Academic astroturf
[email/RFP at this link]
A group of progressive professors is looking to recruit and hire grad students to write short policy pieces to combat conservative ideas and the conservative movement. Above is the request for proposals (RFP) for what they call the Cry Wolf Project.
Grad students can now make fifty cents per word to scramble the difference between disinterested scholarship and agenda-driven advocacy work--in other words to become a part of the Great Progressive Astroturf Movement that has brought us such luminaries as Ellie Light. Along the way, they will make great connections that could help them with future employment. After all, as Patrick Courrielche notes, the brain trust behind this plan is heavily professorial:
On the one hand, there are no surprises--there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one's scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense--and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict. That's how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It's a shaky edifice, but it's an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.
So where are we here? Is this academic freedom blooming forth in its bountiful variety? Or is it a serious, even actionable violation of academic ethics, not to mention abuse of grad students, exploitation of institutional reputation, and wrongful use of taxpayer dollars? Or is it somewhere in the middle?
[email/RFP at this link]
A group of progressive professors is looking to recruit and hire grad students to write short policy pieces to combat conservative ideas and the conservative movement. Above is the request for proposals (RFP) for what they call the Cry Wolf Project.
Grad students can now make fifty cents per word to scramble the difference between disinterested scholarship and agenda-driven advocacy work--in other words to become a part of the Great Progressive Astroturf Movement that has brought us such luminaries as Ellie Light. Along the way, they will make great connections that could help them with future employment. After all, as Patrick Courrielche notes, the brain trust behind this plan is heavily professorial:
If this Cry Wolf program were just limited to a few faculty members at a limited number of universities, it would be of little concern. But the project reaches into some of the most prestigious public and private schools of higher learning in the U.S., including MIT, Yale, Harvard, USC, Columbia, Rutgers, UC Santa Barbara, University of Pennsylvania, and President Obama's alma mater--Occidental College.
Courrielche calls this researchprop, and goes on to detail the research agendas and organized labor ties of the faculty spearheading Cry Wolf.On the one hand, there are no surprises--there has been a decades-long academic tradition, at this point, of discounting the notion that disinterested research is even possible, and of selling the idea that the proper response to this is to shape one's scholarship self-consciously, as a means of ensuring that it assists and justifies the kinds of social justice one would like to see in the world. On the other hand, this activist line of thought has historically had only one line of defense--and that is that it is conducted with impeccable scholarly integrity, is entirely above-board vis a vis research ethics, and is unimpeachable from within the standards of professional conduct. In other words, the ethical standards that accompany interested scholarship are, in theory, terrifically strict. That's how such scholarship can continue to call itself scholarship, and escape being dismissed as propaganda. It's a shaky edifice, but it's an edifice all the same, and it has succeeded. Arguably, though, the Cry Wolf project undermines that entire edifice, as it explicitly supports the arguments of those who would say that large swathes of academia are little more than publicly funded mechanisms for disseminating and producing an ideologically-driven world view.
So where are we here? Is this academic freedom blooming forth in its bountiful variety? Or is it a serious, even actionable violation of academic ethics, not to mention abuse of grad students, exploitation of institutional reputation, and wrongful use of taxpayer dollars? Or is it somewhere in the middle?