Would Sir Isaac Newton flourish in an academic career were he alive today? The great man was said to have “an obsessive, paranoid personality, with Asperger’s syndrome, a bad stutter, unstable moods, and episodes of psychotic mania and depression”. Imagine then if he were to teach young adults at a university today and how difficult that would be for him and his students. How would he get along with colleagues or university administrators?
This is the thought experiment Dr Geoffrey Miller, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of New Mexico, put to readers in an essay written last year.
Titled ‘The Neurodiversity Case for Free Speech‘, Miller explored the perils of modern academia for people who are ‘neurodiverse’ or have “variations in brain function apart from the autism spectrum”.
He makes the case that, for people with these disorders, it is “hard to understand and follow speech codes that prohibit saying or doing anything that others might find offensive”.
Campus Review sat down to brunch with Miller to unpack this argument.
Tell us about the term Neurodiversity.
The term was developed by autism and Asperger advocates and activists to … initially mostly refer to ‘aspie’ people, but you could broaden the term out really to cover anybody with unusual mental traits, personality traits, mental disorders. So, the way I was using neurodiversity was pretty broad, it covered the Asperger spectrum but also the schizophrenia spectrum, which ranges from just a little bit eccentric and quirky to people who are schizo typal, to full blown schizophrenia. It would cover people with various mood disorders like bipolar or depression. It would cover people with post-traumatic stress disorder, or just for my purposes almost anything that would make it hard to understand what other people find offensive, or hard to inhibit saying things that they might find offensive. Whether it’s something that you truly believe, like if you have a weird kind of schizo typal paranoid conspiracy. Or whether it’s just you tend to literally blurt out profanity, like some people with Tourette’s syndrome.
So, I just use neurodiversity quite broadly to mean anybody who just has brains that work a little differently and where that might affect their ability to follow speech codes, or to inhibit sort of politically incorrect speech.
You’ve pointed out a lot of brilliant people, a lot of academics tend to be on that spectrum, or within that umbrella term, and that political correctness has a chilling effect on these ‘Aspies’. Can you explain that a little bit?
Almost all of the scientists I really respect, almost all of the mentors who’ve been great to me have been ‘Aspie’. They’ve been geeks and nerds, and unusual people with eccentric interests and who just don’t respect or follow the kind of mainstream politics or ideologies, or religions. Many of them have learned to cope with the politically correct academic environment, but some haven’t. Some find it really aversive and they get into trouble, or they leave voluntary. My thought experiment and this paper was, what if Sir Isaac Newton had time travelled to the present, given how weird and eccentric, and ‘Aspie’ and ornery he was.
I have to say I love that term as well, I heard you use that a few times. It’s a very American term, but I enjoy it.
Yeah, I’m pretty ornery, punctual but ornery. Newton would have almost certainly gotten into trouble if he’d been a standard tenure track professor in any American, or Australian, or British university. Some folks might say well good riddance, if you drive people like that out of academia. But the problem is who do you have left in science, technology, engineering and math if you do that? If you get rid of all the geeks, nerds and eccentrics because they don’t toe the line politically then you don’t have a university any more. You don’t really have the hard sciences, the behavioural sciences, you’re just going to nuke your talent pool. That’s one of my concerns.
Going back to the piece you wrote. You mentioned you have examples like social and management settings, and teaching settings which are the places where you feel that. Do you think it affects your writing and the things you chose to research as well?
Oh for sure, I’ve researched a lot of unusual or taboo topics in my life that I probably wouldn’t have had the, I wouldn’t say the guts, I would have had better judgement in career management if I hadn’t been ‘Aspie’. I would have done some kind of mainstream, cognitive psychology or social psychology that was inoffensive, or that was politically correct.
Because your area of expertise deals with sex?
