A reasonable way to air grievances?

The recent hub-bub over protests against commencement speakers (Haverford, Rutgers, Smith, Harvard...) has got me thinking about what is a reasonable way for people to air their grievances. To start, let me start by saying that I find the protests at Haverford to be reasonable (this is the only one I've looked into). Given that this all started with the "Occupy Cal", I should also say that I didn't consider that protests strategy to be reasonable.


So, what makes a protest reasonable? Basically, it comes down to how disruptive the protest is and how severe the grievance is.

For the Haverford protest, I consider it reasonable because the disruption was minimal and the grievance was meaningful. The Haverford protest consisted of nothing more than a letter. After the school administration invited Birgeneau to speak, about 30 students and 3 faculty (at a school of 1200 students) sent him an open letter saying that they'd prefer that he not come. At worst, this was mildly rude, but the protesters had a meaningful greviance against him -- his support of the police who violently broke up the Occupy Cal encampment (shown above). Since Birgeneau bowed out, we can't know whether they would have been more disruptive if he came, and as it stands, their protest was well within reason.

The widespread criticism against these protesters (from the academic and media elite) seems to rest of a few silly misrepresentations of the situation. First, they act as though any politicization of commencement is disruptive to the event. However, the reality is that the act of inviting a commencement speaker is just part of the influence game that university administrators play, and issuing invitations to these influential speakers is in fact a political act. If administrators don't want a political commencement, they should not invite people who fashion themselves as leaders; invite more humble people. There's no surprise when this elite network closes ranks to protect one of their own against criticism.

The second misrepresentation is that this is somehow about "academic freedom". Nothing could be further from the truth -- these are about accountability for how certain people wielded power. Anyway, it is impossible for a person holding such a privileged podium as a commencement speaker to simply be regarded as  another person expressing his views. In this unique role with a captive audience, the speaker is representing the institution.

So now I'm thinking about how to scale grievances in order to evaluate what a reasonable response is. Birgeneau does not match the "liar, thief, murderer" description that I apply to many politicians (though Rice arguably does), which is expected given his distance from the levers of coercion. However, he did still have some power and can be judged for how he used it.

The "University challenge" -- decreasing costs; increasing access

At the Economist magazine, the "Schumpeter" columnist discusses some changes in the structure of higher education, and offers some suggestions for decreasing costs and thereby increasing access to education:

Schumpeter: University challenge | The Economist

I don't have any particular comment on this, but one of the commenters at The Economist website brought up the "University of the People" which seems to be an establishment-backed effort to develop a model for low-cost online education.

What is the economic value of a college degree?

I've been pondering whether tuition-free university education for everyone is a worthwhile ideal (I doubt it). However, some people claim that such opportunities are essential to prevent the economic division of our society into "haves and have-nots". One of the favorite statistics offered by this crowd is the income difference between people with degrees and those without. Any educated person should recognize that such statistics are just the starting point for deciding what the value of a degree is (i.e. correlation is not causation). The obvious considerations is that people who complete college tend to have been born with more opportunities in their life (colleges select for motivated people from higher SES groups), and that these are surely contributing to the income differences, independent of actually attending college. There is also the feature of "indentured servitude" resulting from college debt -- the graduates HAVE to work hard to cover their expenses.

Anyway, I found one good discussion of what the value may be (though it isn't a proper analysis of the factors involved). For the most part it provides recommendations for books and reports looking at the issue.

Something more for me to read.

Occupy Cal: what can you learn at university?

Part I: Occupy Cal, and the function of the university
Part II: Occupy Cal: The exclusive university

The Occupy Cal protestors have accused the university of functioning to divide the "haves" from the "have nots". Everyone recognizes that attending a university can provide economic advantages, and that many people are not able to attend a university (especially not their top-choice), so it's easy to see the logic behind that assertion of divisiveness. I argued that the exclusivity of universities contributes to their economic efficiency and educational effectiveness, so increasing enrollment and decreasing tuition is not an option. How can a university provide its services without excluding a large portion of our society from economic, intellectual, social, and political opportunities?

To address this issue, I intend to examine the benefits that the university provides to its students, and whether the university structure is the only way (or even the best way) for most people to gain those benefits. If there are alternative ways to acquire those benefits that do not require selectivity in admissions, then the university can either reform to adopt those more inclusive practices, or alternative institutions can provide these services to the people who were excluded from the university.

Since the professed ideal of the university is to advance learning, I'll start with that topic (a separate post will address the issue of getting "one's foot in the door" by way of professional networking and credentials). As described below, I do not believe that an institution like the University of California is the appropriate context for most people to study.

To begin, it is worth noting that many people -- both those who hold degrees and those who don't -- dismiss the effectiveness of formal education, especially higher education (see yesterday's comment). Many people are fond of the expression "The only time my education was interrupted was when I was in school.", or dismiss degrees as "Bull Shit, More Shit, Piled Higher and Deeper". I can attest that many people have developed strong critical thinking and writing skills without formal "higher education". There are also many examples of successful entrepreneurs who did not attend a university. A degree clearly is not a perfect predictor of economic or intellectual potential. Likewise, I have seen many students (in both high school and universities) who clearly had no motivation for book learning, and were therefore wasting their time by enrolling in classes; they would have learned more at almost any job.

With that being said, I do believe that many people (including myself) benefit greatly from the education offered at a university. I can think of no better way to quickly absorb a field of knowledge than to have a series of experts tell you what to study and how to verify that you have learned it. During that four-year grind through one abstraction after the next, it can be helpful to have a carrot dangled in front of you (in the form of a degree and the opportunities it offers) to make sure you stay focused and learn the full breadth of knowledge within the field.

What may be apparent for the above regimen is that there is no reason that it should cost $15,000 a year (UC budget pdf). Many universities have placed their curricula online specifically to facilitate independent study, and professors regularly post their syllabi online for their students. If a student studies 10 subjects in a year, then books should cost about $1000 if they are being purchased from the university book store, and work is being done to lower this price. If this is all a university offers (as some people suggest that it is), then a motivated student should be able to teach themselves the standard subjects without the expense or bother of the university.

The problem with the above setup is that it does not provide the student with either the peer group or the expert feedback that can address the student's confusions and assure that he does not walk away with a false understanding of the topic. If simply finding a few study partners were sufficient, then a university would not be needed-- meeting at the local library should be possible. However, it may not be easy to find good study partners from the general population; the academic exclusivity of the university (applied even at the level of individual courses) identifies groups of students with similar capabilities, and the administrative structure of the class pressures students to study the material at the same pace. If we could develop a system to allow independent students to find appropriate study partners -- those who are able to study the topic at the specified pace-- then this benefit of the university would be diminished. One troubling possibility is that by attracting competent students to their community, the university depletes their availability in the outside community, and essentially gains leverage via a network effect and a sort of "vendor lock-in" applying to the higher-education industry as a whole.

