A Report From the Stanford Academic Freedom ConferenceThe urgency of our mission was reflected in the list of attendees—many of whom had been laid off, mobbed, or ostracized because of their research.
Elizabeth Weiss
11 Jan 2023
In early November, I participated in the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference—a two-day event run by John Cochrane and Iván Marinovic, Stanford economics and business professors respectively. The organizers’ goal, announced at the outset, was to find strategies that would serve to protect the “core mission” of the scholarly community: “to debate and refine knowledge, to pass on knowledge to the next generation, and more importantly to pass on the habits and norms of critical inquiry and scholarly debate that produce true knowledge.”
The need for academics to recommit to these principles was reflected in the list of attendees, many of whom had suffered job loss, punitive disciplinary proceedings, ideologically motivated censorship, or social ostracism within their professional milieus. These included Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University whose research questioned the efficacy of COVID lockdowns. For over two years, Bhattacharya told us, he faced hostility in the workplace and challenges to his funding sources. You only learn how much academic freedom you really have, he told us, once you take a controversial position.
But at least Bhattacharya kept his job. The same wasn’t true of conference speaker Joshua Katz, who was fired by Princeton University after he’d criticized an open letter, which had been signed by numerous fellow faculty members, demanding anti-racism policies that would compromise academic freedom. More tragic is the case of Mike Adams, a conservative University of North Carolina Wilmington professor who killed himself after being forced out of his job for offensive tweets. His place at the conference was represented by an empty chair that was placed in memoriam during the closing panel.
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Prior to the conference, Inside Higher Ed writer Colleen Flaherty described concerns that this would be a “hermitically sealed event.” And it is true that organizers, presumably fearful that remarks delivered at the conference would lead to the same sort of cancel campaigns being discussed by participants, initially closed the proceedings to the press. Stephanie M. Lee, a writer for Chronicle of Higher Education who’d unsuccessfully asked permission to attend the conference, detailed a letter of complaint signed by over 50 Stanford faculty members, which described the meet-up as an attempt to “protect racist lies and other mistruths.”
To be fair, the conference did include several genuinely controversial figures, such as University of Pennsylvania law Professor Amy Wax, who proudly trumpets the “superiority” of “countries ruled by white Europeans.” Also in attendance was conservative entrepreneur Peter Thiel; and Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, whose Twitter fusillades target all manner of sacred cows. Perhaps the most controversial moment at the conference itself was when former Mount Royal University Professor Frances Widdowson used the full, uncensored English title of Marxist Quebec historian Pierre Vallières’s famous (in Canada, at least) 1972 book, Nègres blancs d'Amérique, N-word and all.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/01/11/a-report-from-the-stanford-academic-freedom-conference/
