The right to know: How does censorship affect academics? | Robert Quinn | Big Think

The right to know: How does censorship affect academics?

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Academic freedom is what makes a university space work as a setting to develop students' capacities. It is the permission to think freely, and have contrarian discussions, that leads to new insights.There are whole zones of knowledge that we never get to because of intimidation put on academics: "We simply don't know what we haven't even thought to ask." Self-censorship, especially regarding sensitive topics, is the dark matter of the academic freedom universe. Out of fear of being attacked, or their families being harmed, some journalists and scholars will forego publishing their findings. The opinions expressed in this video do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles Koch Foundation, which encourages the expression of diverse viewpoints within a culture of civil discourse and mutual respect.

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ROBERT QUINN

Robert Quinn is a human rights advocate, lawyer, lecturer, writer and founding executive director of Scholars at Risk, an international network of more than 500 higher education institutions and thousands of individuals in 39 countries dedicated to protecting at-risk scholars, promoting academic freedom, and defending everyone’s freedom to think, question and share ideas.

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TRANSCRIPT:

ROBERT QUINN: The university space is a microcosm in its ideal of what we would like society to be like. People have adequate food, they have adequate housing and they have a chance to develop their capacities and contribute to the meaningful decisions and discourse of their lives. So that's the ideal. And academic freedom is the essence of that. It's what makes it work because there's an opportunity to talk and engage and bring in the voice that previously can't be brought in. And again, this is only when universities operate on the ideal and I get that.

But for me what really got me into this work and keeps me in this work is because it's a microcosm. We don't understand how much our thoughts, our very thoughts and therefore our identities are shaped by implicit permission to think that or ask that or say that. And the battle over academic freedom is essentially the battle over that inner mental space. As an example and it really opened my eyes to it, I was talking to a very senior professor at a U.S. top university who was a sinologist, an expert on China. And she said one of my dilemmas is as I'm late in my career my Ph.D. students come to me and they say I want to work on this topic relating to say Tibet or Taiwan or so forth. Sensitive topics. And she says I have a professional obligation, it's a great topic and it would lead to so much knowledge but I have a professional obligation to warn them that if they do that they may not be able to travel in and out of the country. Their career may be cut short because those are sensitive topics.

And so she said the challenge is we're not only going to lose the particular dissertation topic that that person wanted to work on but we won't get any of the knowledge that the questions would have led to and the questions beyond that. So there's whole zones of knowledge that we never get to because of the intimidation in the early part of the evolution of the chain of thinking. Sort of to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld where he said that the unknown unknowns, right. We simply don't know what we haven't even thought to ask. And that's why attacks on scholars just like attacks on journalists but really especially with the depth that academics can go to, they're very efficient ways for very subtly invisibly shaping. One of our projects that we're just starting now is how do we measure the self-censorship that goes on. When they come and haul away the professor in the office next to yours to prison that affects whether you're going to publish the next article. How do we measure that.

I call it the self-censorship is the dark matter of the academic freedom universe. It's all over the place and that we can't see it. Creativity comes in because creativity needs space. It needs freedom. We have a holiday card we sent around once that said new ideas begin with a safe place to think. They can be catalyzed by pressure. They can be catalyzed by bad experiences. We all know that. That can spark things as we respond to those things. But at the end of the day it needs space and time and legitimacy to go with it. So that's how I think they're connected.

One in particular really strikes me which is a scholar ...

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