A message to my colleagues at elite universities: You must choose, Stockwellism or Solidarity

It’s amazing to me—though it shouldn’t be—that at a moment when anyone and everyone who teaches or works or studies at an educational institution is under threat, that a professor at Columbia would formulate the threat in the New York Times in this particular way: “Ultimately, the university cannot exist without research,” said Brent R. Stockwell, the chair of biological sciences at Columbia. “It would be really, really more akin to a high school or a local community college where you’re just teaching some classes without world-class researchers bringing the frontier of knowledge into the classroom.” I don’t doubt that Stockwell sees his lifeworld in this way and that it would in fact be threatened in the way he says […]