But leaving aside the availability of study partners, we still have to consider the traditional explanation for why the university is a good learning environment -- expert guidance. Peers often cannot identify each other's mistakes or explain concepts effectively. Only experts can reliably correct students or answer their questions. This part of teaching is very labor intensive, and since the labor comes from experts, it can be very expensive. To top it off, upper-level classes (in sciences, at least) often cover current research topics and rely on the extensive expertise of the instructor. Sometimes the course material is so new that it has not been synthesized into any standard text, and a detailed syllabus cannot be provided prior to the beginning of the semester. At this level, the content of the course can sometimes be dominated by the contribution of the students themselves, and relies on an extensive shared body of knowledge that can be hard to create outside of a formal program with several years of instruction.

The expense of this type of education forces us to ask "exactly what kind of higher education can be provided to the entire population?". Higher education is typically divided into three categories, and California supports all three as public institutions: the research university, the teaching university, and the community college. The first category is the most expensive to maintain, in part because it demands the highest level of expertise from the faculty (expertise arising from ongoing cutting-edge research). This is what I'm normally thinking of when I discuss the university, and the exclusiveness arises directly from the fact that there simply are not enough experts at this level to teach every student in this style. Furthermore, most students probably would not benefit from the type of instruction offered by these experts; only students who have mastered the broad knowledge of a field of study are at a level to understand what these professors are trying to teach. To top it off, these professors are not necessarily the best teachers, and they stereotypically have a hard time explaining concepts to people who do not already have extensive knowledge of the field.

The alternative is to learn from those experts who decided to focus on teaching, with research being a minor part of their activities (all people who hold a Ph.D. in sciences have successfully conducted research at some point). These professors are often better teachers than the professors who focus on research -- having more experience at teaching, and paying more attention to the theory of teaching. These professors would probably be the main workforce of "universal higher education". At the large research universities they often teach the lower-level classes, and they dominate at the smaller colleges that don't maintain active research programs. The third group of experts are those who have mastered their field of study, but have not conducted research of their own. We commonly see this among high-school teachers and the teaching-assistants at universities, but there is no reason that this level of expertise wouldn't be sufficient for most adult learning. My impression is that many instructors at the community college level have this sort of expertise.

The point of all of this is that when we talk about "universal higher education", we shouldn't be thinking of institutions like the University of California -- we should be thinking of the California Community Colleges. Rather than focusing on the institutions that educate the students with the greatest academic achievement, we should be focusing on the institutions that help the people who have had the most trouble. Even if the coursework offered by these institutions is no more advanced than that offered by many high-schools, there is still value in making these services available to the general public because many people were unable to learn these topics in high school, for a variety of reasons.

Focusing on community colleges rather than 4-year bachelor-degree programs is not only much more cost effective (~1/3 of the cost for instruction, as I understand it), but it also is more compatible with the ideal of a widely-educated population. Community colleges are spread throughout the community (as their name implies), enabling students to take classes without structuring their entire lives around study. This saves a lot of money that would have to be spent on room and board, and also allows a student to attend classes while holding down a regular job or raising children. While universities are attempting to be more accommodating to "non-traditional" (i.e. older) students, the basic structure of the 4-year program is optimized for young adults with no family commitments, and it would be foolish to try to extend that to the entire population.

Finally, we need to consider the elitist attitudes that prevent us from allocating our intellectual resources in a way that includes everyone. This "elitism" does not arise from the pragmatic exclusivity of the institutions of higher learning, but instead comes from our tendency to focus on the pinnacles of intellectual achievement rather than focus on enabling intellectual engagement among the broad base of society. This elitism is expressed in part by the attempts to increase the accessibility to the elite University of California, which necessarily draws resources away from the community college system. This largely reflects the selfish ambition of people with moderate opportunities who want to have the best opportunities, regardless of the poor opportunities that others have.

The other elitism comes from the fact that public science funding is often allocated to pure research in a way that provides no broad educational benefit. The decision to hire full-time researchers at national laboratories necessarily depletes the pool of experts who could be participating in broader (i.e. undergraduate) educational activities. Even professors at academic institutions often acquire so many grants that it eats into the time that they allocate to teaching. Our public scientific funding agencies has decided to pursue scientific advancement that is disconnected from broad education. This may be an appropriate decision, especially if we like our new technologies-- but if we care about public education, we need to consider how these decisions affect the allocation of intellectual resources. Scientific progress will continue at a rapid pace even if all public research funding is linked to broader educational activities, and the academic establishment needs to take a hard look at how it uses the resources that it has before it complains that outside forces are preventing it from achieving its educational mission.

What do university administrators do?

One of the main targets of the Occupy Cal movement is administrator salaries, connecting the increase of these salaries with the increase in tuition. The administrators shoot back by pointing out that their salaries make up a tiny portion of university expenditures, and that the real problem is that the legislature (the EVIL Republicans!) has cut university subsidies.

I don't know what the salaries are at Cal itself, but I've noticed extravagant salaries at other institutions (up to $1 million /year for top administrators), which doesn't always match the salaries of football coaches, but is substantially more than the salaries of even the most prominent professors.

With salaries like this, I'd expect the administrative activities of the university to be seamless-- professors would be able to quickly hire technicians, and graduate students would not have a two-month gap in their health insurance coverage following the annual renewal of coverage. But that's just a fantasy land.

I'd like to know how school administrators command such high salaries, and what they are spending their time on if not actually making sure that the administration runs smoothly. Maybe they are just glorified lobbyists, trying to eek more money out of the state. Maybe they are well-dressed sycophants, drawing money from the pockets of wealthy alumni, or perhaps they are slick PR men running immense propaganda campaigns. Maybe they are exceptionally competent administrators, but their fiefdom is so immense that it is impossible to run it efficiently.

Well, I'll hopefully find an answer as I finish reading Benjamin Ginsberg's essay at The Washington Monthgly -- Administrators Ate My Tuition. Being a PoliSci professor and JHU, he may have some insight (or he may just be venting faculty frustrations).

Occupy Cal: The exclusive university

Part I: Occupy Cal, and the function of the university.

