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One of the many recent horrifying stories about American academia this year has been the crackdown on teaching and research about race & racism and especially sex, gender, & sexuality at Texas Tech. Inside Higher Ed covered an earlier 2025 version here, Erin in the Morning covered an April update here. The full memo laying out Texas Tech’s new policy is available here and makes an interesting, if disturbing, read.

The memo focuses especially on teaching & research related to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (SOGI). Among other draconian violations of academic freedom, the memo mandates a binary model of sex/gender and places: “A strict prohibition on SOGI content in all core and lower-level undergraduate courses, requiring alternate materials if primary texts center on or include these topics.” As Erin in the Morning notes:

The implications are profound—and at times border on absurd. In core and lower-level courses, there are no exceptions at all. A history professor course could not allocate instructional time to the Stonewall riots or the gay rights movement. If a U.S. history textbook includes a chapter on the AIDS crisis, the professor must skip it. An English professor assigning Oscar Wilde cannot lead a discussion of the trial and imprisonment that defined his later work and legacy. A professor teaching Virginia Woolf’s Orlando—a novel whose entire premise is gender fluidity—would appear to be in direct violation of the policy. A core literature class reading Walt Whitman’s “Calamus” poems could not explore their homoerotic themes. Sappho—the ancient Greek poet from whom the word “lesbian” derives—could not be taught with any meaningful analysis of her work’s content. A professor teaching Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night or As You Like It could not discuss the cross-dressing that is central to the plot, nor the long theatrical tradition of male actors performing female roles—because analyzing gender performance in Shakespeare would constitute allocating “instructional time” to gender identity themes. A political science class could not examine the Supreme Court’s ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges as anything other than a passing reference. A psychology professor in a core course could not discuss why homosexuality was removed from the DSM. Even a music appreciation course discussing Tchaikovsky or Freddie Mercury would need to avoid any sustained discussion of how their identities shaped their art.

The restrictions do not end at introductory courses, though they include some carve outs for upper-level classes. Not, though, for graduate theses. As the memo states:

Graduate theses and dissertations may only center on SOGI topics as a strictly temporary teach-out exception, explicitly limited to currently enrolled students completing their degrees within formally identified teach-out programs. Upon the conclusive termination of all designated teach-out programs, no degree-culminating student research within the TTU System will be permitted to center on SOGI topics.

It’s hard to keep track of all of the violations of academic freedom coming out of the Federal Government, let alone states like Florida and Texas, but this strikes me as among the most extreme. There’s not even a clear carve out for studying, say, trans regret, a favorite topic for the anti-trans actors in the Trump administration. Though I’m guessing that, in practice, you could get that one through the censors.

Another aspect of the memo caught my eye: how it constructs the ideas it purports to be defending against. This bit is less new, I think, as it echoes a lot of language we’ve seen from the Trump administration (see, e.g. this FAQ from the Department of Education about its 2025 guidance*) and it is less clearly articulated as policy for teaching and research but strikes me as revealing nonetheless. Here’s how Texas Tech describes “Theories or Works Related to Prohibited Advocacy.”

To ensure academic objectivity, faculty are prohibited from
teaching as absolute truth that:
● One race or sex is inherently superior to another;
● An individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, consciously or unconsciously;
● Any person should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of race or sex;
● Moral character or worth is determined by race or sex;
● Individuals bear responsibility or guilt for actions of others of the same race or sex; or
● Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are inherently racist, sexist, or constructs of oppression.

I’ve always been struck by these kinds of statements because they are, in some sense, a mirror or projection of how racists and sexists think about race and sex rather than what’s taught in, say, history or sociology classes. The fundamental starting point of work in the sociology of race and gender is that race and gender are socially constructed – that is, there’s nothing inherent about race or gender, not even their very existence. If you start from that premise, you cannot possibly argue that “an individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently” anything. Race and gender are what we collectively make of them. Nothing more, nothing less.

And the same even more so for the nebulous construct of “meritocracy or a strong work ethic.” Sociologists have long documented how belief in meritocracy functions in contemporary American society to reinforce racism (it’s part of Bonilla-Silva’s elaboration of colorblind racism, for example, under “Abstract Liberalism”). But that’s not even “inherent” in the idea of meritocracy, it’s a function of how merit has been defined and deployed in service of an existing racist order. And, of course, like most sociologists, Bonilla-Silva nests his analysis of racist ideologies in an understanding of racism as structural. Literally the title of the book is Racism without Racists. Beyond that, calls for Reparations are almost always aimed at governments, not individuals.** And let’s not even get started on how anti-racists and feminists tend to think about “absolute truth”!

Anti-trans, ant-feminist actors hold sex/gender essentialist beliefs. White supremacists hold racial essentialist beliefs. They project these beliefs back onto their opposition. Some of this is surely cynical and tactical. But I wonder how much of it reflects the sincere misunderstanding these actors hold about race & gender, and an assumption that everyone involved fundamentally shares that misunderstanding and believes at their core that race and sex are easily observable, distinct, natural kinds. Given that belief, they read the efforts of feminist and LGBTQ and anti-racist activists to dismantle patriarchy and racism as attempts to flip the hierarchy and do to cis white men what cis white men have been doing to them for centuries. Anything else – undoing gender, say – is just unthinkable.

