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Alice Speri
The Guardian
US college campuses have long been associated with the country’s fraying social fabric. Beset by so-called “cancel culture”, mass protests against Israel’s war on Gaza, and mounting conflicts over free speech, a notion has taken hold that colleges and universities represent a convergence of the country’s broader ills.
Dozens of organizations have cropped up promising to foster “civic discourse”, “dialogue across difference” and “viewpoint diversity”. Together, they make up a fast-growing ecosystem that has ballooned, by some estimates, into a $200m a year business some skeptics have billed the “civility industrial complex”.
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Ghent University suspended postdoctoral scholar Nathan Cofnas as a “precautionary measure” pending a “preliminary disciplinary investigation.” The reason he is being suspended, however, has little if anything to do with him legitimately criticizing Jason Arday’s scholarship last month by documenting plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral thesis. Ghent is instead suspending Cofnas because his expressed public views are misaligned with the university’s values and therefore “creates a reputational risk”. This is not how academic freedom should work.
In July of this year, the American Association of University Professors endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate in Michigan’s Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate. Reactions from higher ed commentators played out exactly how you might expect: where defenders saw an obligatory bulwark of academic freedom against GOP incursions, critics saw an own-goal that only further justified those attacks.
However justified the AAUP’s decision may have seemed to some, new research suggests that it will only further fracture public trust in higher education.
