Who values academic rigor and freedom?

Not women, leftists, and leftist women

I was browsing studies out in Lee Jussim's newish journal, The Journal of Open Inquiry in Behavioral Science (JOIBS), and saw this one:

• Rausch, Z. M. (2023). The value gap: How gender, generation, personality, and politics shape the values of American University Students. Journal of Open Inquiry in the Behavioral Sciences, 2(1).

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind (2018), portrayed current undergraduate American college students (most of whom are in the generation Gen Z: 1995 - 2013) as valuing emotional well-being and the advancement of social justice goals above traditional academic values such as academic freedom and the pursuit of truth. We investigated whether this value discrepancy exists among 574 American university students by exploring the prioritization of five different academic values (academic freedom, advancing knowledge, academic rigor, social justice, and emotional well-being). We also explored how gender, generation, personality, major, and conservatism predict each academic value. Generational differences were present, with Gen Z students emphasizing emotional well-being and de-emphasising academic rigor. Males scored higher on measures of academic freedom and advancing knowledge, while lower on social justice and emotional well-being compared to females. Political conservatism was the strongest predictor for social justice scores, with increased liberal attitudes predicting higher scores on social justice. Emotional stability positively predicted advancing knowledge, while negatively predicting emotional well-being. Agreeableness positively predicted emotional well-being, while negatively predicting advancing knowledge. We ultimately argue that gender is a crucial, underestimated explanatory factor of the value orientations of American college students.

Unfortunately, the authors analyzed the data suboptimally. Their chief scale of interest is this one:

We utilized Planke et al.’s (2018) Budget Allocation Measure with slight modifications. In the scale, participants distribute 100 points toward five different academic values in any way they desire but cannot distribute less than or more than 100 points. The academic values are categorized as advancing knowledge (professors prioritizing increasing students' understanding of the world), academic rigor (professors prioritizing creating a challenging work environment), emotional wellbeing (professors prioritizing student mental health and well-being), social justice (professors prioritizing teaching content related to issues regarding how to make society more fair for all people), and academic freedom (professors being able to choose what and how to teach content).Note that this method of measuring beliefs, perceptions, and attitudes has been shown to have many benefits over simply using Likert-scale items. The main benefit is that by giving participants a discrete “budget,” participants are required to think more carefully about how much they value certain attributes over others in a relatively nuanced and relatively realistic sense. This approach has demonstrated to show ecological and incremental validity relative to standard self-report measures in past work (see Li, 2008).

This kind of variable should not be modelled using correlations or single-outcome regression since the outcome variables are a fixed sum composite variable (must sum to 100%). This kind of data structure is called compositional data. Rather, one should use something called Dirichlet regression. I downloaded the public data, and fit this model: budgets ~ age + sex * leftism. Leftism was measured here using the 12-item Social and Economic Conservatism Scale (e.g. "Women should have the right to have an abortion.", "Traditional Values are important to maintaining society."). The model results are (holding age constant at median):

Of note:

• Men (male students) value advancing knowledge more than women, and women value social justice more. This is despite holding leftism constant (look at leftism=0). Overall, men just value academic values more highly than women in general, while women value students' emotional well-being higher.

• The more leftist a student is, the more they would allocate resources to leftist politics (social justice), and for men, emotional well-being. The price of this is academic rigor, freedom, and for men, advancing knowledge. This sex interactions may not be reliable, I didn't do the bootstrapping.

It looks like the more women we get into academia, the less of a university it will be and the more of a left-wing emotional playground it will be. Noah Carl advanced this model in 2021, and the data supports it.