Tuesday's protest at the University of California Berkeley campus included a declaration of an "Open University", which apparently is meant to provide a free education to anyone who wants to participate. This action is clearly motivated by the perception that university is unnecessarily exclusive, and consequently divides our society into "haves" and "have nots".

While economic success is clearly obtainable without a university degree, formal higher education is still widely perceived as the most reliable course to personal prosperity. Such education is intended to provide students with useful (i.e. marketable) skills early in their adult lives, but also enables them to build social relationships that will be advantageous throughout life. While most people recognize the value of these opportunities, it is easy to resent the fact that some people have these opportunities while others are excluded. This resentment is especially pronounced if those opportunities improve a person's ability to compete for economic and social goods without increasing the total amount of such goods in our society. I intend to address the social implications of these opportunities in a future post, but for now I want to focus on a factor of university organization that impacts both of them -- the exclusivity of the university.

Plenty of people are unable to attend the university of their choice (or any university at all) -- either they are explicitly rejected during the application process, or they decide that they do not have the financial resources to pay for tuition while also covering food, shelter, and healthcare for themselves and any dependents. Exclusion for financial reasons seems particularly unfair, since it depends more of the economic success of a student's parents than on their own virtues. Furthermore, to the extent that a university education increases a person's future earnings, economic exclusion from the university contributes to a multi-generational stratification of society based on wealth.

The origin of this economic exclusion is obvious -- the university needs money to operate (e.g. maintain buildings and pay salaries), and it therefore needs some way to motivate people to contribute money. The most straight-forward way to raise revenues is to change fees to the people who benefit most directly from the services provided, and exclude those people if they do not pay. Alternatives exist; for example, money can be raised from philanthropists or can be allocated politically. Our current university system relies on a combination of these revenue sources, with complicated mechanisms designed to maintain both accessibility and adequate instructional resources (e.g. scholarships, loans, subsidies, work-study).

The current debate over the role of the university is driven primarily by concerns over increasing tuition and the consequent student debt. The question is how to reduce the burden on the students themselves? One option is to reduce university expenditures, perhaps by increasing administrative efficiency or reducing salaries of the top administrators. The "Open University" model suggests one path to reducing administrative costs -- abandoning the evaluation and credentialing activities of the university. But more attention is given to the loss of political funding for higher education, and protestors seem most concerned with maintaining the status quo for the California educational system.

The other form of exclusivity is based on academic potential. There are pedagogic reasons for this exclusivity -- uniformity of student capabilities makes it easier to teach students simultaneously, and it increases the chance that students will be able to help each other understand the course material. This is the same reason that many courses have prerequisites. Many educational reformers have tried to integrate classrooms with students of different academic ability, but my understanding is that this normally ends up slowing the progress of the most capable students. While it may sound "elitist" to the students who are excluded, I believe it is totally appropriate to seek the company of people who will advance one's own goals while avoiding those who would inhibit them. If this exclusion is institutionalized at the level of the university, so be it.

California has maintained a three-tier system of public higher education, which traditionally allows for some exclusivity on the basis of academic potential while minimizing exclusion based on economic resources. The UC system has traditionally relied greatly on academic exclusivity, since it only had a limited number of openings for students, but everyone wanted to attend due to the extremely low tuition. This structure is changing as the UC system expands enrollment and raises tuition; UC is perhaps becoming more like other universities around the country.

Overall, I think that academic exclusivity is a good thing (in the absence of a good teaching model where all students benefit from a mixed-ability academic community), and while economic exclusivity is unfortunate, it is pretty much unavoidable at the scale of the general population. Economic exclusivity is pretty much unavoidable for anything that has a cost--as a university education does-- and the failure to pass those costs onto the final consumer results in the squandering of resources (I've seen it first-hand). Even with these costs, access can be provided to the most promising and motivated students by way of scholarships. I'd be hesitant to provide such funding to the mass of young adults who drift towards university education with giving much thought to it. These students often have plenty of time but little money, and have yet to realize the value of their time. By placing a dollar amount on the educational services that they are requesting, we can encourage them to think about what they expect to gain from attending university, and perhaps prevent a few of them from squandering a couple years of their lives engaged in activities that are not appropriate for them.

There is always room for improvement in our institutions, and perhaps we will find ways to deliver higher-educational services with less expense, or in a way that does not segregate students based on academic ability yet still enables the most capable students to excel. Until then, the exclusivity of the university is something that we have to work with, and reflects the simple truth that a university education is not right for everyone.

Occupy Cal: Whose univeristy?

The Occupy Cal crowd has decided to set up camp on the campus of UC Berkeley, despite the UC administration's vows to disassemble it. No doubt the protestors will feign surprise/outrage when the police try to evict them.

As indicated by the chants of the protestors, the issue comes down to this: whose university is it? The protestors claim some sort of democratic authority (on behalf of both the university community and the broader public for whom the university was nominally founded), yet for all their democratic/consensual formalities, they are incapable of representing those groups. They are only capable of representing those people who are willing to spend their time participating in those primitive "General Assemblies" and who are willing to lend legitimacy to the Occupy movement by participating. In the end, the Occupiers have no democratic legitimacy.

Still, the Occupiers are attempting to declare themselves as the legitimate government/owner of the university, or whatever other location they decide to occupy. This is bound to draw a forceful response from the other institutions that claim ownership/sovereignty over those sites. In some situations, that conflict may be intentional and necessary, yet I don't see how the demands of these protestors justify such conflict. Their main message is that they want the state to provide additional funding to the university -- but their tactics delegitimize those very institutions that they are seeking to expand. WTF?

In the end, these skirmishes have come down to establishing "the right to occupy" as part of the first amendment right to assemble and petition the government. I don't see the point in picking this fight. I don't want to live in a society where any mob of political activists can just set up camp in any public space -- thereby excluding everyone else from using that space.

I'm not even sure why tents matter -- except that some of the more theatrical activists like the symbolism (even as they ignore the substance). There may be some issue with people traveling great distances to participate in the protest, and not being able to afford proper housing in the area. However well this logic applies to Washington D.C. or Sacramento, I don't see how it could be relevant to these local protests (unless homelessness were some major part of the agenda). My suspicion is that these protestors are simply seeking to emulate the occupation of Tahrir Square without acknowledging the conditions that prompted Egyptians to use occupation as a tactic -- both their vulnerability to kidnapping if they dispersed, and eventually their demand for the overthrow of the government.

In the end, the university does not belong to a bunch of protestors (especially when most are the recipients of services), and declaring an "Open University" does not in any way make the benefits of the university available to the general public.

