Luke Ford

Professor Stephen P. Turner published in January 2024:

No sooner than the ink had begun to dry (or should we say the pixels stopped changing) on the publications written to celebrate the centennial of Weber’s ‘Science as a Profession and Vocation’ ([1919]2012) than Covid and a series of shocks to the university, especially in the United States, changed the conditions for discourse. The shocks included the ‘enrollment cliff,’ the early arrival of an expected decline in students for long-anticipated demographic reasons, an unexpectedly rapid decline in enrollments in the humanities, notably history, the recognition that young men especially were choosing not to go to college, a simultaneous and related turn against wokeness, a rapidly developing skepticism about the medical research establishment as a result of the admitted failure of Covid vaccines to prevent the disease as promised and the revelation of the false narratives that were officially promoted about its origins together with the silence of the grant-dependent academy and the intimidation of those who spoke out, the great price inflation and the spectacle of prominent academic economists minimizing what was part of people’s everyday experience, and ongoing crises of governance in universities as presidents resigned, and politicians and donors intervened.

If this were not enough, the events of October 7, 2023, produced an outburst of anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian demonstrations that quickly veered into anti-Semitic and anti-western directions. The Presidents of three elite universities, called to testify to congress about their response, repeated carefully crafted excuses that were immediately
seen as hypocritical about free speech—defending students calling for genocide at the same time as they enforced elaborate regimes prohibiting misgendering and micro-aggressions, and promoting anti-racism. The scientist President of one major university, Stanford, had been caught up in a scandal involving what amounted to research fraud. The limited scholarship of the recently appointed President of Harvard, Claudine Gay, was scrutinized after her performance at the congressional hearing and numerous instances of what was arguably plagiarism were found.

Much of the scrutiny was in politicized on-line forums which often either seized on them as evidence of fraudulence or attacked the scrutinizers as racists or as inferiors jealous of Harvard excellence; the main results appeared on Substack, and were selectively amplified in the subsequent public discussion. Soon older questions about the dataset some of this research was based on, which she had refused to share, were raised anew. But 700 Harvard faculty supported her in a petition, some probably motivated by the idea that outsiders should have no influence over the university. A smaller number called for her to resign.

The idea of academic freedom was caught up in this crisis. It was publicly challenged, along with the idea of freedom of speech in general, by the crisis produced by the Israeli-Palestinian war, which was seen as a source of harm, but also which produced problems over the key notions of harm, genocide, and hate speech, which now seemed to be selectively applied and in ways that reproduced the political and intellectual divisions that discourse was supposed to cure. This occurred against the background of an effort to delegitimate the west and ‘whiteness’ in the name of anti-racism, decolonization, and resistance to cognitive imperialism, incarceration, and environmental destruction, all
of which were to be laid at the feet of racialized capitalism. The war was a convenient fit for the zero-sum theory of oppression to the effect that every group’s misery was the result of another group’s ‘privilege’ and exploitation.1 This kind of speech was promoted; responses to it were punished. The short-term result of these conflicts was a widespread acceptance of the need to reconsider these core freedoms as harmful and speech in need of more regulation, especially on-line. But there was also a reaction in favor of free speech and academic freedom, and a sense that it had already been deeply compromised. The fact that people had come to self-censor and act out of fear had become obvious, and documented (Clark et al. 2023; Stevens, Jussim, and Honeycutt 2020).

There was much more: the US Supreme Court had just decided, on June 23, 2023, that the scheme of racial preferences that Harvard and the University of North Carolina had relied on were cases of illegal discrimination2, leading to a massive effort to circumvent the ruling and continue the practices under different terms. In science, retractions, conflict of interest issues, and financial misdeeds had become a worldwide epidemic, in part as a result of the metricization of research evaluation and rewards, in part because of the vast system of science funding itself, which produced an artificial competition oriented toward pay-offs rather than intellectual content, and, particularly in the US, great financial rewards for patents and business deals—the perfect example of the neoliberal idea of artificial competition. At the same time, in the humanities and the social sciences, employment in academic life has become more precarious. Tenure, and the freedoms it implied, has become rarer and alternative forms of support were tied to other agendas…

‘Just and sustainable’ is a fundamental desire that needs no rational support or additional justification, any more than any other desire. In practice the bad purposes came to be interpreted in terms of terms of ‘harm.’ The concept of harm became the de facto replacement for a value system. To ask where one got the authority to pronounce something good or bad was itself harmful: it asserted the authority of the harmer over the harmed. But this denial of authority was selective: only the oppressed, or those speaking for them, could say they were harmed…

Needless to say this understanding is never articulated as a coherent theory, which is why Brown uses the notion of desire. Harm is normally invoked by examples. Freedom of speech and protest over harmful speech is a typical case where the issue arises, and typically the value of freedom of speech (and protest) is not directly attacked, but a notion like ‘responsibility’ is invoked and an affective harm is described. An example of this is the exchange between Eddie Glaude, Jr. of Princeton, and Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. Here the harm is entirely on the level of feelings.