It started slowly. The first indicator I had that something was
afoot was an email demanding that I stop teaching about global warming. As an alleged climate change denier, I obviously
had no right to corrupt what my students learned.
Although this is not my
habit, I quickly sent off a misspelled response via my i-phone. In it I suggested that my detractor needed to
read more about the issue. Next came a
contact from a reporter at a local television station. He informed me that two students approached
him to complain about my transgressions.
These students, who never
discussed this directly with me, explained that they dropped out of my class
because they were deeply offended by my misstatements about well-known facts. My contravention of academic protocols plainly
needed to be broadcast to the world so that I would desist.
The reporter next contacted
me to find out what happened. I explained
my side of the story and he eventually came to my office to record my explanation. The real problem, I opined, was not what I
said in class, but the subsequent attack on academic freedom.
In the meantime, I received
two new emails demanding that I reform.
One simply reiterated my purported ignorance of the relevant science, while
the other asked for a copy of my syllabus.
This latter person was under the impression that this needed to be
approved by the Board of Regents for my course to be funded by the state.
This second individual did
not realize that I am a tenured full professor and this is not how courses are
created. Were this the case, academic
freedom would truly be a thing of the past.
So let me explain what I
believe occurred. The course in question
was about social change, while the materials I was then teaching concerned
revolutionary change. To be specific, I
was explicating Charles Tilly’s theory about WUNC displays. These are purportedly designed to promote
social movements.
According to Tilly, social
activists try to recruit supporters by demonstrating that their cause is
Worthy, that those who favor it are Unified in endorsing it, that they have
large Numbers on their side, and, lastly, that they are deeply Committed to its
success. All of this is put forward to establish
that victory is inevitable.
The idea is to create a
bandwagon effect. Since most people want
to be on the winning team, if they can be persuaded triumph is assured, they
are more likely to jump aboard. This is
what Karl Marx did when he insisted that communism was historically, and
scientifically, preordained.
To make my point, I employed
several contemporary examples. One
concerned global warming. I explained
that when partisans maintained that 97 percent of climate scientists believe in
it, they inflated these numbers in order to intimidate potential skeptics. The research they cited was actually deeply
flawed.
Claims that a climate
apocalypse is nearly upon us is “settled science” are likewise bogus. There is no such thing as settled
science. Isaac Newton’s ideas about
gravity were brilliant; nevertheless Einstein amended them. Someday Einstein’s may also be replaced.
In any event, the current controversy
about global warming does not concern whether there has been warming. This is measurably true. The disagreements are about the rate of
change and its physical causes. To what
extent are these the result of human actions—or something else, e.g. sun
cycles?
At the moment, reputable
scientists differ. It is primarily
politicians who converted legitimate discrepancies in empirical opinion into a
policy debate. It is they who played the
numbers game in order to defeat their opponents.
My students merely got caught
up in this political dispute. Their
idealism, combined with a relative lack of knowledge, made them the perfect
foot soldiers in these culture wars.
Given their passion and genuine desire to improve the world, they were
poised to do vigorous battle.
The trouble is that in the
process they undermined academic freedom.
In their rush to do good, they interfered with our ability to seek—and
test—new truths. Sadly, unless
intellectual dissent is protected, in the long run we will all suffer. Improvements will cease and we will be
trapped in an imperfect status quo.
Melvyn L. Fein, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University
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