Higher Education & þe Public Sphere as ??? Institutions, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: 2022-04-04 Tu
FIRST: Higher Education and the Public Sphere as ??? Institutions:
A very nice book from Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, very nicely reviewed by Ryan Cooper in The American Prospect:
Ryan Cooper: The Cure for Hate Speech Is Not More Speech: ‘It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom, by Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth…. Bérubé and Ruth were motivated by the Trump years and the George Floyd protests to reconsider their previous views on free speech and academic freedom…. [That] the two things are identical… doesn’t survive contact with the case of James Tracy… who loudly promoted the conspiracy theory that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a false flag, and took to harassing the victims’ parents… [claiming] academic freedom has nothing at all to do with free speech… academics should be protected [only] when they are commenting on their area of specific expertise…. doesn’t work either….
Bérubé and Ruth argue that the way to think… is by judging comments… by whether they cast doubt on a professor’s fitness to participate in intellectual life. Academic freedom should protect professors’ ability to say controversial things and start hard discussions, but it comes with an equally important responsibility that those statements be grounded in serious thought and research—and in reality…. Ulrich Baer… argues that… “speech that proposes that some humans are innately inferior to others, and thus undermines the baseline assumption of human equality… degenerates into an exercise in domination.”… This… sounds like censorship, and… it is. But… there are dozens of ideas that are de facto banned from the academy: flat earth theory, geocentrism, phlogiston… “the Jews had it coming,” “vaccines cause autism,” “climate change is a hoax,” and “phrenology has much to teach us.”…
Free speech and free discussion are public goods that require regulation to preserve just like any other kind of public good…. The most widely applicable part of the book is a more general consideration of free speech itself…. It is simply naïve to think that argument will convince people intent on leveraging liberal tolerance to seize power and murder their political opponents…
LINK: <https://prospect.org/culture/books/cure-for-hate-speech-is-not-more-speech-berube-ruth-review/>
LINK: Michael Bérubé & Jennifer Ruth: It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom: ‘When a professor’s intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve… how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion… <https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781421443874>
Modern societies have, among their most important parts, the fiduciary institution or science, the mercenary institution of the commodity market economy, and the institutions of the public sphere and higher education:
One excellence of the fiduciary institution of science is that, by assigning judgment to peer review by the community of those who seek to become masters of knowledge, it provides a sieve for distinguishing discovery from error. A second excellence of science is that by assigning priority and hence status to the first discoverer, it incentives both hard work and the creation of knowledge and the most rapid possible dissemination of that knowledge so that others can then build upon it. Thus the fiduciary institution of science solves the societal problem of incentivizing and then disseminating true and valid discovery. This fiduciary institution goes wrong when the peers who are doing the reviewing do not seek above all to become masters of knowledge—do not prioritize the judgments of nature and experiment above all else—and are in an absorbing state, where results that reinforce their prejudices are seized upon and those who generate such results are promoted, and results that contradict their prejudices are dismissed and those who generate such results dismissed as well. But as long as there is a continuous infusion of young who at least start out wanting to become masters of knowledge and believing in listening to nature and experiment, science progresses—if only funeral by funeral.
One excellence of private property is that by assigning “ownership” it has the potential to push decision-making power out from the ignorance center to the periphery where the information actually is and people understand the situation. One excellence of market exchange is that the prices it produces and disseminates serve as very good signals of the intensity of need for production and transport (or, rather, of the intensity of need times the wealth of those who have the money—for those who do not have the money are invisible to the market). A second excellence is that the act of exchanging a commodity for a price greatly incentivizes the production and transport of commodities the market has judged as valuable. A third excellence is that the market equilibrium coordinates: those whose opportunity-cost to produce or transport is less than the market price do so, those whose willingness-to-pay—that is, their intensity of desire times their wealth—is greater than the market price utilize, and the two are balanced. Thus the mercenary institution of the commodity market—private property and market exchange—solves the societal problems of information, incentivization, and coordination with respect to the production, transport, and distribution of commodities. This mercenary institution goes wrong (a) where there are externalities—where third parties are affected so that market-exchanges are not win-win-win—and (b) where the distribution of wealth is not in accord with the values in the true societal well-being function.
Suppose one were to attempt a similar analysis of the institutions of the public sphere and of higher education. What would it look like? I am not sure. But I think that Bérubé and Ruth may have just given us a very good starting place.
Very Briefly Noted:
Brad DeLong: ‘Matthew Yglesias points to the problem of Bob Woodward <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2006/09/why_oh_why_cant_26.html>
Ben Thompson: The Current Thing: ‘A world where the ability for anyone to post any idea has, paradoxically, meant far greater mass adoption of popular ideas and far more effective suppression of “bad” ideas… <https://stratechery.com/2022/the-current-thing/>
Scott M. (March 16, 2003): Nestor Makhno & Me: ‘Getting rid of Makhno was one of the better things the Bolsheviks did… <https://web.archive.org/web/20100717144259/http://pedantry.blogspot.com/2003_03_16_pedantry_archive.html#90784783>
Stephen Broadberry & Mark Harrison: The Economics of the Second World War: Seventy-Five Years on<https://voxeu.org/article/economics-second-world-war-seventy-five-years-new-ebook>
David Stockman: Author at Antiwar.com: ‘Pearl Harbor My Eye!: We were already getting sick and tired of this Zelensky clown, but the sheer chutzpah of comparing Ukraine’s predicament with Pearl Harbor or 9/11… <https://original.antiwar.com/author/David_Stockman/>
Annotations by Molly White & al.: The Edited Latecomer’s Guide to Crypto: ‘On March 20, 2022, the New York Times published a 14,000-word puff piece on cryptocurrencies… [by] Kevin Roose… <https://www.mollywhite.net/annotations/latecomers-guide-to-crypto> <https://www.bradford-delong.com/2006/09/why_oh_why_cant_26.html>
Twitter & ‘Stack:
Aaron Rupar: I spent all weekend being a punching bag for Trumpers. Here’s why I have no regrets: ‘Given Ginni Thomas’s involvement in a coup attempt, the nature of her marriage is very much in the public interest…
David Corn: ’At the Gridiron dinner, NH Gov Chris Sununu on Trump: “He’s f—ing crazy…. I don’t think he’s so crazy he should be in a mental asylum. But if he is in one, he’s not getting out”…
Edward Luce: ’To Trumpian conservatives, Ukraine’s cause is equivalent to Black Lives Matter—a liberal crusade they must defeat. Jacob Heilbrunn on how Putin’s cause is only getting stronger among Trump Republicans. God give me patience…
Tom Fallows: Bucha, Katyn, & Srebrenica
I had been thinking that one-in-ten was about the right ratio of paid to total subscribers to this ‘Stack, but over the winter the fraction has drifted down to one-in-twenty. So if you are not a paid subscriber—and if you can think of something I could add to the Director’s Cut that would induce you to become a paid subscriber—please email your suggestions to me at brad.delong@gmail.com. &, please, become a paid subscriber to some ‘Stack, even if not this one. Chris, Hamish, and company are working hard and deserve more money, and their ability to satisfy their VC wolves with raw meat would, in the long run, help create a much better public sphere, I think...
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