obtain it will be a social good central to colleges. But the ability to freely battle ideas is central to colleges, I argue, and more important than all of the previous methods of funding denial except perhaps research fraud, so colleges that fail to perform or uphold this function should have funding denied similarly as they would here.

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2016/02/19/a-college-degree-is-worth-less-if-you-are-raised-poor/
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/the-great-college-degree-scam/28067

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