The Review: Racial Preferences; a Homicidal Engineer; More Moralism

Georgetown's investigation of Ilya Shapiro has been condemned across the political spectrum. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. Ilya Shapiro, a conservative law professor recently hired by Georgetown, found himself in trouble before he’d even begun. At issue were his tweets objecting to President Biden’s promise to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court. Some interpreted Shapiro to mean that Black women are by definition less qualified for the position; Shapiro deleted the tweets and apologized. Now, he’s on leave from a job he hasn’t started yet and under investigation by the university. But almost without exception, academic and political commentators across the ideological spectrum think the investigation is unwarranted. Jason Stanley, who has [argued]( in the pages of The Review that university free-speech concerns often run cover for conservative political activism, [tweeted]( unambiguously: “You do not have to be a ‘conservative or a free speech activist’ to see Georgetown’s actions here as a significant error. Parsing faculty tweets for administrative punishment is problematic, full stop.” Other liberal or left writers — Michelle Goldberg, Adam Serwer, Nikole Hannah-Jones — have all expressed similar views. Georgetown’s actions would seem to have very little support. The picture inside the law school looks different, of course. Activists demand Shapiro’s firing; a mood of crisis prevails. Administrators seem, or want to seem, receptive to student complaints. Why? At The Review, Oliver Traldi has a theory. Because Shapiro’s tweets criticize racial preferences, which have become newly vulnerable under a majority-conservative Supreme Court, “one can easily get the impression that university administrations are using their perhaps too-easily-offended students to deflect criticism of race-based preferences, including their own policies.” Read Traldi’s analysis [here](. SPONSOR CONTENT | Rowan university [Built 'from scratch' Rowan University engineers fly drone swarms around the world]( From the Mailbox — More on Moralizing Last month The Review published the anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz on what he calls the “[moral hyperthermia]( of intellectual life at present. Yves Gingras, a sociologist of science at the Université du Québec à Montréal, shared an [essay]( with me he’d written in 2019 on a related topic: the distinction, firm in theory but occasionally challenged, in the hard sciences between moral and epistemic evaluative norms when it comes to publication, awards, grants, and so on. It has generally been understood, Gingras writes, that scientists should make “no moral inquisition to check whether the person, qua scientist, was, for example, racist (like the Physics Nobel Prize winner William Shockley), anti-Semitic (like another Physics Nobel Prize winner Johannes Stark) or misogynous. For it has long been implicit ... that the ‘republic of science’ was a relatively autonomous subset of society with its own rules based on expertise.” As Gingras tells it, challenges to this autonomy have recurred across the 20th century. He provides two historical instances. First, there was the opposition in some quarters of the scientific community to awarding Marie Curie the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in light of rumors that she was having an affair with a married man. In defending herself, Curie appealed to principle: “There is no relation between [my] scientific work and the facts of [my] private life.” She attended the ceremony and received her prize. The second case is more lurid. In 1992, Valery Fabrikant, an engineering professor at Montreal’s Concordia University, murdered four of his colleagues in a fit of paranoid rage. Although of dubious sanity — some psychologists considered him unfit to stand trial — he has retained his intellectual capacities and has kept up publishing academic papers from prison. His continued academic activity didn’t sit well with everyone, but, according to Gingras, “experts in research ethics objected to that censure by recalling that individual crimes are punished by society and should not influence the judgment on the validity of scientific results.” Read Gingras’s essay [here](. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [Academe’s Allergy to Discussing Racial Preferences]( By Oliver Traldi [STORY IMAGE]( Debates over affirmative action are coming — ready or not. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Making Grad School Work for Weirdos]( By Grace Lavery [STORY IMAGE]( Our alt-ac training too often pushes them into corporate straitjackets. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [From Legendary Activist to Adjunct Agitator]( By Hollis Robbins [STORY IMAGE]( Mario Savio’s second act. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Do the Numbers Lie?]( By Charlie Tyson [STORY IMAGE]( A defense of humanistic learning against quantification retreats into mysticism. THE REVIEW | FORUM [What’s the State of Free Expression on Campus?]( By Len Gutkin [STORY IMAGE]( Scholars and college leaders discuss speech, safe spaces, campus politics, and the crises of the present. Recommended - “Unlike Steven Pinker or Cass Sunstein ... Freud and his followers did not try to brush away the conflict between desires and society.” At The New Republic, Udi Greenberg on Samuel Moyn’s [new edition]( of Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents. - “Thus the oyster is enormous and omnisensitive. Now for its body. Its body, so naked and delicate, feels — or can detect — the slightest tremor in particles of light, scrunches up into itself, and — now the sentence switches subjects — there remains after it a little space, where at once from completely nothing appears a world.” At Lit Hub, an [extraordinary essay]( by the Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s English-language translator Jennifer Croft on the science and art of translation. - “Once an academic social contract was exhausted, academic entrepreneurs rushed in to find new partners, formulate new ideas, and establish new institutions — sometimes even outside the university.” That’s the historian Emily Levine, [in conversation]( with Ariel Yingqi Tang on the blog of the Journal of the History of Ideas. For more, check out my interview with Levine from a few months ago for The Review, [here](. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin SPONSOR CONTENT | the university of sydney [Combatting addiction with 'the love hormone']( Addressing the urgent need to find solutions for those affected by drug use disorders, learn how two new approaches to managing substance abuse are revolutionizing the treatment of addiction. FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [The Missing Men on Campus]( [The Missing Men on Campus]( The gender gap in college enrollment has been growing for decades and has broad implications for colleges and beyond. Explore how some colleges are trying to draw more men of all backgrounds — and help them succeed once they get there. [Order your copy today.]( JOB OPPORTUNITIES Apply for the top jobs in higher education and [search all our open positions](. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK What did you think of today’s newsletter? [Strongly disliked]( | [It was ok]( | [Loved it]( This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. [Read this newsletter on the web](. 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