ARI scholars publish article in The Hill regarding Harvard funding controversy

The Hill, a popular online newspaper, published an opinion piece yesterday written by ARI scholars Onkar Ghate and Sam Weaver. 

The article addresses the wider issue in the Harvard funding controversy.  Ghate and Weaver differentiate academic freedom from intellectual freedom, and argue that intellectual freedom cannot exist at a college if that school accepts federal funding.  Here’s an excerpt:

Intellectual freedom is the principle that all individuals have the right to think for themselves, to express their convictions on any subject, and to give their support, financial or otherwise, only to the ideas they choose. When government coercively seizes your money and uses it to subsidize some research program or viewpoint for any reason, it is violating your intellectual freedom. This is the injustice inherent in all government research grants. It is this that private universities like Harvard should now name and challenge.

Instead, they fight for “academic freedom,” which is actually the opposite of intellectual freedom. It asserts the right of universities and professors to teach, write and research whatever they see fit — and to do it at the taxpayer’s expense.

I consider it a victory for the Objectivist movement whenever ARI’s work is published in the mainstream media.  My congratulations to them!

Last night, I submitted the article to Hacker News, which is the most widely-read news aggregator and discussion forum for technologists.  Discussions on the site are generally of a higher caliber than other online forums (HBL is the exception); however, there is still a strong anti-freedom anti-American echo chamber effect, due partially to the moderation system they use.

I was happy to see that the article sparked a small discussion.  I wanted to see where intelligent but mainstream people took issue with the radical ideas in the article.  I encourage the members of HBL to participate in the discussion here and upvote the post.  It’s quick and free to create an account.

From what I saw in the responses, the sticking point for most is that they don’t understand the difference between coercion and voluntary action and therefore between government action and private action.  Here’s an example:

From the article: “But universities cannot get around the fact that federal grants, by their nature, selectively fund certain ideas at the expense of others. The government picks intellectual winners and losers among private citizens, which is the exact opposite of intellectual freedom.”

But couldn’t this be said about any source of funding? All funders, public or private, make decisions about the projects and people they choose to fund. This selection process is not an infringement on academic freedom. In fact, restricting who and how patrons choose to fund research is itself an infringement on their freedom to fund what they want. If I want to fund cancer research, how is this an infringement on physicists and mathematicians?

/sb