Your Cart is Empty
Michael Regnier
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy
Imagine if, at a certain university, the Astronomy Department gradually morphed into the Astrology Department. Hard evidence was replaced by unfalsifiable speculation. Telescopes were traded for horoscopes. How, exactly, could the university’s leaders — responsible for excellence but not themselves trained astronomers — recognize the change? What signs could they have spotted earlier, before all trust was lost?
This is part of the provocative framing of the Vanderbilt-WashU “State of Scholarship” report that has drawn intense debate this week. Commissioned by the chancellors of the two universities, the report was written by a distinguished committee of scholars charged with assessing the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social science fields. All is not well, the report says. The pursuit of knowledge in humanistic fields is, not always but too often, distorted by politicization — skewed by a priori commitments to certain results and muddled by selective skepticism about knowledge itself.
Comments will be approved before showing up.
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.