* Here’s a quote from that FAQ with similar language to Texas Tech: “For example, an elementary school that sponsors programming that acts to shame students of a particular race or ethnicity, accuse them of being oppressors in a racial hierarchy, ascribe to them less value as contributors to class discussions because of their race, or deliberately assign them intrinsic guilt based on the actions of their presumed ancestors or relatives in other areas of the world could create a racially hostile environment, by interfering with or limiting the students’ ability to participate in or benefit from the school’s program or activity.”

** It’s notable, for example, that Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” targets governments not individuals, and the small attempts to implement reparations since have all focused on government action such as a study being undertaken here in Ithaca as part of a larger New York state effort. Some efforts have also come from non-governmental organizations, like Georgetown.

Below is recruitment info for a study being conducted by Theresa Morris of Texas A&M on sexual misconduct in sociology. Please share widely!

“Have you experienced, witnessed, or know of sexual misconduct committed by a professor, staff, or graduate student in a Sociology Department at an American college or university? 

If so, we invite you to participate in a research study on sexual misconduct committed by a professor, staff, or graduate student in a Sociology Department at an American college or university. Participation in the study will involve a one-time survey (~10-15 minutes) and will ask you questions about yourself and about your perspective and consequences of the sexual misconduct. We will not ask for your name or any other identifying information, including the name of your college or university. As a way to recruit others to our study, but completely optional for you, we will ask if you would be willing to share our research call with your network. 

Your participation is entirely voluntary, and the researchers will maintain your anonymity. Will not ask for your name or other identifying information. You will be assigned an ID number. If you have any questions or to find out more, please contact Professor Theresa Morris (Texas A&M University) at theresa.morris@tamu.edu. IRB number 2026-0083. IRB approval date: February 25, 2026.

To participate, click this link.

All my best,
Theresa Morris”

In 2023, the American Anthropological Association passed a boycott resolution very similar (though not identical) to the one proposed by Sociologists 4 Palestine. Some of the materials produced by the AAA campaign are useful to read in light of the debates happening within ASA right now about what a boycott would or wouldn’t mean in practice. I hadn’t seen these resources before and I thought they might be new and useful to many of you as well. Below, I’ll provide some links and excerpts.

This summary of the implementation of the resolution after its passage which contains some explicit language about how AAA’s boycott tries to target institutions while carving out protections for individual scholars:

With this in mind, the Executive Board has approved the following set of actions aligned with the Association’s core values and mission, barring Israeli academic institutions from:

• being listed in AAA’s published materials, including AAA’s AnthroGuide to Departments
• advertising in AAA publications, websites, and other communications channels, including the AAA Career Center
• using AAA conference facilities for job interviews
• participating in the AAA Graduate School Fair
• participating in the AAA Departmental Services Program
• participating in joint conferences or events with AAA and its sections, and
• where within AAA’s control, republishing and reprinting articles from AAA publications in journals and publications owned by Israeli institutions.

The AAA academic institutional boycott does not prevent:

• individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from registering for and attending AAA conferences, even if their institutions have paid for their expenses
• articles published in AAA journals from being reprinted or republished in journals not owned by Israeli institutions that are edited by individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions
• individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from serving as journal editors or Section / AAA elected officials, even if their institutions have paid for related expenses (their institution would be identified as being subject to an institutional boycott)
• individuals affiliated with Israeli academic institutions from publishing in AAA journals, even if their institutions have paid for their expenses, and
• Israeli university libraries from subscribing to AAA journals, including AnthroSource.

The AAA language here is useful for pointing out what is not prohibited. The ASA resolution is worded differently, but I think in practice would function very similarly, requiring most of the steps that AAA ended up enacting. For example, like the AAA boycott, the proposed ASA boycott would not prevent individuals affiliated with Israeli institutions from being members of ASA, attending ASA meetings, publishing in ASA journals, serving on ASA boards, etc. Even accessing ASA journals would be fairly straightforward, as ASA provides access to all members. (There would be some costs – it would be harder for sociology departments in Israeli universities to organize workshops or hire faculty from the US which would affect collaboration opportunities for scholars in those universities, for example, but it’s easy to overstate how much this boycott would affect individual scholars.)

Myths & Facts: A useful sheet addressing common myths about the AAA boycott, most of which apply to the proposed S4P boycott. For example:

Myth #4: Anthropologists should not boycott universities because this is where critical debate is fostered.

Fact: Critical debate and academic freedom are heavily suppressed by Israeli state and academic institutions. Israeli universities have built branch campuses in the occupied territories, and all Israeli universities supported the 2014 attack on Gaza. Palestinian and Israeli scholars are punished (in different ways) for speaking out against Israeli practices of discrimination and abuse. Israeli universities consistently violate the rights of Palestinians, both citizens and those living under occupation. By challenging the discriminatory practices of Israeli universities, this boycott bolsters both Jewish and Palestinian critics of Israeli state and university policy. See also this letter by 22 Israeli anthropologists who support the boycott.

