Activist scholarship risks turning the academy into an echo chamber

Well said!

All very sensible, although I suspect the ghoulish ideologues will have you cancelled for this.

Excellent. Thank you Katy.

Thank you, Katy. I remember teaching Critical and Creative Thinking course for undergraduate students, freshmen, some years back. There, I would divide the class into groups and present some selected topics for the other assigned group to challenge the presenter group. Then I'd have marked both the proponent & opponent groups for their 5C points: conciseness, clarity, consistency, critical views & creative problem solving. They seem happy with the way the CCT materials delivered in this "debate" manner, making them (more) open minded and evaluate the argument (their own & opponent) with the 5C points, rather than subjective markers of like and dislike. I would heartily recommend this article for my students to read.

It is admirable to be an activist, if the cause is just and rational, and it is admirable to be a scholar, provided that one pursues scholarship with an open mind and follows the evidence or the arguments wherever they lead, whether one likes or approves of the conclusions or findings that it leads to or not. But the concept of an activist scholar strikes me as an oxymoron.

In my experience activist academics tend to be bombastic anuses incapable of assimilating any other viewpoint that differs from their own, played effectively most can be hoisted by their own petard eventually, though the damage they've done in the meantime can be hard to ameliorate.

I really don't understand what is meant by "activism" here. I have been a political activist all my adult life, and I am now a climate activist - i.e. I take whatever I judge to be the most appropriate course of action in pursuit of what I want to see happen in the world. My scholarship is tied to my activism to the extent that it's important to me to understand and examine the intellectual basis for the beliefs that underpin my actions, and to demonstrate how my values may or may not play out in the cultural works that I study. Are you saying that academics shouldn't be activists in this sense? Because if that were the case, I would consider it a betrayal of my responsibility as an academic to tell the truth as I find it, and if the truth has a material impact on the world, to make it as widely evident as possible. As a climate activist, that now extends to engaging in acts of civil disobedience as the only way of trying to get the truth of the oncoming climate catastrophe into the political and public sphere. I simply cannot accept that as an academic my responsibility ends at the boundaries of our campus; that it's our job simply to think and let others act, as one colleague suggested to me. As Einstein said, "those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act." There is no neutral, value-free realm in academic research or scholarship. Terry Eagleton's old quip about liberal pluralism still seems to be relevant: "His thought is redneck, yours is doctrinal and mine is deliciously supple." (Ideology: an introduction, 1991) But maybe I've misunderstood.