With Harvard University at the top of the news today following the Trump administration’s decision to stop Harvard from having international students, we bring you a timely Heterodox Academy conversation with Harvard psychologist and HxA member Steve Pinker. Besides being a world-class researcher in human behavior, Steve has a long history of advocacy for academic freedom, free speech, and viewpoint diversity.

I spoke with Steve Wednesday, the day before the Trump administration made the announcement. The block impacts approximately 7,000 students – about 25% of Harvard’s enrolled students. Harvard has now filed suit in the case.

In our live webinar – in which we took questions for Steve from our audience – Steve spoke about his then-upcoming New York Times op-ed, out today, regarding what he calls “Harvard Derangement Syndrome.” The public portrayal of Harvard does not accord with the evidence, as he noted in both our webinar and the op-ed.

He blames, in part, colleagues who have “insanely exaggerated the amount of repression on Harvard, feeding the Trump administration with talking points.” These people, he says, risk driving us to “intellectual nihilism.”

Should Harvard attend to the lack of conservatives on the faculty? Yes, says Steve, even suggesting provocatively that “a bit of D.E.I. for conservatives would not hurt.”

Should grad students and pre-tenure faculty steer away from the kind of research that might get them in trouble? He says he would recommend “discretion,” adding “Why pick the most outrageous [topic] for your thesis? How about one of the others that's a little less outrageous, and then when you get tenure, you can turn to the outrageous one?”

What does he think of journals that attempt to limit what researchers can say in terms of findings? “It's astonishing that the actual content of hypotheses is stipulated by the journal. Nature Human Behavior has a related guideline that nothing that would seem to cast any group into unfavorable light may be published. These are just mind-boggling [rules]....There are those of us who, you know, believe that reality can’t be divined from the armchair. That you actually have to be able to gather data, and they might go one way, they might go the other way. That’s why we’re doing all this [research].”