To the Editor:
I respond and raise questions to two recent recent essays from Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder (“The Purpose of a University Isn’t Truth. It’s Inquiry,” The Chronicle Review, February 10, and “The Truth, and Nothing but the Truth?” The Chronicle Review, February 25.) I am a comparative historian of education and literacy, among other things, and a lifelong professor committed to a genuine understanding of academic freedom and the struggles for its existence and maintenance.
Your two opinion essays are neither reasoned opinion nor truth or inquiry. Revealingly, you define nothing. You misrepresent philosopher Michael Veder’s moderate reply (“Giving Up on Truth Is Giving Up on Free Speech,” The Chronicle Review, February 14). He is certainly not “a truth-or-bust guy,” whatever that actually means.
Your confused opinions are an undisguised attack on academic freedom as we know it, and as it has developed, been debated and fought over historically, and under attack today. You begin with a false and unscholarly opposition between “truth” and “inquiry,” and descend into a muddle of misunderstanding and ignorance.
My first question is: In what “university” are not “truth” and “inquiry” inseparably interrelated? What inquiries do not pursue “truth”? Where is the “academic freedom” to pursue either or both “truth” and “inquiry”? These are complex concepts that have been debated intelligently for centuries, but your screed nowhere reflects the ongoing discourse past or present. You define nothing and never address real debates. You willfully ignore the history that you claim to have studied and taught.
Your critique is uninformed and ideological. Do you expect readers not to know about Academic Freedom Alliance, Heterodox Academy, and Foundation for Individual Rights Education? Or their dishonest “handbooks” for uninformed scholars and other to parrot, and their well-funded right-wing supporters?
You confirm your lack of knowledge in your sweeping ahistorical assertions about universities’ missions and their activities. Your references to Thomas Kuhn on “paradigms” and Michel Foucault on “discursive truth” strongly suggest that you have not read these classics especially in their historical contexts.
You quote Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob’s not-quite “landmark” Telling the Truth About History out of context, and in the next sentence leap to South Boston desegregation battles of the 1970s. And in your second effort, you misrepresent the “great meta-historian Peter Novick.” What, please tell us, is a “meta-historian” great or otherwise? Do you mean a minority conservative philosopher? It is no wonder that you are opposed to “truth” in any recognizable form.
The next paragraph, referring to the “instability” of “truth” does not follow logically. In its confusing endorsement of relativity, it contradicts your entire ideological mission. The out-of-context mention of Judith Butler also contradicts your point of view. Knowledgeable historians today cite Joan Wallach Scott’s On the Judgment of History (2020) and her equally important Knowledge, Power, and Academic Freedom (2019), or even Lynn Hunt, History: Why It Matters (2018), not a 1994 book.
Finally, do you actually think that “postsecondary teachers” in history, English, art, drama, and music do not “pursue truth” but that economists, physicists, and biologists do? Can you offer a single piece of evidence?
You confuse me greatly. Your contradictions on free speech literally leap off the page of your second opinion piece. Your radical misrepresentations of Veber are unscholarly and unworthy of print. But you yourselves benefit from the very academic freedom that the AAUP has struggled to achieve and maintain for more than a century.
Harvey J. Graff
Ohio Eminent Scholar in Literacy Studies & Professor Emeritus of English and History
Ohio State University
Columbus