Two questions – what counts as activism in academia and what (if anything) should be done about it – formed the core of our lively webinar last Wednesday as I spoke with the University of Wyoming’s Martha McCaughey and the University of Chicago’s Tom Ginsburg and took questions from Heterodox Academy members.

The idea for this conversation arose from the contributions of Tom and Martha to inquisitive, a new quarterly periodical I manage at Heterodox Academy. For our second issue, on the theme of “discipline,” Tom wrote for us on “Undisciplined Disciplines” – including on existential threats to universities caused by discipline-based professional associations and departments subbing in political campaigns for scholarly work. Martha, writing on “scholar optimism,” suggested how to think about doing good work in the world without giving up on intellectual rigor and scholarly humility.

At the webinar, Tom offered as an easy example of “egregious” classroom political activism a recent case of a University of Chicago statistics professor who allegedly cancelled a midterm to go to a downtown protest against Donald Trump and suggested the students in the class join him. In that case, Tom said, the provost made clear the action was “totally inappropriate,” a case of what the school’s founding president William Rainey Harper would have understood as “failing in their duty” as a professor.

Martha agreed with Tom's view that faculty must “allow space for pluralism” in classrooms, with Martha noting the professors should not be “acting more like a preacher or politician than a scholar or an academic who’s engaging in inquiry.” She has developed a one-minute, self-assessment primer for checking oneself on the slide from engaged scholarship to political activism. As that primer indicates, scholars maintain humility and an openness to changing their minds based on evidence and also “exhibit curiosity rather than grandstanding.”

The problem arises “when you're presenting a contested claim as uncontested, or you don't let students take reasonable exception that you're then really coming across more like a proselytizer rather than an academic,” in Martha’s words. The behavior may even veer into anti-intellectualism.

In the conversation, I noted that, in the interest of gaining higher visibility, university leaders and media relations departments have sometimes pushed academics to function as “public intellectuals,” opining broadly in op-eds and on social media. Now, universities and their scholars are paying the price as critics decry this as activism under the guise of scholarship.

Talking about how to navigate these tricky waters, Martha and Tom repeatedly used the metaphor of “staying in one’s lane” in terms of scholarly work. Tom questioned why “we have a lot of departments now with foreign policies…which seem to be very clearly outside, from my point of view, any viable claim of disciplinary expertise.” He noted that anthropologists might want to claim that, “As experts in power, we have to comment on power wherever we find it.” But then “you’re going to be commenting all day long every day, because power is everywhere….I just think we have to subject these disciplinary claims to some discipline, to demand that they be subject to scrutiny and subject to argument.” To make claims “which really admit of no limits whatsoever,” he said, represents “a violation of the role morality of scholars.”

Both webinar guests raised concerns about disciplinary associations engaging in activism, with Martha praising the work of Wayne State University sociologist and HxA member Jukka Savolainen, who “took the American Sociological Association to task for making social justice the theme of their recent conference.” She said this was a good example of “individual faculty members…hold[ing] themselves accountable and hold[ing] others accountable to high standards of integrity.”

But Martha also expressed skepticism about approaches that condemn entire fields as supposedly being “activist.” She noted that the much-maligned fields of Women’s Studies and Black Studies were created “because academia was sexist and racist, so [those disciplines’ founding] was actually in pursuit of truth and in pursuit of multiple perspectives, which Heterodox Academy champions.” She added, “I don’t think the activist origins of the field make the field itself activist.”

Tom agreed, observing that these issues and disciplines are “always evolving” and saying, “I don’t think we should throw away or limit our ability to…even push normative agendas that really do come from our knowledge.” He asked, “Isn’t one person’s activism another person’s disciplinary knowledge?…[W]ho draws the line? And I think that’s a very good question.”

What’s the problem with disciplines, departments, associations, or individual faculty members becoming overly and fully activist? Tom said it’s partly that this kind of behavior “draws down on the capital” of public goodwill. So, bleeding activism and academia together undermines academic freedom because it risks public trust. Martha noted a central irony: If you really want to make things better in the world, you have to approach problems as a scholar, because to solve problems you need the kind of reliable knowledge that comes from real scholarship.

Professional schools, all in the conversation agreed, are a special case, because, in teaching students to be professionals, faculty may reasonably find themselves teaching norms that look (and presumably are) political. Saying universities “can’t be a true ivory tower in this day and age,” Tom gave as examples social work and public health. Martha said, again, the issue is “staying in their lane, talking about their area of expertise, and [always being] open to the possibility that they’re wrong…[not] putting politics before inquiry.”

With regard to the question of tolerating activism in the classroom in the name of academic freedom, Martha struck a cautionary tone, saying, “We have to be careful not to let academic freedom rationalize unprofessional, unethical behavior.” She urged that we think of academic freedom “as the shield against outside interference from rich donors or activists or the government,” and not something we “use as a sword politically.” (By the way, those interested in learning more about academic freedom should note the special three-day program offered by the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression.)

So what should we see as solutions to the problems of activism in academia? Both Martha and Tom recommended more explicit and conscious valuing of epistemic humility in the academy with Tom suggesting, “We need to find ways to institutionalize epistemic humility.”

He argued, too, for “better systems of replication,” better self-auditing of scholarship, and “reimagin[ing] how we create cultures where people challenge each other as opposed to engaging in groupthink,” making sure to “reward the people who are doing that kind of intellectual work of challenging others.” Martha shared the approach taken by the University of Wyoming, which seeks to train freshmen to understand that constructive disagreement is how we gain better knowledge.

Additionally, transparency with students (for example, through the use of grading rubrics and well-stated course objectives) can help combat the perception that professors are just pushing activist agendas. Martha gave the example of an English lit professor teaching a lesbian novel; without a transparent explanation of the pedagogical purpose, a student might wrongly assume the professor is just pushing a political agenda.

“Those misunderstandings really do exist,” she said, and politicians too often may take advantage of them. Tom added that, when he is about to give his own normative take on an issue in a law class, he tells the students that he’s doing just that, to make clear he’s providing his own view: “We owe transparency in that regard.”

Scholarly checks and balances can also help keep us on the right track. Martha gave the example of the sociologists who took over the journal “Theory and Society” to put it back on a scholarly track. Martha also called for layers of vetting by faculty of new courses, hiring, promotion, and tenure. She referred to when she went up for tenure at Virginia Tech and her “dossier wasn’t just reviewed by a committee in my department. It had to go to a college level committee of faculty, and then after that, it had to go to a university level committee, by which time somebody in poultry science had to see my work in women's studies as legitimately meeting university-wide standards for scholarship. And I think that's a really good model.”

Tom said that increasing viewpoint diversity could help keep departments from becoming activist camps, but noted it won’t always be easy: “You’re not going to find a bunch of…Republican anthropologists,” he said, because of “path dependency” in the field. But, he said, departments should at least have statement-neutrality policies to “communicate an ethos that, hey, we don’t have orthodoxy here, and there’s not going to be administrative punishment if you disagree with the orthodoxies.”

Want to hear the entire conversation? Find it here. And don’t forget that our open call for contributions to the fifth issue of inquisitive is now open.

Please join me tomorrow (Wednesday, May 14) for another in our webinar series, this time on the important subject of when university investigations of faculty go off the rails.