In their introduction to a book titled 'Who's afraid of Academic freedom' the philosopher, Akeel Bilgrami & , the Sociologist, Jonathon Cole write-
THE TITLE OF this volume, despite its associative distractions, is meant quite literally.
If so, the book will name and shame all those who are afraid of Academic Freedom. Parents, or tax payers (if higher education is publicly funded) are afraid of Academic Freedom because Professors may prefer to teach nonsense rather than do their fucking job. This is also the reason we are afraid of Plumbers' Freedom. Instead of fixing the toilet, plumbers may prefer to charge us an arm and a leg for biting our ear off about the fucking immigrants who are ruining the country. This is particularly galling if, like me, you happen to be of the wrong colour.
A primary achievement of the essays in the pages that follow is to identify and analyze different groups and tendencies in our society that fear academic freedom and attempt to thwart it, sources as diverse in range and generality as intellectual orthodoxy,
i.e. teaching kids stuff which makes their brains hurt but which will lead to their earning big bucks or achieving a lot for their community, their country, or, indeed, humanity as a whole,
intellectual obscurantism,
which can flourish alongside Academic freedom. It might be weeded out as useless and stupid if there is no Academic freedom and worthless University Departments get defunded.
the interests of donors,
especially if the want Scientific breakthroughs rather than illiterate PhD dissertations bewailing the fact that heterosexual males aren't subject to compulsory gender reassignment surgery- probably because of Neo-Liberalism's imbrication with Patriarchy and Nazism.
institutional review board licensing, Israeli and other pressure groups,
like Boycott & Disinvest?
U.S. legislation and government policy, and actions taken within universities such as speech codes and restrictions on research . . .
Why am I not allowed to research my student's genitals while lecturing naked with a radish up my bum? Is it because of the fatal imbrication of Neo-Liberalism with Nazism?
As a value within the academy, it is arguable that freedom of inquiry is unique and may be given a lexicographical priority over other values because it is an enabling value.
You don't have to be in the academy to have freedom of inquiry. Indeed, if such research can 'pay for itself' it will attract funding and, it may be, be better performed outside the Academy. This is because teaching adolescents can be demoralizing when it isn't a 'time-suck'.
What does 'freedom of inquiry' actually enable? I have it but, because I am stupid, I am not enabled to do anything worthwhile. Sadly, much of the Academy is staffed by people as stupid as me. This is because educational credentials are often mere 'signals'. If you have a Doctorate in a non-STEM subject and no advanced work-skills (e.g. fluency in foreign languages or ability to analyse data) what you are signalling is sycophancy (you sucked up to your supervisor) and a very high tolerance for dismal bullshit.
It enables the pursuit of other values
No. Freedom simply isn't enough. Inquiry requires intelligence. But smart peeps don't study useless shite of the sort these two Professors teach.
and, therefore, it cannot be weighed on the same scale as the values it enables,
Sure it can. It is only because Knowledge is a value that Inquiry acquires a value. Thus, it is itself, enabled- provided the guy doing it is smart.
whether these be “truth” in the outcome of inquiry, or more generally “excellence” in the pursuit of inquiry, or simply the peace of mind of inquirers . . .
What enables any activity which consumes calories is productivity. If this is falling, there will be less inquiry and less excellence and the one 'truth' people will obsess about is that watching your kids starve to death isn't fun.
We have said it is “arguable” that this is so.
It really isn't. It is the sort of stupid shite that people who wasted their time at Uni, and who are now wasting the time of their students at Uni, gas on about.
It cannot complacently be assumed to be so. Some of the essays in the volume try to provide the arguments by which it may be established, addressing considerations that are sometimes raised to question this priority of academic freedom, considerations that appeal to the very values that it claims to enable.
Which was cool back in 2015 because we thought the Chinese couldn't overtake us in STEM subjects. Now it looks like they can. That's why nobody gives a shit about Academic Freedom or Wokeness or DEI or BDS or BLM or whatever.
Once the Chinese are ahead of us, they can do to us what we tried to do to them. Their first step will be to refuse to sell us the new vaccinee or Quantum Computer chip unless we hand over any Chinese dissidents on our soil to them. Next, they will want to set up police stations on our soil. After that, will come 'extra-territoriality'. When we protest, they will remind us that it was what Western powers did to China back in the day. I suppose, they will also want to export fentanyl to us to get their revenge for our 'Opium Wars'.
Such lexicographical priority is, of course, often granted to freedom of speech and discussion outside the academy as well, so much so that it is enshrined as a familiar and fundamental law of the land. There are essays here that wrestle with the question: Is academic freedom just a name for the practice, within universities, of the political freedom guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, or is it, for reasons having to do with the specific nature of the academy, set apart from that more general freedom?
The answer is clear. It is more circumscribed. Indeed, liberty is always most wide when it comes to a private person when not employed or otherwise contractually bound to a third party.
That question needs to be considered in conceptual and analytic terms,
No. It is a purely legal matter.
but also historically. One of the curious features of the value of academic freedom is how little it has evolved since the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) first articulated the value in its formal statement in 1915, which was reinforced and somewhat expanded in 1940.
The world was very different then. In any case, as the McCarthy witch-hunts showed, the thing didn't mean very much in practice.
The value has not evolved over time the way the interpretation and scope of the First Amendment has.
We don't know if SCOTUS will overturn Sullivan vs NYT.
While there have been essays and books written about academic freedom since 1940, it may well be time for a more detailed and considered articulation of what exactly academic freedom protects and what it does not— and whether we should reconsider its original intent, which was (as Robert Post has claimed in a number of essays) that academic freedom is distinguishable from First Amendment rights and has more to do with the “contract” that exists between faculty members and others, including trustees, academic administrators, and outside authorities.
Why the scare quotes for 'contract'? Post is a Law Professor. He was outlining what was then the settled legal view. It may now have changed. Still, for the moment, Georgetown continues to teach DEI though a prosecutor tried to get them to stop. Georgetown quoted Sweezy & Keyishian and also raised their religious status as a possible defence. Trumpists seem to have backed off for the moment. But for how long?
Some essays here make an attempt to give some historical grounding to this issue, while others dispute it by showing its extreme restrictiveness. Though questions of academic freedom affect all of society
more particularly if our Academy turns to shit while that of our rivals soar ahead in STEM subjects
and not just the society of scholars, though its fruits are reaped by everyone and by most institutions, a specific group that is most affected by its presence or absence is the faculty in universities with their special duties of teaching and research.
It depends on what they are teaching or researching. If it is stupid shit, defund the fuckers.
With this in mind, the editors decided to carry out an empirical pilot survey of Columbia University full-time faculty opinion on a wide variety of questions revolving around the academic freedom they enjoy and expect but which is sometimes under question and threat. The survey is presented here with an analysis by Jonathan R. Cole and his collaborators.
Plumbers want Plumbers' Freedom. Academics want Academic Freedom. Guess what sort of Freedom Rapists want? No. Don't guess. Get a grant to 'research' the matter.
One question that is derived from the results of the survey relates to the hierarchy of values in a university: Is academic freedom seen by the faculty as a special enabling value,
yes. It enables them to think of themselves as smart whereas the truth is they are nothing but glorified child-minders.
or is it considered by most contemporary faculty members as one among a set of contenders for priority? The fourteen vignettes contained in the empirical study, which in some cases asked faculty members to choose among competing university values (one of which was always free inquiry or academic freedom, although that was never explicitly mentioned in the survey), suggest that most faculty view academic freedom as essentially freedom of speech.
I shouldn't get fired for saying my student has a great pair of tits.
The survey also suggests an erosion of certain core values within the academy.
Coz Obama was President back then. Did you know that he was a member of the Ku Klux Klan? That's why he wasn't nuking Israel.
Is academic freedom one of them, as apparently are values like disinterestedness (exemplified in, among other things, the normative prohibition against faculty members profiting from their discoveries)?
There is no such prohibition. For Patents, the Bayh-Dole Act applies as does the specific contract offered by the employing Institution. The discoverer gets a portion of the royalties. In the case of books published by Professors, they get to keep all the money even if they put their own books on the reading list for their students.
The pilot study raises more questions than it answers, one of which is whether different major universities and colleges place different weights on these various values. It is fair to say that ever since John Coulter in a celebrated address stressed the value of Lehrfreiheit
freedom to teach. Everyone has it with respect to any legal activity.
to the idea of the modern research university, followed several decades later by the equally and rightly celebrated Kalven committee report, the University of Chicago has been something of a pioneer in this country on the matter of the centrality that academic freedom came to have in higher education.
American universities competed with each other. Moreover, unlike pre-war Germany, the Professor was never considered a 'Beamte'- i.e. a privileged sort of public servant who can only be fired for a felony.
A comparison of other universities with the University of Chicago on the question of freedom of inquiry may therefore be one way to assess these differential weights.
It may also be a good way to waste time.
Two essays here that focus on the University of Chicago may provide a start in helping to make such a comparative study possible. Taken together, these essays powerfully convey how no freedom can be taken for granted even in the most well oiled of functioning formal democracies.
What can't be taken for granted is maintaining America's technological lead over China. That is what should be concentrating minds.
It is in the nature of power to resist the possession and exercise of freedom by those over whom it exercises power.
Nonsense. It is in the nature of power to want to trade some of it for wealth, popularity, a place in the history books, etc. If your people are used to freedom and are highly productive, you want them to have even more freedom- especially freedom to make useful discoveries or start promising new enterprises- because, that way, you will gain more of the things you value which power brings.
It is in the nature of stupidity and weakness and malice to mutter rancorously against those who are smart, strong and achieving great things.
And power, as we also know, does not threaten freedom always by coercion or, to put it differently, the opposite of freedom is not necessarily always coercive agents and policies and institutions but the presence of much less easily identifiable tendencies.
This is why you must put on a tin-foil hat and listen to a paranoid nutter who teaches utter shite.
The modern university is not a medieval cloister and is as subject to the political and economic interests that generate these tendencies and threaten freedom as most, if not all, other institutions.
Have you checked under your bed? Hitler might be hiding there.
(One extraordinary, up-to-the-minute example of this is the very recent amendment to a budget bill by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), which was passed by a voice vote and signed into law by President Obama. The amendment, or rider, to the bill ordered the National Science Foundation to refrain from funding any political science research “except for research projects that the [NSF director] certifies as promoting national security or the economic interests of the United States.”
That's why Osama Bin Laden was refused a grant from the NSF to research how to kill lots of Americans. Indeed, Obama wasn't content with just denying Osama academic freedom, he sent in the SEALS to kidnap and kill him even though Osama was just very peacefully doing research in Pakistan.
Not since former president Ronald Reagan’s effort to eliminate all social science funding by the NSF has there been such a blatant attack by Congress on free inquiry and research judged as superior by the members of NSF panels of experts.)
Obama is as bad as Reagan who, let me tell you, was Adolf Hitler in disguise.
In analyzing the nature of these tendencies, their sometimes hidden sources, and their detailed and widespread implications, the essays presented here are exercises in and for democracy.
No. This is paranoid shite. No wonder, Trump won in 2016.
What follows is a set of very brief summaries of each essay in the book to steer the reader to specific interests and points of focus in the volume. Geoffrey Stone provides us with “A Brief History of Academic Freedom,” which traces the origins and evolution of academic freedom from Athens to the present.
Eurocentric much? Akeel should know that India offered complete Academic Freedom at a time when the UK didn't allow Catholics and Dissenters to set up their own Colleges.
