Tom Ginsburg on scholarship versus activism

UChicago Free Speech

An interesting and relevant article on the distinction between scholarship and activism by UChicago law professor and Faculty Director of the Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression:

When one’s scholarship is designed to include advocacy — what Tarunabh Khaitan has called “scholactivism” — risks are obvious. Advocates may reject or downplay inconvenient results, distorting academic debates. More deeply, they violate the “role morality” — the notion that some roles entail specific ethical commitments — of scholarship, which is the very basis for the social tolerance of academic freedom in the first place. While of course there is always a deep politics of scholarship, for example in the selection of topics for inquiry or methods for approaching them, these biases ought to be examined and minimized in genuine inquiry, not celebrated. This requires a humility about the limits of one’s own perspective.