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A weak response to the “Boghossian Report” by the AAUP chapters at Wash U/St. Louis and Vanderbilt (whose Chancellors comissioned the report)

The response is here. It states that,

Historians, literary scholars, and anthropologists are singled out for caricature while the authors fail to acknowledge their own public biases against scholarship performed in the name of social justice.

No evidence is adduced that scholars in these fields were caricatured, so we are left wondering why we should take their word for it? At least the Boghossian Report adduces some evidence, if not systematic evidence. (For contrasting views from anthropologists, see this and this.) But it is simply jaw-dropping to assert that the Report authors have a “bias[] against scholarship performed in the name of social justice”: the whole point of the Report is that a Wissenschaft answers only to epistemic standards, not social justice, so this is not a bias, but the essential point. The justification of academic freedom turns entirely on a scholarly discipline employing rigorous methods to discover truths about its subject matter. Neither the law nor the AAUP recognizes an academic freedom right to pursue social justice under the guise of research and teaching. (The AAUP recognizes the right of faculty to speak as citizens about extramural matters [including social justice], and the Report is quite clear that it is not taking issue with that or the political leanings of the professoriate.)

Responses this stupid do the fields in question no favors.

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