Excerpt from 'The Fall of the AAUP'

Who will really ‘reckon with the judgment of history’?

At the end of her piece, Scott says that “we are now in such a moment when the mission of the university is under threat and that we must speak out.”

On that, we certainly agree.

Unfortunately, Scott and the AAUP don’t seem to think that the mission of the university includes the pursuit of truth. Instead, she says that “diversity and equality ought to be at the center of university policy.” It is really striking that these were the two principles Scott chose to emphasize here. To the untrained ear that sure sounds nice, but in practice it is as ideological and conformist as it gets — not to mention antithetical to the mission of the university.

Would the public agree to massively fund an already trillion-dollar industry that places regular Americans into tremendous debt if it was merely promising to be diverse and equitable to its employees and customers? No, it would have to deliver something well beyond that, something universities have always been meant to be bastions of. The pursuit of truth, it turns out, is a never-ending and arduous process that requires discipline and principle, as well as a commitment to free expression. And it’s something you’re never going to get with a nakedly partisan, biased view on what thinkers and thoughts should be allowed into the discussion.

Scott then makes a smug and condescending reference to the “judgment of history,” and forwards the idea that it is FIRE who will look bad in hindsight because we are “ideologues” who lack a commitment “to the values that have made U.S. higher education the envy of the world.”

As a matter of fact, we do have a commitment to those values: open inquiry and free expression — which, of course, includes academic freedom. No matter what they tell themselves, the sad fact is that it is the AAUP, along with many colleges and universities in the last two decades, who have abandoned this commitment.

I lack the intellectual arrogance to presume how history will judge me or anyone. Honestly, I find the question tedious. It’s the oversimplification of a midwit who’s read too much Hegel, who thinks that history has a “right side,” and who calls everybody else simpletons. History is messier than that.

The truth is that the AAUP relied on free speech and the First Amendment for its entire existence. But once their leaders got confident that enough “right-thinking people” would be in charge forever, they turned on it. They said nothing as tuition prices and bureaucratization skyrocketed while viewpoint diversity among professors plunged. They stopped defending professors whose speech was unpopular with the kinds of scholars who thought the search for truth was over (and that, as luck would have it, they’re the ones who found it!).

When professors were targeted at an unprecedented rate and a culture of — what might you call it? — cancellation hit academia, causing public trust in higher education to collapse, the AAUP sneered at the idea that Cancel Culture even existed. They failed to protect their colleagues, particularly when they were threatened by fellow academics or students. Indeed, they doubled down and came out in favor of political litmus tests as long as they liked the politics being tested for. They gave in to members who wanted to use academic boycotts to serve political ends even if it torpedoed the search for truth. They supported a new exception to academic freedom that basically meant it was nothing more than what their favored members wished it to be.

They then tripled down, claiming that the plunging respect for academia was just due to some outside right-wing plot rather than contempt for a trillion-dollar industry that wanted to wish all criticisms of itself away. Somehow, they couldn’t understand that this would make them even less respected and trustworthy to the public. Instead, they sidelined truth and helped plunge academia into crisis.

But, of course, it was everyone else’s fault.

*excerpted from yesterday's Eternally Radical Idea on "The fall of the AAUP"