Wednesday, August 15, 2007
...they should overlap, one would think, but sometimes the light of day is difficult to deal with. When academia starts rewarding people who reject evidence-based scholarship, we all have an interest.
Lynn has a good post on the El Haj business: Academia, seriously. A snip:
...It's one thing to publish a volume of political propaganda thinly disguised as scholarship in an effort to delegitimize an entire religion, an entire people and an entire nation. This is a free country and Nadia Abu El-Haj is entitled to promote her version of revisionist history and pseudo- social science as she pleases. It's quite another thing when our esteemed academic institutions ignore their own standards in honoring such perversion. And it's beyond the pale to ask parents and alumni to stand idly by while those entrusted with the education (not indoctrination) of our young people demonstrate their inability to distinguish fact from fiction.
It's time that academia started to take its role seriously again. It's time for consequences to ensue if it does not.
Indeed. The defenders of academe against the peasants with pitchforks are out in force in the comments to this short piece on the controversy at the Chronicle of Higher Ed: Alumni Group Seeks to Deny Tenure to Middle Eastern Scholar at Barnard College
I'm confused about the meaning of "academic freedom" when it pops up in cases like these. Does academic freedom imply freedom from any constraints, any basic standards and indebtedness to factually sustainable theories? Or does it mean freedom to create alternative narratives to history and pass them off to unsuspecting students as valid and worthwhile? Isn't the university at all concerned about the possibility that its graduates would be let into world with ideas of truth and accountability forever crippled by the kind of scholarship el-Haj advances?
There seems to be a struggle between two rights here, or rather a right and an ethical principle: the right to academic freedom and the principle of academic truth. Which prevails, or should prevail, when it comes to a question of tenure, the right to teach lies and distortions of history or the principle of academic truth that is opposed to the teaching of lies and distortions?
"When academia starts rewarding people who reject evidence-based scholarship, we all have an interest."
Precisely. Yet too many among academe pretend - convincing even themselves - they're engaging in nuance and abstruse subtleties when in fact they're engaging in subtle forms of guile, evasive sophistries and casuistries and the like. Vanity. And societally corrupting forms of vanity at that, at least so at the core of it, at foundational levels.
People are too often cowed by these academics. It goes without saying that anti-intellectualism and similar reactionary forms need to be resolutely avoided; but respect needs to be earned and that's true for academics no less than with other true professions.
The self-regarding Joachim Martillos of the world are merely the more blatant tips of the icebergs.
Seriously engaged academics deserve respect, but skepticism is the default position, genuine respect needs to be earned and one of the ways in which it is earned is via transparency and openness.
Shedding light on the professoriate
h/t Instapundit