Quislings of Academe

During World War II, in countries occupied or threatened by Nazi Germany, there were a few individuals — though still all too many — who collaborated with the invading dictatorial powers. In France there was Marshal Petain and the Vichy collaborators; in Norway it was the Quislings, named after Vidkun Quisling.

Academe properly exists to foster intellectual exploration, which requires “academic freedom”: freedom from censorship of relevant and appropriate speech under the safeguard of academic tenure.

Academe is currently under attack by the totalitarian, dictatorial ideology of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion); and all too many quislings of academe are worming out of the woodwork, collaborating with the attempt to replace free intellectual exploration by social engineering based on ignorant and mistaken views of human history, human nature, and the interpretation of statistical data.

Among the sad consequences is the denigration of outstanding past achievements. Such denigration ignores the fact that what is taken as established scientifically based knowledge at any given time might be found in the future, near or distant, to have been incorrect in some way. Moreover and worse, it is judged to be morally inexcusable not to have subscribed to DEI ideology even long before it was created.

I had been re-reading The Higher Foolishness by David Starr Jordan [1], which I had first read many years ago while thinking about scientific unorthodoxies. I had remembered it as full of insights and examples about the pitfalls of speculating without a firm basis of evidence.

My fresh look at the book has confirmed that favorable recollection. Curious to learn more about the author, I Googled, and learned not only that he had been the founding President of Stanford University, guiding it for more than 2 decades, but also that he is credited with the discovery of perhaps 20% of known fish species, that he was a founding member of the Sierra Club, and that he was criticized for pacifism during World War I, remaining active all his life in global peace promoting activities [2]. Clearly a remarkably productive man with admirable social aims.

 However, in 2021 the President of Stanford followed the advice of a committee to remove Jordan's name from the places on campus that had been named in his honor [3]:

“President Marc Tessier-Lavigne and the Board of Trustees approved a campus committee’s recommendation both to remove Jordan’s name from campus spaces and to take steps to make his multifaceted history better known. Stanford also will relocate a statue of Agassiz.”

But that “multifaceted history” had already been acknowledged a decade earlier, in the January/February 2010 issue of Stanford Magazine, which is intended to inform all Stanford alumni:

“Meet President Jordan —

Applauded for his guidance and vision, vilified for his pacifism and support of eugenics, Stanford’s first leader created a complicated legacy” [4].

Yet in 2010, and for a decade thereafter, no need had been discovered to purge the campus of all reminders of Jordan because he had favored the possibility of human eugenics  — a view shared by innumerable others of his time and accepted as sound by courts of law.

That denigration was practiced in 2021 but not in makes obvious what the real impetus was: Political correctness, morphed into wokeness and increasingly powered by DEI ideology and DEI bureaucracy.

Even while Stanford’s committee was contemplating the canceling of Jordan, Indiana University (IU) already canceled Jordan who, before moving to Stanford, had been President there (1884-91) after serving earlier as a professor.

Steve Sanders, professor of law at IU, offered these pertinent comments:

“A year or two ago, the vast majority of Indiana University faculty, students, and alumni could not have told you who David Starr Jordan was, what he did for IU, or why he has become controversial. Today, probably most still couldn’t.

Jordan, a biologist, was IU’s seventh president, in office from 1884 to 1891, and his presidency, though short, is universally regarded as one of the most consequential in the University’s history.

But in the national moment we’re in, Jordan has become toxic. That is because, after he left IU, Jordan became a prominent advocate for eugenics, ‘the science of improving the human race through selective breeding, often seeking to control who can and who cannot reproduce.’ Eugenics was not Jordan’s scholarly focus (he studied fish), but as an intellectual leader, his advocacy of eugenics was influential.

Like many eugenicists of his time, Jordan’s embrace of eugenics led him to subscribe to beliefs about the superiority of some racial and ethnic groups and the inferiority of others, beliefs that are rightly regarded today as abhorrent. These views, however regrettably, were mainstream among educated people in Jordan’s time” [5; emphases added].

“I believe an appropriately nuanced solution would have been to remove Jordan’s name from the biology building, because his advocacy of eugenics is today incompatible, to say the least, with sound science, but to keep it on the river as a tribute to the undisputed significance of Jordan’s leadership as an IU president . . . . Yet that sort of nuance and acknowledgement of complexity cannot co-exist with the demands of wokeness and political correctness” [6, emphasis added].

