Truth, not social justice, is the morally superior telos for academia

I have to agree with Conor Friedersdorf in his Truth vs. Social Justice. He is addressing a widely used tool in the postmodernists totalitarian's toolbox - banish people with whom you disagree by citing reasons you don't like them. Somethimes these reasons are real crimes, usually they are differences in norms between one period and another, and way too often, as in the example below, they are simply arbitrary personal feelings.

What is the telos––the purpose, end, or goal––of the university? In a thought-provoking 2016 lecture, the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that the answer ought to be “truth,” but that lately, more of America’s top universities are embracing social justice as a second or alternative telos. While acknowledging that those goals are not always at odds, he argued that “the conflict between truth and social justice is likely to become unmanageable,” and he urged academia to affirm the primacy of truth-seeking.

A recent essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education recognizes the same conflict, but implies that it sometimes ought to be resolved in the other direction.

Its author, Nikki Usher, asks, “Should we still cite the scholarship of serial harassers and sexists?” It is “a bind that we have yet to account for,” she argues, “how the process of building on academic work itself burnishes the reputations of people whose scholarship is good and sometimes even foundational, but whose characters are awful. In the case of a sexist jerk, you are often left without recourse: Cite him, or look like you don’t know what you’re talking about to reviewers and readers.”

Usher notes that peer reviewers once asked her to cite the work of a professor whose scholarship was substantively relevant, but who has “been fairly awful toward me and other women—although just a sexist jerk, not a sexual harasser.”

Declaring herself unsure about what to do, she concludes that “the best strategy” may be a “somewhat sketchy” one suggested by her friend: “Do what the editor wanted so that when he sent the revised manuscript back to reviewers, they would see I had followed their instructions and added the requisite citations. Then ... when I got the manuscript back before final publication, surreptitiously remove the citations.”

This seems to me to be the perfect illustration of the postmodernist totalitarian inclination towards moral anarchy. Actions based on pure emotion, dictating deceit of others to achieve her own ends. And she thinks that signals taking a moral stand. Pfah.

Friedersdorf pays Usher and her ilk the compliment of taking her argument seriously and then dismantling it. But he correctly concludes:

Lots of people recognized for giving the world something of great value were bad people. What’s the point in denying their contributions to their field, perhaps the only good that they ever offered others? Truth, not social justice, is the morally superior telos for academia.

Social justice is only a rallying cry for the random execution of arbitrary power over others without consequence to the initiator or consideration for the victim of their actions.

Pursuit of social justice is, in practice, the evisceration of free speech, individual rights, due process and the circulation of knowledge and the attendant advancement of all people. Photo-shopping people and events from history should always be a big red flag that you are dealing with a malevolent person with no one's well-being in mind but their own.