Insulting Paper Declares that U.S. College Students are of Average Intelligence

From today's TGIF by Nellie Bowles:

We never meant to imply college kids weren’t brilliant: A study out of Mount Royal University in Canada has found college kids aren’t smarter than the average person of their age anymore. Paper title: “Meta-analysis: On average, undergraduate students’ intelligence is merely average.” See, college kids used to be smarter than the general population, when going into higher education was more of a selective thing. But now that so many people go to college, they’re all just intellectually normal. Which you could easily argue is great: More college for more kids! The paper was accepted for publication in Frontiers in Psychology Cognitive Science. But then the commentary class heard about it, and they did not like this one bit. There was outrage! Are you calling us. . . average? The commentary class may be for equity in theory but in practice they need to be told early and often that they are superior. Not average, which is violence, technically. And so the paper was pulled. I’m completely serious that the reason is: Reviewers felt that saying college kids now are “merely” average is “demeaning.” Everyone gets a trophy. And everyone is above average.

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FIRE’s New College Campus Deplatforming Database

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has announced a new Campus Deplatforming Database.

A deplatforming attempt is a form of intolerance motivated by more than just mere disagreement with, or even protest of, some form of expression. It is an attempt to prevent some form of expression from occurring. Deplatforming attempts include efforts to disinvite speakers from campus speeches or commencement ceremonies, to cancel performances of concerts, plays, or the screenings of movies, or to have controversial artwork removed from public display. An attempt to disrupt a speech or performance that is in progress is also considered a deplatforming attempt, whether it succeeds or fails. Deplatforming attempts do not include criticisms of some form of expression and protests denouncing them that are not motivated by the goal of deplatforming the controversial expression.

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FIRE takes aim at California’s DEI Regimen

Greg Lukianoff writes:

From a legislative or regulatory standpoint, the single biggest threat I have seen to free speech and academic freedom on campus has been the DEI requirements implemented by the California Community Colleges system. In an effort to combat these requirements, FIRE sued the California Community Colleges Chancellor and the members of its Board of Governors, as well as the State Center Community College District.

In the case, FIRE is representing six tenured professors, each of whom teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching and pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. This includes requiring professors to “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”

Under these regulations, faculty performance and tenure will also be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of these government-mandated viewpoints. As our client, Reedley College professor Bill Blanken, said, “I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction? What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?

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The Main Function of Formidable Human Brains is Not Truth-Seeking: The Defense of Claudine Gay’s Plagiarism

Notice how Greg Lukianoff distinguishes between the free speech issues and the plagiarism issues in which "smart" people at Harvard, pundits and media are using their formidable intellectual training to generate endless streams of bullshit.

I agree completely with Lukianoff who offers several valuable resources for reforming financially-bloated ideology-permeated elite colleges.

Excerpt:

Once Gay resigned, we then saw people like Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ibram X. Kendi, and others (including the Associated Press, with its coverage being mocked for its original headline, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism”), pointing the finger at racism and right-wing animus rather than on the real problem: Harvard itself, and our institutions of higher learning as a whole.

In my and Rikki Schlott’s book “The Canceling of the American Mind,” we outline a fourth “Great Untruth” (adding to the first three Jonathan Haidt and I described in “The Coddling of the American Mind”) which is that “bad people only have bad opinions.” This is the foundational assumption of what we call the Perfect Rhetorical Fortress, the method by which cancelers on the political Left shut down arguments. By declaring someone a “conservative,” a “right winger,” — or, if you REALLY want them to be ignored, “far right,” “fascist,” or, my new favorite, “Neo-confederate” — whether they actually are conservative or not, they are also declaring that they are evil and therefore incapable of being correct. This form of non-argumentation, which I have dubbed “fasco-casting”, along with the political Right’s Efficient Rhetorical Fortress tactics (which similarly use labels like “liberal” and “woke” to automatically dismiss counterarguments) is a near-ubiquitous anti-intellectual habit these days.

Research has demonstrated that the brain is not primarily a truth-seeking organ. It can seek truth, but that is much more likely to happen in specialized environments where enlightenment principles prevail, for instance the type of environment where disciplined scientists and engineers work together to create things that really work in the real world.

Out in the wild, the real world, where most of us spend most of our time, brains are mostly used as PR departments, generating "reasons" for doing what we want to do based on our emotions.  Lukianoff offers several resources for exploring this counter-intuitive finding:

The biggest problem with smart people is that they’re incredibly good at using their prefrontal cortices to rationalize what they want to believe in the first place. This is a well-documented phenomenon, and one you can observe yourself right now. Are you inclined to agree with me here? If so, you’re already forming rationalizations about why I’m correct. If you’re inclined to disagree, you’re reading this with an eye for poking holes in everything I’m saying.

But it is a serious problem, summarized well by another Substack, The Prism:

“The correlation between intelligence and ideological bias is robust, having been found in many other studies, such as Taber & Lodge (2006), Stanovich et al. (2012), and Joslyn & Haider-Markel (2014). These studies found stronger biases in clever people on both sides of the aisle, and since such biases are mutually contradictory, they can’t be a result of greater understanding…

Since we’re a social species, it is intelligent for us to convince ourselves of irrational beliefs if holding those beliefs increases our status and well-being. Dan Kahan calls this behavior “identity-protective cognition” (IPC).

By engaging in IPC, people bind their intelligence to the service of evolutionary impulses, leveraging their logic and learning not to correct delusions but to justify them. Or as the novelist Saul Bellow put it, “a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep.”

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