Dishonest Zealots Attempt to Destroy the Career of Linguist Steven Pinker

Cognitive linguist Steven Pinker has had an illustrious career as a teacher and prolific author. His politics have often leaned to the left. None of this immunizes him from baseless attacks by hundreds of people who apparently don’t see any value in Pinker’s willingness to contribute his expertise to national conversations on critically relevant issues. They are unwilling to give fair readings to Pinker’s statements. They also appear to be threatened by Pinker’s use of germane statistics in order to shed light on complex claims involving police behavior and racism.

Here is the opening paragraph of a recent letter signed by almost 500 people, many of them grad students and undergrads, then sent to the Linguistic Society of America:

Pinker

In reaction to this letter, Jerry Coyne, eminent Professor of Professor of Ecology & Evolution, concludes as follows at his website: “I’m really steamed when a group of misguided zealots tries to damage someone’s career, and does so dishonestly.”

Linguist John McWhorter has also indicated his enthusiastic support of Steven Pinker:

McWhorter

Here is Jerry Coyne’s full blog post, setting forth the numerous false accusations against Pinker coupled with the evidence clearly demonstrating that these accusations are false. Coyne’s post is titled “The Purity Posse pursues Pinker.”

I invite you to read both sides of this dispute.  I suspect you will be outraged at the way Pinker is being treated.  You might also wonder how it is that hundreds of people who claim to be highly knowledgeable in linguistics are such inept readers.  The phrase “social conflagration” might come to mind as you review the evidence.  The name Robespierre might periodically pop into your thought process.

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Erich Vieth

Erich Vieth is an attorney focusing on civil rights (including First Amendment), consumer law litigation and appellate practice. At this website often writes about censorship, corporate news media corruption and cognitive science. He is also a working musician, artist and a writer, having founded Dangerous Intersection in 2006. Erich lives in St. Louis, Missouri with his two daughters.

This Post Has 30 Comments

  2. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 6, 2020 Reply

    According to one particular Twitter mob at Michigan State University, a professor of physics at a public university must give up his Constitutional right to comment in his own time and in his own personal website on important events of the day? Stephen Hsu offers a detailed response to the accusations on his website. Well worth reading. The claim of the University seems to be that there is no way to separate Hsu’s personal opinions from the official pronouncements of the university. Massive failure to uphold vigorous free speech from an institution who very existence depends on vigorous free speech.

    For many people out there, the First Amendment has the worth of toilet paper. Robust and open speech in order to explore important issues is forbidden. Intellectual insult is beginning to be treated as if it was physical harm rather than a necessary prerequisite for determining public policy.

  3. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 7, 2020 Reply

    Here’s another career-ending engineered by the woke. This time it’s a woman who seems to be good-hearted well-qualified and well-liked. She was the Dean of Nursing of the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. Leslie Neal-Boylan’s sin was to say the following:

    Dear SSON Community,” the email provided to Campus Reform begins. “I am writing to express my concern and condemnation of the recent (and past) acts of violence against people of color. Recent events recall a tragic history of racism and bias that continue to thrive in this country. I despair for our future as a nation if we do not stand up against violence against anyone. BLACK LIVES MATTER, but also, EVERYONE’S LIFE MATTERS.

    Apparently the test for fitness is no longer whether one is racist, since there is no evidence in this article or in Neal-Boylan’s writings that she was in any way racist. Apparently “Everyone’s Life Matters” is now as toxic as the N-word, even when written in the context of an email deploring the “tragic history of racism,” and even when coupled with the phrase “Black Lives Matter.” And even when coupled with this sentence: “No one should have to live in fear that they will be targeted for how they look or what they believe.”

  5. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 8, 2020 Reply

    Here’s yet another incident from Colorado University, where a professor’s insistence that statistics matter resulted in a strong warning shot by the administration. https://www.denverpost.com/2020/06/23/cu-boulder-professor-racist-sexist-social-media/

    Commentary here by Glenn Loury, as part of his interview by Nico Perrino of FIRE. https://www.thefire.org/so-to-speak-podcast-glenn-loury-objects/. At 12:30 in the interview, Loury points out that making students “comfortable” is nowhere on his list of objectives as a university professor. “It might make them feel very uncomfortable” to deal with some facts, but that is part of his job.

