The HBS hosts consider the recent spate of assaults on academic freedom.
As a public institution of sorts (and sometimes) the university claims to be neutral with respect to politics. This has imposed an ideal of seeing “both sides” of all issues. These two sides are supposed to roughly correspond to the two political parties. Such a model is arguably reductive and simplistic, forcing a particular political model in the ideal of being noncommittal in politics. However, lately even this model has come under assault as academic disciplines such as critical race theory, gender theory, and intersectionality have come under direct political assault.
What drives this attack on the university? More importantly, what can be done to counter it?
In this episode, we discuss the following thinkers/texts/ideas/etc.:
Michel Foucault and (implicitly) his lecture “Truth and Juridical Forms.”
Proposition 36 of Part Two of Spinoza’s Ethics, “Inadequate or confused ideas follow with the same necessity as adequate, or clear and distinct ideas.”
Stuart Hall’s lecture “Race, the Floating Signifier” and specifically his remark with respect to “racial science” that “In other words, we are not dealing with a field in which, as it were, the scientifically and rationally established fact prevents scientists from continuing to try to prove the opposite.
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