by Thomas R. Wells
Academics have a privileged epistemic position in society. They deserve to be listened to, their claims believed, and their recommendations considered seriously. What they say about their subject of expertise is more likely to be true than what anyone else has to say about it.
Unfortunately, some academics believe they have a right – or even a duty – to use their privileged position to shape society in the right way. They join organisations and campaign systematically for specific laws, policies, and political candidates. They tell their students who to vote for and help them organise protest marches. They launch boycotts of companies and countries they disapprove of.
Such activism is an abuse of academics’ privileged status that undermines the respect that academic expertise should command and the functioning of academia itself.
I
Academics’ expertise derives from their membership of specialized epistemic communities (what I have elsewhere called ‘truth machines‘) that develop methods to investigate particular issues or features of how the world works, whether that be the effects of international migration on labour markets or the geo-physics of climate change. The outcome of this is not that academics are guaranteed to be correct (just look at the history of science). It is that they have access to the best understanding of the topic that those people in the world most dedicated and able to investigate it have yet managed to figure out. Read more »