The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
Prof. Andrew Koppelman, "Universities Must Quit with the BS"
"The job of academia is the discovery of truth. Universities should not be in the bullshit business."
It's in The Hill today; an excerpt, though all of it is much worth reading:
The war between Israel and Hamas has led some university administrations to realize the virtues of institutional neutrality, as advocated by the famous Kalven Report. Accustomed to pontificating on current events, they have suddenly discovered that they couldn't say anything without making somebody angry.
Worse, having established that practice, they found that even silence sent a nasty message, apparently signifying invidious comparative judgments about which deaths mattered. (More likely it signified comparative judgments about which groups to pander to.)
It turns out — who knew? — that it is politic for officials to avoid taking sides on contentious issues. But there is another reason why administrators ought to remain silent on such matters: anything they say is almost certainly bullshit, and the mission of the university is antithetical to the production of bullshit.
I here use "bullshit" as a technical term. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt explains in his classic analysis that a bullshitter is uninterested in the truth or falsity of his speech: "the motive guiding and controlling it is unconcerned with how the things about which he speaks truly are." Rather, he merely wants to elicit a certain reaction: "What he cares about is what people think of him." … Official university statements are necessarily bullshit, because the administration is aiming to produce a result — inducing the public to admire the school, and signifying a certain flavor of social solidarity….
The Kalven Report observes that a university "is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness." Universities today are plagued by a climate of orthodoxy that chills thought and incapacitates us from thinking about how to address real and pressing problems. Administrations have a responsibility to dispel that climate, not contribute to it.
The job of academia is the discovery of truth. Universities should not be in the bullshit business.
To get the Volokh Conspiracy Daily e-mail, please sign up here.
Editor's Note: We invite comments and request that they be civil and on-topic. We do not moderate or assume any responsibility for comments, which are owned by the readers who post them. Comments do not represent the views of Reason.com or Reason Foundation. We reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason at any time. Comments may only be edited within 5 minutes of posting. Report abuses.
Please
to post comments
.
Except conservative-controlled schools that teach nonsense, claim silly fairy tales are true, suppress science to flatter superstition, enforce childish dogma, consider the Bible a nonfiction work, label evolution a demonic plot hatched in hell, promote creationism, etc.
See above for a great example of bullshit.
Brought to you daily by the Right Rev.
I believe they, too, regularly suffer the slings and arrows of complaint and mockery, e.g. yours.
In this particular case, perhaps hammer more loudly conservative support for Israel was invented by TV preachers who needed Israel to exist so it could be destroyed to initiate the End Times.
Speaking of support for Israel, not only is support for Israel’s government and conduct weakening among Americans but Pres. Biden seems increasingly disinclined to indulge Prime Minister Netanyahu’s immoral bloodlust and right-wing belligerence. Refraining from protecting and enabling Israel with reflexive, unwarranted vetoes at the United Nations might be a good start in this context.
Why do you think a man who erupts into another man’s rear is a loving hero?
These are your fans, Volokh Conspirators . . . and the reason mainstream observers have come to view all of you as either (1) bigots or (2) bigot-hugging losers.
Leniency from better Americans is the only reasonable hope you clingers have left.
We’re still not sure how many of the 1200 deaths are attributable to the IDF. Blumenthal’s reporting was chilling, but not particularly surprising. The IDF had a standing policy to kill soldiers being taken captive, ostensibly up until a few years ago when they did away with it. Looks like they actually just expanded it to civilians and may have grossly and unnecessarily inflated the death toll. This particular government narrative lines up nicely with Frankfurter’s definition, too.
Not calling this brutal war out as a clearly state-driven revenge campaign for the government’s own colossal fuck-up of failing to protect the people it nominally serves also feels like bullshit.
I am sure a lot of exchanged captives would be fascinated to hear that Israel ever had a policy of executing captured soldiers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Arab%E2%80%93Israeli_prisoner_exchanges
You seem to be suffering from a massive dose of ignorant hatred.
More like a heroic dose of bullshit…
It’s not bullshit in the sense discussed by the main blog post, where the content of speech is driven by “what people think of him” rather than about facts. Spouting obvious falsehoods makes other people think poorly of him. But it certainly could be a case of the Big Lie.
Mass murdering dictators tell you to believe a democracy with a free press is deliberately mass murdering not just captive soldiers but civilians, and we aren’t talking bombs?
Hoooo kayyyyyy.
Hamas gunmen butchered some Israeli civilians while placing others in the line of fire as human shields. Under those circumstances, treating the fact that some nonzero number of Israeli dead were inevitably killed by friendly as some kind of ‘boo-ya!’ gotcha point is deeply weird.
It shouldn’t be treated as a gotcha, but it shouldn’t be buried or handwaved away, either.
“But there is another reason why administrators ought to remain silent on such matters: anything they say is almost certainly bullshit, and the mission of the university is antithetical to the production of bullshit.”
Wait, is he talking about what the mission of the university is, or what the mission of the university ought to be?
“The job of academia is the discovery of truth. Universities should not be in the bullshit business.”
All well and good.
But they ARE in the bullshit business, and sucking in millions of tax dollars in the process.
How should society respond?
(Reason’s comment section software is buggy. If a comment starts with a “blockquote” tag, the corresponding closing blockquote tag seems to be ignored – making the entire comment a quote.
Worse, when attempting to edit a comment after posting, the blockquote tags don’t appear in the editable text but, to at least some extent, seem to survive the editing process when the updated comment is submitted.)
Worse still, some edits are not even taking effect.
Close it up, y’all. This gut wins the comments today.
Liberalism is false, and thus BS.
