This page contains a brief quantitative summary of the signatories on the Open Letter to the LSA Regarding Steven Pinker (TOL) and the letter by Jacobson, Partee and Pesetsky (PPJ). In total, 623 TOL signatures were analyzed. We provide a few notes on our methodology, but would like to first emphasize that this discussion is not about individuals but about the overall trend.
A group of linguist volunteers coded each name on the list by academic rank, according to the following breakdown: Student / Non-tenure-track (post-doc, visiting faculty, etc) / Pre-tenure tenure-track / Tenured or retired / Industry and alt-academia. Many of the signatories provided their job titles, but others had to be looked up. Titles outside of the North American system were translated based on job permanence; for example, a UK Lecturer was coded as Pre-tenure if they were still in their probation period and Tenured if they had passed it. Where no easy decision could be immediately made, the datapoint was simply discarded. This methodology resulted in N = 606 classified signatories.
All aggregate results are available online at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kLSgPApwrC2GUZd0TucpJzH2FkiwHV-Yk5RB1rp9m34/
As seen in the following table, more than 30% of the letter’s signatories are tenured or tenure-track, and of them, over 100 signatories are tenured or retired professors.
Totals for all signatories (whose positions were easily identifiable):
| Student | Non-tenure-track (post-doc/VAP/etc) | Pre-tenure | Tenured/retired | Industry/alt-ac | Totals | |
| TOL N | 257 | 85 | 70 | 119 | 75 | 606 |
| TOL % | 42.4% | 14.0% | 11.6% | 19.6% | 12.4% | 100% |
| PPJ N | 16 | 11 | 16 | 117 | 7 | 167 |
| PPJ % | 9.6% | 6.6% | 9.6% | 70.1% | 4.2% | 100% |
We next compared the makeup of signatories to the general makeup of LSA membership, in order to examine whether TOL was driven by a skewed sample whose career stage does not represent the LSA as a whole. The LSA’s Annual Report for 2019 reported a total of 3,297 members, classified as either Student, Faculty, Industry and alt-ac, or Other. Collapsing our own coding of Non-tenure-track, Pre-tenure, and Tenured/retired into one category, “All Faculty”, we arrive at the comparison in the following table. This table shows that the ratios are overall fairly similar.
| Student | All faculty | Industry/alt-ac | Other | Totals | |
| TOL N | 257 | 274 | 75 | N/A | 606 |
| TOL % | 42.4% | 45.2% | 12.4% | 0.0% | 100% |
| PPJ N | 16 | 144 | 7 | N/A | 167 |
| PPJ % | 9.6% | 86.2% | 4.2% | 0.0% | 100% |
| LSA 2019 N | 1044 | 1276 | 211 | 766 | 3297 |
| LSA 2019 % | 31.7% | 38.7% | 6.4% | 23.2% | 100% |
To reiterate, the exact coding of any individual signatory is not crucial. The signatories would not have expected to be analyzed in such depth when they signed; the rough distribution of groups is more important than the individuals; and many other factors fed into who signed each letter. For these reasons, we are not making our detailed coding public, and have also not conducted any statistical analysis on the findings. That said, these findings have been replicated in a similar analysis conducted by Michael Dow.
