At its heart, a university is a gamble on what happens when an institution shows an uncompromising commitment to free speech. Academic freedom is not just another rule in a policy manual. It is perhaps the constitutive feature of the modern American university, which is envied the world over. Yet few universities have come to a full-throated defense of that value. Few administrators seem to publicly espouse it; faculty openly question it; and the public hardly has reason to believe in it if universities themselves do not. For the university to save its soul, attitudes will have to change. […]

Russell and Patterson published an academic essay for a symposium on “post-truth” in Critical Review, the leading journal of political epistemology. The synopsis:

Populists are often cast as deniers of rationality, creators of a climate of “post-truth,” and valuing tribe over truth and the rigors of science. Their critics claim the authority of rationality and empirical facts. Yet the critics no less than populists enable an environment of spurious claims and defective argumentation. This is especially true in the realm of science. An important case study is the account of scientific trust offered by a leading public intellectual and historian of science, Naomi Oreskes, and the misapplication of that theory during the coronavirus pandemic.

Russell and Patterson published an essay on the problematic debate around masking, which fueled polarization:

The critics of public health messaging do not begrudge scientific progress—indeed, most of them want more research. Rather, people are upset by unjustified dogmatic certainty in one direction, followed by an immediate swoop to utter confidence in the opposite course of action. The pandemic produced a headfirst leap into a series of unprecedented interventions, from masks to lockdowns to school closures. In the first weeks of the pandemic, speed was necessary, and mistakes were inevitable. What was not necessary or inevitable was the suppression of healthy skepticism and discussion.

Russell and Patterson published an essay on the warped discourse that led to extended school closures:

[Elites have openly embraced the notion that the public is better served by exaggeration, downplaying uncertainty, or even deception (such as in official estimates of herd immunity). This disdain for healthy skepticism, a normal part of functioning science and democracy, is corrosive to public trust and impedes the accumulation of knowledge. A climate of overconfidence makes it both more likely that we will adopt bad policy and harder to fix our missteps. …

Mislabeling dissent over serious policy disagreements as denial has contributed to the extended closure of public schools, which could ultimately be viewed as the single biggest policy blunder in the pandemic. …

We must stop labelling every valid disagreement as denial, which tends to censor legitimate differences of opinion. In seeking to discourage bad-faith claims, we are also damaging good-faith discussion.

Read the full article, “Let’s put the straw man of pandemic denial out of his misery,” Stat News