Thread: Harvard prof. afraid to publish own research findings

Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone, is very nervous about releasing his new research, and understandably so. His five-year study shows that immigration and ethnic diversity have a devastating short- and medium-term influence on the social capital, fabric of associations, trust, and neighborliness that create and sustain communities. He fears that his work on the surprisingly negative effects of diversity will become part of the immigration debate, even though he finds that in the long run, people do forge new communities and new ties.

[quote]Last October, he told the Financial Times that “he had delayed publishing his research until he could develop proposals to compensate for the negative effects of diversity.â€

Business - News Analysis

How bad is immigration for society?

Madeleine Bunting


An important U.S. study shows us that the effects of ethnic diversity can be read as a challenge, rather than a threat.

NOT MANY thinkers successfully straddle academia and politics, but one of the few who has managed to do so on both sides of the Atlantic is Robert Putnam, author of Bowling Alone. You can spot traces of his influence all over New Labour policy in Britain. He was the man who popularised the concept of social capital — the trust and networks of friendship, neighbourhood, and organisations on which so much of our lives depend — and it has won hi m the ear of politicians of all persuasions: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, an even, most recently, Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi.

Aware of how his work is used politically, Mr. Putnam is understandably nervous now about how he presents the first findings of the biggest study of social capital ever undertaken on which he has been working for over five years. He started out wanting to track social capital over time and in different communities across the United States. What he wasn’t expecting to find was a negative link between ethnic diversity and social capital. Put crudely, the more ethnically diverse the neighbourhood, the less likely you are to trust your local shopkeeper, regardless of his or her ethnicity. He warns that, however uncomfortable this conclusion might be, “progressives can’t stick their head in the sand.â€

Putnam has every reason to be fearful.

In just a few years - maybe less - publishing a work like this will land the author in prison, along with the publisher and anyone else associated with the project.

Interesting thread. Thanks for posting it.