Richard Hanania wrote a piece this week attacking what sounds like a stupid article about Korean adoptees in the US. The study's authors found that while most adopted children in Sweden do worse academically, those adopted from Korea in the 1960s and 1970s do better. Refusing to consider genetics, they speculate that the cause must be that Korean orphanages gave these kids some kind of miraculous start on life. Um, sure.
Hanania on Twitter/X:
After I published my article on Korean adoptees today, a professor at an R1 university wrote to me: "It's a pity I can't assign this in one of my quantitative methods classes."
I got his point, but asked what exactly was stopping him. He wrote the following:
"In one sense, nothing. I have tenure and academic freedom and I don't think I would face the kind of Amy Wax style retaliation that FIRE could sue over. But there would be consequences. The most immediate would be that I would no longer teach or advise grad students – and not because the department chair was punishing me but because students would refuse to take my classes or have me on their dissertation committees. But the more important thing is reserving my credibility for when it is most likely to be effective. You want people to take you seriously when you speak in a faculty meeting or advocate a policy at your university or in your discipline. This isn't careerism, it's about strategic understanding of picking battles to have the most impact, especially given that I am not teaching about inequality and there are other ways to teach the auxiliary hypothesis problem that would be much more effective because they wouldn't make students too upset to appreciate the methodological point."
Good demonstration of how academic pressure comes from below. You can have all the free speech protections you want, and maybe you won't be disciplined or fired, but no law or regulation can stop students from refusing to take your classes, other academics from not wanting to write papers with you, etc.
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