Sanders noted also that IU president McRobbie canceled Jordan in 2020 after having, in 2015, praised him as an “eminent educator, philosopher and scientist” [6].

It may be relevant to note that among the major achievements listed for McRobbie's 14-year tenure as president were “Substantially improved graduation rates” and “Doubling the diversity of the student body and making IU a more inclusive institution” [7]; though whether grade inflation helped with graduation rates is left to cynical speculation.

The canceling of Jordan's name at Indiana and Stanford does absolutely nothing to advance scholarship, research, teaching, or education.

This canceling of a man who had accomplished much of lasting value is nothing but highly public virtue-signaling, intended purely to demonstrate faithful allegiance to DEI ideology.

This is no different from what happened routinely in the former Soviet Union, where official publications were periodically purged of names and references to what was deemed politically incorrect; our contemporary use of the phrase “political correctness” is indeed properly reminiscent of Stalin's Soviet Union.

At both Indiana and Stanford, the committees that recommended canceling Jordan's name, and the presidents who went along, made the suggestion that this would allow Jordan's legacy to be appreciated in its full human complexity. That suggestion is absurd on its face: who would be stimulated to even look into that legacy when Jordan's name is not anywhere mentioned outside archived documents?

My inquiries into all this had turned up Lulu Miller’s idiosyncratic book [8] that is partly a very detailed biography of Jordan and partly a personal memoir. The material about Jordan is highly informative about his life and work, but Miller is unreservedly judgmental about Jordan's eugenic beliefs and activities, venturing that, as time went on, he should have recognized his errors, both substantive and moral, and should have recanted them.

But that opinion displays ignorance of both human nature and the nature of science.

It is characteristic of human beings not to change firm beliefs once they have been acquired, no matter how obvious the contrary evidence might seem to outsiders. Researchers in general, very much including scientists, are no different in this from other human beings. The history of science illustrates copiously that no mainstream consensus is easily altered as contrary evidence builds up. As Thomas Kuhn pointed out in his universally cited work on scientific revolutions [9], the Old Guards do not easily change their view even when outside observers might judge them to have become unsupportable. Max Planck is often quoted for his observation that new theories do not displace the old-established ones until the old Guard has left the field [10], an observation that is sometimes paraphrased as “Science progresses funeral by funeral”.

Of course Miller is far from alone in being wrong about the nature of scientific activity,  such ignorance is all too widespread [11].

The problem for policy makers is to benefit from the best possible scientific insights even when accomplished experts, all of them firmly believing their own theories, differ drastically with one another; hence the suggestion that there should be established an “Institute for Scientific Judgment” [12], what is nowadays more usually called a Science Court [13].

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[1]        David Starr Jordan, The Higher Foolishness, Bobbs-Merrill, 1927

[2]        https://www.britannica.com/biography/David-Starr-Jordan,
“Last Updated: Jan 15, 2024”.

[3]        Chris Peacock, “Stanford will rename campus spaces named for David Starr Jordan and relocate statue depicting Louis Agassiz”, 7 October 2020; https://news.stanford.edu/2020/10/07/jordan-agassiz/

[4]        https://stanfordmag.org/contents/meet-president-jordan

[5]        Steve Sanders, 30 September 2020, “A better way to think about David Starr Jordan: Rename the building, keep the river and street” (members only article; https://medium.com/@stevesan/a-better-way-to-think-about-david-starr-jordan-no-on-the-building-yes-on-the-river-and-street-412d84202e4e

[6]        https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/28/indiana-u-rename-landmarks-named-david-starr-jordan

[7]        https://luddy.indiana.edu/contact/profile/?Michael_McRobbie

[8]        Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life, Simon & Schuster, 2020.
    I was surprised that the long-established publisher Simon & Schuster produced this book without index or bibliography, with “Notes” that make checking citations laboriously daunting. Without the imprint, I would have judged this a self-published work.

[9]        Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 2^nd ed., enlarged,1970 (1^st ed. 1962)

[10]      Max Planck, Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers, 1949 (translated from German by Frank Gaynor, Greenwood Press, 1968

[11]      Henry H. Bauer, Science Is Not What You Think: How It Has Changed, Why We Can’t Trust It, How It Can Be Fixed, McFarland, 2017

[12]      Arthur Kantrowitz, “Proposal for an Institution for Scientific Judgment”, Science, 156 (1967) 763-4.

[13]      Chapter 2 in ref. [11]