“But, what about…”: Another fact sheet, pointed at specific common concerns, such as:

“Yes I oppose Israel’s actions but I don’t want to boycott individual Israeli scholars.”

The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) has called for a boycott that targets academic institutions only. The boycott does not apply to individual Israeli scholars

The boycott of Israeli academic institutions entails a “pledge not to collaborate on projects and events involving Israeli academic institutions, not to teach at or to attend conferences and other events at such institutions, and not to publish in academic journals based in Israel.” Cooperation and exchange with individual scholars is encouraged, so long as it does not happen on the grounds of or through the auspices of an Israeli academic institution.

Under the boycott, individual Israeli scholars can still be invited to international conferences, publish in international academic journals, and the like. Israelis are not being called on to boycott their own institutions, an Israeli scholar with state funds can still be invited to a conference abroad. Rather, the boycott is directed at the Israeli universities themselves. For more information, see PACBI’s guidelines.

And:

“Yes, I oppose Israel’s actions, but why aren’t you boycotting the United States or other countries that do bad things?”

One of the biggest myths about boycotts is that they are only appropriate in uniquely egregious situations or that boycotts are not valid if they do not encompass every other comparable situation in the world.

This boycott is a specific tactical call expressed in solidarity with the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel. Supporting this boycott does not automatically entail accepting or rejecting any other boycotts; we encourage everyone to assess each boycott on its own terms. The American Anthropological Association did not examine the record of every hotel or beverage provider in the world before signing on to the Hyatt or Coca-Cola boycotts. Cesar Chavez did not examine every agricultural product in supermarkets before asking us to boycott grapes. When we are called to adopt a particular boycott, we should mainly ask if it is warranted and likely to be effective.

Resources: S4P has produced its own materials too, but I found some of these Anthro ones to be super on point to the discussions floating around. Usefully, it includes a variety of endorsements and testimonials, including a task force report produce by AAA (of the sort I suggested ASA might authorize), and Palestinian and Israeli voices. For example, it links a speech by Israeli sociologist Hilla Dayan from a 2015 discussion at Tel Aviv University that succinctly states the case for targeting Israeli academic institutions:

So; the academic boycott. As you have all been waiting so politely, it’s time I presented the goods. I may disappoint some people here by not presenting the case against the involvement in the occupation of the Israeli academia in general, and Tel Aviv University in particular. It’s a strong case that shows that academia heavily services the security establishments, which it endows with special grants and speedy academic titles. Academic research is being used to provide legal and ethical justifications for the occupation, philosophers serve on military tribunals sentencing refusniks, archeologists dig in the service of the extreme right in Jerusalem, and the list is long. I would be glad to share with you these materials.

…

I do not support the boycott out of desperation, the belief that only the “civilized” world will save Israel from itself. I support the boycott from within, out of a love of the people living here, as an act of patriotic love for this place, out of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, out of fidelity to the idea of the university as handmaiden of society, not the state, and out of a hope that I will never ever lose, a hope for our future, after apartheid Israel.

There’s lot more there to read through, and most of it just as relevant (or more so) in 2026 when considering ASA’s options as it was in 2023 for AAA.

What I haven’t found yet is a retrospective on what the AAA’s boycott has meant for the association. So far, all I can find is coverage from the initial debates over the resolution. It’s only been three years, but they’ve been quite a tumultuous three!, and I’d love to hear from anyone involved in AAA what, if anything, the boycott has amounted to in practice.

The following is a guest post by Roi Livne and an anonymous co-author.

They called them “aid distribution centers.” Orwell himself would not have thought of a better term. Every day, shortly after they opened, Dr. Mark Brauner, a U.S. emergency physician who was volunteering at Nasser Hospital in the Gaza Strip, heard

ambulances flying toward the hospital, private vehicles, donkey-drawn carts bringing in people, streams after streams of people. They often have isolated gunshot wounds to their head, to their neck, in the very center of their chest. […] We’re seeing lots of children, adolescents, teenagers. We’re seeing some older people. But it’s really more execution-style than the typical blast injuries that we see, which tend to be more multisystemic, like head, neck, chest and abdomen with shrapnel. These are really isolated, targeted types of injuries that are much more consistent with the firsthand reports that we’re getting and a lot of the video and that we’re watching from the so-called food distribution centers, where it’s kind of like a perverted Squid Games, where they’re giving a certain period of time to get the aid. If there’s any chaos, then they just start opening fire. And then, we see it in our facility 20, 30 minutes later.[1]

Less than a year later, a group of sociologists is petitioning in support of the ASA President’s decision to disallow members to vote on what they define as a “deeply contested” and “complex political question.” The group is not lacking in academic acumen and credentials. Among them is at least one member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of our favorite scholars of the U.S. right wing, a brilliant gender scholar who served as ASA president, and two prominent economic sociologists.[2] The list is getting longer as we write. All agree that the ASA should not take a position on issues that fall “outside most members’ areas of expertise”, because this “would place sociologists in the position of being asked, collectively, to endorse the exclusion of colleagues based on nationality.” 

