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adding independence and neutrality

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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
2025-02-17 08:15:48 -05:00
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feed/feed.xml
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@@ -5,11 +5,26 @@
<subtitle>The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.</subtitle>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/feed/feed.xml" rel="self" />
<link href="https://kfitz.info/" />
<updated>2025-01-31T20:00:18Z</updated>
<updated>2025-02-17T13:12:13Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
<author>
<name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
</author>
<entry>
<title>Independence and Neutrality</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/independence-neutrality/" />
<updated>2025-02-17T13:12:13Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/independence-neutrality/</id>
<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Back in December, my university&#39;s top administrators announced an official position of &amp;quot;thoughtful restraint,&amp;quot; attempting to stake out a commitment to institutional neutrality on contentious political issues by not making statements or taking sides. &amp;quot;As an educational institution, our goal is to serve as a forum for debates, not proponents within them,&amp;quot; the website describing this non-position says, &amp;quot;with the highest value being the pursuit of truth.&amp;quot;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Even as I understood the administration’s desire to avoid making a misstep on an issue that had already resulted in the downfall of several prominent university presidents, this statement bothered me. Is &amp;quot;the pursuit of truth&amp;quot; best served by turning the institution into &amp;quot;a forum for debates&amp;quot; — mere platform without judgment? And are all debates the same? I wondered whether there were issues — however “contentious” — on which the pursuit of truth would require the university to take a stand, to maintain its commitment to the fact that there are areas of settled knowledge in which the call to “debate” is always issued in bad faith. And though I didn’t quite have the words to say so at the time, I wondered whether the institution might find itself hoist on its own neutral petard, whether the university&#39;s self-protective position could wind up being the very thing that could do it in.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve been reading Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth&#39;s &lt;em&gt;It&#39;s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom&lt;/em&gt; this weekend, though, and just ran across a passage, summarizing the impact of Felix Frankfurter&#39;s opinion in &lt;em&gt;Sweezy v. New Hampshire&lt;/em&gt; (1957), which tied the necessary freedoms of the university to its responsibility to remain neutral on the issues of the day. Bérubé and Ruth read this opinion through Adam Sitze&#39;s essay, &amp;quot;Academic Unfreedom, Unacademic Freedom,&amp;quot; in which Sitze shows that Frankfurter&#39;s opinion derives in part from a misreading of an argument about the open universities in South Africa issued just before. The South African argument tied academic freedom to the universities’ independence from the state -- and in the South African context, independence was grounded in resistance to the apartheid regime.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Here’s Bérubé and Ruth’s concluding move in that discussion:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;“Independence” and “neutrality” are not the same thing. In the South African context, neutrality would have meant acceding to academic apartheid. Once the backstory is supplied (and history returned to theory, as in the work of Charles Mills), the lesson then is that the university must remain independent from the government but &lt;em&gt;cannot&lt;/em&gt; remain neutral. Faculty must make judgment calls on the university&#39;s behalf that take into consideration the historical and political circumstances in which their universities find themselves. (211)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Two months later, it is clear to me that “thoughtful restraint” will not only not protect the university from those who wish to do it harm, but will erode the very independence that the institution needs in order to survive right now: the ability to bring the faculty’s best judgment to bear in declaring that there &lt;em&gt;are&lt;/em&gt; truths that cannot be ordered away. Our institutions cannot live out their most basic reason for being without a willingness to point out and reject outright lies, and without the ability to say that there are issues — like the basic humanity of each and every person on campus, and that they deserve respect, safety, and opportunity — that should never be up for debate.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Holding Space</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/holding-space/" />
@@ -128,20 +143,6 @@
