A propos this, a professor in a philosophy-adjacent field elsewhere writes:
I was very glad to see your response to Soucek on your blog and then in CHE. He is part of a growing cadre of people who profess commitment to – and expertise in – academic freedom, but are in fact deliberately chipping away at it with the aim of making it easier to establish and enforce DEI orthodoxy. (See too, eg, Anita Allen and, more obviously, Michael Berube & Jennifer Ruth.) What’s worrying about such people is that they can cite real credentials & experience to bolster their claim to care about and understand academic freedom. Even if philosophers and serious scholars of academic freedom can readily recognize their errors and see what they’re doing, the situation remains extremely troubling because their work offers exactly the cover senior administrators and DEI professionals need to double-down on their agenda while claiming to still uphold academic freedom.
In philosophy, there is still a chance of keeping the discipline alive and healthy. But philosophers need to recognize how incredibly easy it is to essentially destroy and co-opt a department, how a couple of motivated illiberal faculty can do that, and how increasingly many people in my generation see themselves as on a mission to ‘fix’ the discipline by establishing a DEI orthodoxy. (Of course, it only makes matters more difficult that there really are issues of bias in philosophy that need to be thoughtfully and effectively addressed.)
I am grateful for your efforts and leadership to both push back against the destruction and closure of open inquiry and to respond directly to those like Soucek, who, in an ostensibly serious and authoritative way, are telling administrators and DEI ‘professionals’ almost exactly what they want to hear.
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