It explores the many battles that have been fought over the years to give meaning and content to that freedom; examines its meaning today; and considers the political, economic, and cultural challenges academic freedom continues to face now and in the future.
These cretins didn't see Trump coming. Their big beef was that Obama might secretly be the Grand Wizard of the KKK.
Akeel Bilgrami finds a celebrated argument in John Stuart Mill appealing to human fallibility to be both fallacious on its own terms and unnecessary to make the case for freedom of inquiry.
Fair point. Mill truly was as stupid as shit.
He rejects such metaphors as “the marketplace of ideas”
There is an actual market for good ideas in every utile (and some nonsensical) field.
and “balance in the classroom”
Why be balanced when you can gas on about how Neo-Liberalism is committing genocide on the fairies at the bottom of your garden?
that are encouraged by Mill’s argument and provides an alternative analysis for what it is in dogmatism that threatens freedom of inquiry.
There is no need for such analysis. The very word 'dogmatic' means 'resistant to new ideas or evidence'.
David Bromwich
who attacked Obama & Biden- because that's what Left-Liberals are supposed to do- right?
articulates the case against the sort of sequestering of academic freedom from the more generally articulated political freedom enshrined in the Constitution that has recently been put forward by both Robert Post
he does no such thing. The dude is a lawyer. Bromwich teaches Eng Lit.
and Stanley Fish,
who, much to the disappointment of his students, isn't actually a fish.
and in doing so raises a question about the extent to which their position reflects (and feeds) the increasing transformation in our societies of knowledge into a form of “expertise.”
As opposed to imbecility- right?
Jonathan R. Cole’s essay deploys the ideals and logic of the Kalven committee report as a point of departure for his analysis of the logic and limits of academic freedom. He suggests that the threats against academic freedom are very much still with us
if a freedom is misused, it will attract censure or be curtailed in some way.
and proposes how great universities ought to respond in certain ways that are consistent with this value.
Anything at all is consistent with any value whatsoever by a judicious choice of 'Structural Causal Model'. These morons thought attacking Obama would help someone further to the Left to gain power. But, it was Trump who won in 2016.
He outlines the nature of the threats and the roles that the university and its faculty ought to play in responding to them.
He was wrong. Sociologists generally are.
Indeed, he argues that great universities cannot be created or continue to exist without a vigilant defense of this value, upon which is built most of the rest of the structure of a great university.
That's how come Tsinghua University and the Singapore National University have got into the top 20 Universities globally. How soon before Tsinghua takes top spot? Thanks for this outcome must, of course, go to the tremendous amount of freedom Chairman Xi allows his people.
He argues, as does the Kalven committee report, that the best of our universities are by design meant to be unsettling—to be critical of our society’s weaknesses,
like the fact that Obama is a fucking Nazi
as a source for new, even radical ideas (in all disciplines)
e.g. that Israel, which is our friend, should be nuked while crazy Jihadis, who hate and try to kill us, must be coddled
that must also meet the test of extreme methodological rigor.
In Sociology this means Rossi's metallic laws which can be more generally stated as 'All Sociological research, when strictly reviewed, turns out to be worthless because of BAD methodology.' The truth is methodology doesn't matter. What matters is whether the thing is useful.
The essential tension with the university is between the acceptance to listen to the most radical ideas
e.g. eat your own shit. Don't let Big Food fool you into thinking you need to buy groceries.
and simultaneously to apply the most stringent methodological criteria for establishing fact or truth.
To do that you have to be a Math maven with a very fucking high IQ. Guys of that calibre aren't going to waste their time in non-STEM (or Fintech) fields.
Joan Scott
gender theorist whose brains rotted away thanks to her prolonged exposure to French psilosophy.
exposes the weaknesses in conventional efforts at making and maintaining a distinction between politics and scholarship by appeal to a notion of “objectivity,”
everybody should be allowed to identify as a Native American Woman who is also a walrus. Objectivity is very evil. Did you know it once gave Adolf Hitler a beejay? Subjectivity told me about it. I like Subjectivity. She says I am the prettiest Native American walrus she ever met.
and thinks the consequences of this through for the diverse use that is made of notions of “academic responsibility” to restrict academic freedom.