Occupy Cal, and the function of the university

The "Occupy Cal" crowd is pissed about how the University and the police treated them last Wednesday, and are calling for a "general strike" at the University of California Berkeley campus for this coming Tuesday (Nov 15). This is modeled on the "strike" at the Oakland port at the beginning of the month.

I've put the word "strike" in quotes because it does not fit the definition of "strike" as I understand it -- being the refusal of workers to continue doing their regular jobs. In both of the above "strikes", the organizers are seeking to disrupt regular economic activity by bringing in large numbers of protestors who normally do not directly participate in those economic activities.

In this case, someone supporting this action has explained why UC Berkeley is being targeted in this way:

“In calling for a strike, activists realize that the university’s function in society is to create a division between haves and have-nots. Therefore, this is meant as a special kind of strike, one where all those who have been excluded from the UC system converge on the campus and help occupy it. At the same time as we shut the university down, we open it up to all who have been excluded from it,”

This statement brings up some important issues; however, if I were to take it literally, I would say that it presents a view of our society that is both terribly naive and borderline paranoid. Instead, I will be charitable to the authors and assume that they presented this narrow view of things for the sake of rhetorical impact, and for the same reason selected as "the function" of the university one incidental effect of its activity. I assume that they intended to start a conversation among the stakeholders in the University system (UC, and academia as a whole), so let's get started.

What is the function of the university (and UC in particular)? I interpret "the function of an institution" to mean the goal being sought by the people who support and participate in that insititution. With that interpretation, the function of the university (and especially UC) is clearly not to divide our society. Still, divisiveness may be an unfortunate consequence of how the institution operates. An undeniable truth is that the people who participate in the university are often seeking their own prosperity; they are the getters, and are likely to become the "haves". This in itself is not particularly profound -- people regularly participate in activities that advance their own prosperity (from maintaining one's own home, to providing commercial services, to learning skill sets, and even seeking collaborators for projects). This is all normal and appropriate, and it is likewise appropriate that we form exclusive institutions to coordinate activities among people who are capable of advancing each other's productivity.

So how does the university produce social division by providing educational services? Stay tuned for more ideas on how that occurs (to the extent that it does), and what might be done to reduce those divisions.

Do they understand what they are doing?

This past Wednesday, riot police tried to disperse a large group from the campus of UC Berkeley. As pointed out by the Chancellor, the protestors engaged in activities that were outside of what he understands to be the tradition of "peaceful" resistance. I wonder if the protestors understood that they had crossed that threshold, and what it implies about their attitudes towards established legal authority.

For those unfamiliar with the events, this is how I understand the course of events: there was a big rally, then some people set up tents, cops amassed and told the protesters to take their tents and leave, protesters refused. A negotiator said that the protestors could occupy the plaza constantly for a week, as long as no camping equipment was set up and people didn't sleep there. When the protesters rejected this offer, the cops tried to dismantle the campsite, but were blocked by a crowd. The cops then beat their way through the crowd and took the tents.

Here's the video of part:



Here is the core of the Chancellor's letter:

It is unfortunate that some protesters chose to obstruct the police by linking arms and forming a human chain to prevent the police from gaining access to the tents. This is not non-violent civil disobedience. By contrast, some of the protesters chose to be arrested peacefully; they were told to leave their tents, informed that they would be arrested if they did not, and indicated their intention to be arrested. They did not resist arrest or try physically to obstruct the police officers’ efforts to remove the tent. These protesters were acting in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, and we honor them.

...

We call on the protesters to observe campus policy or, if they choose to defy the policy, to engage in truly non-violent civil disobedience and to accept the consequences of their decisions.

Basically, the distinction that he is making is between those who use the legal system as a stage on which to protest-- using their arrest for theatrical purpose-- and those who stand outside of the legal system and try to gain sympathy when the legal system imposes itself on them.

This later activity is fundamentally radical, since it rejects the legitimacy of the legal system itself. The only alternative to the use of force is the abdication of authority by either the University administration or the police. We've seen this tactic used repeatedly in the Occupy protests, but it is also paired with rhetoric that suggests that the protestors don't comprehend how these actions are an immediate and radical threat to the establishment (e.g. "stop beating students"). On the other hand, the rhetoric of "occupation" is inherently radical, but it doesn't seem to be a turn-off to the non-radical left. People apparently treat it as nothing more than a brand. But we've also seen this contradiction in the Tea Party movement, where they simultaneously spouted radical rhetoric (including the name) even as they demanded respect from the establishment.

In the end, I'm not sure exactly what these people wish to achieve, or how they expect their actions to achieve these goals. It seems that the protests have become focused on the tactics of protest themselves -- the perpetual occupation of public space for the sake of protest, and camping as a form of protest. Right now, I don't find these to be particularly compelling reasons to get involved.

However, there are some good fights to be picked over this issue. There are plenty of cities with overly restrictive requirements for permits to gather. It may be interesting to see these rules presented as a form of class-warfare, which weaken the ability of regular people to engage in political propaganda, even as the wealthy have the alternative outlet of mass-media.

The 99% are to blame

This past week saw two "riots" on college campuses. There was a bit of a scuffle with cops as the Occupy Cal group (i.e. the "99%-ers) tried to establish a campsite on campus. Across the country at Penn State, a spontaneous riot broke out following the announcement of Joe Paterno's dismissal for his failure to adequately respond to news that one of his assistant coaches was raping 10-year olds in the team showers.

Each of these confrontations is worthy of much discussion, but what I find most interesting at the moment is how the events at Penn State undermine the narrative being presented by the Occupy crowd.

Joe Parterno is the 1%. Even by the standards of University faculty, sports coaches have extremely high pay. Paterno was bringing in around a million dollars a year, while several other head-coaches bring in multimillion dollars salaries. University payscales are a perfect microcosm of the more widespread inequalities that the Occupy movement decries.

My view is that "gods are not allowed to make mistakes"-- when someone of Paterno's stature and power is this neglectful of his duties, he deserves to be thrown out on his ass. However, consider the reaction of the great masses in the Penn State community -- they defended Paterno, with massive public protest. They embraced the idea that a person like Paterno is above the law; he is so great that he can do no wrong. Even more telling, there was no Karl Rove manipulating public opinion behind the scenes. This was totally spontaneous.

I have read innumerable essays by concerned leftists pondering why the lower classes repeatedly vote against their own interests. These overly partisan egalitarians find the obvious answer -- it's the other party! (i.e. the Republicans). If they would open their eyes, this riot (which is just part of a long-standing phenomenon) would put their partisan theories to lie. There is no need for sophisticated propaganda to create massive inequality. A college education does not cause people to open up their eyes to what really matters. The truth is that most people are morons. Most people are willing slaves who fantasize about having a king. They dream of a benevelent lord who will provide them with bread and circus, absolving them of any responsibility for their own lives.

