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This forum is very focused on a particular political left/right culture war. However, there are other, deeper culture wars running through society that I find a lot more fascinating.
I think you can see a particularly interesting example hiding in the recent updates to the Francesca Gino affair. If you haven't heard of this, the wiki summary is a good overview: Francesca Gino was a high-flying behavioral science professor at HBS with all the standard TED talk/pop-sci book deal-type accolades. However, there were some statistical issues in her papers that were investigated by a blog Data Colada (run by the researchers who invented the term "p-hacking"!). Data Colada eventually wrote a four-part series of posts arguing that these papers were based on falsified data and the resulting scandal led to Gino losing tenure at Harvard. In between these raw events, there was also some pretty crazy drama; for example, a graduate student being threatened and blacklisted for originally pointing out the inconsistencies.
The most telling piece of the extra drama was that at one point, Gino decided to sue Data Colada for libel instead of directly giving a refutation of their analysis---your interpretation might vary, but this really felt like running to another arena where she could win through discussions of procedure and legal games instead of being confident in her ability to get vindication on scientific merit.
Now for the hidden culture war: while the scientific community seemed pretty convinced that Data Colada's case was ironclad (if you have time to read the full blog posts, you can check this yourself too---the section "Excel files contain multitudes" seems particularly damning), Gino did have many defenders outside science. Like Gino's self-defense, the other defenses are fascinating and, to me, very revealing. As a older representatives, you can see the reporting in the MBA-focused newsletter Poets and Quants (example) or a series of podcasts by Lawrence Lessig. Much more recently, Bill Ackman (relevant to here as a major force behind the removal of ex-Harvard president Claudine Gay) made a long twitter post explaining why he believes Gino is innocent.
If you read these defenses, something strange immediately pops out---instead of actually refuting Data Colada's points about why the data was fraudulent, they're almost completely focused on the process by which Harvard punished Gino/how different it was from the way other behavioral scientists were treated. There's also something more to the off-vibe I feel reading them: see these quotes from Lessig's second podcast interviewing Gino:
The mindset seems to almost be "She was doing all the things she was supposed to do, working so hard playing the academic career game exactly right when suddenly people changed the rules out from under her. Look at how unfair this was!". Nowhere does there seem to be any realization that the point of science is not actually the career game---you're actually supposed to further the project of learning truths about the world. If you actively impede it instead, it doesn't matter how well you were following the game and you should be punished very exceptionally!
This is the deeper culture war I was talking about. To some people, the point of a career is to add value to world, to create something that benefits others, achieve some mission, etc. However, to others, the point is to play a game as best as you can and climb a ladder of credentials and accolades determined by some competitive rules and procedures society pre-decided. The Gino case suggests fitting archetypes for both sides: a research scientist purely interested in their field vs. a careerist MBA or lawyer. Obviously from how I'm framing this, I'm extremely partisan towards one side of this culture war---so much so that I actually feel much more strongly about it than the political one and can't write this post anywhere close to neutrally. The "lawyer"-side viewpoint feels alien and evil, completely incompatible with a thriving society that can actually technologically progress.
What's even more interesting is how this culture war intersects with the political one. For example, there was a post here recently about meritocracy that bothered me much more than what I normally see here. It seems to be exactly the same almost nihilism that I'm reading into the defenses of Gino. The mindset in the comment is so similar: that there's no actual point to the positions you give people, no actual value these positions produce that might vary based on who gets them. Really it's all solely a zero-sum way to assign people status. Just pick the game you're going to have people play to get assigned and then stick to it fairly.
The example post is at +25, so clearly there are a lot of people here who buy the "everything is solely a status game" viewpoint. I'm biased here to the point that I can't even imagine arguments why this viewpoint is at all reasonable, either in the Gino case or in comments like the example---does anyone want to explain? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this?
I don't know whether or not she's a fraud, but she's a social psychologist, so I assume so. What I can point out is that, from a lawyer-side viewpoint, and I mean literal lawyers, the process she went through is so staggeringly unjust that even if she's 100% obviously guilty it will still shock and horrify a lawyer. Universities are allowed to essentially act as courts for their employees and students, with far more power over them than a private-sector employer has in almost any field, and have turned that into running deranged kangaroo courts. It's of a piece with how they handle sexual assault allegations, to give an example with an opposite culture war valence (amusingly, Gino is suing under the same Title IX used to justify those star chambers).
Can you explain what you find so egregious here? Coming from industry, not academia, they seem to have gone to much greater lengths to treat Gino fairly than any other employer would have. I could be fired on the spot for falsifying data - Harvard:
I don't think there's any chance I'd remain employed for 2 years whilst credibly accused by peers, and filing lawsuits against my employer. 'Staggeringly unjust' doesn't really seem to fit the process as applied.
Well, most notably, a person of similar prominence in the private sector (Harvard is not the private sector) would have hired a lawyer day one. Harvard supposedly told Gino she was only allowed two "advocates", and that she was not allowed to recruit anyone else in her defense. Now, this is mostly unenforceable bullshit enabled by the psychological and cultural power universities have over people in their world, but it still works on them. I once had to deal with an academic disciplinary proceeding in my old career (innocent, to be clear, but some people had a grudge and made Complaints), and they made it clear that I could not have a lawyer in the room at any time or it would be considered a violation of the Process, and violation of the Process means they will find a way to find against you - but I could have a family member for 'emotional support'. As soon as they realized my chosen family member was also a lawyer, they adjourned, rang up the university's chief counsel, and went into full cover-their-ass drop-the-charges mode.
The thing is, in industry people get fired all the time, and they go on to the next job with often minimal consequences (I've heard some amusing examples of the extreme circumlocutions employers have to go to in references for fired employees to say someone's a bad apple without being caught doing so. Always liked "You'll be lucky if you can get him to work for you"). In academia, someone getting fired for cause destroys their professional, social, and usually emotional life. Decent chance you'll lose your spouse, if you're married. It's more like being defrocked from the priesthood than losing a job. And the university's facade of being a "court" makes it all the more damning if they find against you. Harvard appears to have done a pretty good job with the investigation, but at least according to Gino's defenders it was not an adversarial process where she had a fair chance to defend herself - the Kafkacrats of the university told her to shut up, did their own thing, and came back with a report over a year later without giving her a fair shake to mount her (admittedly, extremely weak) defense.
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The more I hear about university politics, the more I conclude that they have too much power. Their authority needs to be separated into isolated chunks. They should not be teaching courses and then evaluating their own performance by giving exams as well. They should not be setting tuition fees and also collecting them. They should not be both centers of mass-education for undergrads and also the education of the elite few who go on to PhD and Master's courses.
Most of all, the powers they have which resemble the powers of the judicial system in any way need to be taken away. Universities are not courts of law, they do not have the accountability, moral fiber, or training to do law properly, and any incident which requires the intervention of a court should be handled by an actual court of law.
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I don't see how universities have more power over their employees than any other employer. They can fire (and sort of blackball) an employee, but so can any other employer.
Students, on the other hand, lose an insane investment if they get kicked out. So I agree there.
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