Keeping Your Company Out of the Culture Wars, Keep it Free to Pursue its Business Purpose

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff wrote an article that offers real-world advice to corporations. They are addressing businesses that want to simply do business while avoiding moral dependency of the up and coming generation that includes many childlike adults who have been coddled all the way through life, including at their elite universities. Here are the first three suggestions list in How To Keep Your Corporation Out of the Culture War: Eight steps business leaders can take to prevent ideological pressure and political conformity in the workplace.

1. Expand your definition of diversity. While racial diversity and gender expression often dominate what people mean by diversity on campus, for a company trying to serve a diverse market in a fast-changing economic environment, having diversity of opinion, diversity of experience, and diversity of social class and geographic background can be even more important. In fact, the kind of diversity most often found to confer advantages on teams is not demographic diversity but rather diversity of perspectives on topics closely related to the task at hand. This includes both functional diversity (e.g., what roles people play in the company) and political diversity (at least when trying to find truth about politically controversial topics).

2. Reconsider what colleges you hire from. While elite colleges offer the promise of bright and hard-working employees, the problems we covered in our book are generally more severe at elite private colleges. You might want to consider hiring from large state schools, and ones from regions of the country other than the West Coast or Northeast. This will increase your diversity by social class and region, and it may help your organization avoid the elite college groupthink that seems to be damaging some organizations, potentially giving your organization a competitive advantage.

You might want to go still further and consider hiring people who have not attended college at all, if you can put in place standards that still guarantee hard-working employees with relevant skills. We believe that the numbers of bright, hard-working, and talented people choosing to skip college or to learn through a less traditional alternative will increase in the coming years, while the ability of elite college graduates to work well with those who do not share their beliefs will continue to decline.

3. Orientation: Be direct with candidates and new hires. If you decide that you want your organization to be politically neutral or self-consciously politically heterogeneous it’s a good idea to say so in job postings, and to introduce that idea to employees from their very first day. For example, you could state: “Our company’s culture is oriented toward success in our mission, which is [lay out business mission here]. We therefore do not take public stands on issues that are not central to our business mission. If you're not willing to work for such a company, or with people who disagree with you on some of your deepest beliefs, this might not be the right organization for you.”

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Georgetown University’s Free Speech Problem

Modern minds, even sophisticated ones, increasingly struggle to recognize two completely orthogonal concepts: A) The content of speech (which we might disagree with or even find offensive) and B) the right to speak. That a large university purporting to uphold free and open inquiry (see comments) refuses to recognize this distinction and promptly act on it is an embarrassment.

FIRE's Headline: "Georgetown’s investigation of a single tweet taking longer than 12 round-trips to the moon." The money quote:

“It’s laughable that Georgetown Law’s administrators would need even one day to pore over a tweet,” said FIRE Executive Director Robert Shibley. “But if they’re determined to use their magnifying glasses on the tweet until they find something punishable, they’ll be investigating until their retirement.”
Here's Georgetown's policy strongly in favor of free speech.

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Free Speech: A Shield Against Oppression

Historically speaking, free speech has primarily served as a shield against oppression. Jacob Mchangama, who has written Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media, also wrote an article at the Heterodox Academy blog. Here is an excerpt that I will have ready the next time I hear the free speech is a "problem" or that it is a tool of "oppression" or "violence."

A global look at the history of free speech suggests that free speech is in fact a shield against oppression. White supremacy, whether in the shape of American slavery and segregation, British colonialism, or South African apartheid, relied heavily on censorship and repression. Conversely, advocates of human equality like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Nelson Mandela all championed the principle and practice of free speech to great effect and at huge personal cost. In the words of the late Congressman John Lewis, “Without freedom of speech and the right to dissent, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.” Tragically, several countries, not least India, still use hate speech laws, with roots stretching back to the era of British colonialism, to silence dissenters as well as the minorities these laws were supposed to protect. Moreover, the current tsunami of Republican-sponsored bills aimed at censoring “divisive” teachings on issues such as race, gender, sexual orientation, and even American history, are often uncomfortably close to their anti-racist speech code counterparts when it comes to wording and the underlying philosophy that words constitute, or are comparable with, tangible physical harms. Far from serving as a remedy against “cancel culture,” such bills are likely to increase partisan and ideological policing of nonconformist speech to the detriment of free and open discourse without which higher education becomes stale and ultimately meaningless.

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