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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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my boss regularly talks about the importance of ideological diversity (he's confidentially told me that he fears our center-right government is looking to pick fights with academia over 'cancel culture', and he has been given a top mandate by university central to avoid anything that would give the press 'woke academia gone mad' headlines).

Unless I'm misunderstanding it, this sentence kind of amazes me. As an example of how much your current institution respects ideological diversity, you mention that the institution has deliberately fostered a chilling effect on speech where it's common knowledge that speech perceived as being too woke will be frowned upon by the higher-ups... and where those higher-ups are themselves acting as a result of a chilling effect deliberately created by the government to minimise the presence in academia of an ideology it does not like? And this seems to you like ideological diversity?

I mean, that makes sense if you define 'ideologically diverse' to mean 'friendly to right-wing viewpoints', but not if you have a more reasonable definition of what that should mean.

(i) In the main interview, when I asked why I wanted to work at BAU, I mentioned that it had a great record for academic free speech, including a very respectable FIRE ranking. I could see people looking flustered when I said this, and I was subsequently told that this was a strategic mistake, because 'academic freedom' would code to many faculty members as basically the right to say unpalatable non-progressive things (plus FIRE was not well regarded). I knew it was a risk, but as far as I was concerned, it was a good filter for the kind of people and environment I wanted to work with. Still, I was surprised that it went down so obviously badly. BAU is not Mount Holyoke or Harvard; it is a massive university with lots of blue collar and international students, so it wasn't antecedently clear to me how much progressive identarian authoritarianism would have seeped in.

I mean, you probably should have guessed that, yes. You probably shouldn't lead with "Hire me, I'll be a constant annoyance to you for years to come." The question of whether you can get hired despite viewpoints that might make them look bad, if you otherwise have a stellar resume, is distinct from the question of whether you can get hired with the opening pitch "I'm gonna make you look terrible in the press, k?"

(v) In my current job, I have lots of autonomy, as do people who report to me. For example, if someone says "I want to try to start a collaboration with University X in Argentina", then our default response is "Cool, how can we make that happen?" We also have lofty ambitions, and are constantly trying to find ways to expand or get more money (we have tripled the number of our grad students in the last 3 years, for example). This is despite being a pretty small organization within our university. By contrast, at BAU, when I made some more ambitious proposals for how BAU could foster collaboration or bring in new grants or spin-off new research centres, I was met with uncomprehending stares; the default view was "well that could be interesting I guess, but shouldn't you be focusing on traditional publications to boost your odds of getting tenure?" While that may be a realistic assessment of what would be in my interests working at BAU, again, it put me off working there.

Our offices may be grotty and dilapidated by comparison, but the wider team gets on brilliantly, we pack out our rooms and the bars afterwards with a wide mix of academic staff

I don't have much direct experience with US academia and how it compares to European academia, but this sounds reasonable to me, yes. When I meet Americans older than 50, they are always amazed that I go to the bar with people I work with all the time; they seem surprised that anyone anywhere in the world still does this.

you mention that the institution has deliberately fostered a chilling effect on speech where it's common knowledge that speech perceived as being too woke will be frowned upon by the higher-ups

Not the case at all. We have plenty of people working on projects that might be perceived as woke. The main thing we’re keen to avoid is accusations of cancel culture or right-leaning views being censored — that’s what I mean by bad headlines.

You probably shouldn't lead with "Hire me, I'll be a constant annoyance to you for years to come."

Why should this be a consequence of supporting academic freedom? I want to work in an institution with bold thinkers from across the political spectrum who feel confident exploring big controversial ideas. That used to be very much part of the mission statement in much of the humanities, and that’s why I wouldn’t be interested in working at an institution where academic speech was suppressed.

Not the case at all. We have plenty of people working on projects that might be perceived as woke. The main thing we’re keen to avoid is accusations of cancel culture or right-leaning views being censored — that’s what I mean by bad headlines.

So in particular, if you were interviewing for a position in front of a higher-up in the department and your first words to them indicated that you might be very likely, as a teacher, to say the kind of thing that would generate a "Woke Academia Gone Mad" headline, they might choose not to hire you?

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