Academic Freedom and Democracy under Assault

Abstract

The lecture addresses the responsibility and options for action that scientists have when academic freedom comes under pressure. It compares research findings and recommendations for action from various disciplines on the question of how democracy and the rule of law, as prerequisites for academic freedom, can be strengthened.

Objective

Students examine the historical events and texts that various authors have investigated in order to develop their theses and recommendations on the question of what action scientists can take when academic freedom and democracy come under pressure. They learn to critically reflect on and examine the suitability of these recommendations for action.

Content

In 2020, researchers from Princeton University's Program on Science and Global Security published a statement in defence of democracy. They were concerned about the undermining of democratic checks and balances, threats to the electoral process, propagation of disinformation, vilification of minorities, attacks on the free press and sidelining of science as input to public policy. They therefore wrote that the sciences are urgently needed right now to tackle national and global challenges such as COVID-19, climate change, social inequality and the threat of nuclear weapons, and that the democratic foundations of the USA must be defended by exercising civil and political rights and ensuring the integrity of the electoral process. The declaration was co-signed by physicist Frank von Hippel. Due to his expertise in the field of nuclear energy security and disarmament issues, he had advised the US Congress. In his 1991 book “Citizen Scientist”, he described his experience that the US government not only invited scientists to advise it during the Vietnam War, but also to lend an appearance of objectivity to its political decisions, which sometimes turned out differently than recommended. This 'legitimizing' role of advisors seemed to him to undermine the democratic decision-making process, as it allowed the government to dismiss legitimate concerns of citizens as 'uninformed'. Von Hippel and several fellow scientists therefore decided to make their expert knowledge available directly to the public in the sense of "public-interest science". Von Hippel's father, also a physicist, had fled Germany with his Jewish wife in 1933 as a political opponent of the Nazis, worked with Niels Bohr in Denmark and then came to MIT. He gave his children the motto: “We shall not be intimidated.” Von Hippel's family shares a history of emigration with the family of philosopher Jason Stanley, whose father fled from Berlin to the USA. Stanley's fields of work are linguistics, cognitive science, epistemology and theories of fascism. In "How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them" (2018), he described fascist strategies such as the construction of a populist dichotomy of 'Us and Them', the denial of human equality, the stoking of sexual fears in men, the establishment of a victim narrative, the promotion of anti-intellectualism, the undermining of press freedom, the use of propaganda, the obstruction of reasoned debate by stoking fear and anger and the call for 'law and order' as the supposedly only solution. According to Stanley, knowing these strategies makes it possible to take a firm stand against their use. Timothy Snyder, American historian specializing in the history of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust, takes a similar view: Based on an analysis of recent European and American history, he described the conditions under which democracies can turn into dictatorships. In "On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century" (2017), he presented recommendations on how to prevent the collapse of democracy and the rule of a totalitarian regime. He illustrated his remarks by reading relevant literary texts and Klemperer's study of the Language of the Third Reich. Stanley and Snyder recently left the USA. Were their recommendations for action unsuitable? Or was it already too late to act? Does this mean that these lessons were written primarily for us? Academic freedom is currently also affected by the risk of restrictions at European universities, and populist movements are on the rise, right-wing parties are gaining ground. The lecture will therefore compare research findings and recommendations for action from various disciplines and examine them with regard to the question: To what extent can they guide action for academics and citizens?

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