Let us start with the last accusation. It is false. Sociologists for Palestine’s resolution does not call to exclude colleagues based on their nationality. The allegation is especially puzzling because the petition’s initial description of the resolution is accurate: “[a] motion to boycott Israeli universities and organizations” [emphasis ours]. Sociologists for Palestine have clarified the difference between boycotting individuals and boycotting institutions multiple times, in the FAQs on their website and in endless exchanges on social media. But don’t trust them. Read the language of the resolution and decide for yourself.

The petition’s other argument is even more troubling. Over the years, the ASA has taken positions on numerous political issues: from same-sex marriage to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, to the South African apartheid. In all these cases, only a minority of the ASA’s members had expertise on the topic—an obvious situation in any highly professionalized discipline—which did not stop the association from presenting and passing those resolutions.

What exactly are the “deeply contested political issue” and “complex political questions” in this case? The facts are clear and the brutal stories are accessible to any person who wishes to know them. They are meticulously chronicled and organized in a superb online archive that the Israeli historian Lee Mordechai compiled. So is the bottom line: some 20,000 babies, toddlers, and children killed; a direct death toll of over 75,000 people (by Israeli army data, 83 percent of them were civilians); and a minimal estimate of excess mortality (including deaths due to starvation, malnutrition, healthcare prevention, and dislocation) that surpasses 83,000.

This harrowing bloodbath was not accidental. Accidents are isolated anomalous events—a bomb falling in the wrong place, a stray bullet hitting a civilian, or soldiers misidentifying a target. Israel’s assault on Gaza, by contrast, was a two-year-long campaign, which generated a fairly stable death toll throughout. Israeli officials spoke very openly about it, declaring their intentions in full transparency and continuously making decisions on resuming the campaign and increasing the toll. On October 28, 2023, the Israeli prime minister announced Israel was dealing with “Amalekites”—the ancient people that the Bible commands to exterminate—and on October 9 its minister of defense announced he had ordered “a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.” Using AI models, the Israeli army struck entire blocks and neighborhoods when these models identified them as likely to have Hamas operatives in them. There are also dozens of gruesome first-hand accounts on how bored Israeli soldiers murdered for entertainment and a detailed report documenting 94 Palestinian prisoners who were tortured or neglected to death, as well as a video documentation of several prison guards raping a prisoner. The prosecutor who leaked this video was jailed and dismissed from the army. Last month, the prosecutor who replaced her dropped all charges against the rapists. 

While we cannot speak in the petitioners’ names, we do not believe that any of them condones such atrocities. Nor do we imagine that they would consider a genocide justifiable because it was done in retaliation to the October 7 massacre, or, even more disturbingly, as a preventative genocide, which would supposedly deter future Hamas attacks. 

Perhaps, then, the reference to “deeply contested issue” has to do with the diverse moral stances and opinions among ASA members? This diversity surely exists. But our discipline has spent much of the past 150 years analyzing how social solidarity and shared values can still exist in socially differentiated and morally diverse societies. Indeed, Alvin Gouldner’s timeless essay, The Sociologist as Partisan, called to organize the entire discipline around values.[3] What other value than an unconditional commitment to human life and dignity does our tribe of sociologists share? And if we share this value, how can we not respond when a genocide takes place?

Or do the “complex political questions” have to do with the particular strategy (BDS) that Sociologists for Palestine chose to adopt? This is an issue that the ASA membership should discuss and debate. Whatever one’s position on the matter is, it is hard to deny that the ASA’s two-year debate over Palestine and Israel has made the association a hustling and bustling space. Multiple panels have been organized, heated arguments have been exchanged, members have been called to educate themselves on the topic and many of them rose to the challenge. 

It is noteworthy that the petition does not suggest any substantive opposition to the resolution. Instead, it affirms the ASA President’s decision to close a discussion to avoid contestation. Conflict avoidance has never been a form of collective inquiry. If any of the petitioners—or any other ASA member—feels ambivalent about one or more of the resolutions’ proposals, they should express themselves and voice their doubts. If they believe, as this petition states, that asking thousands of ASA members to cast individual votes is the wrong way to deliberate and decide on the issue, they should endorse proposals such as Dan Hirschman’s, which marks several directions that the ASA President and legal counsel foreclosed when they excluded council and membership from the decision.

It seems to us, then, that behind the petition is a deeper vision that offers a stark alternative to Gouldner’s: “The sociologist as bystander.” The petitioners are asking ASA members to gawp at human misery, death, and destruction as dispassionate experts, blink, and proclaim that they shall not speak on the issue, as it is very complex and contested. Perhaps years from now, Max Weber will arise from the dead and misquote Nietzsche again, this time to our embarrassed faces:

“Narrow specialists without minds, pleasure-seekers without heart; in its conceit this nothingness imagines it has climbed to a level of humanity never before attained.” 

Roi Livne is an Israeli Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Michigan.

Anonymous is a sociologist working in an Israeli academic institution, who maintains her anonymity to protect her job and personal safety.

