An Assault on Academic Freedom

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