Human Capital: Josh Barro thinks well of some of his professors at Harvard—but not many, and he thinks well of precisely zero Harvard administrators. They should all think about that:

Josh Barro: Universities are not on the level: ‘For me, the problem starts with the replication crisis…. A decent amount of what I was taught in Harvard’s social psychology courses was just wrong… replications failing… p-hacked… fraudulent data…. Universities’ level of interest in addressing widespread research dishonesty in behavioral science has been… mixed. I can’t be the only one wondering how much longer Dan Ariely is possibly going to remain a professor in good standing at Duke….

Research dishonesty in universities goes beyond the social sciences. In the humanities, it has taken a different form—postmodern research that aims at “my truth” instead of truth…. A lot of what’s happening at universities isn’t really research — it’s social activism dressed up as research, which need not be of good quality so long as it has the right ideological goals. Of course, this is not what all (or even necessarily most) professors in the humanities are up to…. I see arguments… that it’s administrators at the top of these institutions pushing departments in politicized directions….

It’s part of a broader dishonesty in how people in higher education insist on talking about affirmative action. Affirmative action policies prefer personnel of certain racial and ethnic backgrounds as part of an effort to alter the institution’s demographic balance—this is the point of affirmative action—but apparently it’s racist to admit this….

If I [had] copied like Gay did when I was a Harvard student, and if I got caught, I would have expected the university to require me to withdraw. And that’s why it’s been so jarring over the past month to watch some academics and journalists announce a new, laxer standard on plagiarism that was unknown to us when we were students….

All of this colors the way I feel about the conservative “war on higher ed.” Liberals… are very agitated about it. But it’s not clear to me exactly what one is supposed to be defending and why. I’d much rather see this industry do some introspection about why it’s losing public trust… <joshbarro.com/p/univers…>

The only place where I would register serious disagreement with Josh is on affirmative action: It is a fact that there are important aspects of finding merit—of finding the people who will do the job best—that escape our standard old-boy-network and well-primed-test-accomplishment screens, and there is good reason to act on that fact. The point is that massive demographic imbalance is probably a sign that you are doing meritocracy wrong.