October 2025

(I wrote this piece a week or so ago, meant to do a bit more work but haven’t got around to it. Hence slightly dated allusions)

The culmination of Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was a press conference at which both American and British leaders waved pieces of paper, containing an agreement that US firms would invest billions of dollars in Britain.

The symbolism was appropriate, since a central element of the proposed investment bonanza was the construction of large numbers of nuclear reactors, of a kind which can appropriately be described as “paper reactors”.

The term was coined by US Admiral Hyman Rickover, who directed the original development of nuclear powered submarines.

Rickover described their characteristics as follows:

1. It is simple.

2. It is small.

3. It is cheap.

4. It is light.

5. It can be built very quickly.

6. It is very flexible in purpose (“omnibus reactor”)

7. Very little development is required. It will use mostly “off-the-shelf” components.

8. The reactor is in the study phase. It is not being built now.

But these characteristics were needed by Starmer and Trump, whose goal was precisely to have a piece of paper to wave at their meeting.
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I have a long-standing pet peeve about the conflation of academic freedom and freedom of speech, especially in the context of (purported) campus debate. In order to illustrate why one should not conflate academic freedom and freedom of speech, I introduce two uncontroversial theses about each.

Thesis [I]: lying and deception are protected features of political speech under most contemporary ‘free speech’/‘freedom of expression’ doctrines/legal standards; they are seen as occasionally necessary in politics, and sometimes (even if rarely) lauded by public opinion. By contrast, thesis [II]: lying and deception in scholarship and education are wholly incompatible with academic freedom.

I’ll take [I] as common ground. And before you are worried that I am setting a trap for you, even if you accept [I], you are not required to sign up for Platonic skepticism (here) — which holds that democratic political speech is usually in the realm of opinion, not truth — about political discourse.*

You may have doubts about [II]. You may, for example, think that lying and deception are permitted when used instrumentally to discover truth, say, in a social psychology or a behavioral economics experiment. Since the replication crisis, I won’t concede such examples because the nay-sayers (mostly my friends from experimental economics) turned out to be prescient: those scholars used to lying to their subjects also got in the habit of less than forthright truth-telling to each other and the wider public. And while I grant that lying to subjects probably didn’t cause the replication crisis in social science, it was, in fact, manifestly part of a more general corrosion of academic norms.

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