Roland Fryer writes in the WSJ-
Anti-Israel Protests and the ‘Signaling’ Problem
The economic theory that explains the powerlessness and confusion of university administrators.
University administrators get more power if confusion and factionalism prevails on the campus. If everybody has a grievance against everybody else, it makes sense to have a large class of administrators who get paid to appear to be interested in that nonsense.
The anti-Israel protests on college campuses present a puzzle for observers of academic norms and mores.
Not really. There has been a big 'Boycott, Disinvest, Sanction' movement since 2005. It was bound to seize this opportunity to regroup and gain funding. Previously, it had been unsuccessful because Israel is a knowledge economy. We hurt ourselves by boycotting them. By contrast, Palestinians seem to have produced little of academic value though there are plenty of excellent Palestinian Doctors and Engineers and so forth.
Today, even relatively minor linguistic infractions, like the failure to use someone’s preferred pronouns, are categorized as abuse at many elite institutions, some of which even define potentially offensive speech as “violence.”
This has caused a backlash. Vivek Ramaswamy was able to parley a book attacking 'Wokeism' into a Presidential bid. But Obama had already warned against it and the film 'Undercover Brother 2' had suggested the toxic thing was actually created by 'the Man' to 'divide and rule' the ghetto.
One need not even speak to run afoul of campus speech codes; I recently participated in a training in which we were warned of the consequences of remaining silent if we heard someone “misgender” someone else.
We are pleased to hear that eggheads are being bullied and humiliated by stupid administrators.
Definitions of “harmful” speech have become so capacious that one assumes they include antisemitism.
Though Jews are the most ardent attackers of Israel.
In some cases, they surely do: A university wouldn’t take a hands-off approach to a student or faculty member who expressed prejudice against Jews in the manner of Archie Bunker or the Charlottesville marchers.
Unless Archie could claim Jewish heritage.
Yet that’s what many of them have done when faced with protesters’ speech that is offensive to Jews, even when it crosses the line into threats, intimidation and harassment.
Jews are smart. Bully them and they will go elsewhere to do smart things. This is good news for Israel. A knowledge economy needs more and more smart people. Indians can be brought in to do the menial jobs.
At a December congressional hearing, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT struggled to answer when Rep. Elise Stefanik (R., N.Y.) asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violates the schools’ “code of conduct or rules regarding bullying and harassment.”
To be fair, Presidents of Ivy League Schools tend to struggle with tying their own shoe-laces.
Two of the presidents lost their jobs, but the central question remains unresolved: How could it be that the university is zealous about policing pronouns but blasé about the advocacy of hateful violence?
People who advocate hateful violence might kill you or firebomb your house. Pick on the weak. Obviously, sooner or later, they will turn on you and accuse you of subjecting them to epistemic rape. Better still, stop speaking English. Invent your own language.
For someone who prides himself on adherence to fact, reason and rationality, trying to follow the logic of university decision-making over the past five years has been a mind-bending experience.
Why just the last five years? Political Correctness has been around for ages. Phillip Roth's 'the human stain' came out in 2000. A professor of African American heritage is accused of racism because he uses the word 'spook' to mean students who don't show up for class. Are they ghosts? It turns out the student in question was black. The joke here is that for older people 'spook' meant White- especially a white Jazz musician. I suppose one might say that Edward Said- who was Palestinian- contributed to the rise of 'grievance studies' and the notion that those in authority had absorbed a racist or colonialist epistemology and thus should be investigated by the thought police.
But universities are also political entities, where competing interests vie for influence over the function and purpose of the institution.
Grievance Studies can create administrative jobs for those with credentials in it. Why be an ill-paid Teaching Assistant or struggle for tenure on a pittance when you can be a well-paid administrator?
In the case of the protests, two competing interests have made themselves heard most loudly: students and faculty who are hostile to Israel
both may have more precarious finances than the administrators
and alumni donors who see the protests as antisemitic.
Because that is what they are. I'm not against Jews but I don't want to compete with them in a knowledge based field. On the other hand, I bet I can fart louder and longer than the best of them. Martha Nussbaum, I'm looking at you.
Caught between them are administrators, who must figure out how to balance these interests without entirely losing the faith of either group.
Nobody has any faith in administrators. They win by showing themselves to be useless because, obviously, the solution to the problem of useless administrators is hiring more administrators.
This dynamic can be explained by economic theory.
It was explained by C. Northcote Parkinson.
In the early 1970s, economist Michael Spence introduced the concept of signaling, which has since become one of the foundations of information economics and earned Mr. Spence the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.
Signals are of two types- 'cheap talk' gives rise to 'pooling equilibria', 'costly signals' give rise to 'separating equilibria'. In Universities, more especially STEM subjects, brainy and hard working people have a trait which it is very costly for ordinary people to duplicate. There is a wide gulf between Terence Tao and me. But, I can fart louder and longer than Tao and can be much more vocal in demanding compulsory gender reassignment surgery, free at the point of delivery, for Nicaraguan goats. The other thing is that most academics initially show promise but then fizzle out. Moreover, their research program may turn out to be stupid and useless. It is helpful for them to be able to reinvent themselves as moral entrepreneurs or activists of some description.