Also, why are we not allowed to teach our students how to eat their own shit? Is it because of the machinations of Big Food?
Jon Elster’s polemical essay is on how tolerance of two broad tendencies in academic disciplines that he finds “obscurantist” can be a threat to academic freedom. At first sight, this would seem to be an argument for there being too much academic freedom. But that is not his view. He distinguishes between freedom of thought and freedom of speech and claims that “excessive politeness” toward obscurantism undermines the former. The essay should raise an interesting question for the reader.
Only if the reader is an academic and is tired of being polite to his students. Why am I not allowed to tell them what I really think of them? It really is true that I would rather they sucked me off, while I shouted 'you like this don't you, you retard bitch!' than expect me to read their illiterate essays
Suppose even that we put aside the protest that one person’s obscurantism is another person’s depthful clarity, and grant him that we have permitted a great deal of obscurantism in the academy. The interesting question is: Why is this a form of academic unfreedom?
Politeness. The fact that you are not allowed to demand a beejay from the obscurantist while calling him a big fat retard bitch.
Obscurantism, if and where it exists, is no doubt a wrong,
It isn't a wrong any more than stupidity is a wrong.
but why should all wrongs be the same wrong?
They aren't. That's why when somebody wrongs you by shitting on your head, you suffer a different wrong from the one where the Vice Chancellor anally raped you shouting 'you love this don't you, you fugly retard bitch?!'
Should we count it as the same wrong as academic unfreedom,
No. Academic unfreedom is stuff like not being allowed to teach the theory of evolution.
as promoting the same wrong as coercion or dogmatism does, or as a different sort of malaise in the university?
Why bother? The fact is America under Obama was pretty free. Left leaning Academics were thriving. It was the Right wing sort who had to keep mum. Yet, the Left wasn't happy. In 2014 a whole bunch of them wrote to Obama about Gaza demanding he stop all aid to Israel. They really didn't know when they were well off.
Michele Moody-Adams addresses conflicting values as they affect questions of academic freedom.
As an African American woman, she knows a thing or two about the value of freedom.
As she notes, academic freedom can have culturally and politically unsettling consequences, particularly when practices of intellectual exclusion that are central to academic freedom and define academic life conflict with values of inclusion that we deem important to democratic institutions. Her essay considers the causes and implications of such conflicts, as well as broader cultural sources of unease about academic freedom, to show that the benefits of protecting academic freedom far outweigh any potential dangers.
She is right. If some bunch of rednecks want to have a White only Campus let them set it up with their own money. After that they can get down to the serious business of marrying their Sister-Mommies.
As we said above, Robert Post has written extensively in the past on aspects of the history and practice of academic freedom in the United States, and has made a clear and sharp distinction between the concepts of academic freedom and the First Amendment clause protecting freedom of speech. He has argued that academic freedom grew out of an effort to redefine the relationship between academics and their employers in an era (the first two decades of the twentieth century).
An era when security of tenure was important to attract and retain talent.
His is an argument that academic freedom protects the rights of experts from disciplines to make a series of decisions about the quality of scholarship and the organization of how to evaluate it without external interference.
Sadly, this is a case of shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Some University Departments became adversely selective of imbecility five decades ago. You have cretins teaching drooling imbeciles. This is a Credentialist Ponzi scheme which must be shut down.
In the current essay found here, Post makes a structural argument that the constitutional law of academic freedom, properly speaking, protects neither professors as individuals nor universities as institutions, but the disciplinary norms which define the scholarly profession and which universities exist to nourish and reproduce.
This is meaningless jibber-jabber. Still, if it stands up in court, who are we to cavil?
Philip Hamburger
Not an actual Hamburger. Sad. Still, his outfit overturned Chevron deference. It gets money from one of the Koch brothers
explores conflicting norms in his essay where he argues that the use of institutional review boards, or IRBs, violates the principles of academic freedom.
