Jo Boaler, Still the Victim

We have been very busy of late, playing Dr. Jekyll for a change.¹ Which has made this one long overdue. Still, it has to be done.

A few weeks ago, the Guardian published an article by freelance journalist, Alice Speri:

‘We’re like sitting ducks’: the right’s ‘war on woke’ has a well-tested playbook to take down academics

We had not previously heard of Speri but her article is astonishing. It is confused and extraordinarily manipulative, an exemplar for all that is wrong with the Guardian, with media coverage generally of MAGA thuggery, and with the big media coverage, almost always, of poor little Jo Boaler. 

Speri’s article is concerned with the attacking of prominent members of the American academic Left(ish) by the means of attacking their academic work. Speri has cause since even under the best interpretation many of these attacks can be argued to be in bad faith. Often, the academic work is not the genuine target, or at least is not the primary target, and the attack is much more a means to an end, a mechanism by which to attack the academic for their public role in one of the culture wars. It is akin to getting Al Capone on tax evasion. True, this may be considered a legitimate tactic, either because the principal crime and the subsidiary crimes are sufficiently intertwined or due to the nefariousness of the principal crime. Many people, however, are made queasy by such tactics. Even in the case of Capone there was something not really playing ball about the tax thing. And here we’re not talking about mobster murders but about genuine and strongly held differences of opinion on cultural and social issues. Even at the best of times, good faith engagement is difficult and academic gotcha journalism does not help.

Moreover, plenty of these attacks on academics are indisputably in bad faith. Christopher Rufo, who is Speri’s arch villain, is anything but an honest broker. Rufo is nasty and manipulative, shamelessly batting for his team, with a corked bat when he thinks he can get away with it; nothing Rufo says or does should be taken on face value. Which makes it a remarkable achievement for Speri’s article to entice one to Rufo’s side.

Speri is batting just as shamelessly for her team as Rufo is for his, and much more stupidly. Speri accepts the Goodness and Rightness of her team without a moment’s pause. Critical Race Theory is simply “an academic approach examining the role of systemic racism in society”; Speri does not contemplate that CRT might be a divisive and unfalsifiable poison. The Stanford Internet Observatory was simply “a research observatory focused on misinformation that had come under attack from Republicans”; there is no mention that “misinformation” generally is a rigged game of appeal to self-appointed authority, nor that the SIO in particular was up to its neck in partisan hackery and creepy censorship. And on and on.

Speri’s article mentions a number of targets but her centrepieces are two academics, the most prominent of which was Claudine Gay. In 2023, Gay, a black woman, was the newly installed President of Harvard University, just in time for October 7 and the subsequent antisemitic free-for-alls on American (and Australian) university campuses. After a horrendous performance in front of a reprehensible Republican show trial, Gay became a very prominent target. Rufo and his mates went to work, found numerous instances of plagiarism in Gay’s academic publications, and Gay was eventually forced to resign.

The Gay episode is complicated; the simplest summary is that pretty much everyone involved acted like an asshole and a hypocrite, extending well beyond Gay but also definitely including her. As Harvard President, and as a Dean before that, Gay fitted right in with and actively promoted the sanctimonious and censorious DEI Harvard culture. Gay only presented as a champion of free speech when it came time to defend the rights of Harvard’s antisemitic students. Speri is correct that Rufo’s was a Capone attack but there was no shortage of reasonable motivation for the attack, upon which Speri spends about three flippant words.² As for the plagiarism accusations themselves, Speri plays them down just as Rufo played them up: neither of them is to be trusted an inch.³

If that were all to Speri’s nonsense we would have let it pass. It is depressing and exhausting watching never-a-doubt liberals’ floundering attempts to counter MAGA brown shirts, watching liberals’ failure to reflect upon their past failures with any sense or honesty, but it is not our department. We wrote on it briefly when Trump was reelected, and undoubtedly we will be irritated into doing so again, but we’re not seeking to do so. As flagged, however, Speri has strayed onto our turf: Speri’s other key defendant is Jo Boaler and we’re not letting that get by without a solid whack.

Speri opens her article with a recap on Boaler:

Jo Boaler, a professor of mathematics education at Stanford University, is not new to criticism of her work turning ugly. Boaler champions a reformist approach to teaching maths, arguing that strategies that emphasise reasoning over memorisation lead to more equitable outcomes.

Yeah, it’s reasoning versus memorisation: a very even-handed summary of the pedagogical dispute.

When she first moved to the US from Britain in the late 1990s, she was warned that her research would anger defenders of traditional methods. Backlash from some colleagues – including accusations of “scientific misconduct” that the university dismissed – grew so personal that she briefly moved back to the UK.

And on it goes. Speri makes hay from the recent anonymous and idiotic Stanford attack on Boaler, providing a convenient platform from which Speri can then ignore any substantive ciriticism of Boaler. Speri swallows whole Boaler’s sob story. It is all “personal”. Speri links to Boaler’s counterattacking screeds but does not link to or offer a word on the long-running and substantive and serious concerns about Boaler’s work, and about Boaler’s own conduct. Boaler is just an innocent lamb, simply fighting for “equity” and caught in the culture wars.

Speri’s attempt to make Boaler the poster child in the fightback against the Rufo gotcha game is utterly absurd. Sure, Boaler cloaks herself in social justice garb, making her and her work all the sillier for it, and also putting her on the radar for the culture wars. But that is not it. That is not the fundamental reason why some mathematicians and teachers and maths ed people, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with and zero time for Rufo-like warring, are so disapproving of Boaler and her work. They are disapproving because, with good reason, they believe Boaler’s ideas on mathematics education suck. They are disapproving because, with good reason, they believe Boaler’s research is dodgy and because they never see Boaler forced to confront substantive criticism in any substantive manner. They are disapproving because they are sick to death of so much of the establishment media giving sweet little Jo Boaler a free pass. As did Speri.

At the moment, Rufo and his fellow thugs are drunk on power. It is depressing and frightening, although they are so drunk there is a good chance that they will quickly crash the car and a bruised but intact America might swing back to some relative sanity. But blinkered nonsense such as Speri’s is not going to get us there. It is only going to make the fight much longer and much harder, and much more difficult to platform the genuine good guys for whom to cheer. Speri-ing is as much of a problem as Rufo-ing, and the former is sure as hell no solution to the latter.

1. It’s been odd, and oddly enjoyable.

2. Twenty years ago, David Robinson, Monash University’s widely and justly loathed Vice Chancellor, was forced to resign after Monash philosopher John Bigelow hunted for and found (further) evidence of Robinson’s plagiarism. We confess that at the time we had zero Capone-like concerns about Bigelow’s strategy.

3. With our brief look, Gay’s instances of plagiarism seemed to be pretty small beer, more sloppiness than grand theft. But, there were a lot of them. And, one properly seeks to hold Ivy League presidents to a high standard.