This seminal concept helps explain how individuals and organizations communicate their attributes or intentions in situations of information asymmetry.
This is irrelevant in the case of Universities. People can easily check and see what sort of expected earnings bump they receive by studying different subjects at different Colleges. Since Universities need revenue they are bound to run some shitty courses for thickos like me. There is an element of 'cross-subsidization'.
The best-known application is the job market. Employers and potential employees face a situation in which applicants have more information about their productivity than the employer,
No. You know less about whether you can be a good lawyer or accountant than the guy whose job it is to recruit lawyers and accountants. A good HR department screens out the lazy and the stupid unless laziness and stupidity are what the job requires. Signals don't matter- they are easy to fake. Screening is what is important. Try to find traits which correlate with good outcomes which the candidate won't be aware off. I went for an interview with Arthur Anderson. The interviewer was very friendly. I thought he liked me and started babbling. At the end of the interview, he explained to me that I had revealed I was lazy, hated office work, and was as stupid as shit. It is difficult to disguise your true nature if the other guy has vast experience of 'screening'.
since the employer can’t directly observe those qualities before hiring.
The candidate tries to fool the employer but he can hire good screeners. Still, if you have amazing social and educational qualifications, the employer may feel obliged to give you a chance. After all, there are always places you can park a posh but lazy fellow.
To overcome this asymmetry, job seekers engage in signaling—taking actions that can credibly convey information about their abilities. Such signals include everything from educational credentials to the way the applicant dresses for an interview.
But the employer can find traits which correlate with success which the candidate is unaware off. True, he may take special coaching classes to fake those traits. But that itself is a desirable quality. The guy who is faking it to make it might actually make it by becoming the very thing he is trying to fake.
When I encountered Mr. Spence’s model in graduate school,
I encountered it in my third year at the LSE in 1981.
I was mesmerized. My doctoral dissertation extended his work to understand underinvestment in education in some black communities.
One may also speak of overinvestment in guns and drugs. True, you may end up getting shot but there is also a chance that you will spend your twenties and early thirties in jail. This may correlate to higher longevity and even educational attainment.
The basic economics also seem applicable to what’s going on now on college campuses.
No. What is happening has to do with poor screening. Universities don't have an incentive to weed out useless Research Programs and to get rid of kids incapable of any greater cognitive effort than is required to say 'dicks cause RAPE! Ban dicks immediately!'
I must admit, if I had been a student in Hitler's Germany I would have wanted 'Jewish science' to be banned. Why struggle to understand Einstein when you can get a degree in Aryanism instead?
The key idea is that the protests present university administrations with a two-audience signaling quandary: Behaviors that appease students may anger alumni, and vice versa.
Most students would benefit by getting rid of 'activists'. But why stop there? Get rid of administrators as well. They don't add value.
The real problem here is that if Universities screen out the stupid and the useless, then they would also be expected to 'screen in' talent. But that's what private enterprise does! Wealthy alumni may prefer Universities to produce some people who can be trained to be productive but who are not so skilled that they can set up as competitors. Education is about neoteny- it infantilizes. But the child understands it is helpless and thus is malleable. The advantage of having a lot of gesture politics on the campus, is that kids instinctively become sycophantic and unwilling to think for themselves. These are important work skills.
Like a job applicant’s potential productivity, university administrators’ political preferences are hidden from students and alumni,
They may engage in preference falsification or seek to give a misleading impression in order to enjoy a quiet life.
but they may signal them in various ways. They may choose a liberal commencement speaker rather than a conservative one, they may create programs that emphasize “inclusiveness,” and so on.
Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity means creating academic programs where you can get a PhD in QMT by finger painting using your own feces
Students and alumni observe these strategic disclosures of preference, and each group decides whether to accept the decision or agitate against it.
No. Students and alumni become agitators if there is some reputational, assortative, or other careerist benefit. BDS was and is well financed. It has its own citation cartels and social and careerist networks. Currently, it appears that an old rift within the American Jewish community has re-opened. Some Jews want to reverse America's commitment to Israel. The problem here is that Israel may benefit by going it alone- trading arms with whom it pleases. Moreover, without Israel, America has no friends in the region. Israel can do a deal with the Eurasian power bloc headed by China though the latter currently seems to be benefitting from its long standing ties with Hamas. But how long will the Sunni Ikhwan be content to sacrifice Arab lives for the greater glory of Iran? What if some new variant of the Islamic State appears? Already there have been deadly attacks inside Iran itself.
University administrators whose preferences align most closely with their alumni will ignore the students and simply do what they think is best, as the University of Florida’s president did when he banned encampments and declared that the school is “not a daycare.” Those whose views align with the protesting students will do the opposite.
