“I’ve suggested that academic freedom is a good thing on pragmatic grounds, but also made clear that it fundamentally depends on public willingness to delegate some degree of self-governance to the academy. If the public decides that academic freedom isn’t working out in terms of the goods it provides, then too bad for academic freedom.”

No understanding of academic freedom, of the need for tenure, or even of democracy.
Amazing

Meanwhile on the next thread the good liberal Professor Henry Farrell Ph.D is trying once again to codify the necessary and necessarily informal obligations of democracy as rules. I’d post there but I’m banned. And by the way my first comment on this one is still in moderation limbo. I wish it were better written but it stated the obvious. Let’s see if it makes it past the guard.

I agree, but that’s a different topic. I suppose one could say that they are affected too much by power institutions and individuals and not enough by the powerless. But that’s just natural, if not tautological.

And as far as the arts go and Karen Finley a second rate cabaret pornographer bursting into tears when she didn’t get a government grant: try to imagine Hugo Ball getting miffed when the Swiss Government refused to pay his bills. And remember be had a cabaret act too. There’s a difference between politics and the politics of pretension.
The culture of the soi-disant.

And second, being able to ignore outside pressure in the tenure process doesn’t necessarily create a bubble.

It can mean many things. To friends of mine it meant channeling their education and dissertation subjects towards aspect of their fields that were likely to get them the tenured positions they now have. They worked very hard to conform, and now spend a large part of their careers playing one school against another, Stanford against MIT against the University of Chicago, to further their own advancement. As one of them says matter-of-factly: “research support and partnership it’s all is pretty much quid pro quo.” They had no “freedom” in their choices. Careerism is not the definition of free thought.

As I’ve said more than once, including in the comment that didn’t make the grade on this post, it takes more than rules to make a system work, it takes a minimal level of trust. The defense of independent autonomous specialized bubble cultures in the arts and humanities (a legacy of post war rationalism and sputnik) is not healthy. The art world bubble, the academic bubble, the journalistic bubble, the military bubble, the born again bubble, the American political cultural bubble, none of them are healthy, politically or intellectually.

Um, Dan, the word ‘arbitrary’ doesn’t mean what you think it means. Standards imposed by a community (or even “community”) can not be arbitrary (let alone “completely arbitrary”) by definition. For better or worse they are the standards of that community, that’s all.

Of the fact that academic freedom and the tenure system exist specifically to support a particualr mode of scholarly inquiry, and are not simply instances of more general rights to free speech and job security.

I’d also add that the conflation of these concepts in the case of Nadia Abu El-Haj is particularly telling. Abu El-Haj is hardly a lonely voice in the wilderness, adamantly defending highly idiosyncratic ideas. On the contrary, her work has been widely praised by her peers, and stands squarely in the mainstream of her field. The criticism directed at it, claiming that it’s nothing more than political polemic masquerading as scholarship, is therefore implicitly directed at the field as a whole.

Now, had this work been politically unpopular but intellectually unassailable—say, a brilliant biological study that happened to provide powerful evidence for evolution—the field’s scholars would no doubt have defended her on the grounds Henry outlined: that peer review is the best available arbiter of the long-term value of scholarship in technically difficult, highly rigorous research disciplines. That those scholars instead fell back on Eric’s defense—the absolute freedom of the “community of competent scholars” to impose completely arbitrary standards on its members, outside critics be damned—speaks volumes about the field’s confidence in the defensibility of its value to those not drawing a salary from it.

A good analysis of what – whether a bunch of political hacks should be involved into the tenure process? How’s that?

“Academic freedom” in this context is a simply phase describing the concept of academic world’s independence from the outside world, that’s all. And Dan Simon in 23 is pretending that it means something else.

This is a good analysis.

Even more than usually, this seems liuke a question calling for judgement in weighing competing values, as opposed to one that can be resolved within a single coherent set of ideas.