An Existential Threat to Doing Good Science
If you had asked me about academic freedom five years ago, I would have complained about the obsession with race, gender and ethnicity, along with safetyism on campus (safe spaces, grade inflation, and so on). But I would not have expressed concerns about academic freedom.
We each have our own woke tipping point the moment you realize that social justice is no longer what we thought it was, but has instead morphed into an ugly authoritarianism. For me that moment came in 2018, during an invited speaker talk, when the religious scholar Reza Aslan stated that we need to write on a stone what can and cannot be discussed in colleges. Students gave this a standing ovation. Having been born under dictatorship in Brazil, I was alarmed.
Soon after that, a few colleagues and I attempted to pass the Chicago Statement what I viewed as a very basic set of principles about the necessity of free speech on campus. My shock continued as students broke into a faculty meeting about the Chicago Statement screaming free speech harms and demanding that white male professors sit down and confess to their privilege.
The restriction of academic freedom comes in two forms: what we teach and what we research.
This is a big problem everywhere. We have to support doing science, not The Science.