The pursuit of knowledge generates disagreement, including disagreement about how to pursue knowledge.
This has implications for current debates of scholarship and activism and complaints about some academics being activists.
Enzo Rossi (Amsterdam) puts it this way:
Those who oppose the distinction between scholarship and activism—between truth and power, if you will—arrived at their position by pursuing epistemic goals. That is, by trying to understand what knowledge is. I think their answer is wrong, but I respect it, because I see that they arrived at their answer how I arrived at mine: by pursuing knowledge. Centring the university’s epistemic mission, and the academic freedom it requires, leads to fundamental disagreement about what the epistemic mission is, and so about what it entails when it comes to the university’s role in social and political life. The very commitment to putting the pursuit of knowledge front and centre leads to pluralism about what that commitment entails—a pluralism that spans from the institutional neutrality of the Kalven Report to the scepticism about neutrality often found among activist scholars.
This pluralism is simply the product of academic freedom and good-faith enquiry. It would be arrogant and unscholarly to suppress it, from either side. And if that’s the case, we have an answer to our initial question. The problem isn’t that some academics are activists. Sometimes the pursuit of knowledge leads to an activist orientation to science, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s important to recognise the legitimacy of both outcomes, and to ensure that neither view of scholarship takes over the university and suppresses the other. So, universities can’t be neutral pursuers of knowledge, because many of their members have come to reject neutrality precisely by pursuing knowledge. It is regrettable that these differences often play out in terms of self-selection into different academic fields, which sometimes results in overpoliticisation—whether of a hyper-activist or hyperneutralist kind. It would be even worse if an entire university took sides on this issue…
If either the activists or the partisans of neutrality took over, we’d have an overpoliticised university: a university that rejects the outcomes of free academic enquiry when it dislikes them…
So, a university that is serious about its epistemic mission should neither be neutral nor activist. I want to suggest that it should be pluralist instead.
The rest is here. Discussion welcome.
Not sure there’s a ton of daylight between being pluralist and being neutral.
I very much agree both with this, and with the original post. One might put the point as follows: while perhaps as abstract philosophical positions we might be able to articulate a difference between ‘being a pluralist’ and ‘being neutral’, at the level of concrete university policies, genuinely pluralistic policies are likely to wind up being identical to genuinely neutral policies.
That is a feature of the view I sketched in that opinion piece, fwiw.
I think there are strong pragmatic reasons for academics not to bill what they do *qua academics* as activism, and to subordinate political aims to the rules of scholarly engagement.
1. We need the public’s support—including those who may not support various activist projects.
2. It’s of course fine or even praiseworthy to have political or moral aspirations for one’s research. (Research on democracy, for example, may be motivated by a concern for democratic backsliding.) But you can’t just take any academic means you like towards your goals, or else you make the knowledge-creation process into a joke. For example, you can’t reject a grant application because the project threatens to uncover some facts that would embarrass your own cause.
I’m having trouble following the argument. It seems to be: even though the mission of a university is x, many people wrongly but in good faith think it is y, and so we should think of or act as if the mission of the university was x and y. That doesn’t follow without some sort of Rawlsian anti-perfectionist premise. However plausible such a premise is regarding liberal democracies, it seems much less plausible regarding individual entities, often private, such as universities.
For a strong counter-argument to this make-nice proposal, see the following talk by Jonathan Haidt: https://youtu.be/Gatn5ameRr8?si=UzGjU9D7Qtp4peX5
I side with Haidt, not Rossi.
Wow, this aged remarkably poorly, all things considered.
From the video:
I think if you googled that in 2016 you might or might not be appalled. I think if you googled that in 2026, you’d go, “Ah, well, that explains a lot.”
I suspect Felix does not have his finger on the pulse of public sentiment towards activism in higher education, and that the exchange here is more representative of how those outside the academy view such activism:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmAfvI4r_MM
We’ve gone from Haidt to Rogan now. That at least helps to put the problem into view.
Coincidentally, I just watched this, featuring another Rogan guest, one who may very well become Surgeon General. It’s interesting how raising the spectre of “activism,” and constructing a boogeyman out of academia, has allowed quacks to rise to positions of power, leveraging their podcast appearances and social media presence to do what fundamentally amounts to activism, but without getting called activists. You can bet, however, that if academics raise concerns about this person being appointed Surgeon General, they will get accused of being activists. And maybe we’ll even get a new generation of Haidts to run interference, to “both sides” the matter until institutions are completely hollowed out by the likes of Means and other quacks.
Felix! Come on! If you think a Skepchick trumps a Haidt and a Rogan when it comes to what the world outside the Academy thinks of things, I’m afraid all I’ll do is downgrade my estimation of your ability to track what’s going on with the Zeitgeist outside the academy.
Oh, I don’t think she does—but that’s no fault of her own. The information environment is thoroughly polluted, and in no small part that is due to Haidt, Weiss, Rogan, and what was once known as the “intellectual dark web.” That it presented itself as being more in touch with “what the world outside the Academy thinks of things” was part of the schtick. That, despite this, many of its figures were directly either tied up in (or running interference for) the Epstein class, makes it all darkly ironic.