    Perrino asks for Loury’s reaction to situations when a person claims that open and vigorous speech “denies their humanity.” How does one proceed in these cases where real issues based upon real facts are at stake? At Min 14, Loury responds by indicating that he is Black, which gives him some cover to assert that his motives are not nefarious. What he does is to ask the student to suspend disbelief and not be driven into a panic. He tries to give voice as well as he can to both sides of arguments. At the end of the day, he expects students to present their facts and their arguments in favor of their position. He does not accept “the highhanded move, which is both a bluff and a bullying tactic (“You’re making me feel bad, so you are a bad person, so don’t say that”). It’s a bluff because . . . we can all see what the facts actually are, whether agree to acknowledge them or not. They are there, staring us in the face. And it’s a bullying tactic because they are telling you to shut up . . . They don’t get to tell me to shut up at the university when I’m making an argument.

    At 20:21, Loury discusses the Kalvin Report from the University of Chicago, setting forth a university’s mission, including not taking a position on political positions, but serving as an incubator for dissent, involving students and teachers as dissenters.

  6. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 10, 2020 Reply

    An organization called “The National Association of Scholars” is tracking cases where university teachers are being disciplined or fired for expressing their opinions (or even for stating facts). Admittedly, NAS was founded and funded by conservatives. That said, it has taken up the cause of open, vigorous free speech in universities, which should be one of the main missions of universities. The political Left is losing out by failing to step up on this critically important issue.

    Here is an excerpt from NAS on the danger of Cancel Culture:

    “Cancel culture,” a new form of mob rule used to enforce progressive orthodoxy in, well, everywhere, has grown all too common in American higher education. Administrators, students, and even professors run the risk of “cancelation” whenever expressing views deemed out of step with the ideological homogeneity dominating our colleges and universities.

    We’ve all seen it happen: a professor says, publishes, or even Tweets an allegedly controversial statement, and the “anti-racist” barbeque gets started. Students create petitions to demand that their teacher is fired; colleagues condemn their peer’s views as “perpetuating” one of the myriad “isms” or “phobias” seen as heretical by the modern left; and college administration gives in to the mob’s demands, punishing the “culprit.”

    To be sure, some of the aforementioned statements are unsavory and may be worthy of institutional discipline. But the vast majority are not. And yet, woke higher education bureaucrats show an eager willingness to placate the angry students and professors insisting that “justice” be served. Meanwhile, “cancelees” have their professional reputations permanently sullied and, in many cases, ruined.

    A recent example of “academic cancelation” is the case of Kathleen Lowery, Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. Professor Lowery is a self-described “gender-critical feminist,” that is, she does not believe that transgender identity should supercede biological sex in public policy decisions. For example, she has said that “housing trans-identified men in women’s prisons is not fair to women prisoners and I think it puts women at risk.” Seems pretty reasonable.

    And yet, Professor Lowery has been canceled. She expressed this view to one of her classes in order to expose students to varying opinions on sex and gender identity, causing some to “feel uncomfortable” and report Lowery’s alleged transphobia to administration. Two months later, she was informed of her dismissal from the university, effective July 1, 2020.

    The Mission Statement of NAS:

    Our Mission
    The National Association of Scholars upholds the standards of a liberal arts education that fosters intellectual freedom, searches for the truth, and promotes virtuous citizenship.

    Our Ideals
    The standards of a liberal arts education that the NAS upholds include reasoned scholarship and civil debate in America’s colleges and universities; and individual merit in academic and scholarly endeavor. We expect that ideas be judged on their merits; that scholars engage in the disinterested pursuit of the truth; and that colleges and universities provide for fair and judicial examination of contending views.

  11. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 14, 2020 Reply

    “Seeing one of their peers fired from his job and then banished from their professional network after being accused of racism, and then other members similarly accused merely for questioning the fairness of this response, surely dissuaded many people who disagreed from speaking up.

    “Reasonable people are not commenting, and the reasonable people are afraid for their jobs,” one member told me, adding that several peers had sent private messages objecting to Shor’s mistreatment that they felt afraid to share with the list.”

    https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/white-fragility-racism-racism-progressive-progressphiles-david-shor.html

  13. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 14, 2020 Reply

    “The petitioners cite few examples of anything even approaching bad behavior from Gary Garrels. Their sole complaint is that he allegedly concluded a presentation on how to diversify the museum’s holdings by saying, “don’t worry, we will definitely still continue to collect white artists.”

