Open Inquiry News: A Blue Wave Crashes on Campus

The midterms, a worried free speech movement, and what it takes for scholars to resist tribal politics

The past two weeks brought a blue wave in the midterms, a gathering of free speech defenders in Philadelphia, and an inside account of how writers lost faith in the principle of free expression. Underneath all of it is a question that matters for academia: when professional norms run up against political loyalties, which one gives?

Here are the stories we’re following at HxA.

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In flipped states, “sayonara” to an era?

The “blue wave” washed ashore on election day. What will that mean for open inquiry? Education pundit Rick Hess predicts one consequence:

A signature Republican higher ed reform has been the push to establish civic centers at flagship universities. Several newish centers are in red states that elected Democratic governors, including those at the University of Texas, the University of Iowa, and Ohio State University. These programs may be in hot water. … While it’s not clear that new governors or legislators will target these programs, the centers will surely have fewer allies and more critics as new appointees are named to state agencies and boards over time.

In Texas, Republicans in power supported new civics programs, but also — as Free the Inquiry readers know — ushered in new bans on teaching certain topics and concepts, as well as an unexplained tenure denial, and academic programs phased out with little explanation.

Inside Higher Ed recalls that last year, after the Legislature put faculty senates under the control of boards and presidents, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told “looney Marxist UT professors” to find a blue state: “Yippie Ki Yay! Adios! Sayonara! Auf Wiedersehen! Au Revoir! In every language you can possibly think of: Goodbye!” The day after the election, UT Austin drama professor Charlotte Canning quoted that last line back to him.

Trash talk aside, there is reason to be hopeful and still cautious. We sincerely hope that externally imposed taboos, and the broader chilling effects they create, will no longer be choosin’ Texas. But we’ll have to stay vigilant, since some of the sharpest threats to open inquiry for faculty and students have always come from other faculty and students.

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Intellectual freedom, not just on paper

In the field of literature, George Packer writes in The Atlantic that threats to expression can come “from inside the house” like a horror movie villain. As he saw it during a period of controversy at the advocacy group PEN America, for some stakeholders “literary freedom was never the real concern. What mattered was whether PEN helped or harmed their political cause.”

In academia as in the literary world, when one’s peers have the ability to shun and punish under the banner of their expert judgment, formal protections for freedom can only go so far. There’s something else needed that is less formal and harder to measure, but no less important. We could extend to academic open inquiry what Packer says about free speech:

[F]ree speech depends on more than the law. It needs a culture of free expression—a set of widely shared habits and expectations that guide daily life, an ability to tolerate disagreement, a willingness to listen even, or especially, when we don’t like what we hear. The First Amendment stands there like a block of stone against the efforts of would-be government censors, but a culture of free expression is a delicate thing that has to be trained and tended. It can bloom and fade. It lives or dies in the inner recesses of our minds, releasing or smothering thoughts and words regardless of the protections of the First Amendment. … In other words, a culture of free expression is up to us.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a leading advocate for expressive freedoms, both in law and in practice. HxA was proud to be a sponsor of FIRE’s Soapbox conference in Philadelphia this past week, where the state of intellectual freedom in higher education was a prominent topic.

Independent journalist Matt Taibbi was in Philadelphia too, and came away uneasy. “Supporters of civil liberties are becoming a subculture,” he writes. One longtime donor told him, “Everyone was for free speech then. Where have all my friends gone?” FIRE’s Will Creeley and Nico Perrino offered some comfort: across American history, free speech has often depended on a small, stubborn community. But Taibbi’s larger point is that lawsuits can only do so much. Free speech culture, he writes, “is about far more than the right to say unpleasant things. It’s a way of life.”

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Can scholarly norms resist the call of politics?

At one discussion at the Soapbox event, panelists (including HxA board chair Jeffrey Flier and HxA member Evan Morris) decried examples of politicization in the field of medicine — but constructively disagreed about how to quantify the relative size of the problem in a field that continues to steadily make life-saving discoveries, far from the publicity on topics such as youth transgender medicine.

There certainly is a danger, especially in advocacy circles, of talking as if the worst scandals in an academic field are typical of it. Science is built on the constant correction of errors, and overstating a problem for the public may be as damaging as understating it.

At the same time, it is not entirely comforting to think that scholarly norms are what scholars hold dear, except in the moments, and on the topics, when their fields are most politically relevant. If we follow the best evidence in the cognitive science of reading except when we train teachers, for example, or adhere to the longstanding public health views on pandemic responses except in an actual pandemic, what does that say about the academy’s true priorities?

Of course, complaining about a culture is not the same as fixing it. Cultures are built on practices, in this case academic practices, that usually don’t require permission from any statehouse. To build a culture of open inquiry, host a Heterodox Conversation. Study a taboo topic. Start an adversarial collaboration. Help students disagree with a professor, maybe for the first time.

Waves come and waves go. Universities can still decide to run a tighter ship.

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Have campus news related to open inquiry that we should be aware of? Send it to communications@heterodoxacademy.org

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