E-Pluribus | May 2, 2024
Academic freedom: just what the doctor ordered; freedom isn't cheap; and the origins of natural law.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Jeffrey S. Flier: Defending Academic Freedom in Higher Education and Medicine
Former dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier addressed the Association of American Physicians on April 5, 2024. Quillette has published an essay adapted from that talk. Flier addressed the issues caused by higher education’s attempts to enforce ideological conformity. He urged his colleagues to embrace the true diversity that academic freedom is intended to engender.
In the US, free speech is protected by the First Amendment, which restricts the ability of government to limit citizens’ speech, with exceptions for speech that incites violence, represents a true threat to safety by narrowly defined criteria, or constitutes fraud or defamation. Hate speech, even if vile, is protected under the First Amendment. First Amendment protections don’t apply to private institutions, like many universities, though most universities voluntarily establish free speech rights for their communities.
Academic freedom is a more limited concept, protecting scholars, researchers, and educators from censorship, discipline, or retaliation by their institutions. Academic freedom is essential to the pursuit and transmission of knowledge and to critical thinking.
Of course, freedom of speech and academic freedom don’t imply freedom from criticism. Faculty scholarship and speech can, will, and should be judged by colleagues in the field, and such judgments will influence decisions about research funding, promotions, and recognition. But the success of the academy also requires tolerance for viewpoint diversity among faculty and the ability to engage in respectful conversations across areas of disagreement, free from ad hominem attacks.
I believe these critical values are under increasing threat. The symptoms are numerous, but include: cancellations or attempted cancellations of faculty for claimed offences against specific viewpoints and values; the consequent self-silencing by faculty who fear the consequences of speaking out about their concerns; and administrative bloat and incursions that police speech.
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As happens too often in today’s polarised political environment, many people see only one side of this issue. Those on the right focus on campus events, practices, and ideologies that they see—sometimes correctly—as biased and harmful, and mistakenly support employing state power to move these in their preferred direction. Many on the left assert that claims of threats to academic freedom by campus policies and culture are exaggerated and can be dismissed as a moral panic. They focus their concerns on the real dangers of politically motivated interventions by state or federal government.
But the threats from both within and outside the academy are serious, and defending academic freedom requires aggressively countering both. To recognize or emphasize only one of these threats undermines academic freedom by rendering concerns about academic freedom subservient to politics.
[. . .]
As we pursue such reforms, we must simultaneously resist government actions that violate academic freedom. This is truly a both/and situation.
Read the whole piece.
Hannah E. Meyers: We Have a Freedom Problem
Freedom is not free, nor is it a get-out-of-responsibility-(or jail)-free card. At City Journal, Hannah Meyers looks at the attitudes of student protesters, in particular their distorted impressions of what freedom allows as well as what it costs.
We are witnessing a generation of Americans never asked even to imagine themselves in an unfree society—and who therefore are unable to grasp the enormity of the liberties that they take for granted. This has shown itself in how gleefully—to the point of extreme caricature—students have adopted the battle cries, demands, garb, and imagery of implicitly violent Islamist groups and governments, under whose rule they would find themselves brutally subjugated. Khymani James, the gender non-conforming Columbia student and protest spokesperson who avowed his desire to murder Zionists, is clearly not imagining his own, lip-glossed self in the type of society that he wants to empower in the Middle East. Such a regime would not recognize his pronouns—as a recent Iraqi law imposing 15 years’ jail time for homosexuality might caution him.
How did these students get so confused about what powers and ideologies genuinely protect human liberty? They have recited aloud a backward story about freedom.
They intone official Columbia “land acknowledgments” that conjure up the nations of Native Americans who trod around Morningside Heights for centuries before the university laid its first cornerstone. They are reminded that, contrary to pre-America—where all was equitable and tranquil and tolerant—what we have now is “exclusion, erasure, and systemic discrimination.” Never acknowledged are the American Revolutionary War soldiers who shed their blood so that their descendants could live in a society committed to the proposition that all men have an inalienable right to liberty.
