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“学术状况”报告的最佳论据是它的批评者
当范德比尔特大学和圣路易斯华盛顿大学的校长委托一个由纽约大学哲学家保罗·博格西安 (Paul Boghossian) 担任主席的委员会来评估人文和社会科学学术状况时，他们邀请了一种特殊的答复。 《“学术状况”报告的最佳论据是它的批评者》一文首先出现在美国企业研究所 - AEI 上。
来源:美国进取研究所信息当范德比尔特大学和圣路易斯华盛顿大学的校长委托一个由纽约大学哲学家保罗·博格西安 (Paul Boghossian) 担任主席的委员会来评估人文和社会科学学术状况时，他们邀请了一种特殊的答复。
The report that resulted advances a contestable empirical claim: that across several fields, certain politically charged questions have been quietly treated as closed, dissent is recoded as incompetence rather than disagreement, and a good deal of scholarship now serves a moral program settled in advance. One can answer such a charge in the ordinary scholarly way—with evidence, counterexample, and argument. The report invites it, conceding that its conclusions are not yet supported by the kind of quantitative study its critics would demand and urging administrators to consult disciplinary experts before acting.
Instead, the Vanderbilt and Washington University chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) have supplied something more useful than any defense the report’s authors could have drafted for themselves: a confession. Their June 11 joint statement does two things, and each one proves the case it means to refute.
首先，它要求的不是反驳，而是删除。 The chapters call on their chancellors “to rescind the report” outright—to unpublish it, to make it disappear from the universities’ websites.这是一种暴露性的反射。自信的学科会用更好的描述来满足对其自身的不讨好的描述。对自己的标准失去信心的学科会转而使用删除键。 The report asked, in effect, whether some fields have lost the capacity to hear criticism as anything but an attack to be repelled.第一个实质性回应是一项压制该问题的动议。