Who is Ladling the Chum?

My response to the "feminization" debate

A few weeks ago Helen Andrews bloodied the waters with her “The Great Feminization” piece in Compact arguing that women in the workplace caused “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” Andrews ladled a lot of social science to make her case, citing demographic studies, quantitative survey data on political values, and the evolutionary psychology from “social science literature,” particularly the work of Joyce Benenson.

Without university-produced data, there would be no splashy story. Go check – Andrews’s hyperlinks will bring you to university research embedded in think pieces complaining about university wokeness, or data from agencies like the NCES or the Fed. Same goes for those responding to Andrews. David French in New York Times (October 23) agrees “that men and women are dispositionally different in the aggregate” citing “a 2022 study.” Megan McArdle in the Washington Post (Oct 26) opens with a nod to “the social science literature on men and women,” including Benenson and others. A new Matthew Yglesias post also links to data.

The “debate” is mostly dishing out competing study findings. No one is actually arguing.

I’ve been thinking of the scene in Jaws where Chief Brody ladles bloody chum in the water to catch the title character. Nobody mentions the work of catching the little fish and grinding other bloody body parts as bait. Who are these workers and who is paying them?

More broadly, who is responsible for this feeding frenzy? It goes beyond “feminization,” of course. Both left and right regularly marshal “studies” on gender, wokeness, universities, ideology, decline in free speech to make political points. This “chum,” this constant, media-driven reduction of human life to aggregate data, is the raw material for what is now called ‘identity politics.’ The endless arguments over ‘feminization’ or ‘wokeness’ are just sharks fighting over the bait. To understand the problem, you have to look at who is grinding the fish and who is ladling it out.

The demand for data about aggregate differences encourages scholars comparing identity categories, slicing humans into pieces to examine our similarities, differences, preferences, traits, desires, hatreds. Universities now create the demand that requires them to produce the supply.

Here’s my take. Sometime in the 1970s, journalists began reporting on the findings of university research and the phrase “a new study finds” entered daily conversation (Google Ngram data here; for those with access, ProQuest and LexisNexis will confirm). Journalists like Philip Meyer argued that reporters should adopt empirical methods of social science. You can see traditional news source phrases like “an official confirms” decline as “studies show” rise sharply in the 2000s, with digital news, the end of space constraints, and pitched battles for clicks. Shrinking newsrooms needed cheap steady content.

“Studies find” news stories are obviously good for discoveries, new medical treatments, root causes, susceptibilities, side effects. But daily consumption of stories carving society up into gender, race, ethnicity, family categories and presenting “findings” with high certainty leads to society thinking of itself in pieces. Is it actually true that “Americans are lonelier?”

You can see public addiction to “studies that explain ourselves to ourselves” everywhere. The “study” long ago replaced the sermon as the subject of the sermon.

To be sure, universities always offered pre-packaged faculty research in the form of press releases. Once upon a time, the journal embargo system mattered to synchronize publication and to create the “newness” of the event. How else was the public going to learn about science and engineering breakthroughs?

But the tens of thousands of studies of male impulsivity; liberal/conservative anti-democratic tendencies; male preferences in sex dolls; tipping and race, liberal/conservative women’s views on marital infidelity; intersectional microaggressions against Asian female surgeons; gender differences in online political trolling…whose fault is this?

Two of the pieces here are from Nature, suggesting that complaints about their “social justice” agenda is a gnat buzzing around the chum. Core verification systems have been re-engineered to produce demographic metrics yes, but why? Because the ‘sociological gaze’ has become the ‘factory model,’ a bureaucratic system where ‘chum’ (demographic data) was the only acceptable ‘output.’

The right critiques the university’s “sociological turn” while drawing on the fruits of this turn. Just today, I saw on X one of the loudest critics of universities, Steven McGuire, crow about a study saying conservatives are not particularly rigid, posting the news coverage of the study, not the study. To combat “woke” social science, conservative universities want heterodox social science on “marginalised” orthodoxies.

If universities have become chum factories, maybe it’s because media sharks are asking them to be. In her feminization piece Andrews cites Quillette which cites many other studies. David French cites a CNN story that links to some test but not the study, which I had to go look for.

Who is going to stop the young scholar who wants to make headlines from launching ever more outrageous research chopping us into identity bits? It’s not called “clickbait” for nothing. The demand and expectation for sociology is so much a part of daily life that I’m guessing nobody even sees it.

And is it possible to understand the rise of “identity politics” on campuses without understanding this social science to media to public pipeline context?

Identity politics didn’t emerge from critical theory seminars or radical faculty. Fifty years of teaching everyone to see the world through demographic categories created identity politics. Generations of students, administrators, and faculty now think in aggregate group differences. Entire research infrastructures emerged to measure disparities between categories. Scholars are rewarded for producing findings about identity-based patterns. Of course higher ed is now operating according to identity-based logic.

When I think about the institutions of higher ed that have resisted this, the only one is St. John’s College. Every other institution, from the behemoth CSU to Harvard, has responded to market signals. Tell us about our identities!

Can anyone blame universities from consuming their own product, training everyone to see themselves and each other as representatives of data-driven categories?

For fifty years, the public has been trained to accept the “sociological gaze” as authoritative and to see themselves and social problems in terms of statistical aggregates. The “study” became the primary unit of secular truth, and “data” became the vernacular of public proof, replacing older forms of authority rooted in philosophy, tradition, or anecdote. This expectation that truth is found in data of course turns the sociological gaze back onto its institutions.

My critique of Helen Andrews isn’t even that she has simply taken people’s chum to throw to the sharks, because the shark she caught is the feedback loop in action. More people are going to want more data. More scholars will be on it. More parts of society will be chopped up into bits and examined. Meanwhile politicians, state legislatures, and education reformers will continue to ask: what is wrong with universities?

Demands for quantifiable justification means the collection of data, which then becomes the agent of more data to be collected. This is the natural bureaucratic response to the demand to “know.” Progressive and conservative activists have been able to justify their positions from the same social metrics (“admissions of these categories,” “achievement gaps for this category”). The pragmatic, “workforce” model championed by many state legislatures can justify itself with economic metrics showing how “our graduates have an X% job placement rate.”

Nowhere do I see a political figure arguing for an education system that treats each individual student as an individual not a specimen of a category, a data point in an aggregate, who can produce expected metrics. Nobody these days is going to fund a university that cannot measure itself. Data is the “output” that fits the new “input” of the public-metric sphere.

“Identity politics” is the logical outcome of this.

So, this is my response to the recent debate: what is bigotry in the age of sociology? For decades individuals been trained to see themselves and each other as representatives of demographic categories, to think in terms of aggregate group differences. Scholars are rewarded for finding these differences and journalists for reporting them. Universities are funded to measure disparities and produce expected metrics about categories. And then everyone is surprised when people start thinking in categories. The feminization debate is just the latest symptom. The feedback loop from university research to media to public discourse and back to universities is complete. Everyone is asking: what’s wrong with universities? No one is asking: what are universities being asked to produce?