Its a subtle point but his NCLA are scoring victories in Court by challenging what they consider to be unlawful use of administrative power.
He argues that licensing of speech or the press was a method of controlling the press employed by the Inquisition and the Star Chamber,
the offense of seditious libel, blasphemy, etc continued past 1695.
and the First Amendment unequivocally barred it. Nonetheless, the federal government has revived licensing through the regulation of human-subjects research. Although federal regulations provide for academics and students to get permission for “research,” which sounds like mere conduct, both the text and the effect of the regulations reveal that they provide for licensing of speech and the press—initially in academic inquiry and then in its publication. Of course, research on human subjects can be harmful, and the government aims to prevent that, but the harms prevented by the human-subjects research regulations are minimal compared to the harm caused by suppression of speech.
Particularly in medical research and its publication, the suppression evidently causes several thousands of deaths each year.
So, there's at least one essay in this book which isn't shite. That's because it is written by a legal scholar.
Hamburger juxtaposes these two norms of the academy, while arguing that, in fact, the federal regulations are unconstitutional. Indeed, the resulting censorship is the most widespread and systematic assault on the freedom of speech and the press in the nation’s history.
After COVID, we can all understand why the NCLA might be useful.
Richard Shweder’s essay seeks first to define the ancient Socratic ideal of freedom of thought and the application of the methods of critical reason as the ultimate ends of academic life. According to this view the university is primarily an intellectual, not a moral, political, or commercial, institution.
Akeel Bilgrami comes from India. Most Colleges are the essential training ground for a training in crime. Lawrence Bishnoi got his start in student politics. He runs the most dreaded gang in India- and maybe now also Canada where his henchman, Goldy Brar, went on a student visa.
What makes a great university great is
high IQ students working on STEM subjects. You don't have to go to Collidge to get drunk, read Plato, and experiment with sodomy.
its commitment and willingness to nurture and protect the ardor and fearlessness of autonomous minds to following the argument where it leads regardless of moral, political, or commercial interests or popular opinion.
If you are in statu pupillari, you aren't autonomous. The same goes for guys who have to give lectures for a living.
Is this antiquarian conception a foolish ideal in the contemporary academic world?
Yes. Also, though Socrates didn't charge those whose ears he bit off, Sophists did. So did Plato who set up the Academy and Aristotle who set up the Lyceum. If there are rich adolescents, there will be a market for 'higher education'. If parents don't think such education will advance their sons' interests, then 'intellectuality' will be the monopoly of the pederast, not the pedagogue. At any rate, that is what I take Socrates to be getting at in the Lysis.
To what extent does a self-consciously neo-antiquarian academic institution such as the University of Chicago live up to the standard?
To the extent that you think Leo Strauss was the cat's whiskers. He really wasn't.
Would Socrates be welcome and thrive within the halls of the modern university
No. He also didn't seek to enter such higher education facilities as existed in his own time.
or would he slowly suffer death by a thousand cuts?
Plato and Aristotle would do well enough.
I skip over a section devoted to essays by Chicago Uni Professors magnifying the importance of their own Institution.
Stanley Fish and Judith Butler take opposing sides on the relation between academic freedom and the academic boycott politics surrounding the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands.
Fish isn't actually mad. That's a disadvantage in his line of work. To be fair, when he started out, there was much sound scholarship to be found in the English Dept.
While Fish takes this particular issue as yet another location to argue for his view that the academy is a relatively narrow and isolated enterprise
which is why students might be persuaded to study John Skelton rather than eat their own shit as a way of protesting Obama's genocide in Gaza
whose pursuits must not be contaminated by larger political struggles, Butler makes an argument that academic freedom is a conditioned value,
just like actual freedom. You are actually in jail right now. This is because everybody is actually in jail and will remain in jail till Beyonce admits that I am cuter than her and much much better at shaking my money-maker.
a value that can only be implemented under certain conditions that are necessary for it,
Why can't all those fucking Israelis just kill themselves already? Would that be too much to ask?
and if those conditions are being manifestly abrogated by the Israeli government’s policies and practices, then it cannot be a threat to academic freedom, as is sometimes thought, to propose an academic boycott of the sort that some would wish to impose on Israel.
