Academic Freedom Is Social Justice: Sex, Gender, and Cancel Culture on Campus.

I teach in and co-direct the undergraduate program in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. During the promotion of my recent book on testosterone and sex differences, I appeared on "Fox and Friends," a Fox News program, and explained that sex is binary and biological. In response, the director of my department's Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force (a graduate student) accused me on Twitter of transphobia and harming undergraduates, and I responded. The tweets went viral, receiving international news coverage. The public attack by the task force director runs contrary to Harvard's stated academic freedom principles, yet no disciplinary action was taken, nor did any university administrators publicly support my right to express my views in an environment free of harassment. Unfortunately, what happened to me is not unusual, and an increasing number of scholars face restrictions imposed by formal sanctions or the creation of hostile work environments. In this article, I describe what happened to me, discuss why clear talk about the science of sex and gender is increasingly met with hostility on college campuses, why administrators are largely failing in their responsibilities to protect scholars and their rights to express their views, and what we can do to remedy the situation.

Testosterone levels and mental rotation performance in Chinese men.

Males achieve markedly higher scores than females on mental rotation tests (MRTs). Therefore, it might be hypothesized that, within groups of males, testosterone levels modulate MRT performance. However, studies of this relationship have yielded inconsistent results. Notably, a recent study of 28 American men, using the computerized Shepard and Metzler MRT (SM), found significant associations between salivary testosterone levels and the intercepts of the functions relating response time and error rate to the angular disparity between comparison objects. Conversely, a study of 35 British men, using the same methodology, found no such associations. We attempted a cross-cultural replication of these studies, in which we obtained salivary testosterone levels, together with performance measures on the SM, from 92 heterosexual right-handed men, aged 21-38, in Beijing, China. We hypothesized that Chinese men might perform more slowly and carefully than Western men on this test (which imposes no time limitations), but that associations of testosterone levels with performance, if real, should nevertheless be detectable across cultures. We found that the Chinese men indeed displayed significantly longer response times than the American men, although the Chinese men were equally accurate. Interestingly, testosterone was significantly associated with the slope of the response time function in Chinese men, whereas the earlier American study had found that testosterone was associated with the intercept, but not the slope, of this function. These observations suggest that differing cultural values regarding speed and accuracy may influence MRT performance--and that these values must be considered in future studies of testosterone and MRT measures.

The relationship of male testosterone to components of mental rotation.

Studies suggest that higher levels of testosterone (T) in males contribute to their advantage over females in tests of spatial ability. However, the mechanisms that underlie the effects of T on spatial ability are not understood. We investigated the relationship of salivary T in men to performance on a computerized version of the mental rotation task (MRT) developed by [Science 171 (3972) (1971) 701]. We studied whether T is associated specifically with the ability to mentally rotate objects or with other aspects of the task. We collected hormonal and cognitive data from 27 college-age men on 2 days of testing. Subjects evaluated whether two block objects presented at different orientations were the same or different. We recorded each subject's mean response time (RT) and error rate (ER) and computed the slopes and intercepts of the functions relating performance to angular disparity. T level was negatively correlated with ER and RT; these effects arose from correlations with the intercepts but not the slopes of the rotation functions. These results suggest that T may facilitate male performance on MRTs by affecting cognitive processes unrelated to changing the orientation of imagined objects; including encoding stimuli, initiating the transformation processes, making a comparison and decision, or producing a response.