By David Pan · Wednesday, April 24, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative  Columbia University president Nemat Shafik’s recent testimony to Congress indicates an important shift in our conception of academic freedom. While affirming the legal principle of free speech, she clearly accepted limits on academic freedom by stating that calls for genocide have no place at the university. Since at least one issue would disqualify someone from participating in Columbia’s educational project, she opens up the question of the limits of academic freedom and the duty of a university to enforce such limits through decisions on hiring and dismissal of faculty as well as suspension of students. While the American Association of University Professors seeks to criticize such restrictions on academic freedom, its 1940 statement on academic freedom stipulates that “[i]nstitutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.” The congressional hearings have demonstrated that the common good may require restrictions on academic freedom, and such restrictions indeed are already part of the way universities see their mission.
Continue reading →
By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Friday, January 19, 2024 Collin May’s essay “Critical Theory as an Anti-Emancipatory Project” appeared earlier this week in TelosScope.
Collin May would not seem like an ideal target for cancelation—if by that one means someone relatively defenseless, inarticulate or unable to speak for himself, lacking in intellectual resources to understand his predicament, uncredentialed, without elite professional training in the subject he is accused of mishandling, or ready access to legal counsel. Or if by that one means someone accused of having done something wrong under murky circumstances, in any way nebulous, difficult to check, or hard to prove one way or the other.
To the contrary. May is himself a lawyer, trained philosopher, theologian, and scholar of Islam. Yet he ran afoul of the powers of “woke” that be, over the publication of an academic book review on the subject of Islamic history, published years ago in a prestigious outlet, just when he had stepped into a prominent role as a Canadian civil servant.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Monday, January 2, 2023 The following comments refer to Robert Redeker’s piece from Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, published in English translation on TelosScope here.
In a notable comment in The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud compares Oedipus Rex with Hamlet in order to describe what he calls “the secular advance of repression in the emotional life of mankind.” Between Sophocles and Shakespeare, civilization underwent an enormous increase in the control of affect and a withering away of the formerly unmanaged space of some original freedom. Of course Freud was talking about widely separated historical moments, ancient Greece and Elizabethan England. Today, through hyper-acceleration in a much shorter period, we are undergoing a comparable quantum leap of control (see: surveillance) accompanied by restrictions on free speech and free thought unthinkable only a few decades ago.
Continue reading →
By Robert Redeker · Monday, January 2, 2023 The following text originally appeared in Le Figaro on December 30, 2022, and is published here in English translation with permission of the author. Translated by Russell A. Berman, whose comments are here.
In 1793, the great German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte discovered what the rector of the Great Mosque of Paris does not know today, if one can judge by the complaint that he filed against the author Michel Houellebecq, i.e., that freedom of thought is divine. Let us listen to Fichte: “It is both a human and divine truth that man has inalienable rights and that freedom of thought is one of these rights.” What does that mean? It means that denouncing and opposing freedom of thought is blasphemous; that this sort of anger simultaneously offends the divine part of humanity and, indirectly, God himself; and that this sort of attack is dehumanizing because it attempts to tear out of the human conscience what God himself gave it.
Through its legal action, the Grand Mosque of Paris poses two risks, for the writer and our country: the risk of forcing the writer, a candidate for the Nobel Prize, to live under close police protection or, in other words, to become a sort of prisoner of conscience in his own country, and the risk of inciting a fanatic ready to spill the blood of the man targeted as an “Islamophobe.” Let us recall that since Islam is not the state religion of France, one has the right to speculate, perhaps erroneously, that it is wrong and alien to the soul of French civilization. One similarly has the right to discuss this idea, as long as one stays at the level of general ideas and refrains from defamations or direct calls for violence.
Continue reading →
By David Pan · Monday, October 3, 2022 Telos 200 (Fall 2022): The Place of Truth at the University is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 The place of truth at the university has always been elsewhere. Scientific conclusions are after all hypotheses, subject to continuing examination and critique in a process that forever defers the arrival at a final truth. In addition to this unbridgeable temporal distance from truth, there is a spatial distance to the extent that the university is subject to a larger purposive context that stands outside of scientific activity itself. A researcher can be objective by being non-prejudicial in collecting facts and weighing arguments but can never be neutral in terms of the goals of the research, which must always be established before the research begins and from outside of the research project itself.[1] Research cannot begin until an interest in some question has been expressed, and such an interest has generally not been up to the researcher to decide. Whether the goal of medical research will be to protect humans from a virus or attack humans with a virus will be determined by the sponsor of the research rather than the researcher, who at best may decline to take part in some forms of research. If the determiners of the goals of the university are not the professors themselves but the society that sponsors their work, it is within this external values framework that the truth of the university must be found.
Continue reading →
By Telos Press · Thursday, January 6, 2022 The Telos Student Seminars provide a forum for students around the world to engage with critical theory by discussing a common set of paired texts from Telos—one current essay and one pertinent essay from our archives. The following reports from our first Telos Student Seminars at Concordia University in Irvine, California, and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center in Nanjing, China, compare Paul Kahn’s “Law and Representation: Observations from an American Constitutionalist” (Telos 195, Summer 2021) and Paul Piccone’s “The Crisis of Liberalism and the Emergence of Federal Populism” (Telos 89, Fall 1991). The Irvine seminar advocates addressing the political challenges highlighted by Kahn and Piccone through a new American civil religion “built on mysticism,” while the Nanjing group took the seminar as an occasion for a wide-ranging, cross-cultural discussion about society and politics. Telos Student Seminars participants across the globe will gather virtually for a discussion with Paul Kahn at the end of this month. For more details about the Telos Student Seminars, including summaries of the two essays under discussion, click here.
Read the reports here.
Continue reading →
|
|