They may try to do so. The problem is that most of their assets are illiquid and so, at the margin, it is alumni donations which keep the lights on. Columbia's President was previously head of the LSE. She took a very strong line against the Unions and appears to be following the same tough line in her new post. But the political climate in Biden's America is very different from that of Brexit Britain.
But most top administrators don’t have such strong preferences. They will engage in a high-wire act of trying to appease both students and alumni.
Administrators are fond of inaction. Hopefully, problems will go away by themselves.
If students decide “safety first” is the most important initiative on campus,
trouble-makers should be arrested. Sooner or later, non-students will invade the campuses and nobody will be safe.
administrators—even if they disagree—will adopt stances consistent with that and hope the alumni don’t revolt too much.
Why would the alumni object to campuses being safe?
If a few months later students set up encampments and chant anti-Israel slogans,
either administrators enforce the law or they cease to be relevant. The same people shouting 'boo to Netanyahu' may demand the President resigns or undergoes gender reassignment surgery every Tuesday.
then administrators will also adopt stances consistent with that and, again, hope the alumni don’t complain too much.
Why should administrators not try to make their Institutions more productive and better fit for purpose?
The congressional hearings revealed that this signaling strategy was at work.
No. They revealed that the Presidents didn't know the law and were confused as to what their duty of care actually involved.
The three presidents would risk alienating students if they disavowed anti-Israel slogans and alumni
the protesting students were already alienated. They thought BDS should have been implemented twenty years previously.
if they endorsed them. So they offered lawyered-up equivocations that signaled confusion and weakness.
'Lawyered-up' is the mot juste. They simply didn't know the law and the legal advise they had received was incoherent, not to say nonsensical.
Economic theory can explain why the situation on so many campuses has spiraled out of control and why no interested party—neither students nor donors nor seemingly anybody else—has anything good to say about how administrators are handling the protests.
No. Economic theory says that those with more money and greater numbers should pay to enforce the law against a small group of nutters. Why has this not happened? One answer is Timur Kuran's 'preference falsification'. The other is straightforward 'incentive incompatibility'. The problem with having more and more useless administrators is that less and less that is useful can get done.
But economics can’t address the more essential issue at play, which is moral
No. It is just incentive incompatibility. Maybe Columbia's President- because of her previous reputation for toughness- can benefit by taking a hard line. But we can't be sure that she won't be made the scapegoat and sent back to Britain with her tail between her legs.
Elite universities decided years ago that they would adopt a basic principle: Any speech act that attacks, questions or even declines to affirm the self-understood identity of another constitutes harm worthy of punishment.
Why did the do so? I think at least part of the answer has to do with Edward Said who showed that you don't have to teach the boring shite you are paid to teach. You can just gas on about any bee in your own bonnet. Your students too welcome the opportunity to gain sheepskins in Grievance Studies without ever having to engage with anything cognitively complex. I'd love to get a PhD in Algebraic Topology by showing that dicks cause RAPE! Ban them immediately!
I may not like that principle, but it’s now a fait accompli. And if you’re going to punish one person who violates it, you have to punish everyone who violates it.
Nonsense! Pick only on the weak. Don't punish a guy whose pals in Hamas might firebomb your house.
To permit attacks on one identity group
like the US war on terror which killed or displaced tens of millions of Muslims
while prohibiting attacks on others is worse than hypocrisy—it is profoundly immoral.
Hypocrisy is immoral. I am losing respect for Fryer as I read this article. Still, I suppose it is in his interest to signal the sort of extreme stupidity which gets rewarded with a Nobel.
If administrators had the courage of their stated convictions,
they would not be administrators or else their Institutions would have become vastly more productive.
if they had principles rather than merely gestures meant to signal their status as good liberals,
gesture politics replaced the real thing because, it turned out, politics tends to be about- as Obama said- doing stupid shit.
the most egregious antisemitism on campus would have been stopped before it could snowball.
That is the intention behind the 'Antisemitism awareness Act' which may not pass in the Senate or else be considered merely 'advisory'. The problem with antisemitism is that the workaround has been to say 'I'm against Zionism'.
My own feeling is that we, in the West, feel that if we are no longer slaughtering Muslims all over the place, Israel should not be allowed to do so even if it acts in self-defense. On the other hand, the US has been trying to push Israel back to its pre-1967 borders since the days of Nixon and the Rodgers Plan. What is as yet unknown is if Israel can 'go it alone'. My own feeling is that Arab leaders, sooner or later, will push back against Hamas and the Brotherhood. Alternatively, we may see a resurgence of Sunni terrorism as a counterweight to that which is sponsored by Iran. Meanwhile, the question facing Universities is how to deliver better value for money. You can't string along Teaching Assistants forever. There must be some other way to defeat 'Baumol Cost Disease'. The obvious answer is to streamline administration and defund failed Research Programs. So long as the current protests distract attention from this, the administrators are safe. But voters may be losing patience. Why not curb the nuisance posed by crazy activists? Why wait till China has overtaken us to reform our Higher Education system?
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