A Twitter Mob Takes Down an Administrator at Michigan State, and Faculty Cowards Respond by Recanting Their Own, Legitimate Research
Re-posted by Nicholas Stix
A Twitter Mob Takes Down an Administrator at Michigan State
The Graduate Employees Union denounced Stephen Hsu, and the president demanded his resignation.
By Jillian Kay Melchior
June 25, 2020 1:28 p.m. ET
[Wall Street Journal]
'We are scientists, seeking truth," Michigan State University physicist Stephen Hsu wrote in a 2018 blog post. "We are not slaves to ideological conformity." That might have been too optimistic. Last week MSU's president, Samuel L. Stanley Jr., yielded to a pressure campaign, based in part on that post, and asked Mr. Hsu to resign as senior vice president for research and innovation.
The trouble began June 10, when MSU's Graduate Employees Union composed a lengthy Twitter thread denouncing Mr. Hsu as, among other things, "a vocal scientific racist and eugenicist." The union claimed Mr. Hsu believes "in innate biological differences between human populations, especially regarding intelligence."
[N.S.: That there are "innate biological differences between human populations, especially regarding intelligence," is a matter, not of "belief," but of established scientific fact.]
Mr. Hsu says these accusations "were made in bad faith." Take that 2018 blog post, which responded to New York Times articles that, in his words, linked "genetic science to racism and white supremacy." In it, he wrote: "All good people abhor racism. I believe that each person should be treated as an individual, independent of ancestry or ethnic background. . . . However, this ethical position is not predicated on the absence of average differences between groups. I believe that basic human rights and human dignity derive from our shared humanity, not from uniformity in ability or genetic makeup." Mr. Hsu doesn't work in this field but rejects the idea that scientists should categorically exclude the possibility of average genetic differences among groups.
In a 2011 post, Mr. Hsu argued that standardized tests are predictive of the quality of graduate-school candidates. The post mentioned nothing about race, but the union imputed to him a belief "that lack of Black & Hispanic representation in higher ed reflects lower ability, despite evidence these tests negatively impact diversity."
The union also faulted him for having "directed funding to research downplaying racism in bias in police shootings." The MSU professor who conducted that work, psychologist Joe Cesario, tells me that "we had no idea what the data was going to be, what the outcome was going to be, before we did this study." Mr. Cesario has collected evidence from a simulator and from real-world interactions between police and citizens. He concluded that "the nature of the interaction really matters the most, and officers were not more likely to be ready to shoot upon encountering a black versus white citizen."
A June 3 op-ed in these pages cited Mr. Cesario's work, and the MSU communications team highlighted the mention in the June 9 edition of their email newsletter, InsideMSU. The next day, the Graduate Employees Union denounced Mr. Hsu. By June 11, editors of the newsletter had apologized "for including the item and for the harm it caused." Hundreds of MSU students and employees signed petitions calling for Mr. Hsu to be fired from the administration.
Mr. Hsu says he felt compelled to step down because he served at the pleasure of the president. But he thinks Mr. Stanley handled the matter badly. "The first action of the university should be to investigate, find the truth, and defend the person if the claims are false." Mr. Hsu says MSU undertook no such investigation.
MSU spokeswoman Emily Guerrant said: "President Stanley discussed the allegations directly with Mr. Hsu, and Mr. Hsu's responses to those complaints as expressed through his blog. The president also discussed the allegations with other relevant people and organizations at the university." She also sent me the university's statement on the controversy: "MSU stands behind the academic freedom of all our faculty to research any topic and those rights and privileges continue to extend to Dr. Hsu." The statement noted that Mr. Hsu is still a tenured member of the faculty.
Kevin Bird, president of the Graduate Employees Union, denies that the successful campaign to oust Mr. Hsu from the administration will have a chilling effect on free speech and inquiry. Mr. Bird said that he hadn't called for Mr. Hsu to lose tenure, and "if there's a campaign for that, I won't be a part of it." But senior vice president is "this really powerful administrative role," and "the way his beliefs were expressed made it seem like he had no concern for increasing diversity." So Mr. Hsu had to go. "I don't personally believe that kind of enforcing a higher conduct to administrators will necessarily chill faculty," Mr. Bird says.
Mr. Cesario disagrees. It's "bad or worse that they are doing this to an administrator," he says. "If anybody should be allowed to explore all topics, speak on all topics, and go where the data leads them, it's administrators." He expects the activists who won Mr. Hsu's dismissal won't stop "pushing for a narrowing of what kinds of topics people can talk about, or what kinds of conclusions people can come to." The number of administrators willing to defend scientific inquiry, Mr. Cesario adds, is "now down by one."
[N.S.: Cesario has since exposed himself as a liar, and a craven coward:
"Joseph Cesario, a researcher at Michigan State University, told Retraction Watch that he and David Johnson, of the University of Maryland, College Park and a co-author, have submitted a request for retraction to PNAS."
"We were careless when describing the inferences that could be made from our data. This led to the misuse of our article to support the position that the probability of being shot by police did not differ between Black and White Americans (<a title="https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias" href="https://www.city-journal.org/police-shootings-racial-bias">MacDonald, 2019</a>). To be clear, our work does not speak to this issue and should not be used to support such statements. We accordingly issued a correction to rectify this statement (Johnson & Cesario, 2020).</em>
A tip 'o the hate to Steve Sailer.
Ms. Melchior is an editorial page writer for the Journal.
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