Harvard President Faults Faculty Activism for Chilling Debate and Free Speech
thecrimson.com
thecrimson.com
No one anywhere wants to clean their own house
Kowtowing is what happens when changes happen in response to overt bullying by a powerful, hostile autocrat.
Embracing (and nurturing) the above toxic principle is evidenced by folks who parrot talking points supplied by powerful, hostile autocrats.
Hm.
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.
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.
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.