Is this true, though? I think we're at risk of a fallacy. An equally plausible
proposition is that scientists go where their objects of study exist. It might
be right to say that academics migrate to free spaces. But the overlap between
scientists and academics isn't crisp.
Similarly, I guess, we might assume scientists have diverse/divergent
non-scientific aspects of their whole person[ality]. (Renee' commented a lot on
how many of the people we met peri-SFI were artists or musicians - but I know a
lot of non-scientists and non-academics who have at least as much diversity in
their ... extracurricular activities.) And if we make that assumption, then the
damage a lack of freedom does to the rest of their person might also damage
their science.
But then we might have to argue that "creatives" would tend to migrate to
places with more freedom. Is that true? I doubt it. Personally, it seems to me like some
of the most oppressive societies/circumstances generate some of the most beautiful art.
Think of poor people in Apalachia and all that string music ... or Irish music during the
potato famine ... or Arabic heavy metal.
Taken to its conclusion, we could argue that environmental stressors generate diversity, even if
only anastomotically. So we'd see more "freedom" in oppressive contexts and more homegeny
in "freer" contexts.
On 4/21/25 10:44 AM, Jochen Fromm wrote:
Scientists tend to go to places where academic freedom exists. For example when
the Nazis came to power in Germany scientists abandoned prestigious
universities like the one in Göttingen which was famous for Mathematics and
Quantum Mechanics. Oppenheimer and Dirac studied there. Wikipedia says
"Most of them fled Nazi Germany for places like the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Following the great purge, in 1934 David Hilbert, by then a symbol of German mathematics, was dining
with Bernhard Rust, the Nazi minister of education. Rust asked, "How is mathematics at Göttingen,
now that it is free from the Jewish influence?" Hilbert replied, "There is no mathematics in
Göttingen anymore"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_G%C3%B6ttingen
-J.
-------- Original message --------
From: Nicholas Thompson <thompnicks...@gmail.com>
Date: 4/21/25 7:32 PM (GMT+01:00)
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam@redfish.com>
Subject: [FRIAM] Academic Freedom
What has happened in my lifetime is that much that I once took to be inarguable has now become arguable, including the plain meaning of the constitution and Academic Freedom. Academic Freedom is a relatively new idea , dating back to the early 19th century German universities, or the foundation of the AAUP in the early 20th Century, or perhaps to the sixties. In the late 19th Century, university presidents were still hiring and firing faculty members at will, indeed, trading faculties back and forth like baseball teams. I love the Yeats quote and grateful to have it put before us, but it depends for its force on our agreeing what the center is. At twenty, I thought that history was a ratchet and "progress" irreversible. (Why would anybody want to go back?) But the center of the sixties is the center no more. And if ideas like "no person is above the law" and "people in Universities should be free to teach what their reason tells them is true" are to become the center
again, it will because hard work makes it so. It is not for nothing that university curricula are called the Liberal Arts. The Liberal Arts are an ideological position that many Americans have come to detest. If they detest "us", it is because of our assumption that the position we hold IS the center. There are lots of people who believe that a form of government which cannot give them Christian Nationalism, rigorously defined sex roles, and white, male, privilege is not a form of government they want to live under. The center is creeping in their direction. Is this the center we want to hold?
nick
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