Bias and Scholarship - Part 1: What is Tolerance?

This blog begins a series on academia. Many claim that there is bias in scholarship. To tackle this question we first have to think about what is meant by bias. A good way to do that is to define the concept of tolerance.
The first quality of tolerance is that to tolerant something, or someone, you have to have disagreement. The Baptist practices tolerance for the Methodist only if there is disagreement with the Methodist. If the Baptist believes that all Protestants are brothers and sisters in Christ then "tolerating" the Methodist does not mean much. Tolerating the Catholic, Muslim, and Atheist is much more relevant. In fact, the more you disagree with a position or person the more tolerance you need.
I point this out because often the measure we use for tolerance assumes that there is disagreement, when that may not be the case. For example, questions about attitudes towards homosexuality are only measures of tolerance if a person disagrees with that lifestyle. For a political progressive, questions about attitudes towards Christian fundamentalists are more telling.
But does tolerance indicate agreement? For the political progressive to be tolerant of the Christian fundamentalist, he/she does not have to agree with that person's religious beliefs. But he/she can not use those beliefs to discriminate against the fundamentalist in ways that are not warranted. What do I mean by that? A political progressive may decide not to date the fundamentalist because of their different outlooks on life. To make such a decision is not being intolerant since on this issue the religious, and possible political, difference matters. But if the political progressive refuses to hire the fundamentalist as an accountant then I would argue that there is intolerance. A person's religious beliefs does not influence how well he/she can count.
What this means in academia is that sometimes bias, or intolerance, is warranted. But it is only warranted if the intolerance about is relevant to the task at hand. A Marxist may be "intolerant" of the ideas brought by a free-market advocate. That intolerance can legitimately come out in criticism of a book written by the free marketer. However, the religion, sexual preference, race, and sex of the free marketer is irrelevant to how the Marxist should treat him/her. Refusing to promote, hire or accept someone because of religion, sexual preference, race or sex is clearly a sign of intolerance.
The challenge in academia is when to be discerning or even "intolerant" of certain perspectives and individuals and when to learn to accept those ideas and people. Furthermore, this is not just about the intolerance of a single or a few academics. It is also important to think about systematic ways that bias can play itself out in academia. If there is a trend of intolerance in academia, then we have more serious problems than the proclivities of a few scholars. Investigating these potential problems is what I like to do in the next several blogs.



Sincerely,



Trouble-Maker