Ville Kari
For some time now, academia has been facing a mounting backlash from the general public and, in some countries, from public institutions. The accusation is that law faculties, social sciences, history and the humanities are dominated by variants of critical theories stemming from Marxist and post-modern French roots; that these are all unified through a politics of rejection and hostility to all things Western, European, technical, traditional, rational, masculine, or otherwise not belonging to protected group identities and ethnicities. The allegation is also that academia has capitulated to a culture of fear, where disagreement is no longer possible in the fear of expulsion and cancellation.
I am an academic, and I am therefore part of those deemed guilty under this criticism. Yet for some reason – at least for now – I feel a rather compelling need to stay here, not to ride this wave of paranoia but precisely to stand through it, to preserve the thousand-year academic tradition which I have had the privilege to witness and to be part of. How could I try to defend my vocation against the mounting external critique?
The allegation of a “culture of fear” in the faculties is not primarily a critique about arguments, methods, or evidence, but a critique of the entire academic field as a moral and political formation. From that perspective, distinctions that matter greatly inside academia collapse into a single pattern of external outcomes: skepticism towards law, the state, and the idea of prosperity; suspicion of liberal progress narratives; emphasis on power, domination, and exclusion; and a tendency to align scholarship with all manner of activist causes. The claim is not necessarily that every individual scholar shares the same theory or the same politics, but that the field as a whole has acquired a directional bias that infinitely reproduces itself, irrespective of any silent internal diversity.
I believe it is important to concede what cannot plausibly be denied. It is true that many dominant frameworks in law, history, and the humanities descend genealogically from Marxist social critique and from French postmodern theory. It is also true that these frameworks share a ritualistic suspicion towards inherited authority, sensitivity to structural ‘power’, and an eagerness to moralise over historical actors and events. It is also true that academic incentives increasingly reward critique over contemplation, exposure over explanation, and moral clarity over aporia and the sense of tragic ambiguity. Any defence of academia that denies these realities will likely fail, because the criticism draws much of its strength from publicly known and recognisable experience. Yes, the bias is there. It is real.
At the heart of the criticism is a politicisation of academia, and the accusation of subjecting the pursuit of knowledge to blind activism. True, it is today no longer credible to claim that knowledge and scholarship would be politically ‘neutral’ in any old, self-evident, positivist sense. Choices about topics, archives, and questions that researchers ask are commonly understood as value-laden and reflecting deep political or personal sensibilities. Claims and ideas about the truth appear to us today usually as ‘narratives’, not as incontestable ‘facts’. However, it does not follow that all politically conscious inquiry is intellectually corrupt as such. The relevant distinction is not between activism and purity, but between dogmatic constraint and openness. Scholarship becomes ideological when its conclusions are fixed in advance, when evidence functions only illustratively, and when counter-arguments are treated as moral failures rather than intellectual challenges. Ideological scholarship, in turn, becomes a performance of intellectual ‘positions’, a sort of game of gambling with a scholar’s reputation – and employment – at stake.
A dedicated academic can defend his vocation by insisting (publicly and institutionally, and often at a price for his short-term wellbeing) on standards that cut against predictable or predetermined outcomes: genuine engagement with uncertainty, willingness to acknowledge tragedy and trade-offs rather than moral binaries, and resistance to collapsing explanation into indictments and condemnation. These are not conservative positions; they are classical scholarly virtues. The problem is not necessarily that many academics study oppression, but that they sometimes forget that law and ‘power’ can serve other ends besides harms, facilitating peace as well as domination, freedom as well as repression, and that law and history often have more depth than mere split between villains and victims (or in group language, victims and victimisers, saints and sinners, the oppressors and the oppressed…).