I disagree as to classical liberalism. However, the “liberalism” of the people who run our universities (the likes of Ms. Gay, Ms. Magill, and Ms. Kornbluth) is most definitely false / BS. Which explains why they were gung-ho for BLM, but have trouble saying anything about the 10/7 Hamas attack (unless it is to praise it!), and why they’ve been clobbering people left & right with their “No hate-speech allowed!” speech-codes … until the crazed “anti-Zionists” came out of the woodwork, screaming “Death to Jews!”
Only an academic feels the need to appeal to authority to define bullshit. Bullshit is always and everywhere a sales pitch.
What interests me is the origin history of the word. Bullshit is repellent, yet people are drawn to it (like flies???). There was a first bullshitter, and a first person to call out bullshit. My dad used to say, you cant bullshit a bullshitter, but I am sure he was wrong.
My father also used to say that. As a matter of fact, when I would try to explain a bad grade in school, he’d angrily tell me, “Don’t bullshit a bullshitter.”
He spoke with some authority, as he was quite the bullshitter himself. As an adult, I got to see that it was indeed difficult to bullshit him. Such was the case of a person who couldn’t believe in much because he knew how easily, and convincingly, bullshit is manufactured.
And even though I’m not much of a bullshitter, I don’t trust people any more than I trusted my father. Which is to say that I trust anybody about as much as I trust a bullshitter.
It’s not an uncomfortable view of people. I think I’d call it “skepticism.”
The purpose of universities has always been job training, whether that is future professors, professional bullshitters, or propagating marginal fields to collect more student loan dollars from marginal students.
Universities are at the forefront of leftist degeneracy. Go to any college campus, and you won’t find any with more than a handful of token professors or students who are willing to speak out on the evils liberalism hath wrought.
Yes, and by means of creating marginal jobs teaching marginal ideology.
Jobs.
“The purpose of universities has always been job training”
Many argue that its purpose is to create well-rounded people.
(I’m going to duck out of here now before anybody tries to respond.)
Yes, well-rounded so they can get better jobs.
The needle on my snark detector is jumping all over the place. Can’t get a good reading.
Try phonics.
Universities should not be in the bullshit business.
…
Official university statements are necessarily bullshit
This statement needs to get straight with itself.
The implication is that universities should almost never issue official statements of that kind.
No, it makes perfect sense, Universities should only put put statements on issues that directly effect the universities themselves.
Leave the political statements to politicians editorialists, professors if they must, and civic organizations on campuses or off, and individuals. But Universities as institutions should stay out of.public controversies.
Same with corporations.
The golden age of American higher education is over.
I’ve long said that the internet was going to destroy higher education much the way that the Interstate Highway System destroyed the railroads. But the Railroads didn’t help themselves and higher ed hasn’t helped itself, either.
“The golden age of American higher education is over.”
There’s cause for hope: I’ll be dead soon, and that’ll let other people define “the golden age of American higher education.”
It was full of bullshit when I attended college, and yet it still worked out for me.
Maybe we don’t need a golden age anything, and progress can be had with just a little bit less bullshit tomorrow than today?
(Golden age? Sounds like bullshit to me.)
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/12/politics/new-york-redistricting/index.html
Scratch a liberal, find a tyrannical thug.
You shouldn’t scratch people.
Look who suddenly claims to object to gerrymandering!
This clinger is still a fan of race-targeting voter suppression, though.
https://reason.com/volokh/2023/12/06/should-universities-ban-advocacy-of-genocide/?comments=true#comment-10346274
Harvard should change its motto from Veritas to Quid est veritas?
All this was said long ago by William F. Buckley in his God and Man at Yale (1951), aptly subtitled “The Superstitions of Academic Freedom”. It begins with the quaint notion that universities should teach the truth, but this had been undermined by the notion of “academic freedom”, which was just an excuse to introduce heterodox (but always left-wing) ideas into education.
That ship has sailed. The Marxists’ long march through the institutions has been a complete success. The current education system can’t be saved. It can only be exposed for the racket it is, destroyed, and rebuilt from the ground up. Correction begins with school choice and an end to vampiric federally-guaranteed student loans.
The Volokh Conspiracy: Where Harvard, Yale, Berkeley, Michigan, UCLA, Princeton, Wellesley, Penn, and the rest of America’s strongest teaching and research institutions are disdained. . . because these despicable clingers love nonsense-teaching conservative schools, fourth-tier rube factories, for-profit and online diploma mills, and strenuously bigoted institutions that mock academic freedom.
Carry on, clingers . . . we will, of course, continue to let you know just how far and how long.
“We?” You count yourself among our betters? I had you pegged as one of their useful idiots.
I would not make statements this extreme. Universities obviously have goals other than discovering the truth.
To use a very simple but obvious example, whenever researchers refrain frim nonconsensual human vivesection when that would be the quickest way to reach the scientific result, they are placing values other than seeking truth above the goal of seeking truth. That is, every time research is constrained by some sort of ethical principal or code, seeking truth is not being made the highest value. Even economic constraints place solvency above truth-seeking in the hierarchy of values.
Universities exist within a society. They are constrained by requirements to not harm that society. They are also assigned additional tasks, such as educating the young, which constrain or compete with pure truth-seeking. Moreover, to get other people to pay them, they have to do something for them, and they have to maintain at least somewhat good terms with them.
The Hill article may be right that universities should make fewer statements about general social issues. But its reasoning contains sweeping generalities that obviously aren’t so. Truth-seeking is an important function of universities, but it is not and cannot be the sole function or value. As is often the case, the best policy is often a compromise between competing values and needs, not maximizing one value at the expense of all others no matter what.