“To save free speech we must stop funding people who theorize in bad faith, endlessly looking for ways to undermine reality so as to put themselves in power.”
No projection going on here, the modern conservative movement is a paragon of unselfish sincerity, as exemplified by the national administration. It may look like they're up to their absolute eyeballs in corruption and double dealing, but just ask them and they'll tell you they're the most honest folk to ever walk the earth, or indeed any other planet.
I thought that universities were about exploring challenging ideas according to the free speech advocates. Are the ideas promoted by critical theorists not merely challenging ideas?
>To save free speech we must stop funding people who theorize in bad faith
To believe this in a meaningful, rational way would require one to constantly call out administrations and propagandists, after months and years of debunking evidences the methods to serially operate in bad faith.
In the absence of any calling out: We can reasonably surmise they are either captured by political cultists and not processing rationally - or that they are simply operating in bad faith.
Granting, however, that some percent of folks simply get off on bad actors and the harm they do to those who never earned that. For them, cruelty brings it's own buzz and that is enough.
The problem is that critical theory at the foundational level (Adorno, Foucault, even Butler) is an extremely useful and coherent way of thinking about power and situated perspective.
Unfortunately the revolutionary praxis that emerged from it is what we typically see in the academy under the label of “critical theory”, which smuggles in a lot of “liberation” ethics under the guise of critique — so it’s no longer “this is how to think about power”, but rather “power is evil and should be destroyed, or even better given to me”. Foucault literally called these people “saviors” and he didn’t mean it nicely.
(It doesn’t help that this praxis is simplistic, ties into friend/enemy emotions, and gives people “something to fight for” in an era where meaning is hard to come by.)
No matter how contaminated the bathwater, though, I think the baby is probably worth saving.
Seems like a pretty obvious effect no? There’s a major power imbalance between professor and student. Not sure how much it would extend outside of the classroom.
> Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said the University “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism had chilled free speech and debate on campus.
The university does not "allow" professors to express their opinions; that is a fundamental tenet of academic freedom, and is critically important to free speech in and of itself. The idea that a university could _prevent_ professors from giving their opinions in class is laughable anyway; if we didn't value the opinions of professors, we wouldn't need them at all, and could get away with lecturers without PhDs or research obligations. (Of course, many university administrators would quite like that.)
It seems to me that Garber is less interested in preventing faculty from expressing opinions in general and more that he is interested in suppressing a particular set of opinions he and his donors disagree with.
There is a big difference between professors being "free" to publish and express their views on a subject, and teaching that same subject in such a way that their views are presented as the only acceptable views on that subject.