    Garrels has apparently articulated this sentiment on more than one occasion. According to artnet.com, he said that it would be impossible to completely shun white artists, because this would constitute “reverse discrimination.” That’s the sum total of his alleged crimes. He made a perfectly benign, wholly inoffensive, obviously true statement that at least some of the museum’s featured artists would continue to be white. The petition lists no other specific grievances.”

    https://reason.com/2020/07/14/gary-garrels-san-francisco-museum-modern-art-racism/

  18. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 18, 2020 Reply

    Poet Cancelation:

    The assertion that racially sensitive language used within the framework of an artistic context is itself somehow racist by default is intellectually dishonest. It presumes as an ideal to manifest itself as a thought crime and prevents authors from attempting to recreate scenarios from the real world without causing offense, no matter the intent of the work.

    It also presumes that an intended audience (poets write mainly for an audience of their peers, albeit other poets) who should themselves be educated on the principles of poetic craft, are somehow now incapable of rigorous critical thought when applied to a work that challenges societal norms or presuppositions of personal and artistic subtext within content they’ve engaged their attention.

    These conceits are self-defeating when applied across the broader spectrum of the arts.
    There is another flaw in this outrage mentality, and that is it operates without offering a presumable granting of benevolent intent upon the artist being questioned. Always, without fail, in this scenario the artist is immediately tarnished with accusations that leap to the worst possible conclusions about them and about their work. In this case, not only is Michael Dickman accused of being a racist, but he is accused of reaffirming white supremacy, and thusly Don Share, the editor who published the work, is again accused of justifying racism in his magazine, which means Don Share must also be an unrepentant racist. There’s no allowance for nuance here. There’s no open dialogue or allowance for debate in a meritocracy. Someone made a grievous mistake, and now they must be met with the harshest possible sentence, deplatformed and tossed into the dustbin of history with no remorse.

  19. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth July 31, 2020 Reply

    John McWhorter, writing at Quillette:

    I am gathering reports from academics and writers nationwide cowering beneath it, and I have so far amassed 150 reports who have seen people land in trouble or who have landed in trouble themselves. This is likely just a fraction of the problem given how widespread preference falsification and self-censorship are in a climate as intellectually unhealthy as this one.

  21. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth September 17, 2020 Reply

    A recent example of this insanity is from “If USC can punish Greg Patton, free speech on campus really is dead”:

    That seems to be the logic — such as it is — for the University of Southern California’s decision to remove business professor Greg Patton from his classroom: He used a word that caused offense. But you can’t have free speech, or a free university, on those terms. And anyone who cares about either needs to raise their own voice, right now.

    A specialist in business communication, Patton gave a lecture last month about the ways different language speakers employ “pause words” — like the English term “um” — when they’re grasping for other ones. In Chinese, he noted, people use the word “ne ga” in a similar fashion.

    That sounded so much like the N-word that several African-American students complained, which led USC officials to remove Patton from the class. As in the case of Coleman Silk, the context surrounding Patton’s remark was irrelevant. All that mattered was that people felt harmed by it.

  23. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth October 28, 2020 Reply

    Mr Price last week resigned from Cambridge City Council. He had sat as a Labour councillor since 2010 and was once the council’s deputy leader.

    He resigned rather than follow the Labour Group whip and vote for a motion that declared, among other things that:

    “’Trans women are women. Trans men are men. Non-binary individuals are non-binary.’

    Those are, of course, the holy words of trans orthodoxy, a catechism that cannot be questioned despite the countless questions it raises. (Here’s a starter for ten: if trans women are women, what does the word ‘women’ mean?)

    Mr Price quit because, he said, he could not accept the unquestioning, uncritical adoption of those words. He noted that for some people, those words have highly troubling implications.

    Resigning, he said:

    “‘The inclusion of the first three sentences of this motion will send a chill down the spines of the many women who believe there is a conflict of rights and who want to be able to discuss those in a calm and evidenced-based way….
    [It is] foolish to pretend that there are not widely differing views in the current debate or that many people, especially women, are concerned about the impact on women’s sex-based rights from changes both in legislation and within society and who fear, not only that those rights are under threat, but that they are unable to raise legitimate questions and concerns without a hostile response.’

    https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-trans-debate-could-cost-this-cambridge-porter-his-job

  24. Avatar of Erich Vieth
    Erich Vieth October 29, 2020 Reply

    Interesting video by a Smith College staff member, Jodi Shaw. She sprinkled her video with hints that she has already lawyered-up do to her claims regarding a hostile work environment at Smith. I will be watching her upcoming videos to hear more specifics about what Smith is doing to its employees re CRT.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blqpCMChBpI&feature=emb_logo

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