A half-century of middle class unionism and public universities has done nothing to lessen this peasant mentality among the masses. It's time to consider the possibility that democracy has failed. Democracy is impossible because when power is given to the masses, they give it right back. Those of us who want freedom will have to find it ourselves. If we want a society of equals, we will have to find it separately from the servile masses. We obviously can't physically separate ourselves from them, but we can weaken the institutions that they use to force themselves on us.

UniLeaks: wikileaks for education

I just came across a new website called UniLeaks, which solicits...

restricted or censored material of political, ethical, diplomatic or historical significance which is in some way connected to higher education, an agency or government body working in partnership with an institution, e.g., a University.

As yet, I do not see the point in creating a system targeted at particular institutions. Maybe this is a way to attract specialists who would be interested in these documents. However, my first suspicion is that this is the work of anti-intellectuals who are digging for any possible dirt on academia.

In part, this is because I can't imagine that they would find particularly interesting documents that are distinctive of universities. The most likely "dirt" will relate to fund-raising, resource allocation, and employee relations -- just like with any large institution. My fear is that these people will be digging for documents like the stolen* emails at the center of Climategate, which they can then pass to the right-wing noise machine for selective quoting.

As I suggested in Privacy and Transparency at the University, this strategy seems to be increasingly common among some political factions. Michael Mann suffered legal harassment as a result of the Climategate brouhaha, and Frances Fox Piven was singled out and demonized by Glenn Beck at the height of his popularity. This may be a strategy of attacking soft targets -- mid-level public figures who will never wield political power and do not have a mass-audience.

With that being said, I am cautiously optimistic about the establishment of UniLeaks. I am deeply interested in maintaining transparency and accountability (but also political independence) among universities. I am also hopeful that the proliferation of Wikileaks-style organizations will help to move these whistle-blower systems into the political mainstream, and reduce the risk of retaliation.

Update: I found an article about UniLeaks in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The rhetoric used by the (Australian) administrator of the site seems to be a mixture of academia-idealist (e.g. students are not clients), and government-accountability (e.g. universities get a lot of state money). Also, some articles noted that this is just one of many specialized WikiLeaks clones.

*I say that these emails were stolen rather than leaked, because a leak requires that someone had legitimate access to the documents being leaked. Since no-one should have had access to the email database at the center of Climategate, that data must have been stolen.

Privacy and Transparency at the University

The Mackinac think-tank has filed a broad Freedom of Information Act request for the emails of professors of labor studies at three universities run by the state of Michigan. This appears to be nothing more than political harassment, similar to the harassment of climate researcher Michael Mann by Virginia's Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, following the "Climategate" brouhaha. It is specifically to avoid this type of political pressure that we have the notion of "academic freedom", and that universities jealously guard their independence from the state.

The heavy use of the Internet by university professors has clearly opened them up to new forms of encroachment by political actors. Universities should dedicate some serious thought to how they manage their data, so as to keep private communications private, and properly document and release any information that should be made public.

I propose that, by default, all internal communications of university staff and students should be considered private, and should be handled in a way that maintains confidentiality. To accomplish this, university IT departments should develop encryption standards for individual email accounts and encourage their universal adoption. This is not a terribly difficult technical issue, as strong encryption systems have already been developed and deployed, such as Pretty Good Privacy. One of the big hurdles to adopting PGP encryption is to establish a network of users with trusted encryption keys; universities are in a perfect position to accomplish this.

This idea of secure communication within universities probably scares a number of people -- I've repeatedly heard mumblings about universities being sinister, oppressive forces in society (for example, view the first comment on this blog post at Bleeding Heart Libertarians). You don't have to be an anti-intellectual conspiracy theorist to insist that universities develop a high level of transparency. Universities provide some important public services where the quality of the final product (e.g. research results, student certification) cannot be easily evaluated without knowledge of the process by which it was produced. To maintain public trust, universities should develop a process that provides relevant information to anyone with a legitimate interest.

Documents relating to student evaluation should be available, both to administrators and to each student or their representative. If encrypted emails are among these documents, the student should keep a copy, and perhaps the university could keep a copy of the student's encrypted emails (at least, any from a professor), which could be recovered if the student provides his decryption key. One nice side-effect of widespread encryption would be widespread signing of electronic documents (using the same key), so that if a document is deemed relevant to an accusation, its authenticity can be easily validated.

Finally, we have the raw data that goes into research publications. The issues here are complicated, and many extend beyond individual universities. For instance, data accessibility has been a major source of contention in climate research, but much of the raw data is treated as a commercial asset by non-academic institutions, so there is little that universities can do. Additionally, scientists will always hesitate to release data until they have had a chance to analyze it themselves. Each field of research probably has to develop its own process for making raw data accessible. For instance, biologists have developed a massive database of DNA sequences (Genbank), and all major journals require that any sequence discussed in a publication be submitted to the database. There is currently a push to mandate the publication of the source code for any program used in an analysis. There has even been some frivolous dispute over accessibility to the raw data from traditional microbiological techniques (which is rarely digitized).*

The complete archiving of research data is an unreachable ideal, though it may become more common with the increasing automation of data collection. Every innovation in data collection and data storage will require researchers to develop new systems for archiving data, possibly leading to the loss of older data archived with obsolete systems. University IT departments (and perhaps librarian/archivists) may be able to provide resources that enable researchers to record their data in an accessible form, but ultimately the focus and extent of archiving and distribution will be determined by the value of the data to other researchers, not curious laymen.

*Addition: There are also experiments relating to transparency in the peer-review process.

Our own Cultural Revolution?

As an academic with some Chinese colleagues, I've heard the horror stories of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ™. I've never even considered whether it could happen in America, but a couple of essays from conservative academics have pushed the possibility into my mind.

First, the stage is set by the class/culture war masterpiece from Angelo Cordevilla, "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution", presenting the "ruling class" as culturally disconnected from the rest of the country (oddly called "the country class", even though for the past century or so the majority of Americans have lived in cities). As is common in these criticisms of the liberal elite, academics take much of the blame for ignoring the culture of the common man, who just isn't going to take it anymore. The second reading, Whoring it in Higher Education from Jason Peters, bemoans the loss of academic integrity in the face of financial incentives. He seems to be saying that everyone involved in higher education, from the students to the professors, has abandoned the nobility of learning in favor of social status and prosperity.

