The Review

Ilya Shapiro, a conservative law professor recently hired by Georgetown, found himself in trouble before he’d even begun. At issue were his tweets objecting to President Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Some interpreted Shapiro to mean that Black women are by definition less qualified for the position; Shapiro deleted the tweets and apologized.

Now, he’s on leave from a job he hasn’t started yet and under investigation by the university. But almost without exception, academic and political commentators across the ideological spectrum think the investigation is unwarranted. Jason Stanley, who has argued in the pages of The Review that university free-speech concerns often run cover for conservative political activism, tweeted unambiguously: “You do not have to be a ‘conservative or a free speech activist’ to see Georgetown’s actions here as a significant error. Parsing faculty tweets for administrative punishment is problematic, full stop.” Other liberal or left writers — Michelle Goldberg, Adam Serwer, Nikole Hannah-Jones — have all expressed similar views. Georgetown’s actions would seem to have very little support.

The picture inside the law school looks different, of course. Activists demand Shapiro’s firing; a mood of crisis prevails. Administrators seem, or want to seem, receptive to student complaints. Why? At The Review, Oliver Traldi has a theory. Because Shapiro’s tweets criticize racial preferences, which have become newly vulnerable under a majority-conservative Supreme Court, “one can easily get the impression that university administrations are using their perhaps too-easily-offended students to deflect criticism of race-based preferences, including their own policies.” Read Traldi’s analysis here.

From the Mailbox — More on Moralizing

Last month The Review published the anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz on what he calls the “moral hyperthermia” of intellectual life at present. Yves Gingras, a sociologist of science at the Université du Québec à Montréal, shared an essay with me he’d written in 2019 on a related topic: the distinction, firm in theory but occasionally challenged, in the hard sciences between moral and epistemic evaluative norms when it comes to publication, awards, grants, and so on. It has generally been understood, Gingras writes, that scientists should make “no moral inquisition to check whether the person, qua scientist, was, for example, racist (like the Physics Nobel Prize winner William Shockley), anti-Semitic (like another Physics Nobel Prize winner Johannes Stark) or misogynous. For it has long been implicit ... that the ‘republic of science’ was a relatively autonomous subset of society with its own rules based on expertise.”

As Gingras tells it, challenges to this autonomy have recurred across the 20th century. He provides two historical instances. First, there was the opposition in some quarters of the scientific community to awarding Marie Curie the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in light of rumors that she was having an affair with a married man. In defending herself, Curie appealed to principle: “There is no relation between [my] scientific work and the facts of [my] private life.” She attended the ceremony and received her prize.

The second case is more lurid. In 1992, Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor at Montreal’s Concordia University, murdered four of his colleagues in a fit of paranoid rage. Although of dubious sanity — some psychologists considered him unfit to stand trial — he has retained his intellectual capacities and has kept up publishing academic papers from prison. His continued academic activity didn’t sit well with everyone, but, according to Gingras, “experts in research ethics objected to that censure by recalling that individual crimes are punished by society and should not influence the judgment on the validity of scientific results.”

Read Gingras’s essay here.

Recommended

• “Unlike Steven Pinker or Cass Sunstein ... Freud and his followers did not try to brush away the conflict between desires and society.” At The New Republic, Udi Greenberg on Samuel Moyn’s new edition of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents.
  

• “Thus the oyster is enormous and omnisensitive. Now for its body. Its body, so naked and delicate, feels — or can detect — the slightest tremor in particles of light, scrunches up into itself, and — now the sentence switches subjects — there remains after it a little space, where at once from completely nothing appears a world.” At Lit Hub, an extraordinary essay by the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s English-language translator Jennifer Croft on the science and art of translation.
  

• “Once an academic social contract was exhausted, academic entrepreneurs rushed in to find new partners, formulate new ideas, and establish new institutions — sometimes even outside the university.” That’s the historian Emily Levine, in conversation with Ariel Yingqi Tang on the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas. For more, check out my interview with Levine from a few months ago for The Review, here.
  

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin