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  "path": "/2026/02/18/activism-and-the-pursuit-of-knowledge/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-02-18T12:38:47.000Z",
  "site": "https://dailynous.com",
  "tags": [
    "Academic Freedom",
    "academic freedom",
    "activism",
    "institutional neutrality",
    "politics",
    "universities",
    "Activism and the Pursuit of Knowledge",
    "Daily Nous"
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  "textContent": "The pursuit of knowledge generates disagreement, including disagreement about how to pursue knowledge. This has implications for current debates of scholarship and activism and complaints about some academics being activists. Enzo Rossi (Amsterdam) puts it this way: Those who oppose the distinction between scholarship and activism—between truth and power, if you will—arrived at their position by pursuing epistemic goals. That is, by trying to understand what knowledge is. I think their answer is wrong, but I respect it, because I see that they arrived at their answer how I arrived at mine: by pursuing knowledge. Centring the university’s epistemic mission, and the academic freedom it requires, leads to fundamental disagreement about what the epistemic mission is, and so about what it entails when it comes to the university’s role in social and political life. The very commitment to putting the pursuit of knowledge front and centre leads to pluralism about what that commitment entails—a pluralism that spans from the institutional neutrality of the Kalven Report to the scepticism about neutrality often found among activist scholars. This pluralism is simply the product of academic freedom and good-faith enquiry. It would be arrogant and unscholarly to suppress it, from either side. And if that’s the case, we have an answer to our initial question. The problem isn’t that some academics are activists. Sometimes the pursuit of knowledge leads to an activist orientation to science, and sometimes it doesn’t. It’s important to recognise the legitimacy of both outcomes, and to ensure that neither view of scholarship takes over the university and suppresses the other. So, universities can’t be neutral pursuers of knowledge, because many of their members have come to reject neutrality precisely by pursuing knowledge. It is regrettable that these differences often play out in terms of self-selection into different academic fields, which sometimes results in overpoliticisation—whether of a hyper-activist or hyperneutralist kind. It would be even worse if an entire university took sides on this issue… If either the activists or the partisans of neutrality took over, we’d have an overpoliticised university: a university that rejects the outcomes of free academic enquiry when it dislikes them… So, a university that is serious about its epistemic mission should neither be neutral nor..\n\nThe post Activism and the Pursuit of Knowledge first appeared on Daily Nous.",
  "title": "Activism and the Pursuit of Knowledge"
}