There are no 'interesting questions about free speech' in universities arising from this decision. Academic…
There are no 'interesting questions about free speech' in universities arising from this decision. Academic freedom has never = freedom of speech. That's the political libertarian framing. Thread about what (I think) this all means. /1 https://t.co/izVgy9pCf5
Political libertarianism is really just iconoclasm. The destruction of existing institutions. Institutions that carry the accumulated learnings of societies, across generations. As we did in the Reformation. We're going through another iconoclastic phase now. /2
You can see this everywhere if you look. For example in the pandemic, where politicians deliberately set up an opposition between their decisions, and expertise. Expertise lives in institutions. Institutions force you to apply accumulated wisdom to a decision. /3
Populist politicians obviously hate that. So for decades now they've made the real opposition in politics not the Left, or the Right, but institutions. 'Bureaucracy', as they call it. But it's a full-culture phenomenon. For example.../4
...in organisations and businesses, we've had MBA-led assaults on existing 'administration' for decades, with constant outsourcing of expertise away from the accumulated internal knowledge. The failures and costs of this shift have been phenomenal. /5
Going back to Peter Ridd and universities, ironically nothing will fire up an academic's anger more than their university's administration. It's the same iconoclasm. Academics don't like you pointing out that universities are almost universally run by...other academics. /6
Academic freedom has never meant the freedom of individual academics to say what they like. It also hasn't meant that they can, provided it's 'in their area of expertise'. All libertarian nonsense. Politicians want to turn this into a free speech issue, to dovetail with.../7
...their wider culture war. That war is always about finding an individual who shares your views, and setting up a straw man situation where it appears their view is being oppressed. Ridd is the perfect patsy for the climate deniers in politics, and they will always.../8
...use people like Ridd as their Trojan Horse to undermine another institution they see as in their way. They'll chew him up and spit him out when they're done with him, he's a fool if he thinks they actually care. /9
Academic freedom is peer-review. The right to have a view, provided it's tested by your fellow experts. Society knows ideas are its deepest layer, and universities therefore will always represent a threat to those in positions of authority. So in the history of universities.../10
...society has put this proviso on them being allowed to uproot the status quo of ideas. You can have that 'freedom', provided it's within a culture of peer review. Academic governance, as it's called. In recent decades the New Public Management (NPM) zealots.../11
...in universities (usually failed academics who took the management career path) have tried to marginalise academic governance as being only about the 'quality' of a university's offerings. TEQSA believes and enforces the same rubbish. So the management can make any idiot.../12
...decision it likes, and it will be the job of academic governance to ensure the outcome is 'quality'. Bizarre that academics fell for this, but they're usually individually brilliant, and collectively quite stupid. A university's core 'product'.../13
...(NPM-led unis spend years arguing over what their core product and core customer is) is ideas. Not students. Ideas. That's their job, to be the steward of ideas. Peer-review is the only management and governance method that can work for that, because no individual.../14
...can own an idea. Ideas exist separately to people, and are the raw material of society. This will never change. And so the only method of taming them is a collective method. Academic freedom, the freedom to collectively decide on ideas. Anything else is fundamentalism. /end