&lt;p&gt;You are, inevitably, going to make decisions that turn out to be bad ones. When you do, you have to own your role in those decisions and be accountable for the harm those decisions cause. Mistakes do not just get magically made without a mistake-maker.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And even when you feel -- perhaps correctly -- that the decision you made was the only one that could be made, that circumstances left you with only one option, you still need to own it. You might be able to explain, but you have to be cautious with explanations, to avoid making it appear as though you are deflecting your own responsibility. As painful as it is to be publicly accountable, you &lt;em&gt;must&lt;/em&gt; take that accountability to your community seriously. Hand-wavy gestures that shift blame are visible to everyone, and are a significant factor in destroying trust.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;You cannot lead in the passive voice. You cannot build good relationships in the passive voice. And you cannot undo damage in the passive voice. You can only deepen it.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Time Is Weird</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/time-is-weird/" />
<updated>2024-09-08T22:21:58Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/time-is-weird/</id>
<content type="html">&lt;p&gt;There&#39;s this moment that happened a lot of years ago: I was walking through the living room of the apartment I was living in and the television was on playing god knows what, and something made me think, &lt;em&gt;you know, the next time I&#39;m 25 --&lt;/em&gt;, followed quickly by &lt;em&gt;you big dope, that&#39;s not going to happen...&lt;/em&gt;, at which point I stopped dead and thought &lt;em&gt;you do realize that standing right here, right now, is the youngest you will ever be again... right?&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;All of that happened in a split second, but I stood there for a solid minute taking it in, my head more silent than it had ever been. I just kind of froze, simultaneously shocked by the obviousness of the thought and by the fact that even though I&#39;d obviously &lt;em&gt;known&lt;/em&gt; that all along, that time only moves in one direction, that we only ever get older, I hadn&#39;t really internalized it until that moment.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I was 34 then, which seems like it was yesterday. Except it was the fall of 2001, and I was on my pre-tenure sabbatical, trying like crazy to finish the manuscript of my first book. It was not long after 9/11, and I was still having a hard time getting my brain to wrap itself around any number of things -- what was happening in the world around us, what I was trying to argue in my book, what time even was.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I had cause to remember this moment earlier today. I&#39;m 57 now, and there&#39;s some core part of me that is genuinely unsure how that happened. I can sit down and do the math and it all adds up, and yet it doesn&#39;t make sense to me at all -- &lt;em&gt;sense&lt;/em&gt; in the same internal way as that moment of realizing that I was only ever going to get older.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I have all kinds of physical evidence of the passage of time, in my creaky knees, my worsening eyesight, my ever-slowing metabolism, but there&#39;s something in me that just doesn&#39;t want to believe that it&#39;s all a one-way trip, that I can&#39;t recover parts of who I was or some of the paths I didn&#39;t take.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Don&#39;t get me wrong: even if I could go back, I wouldn&#39;t -- I have enjoyed my life and my work more and more as time has gone on, and I&#39;m happier than I&#39;ve ever been. And that retirement thing -- not too many years into the future -- looks pretty sweet.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s just funny how even after all these years, I can still get tripped up by the sadness of time, the stuff that gets left behind, the things that never quite manifest. Time may only move in one direction, but I still find myself needing to learn the same things over and over again.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
</entry>
</feed>

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@@ -545,13 +545,21 @@ pre[class*="language-diff-"] {
<subtitle>The long-running and erratically updated blog of Kathleen Fitzpatrick.</subtitle>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/feed/masto.xml" rel="self"/>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/"/>
<updated>2025-01-31T20:00:18Z</updated>
<updated>2025-02-17T13:12:13Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/</id>
<author>
<name>Kathleen Fitzpatrick</name>
<email>kfitz@kfitz.info</email>
</author>
<entry>
<title>Independence and Neutrality</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/independence-neutrality/"/>
<updated>2025-02-17T13:12:13Z</updated>
<id>https://kfitz.info/independence-neutrality/</id>
<content type="html">Back in December, my university&#39;s top administrators announced an official position of &amp;quot;thoughtful restraint,&amp;quot; attempting to stake out a commitment to institutional neutrality on contentious political issues by not making statements or...</content>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Holding Space</title>
<link href="https://kfitz.info/holding-space/"/>
@@ -15880,7 +15888,7 @@ For keeping...</content>
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