Israel has a lot of very smart people. We injure ourselves by denying ourselves the benefit of 'Jewish Science'.
John Mearsheimer looks at the variety of ways in which the “Israel lobby” adversely affects the freedom of the academy in the United States,
did they demand a boycott of the works of Edward Said? No. But they didn't protest when Obama illegally killed Osama who was just quietly doing research into Kaffir-killing in Pakistan.
from smear tactics against professors who are critics of Israel and working toward excluding such critics from visiting and speaking on campuses to co-opting students to support Israel and discouraging donations to universities that do not internally subdue criticism of Israel.
BDS is virtuous because it is a socially acceptable way of saying 'Hitler had the right idea'. But trying to push back against this virulent form of anti- Semitism is very evil. Why? It's because Hitler really did have the right idea.
Noam Chomsky expands the canvas of these issues from Mearsheimer’s narrower interest in the intrusive presence of the Israel lobby on campuses to the much more generalized voluntary subservience of university administrators and intellectuals to state power,
Chomsky was very angry with Obama for killing Osama but failing to kill some anti-Castro dissident who never harmed any American citizen. He also thought it very sinister that everybody except himself was 'subservient' to State Power. It didn't occur to him that the American State tries to do things which are useful and good for American people.
with some telling details of the recent history of this form of subservience as it relates to American foreign policy toward the Middle East.
i.e. Chomsky repeats his paranoid rantings.
...Modern social life is everywhere characterized by the undue demands that are made on individuals in the occupations that they choose or are landed with and by the brief and distracting release from such demands in recreation.
To establish Academic Freedom, we must abolish Social life. Professors should be sent off to live alone on an asteroid far away from any contractual or social obligation.
Life in a thoroughly professionalized academy cannot be counted as an exception to this.
Yet, there are plenty of Professors who do useful work and who don't feel 'undue demands' are being made of them. By contrast, it is certainly the case that Socioproctologists find it unjust and onerous that they are expected to cover their nakedness when answering the doorbell.
There is scarce time and energy remaining for serious critical reflection on what one does in living such a life, and this often induces an unwilled complacence about what one may have allowed as fundamental threats to the basic liberties that enable the pursuits of inquiry.
Not if you are teaching shite. You simply don't matter in the slightest- though you may have some small nuisance value. But if Academics make a nuisance of themselves, there may be a back-lash as we now see under Trump.
But, as even these brief summaries of the essays in this volume display in gratifying abundance, there are also pockets of determined resistance against such complacence.
Hamburger might be having some impact. But he seems to be on the other side of the ideological divide from the majority of the contributors.
In inviting and presenting them, we have sought both thematic range and historical depth in identifying and diagnosing the threats to freedom of inquiry, but above all we have sought to exemplify the spirit of controversy that many of the contributors believe universities should protect, indeed encourage.
Yet, the book, as a whole, appears a dialogue between the deaf. Freedom is a bunch of defeasible Hohfeldian immunities. They are costly to maintain in an effective form. Thus the correct way to analyse any type of freedom is through a 'Law & Econ' approach. What are the costs of maintaining the Freedom? What are the benefits? How is this affected by what rival countries are doing? What about 'Baumol Cost Disease' (i.e. the tendency for non-tradable services to rise in price relative to tradable goods)? What about Demographics? These are the questions you should be addressing if you are compiling a book on Academic Freedom. This means you need an economist or two to weigh in on the subject. Also, Eurocentrism is simply untenable in the 21st century. China is rising. Only those sleeping the sleep of the dead can afford to be 'Woke'.
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