I do a lot of sex research, I work on behaviour genetics, the inheritance of traits, behavioural traits. That is subject to a lot of political reaction from the left. I’m currently researching polyamory and open relationships, which are heavily stigmatised. But as a sort of ‘Aspie systematiser’, who’s just interested in understanding behaviour, I’m willing to go to those places. I think we need people who have that sort of contempt for social norms in a way, to push the boundaries of behavioural research.
Do you think then that’s something that ‘neuro normative’, which I think is the term you may have used, people will lack, because they’re worried about political correctness? Or worried about damaging their chances of climbing the management chain and not offending people.
Absolutely, I think the ‘neuro typical’ or the ‘normies’ can be much more successful in controlling for IQ and hard work, because they choose research that’s less offensive and more fundable. They get along better with their colleagues and administrators. They don’t offend their students as much. They sometimes have easier relationships with the people they’re mentoring, if they have political disagreements with them. They also have easier interactions with the media and the public. We academics are expected to reach out and engage with the public, a lot of universities prioritise that. But if you sort of push ‘Aspies’ to do that there will be some friction that develops. Because the Aspie’s think a lot of the political values held by the general public, or journalists, are kind of dumb.
Can you think of times when you’ve thought about censoring your teaching?
Oh, I do censor my teaching. There’re several topics I just avoid, even when I’m teaching human sexuality, even when I try to scare away on the first day the students who might have the worst reactions to controversial materials. Still, there are certain issues that I know could just too easily lead me into trouble, and it’s not just me, it’s everybody I know who teaches human sexuality. Or anything related to it, in any behavioural scientist department. I can’t even tell you what those topics are, because I’d even get into trouble for revealing which ones are controversial.
You’re coming at this from a totally different viewpoint than is typical here in Australia, especially as it’s normally a very politically loaded, left/right thing. When did you start noticing this creeping in, in your career? At what point in your career were you like, “wow this is something I have to consider?”
It was really early, I mean as soon as I got interested in evolutionary psychology, early in grad school, circa 1989. I mean I’m 53 now, I’ve been in academia for a long time. But as soon as I got into grad school and I got interested in human evolution and genetics, and sexuality, and all of that, it became clear that number one, my career track would be much harder. Just in terms of getting jobs, and funding, and number two, that I’d have to learn to be really careful in talking with colleagues about these issues. I think it’s been an ongoing struggle for everybody who works in my field, evolutionary psychology. But I think it got worse with the culture wars in America in the late 80s and early 90s. Then things kind of calmed down a bit in the late 90s and early 2000s. Then you’ve got this more recent wave of political correctness about the last five or 10 years. That’s become much more intense than anything we saw before.
When did you start coming to the realisation that it maybe had something to do with you being ‘Aspie’, or on that spectrum? Throughout your life before academia were you always kind of thinking about that?
I always knew I was a sort of socially awkward nerd, and I always loved the company of nerds, both as male friends and as girlfriends. So, I knew that was a personal challenge for me, but I didn’t really connect it to the free speech issue really until a few months before I wrote this Quillette piece last year. I just didn’t see those dots, but I read so much about the diversity initiatives, they all had to do with race, ethnicity and sex. None of them had to do with the kinds of individual differences like mental disorders and personality traits that I was studying. I thought, well wait, there’s a double standard here. Like academia is very welcoming to people from different racial groups, both sexes but they’re not actually making any accommodations for ‘Aspies’, or nerds, or geeks. Or even anybody with any of the other mentioned disorders that I mentioned.
I was going to ask what you feel you can’t teach, or say. But then like you said, you can’t really talk about sort of stuff.
Well I mean, let me give maybe one example that’s only semi-controversial. So, with the #metoo movement, there’s a view that we live in a rape culture and that the burden is on young men to learn how not to do anything sexually coercive or inappropriate; tat if we make any suggestions for young woman about, just in the interest of prudence, ‘here’s how to avoid situations that could lead to sexual coercion or date rape, or trouble’. That’s viewed as very un-PC, that’s viewed as victim blaming.
What do you feel will be the learning outcomes? Or the future for academia if it is true that this is happening?
