The Review

In her dissenting opinion in Students for Fair Admissions vs. Harvard, the Supreme Court decision that overturned affirmative action, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, made a startling assertion. “For high-risk Black newborns,” she wrote, “having a Black physician more than doubles the likelihood that the baby will live, and not die.”

That would be astonishing, if it were true. In fact, almost nothing even resembling it seems to be the case. The 2020 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper on which the claim was based — “Physician-Patient Racial Concordance and Disparities in Birthing Mortality for Newborns” — identified a much more modest effect. As Ted Frank wrote in the The Wall Street Journal, Justice Jackson appears to have accepted a garbled summary of the PNAS paper provided in an amicus brief by the Association of American Medical Colleges. In any event, the paper’s findings failed to check out. In a follow-up PNAS study reinterpreting the original data, George J. Borjas and Robert VerBruggen conclude that the “racial concordance effect” is “statistically insignificant.”

Justice Jackson’s inclusion of such an implausible statistic in her dissent provides the opening anecdote of the University of Toronto psychologist Paul Bloom’s recent essay in our pages, “Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings.” The sciences and the social sciences, Bloom writes, are afflicted at scale by a failure of skepticism across prestige journals when it comes to results that are politically convenient for liberals. By the same token, results liberals find politically inconvenient face greater hurdles than they would if they were politically neutral. As a rule of thumb, Bloom suggests, you can assume that scientific findings progressives consider attractive are less robust than those they consider unattractive, because the latter have weathered a more rigorous review process.

I suspect that many will nod along in agreement with Bloom’s argument — and that many others will object. Either way, I’d love to hear from you.

This Is a Library!

Last week, Andrew Manuel Crespo and Reshmaan Hussam, both faculty members at Harvard, described in our pages the protest they’d joined in Harvard’s Widener Library. The protest was a silent one; the only verbal expression was the printed signs they’d taped to their laptops reading “Embrace Diverse Perspectives,” an excerpt from the Harvard Library’s statement of values. Their action was in solidarity with a dozen Harvard students who had been suspended from the library for their own silent protest — this one against Israel’s conduct in the expanding Middle Eastern war. The students wore keffiyehs; their laptops boasted slips of paper reading “Imagine It Happened Here.”

“We do not understand why a university would punish people for reading in a library,” Crespo and Hussam write, “even if they are reading in hopes that others will engage with the ideas they are exploring.” And they conclude by asking: “Will it punish us, too?”

It has, as The Harvard Crimson reported. Although the participating faculty members retain their borrowing privileges, they are not allowed to enter Widener for two weeks, the same ban the students faced. In the meantime, similar silent protests have taken place at the Harvard Law library, from which scores of students have now been banned.

Although Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom has been criticized, including in these pages, for failing to defend the expressive rights of students protesting Israel, its co-president Melanie Matchett Wood, a professor of mathematics, was quick to condemn Harvard’s punishment of the library protesters. The “administration’s claim that this behavior is somehow prohibited by University policy,” Wood wrote in the Crimson, “violates widely accepted norms for free expression on campus, and is inconsistent with the value of free speech described as ‘essential’’ in the University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, a document which since 1970 has outlined the importance and limits of free speech on campus.”

Recommended

• “The faith in which I was raised, and in which I found deep inspiration from fellow believers of all types, of whatever political persuasion, remains the same faith, even as the Church itself goes through cultural permutations, here and abroad, that occasionally fill me with a sense of impending doom.” In Commonweal, Phil Klay writes about social changes in the Catholic Church — and also about Evelyn Waugh.
• “This year the Riksbank awarded its prize to a treatment of early modern institutions so selective it functions as a bedtime story for capitalists. The good institutions produced prosperity. The bad ones produced misery.” In The Financial Times, Brendan Greeley takes aim at the economists Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson.

• “Nostalgia’s power is most potent when no compelling, believable vision of a brighter future exists.” In Aeon, Jennifer M. Morton reads Hobbes in light of present politics.

  Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin