Open letter regarding Steven Pinker & the LSA
About me.
I am a Professor in a prominent Linguistics department. I am the junior co-chair of an LSA committee, the Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics (COSWL). I had been, for a few years, listed as an LSA Media Expert in semantics. I was one of the over six hundred signatories on the Open Letter to the LSA regarding Steven Pinker’s privileged status in the association. Despite my relative prominence in terms of my title and my work with the LSA, I was never contacted by any of the several high-profile journalists who have covered this issue in favor of Pinker, in some cases in the professed absence of people willing to speak publicly against him. I would have been willing, if contacted. But perhaps in part because of my gender, I was never contacted as someone whose opinion matters on this issue.
Unlike Pinker, I do not have an endowed chair. I am not employed by the country’s best- resourced university. I do not have a PR agent who profits from the number of high-profile interviews I give. I do not have any book deals with the popular press. I do not have a social-media following, gratefully. I am writing this letter from the stressful confines of my maternity leave with my second child, in a pandemic (needless to say). I do not wish to be contacted by angry strangers who disagree with me and consequently wish ill of me, which is a fate suffered by many of my junior co-signatories.
About the letter.
I have, for a while, wished that Steven Pinker’s name was not on the list of Media Experts. I was relieved when a group of people wrote a well-thought-out letter asking that it be removed. The argument in the letter is simple: 1) the LSA has recently issued statements about what values its members should strive to embody; 2) Steven Pinker does not embody those values, regardless of what people think about them; 3) the LSA lacks any democratic process for either vetting its Media Experts or removing people from its list of Fellows; 4) in the absence of a democratic process, the letter wishes to suggest that he be removed as a Media Expert and Fellow by the process of petition.
It’s unclear to me what happened to these core arguments. The letter is instead misrepresented as an attempt to censor, cancel, and even defenestrate Pinker. In contrast to these characterizations, the letter was heart-breakingly modest in its goals: We pay dues to an organization. Given that this organization professes to care about the public behavior of its members, and given that Pinker’s public behavior is divisive, contentious, and almost exclusively unrelated to the field of linguistics, we would like that organization to stop aiding in his already sky-high prominence. To quote one of many well-written defenses of the Open Letter to the LSA, “They signed it and they are not hooligans with baseball bats destroying all that is good and sacred. They were trying to have a say. We should trust them and look carefully at that media list again, and try to figure out ways of having a system in place so that democratic representation is respected.”
About the LSA.
I have been a member of the LSA, off and on (salary permitting), since I was in high school and asked for a membership from my parents as a Christmas gift. It was founded in 1924 and is run by a set of core officers and an executive committee that, perhaps understandably, consists solely of Full Professors in the field.* Its initial reaction to the Open Letter was tepid and vague, leading Pinker to trumpet that the LSA was supporting him in the issue. But its follow-up response all but explicitly confirmed that it was embarrassed to have been interpreted as endorsing Pinker (although he has yet, unsurprisingly, to correct the record). Pinker’s victory lap isn’t just unbecoming, it’s premature.
The LSA has pledged to “mov[e] forward with the creation of task forces using the existing structures of the LSA,” specifically the Committee on Committees and Delegate Appointments. There is some skepticism about the makeup of these task forces and thereby their efficacy. But I have faith in the LSA to see this pledge through, and in its members to eventually — once a democratic process is made available — correct this inconsistency in the public goals of the Society and the behavior of a member to whom it grants a position of privilege.
Like many professional organizations, the LSA committees are run largely by senior members. And since the junior generation is by definition the future of the field, this is likely to mean that it is too often on the wrong side of history. The committee I am a member of, The Committee of the Status of Women in Linguistics, has been unable to change its name to The Committee on Gender Diversity in Linguistics — the natural correlate of the LSA’s Committee on Ethnic Diversity in Linguistics — despite many of its members being uncomfortable with the gender binarity reflected in the name. The LSA held its most recent in-person annual meeting in New Orleans, LA in the midst of the proposal of prohibitive abortion laws in that state, and subsequent state boycotts. As with the Pinker debacle, it is hard as an earnest, dues-paying member to know what to do in these situations. The choice between boycotting the LSA and participating in its outdated, often misguided strictures is a hard one.
About the future.
Most of the LSA committees are open to junior members, including students. Join them. Unlike the process to remove fellows, the process for nominating fellows is a democratic one; participate in it. The LSA is more than the embarrassing shitshow that Pinker — who is not a linguist in either degree, title, or self-identity — would make it seem. It supports the preservation of endangered languages, and the well-needed addition of linguistics to K-12 school curriculums. It supports conferences and open-source journals. Let’s not let Pinker’s bad behavior interfere with these efforts, or the greater profile of the field. Let’s work together to drag the LSA into the 21st century, with all of the beautiful social justice that entails. If you’ve got any ideas, let me know how I can help.
*Edit: This is not entirely true, I have been corrected. There is one position on the Executive Committee reserved for a student, the Bloch Fellow, and one for the Executive Director, a non-voting staff member.
Update, 7/22/20
I have been contacted by representative of the LSA to privately clarify what I meant in the above by “its outdated, often misguided strictures.” I gave the response below, which I’m reproducing here because I think the second paragraph especially might help others understand the collective frustration right now. (In particular, that it might shed light on the perspective that in the absence of a firm position on these issues, the LSA has ceded to the most powerful, well-connected voice in the debate, in this case to detrimental effect.)
I understand the appeal of a quick answer from me about what I meant by “strictures”. But it’s clear to me, especially after receiving feedback from that post, that everyone — or at least every demographic subgroup in the LSA — has different ideas on what the LSA can be doing differently to welcome as many people as possible. So it’s incredibly important to get a plurality of perspectives on this question, not just one from me, a senior (white/cis/generative/etc.) members. And if you’re eliciting labor from these people, especially from vulnerable (i.e. non-senior/white/cis/generative/etc.) members, it’s important to compensate them for this labor, in the form of official committees they can list as service on their CVs, which will in turn help them “earn” a job.
There does seem to be a consensus, however, that the most pressing task in front of the LSA is to belatedly develop some procedures to enforce the values it espoused in its recent Statement on Racial Justice. What happens if a member of the community does not abide by those values? In what ways can the LSA hold them accountable (e.g. removing them from the Fellows and/or Media Experts list, prohibiting them from participating in LSA-affiliated conferences), and in what ways can it not (e.g. kicking them out of the LSA, trying to get them fired)? And who is empowered to adjudicate this? In the absence of a codified set of procedures to hold LSA members accountable, the Statement on Racial Justice rings hollow and insincere. And in the absence of clear answers to these questions, the LSA has unwittingly allowed powerful people with political agendas to answer the questions in the media for them.