[1] Democracy Now, “One Mass Casualty After Another.” June 25, 2025. https://www.democracynow.org/2025/6/25/gaza_healthcare [Last Accessed: April 14, 2026]

[2] Omissions should be attributed to our ignorance, not to any disrespect.

[3] We owe this connection between Gouldner’s program and U.S. sociologists’ engagement of the question of Palestine to the late Michael Burawoy.

This text is posted on behalf of the sociologists listed at the end of the text. Others are welcome to sign via comment or by contacting one of the original signers.

We are sociologists (and many of us ASA members) committed to the discipline and to the highest standards of scholarly inquiry. We believe the motion to boycott Israeli universities and organizations should not be brought to a membership vote.

While we hold differing views on the underlying issues, we share a common concern: even when framed as a procedural matter, bringing this resolution to a vote would commit the ASA to taking a disciplinary position on a deeply contested political issue outside most members’ areas of expertise. It would place sociologists in the position of being asked, collectively, to endorse the exclusion of colleagues based on nationality.

Professional associations should not claim to speak for the entire discipline on complex political questions. Sociologists should speak in their own names. Even if a majority of voting members were to support such a measure, many would not. A 50% + 1 vote is not an appropriate basis for the ASA to take a political stance that purports to represent the discipline as a whole.

Original signers, in alphabetical order:

• Amy Binder
• Kevin Leicht
• Andrew Perrin
• Ashley Rubin
• Cristobal Young
• Ezra Zuckerman Sivan

Additional signatories can be found here

As most readers of this blog likely know*, the American Sociological Association (ASA) is in the midst of a crisis. Earlier this year, Sociologists 4 Palestine (S4P) submitted a petition signed by 428 sociologists calling on ASA to hold a membership vote on whether to boycott Israeli academic institutions. The full text of the proposed resolution is here. ASA leadership responded with a letter arguing that the proposed resolution exceeded the scope of what membership resolutions were allowed to address:

All of the proposed actions are governance matters related to ASA business operations and are therefore not petitionable. Only ASA Council can make decisions regarding ASA operational and governance matters.

This reading of the ASA bylaws is disputed (see S4P’s response here) but many seem convinced by it (see, for example, response to a recent sectionwide survey in the Environmental Sociology section, one of many sections to have polled members on their response to the situation**). Let’s, for a moment, take ASA’s reading at face value and as correct. The petition, as submitted, would be invalid as a binding membership vote. What should ASA do?

Three further stipulations: First, ASA agrees that the actions requested in the resolution are within ASA Council’s power to enact. Second, ASA holds itself to be a democratic, membership organization. Third, there is precedent for the organization taking similar actions to those proposed in the S4P petition (most notably in response to South African Apartheid in the 1980s).

Given that, here’s one possible solution: ASA should place on the ballot an advisory vote on the proposed resolution. The vote, per this reading of the by-laws, cannot be binding because it concerns an “operational and governance” matter but there’s nothing against ASA asking its members’ opinions on such a matter. Then, ASA Council should commit to voting on the resolution. This vote would be informed by the results of the membership poll, but not bound by it. It could also follow a formal process for gathering more information, such as constituting a committee with expertise on e.g. the history of South African apartheid, social movement boycotts, and contemporary Israel-Palestine (all of which are topics about which sociologists have substantial collective expertise). Council could consider an expert committee report plus the membership poll and make a formal decision (to enact the resolution, enact parts of it, enact some alternative form of sanctions, or to do nothing).

In so doing, ASA would both follow the letter of its by-laws and the spirit of its constitution as a democratic association. Additionally, it would make it clear that ASA leadership is not hiding behind bureaucratic procedure to avoid taking a stance on an important issue simply because it is controversial (which is what ASA’s response appears to do).*** If ASA agrees that Council can decide the issue, then they should decide it. Let members vote, let experts advise, and then make a decision.

* Assuming we still have readers?

** Examples of quotes from that survey:

Their justification is appropriate. If the organization should consider taking this stance, collective deliberation should be the first step, not a vote by separate individuals. A forum at the annual meeting might be appropriate.

If members read ASA’s actual policy and rationale rather than circulated mischaracterizations, they’re likely to approve ASA’s decision in this case, as I do.

I wholeheartedly support the ASA leadership’s rationale for not permitting the petition to go to a vote. It is very clearly (to me) outside of the scope for member petitions. I do not support this type of public policy position going to a vote to membership.

*** Or, worse yet, hiding behind bureaucratic procedure to avoid making clear a stance that is morally indefensible, i.e., unwillingness to oppose genocide.

::dusts off the blog::

Hi everyone! Things have been a bit quiet here at scatterplot. I wish we could say the same for the rest of the world. Instead, things have been very, very loud.

Right now, President Trump is threatening to commit war crimes against Iran after the initial failures of his illegal war. Every day has felt like this for a year. I was just in a meeting for a new paper collaboration and we joked about how surreal it feels to plan to write something that might, if all goes well, come out in 2028 when it’s not clear there will even be a 2028. And yet, what else are we to do?