The following excerpt is what reminded me of the Cultural Revolution:

I’d like to see more people with soft hands working harder, professors and students alike. I would allow no one on a liberal arts college campus to eat in the cafeteria who has not participated that week in serious food production.

And I would make more stringent demands on faculty members who enjoy arguing in the faculty dining room the merits of various single-malt scotches. Let them argue, but let them do some real work first. Let them, for example, castrate a ram for every gyro they eat.

Of course, Professor Peters is not suggesting that this solution be forced upon schools from the outside, let alone that children be separated from their parents or that unrepentant ivory tower snobs be executed. I see no reason the believe that anything like the Cultural Revolution is likely, but I wonder if there might be the slightest seed of it somewhere in contemporary political movements like the Tea Party. America is different from China of the 1960's both in the large portion of population that may qualify as "elite" (e.g. college educated) and the mobility among classes. However, if the economy continues as it has, with lawyers, bankers, and computer programmers getting additional raises even as the non-college crowd struggles to make ends meet...then maybe, just maybe.

Where's the respect?

Yesterday, I wrote that the rhetoric and political agenda of conservative Christianity can easily be interpreted as disrespectful towards those of us who don't share their religious views and policy preferences (Don't say "abortion is murder"). This rhetoric is often moralistic -- suggesting that anyone who disagrees is fundamentally degenerate, rather than simply being mistaken about one rather small part of life. The political agenda is often punitive -- insisting that certain behaviors are obligatory or prohibited, rather than simply being encouraged or discouraged.

While I believe that conservative Christians are the main source of this disrespect in public discourse, I figure that I should try to figure out where they may feel disrespected by the people whom they disagree with. Unfortunately, many public figures make constant spurious claims that Christians are the victims of frequent disrespect, yet the examples that they cite (e.g. "The War on Christmas") are typically nothing more than non-Christians challenging the cultural dominance of Christianity.

Here are the issues where I expect that conservative Christians (really, social conservatives more generally) may feel that their sense of morality is being disparaged, or that they are being prohibited from engaging in important aspects of their desired lifestyle.

• Animal rights: There's nothing worse than being called a murderer. Animal rights activists can get pretty extreme in their rhetoric. Luckily, the absolutists have no real political or social influence. While conservatives may call these people "leftists", in fact they are just as likely to target their fellow "leftists" as anyone else. In fact, one of their favorite targets is another stereotypical "leftist" group -- biologists engaged in animal research. Another favorite target of animal rightists is the hedonistic, fur-clad cosmopolitan elite who the cultural conservatives often rail against. Regular Americans eating cheeseburgers almost never receive any attention from these people. The small-town family farm of conservative ideal is typically viewed as being a pretty humane system for producing meat. Vegetarians are definitely more common on "the left" than "the right", but they are typically pretty tolerant of us carnivores, and there isn't any reason that a Christian must eat meat (is there?). The only real conflict between traditionalists and vegetarians arises over hunting, but vegetarians will typically cede the issue if the hunters make the case that it is an important part of non-elite culture and livelihood (but British fox hunting doesn't get a pass).
• Gun prohibition: As with hunting, some extremists will attribute base motives to people who want to own guns, such as bloodlust or a desire to dominate others (frankly, many Republicans have done a lot to connect these ideas in public perception). However, most calls for restricting gun ownership are framed as utilitarian anti-crime measures. As with meat-eating, gun ownership doesn't have anything to do with Christianity, though guns do play a role in some traditional lifestyles. The prospect of broad gun prohibition is politically plausible, but remote. If conservatives are concerned about losing their guns, that risk is nothing compared to the prohibitions that they are imposing on others.
  
• Multiculturalism/Libertinism: Conservatives are often depicted as "hateful" or "dictatorial" for holding others to certain standards. This is often a reasonable response to attempts by conservatives to impose their cultural preferences on others. However, this hostile response is not justified if the conservative is trying to persuade others to change their lifestyle in the absence of coercion. But unless we have a culturally libertarian state (including unlimited immigration), non-conservatives will be justifiably suspicious that any advocacy for cultural uniformity is just a prelude to violence.
• Abortion: Opposition to abortion is often ascribed to an attitude that women are subordinate to men. This accusation is probably made to quickly in many cases, but I cannot say that it is unprovoked; if you want to dictate major life decisions to women, be prepared to be called "sexist". While not all opponents of abortion are sexist, there is good evidence than a good portion of them are, and America traditionally was sexist, so a traditionalist should not be too shocked by this accusation.
  

To sum it up, these non-traditionalist moralists typically have little influence and very rarely pass legislation that severely interferes with the continuation of traditions. The only issue where I think that traditionalists could reasonably feel disrespected by mainstream attitudes is with regards to gun ownership, and even there they face rather weak opposition.

Aside from partisan posturing and attacks on politicians, most disrespect in public discourse originates from conservatives.

Let's talk, but don't say "abortion is murder"

Todd Hartch, has written an interesting essay about what drove him to get involved in the gay marriage debate at his workplace. Many of us try to avoid the topics of politics and religion at our workplaces, but things are a little different for Mr. Hartch since he's a (tenured) professor of history at a public university. He's also a socially conservative Christian, and like many conservatives, feels that he's been pressured to keep his mouth shut by the fabled "campus political correctness".

I am probably the ideological opposite of Prof. Hartch, but I liked a lot of what he said in his essay, and my first impulse is to endorse his call for his political/ideological allies to speak up. Below are some of the key points of his essay, with my thoughts interjected:

Campus Political Correctness and the Costs of Free Speech

For at least two generations, Catholics, Orthodox, Evangelicals, and other religious conservatives have sought to “get along” with the prevailing American campus culture of relativism and moral license. We have dedicated ourselves to academic excellence, to fair and balanced teaching, and to keeping a low profile. We have kept quiet in department meetings, in the faculty senate, and on university committees. We have bitten our tongues when colleagues disparaged our religion, our morality, and our most cherished beliefs. We have convinced our colleagues that religious conservatives can be surprisingly thoughtful and urbane.

The above description matches my own impression of the situation in academia (at least in the sciences). I have a number of conservative religious colleagues who allow their religious identity to be known, but don't make a fuss when they disagree with others. Political comments are often shared among like-minded colleagues, though a few faculty members will make leftist/anti-religious comments to broader audiences and sometimes earn a rebuke for unprofessional behavior.

Overall, most members of the department follow the same strategy as Hartch described. It's just good manners. There is good reason to avoid this sort of confrontation with one's colleagues. At best, it distracts from work, and it may even make it impossible for colleagues to work together.

