Universities face a fatal choice. They can acquiesce to the demands of censorious staff and students or reject intolerance and bullying by reaffirming their traditional enlightenment values.
As you’d be aware the Australian government has made upholding academic freedom and freedom of speech a condition of funding. I don’t hold much faith that this will have a tangible impact on cultural tides that have made some ideas heretical. I’d be interested in thoughts as to why some ideas (e.g. issues you have flagged like trans rights advocacy and indigenous knowledges) have become so hegemonic. If we understood why and how this occurred we might have a more effective means of promoting free debate and discourse than elaborate but ineffectual free speech codes.
Excellent article. Both evolution and the biblical creations stories may be taught in parallel when it is acknowledged that conflict between them may be explained by a category mistake. While evolution is a natural science that relies on evidence and causality the biblical creations stories belong to a different category, namely the legendary or theological. They were written before the scientific method was pronounced and in no way give a causal explanation of the origin of all things. They are, instead, narratives that address the relationship between humans and humans, humans and the natural world and between humans and God. They are science in their own right because they are based on knowledge of the human condition; they are not natural science but theological science. As a science, theology has its own rationality, it is not open to speculation or superstition. As such, theology earns a place in academe, a place that it held from the beginning of universities.
A brilliant survey, Steven, and evaluation of what appears to be the state of play in universities and among the thinking classes who ought to know better, around the world. I am troubled, too, by the closing of the modern mind—in poetry, in universities, at large. I write about it in an essay with which I close my most recent collection, Walking Underwater. Truly, this is the age of outrage. Hannah Arendt is surely turning in her grave. This is what happens when otherwise good people let themselves be convinced and cowed by hegemonic ideology (no matter how fine the causes that ideology purports to support). Non-conformists are scapegoated, what you call the enlightenment values (rigour of research and logic, critical thought, empiricism, humanist values etc) that have guided universities through the ages are abandoned, self-evident truths are denied and absurdities normalised/codified, and all manner of appalling, bullying behaviour is practised as if it were piety. I see it happening around me. I'm with Flannery O'Connor (and beautifully quoted): the writer is obliged to push back against the mainstream orthodoxies fo their age. And the scholar.
Steven, so pleased to see you displaying the fruits of a lifetime labouring in the academic vineyard in such clear and succinct prose.
Thanks Peter.
As you’d be aware the Australian government has made upholding academic freedom and freedom of speech a condition of funding. I don’t hold much faith that this will have a tangible impact on cultural tides that have made some ideas heretical. I’d be interested in thoughts as to why some ideas (e.g. issues you have flagged like trans rights advocacy and indigenous knowledges) have become so hegemonic. If we understood why and how this occurred we might have a more effective means of promoting free debate and discourse than elaborate but ineffectual free speech codes.
Excellent article. Both evolution and the biblical creations stories may be taught in parallel when it is acknowledged that conflict between them may be explained by a category mistake. While evolution is a natural science that relies on evidence and causality the biblical creations stories belong to a different category, namely the legendary or theological. They were written before the scientific method was pronounced and in no way give a causal explanation of the origin of all things. They are, instead, narratives that address the relationship between humans and humans, humans and the natural world and between humans and God. They are science in their own right because they are based on knowledge of the human condition; they are not natural science but theological science. As a science, theology has its own rationality, it is not open to speculation or superstition. As such, theology earns a place in academe, a place that it held from the beginning of universities.
A brilliant survey, Steven, and evaluation of what appears to be the state of play in universities and among the thinking classes who ought to know better, around the world. I am troubled, too, by the closing of the modern mind—in poetry, in universities, at large. I write about it in an essay with which I close my most recent collection, Walking Underwater. Truly, this is the age of outrage. Hannah Arendt is surely turning in her grave. This is what happens when otherwise good people let themselves be convinced and cowed by hegemonic ideology (no matter how fine the causes that ideology purports to support). Non-conformists are scapegoated, what you call the enlightenment values (rigour of research and logic, critical thought, empiricism, humanist values etc) that have guided universities through the ages are abandoned, self-evident truths are denied and absurdities normalised/codified, and all manner of appalling, bullying behaviour is practised as if it were piety. I see it happening around me. I'm with Flannery O'Connor (and beautifully quoted): the writer is obliged to push back against the mainstream orthodoxies fo their age. And the scholar.