To the Editor:
Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder’s essay “The Truth, and Nothing but the Truth?” (The Chronicle Review, February 25) is a response to my criticisms (“Giving Up on Truth Is Giving Up on Free Speech,” The Chronicle Review, February 14) of their earlier piece “The Purpose of the University Isn’t Truth. It’s Inquiry” (The Chronicle Review, February 10). In this latest essay, Khalid and Snyder say their own work is “not trained on truth.” The more I read of it, the more I agree.
Let’s start with a strawman. “For Veber,” they say, “truth and knowledge are one and the same.” I wish. If truth and knowledge were for me the same, there would be no truth I do not know. And that would make me omniscient. The idea was that knowledge entails truth. To say one thing entails another is not to call them identical. Being a dog entails being a mammal but that doesn’t make those the same property. Likewise, knowledge entails truth but not all truths are known.
Here’s another strawman. I used a simple example to demonstrate the absurdity — indeed, the insanity — in the claim that historians change the past by writing about it. They take this to mean I think all of history should be reduced to a list of names and dates and historians should not investigate complex matters like the question of why so many ordinary people participated in the Holocaust. Please.
I said if they give up on truth, universities give up on their best defense of free speech. In response, Khalid and Snyder say self-expression — including the sort we find on social media — is intrinsically valuable and that’s a reason to have free speech in universities. But just because something is intrinsically valuable, that doesn’t mean it’s part of the fundamental mission of the university. Pleasure is intrinsically valuable but, as the Promotion Committee will tell you, not all pleasant activities warrant a professorship. And I encourage you to scroll Twitter and think about how much of the non-truth directed self-expression you see there has any value at all. Now this isn’t to suggest the fine arts and literature don’t belong in a university. It’s to suggest they are more interesting and more important than unmoored and truthless self-expression.
Khalid and Snyder offer a list of cases where faculty and students got in trouble for something they said. Some of these have to do with things said in the context of teaching and research where truth is of crucial import. But some are cases of extramural speech. In these cases, Khalid and Snyder say “students and faculty members have a right to express themselves without fear of punishment for touching on taboo topics or expressing ‘offensive’ political views.” I agree. But this is a red herring. Teaching or taking classes at a university does not amount to forfeiting your fundamental rights as a citizen of a free society. But that’s irrelevant to whether there’s such a thing as non-truth directed inquiry and whether it should be a primary function of a university.
Khalid and Snyder overlook other perfectly truth-friendly reasons why universities should not punish people for extramural speech. Consider the case where the University of Florida tried to block faculty from providing expert testimony in court. That’s an easy one. It’s a bad idea to prevent faculty from publicly speaking on matters related to their expertise — especially in court — because the fact that someone is an expert on something makes what they say about it more likely to be true.
Now what about cases where faculty make controversial or offensive public pronouncements on matters outside their areas of expertise? Why can’t we punish them for that? Here again, there’s the point that the dean is not and should not be authorized to rescind the U.S. Bill of Rights. A second answer says protecting extramural speech is a prophylactic measure. As Keith Wittington argues, permitting universities to punish people for extramural speech made in non-academic contexts makes it too easy for them to do so in academic ones. And that in turn undermines the university’s ability to get at the truth.
Speaking of profs testifying in court, it’s worth noting that historians do this too sometimes. But if, as Khalid and Snyder think, history does not aim at the truth, why should we let them? Consider the libel suit brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books a couple of decades ago. Irving sued because Lipstadt accused him of being a Holocaust denier who falsified the historical record. Thanks in large part to the expert testimony of Cambridge historian Richard J. Evans, the English court ruled against the plaintiff on the grounds that what Lipstadt said was in fact true. Apparently, nobody told the judge that historians are not in the business of getting at the truth about the past but in rewriting and reconstituting it.
Evans’ book on the affair, Lying About Hitler, opens with the following sentence: “This book is about how we can tell the difference between truth and lies in history.” But if Khalid and Snyder are right, why would we ever expect a historian to help us draw that distinction? And come to think of it, if you are a historian who agrees with Khalid and Snyder, what exactly is your criticism of Holocaust denial? It can’t be that it isn’t true because truth’s not your bag. It can’t be that it doesn’t fit the evidence because evidence just is a reason to think that something is true. You can call it offensive but, as any free speech advocate will tell you, that’s not an epistemic criticism. You can’t go around dismissing ideas just because you find them offensive. The remedy for offensive speech, they say, is more speech. But unless the additional speech is supposed to get us closer to truth, why should anybody listen?
In my reply to their earlier essay, I said aiming at truth doesn’t mean that you’ve hit it, that you know you’ve hit it, or that you can ever be absolutely certain you’ve hit it. Khalid and Snyder still don’t agree. And that may be the root of the whole thing. The word ‘truth’, they say, “suggests absolutes, fixed points, and infallibility.” I don’t know who suggested that to them but it wasn’t me.
Michael Veber
Associate Professor of Philosophy
East Carolina University
Greenville, N.C.
