The High Cost of Skepticism
What happened to two scientists who believed that tenure and First Amendment would protect their rights to free inquiry
Tavris, Carol
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/high_cost_of_skepticism
Date Written: 2002-07-01
Publisher: Skeptical Inquirer
Year Published: 2002
Resource Type: Article
Here’s what happened to two scientists who believed that tenure and the First Amendment would protect their rights to free inquiry.
Abstract:
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Excerpt:
In the olden days, perhaps twenty or thirty years ago, academic debates were marked by sweet discourse and the harmonious if impassioned hum of debate. (Also by sarcasm.) The rule used to be that if you disagreed with someone’s opinion or interpretations of data, you did the civilized thing-you called the person a knucklehead or an incompetent fool. Or you wrote a devastating reply explaining why the knucklehead was terminally wrong, misguided, or drunk.
That was then. Just as noise trumps silence and rage trumps courtesy, the cudgel of lawsuits to silence or cower the opposition trumps free debate. In universities across the country, lawsuits, even spurious and unsuccessful ones, have weakened the once-sacrosanct guarantees to scholars of free speech and association. Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) and Human Subjects Committees have proliferated, to protect human subjects from harm caused by unethical scientists-and to protect universities from any lawsuits that might ensue.
Of course some scientists have conducted dangerous and/or unethical research. I do not disapprove of efforts to assure the safety of subjects any more than I do of lawsuits to punish those who plagiarize, commit libel or fraud, or maliciously destroy reputations. But all institutionalized efforts to correct one problem will inevitably create other problems. Today, many of the IRBs originally established to protect subjects have instituted so many byzantine restrictions and rules that even good scientists cannot do their work. Some have become fiefdoms of power-free to make decisions based on caprice, personal vendettas, or self-interest, and free to strangle research that might prove too provocative, controversial, or politically sensitive.
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The growing power of IRBs in academia, along with the increasing number of restrictions on free speech in the politically correct name of “speech codes” and “conduct codes” (described so well by Alan Kors and Harvey Silverglate in The Shadow University), is perilous for independent scientific inquiry. For years, the skeptical movement, which had its birth in the domain of philosophy and the study of logic, has tended to regard failures of skeptical and scientific thinking as failures of reasoning-something amiss in human cognition. The underlying assumption has been that if we can only get people to think straight, junk their cognitive biases, and understand the basic principles and methods of science, pseudoscientific reasoning will become as vestigial to the mind as the appendix is to the body.
Perhaps, but the skeptical movement needs also to focus its energies on the growing institutional barriers to free inquiry, and the efforts to silence those whose inquiries make waves.
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