In western academia, everything began with philosophy. Ever since, especially since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the 17th century, there has been a long, centrifugal process, with discipline after discipline making its distinctive contribution and marking out its methods and its domain of inquiry. Raphael’s painting The School of Athens displays this perfectly, with the two great philosophers Plato and Aristotle in the centre. Yet even here, Raphael points at the specialisation of knowledge that is about to explode. Plato points upwards, symbolising his interest in the timelessness of metaphysics. Aristotle gestures downwards, emphasising his interest in the empirical.
Today, at university, students and researchers focus on a single sub-branch of, say, modal logic, labour economics or organic chemistry. Knowledge has accumulated and fragmented. Renaissance men (or women) are almost nonexistent.
Hand in hand with this, especially in the last century, we have seen ever more rigorous academic standards and an ever sharper emphasis on evidence and logic, and the importance of separating these from opinions. As a senior member of Oxford University put it to me recently, from the start he was taught to distinguish the positive from the normative, and that, in the words of his tutor, “we only do the positive”.
This is correct 99% of the time, and the new chancellor of Oxford was fully on target when he said a university did not need a foreign policy. However, the central question about universities – all universities – is whether they can be and should be neutral with respect to everything. Should we avoid the normative all the time? Absolutely not.
Return to the Raphael painting. Aristotle and Plato have different approaches, but they are entirely agreed about one thing: the subject of their inquiry is the cosmos. Or, as Ludwig Wittgenstein put it, “The world is all that is the case”. We in universities, in every discipline, have an interest in investigating the universe as it is. This can and should include writings about human imagination or our dreams or fantasies. But our investigations cannot take seriously claims about the world that we know not to be the case. Evolution and creationism are not to be compared, one with the other, any more than we should take someone seriously who believes the Earth is flat. In universities, beliefs are to be examined, not taken as God given.
None of this means that there is anything as simple as the truth. The truth is almost always partial, debatable and context dependent. Yet, as Bernard Williams argued so convincingly in Truth and Truthfulness, academics must be truth-tellers. We cannot be neutral with respect to fake news, misinformation or outright lies. No matter where these come from, they must be called out. If a university does not believe this and does not act accordingly, it does not deserve to be a university.
With Columbia having capitulated, and with Harvard and Princeton under pressure to follow suit, every university, not just across the US, but around the globe, must unite in standing up for truth-telling.
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Andrew Graham is a political economist, former master of Balliol College, Oxford and former director of the Scott Trust
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