One reason I’ve been blogging less* is that our collective public conversations in 2026 seem to fixate on basically two topics: Trump and AI. Many have noted how climate change has fallen off the agenda, for example.** One of the best essays I’ve read in a long time is about both Trump & AI and it helped me make sense out of why those two topics have so dominated conversations, and why that’s so frustrating.

In The Guardian, historian of science Kevin Baker published an excellent essay titled: “AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying.” If you haven’t read it yet, go do so and come back. Got it? Ok.

One of the excellent points Kevin makes in the piece is that “AI” (and especially LLMs) are a charismatic technology:

A charismatic technology shapes the whole field around it, the way a magnet organises iron filings. LLMs may be the most powerful instance of this type in history.

Kevin goes on to write about the coverage of the horrifying destruction of a girls’ school in Iran in the initial wave of the US bombing campaign:

In the days after the strike, the charisma of AI organised the entire political conversation around the technology: whether Claude hallucinated, whether the model was aligned, whether Anthropic bore responsibility for its deployment. The constitutional question of who authorised this war and the legal question of whether this strike constitutes a war crime were displaced by a technical question that is easier to ask and impossible to answer in the terms it set. The Claude debate absorbed the energy. That is what charisma does.

Trump’s charisma combined with AI’s charisma made for an irresistible discursive black hole. The overall war – launched without legal authority, with unclear aims, by an increasingly incoherent authoritarian with access to nuclear codes, with immediate consequences felt most sharply by those directly killed or harmed but also diffusely by anyone who buys anything – has been hard to turn away from, perhaps the most egregious of Trump’s litany of crimes. Adding an AI angle took that gasoline and set it absolutely ablaze.

In general, stepping back, we can feel this kind of charisma-absorption of energy effect ever since Trump’s rise to political prominence in the lead up to the 2016 election. I am sick of talking about Trump. I am sick of talking about AI. And yet talking about anything else feels like a struggle. But what other stories are we missing as the Trump-AI charisma absorption nexus sucks up all the energy in the room? How do we keep an eye on the very real and very consequential actions of Trump and the very real and very consequential transformations threatened by the rise of LLMs without losing our freaking minds/our ability to see other stories and other angles?

I don’t have any answers right now. But having that language to pose the question has been helpful for me, so perhaps it will be for you too.

* The main reason I’ve been blogging less is that I have two kids, ages 6 and 3, who together bring in average of something like 4-5 diseases per month. The four members of my household had five doctor appointments yesterday. Today is, knock on wood, the first day both my kids will have been in school all day in almost a month. Blogging was, suffice it to say, one of the first things to go.

** This can be overstated – we’re still talking a lot more about climate than in say 2007, but a lot less than during the Biden administration. See MeCCO for some data.

Two recent surveys give strikingly different answers. Pew’s American Trends Survey finds that 70% of Americans think “the higher education system in the U.S. is generally going in the wrong direction,” while Lazer et al.’s American High Education Barometer study finds “59% approve of US universities. A majority approval is evident across a wide array of demographics, as well as in every single state” and “75% of Americans trust universities and colleges ‘some’ or ‘a lot’. This places higher education in 4th place out of the 20 institutions we evaluated in terms of institutional trust.” What gives?

The two surveys were conducted similarly in time (Pew Sept. 22-28, 2025 and Barometer July 3-August 1, 2025), and both are online nonprobability samples weighted for known population parameters. Barometer is a substantially larger sample (N=31,891, relative to Pew’s 3,445), but Pew’s can hardly be called a small survey sample.

Of course, right-direction/wrong-direction is not the same as trust/mistrust, so it’s possible the public is carefully parsing the question texts, and lots of people think higher ed is going in the wrong direction but nevertheless trust it. That seems unlikely to me.

Barometer doesn’t seem to have published the question text, but invites communication to the report’s authors. It seems, though, that Barometer asks about “universities and colleges,” while Pew asks about “higher education.” That’s potentially a big difference in priming, since universities and colleges may include attitudes about science, health care, and even college sports, while “higher education” may signal undergraduate education more narrowly. (Just my conjecture – I have no evidence for this.)

The other questions on the Pew survey do focus mostly on undergrad education (all the questions except one are about students; the remaining one is “Advancing research and innovation”), while Barometer asks about universities’ role in technology, science, economic growth, health care, democracy, and relations with other countries.

It’s tempting to just go with the Barometer survey since the findings are much more comforting. I suspect what’s really going on is that most Americans don’t have well-formed attitudes about higher ed (or universities and colleges) either way, which leaves them open to more significant framing and priming effects in differing surveys.

There’s a lot of talk about Americans’ declining trust in higher education, often citing Gallup’s “confidence” measure (yet another, distinct from “trust,” “right-direction,” and “approve”). Gallup finds a big partisan gap; Barometer does too, but with a higher baseline level of trust. And a lot of higher-ed reform discussions and proposals are built on the premise that this distrust is fixed and demonstrated.

