#09 Bacchus reading group meeting

This month’s reading: Davids, N. (2021). Academic freedom and the fallacy of a post-truth era. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 1-12.

Notes of the comments made during the discussion:

• Whilst the author did make good forays into outlining the tensions that exist around academic freedom, outlining some of the problems, it was less explicit of why a focus on truth (and by extension of academic freedom) was important in the first place.

  • An ideal of truth/academic freedom being the mechanism, by which academics and the public enlarge then subsequently can negotiate what is and is not important

• Another interesting point, was the example of the speaker from jylland posten being dis-invited, and subsequently individuals condemned the decisions as “cowardice”

  • The very charge of cowardice is interesting for a number of reasons.

    • Firstly, it implies that the opposite action is desirable,

    • Secondly, it is a form of public shaming where the actions are not to the liking of the individual making that charge and

    • Thirdly, the cultural framework from which this accusation is made is normalised and taken for granted

• Interesting point raised by Stephen Burwood in email correspondence. In that:

  • “the war being waged against the university is not simply against dissenting public intellectuals and academic freedom; this war is deeply implicated in questions of power across the university, specifically regarding who controls the hiring process, the organization of curricula, and the nature of pedagogy itself.” (p. 1187, bold added for emphasis)

  • That questions of academic freedom go to all dimensions of the university organisation, and are not just peripheral to a specific subset of special interest

• The certainty and negotiations, of what it means for something to be true and where are the boundaries of (academic) freedom, then become a role model that is propagating outwards to wider society

  • In a positive technical sense, that the “role model” that students learn to self-develop their own ideas, will hopefully be given on and inspire others

  • In a negative technical sense, that the “role model” that the university uses in shutting down avenues of speech, then also becomes a legitimating way for wider society of how to censor speech

• Academic freedom, and advocating for it, is not without risk.

  • Likewise, challenges to academic freedom are often presented in a Orwellian type fashion, that shutting down someone’s speech is actually a good thing, and in turn supposedly promoting more freedom of speech

• Academic freedom, is important in that cultural shift and new ideas, all new ideas first only ever manifest with an individual speaking up and daring to question the accepted dogma/wisdom

  • If the university as a mechanism does not tolerate dissent, the consequence is that no new innovation manifests as established conventions are not challenged