DO ACADEMIC CONVENTIONS TRAMMEL INQUIRY?

In principle, encouraging "that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found" sounds desirable.  In practice, though, scholarly inquiry builds on previous inquiry, and there is at any time a box to be respected rather than mindlessly thought outside of.  Implicitly, there ought be limitations on what an academician is as a public intellectual.  Halifax philosopher Mark Mercer explains.

Some say all within the academy should be free from sanction to say what we please—as long, that is, as we seek to back up what we say with evidence or reasons. We must be willing to engage in critical discussions of what we say. That the position we take is a reasoned position or that we welcome criticism of what we say is necessary to our enjoyment of freedom of expression on campus. If we are prone to make outlandish claims without offering evidence, or if we turn our backs on criticism, we might rightly be told by a university official to reform our ways or keep quiet. If we persist and draw the ire of a colleague, student, or other member of our community, we should face corrective discipline, if not punitive discipline.

That freedom of expression on campus is conditional on giving reasons or responding to criticism is not the majority view among expression’s advocates, thankfully, but it does find some support among them. It is a common view, though, among those who dislike or fear freedom of expression on campus, including administrators and others with power. It is a claim frequently marshalled by those who seek to justify restrictions on campus expression or to extend them further. That is why it is important to be clear why this claim is false.

Now it is true that being ready and willing to explain oneself and to respond to criticism (sometimes by changing one’s mind) is a virtue among academics. Many of us are drawn to universities precisely because we enjoy and appreciate debate and the clash of ideas. We want to believe only truths, of course, but we want also to understand why the truths are truths, and that requires that we comprehend the reasons things are as they are. A prophet who does not engage in critical discussion would impede our pursuit of understanding, even should he speak nothing but ennobling truths.

Barnard College president Judith Shapiro seems to be concurring.

The damage a fundamentalist approach to free speech can cause our educational systems should be easier to address, given a commitment to core values regarding facts, logic and evaluating sources of information. Where we cannot arrive at the truth about a particular matter definitively, we can still get closer and at least move into the neighborhood. And when we are not ourselves in a position to judge the truth value of what we encounter, we must have ways of evaluating sources and learning how particular experts obtain their special knowledge.

Faculty members who have been especially focused on defending their freedom of speech need to be paying more attention to the quality of their speech. They need to be mindful of their professional responsibilities as well as their rights. That is why they are the ones getting paid and students are the ones paying.

I think she's drawing the distinction between professor in the classroom, and professor as public intellectual, or as professor using his status in his field to make a claim outside his field.

What faculty members used to say in private -- for example, while enjoying a drink with some colleagues -- is now shared on various nonprivate platforms. What was fine in the former context is not so fine in the latter. We now live with the danger of privacy disappearing altogether.

Her post then gets into the weird: take that part or leave it as you wish.  Professor Mercer, on the other hand, provides the necessary clarity.

Those who would restrict expression on campus like to distinguish between academic freedom and freedom of expression. While freedom of expression is available to all and doesn’t come with responsibilities to speak usefully and to explain or justify what one says, academic freedom does. These responsibilities should be enforced, they add, or universities would be no better than speakers’ corners or talk radio. Rules are needed to keep order and to keep members of the community on track. The rule not to speak except with reasons and with a willingness to consider criticism is a good rule of academic life, they say, for it discourages blowhards and mountebanks and, thereby, works to prevent bad expression from driving out good.

I'm not sure whether Professor Shapiro concurs. The headline to her post (it is, bear in mind, from Inside Higher (Woke) Ed) suggests something similar, with "Faculty members who have been especially focused on defending their freedom of speech need to be paying more attention to the quality of it." The partisan tone and the potted political economy of her concluding remarks suggests something else.

That's where the public get a say.  Use your academic status to make a silly argument, on a non-private platform or wherever, brace yourself for the incoming. "We don't refute people like this. We mock them. And we pity the students in their classes."  Exactly.