I think Americans should trust higher ed. I think higher ed should try to be trustworthy. And I think higher ed should reform in a variety of ways. But the wide variation in findings in these surveys makes me think the reform should be based on a careful analysis of where we are doing research, education, and service well and where we are falling short rather than trying to follow public (dis)trust.

Believe it or not, there’s more on that old Regnerus “study” (see https://scatter.wordpress.com/2012/06/23/bad-science-not-about-same-sex-parenting/ for the early rebuttal, more than 13 years ago!). In a recent book, Multiverse Analysis by Cristobal Young and Erin Cumberworth, they use the technique the book is about to re-analyze the data from Regnerus’s NFSS in order to assess the likelihood of the article’s having been correct. The results are complicated, as I’ll discuss briefly below. But the complexity didn’t stop Paul Sullins from declaring in Public Discourse that it constitutes “New Vindication for the Regnerus Same-Sex Parenting Study.” Does it?

No, not really. And the reasons are pretty much the same as in that old Scatterplot post and the two articles that followed: Perrin, Caren, and Cohen 2013 and Cheng and Powell 2015.

As I understand it, the Multiverse Analysis approach Young and Cumberworth advocate is a way of computationally modeling the likelihood of various outcomes being true by simulating an expert debate over modeling and then harvesting all the possible outcomes. (BTW this seems very interesting to me but it’s not at all my field, so please feel free to correct my interpretation.) From the book’s introduction, the goal is to

reduce the discretion of authors to pick an exactly preferred model and result while expanding the range of models and results that any one author considers. The method involves specifying a set of plausible model ingredients (including possible controls, variable definitions, estimation commands, and standard error calculations) and estimating all possible combinations of those model ingredients. The principle is to use only vetted, credible model inputs, as any author would do when selecting a single estimate, but then report back every estimate that can be obtained from those inputs. It perturbates the model using a combinations algorithm while also reporting how much each modeling input (or assumption) matters for the results.

They chose several controversial studies to submit to this analytical strategy, including Jeremy’s favorite hurricane-names study. Controversial studies lend themselves well to the approach, not just because they’re interesting intrinsically but also because there are extant critiques in the literature that can be used to create the multiverse.

One of the chapters is based on the Regnerus study (Chapter 11, “Data Processing Multiverse Analysis of Regnerus and Critics”). Most of the analysis deals with the distinction between Regnerus’s emphasis on the status of parents as “same-sex” and critic Rosenfeld’s (2015) emphasis on family instability by focusing on transitions. The chapter finds basically that Regnerus’s point estimates are larger than warranted, but that nevertheless the large majority (76%) of models are “both negative and statistically significant.” Comparing the Regnerus approach to the Rosenfeld approach yields this graph:

in which both still yield negative results, but Rosenfeld’s less so.

So does this count as “vindication?” No. Because the core problems with the study were never the analytical strategy but rather the data themselves. As documented elsewhere, NFSS used a screener question, asking people whether a parent ever had a romantic relationship with a member of the same sex. Everyone who said “yes” was included in the survey in order to oversample for those who said their parents had done so.

Not to revisit the “cheeto-eating” side-argument, but there are all sorts of reasons an online survey-taker might say yes to that question, and many of those reasons are not about the accuracy of the statement. Young and Cuumberworth agree: “We see it as bad practice to prescreen a survey with the question ‘are [sic] either of your parents gay?’ and then include everyone who responds ‘yes.’”

The later questions are similarly suspect, with the effect that a significant number of those identified as having been “parented” by “same-sex parents” were almost certainly not. Cheng and Powell’s paper details this well on the data-cleaning side, but even if you take the respondents to be telling the truth, the thing measured by NFSS is not the thing most people think of as same-sex parenting.

What that means is that no number of alternative analyses in the multiverse can possibly discover an effect of same-sex parenting, because the data don’t contain any plausible measure of same-sex parenting.

Young and Cumberworth also chastise some of the critiques as overly focused on significance testing:

A focus on significance testing alone, to the exclusion of effect sizes, is bad statistical practice in any context (Gelman and Stern 2006). It is especially flawed here, as the critics provide new specifications that cut the sample size and greatly reduce the treatment group. … It is not a fair assessment of the data to report that significance levels fall after dropping as much as 44 percent of the treatment group: Of course statistical significance will be lower when the sample is smaller.

I think this is wrong. If “dropping” the cases were just a technical matter, they might have a case. But the rationale for dropping the cases is that they are not in fact cases in the treatment group. If I assign 100 people randomly to receive the COVID vaccine, but only 56 of them actually get the vaccine, it is the right decision to drop the other 44 cases (or, I suppose, assign them to the control arm of the study). The remaining 56% of the cases don’t provide sufficient information to confidently distinguish the point estimate from zero, which is what the significance “stars” mean. In other words: based on the 56% of the treatment group that we have some confidence actually received the treatment, we cannot conclude that the treatment mattered. That’s, well…. “no difference.”

My colleague Lisa Siranagian’s piece, “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” has been getting attention including positively in the Chronicle Review and negatively in Minding the Campus. When I first read it, I wrote privately to Dr. Siranagian, as I think the argument is important and I disagree with her on it. Below (with her permission) is an adaptation of what I wrote to her.

I think both “viewpoint” and “diversity” are bad ways of thinking about this problem, but I think the problem itself is quite real and quite worrisome. (I prefer the term “ideological pluralism,” which is still problematic but perhaps less so.) It’s important to define the scope of the problem: I don’t think it’s accurate to say academia is less ideologically diverse than other major institutions, but rather that its diversity is remarkably skewed relative to the space of politics in general, and I think that skew interferes with inquiry, particularly but not entirely in the social sciences and humanities.

I don’t consider myself part of any “movement” for viewpoint diversity, but I am more sympathetic to the concerns raised under that label than Lisa is; and indeed I am “thrilled to have [her] ideas in the mix.”

I think the article’s distinction between intrinsic and instrumental reasons for valuing intellectual diversity rests upon a questionable premise: that one or another “viewpoint” — a metaphor that I think is itself quite problematic — is “the best or most true.” I would argue that that’s not generally possible — even in the natural sciences, but certainly not in the humanities or social sciences. Certainly any one question could theoretically be resolved as best or true, though even that is pretty rare. But the idea that a package of tendencies and approaches — a “viewpoint” — is going to be proven better or true (or worse or false) strains credulity. (I also think that goal is rather totalitarian, in that it seeks univocality in a pluralistic society.) In the absence of that, it’s both intrinsically and instrumentally better to entertain a larger range of claims and arguments.

I agree with a point the article makes a couple of times, particularly in thesis 1: that valuing ideological pluralism is at odds with a “search for truth” purism. If the process of inquiry can be performed entirely separately from any political motivations or considerations, then there is no justification for seeking political/ideological breadth because it’s not relevant to the process of inquiry. In short: ideological pluralism is valuable only insofar as the process of inquiry can’t be separated entirely from ideologically-tinged foundations, so the “stick to objective science” goal is at odds with the ideological pluralism goal. (There may still be pedagogical justifications, but that’s outside the scope of what we’re talking about, I think.) And I do think it would be helpful for scholars particularly in the humanities and social sciences to work hard on laboring under the discipline of making evidence-based arguments that are not bound to political positions — but as you know well, that itself is quite contested and even unpopular among many of our colleagues.

But even if that discipline were more widely supported, this unmotivated “search for truth” ideal strikes me as hopelessly naive and very much at odds with all we know about the social realities of inquiry across the disciplines. This is not because truth itself is impossible, but rather because its discovery is animated specifically by motivated debate and contest. New evidence isn’t just “uncovered,” but emerges because someone is investigating a hypothesis that is surprising or even heterodox; new methods don’t initiate paradigms on their own, they do so in the hands of someone(s) in contest with extant paradigms. I’d argue that in many (but not all) fields, the set of hypotheses (or arguments, claims) that get considered is constrained insofar as the scholars working with them share more sets of value propositions — “viewpoints” — than necessary. That’s why I think the article’s conclusion is wrong: “…those of us who want good ideas to win and bad ideas to lose should understand that viewpoint diversity… can only ensconce more bad ideas.”

Another way of saying this: what claims in the humanities and social sciences are true in the same way as “DNA’s structure is a double helix” is true? I suspect there are actually relatively few claims even in the natural sciences that are true in quite that same way; for example, “we have to close public schools for a year and a half to mitigate COVID risk” is a scientific claim that is less true than the DNA claim. And I certainly don’t think claims like “settler colonialism is always evil” or “inequality is the most important outcome to diagnose” can be said to have the same truth-status as the structure of DNA, even though both enjoy strong, almost axiomatic, support within relevant fields.

Theses 2-4 seem to me to rest on a foundational claim: that intellectual matters are entirely distinct from political ones, and that when disciplinary standards are “settled upon by the collective expertise of the discipline,” that settling-upon carried no political dimension. Again, this strikes me as wildly unlikely as an empirical matter, and probably simply impossible in many fields based on the fact that so many of these standards are themselves political (or moral) on their faces. 

I think theses 5 and 7 are pretty similar – they amount to proponents of viewpoint diversity are lying about what they really want. Thesis 5 holds that they don’t want all diversity, just a particular kind; thesis 7 that they hold this preference for reasons of “bad faith.” That may be true of some proponents; to the extent that I am a proponent, it is not true of me, and I don’t believe it to be true of many of the others I’ve talked and worked with who count more as “proponents” than I do. More importantly than that, though, it’s not a verifiable question; the argument for viewpoint diversity needs to succeed or fail on its merits, not on whether you think the people making the arguments are good or not. Similarly for thesis 6 and part of the opening: the fact that anti-university actors (including most prominently the Trump administration) have used the rhetoric of viewpoint diversity to attack universities, professors, and academic freedom is certainly true, but not an argument against viewpoint diversity itself.

There are, of course, very bad reasons for pursuing viewpoint diversity. One is because the Trump Administration wants it (or claims to). Another is because we anticipate it may insulate us from future attacks. But I believe the other reasons I offered above are valid and important.