I DON'T CARE WHO GETS THE CREDIT.

Let me refresh your memory, dear reader.  Many years ago, I wrote an essay for the Northern Illinois University Faculty Bulletin titled "The Costs of Correctness."  It opened,

Universities are failing to carry out their mission. Contributing to this failure is a collection of ideas we call "politically correct." The intellectual foundation of these ideas is an extreme relativism that questions the possibility of objective knowledge and seeks to dispel "coherent beliefs of any kind." A university built on such a foundation cannot stand. "Politically correct" activists are actively correcting "insensitivity," especially on the part of white males, toward women and minorities. That activism may be misguided, and it diverts attention from other, more serious failings of universities.

At the time I posted the essay, I noted,

The good news from that recent post is that people with bigger platforms than mine are paying attention to those more serious failings. When I wrote the essay, it was with the hope of persuading people to pursue a different course from the one the trendy scholarship was pursuing.

Then I laid down the bill of particulars, circa 1990 (which was amusing at the time, with communism crumbling all over the world).

The words university and universal have common roots: a university is a storage of universal knowledge. Its mission is to acquire, expand, and transmit knowledge. Universities are failing at that mission. For example, some students wonder why people refer to a "second" World War; and large numbers believe that "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a constitutional right. Students in this country do not perform as well on multi-step mathematical problems as their counterparts in other countries. University graduates teach high school students, and, according to the National Association of Manufacturers, high school graduates write poorly (many cannot fill out a job application) and can't do simple mathematics.

Now come Steven Pinker and Bertha Madras with "Why We Created Harvard’s Academic Freedom Council."

Confidence in American higher education is sinking faster than for any other institution, with barely half of Americans believing it has a positive effect on the country.

No small part in this disenchantment is the impression that universities are repressing differences of opinion, like the inquisitions and purges of centuries past. It has been stoked by viral videos of professors being mobbed, cursed, heckled into silence, and sometimes assaulted, and it is vindicated by some alarming numbers. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, between 2014 and 2022 there were 877 attempts to punish scholars for expression that is, or in public contexts would be, protected by the First Amendment. Sixty percent resulted in actual sanctions, including 114 incidents of censorship and 156 firings (44 of them tenured professors)—more than during the McCarthy era. Worse, for every scholar who is punished, many more self-censor, knowing they could be next. It’s no better for the students, a majority of whom say that the campus climate prevents them from saying things they believe.

The embattled ideal of academic freedom is not just a matter of the individual rights of professors and students. It’s baked into the mission of a university, which is to seek and share the truth—veritas, as our university, Harvard, boasts on its seal.

From there, although they used different words, and offered a higher level of generality, they found themselves in the same place I was, five years ago.

Relearning from scratch, though, seems to be where we are headed.  Consider privilege.  We could apply the argument to any other emergent phenomenon.  Take seriously the arguments from outrage about "inherited" or "unearned" advantage or privilege or custom or what have you: aren't you reduced to having to construct your rules of interaction ab initio?  Just for fun, dear reader, consider a future privilege training session in which a novice, skeptical of the message yet alert to the irony, asks the trainer what he (or she, or it, or whatever the pronoun conventions are) did to earn the right to conduct the training and introduce that material.  Sometimes you undermine them with mockery, and sometimes, you undermine them by asking difficult questions.

Or, as Professors Pinker and Madras do, pointing out the consequences.

The reason that a truth-seeking institution must sanctify free expression is straightforward. No one is infallible or omniscient. Mortal humans begin in ignorance of everything and are saddled with cognitive biases that make the search for knowledge arduous. These include overconfidence in their own rectitude, a preference for confirmatory over disconfirmatory evidence, and a drive to prove that their own alliance is smarter and nobler than their rivals. The only way that our species has managed to learn and progress is by a process of conjecture and refutation: Some people venture ideas, others probe whether they are sound, and in the long run the better ideas prevail.

Any community that disables this cycle by repressing disagreement is doomed to chain itself to error, as we are reminded by the many historical episodes in which authorities enforced dogmas that turned out to be flat wrong. An academic establishment that stifles debate betrays the privileges that the nation grants it and is bound to provide erroneous guidance on vital issues like pandemics, violence, gender, and inequality. Even when the academic consensus is almost certainly correct, as with vaccines and climate change, skeptics can understandably ask, “Why should we trust the consensus, if it comes out of a clique that brooks no dissent?”

There are many reasons to think that repression of academic freedom is systemic and must be actively resisted. To start with, the very concept of freedom of expression is anything but intuitively obvious. What is intuitively obvious is that the people who disagree with us are spreading dangerous falsehoods and must be silenced for the greater good. (Of course the other guys believe the same thing, with the sides switched.)

Where I noted legislators were beginning to question the value of the money they were appropriating for higher education, they noted the ways in which current legislative interference, replacing one orthodoxy with another, would be no better.  In the final analysis, they recognize that the faculty are the proper stewards of the university.  "The coin of the realm in academia ought to be persuasion and debate, and the natural protagonists ought to be the faculty. They can hold universities accountable to the commitments to academic freedom that are already enshrined in faculty policies, handbooks, and in the case of public universities, the First Amendment."

In addition, what observations a few faculty members at the likes of Northern Illinois University make might have only limited, local effect.  When there are people at places you might have heard of making similar observations, there is potential for people outside the university to notice.

We will encourage the adoption and enforcement of policies that protect academic freedom. When an individual is threatened or slandered for a scholarly opinion, which can be emotionally devastating, we will lend our personal and professional support. When activists are shouting into an administrator’s ear, we will speak calmly but vigorously into the other one, which will require them to take the reasoned rather than the easy way out. And we will support parallel efforts led by undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students.

Harvard is just one university, but it is the nation’s oldest and most famous, and for better or worse, the outside world takes note of what happens here. We hope the effects will spread outside our formerly ivy-covered walls and encourage faculty and students elsewhere to rise up. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and if we don’t defend academic freedom, we should not be surprised when politicians try to do it for us or a disgusted citizenry writes us off.

I used to hear that sort of "we-ought-do-it-before-the-legislature-makes-us" argument in faculty senate meetings, mostly for some new administrative fad, and surely legislatures of a populist bent have sought to defund diversity programming and other faddish stuff.  I also have recollections of Members of Congress suggesting that if Harvard or the other Ivies kicked the Reserve Officer Training programs off campus, they ought no longer to be eligible for federal funding, whether from the National Science Foundation, the various National Institutes, or the National Endowments.  If faculty at the universities that educate most of the students while receiving almost none of the national attention stand up and emulate Harvard's Academic Freedom Council (which is not, yet, part of shared governance) in defense of scholarly discourse and proper intellectual inquiry, well, that's an argument from authority that I can endorse.