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Who’s biased? Not us! So shut up.

I’m going to have a longer post on a new piece on Jonathan Haidt in a bit, but I had to pull this from the sidebar out for a separate piece. Longtime readers will remember I posted something about a talk Haidt — an atheist liberal — gave to a conference of fellow social psychologists. […]

I’m going to have a longer post on a new piece on Jonathan Haidt in a bit, but I had to pull this from the sidebar out for a separate piece. Longtime readers will remember I posted something about a talk Haidt — an atheist liberal — gave to a conference of fellow social psychologists. In it, he said that the extreme underrepresentation of conservatives in their field led to them not understanding how conservatives think, and thus to distorted conclusions. Haidt’s was a plea for intellectual diversity in the field, not for its own sake, but because the bubble social psychologists live in stood to distort their research and analysis. Marc Parry, a Chronicle of Higher Educationwriter, reports that the talk didn’t go over well with some in the audience. This is priceless:

Another [objection to Haidt’s speech] is that his argument might arm those who are “eager to dismiss our findings,” as John T. Jost, a psychologist at New York University, expresses it. “We’ve seen this with climate-change issues,” he tellsThe Chronicle. “If you can just accuse the scientist of ideological bias, then you can ignore the research findings.”

Got that? Haidt is wrong not because his data and analysis are incorrect, but because they are not helpful to the cause. Jost sounds like he’s ignoring Haidt’s findings because Haidt — a secular liberal! — has reached an ideological conclusion that Jost finds discomfiting. More from the Parry story:

One young psychology professor feels that Haidt painted an accurate portrait. It’s a measure of the sensitivity of this topic that the professor, a conservative who contacted Haidt to express her gratitude for the talk, declined to let The Chronicle publish her name. She fears that exposing her political leanings could cause friction with her colleagues, and she also worries that going public could sabotage her career, damaging her ability to win tenure or preventing her from getting hired by another college. The professor, who earned her Ph.D. from a major public research university on the East Coast, recalls frequent jokes about Republicans. One conference presenter, she says, discussed the need to mold undergraduates into liberals while their minds are malleable. “It makes you feel not welcome,” says the professor, who now teaches at a Christian university in the South. “They basically hold an attitude that conservatives are racist and full of hate and stupid.” She also says a liberal mind-set guides researchers. “They’re not testing things that might contradict their findings,” she says.

Think about that. This professor is so afraid for her career that she won’t even allow herself to be publicly identified as a conservative. I get this. I’ve mentioned before my friendship with practicing Evangelical Christians in major broadcast and newspaper newsrooms who were afraid for their colleagues to learn about their conservative Christianity, for fear of how the bias would affect their careers. And yet, the same people who inspired such fear in dissenters surely thought of themselves as paragons of open-minded liberality and tolerance. As with the field of social psychology, so with the field of journalism: if everybody, or nearly everybody, sees things more or less the same ideological way, they’re not likely to ask questions that would undermine what they prefer to believe. This is not something particular to liberals, obviously. It’s human nature. There are liberals who believe that liberals cannot oppress, only be oppressed. You find conservatives who think the same way, from the Right. It is particularly appalling, though, to see it among people who pride themselves on their open-mindedness and tolerance, when the truth is they only tolerate people who already agree with them.

Consider the hellacious smackdown the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals put on Eastern Michigan University for discriminating against Julea Ward, a Christian graduate student studying for her degree in counseling, who was thrown out of the program just shy of completion (despite her 3.91 GPA) because her religious beliefs prevented her from affirming same-sex relationships and non-marital heterosexual relationships involving sexual activity. It wasn’t that Ward told these people they were wrong; it’s that she recognized that she wouldn’t be able to serve them as they wanted, and instead referred them to a counselor who would. From the federal court’s opinion: Ward responded that she did not discriminate against anyone. She had no problem counseling gay and lesbian clients, so long as the university did not require her to affirm their sexual orientation. Because her professors taught her that counselors dealing with such clients “cannot talk about anything other than affirming [their samesex] relationships,” —a message Ward’s religious beliefs prohibited her from delivering—Ward asked that she be allowed to refer gay and lesbian clients seeking relationship advice to another counselor. Two days later, the university sent Ward a letter conveying the committee’s unanimous opinion that she violated the code of ethics. Because Ward was “unwilling to change [her] behavior,” the committee expelled her from the counseling program, effective that day. Ward appealed the committee’s decision to the Dean of the College of Education, Dr. Vernon Polite. He denied the appeal.

Dean Polite — love it. More from the court ruling:

What exactly did Ward do wrong in making the referral request? If one thing is clear after three years of classes, it is that Ward is acutely aware of her own values. The point of the referral request was to avoid imposing her values on gay and lesbian clients. And the referral request not only respected the diversity of practicum clients, but it also conveyed her willingness to counsel gay and lesbian clients about other issues—all but relationship issues—an attitude confirmed by her equivalent concern about counseling heterosexual clients about extra-marital sex and adultery in a values-affirming way.

The court found that the university’s claim that Ward violated their policy was rejected. There was no evidence of such a policy:

Many of the faculty members’ statements to Ward raise a similar concern about religious discrimination. A reasonable jury could find that the university dismissed Ward from its counseling program because of her faith-based speech, not because of any legitimate pedagogical objective. A university cannot compel a student to alter or violate her belief systems based on a phantom policy as the price for obtaining a degree.

The only thing Julea Ward did wrong was to hold conservative religious beliefs to which the professoriat at her university objected. She didn’t even try to impose those beliefs on others — in fact, just the opposite. These liberal professors punished this woman because she believed the “wrong” things. Hooray for what Rusty Reno calls “a season of judicial sanity.”

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