"You're a professor. Professors should profess."
That's what one of my mentors told me, a long time ago. Back in the day, before online teaching and the general adjunct-ification of higher education worked together to bid down the price and intellectual capacity of the teaching help, a professor was supposed to have her own ideas about things. She was also supposed to be able to express them freely without fear of being fired or sidelined. Academic freedom of this kind had a purpose. It ensured the open marketplace of ideas could flourish, which itself aided in the development of modern liberal society: society with free markets, free speech, and free institutions. Free students led by free professors who grew up to be the building blocks of a free society.
Through the free expression of ideas about culture, economics, business, politics, technology, and even education, modern society developed and moved away from the religious dogma in which it was founded. Think about just about any idea that has any importance, from the rule of law to the factory system to the US Constitution, and you notice that this idea, in its day, had detractors. But the marketplace of ideas won out, and today we are protected by the rule of law, our products are made by the factory system, and the US Constitution is still in force last time I checked.
Try to imagine society without these ideas.
I have some strong opinions about a lot of things, but as a PhD-trained climate policy specialist who also studied "PPE" (politics, philosophy, and economics), I was encouraged to express these ideas without fear or restraint -- except the intellectual restraint that grew out of the facts themselves.
Actually, I was required by the nature of my PhD program to express my ideas.
If I hadn't had any ideas I would not have passed the program. And I kept having ideas and expressing them right up until the time that my having ideas, and the ideas I was having, became incompatible with the new so-called leadership of (some) parts of American higher education.
Some folks just don't like ideas.
Well, they didn't stop me. I've been at it again.
Professing.
From the comment section of the New York Times:
Mick Womersley | Maine
Bret has made a workmanlike job of setting aside bias and exploring the options. I wish more conservatives would do the same. My only quibble is that he hasn't quite gotten his head around the math and so has picked, in a weak-minded way, the wrong option, doing nothing now. Global circulation is a complex dynamic system and requires a dynamic systems model. This kind of math isn't taught except in science programs. Commentators get it wrong. Yes, climate policy is a kind of insurance, an ounce of cure to avoid a pound of pain. So much is mentioned fairly. But the full scope of possible outcomes is missing or slighted. As one example, the results of the recent Thwaites Glacier expedition have served primarily to demonstrate that one possible outcome, the catastrophic melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is more likely than previously thought, with enough sea level rise as a result to swamp a good portion of the worlds largest cities. There are several other bad possible outcomes to discuss. They aren't. It isn't alarmist to cover all the bases. You buy house insurance to offset the risk of a drastic fire. It may be a low risk, but the results of the fire would be sufficiently bad that the conservative householder views the premium as a reasonable expense. Climate scientists have been asking the free market to pay the premium for decades and it hasn't done so. So we will instead choose to rebuild after the fire. That's the logical outcome of the thinking in this column.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/28/opinion/climate-change-bret-stephens.html
No comments:
Post a Comment