I don’t think neutrality is the relevant consideration, and the neutrality talked about in the Kalven Principles is really pretty orthogonal to the question of activist scholarship. Scholarship worth looking at is guided by a set of academic and disciplinary norms, and it aims at something. The question posed by activist scholarship is whether it is guided by the wrong kinds of norms and aims at the wrong sorts of ends. Critics are best understood as answering yes and yes—activist scholarship is guided by political norms and aims at political ends, both of which are distorting. But to say this is not say good scholarship necessarily aims at purely epistemic goals like truth and knowledge. A lot of important research, in fields like medicine, education, and social welfare, aim at other goods like health, better teaching, and addressing poverty. I would argue what distinguish good scholarships from activist scholarship is whether in pursuing these aims scholar adhere to academic norms such as the willingness to consider evidence that challenges antecedent commitments and allow reasonable competing voices to be heard. It’s when the scholarship takes a back seat to the activism that there’s a problem.
From Rossi-
I think it would be more accurate to say that there is no field of study, no focus of research or research method, no scholarly pursuit that resides outside the realm of the values expressed by individuals and communities.
There is no ‘value-neutral’ science, just as there can be no epistemic claims that are apolitical.
If a person extols academic freedom, they are expressing a moral stance. If they insist scientific research must be performed, and the results disseminated, without political constraints, they are staking out a political position.
Ignoring the history of how scholars have been silenced and imprisoned because their work was not consistent with the preferences of those holding political authority (q.v., Galileo), or the instances of scientific research that has been suppressed and discounted because it contradicts dominant cultural narratives (q.v. Darwin), or perhaps suggesting ‘that doesn’t happen today’, only serves to perpetuate specious notions of value/political neutrality.
Perhaps a more specific example will illuminate the intrinsic value statements and political aspects of otherwise scientifically uncontroversial statements-
Viral pathogens cause illness in humans. This is known as ‘the germ theory of disease’.
The spread of infection, and severity of illness, can be reduced by vaccination. Dramatically.
Using tax dollars to develop and disseminate vaccines saves lives. Opposing the use of vaccines, and attempting to discredit their utility, kills people.
As I said, uncontroversial.
I think trying to kill fewer people, when their deaths can be foreseeably prevented, is a preferrable moral stance to knowingly causing more to die.
These are politically charged assertions, because apparently not every person values the lives of other people, and this is reflected in their public statements and conduct.
There’s no degree of sanitizing postulates through abstraction that can remove from scholarly work the griminess of the world. Moral and political considerations. Competing epistemic frames.
We cannot address such considerations in a principled and reasoned manner if we fail to acknowledge their pervasive presence in every academic and scientific pursuit.
In your list of claims, only
“using tax dollars to develop and disseminate vaccines saves lives. Opposing the use of vaccines, and attempting to discredit their utility, kills people”
is overtly political. One can study viral pathogens, develop vaccines, or study vaccine efficacy, without taking any stance on this. And that makes the commitment to such a claim at least potentially tangential to the academic work – even if it’s reasonably held by those who work on such things.
I take Rossi’s point to be that, it doesn’t matter whether you study viruses because you want to save many lives, or just because you find it interesting – as long as you pursue knowledge in good faith. The university, at least, shouldn’t much care.
One way to clarify this is to bring in Max Weber (a sociologist, I know). He explicitly acknowledged that values shape what we study and why we care about certain issues. In that sense, yes, there is no research that exists outside values.
But Weber also drew an important distinction that your comment collapses. Values can orient topic selection and public commitments without erasing the difference between empirical and normative claims. Saying vaccines reduce transmission is an empirical claim. Saying we ought to fund vaccination programs is a moral and political judgment. The second may be compelling, but it does not become a scientific conclusion simply because it aligns with evidence.
Weber’s point is not that scholars are apolitical. It is that methodological clarity requires keeping explanation and evaluation analytically distinct, even in a world saturated with values.
Yes, all inquiry is value-laden, total neutrality is impossible, etc., we’re all philosophers here, we know the arguments. But can we please avoid sophistry? Are folks seriously denying the very possibility of a politicized classroom in which professors preach for their preferred politics in an unacceptable and unprofessional manner? Imagine someone teaching, say, some kind of intro moral issues class, and instead of teaching different positions on controversial matters, injects themselves strongly into the discussion on one side or another, demonizing all who disagree with their position. That’s a clear case that is wrong, yes? Well, consider that the end of a spectrum. Granted, there may not be a clear line (vague phenomena are like that), but that doesn’t erase the value of distinguishing the two ends of the spectrum from each other and aiming more for one than the other.
I agree with all of this.
The problem is that, in the eyes of some, it doesn’t matter how far you try aim for one end more than the other, you are always going to be seen as being on the “politicized” end. We all know that the philosophy classroom in the movie God’s Not Dead is an absurd caricature. But there are people who, at one point or another, took a philosophy class briefly or heard someone else talk about taking a philosophy class, and who came away with the impression that’s what a philosophy classroom is like. So they are going to present it as politicized even if one aims for the other end, as most people I think do.
You could say that this is just misinformation or disinformation affecting people’s perceptions of the philosophy classroom, and I think that’s right too. However, it’s those perceptions that we have to deal with when those who think that acquire the power to take action against what they’ve deemed to be politicized; when they make it political. That has happened in recent years.