On the contrary: in their high-priced classes, Ivy League youths are drilled in the idea that it was colonial-era settlers who stole freedom from indigenous peoples. It is police, like the helmeted public servants laboriously cleaning tents filled with chipotle wrappers and Marxist texts from campus lawns this week, who curtail freedom by incarcerating predators. It is America, Israel, and the West that usurp liberty, with their capitalist-based property rights—which, in truth, have helped drive the greatest advances in living standards in human history—and their commitment to free expression so staunch as to permit even bizarre notions such as the idea that biological sex is a construct.
So entitled are young Americans in their license that they are shockingly blind to their own villainy in appropriating it from others. UCLA protesters blocked Jews from campus libraries; Columbia students obstructed quads and buildings from those whose opinions (Zionists) they don’t like. In Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, they stacked vending machines against doors and chained together chairs and tables to impede elevator access. Wholly deluded about the responsibilities their freedoms confer, students then held press conferences claiming that the university was refusing them needed “humanitarian aid” by not delivering food and water to their hijacked, pillaged hideaways.
Read the whole thing.
Eric-Clifford Graf: What Is Natural Law?
Although “natural law” may not be a topic exactly ripped-from-the-headlines, understanding how our legal system came to be is important for citizens to understand. Eric-Clifford Graf at Minding the Campus gives us his take on natural law and what it is as well as what it isn’t.
Natural law is based on a dialogical coordinating principle. This is the theoretical foundation of natural law elucidated by John Locke and then played out to varying degrees by theorists as diverse as James Madison and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. A primordial legal arrangement arises naturally, as it were, because in any community of more than one person, the risk of tyranny always exists. Therefore, we agree to limit the power of whoever is in charge.
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The problem with the purely theoretical explanation of natural law is that it’s overly abstract. It only makes sense to most people when considering international relations or reviewing founding compromises like those at the heart of the U.S. Constitution of 1789. Otherwise, it’s hard to imagine wandering through a primordial forest, encountering an unknowable rival, and agreeing with him to respect the rights of some other person who might come along. Theoretical natural law might work as a general model for interpersonal relations, but it’s too epic and theological for daily use. For understanding recent history or contemporary politics it’s probably not useful at all.
[. . .]
Natural law also derives from nature; that is, it appears to have a logic that doesn’t depend on any single human’s ability to justify it or apply force to make it real. This vision of natural law is circular and tautological, but it’s no less true for that.
Natural law is, well, natural. As such, it’s independent of its administration. And the reason why a law that functions properly over time always seems sacred, divine, and universal, not foreign, unique, or sui generis, is that it works. This suggests that the reason or the logic for why said law works is somehow previous to its formal codification. We accept rules because otherwise, we’ll be at each other’s throats: Two men agree to respect the right of a woman to choose between them or not to choose at all; a community of families elects a council of elders to make decisions on behalf of everyone else; we respect the space of a household or the objects claimed by each member of a clan or tribe; we recognize that the land worked by an individual or an association belongs to them. Perhaps they should, but such rules don’t instinctively require written justifications.
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Natural law arises at humanity’s interface with nature—i.e., it is recognized, recalled, or required by virtue of living proximate to nature. This is different from the idea that a law works naturally because now we’re specifying that natural law requires a frontier, a real sense that humans live their lives by struggling against the universe and not rooted deep within some overpopulated urban space overflowing with others who are just like us. This vision of natural law requires an external boundary. The recognizable presence of Nature with which citizens interact makes us realize that laws are only good to the extent that they facilitate our interactions with Her and with each other in proximity to Her. In this sense, natural law arises spontaneously at the very site of contact with that which is not already a part of us.
[. . .]
Understanding natural law can help when founding or dissolving a nation, and it can help when considering the advisability of local ordinances. It can even help when deciding what actions to take in our own lives. The alternatives—which include letting foreign nations, self-interested politicians, and puritanical neighbors make decisions on our behalf—are not designed to promote our personal development, cultivate our dignity, or fulfill our desires. In fact, they’ll probably make us dependent, cautious, and inept across the board. Would that be natural? I think not.
Read it all.
Around Twitter (X)
When Jacob Mchangama says “mega thread,” he’s not kidding. The CEO of The Future of Free Speech is concerned about US legislative attempts to outlaw antisemitism based on Europe’s experience. A few excerpts are below. Click here for it all.
Emma Camp has a story at Reason on police abuse of authority regarding IDs". She excerpts it below:
And finally, it’s just possible some students at George Washington University might have lost respect for their college’s namesake: