This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist Trumpist Turn to “Discourse Safety Initiatives”We need a guide to how to deal with the new rounds of escalating weaponized cancel-culture to the max. But only a fool would trust the "New York TImes" to help think these things through, as here...
We need a guide to how to deal with the new rounds of escalating weaponized cancel-culture to the max. But only a fool would trust the New York TImes to help think these things through, as here it is once again dealing from the middle of the deck…Wait! Alex Bronzini-Vender says he is writing about what is wrong with Harvard. And yet his two concrete examples are from Northwestern and Texas A&M? The most concrete thing he says about Harvard as an institution is that Harvard does bad by (a) pointing to IHRA and (b) saying that the university “considers the examples that accompany the IHRA definition [of anti-semitism] to the extent that those examples might be useful in determining discriminatory intent”? You see the problem here?: NU. TA&M. might. If all ya got is that Harvard said something you object to “might” be useful, something from TA&M, and something from NU, then ya got nuthin:
Now I would be eager to hear from Ryan Enos and from Steve Levitsky—who are quoted in seeing significant problems with Harvard’s current institutional position. But I want to hear from them in full context. Not what we have here. And so, once again, I find myself in the same position I find myself with respect to, say, The Free Press. I very hard to see the New York Times editors as working in good faith here. (Alex himself is, of course, young and a student—and so the appropriate attitude to take to him is to urge him to sharpen and stress-test his arguments.) OK. What, then, you ask, should we in universities be doing? We should be doing our jobs. We should not be entering into any transactional “compacts”, but simply do our jobs. And we are deserving of support to the extent that we do our jobs well. As my brother-in-law Paul Mahoney, still Interim president of the University of Virginia for one more day, wrote in the letter that—in my reading, which could be wrong—made the MAGA Regents of UVA bounce him out of the job tomorrow:
“Academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship”, and so any “contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education”. But what is our job? It is complicated. A university is different from the public square. A university is a place in which its members have duties:
That means that members of a university have academic freedom, not public-square 1st-Amendment free-speech freedom. The idea is to generate, improve, and evaluate ideas; and then to disseminate those ideas; and to create and maintain a community that those who want to take on those duties find a safe, welcoming, and supporting place to do so. How to arrange an institution and a community that does that best is, as I said, complicated. The key dilemma is how to support those who are here to listen and to learn, and to weed out those who are not here to listen and to learn (and to encourage them to their proper place(s) go) without discouraging the speaking and the thinking. And here my go-to guru is the most learned Jacob Levy:
And:
Plus MOAR, for example: <https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789633866542-003/html> ; and <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-academic-freedom-and-institutional>. As I put it in the past: Brad DeLong (2017): “Any Community... Flourishes only When Our Members Feel Welcome & Safe...” <https://web.archive.org/web/20170926230940/https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/09/any-community-flourishes-only-when-our-members-feel-welcome-and-safe.html>: ‘A university has three goals: 1. A university is a safe space where ideas can be set forth and developed. 2. A university is a safe space where ideas can be evaluated and assessed. 3. A university is a safe space where scholars can develop, and gain intelligence and confidence. Speech whose primary goal is to undermine and defeat one or more of those three goals does not belong on a university campus. If you come to Berkeley, and if your speech is primarily intended to—or even, through your failure to think through what you are doing, has the primary effect of (1) keeping us from developing ideas that may be great ones, (2) keeping us from properly evaluating and assessing ideas, or (3) driving members of the university away, your speech does not belong here. There are lots of people who want to take advantage of free speech week to neither: 1. develop ideas that may be great ones, 2. thoughtfully and rationally evaluate and assess ideas, nor 3/ make the university a welcoming place for young scholars. Some will want blood in the streets. Some will hope to take advantage of blood in the streets. Somebody may wind up dead, or maimed, as part of a game of political-cultural dingbat kabuki largely orthogonal to the three proper missions of the university. It is a serious concern. This is still, today, a hill I will defend—but I will listen to reasoned arguments against it, and try to think and learn. For others disagree. Noah Smith for example:... Continue reading this post for free in the Substack app
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From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist Trumpist Turn to “Discourse Safety Initiatives”
Tuesday, 30 December 2025
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