Then there is the problem of technology. The practical conditions for dealing with academic disagreement are not what they used to be. Now to some extent, academic life has always involved conformity pressures: think of intellectual schools, patronage networks, disciplinary fads et cetera. But the contemporary environment, subjected to constant surveillance and informants in ‘social media’, threatens to collapse the boundary between scholarly dispute and public moral inquisition. This leads to not merely individual but also institutional pressure: administrative risk aversion, driven by litigation fears and reputational management, has shifted academic authority away from peer assessment towards institutional policies and compliance mechanisms. Normative language drawn from activist arenas – ‘harm‘, ‘exclusion‘, ‘safety‘, ‘violence‘, ‘erasure‘ – has entered institutional governance through imitation and bureaucratic transmission. It is therefore not a surprise that in this environment, any intellectual disagreement can plausibly be experienced as ‘dangerous’, not because dissenting arguments are necessarily weak, but because their interpretation may escape the scholar’s control once they become targeted, moralised and scandalised.
To deny this reality would be a mistake. Note that a culture of fear does not need fear to be universal, or indeed even real; it only needs to be rationally anticipated. When junior scholars, precarious faculty, or graduate students observe that certain ‘positions’ correlate with professional harm, then self-censorship becomes a rational adaptive response regardless of any formal sanctions. In an industry structured on fixed-term contracts, little is needed for this to happen. From the standpoint of academic continuity, this is perhaps the most serious aspect of a culture of fear.
What is disagreement in an academic context, after all? The feared conflicts today are not disputes about evidence or substance, but about ‘speech’ framed as identity-denying, discriminatory, or politically hateful ‘violence’ that risks the condemnation of ‘posterity’ (which may just as well be two months or two decades from now). From a social activist perspective, different thought and speech is not ‘disagreement’ but aggression by other means. This eventually leads to a common intellectual breakdown, because once scholarship or experimental thought becomes redefined as potential moral harm, academia loses its trust and its intellectual freedom. Likewise, without trust and good will, administrative actors default to risk minimisation and moral accusation displaces scholarly refutation.
Please let me be clear: there is (or should be) a distinction between being mistaken or unconvincing or unpopular on the one hand, and moral transgression on the other. Academic disagreement must be protected precisely when it is uncomfortable and inconvenient, encouraging conduct in good faith and with proper reasoning. By good faith I mean traditional, subjective, well-meaning good faith, not the radical kindness of the Grand March of kitsch. This is not a defence of incivility or bad faith; it is a defence of contestability, of the possibility of right and wrong, of value and merit, and an assertion of the fundamental right of academics to experiment – to try out ideas together to find out what works and what does not. Once contestability, value and experimentation are replaced by the game of asserting intellectual ‘positions’ and the moral sorting of individuals to the right and wrong side of history, scholarship ceases to be cumulative and open-ended; it becomes performative, generic, meaningless, and infertile.
In the end, cultures of fear arise less from ideological conviction than from institutional abdication: the retreat of departments, colleagues, journals, and professional associations from their responsibility to speak truth to each other as well as to tolerate and adjudicate healthy disagreement internally and defensibly. Today, the fear narrative gains traction among the wider public because academia has often failed to enforce its own standards to any adequate degree. When ideological conformity appears selectively policed, the charge of activism masquerading as scholarship becomes persuasive.
The defence here is not to demand some sort of ideological neutrality, which is neither possible nor historically accurate, but to cultivate a culture of good faith, trust, and fair play, and to defend institutional procedures of transparency, due process, and a presumption in favour of debate rather than sanction. It requires the reassertion of an older academic ethic: that the purpose of scholarship is not moral alignment but a sincere pursuit of the elusive truths of the universe. I may not agree with your belief, but I defend your right to it. Defending the possibility of disagreement does not require rejecting critical scholarship or denying historical injustices. But it requires rejecting predetermined scholarship, in which conclusions are treated as moral imperatives rather than candidates for best available syntheses, to be questioned again at the next opportunity.
If universities visibly protect that ethic, especially when it may be costly, the narrative of ideological coercion and a culture of fear will begin to lose its force. If they do not, the allegation will continue to resonate, not because it is perfectly accurate, but because it names a real institutional failure in the language of a broader political conflict, and feasts on its carcass.
