SadKangaroo wrote on Sep 13
th, 2024 at 12:08pm:
It is profoundly disheartening, considering your tenure in academia, to witness such a glaring lack of intellectual integrity.
Despite decades of experience in a senior academic role, it appears that intellectual dishonesty remains prevalent.
What could have transpired to lead to this?
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As an aside to the broader discussion on education and our differing views, it is pertinent to recognise that, at least within the Australian context, our right to free speech is not explicitly guaranteed but merely implied.
If an engineering academic recklessly or deliberately misled students about how to build a bridge, Australians would not just expect that academic to be sacked; they would want to know, and would want every academic to know, that intellectual standards were being rigorously enforced.
Now, however, Mark Scott, the vice-chancellor of Sydney University, has decided that Professor Sujatha Fernandes, who told her students that reports of Hamas committing mass rapes on October 7 were “fake news”, will escape with the slightest rap of the world’s lightest feather-duster.
How making statements that are demonstrably false can be anything other than a serious breach of the university’s requirement that academics respect the “highest ethical, professional and legal standards” is a mystery.
It is, after all, the very purpose of a university to encourage the pursuit and dissemination of knowledge: that is, of claims that can reasonably be held to be true. And it is no accident that the modern university’s emergence coincided with the rise of the notion that a commitment to the value of the truth, and of truthfulness in research and teaching, was academics’ foremost obligation.
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That, Max Weber famously argued, was the entirety of academic freedom: the freedom to dispassionately seek, and equally dispassionately teach, the truth, with all partisanship abandoned – and even the slightest step beyond that transformed teaching into preaching, losing every protection academic freedom afforded.
No one could claim that Weber’s lofty ideals were always realised. But the ethic of objectivity proved crucial in the spectacular advances that marked every field of knowledge. Directly, it greatly enhanced the calibre of academic activity; indirectly, it provided users of research with quality assurance, facilitating the acceptance of controversial results.
Yet it has collapsed, most notably in the humanities and parts of the social sciences, to the point where Australia’s oldest, and once most prestigious, university considers purveying gross falsehoods a trivial offence....
It would be easy, but largely incorrect, to blame that collapse on writers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault or Pierre Bourdieu. Rather, as Daniel Gordon and Nathalie Heinich have argued, the crucial factor was the rise, initially in North American universities, of centres – such as those dedicated to black, indigenous and women’s studies – that regarded advocacy as integral to their mission.
It was the growing tension that created with the ethic of objectivity, which abjured advocacy, that made the traditional academic virtues increasingly contentious. The arrival on the scene of Derrida, Foucault and Bourdieu therefore filled a need – a need, felt by activist academics in the English-speaking world, for intellectual legitimacy.
That those writers were comprehensively panned in France itself, where philosophy is taken seriously, scarcely mattered. To cite but one example, Jacques Bouveresse, undoubtedly the leading French epistemologist of his generation, dismissed Derrida’s work as nonsense.
Much as he may deride the concept of “the truth”, wrote Bouveresse, even Derrida, as he jets from conference to conference, needs to know whether it is indeed true that his flight leaves next Wednesday at three, rather than Thursday at five. And Bouveresse also showed that Foucault, who claimed to stand on Nietzsche’s shoulders, had grievously “mistranslated, misrepresented and misunderstood” everything Nietzsche had to say.
But what mattered to the activists was that Derrida, Foucault and Bourdieu argued that scholarship was inherently political. “Objectivity”, they contended, was a mere fig leaf for the interests of the ruling class.Properly considered, the truth of a claim depended neither on how it was derived nor on its relationship to reality. It depended, wrote vastly influential American postmodernist Hayden White, on whether it was made from the right moral – that is, political – “standpoint”.
The way was therefore open to the development of what is now known as “standpoint epistemology”, which, in its most popular version, asserts that a proposition’s truth depends on the identity of its proponent. That is, of course, scarcely an inch away from Stalinism’s “proletarian science”, not to mention the Nazis’ “Aryan mathematics”. And if that epistemology was good enough for Stalin and Hitler, why wouldn’t it be good enough for Hamas and its taxpayer-funded acolytes?
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In a situation where consensus is elusive, the stringent quality assurance the rules of objectivity provide may well be the only thing that permits some shared understanding of reality to emerge – and with it, a shared appreciation of the constraints reality imposes.
Henry Ergas
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