What has happened in my lifetime is that much that I once took to be inarguable has now become arguable, including the plain meaning of the constitution and Academic Freedom. Academic Freedom is a relatively new idea , dating back to the early 19th century German universities, or the foundation of the AAUP in the early 20th Century, or perhaps to the sixties. In the late 19th Century, university presidents were still hiring and firing faculty members at will, indeed, trading faculties back and forth like baseball teams. I love the Yeats quote and grateful to have it put before us, but it depends for its force on our agreeing what the center is. At twenty, I thought that history was a ratchet and "progress" irreversible. (Why would anybody want to go back?) But the center of the sixties is the center no more. And if ideas like "no person is above the law" and "people in Universities should be free to teach what their reason tells them is true" are to become the center again, it will because hard work makes it so. It is not for nothing that university curricula are called the Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts are an ideological position that many Americans have come to detest. If they detest "us", it is because of our assumption that the position we hold IS the center. There are lots of people who believe that a form of government which cannot give them Christian Nationalism, rigorously defined sex roles, and white, male, privilege is not a form of government they want to live under. The center is creeping in their direction. Is this the center we want to hold?
nick -- Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University nthomp...@clarku.edu https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson
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