In the end, what have such actions won for us? ...Our jobs are secure and our careers give every sign of continuing success.

We have watched, though, as our campuses veered farther and farther off course. Sexual license is now taken for granted. Mentions of abortion, homosexuality, and even bestiality [I think Hartch didn't get the joke -R] hardly merit a second glance in our campus papers. Many students have never heard a rational conservative argument about any moral issue.

I agree that rational conservative voices are hard to find. At least, it's hard to find any who can speak meaningfully about social issues to a person who doesn't share their own religious and cultural identity (Hartch is only the second such writer that I've encountered).

This is something that conservatives should keep in mind if they want to engage in thoughtful discussions with others. Hartch was bothered by derisive comments targeted at his culture, but I think that conservatives most often are the ones dishing out derisive comments. Liberals may make snide comments about conservatives in their private conversations, but conservatives regularly announce to the world that liberals are degenerates who are destroying everything good in our society. Off the top of my head, I recall a Republican candidate for Congress who attacked his Democratic opponent for supporting "San Francisco values", and the Pope recently blamed atheists for Nazism. These are mainstream conservative Christians. To further illustrate the point, conservatives regularly use moral reasoning to justify criminal punishment of many actions that others engage in (e.g. drug use).

A thoughtful conservative will have to keep this in mind when he tries to hold a conversation with others: mainstream conservatism regularly denigrates the morality of others and even threatens others with physical punishment. The epitome is probably the rhetoric around abortion. Mainstream conservatives regularly equate abortion with murder and the holocaust. If you tell your colleague that "abortion is murder", think about what you are saying. This person may have had an abortion, or may know someone who had an abortion. In that situation, you would be calling that person or their friend a murderer. That's quite a loaded word, and even if you don't mean to say that abortion should be punished by imprisonment or execution, it isn't hard for another person to make that inference (at least at an emotional level).

Many conservative positions can be viewed as threatening, and must be thoughtfully worded if they are not going to start a fight. I've seen what happens when the words "abortion is murder" are uttered to the wrong person. So, if you want to have a thoughtful conversation, don't say "abortion is murder"; you may also want to be clear to distance yourself from anyone who does make those statements in public.

Perhaps all this might be justified if students were somehow benefitting from this atmosphere of license and relativism. The opposite is the case. Most students, even at the best universities, have no passion, no love of learning. Focused on careers, at best, or, more often, on nothing at all, they approach texts that have changed the world as if they were being forced to read the dictionary. Faced with the results of painstaking research, they yawn and check their phones. They do less homework than American students have ever done before because professors have relaxed their requirements. The result is that, amazingly enough, students are bored in their modern Sodom.

What is to be done?

...

It’s time to speak up. It is time to make a public case for truth, for human dignity, for academic standards, and for the joy of learning. I guarantee that students will not be bored when they see us defending the truth. (I should point out that speaking up is not a synonym for being rude.)

I agree that students typically don't appreciate the opportunities that they have at a university, and faculty have a responsibility to engage them in any way possible. If that means discussing politics and morality, then so be it. If there is anyplace where Americans can have a respectful political discussion, it is on campus.

We need to go into this process knowing that the risks are real....we risk our jobs. There’s not much that can be said to minimize this threat, but I can propose that if universities make it a common practice to fire their vocally conservative professors, it will publicize our arguments more than anything we could do on our own.

Interestingly, most calls to fire politicized professors (e.g. Ward Churchill) come from conservatives. David Horowitz has made it his mission to discourage professors from discussing political, moral, or religious issues with their students.

However, let's assume that universities manage to protect the free speech rights of everyone. Professors still must not appear to be prostletyzing to their students. Hartch has provided examples of how professors can participate in these discussions outside of the classroom, but even there the power relationship between students and professors still holds. A professor will have to be impeccably respectful of others in order to avoid intimidating students into silence on this issue. I think this will be difficult if a professor such as Hartch effectively says "my sexual impulses are healthy, while yours are worthless if not destructive".

Finally...

[W]e need to dialogue with those most opposed to our ideas. Some professors and students will respond to our more visible presence on campus with anger and ridicule, but some will want to understand us. With this latter group we must make every effort to communicate clearly and to forge relationships of trust and respect.

Well, good luck with all this. Such discussions should have intellectual value, and they may even overcome some of the divisiveness of mainstream political discourse. Finally, a tradition of open discussion of issues outside of one's own specialty may allow truly fringe opinions to be expressed openly. Maybe the radicals will be a bit more visible. Maybe recent immigrants will become stronger advocates for their traditional religions. There is also the chance that the anti-religious expressions that Hartch wants to counter will become much more frequent and ubiquitous as more people feel comfortable discussing these issues.

As you may have noticed, my own opinions are well outside of the mainstream (largely opposite to Hartch's). As things stand, I avoid talking about a lot of my political and moral opinions. When I do discuss these issues, I take care to avoid direct contradiction of mainstream values (though I will openly question the value of voting). I was more open about my fringe opinions during my first couple of years in college, but as I entered a more professional environment, I kept my mouth shut more and more.

Whatever happens, part of the purpose of the university is to hash out these issues and clearly expose the purely idiotic arguments that are so common in public discourse.

For further thought: International travel is part of the job description for many academics. Would open discussion of sensitive issues interfere with their ability to travel, particularly to more restrictive countries? Even in the USA, one academic was denied entrance due to what he had said about drug use, and another may have been denied entrance dues to his political opinions (since visa's can be denied without any evidence, we can't really know).

from Confessions of a Community College Dean: When Students are Homophobic

Confessions of a Community College Dean: When Students are Homophobic

This is an interesting little story about how a teacher (and school administrators) should respond to bigotry from students.

The comments are pretty good also (aside from the partisan sparring over whether conservatives/Republicans are bigots). My only contribution is to point out that everyone has power....even "subordinates". Power is a diverse and dynamic thing -- not a simple and static hierarchy. It can be direct (physical threats) or indirect (social influence). Indirect power can be formal (a landlord being able to call the cops to evict a tenant) or informal (defaming someone's character).

What do scientists think? (last post for awhile)

Many contentious social and political issues are informed by scientific research. Debates on these issues often appeal to the authority of the researchers in this field. Consulting experts is good component of a decision-making strategy when we don't have the time to thoroughly investigate some issue personally.

However, this still requires that we answer two questions:

1. who are the credible experts?
2. what do they think?

