Academic Freedom

Saturday 14 September 2013 - Filed under Uncategorized

Only when you’re in line with the narrative.

A professor in the computer science department at Johns Hopkins, a leading American university, had written a post on his blog, hosted on the university’s servers, focused on his area of expertise, which is cryptography. The post was highly critical of the government, specifically the National Security Agency, whose reckless behavior in attacking online security astonished him.

[. . .]

The post was widely circulated online because it is about the sense of betrayal within a community of technical people who had often collaborated with the government. (I linked to it myself.)

On Monday, he gets a note from the acting dean of the engineering school asking him to take the post down and stop using the NSA logo as clip art in his posts. The email also informs him that if he resists he will need a lawyer.

Academic freedom doesn’t mean what any rational person would assume the very simple phrase should mean: that academics at universities, ostensibly institutions that value free thought and diverse points of view, should be able to profess whatever their conscience and research dictates without fear of reprisal for professing said thoughts. It means towing the academic narrative that supports liberal thinking.

2013-09-14  »  madlibertarianguy