Academic freedom

 I was thinking about a book by Bérubé about academic freedom. He and a colleague, Jennifer Ruth, with whom he wrote this book, It's not free speech, argue that academic freedom is not the same as 1st amendment freedom, and that certain opinions, even if free speech, should be beyond the pale in academia. Scholarship that argues for the inferiority of certain races, or that Western colonialism could be a good thing.  These rules should be enforced by faculty committees, not by administrative units. So the faculty should police itself to make sure no bad opinions get expressed.

Here's the problem: what about a book that says the leyenda negra is false, or that Hapsburg Spain is not as benighted as it seems? Or that the left started the Civil War in Spain? There are all kinds of things that can be debatable, where one can learn from the other side of things, without agreeing wholly with the argument. We can read things in a devil's advocate spirit. 

You have to go down that road if you want to make the best arguments "on the right side of history," so to speak. I've often noticed when leftist arguments are obviously weak, because they have been developed in a vacuum, without consideration of counter arguments. We should be able to argue that DEI programs are not all that great, without being put in the Trump camp. Even the notorious "Western colonialism was positive" article has to be considered in that way.  

Who gets to decide where the line is? We have to already know the truth to decide what opinions are beyond the pale... 

Of course, putting it in the hands of other professors does not solve anything, since academia's range of opinion is narrow.