I think it has terrible effects on student learning. I mean, for example, I teach human sexuality because I think human relationships are a huge source of both wellbeing and pleasure, and pain and heartbreak, even apart from people’s careers, and I think if I can give my students tools to have better relationships, and marriages, and better ways of understanding their partner that’s a huge win. Just in terms of their life quality going forward. If I have to handicap how I do that, if I have to not give half of the useful advice and insights that I could give, it really harms them. I think it inhibits research, it means we can’t do good research on lots of socially important topics. We can’t challenge a lot of the dominant areas for what causes certain kinds of social problems like prejudice or crime, or terrorism or whatever. I think third, it threatens funding for academia. A lot of conservatives and centrists in America are so pissed off with universities being leftist and indoctrination camps that they basically want to defund universities completely, they’re like ‘why should my tax payer dollars be indoctrinating my kids into political values that are actually contrary to everything I stand for?’.
You’ve mentioned the left quite a lot, but does it work the other way? Especially in your topic, I can’t imagine conservatives want to talk too much about sex in universities?
There are conservative approaches to sexuality. Well it’s an interesting issue, like okay would more young conservatives go into sex research if sex research wasn’t so leftist? I think more of them would, they might study things like successful Christian marriages, and how they operate and how the church supports certain kinds of intimacy and sexuality, and commitment. They would do very different kinds of studies on abortion, or pre-marital sexuality.
But then they might totally ignore gender identities which, whether you believe in it or not, is a huge part of sexual studies I would imagine?
It is now, but you know you could imagine a kind of sex research that pays as much attention to like the 80 per cent of Americans who are Christian as it does to the 0.1 per cent who are trans. But that would be considered a pretty radical change compared to kind of standard leftist sex research.
What in your mind is free speech? Is there anything that we can’t discuss in academia or society? Or is there anything we shouldn’t be allowed to?
I think free speech is just the way that society helps overcome its own self-deceptions and its own taboos, biases and unspeakable topics. So I think there should be very few limits on free speech with some key exceptions. I think the key exceptions are actually quite informative because they kind of help recalibrate us in terms of, ‘oh what’s really bad to share?’ So designs for nuclear weapons should not be covered by free speech. Like you should not be able to share this.
You should not be able to share genetic engineering information about how to create airborne bio weapons, or engineered pandemics. These are two huge existential threats to civilisation, nuclear winter and pandemics. Those are big deals.
In your Quillette piece, you’ve mention J.S Mill. I’m paraphrasing here, but my understanding of Mill is you can say whatever you want as long as it doesn’t harm others, and society will decide that. So, if PC speech or thought is what is the prevailing theory, surely that’s okay? In a liberal sense?
The question of harm is tricky. I mean the nuclear bomb issues like nuclear winter is clear harm. I think saying something like, one ethnic group differs a little bit from another ethnic group on some trait, here’s the evidence. It might hurt some people’s feelings, but new research tends to. New research on human behaviour tends to hurt some people’s feelings, because they have a model of the world that needs to be updated, which is painful.
If enough people think it’s not acceptable to talk about, then what do you think?
I think those people have to suck it up and deal with it.
This issue doesn’t really seem like it’s going to go away. How do we strike a balance going forward in academia, with keeping free thought but also not causing harm to others going forward?
I think the main way to fix the problem is to just let go of the whole model that there’s a trade-off between free speech and the wellbeing, and safety of people. That model is the problem. The notion that hearing ideas that we don’t like is similar to physical harm, or violence, that idea is the problem.
I think it’s bullshit. It’s the way that all repressive regimes throughout history have always clamped down on free thought. They never say that idea is taboo, they’re always saying, oh how dare you. That hurts people’s feelings, that offends our sense of the sacred. That undermines the progress towards the great communist utopia or whatever it is. We have to draw a really clear line between actual physical damage and the verbal expression of ideas.
Geoffrey Miller is a tenured associate professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico.