It Has Come to This: Academic Samizdat
13th November 2018
Steven Hayward at Powerline blows the whistle.
We have come to the point where even liberal academics in good standing will feel the wrath of leftist orthodoxy if they depart from the party line. So what to do? Imitate the late Soviet Union, and start a samizdat literature.
I heard several months ago that this new initiative was in the works, but now it is official. A group of scholars from across the political spectrum is launching the Journal of Controversial Ideas, which will publish pseudonymous peer-reviewed articles in a wide range of disciplines, so that authors can write candidly. It is significant, I think, that one of the prime movers behind this is philosopher Peter Singer. Let this sink in a moment—a tenured professor who has advocated the most extreme positions in favor of animal rights and even infanticide thinks academic discourse is stifled by a leftist orthodoxy. When you’ve lost Peter Singer. . . (Many of the other editors identified so far are left-leaning, though Princeton’s Robert P. George will be on the editorial board.)