I'll get back to these issues in a moment, but I first want to point to a underutilized resource for answering these questions: the National Academies, including the National Academy of Sciences(NAS). The National Academies regularly produce reports on issues of interest to the public, including Climate Change, and Evolution. The National Academies assemble committees of experts on a given topic, which then produce reports that state the opinions of the experts and also review much of the evidence behind their opinions. If you want to know what scientists believe about some field of research and why they believe it, first go to the NAS.

Given the availability of these resources, it's distressing that many people harbor severe misimpressions about expert opinion. Typical errors include the misidentification of experts and exaggeration of the influence of fringe opinions within the research community.

One common error in identifying experts is to consider all scientists to be experts in all fields of research, or all members of a field (e.g. biology) to be experts in all subfields within that field. Even within a subfield (e.g. microbial evolution), there are many lines of research being performed and expertise is not evenly distributed. I think that part of the reason for this error is that the public often isn't aware of the vast amount of research being done these days (which is only going to increase as the global economy expands).

It's true that a scientist may be better than a non-scientist at interpreting the debates in a random field of science, but there are still plenty of people who will have greater expertise than that random scientist. This is the idea behind the reports issued by the NAS: non-scientists turn to scientists as a whole for expertise, and scientists then identify those among their ranks with the greatest expertise.

Another common error regarding expert opinion is to identify one or a few experts (or near-experts) with a particular opinion and then interpreting that opinion to be common among the community of researchers. To make it worse, this one dissident's deviation from the standard opinion is often exaggerated and interpreted as dissent from the core components of the standard theory, rather than being dissent from a particular aspect of the theory (I've seen this with evolution, global warming, and HIV as the cause of AIDS).

Dissent is essential to scientific progress, and scientists often give disproportionate attention to dissenting opinions, if for no other reason than that without disagreement there is nothing to research. However, this emphasis on dissent within the scientific community should not translate into giving dissenters excess influence in public discourse. There are many reasons that a person can arrive at an erroneous conclusion, so there is not much information in the fact that people disagree. Going by the principle that there is one correct opinion and many erroneous opinions, we should pay attention when a large number of experts agree on a point, and not give much attention to the scattered and diverse dissensions (unless you are interested in the issue for purely intellectual reasons).

Unfortunately, the public and the press is good at finding a few voices that provide whatever opinion they want to hear, yet are incapable of surveying the opinion of the large number of experts who hold the dominant opinion...probably because those experts are doing research rather than writing blogs or talking to reporters. This is why we have reports from the NAS.

People also feel that they should be directly informed about the issues affecting their lives, and want to see both sides of "the debate", even though the debate is often driven by groups with an economic or ideological interest in persuading others to the view the world in a particular way. For those who want to rely on experts for guidance but not conclusions, the public debate often degrades into an exchange between two experts (e.g. ClimateSci and RealClimate). While the reader will still have nothing resembling expertise, I suppose that they can more directly evaluate the credibility of the two experts. However, they need to keep in mind that if the blogger representing the dominant view does something that discredits his personal opinion, the reader still has to contend with the credibility of everyone else who supports the majority view.

Science denialism

Despite some accusations, global warming theory is not a fad. See the following paper:

Peterson, Thomas & Connolley, William & Fleck, John (September 2008). The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus. American Meteorological Society. http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520-0477/89/9/pdf/i1520-0477-89-9-1325.pdf

The hypothesis was proposed over 100 years ago, and has been a focus of serious research since the 1950s or so, and has been the consensus opinion of climate researchers for about 20 years now.
The fact that most of the public kept their heads in the sand* through this process is irrelevant. Science does not progress by going back to square one at the request of every ignoramus who decides that he wants to passively investigate some phenomenon as a part time hobby.

This post was inspired by the discussions at Libertarians for Junk Science, and is related to my post at Freedom Democrats The Politicization of Climate Science.

*with the help of plenty of profiteers driven by ulterior motives

Politicization of Climate Sciences

Written for Freedom Democrats

In the wake of Climategate, climate researcher Mike Hulme has articulated the ideal role of science in public discourse. Basically, he declares that scientific debates should be kept separate from ethical debates (leaving aside bias inherent in hypothesis generation and choice of research directions), while still informing our actions. This is a nice ideal, but ignores the fact that people will enter scientific debates with ulterior motives and it can be hard for the layman to distinguish between the sincere scientist and these charlatans.

In contrast to Mike Hulme's call for the separation of science and politics, we have his colleague James Hansen (head of NASA's Goddard) who is quite happy to transform his scientific prestige into a platform for political moralizing. In reviewing Hansen's new book for DailyKos, DarkSyde introduces him in this manner:

To be a top climate scientist today means being up to speed in graduate level physics, advanced mathematics, planetary astronomy, meteorology, paleontology, oceanography, bio and geo-chemistry, dealing with programmers and constantly shifting computer architectures, and now on top of everything else, you have to be a tireless political activist and media celebrity.(emphasis mine)

No, you don't have to be a political activist...at least not in Hulme's model of science and politics. The scientific method strives for consensus, while the political method strives for domination; If Hansen and DarkSyde want to make politicians out of scientists, then they should expect politicized resistance and deal with it as a political dispute.

When Hansen compares carbon emission credits to the Indulgences that sparked the reformation, he just sounds like a moralizing fool (even to someone like me who agrees with his preference for a carbon tax, in this case).

There is no necessary connection between doing research and political advocacy. A scientist does have a responsibility to communicate his findings to the public, and when his findings have urgent implications, there is not time to allow the knowledge to percolate through the formal education system (i.e. inform other researchers, who inform their students at university, who become teachers in the primary and secondary schools). So there is an imperative for some member of the field to directly communicate the field's findings to the general public, which probably means being "a media celebrity". However, this is an issue for all academic disciplines, and it is not a requirement for everyone in the field--certain individuals naturally distinguish themselves within the field as communicators and politicians (often taking jobs such as heading major research institutions), and these individuals are the natural public spokespersons of the field.

But what if the research findings have implications for economic policy? If the spokesperson ignored those implications, they would be neglectful in their communication to the public, but taking a position politicizes the field of study. Following Hulme's model, I suggest that that the scientist make a point of contacting political activists, informing them of the situation, and allowing them to advocate for policy changes. This may even include sitting down with them for a public Q&A, where the scientist acts as a resource on which they draw as they suggest policy responses. This could be either a live discussion, or a book where the first chapter describes the scientific situation and the subsequent chapters are written by activists/politicians who explore the implications.

I'm not saying that scientists should avoid politics all together, just that they shouldn't use their prestige as a practicing scientist to gain exceptional authority in their political advocacy (at least until they have retired).