It's in The Hill today; an excerpt, though all of it is much worth reading:
The war between Israel and Hamas has led some university administrations to realize the virtues of institutional neutrality, as advocated by the famous Kalven Report. Accustomed to pontificating on current events, they have suddenly discovered that they couldn't say anything without making somebody angry.
Worse, having established that practice, they found that even silence sent a nasty message, apparently signifying invidious comparative judgments about which deaths mattered. (More likely it signified comparative judgments about which groups to pander to.)
It turns out — who knew? — that it is politic for officials to avoid taking sides on contentious issues. But there is another reason why administrators ought to remain silent on such matters: anything they say is almost certainly bullshit, and the mission of the university is antithetical to the production of bullshit.
I here use "bullshit" as a technical term. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt explains in his classic analysis that a bullshitter is uninterested in the truth or falsity of his speech: "the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are." Rather, he merely wants to elicit a certain reaction: "What he cares about is what people think of him." … Official university statements are necessarily bullshit, because the administration is aiming to produce a result — inducing the public to admire the school, and signifying a certain flavor of social solidarity….
The Kalven Report observes that a university "is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness." Universities today are plagued by a climate of orthodoxy that chills thought and incapacitates us from thinking about how to address real and pressing problems. Administrations have a responsibility to dispel that climate, not contribute to it.
The job of academia is the discovery of truth. Universities should not be in the bullshit business.
The post Prof. Andrew Koppelman, "Universities Must Quit with the BS" appeared first on Reason.com.
