[ad_1]
Philosophy professor Jason Stanley said after the Capitol attack that “one of the things that has surprised me in recent years is that many colleagues saw his lack of participation in public debate as a form of virtuous heroism.”
There is in academia an understandable resistance to quick analysis and strong opinions, such as those that characterize the climate of contemporary debate. The teacher’s favorite “depends” is rarely an available answer option when, for example, talking about sledding in cemeteries.
About the British I’m going for a doctorate, my colleagues have been divided between two fields. Those who only write research articles, period. Without podcasts, without chronicles and absolutely without Twitter. And then those who from the exile of the reading rooms to the Internet still want to find some kind of context. Those who try to balance research and teaching by disseminating their results to the public.
In any case, this is how we try to justify our more or less heavy addiction. Because the so-called third task includes being interviewed about your dissertation, but perhaps not arguing with people on social media. OR?
After all, we live among climate deniers, vaccine opponents, and apparently shamans. More or less ordinary people are so convinced that election watchers lie that they put on soft pants, take selfies, and attack public buildings. Invisibility is perhaps simply a luxury that academics cannot afford right now.
That’s the idea behind it the recently launched Swedish Philosophy platform, which wants to open up the philosophical world to a wider audience. In a post, Torbjörn Tännsjö writes that he was alone in Sweden for a long time combining the roles of academic philosopher and public polemicist. That researchers can contribute but also that there is a risk of being unjustly attacked or even silenced in the public arena.
Academics belonging to an already vulnerable group can expect particularly severe attacks. And so it has always been. In “Einstein and Prejudices – On the Narrow Spaces of Science” (2019), educational sociologist Rebecka Göransdotter describes how the 1920s European treated Albert Einstein’s research as inferior “Jewish physics”, part of “Jewish propaganda “. While he was greeted as a superstar in many places, his research colleagues and the rest of the audience mixed objective objections to the theories of relativity with anti-Semitic outbursts.
Jason Stanley’s work in “The Methods of Fascism” (2019) shows that it is no coincidence that even today’s right-wing extremists question the experience and paint universities as an oasis for liberalism, cultural Marxism, and feminism. . That Orbán, Trump and the Swedish Democrats want to stifle gender studies and connect critical theory with “globalism.” In establishing the myth of a golden past, it is difficult for researchers to find science and evidence to the contrary.
Einstein could not be neutral against the social and ideological struggles of his time, and came to take an increasingly strong position for socialism and pacifism. When “Über die spezielle und die allgemeine Relativitätstheorie” of 1917 was translated into English, it also changed direction to convince the public of its own credibility, but also of the importance of being on the side of the internationalist search for truth. Göransdotter describes how in 1920’s “Relativity,” thought experiments with endless train tracks and space travel seem to emphasize science’s dependence on global cooperation and the absence of geographic boundaries.
The challenge for today’s researchers is learning to navigate the climate of debate of our time. Build alliances with others who realize that an attack on democracy is always an attack on the university as well. And then Twitter is not that stupid.
