The Duck of Minerva

Academic Freedom

Academia

by Josh Busby

17 February 2017, 1823 EST

President Trump tweeted this on Friday. Even before he issued this egregious tweet, I had prepared a thread on Twitter of my observations from a recent trip to DC. This builds on my post from earlier in the week on how to defend democracy from the perch of the Ivory Tower.

After my trip to DC, it occurred to me that academics, particularly tenured ones, have the freedom to resist this administration and speak out in a way that many NGOs and think tank folks cannot. We should exercise our liberty while we can.

I was really inspired to write this thread when I read a series of tweets from Paul Musgrave on how liberalism has embraced data and facts as the way forward  when it is not at all clear that is the moment we are living in (says the guy writing a blog post). Storify below after the jump.

Joshua Busby is a Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas-Austin. From 2021-2023, he served as a Senior Advisor for Climate at the U.S. Department of Defense. His most recent book is States and Nature: The Effects of Climate Change on Security (Cambridge, 2023). He is also the author of Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge, 2010) and the co-author, with Ethan Kapstein, of AIDS Drugs for All: Social Movements and Market Transformations (Cambridge, 2013). His main research interests include transnational advocacy and social movements, international security and climate change, global public health and HIV/ AIDS, energy and environmental policy, and U.S. foreign policy.

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