A few months ago Jacob Levy (McGill)  published a lengthy Op-Ed, “Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ,” in the Globe and Mail. It offered a salutary account on the nature of academic freedom in the aftermath of the “Dec. 5 U.S. House of Representatives committee hearing grilling the leaders of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania, and the subsequent resignation of two of them, Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Elizabeth Magill.”

Before I get to our differences, I agree with much of Levy’s analysis not the least his account of the difference(s) between academic freedom and freedom of speech. In particular, according to Levy a “university’s core commitment is to the discovery, transmission and preservation of knowledge – paradigmatically, what is done in research, in teaching, and in publication and library collection. The principle that defends that commitment is not freedom of speech as such, but rather academic freedom.”

I differ with Levy on two important points. Let me explain. After listing a number of important characteristics of academic freedom, Levy writes the following:

A rule that has traditionally accompanied and strengthened academic freedom is institutional neutrality. If academic freedom is the ability of scholars and scholarly communities or disciplines to work without having an orthodoxy imposed on them, institutional neutrality is the commitment not to declare an orthodoxy in the first place. Just like a professor at the front of a classroom shouldn’t use it as a pulpit to announce their own political and religious views, so too should the university as a whole not adopt substantive political or religious opinions that would chill the freedom of its members to pursue their own ideas and arguments. A great deal of important political inquiry and debate happens at a university, but it’s undertaken by students and professors with differing views pursuing differing arguments, not by the institution as a whole declaring official conclusions.

Universities sometimes need to speak up in favour of their own institutional interests or the general needs of higher education. A few university decisions unavoidably require substantive moral judgments about political figures: whose contributions are worth honouring with an honorary degree, whose career involved so much injustice that their name should be stripped from buildings. But when there’s not that kind of necessary connection to university business, the institution should stay silent and neutral, to guarantee the freedom of students and professors to inquire, criticize and debate. — Jacob T. Levy (Jan 12, 2024) [emphasis in original]

Levy’s stance on institutional neutrality is a return to and re-affirmation of the principles of the (1967) Kalven Report at The University of Chicago. Levy has appealed to it (here) in the past; this has prompted some of my own writing on academic freedom (recall; and here). Importantly, in the second quoted paragraph, Levy implicitly sides with the majority opinion of the report and distances himself from the then dissenting voice George Stigler (a future Nobel laureate in economics) who thought strict neutrality was even possible in the “few university decisions” that Levy thinks “require substantive moral judgments.”

Before I offer my criticism, I would like to state that I doubt the rule of strict neutrality is possible for universities and colleges, but I won’t rely on this in what follows. I will, however, indirectly indicate that many quite ordinary practices keep strict neutrality far out of reach. And so academic freedom better not rely on this rule.

Be that as it may, I was surprised by Levy’s stance. Levy is a leading thinker of contemporary liberalism, who shows an unusual sensitivity to the significance of intermediate and corporate bodies in a pluralist society. (‘Corporate’ here does not mean ‘business,’ but an institution with a charter or authorized by the state to act as a single entity.) I use ‘corporation’ and its cognates because these can have a personality and a mission-specific character. My reason for my surprise is that Levy proposes institutional uniformity here, which is at odds with his (and my own more skeptical) liberalism.

My first disagreement with Levy is this: as corporate bodies, universities do not have uniform missions. I don’t mean this as a hypothetical point. For, in many places we are familiar with universities that have their roots in some confessional or religious orientation. A number of other universities, public and private, have well known commitments to serve the needs of particular national, linguistic, or ethnic minorities (including some that serve speech or vision impaired), etc. Others serve particular sectors (agriculture, technology, theology, the arts) or are constituted by professional schools, etc.

In my view the liberal position here is that as corporate bodies, universities and colleges should interpret academic freedom in light of their particular corporate identity which involves the general commitment to discovery, transmission and preservation of knowledge. In my first disagreement with Levy, I am not relying on the idea that such particular corporate identities may well shape how one understands what knowledge is. (But see below.) But rather that such identities shape what knowledge is worthy.

This may sound ‘woke,’ but is actually uncontroversial. For example, much research on humans and animals is subject to ethical scrutiny and pre-approval— a clear constraint on discovery of knowledge. In many contexts, there is a requirement to teach or publish in a particular language. That is, a clear constraint on transmission and preservation of knowledge. (Even if these constraints do not always prevent other activities, they do involve huge opportunity costs.) Universities have to make all kinds of substantive moral and political judgments about sponsored research — should one accept tobacco money? — that do not involve its political/social survival.

I understand that this itself may be a source of unease. It is undoubtedly the case that this means that some universities will interpret their mission rather restrictively, whereas others will actively and intensely give the widest freedom to some kinds of research. Obviously, it also means that private universities will have more room for idiosyncratic understanding of academic freedom whereas public universities may well feel much more uniformly constrained by public regulation/jurisprudence.

So, rather than promoting a uniform stance on academic freedom, we (qua liberals) should welcome institutional diversity, even if it involves the thriving of some illiberal corporate identities. (I put this very much in the spirit of Chandran Kukathas’ Liberal Archipelago.) Such intellectual diversity may well have epistemic pay-offs for the discovery, transmission, and preservation of knowledge.

As an aside, obviously it would be best if the corporate mission of a university is established and re-affirmed periodically through self-governing functions. Even in the best of times, mere lip-service to such missions is a risk. In practice, mission statements often seem like they are written by communications departments as recruitment devices or branding purposes. (Lurking here is an even more substantial question about what a university is.)

Okay, so much for my first, most fundamental disagreement with Levy.  There is also another disagreement about what falls under academic freedom.

This second disagreement is based on the thought that what constitutes academic knowledge is itself shaped by academic context: disciplinary or methodological. I don’t view this as controversial. In fact, I assume it is common ground between Levy and myself, and it probably informs his commitment to the rule of institutional neutrality. In the advanced cognitive division of labor of hyperspecialized modern research it’s probably best that University administrators and corporate officers like Trustees are kept at arm’s length from judgments about details that are are only fit for specialists.

But lurking here is a further thought that how one understands academic freedom, thus, has to fit the particular needs of knowledge discovery, transmission, and preservation of knowledge. This, too, will involve departures from neutrality. Let me explain by way of engagement with Levy’s argument. Levy writes, the following:

For example, the odd thing about the centrality of student protests to important moments in university life is that they are so irrelevant to the university’s mission. There is very strong protection for the freedom of protest, not because protest is important to a university the way it is to a democratic society, but because it’s academically irrelevant. It’s wrong to question a student’s (or professor’s) standing in the academic community because of what they say at a protest – or on social media, or in any other non-academic setting. The only appropriate limits are not about the content of what’s said, but about the conduct of the protest action; the university has to protect not only the safety of its other members but also the security of its academic functions. It can’t rule against the language on a sign, but it must intervene to prevent violence between students, or occupations and blockades that would prevent a class from meeting, or an invited speaker from speaking.

To be sure, I agree with Levy what he says about conduct here. I also agree that protest is not especially important to the academy relative to, say, its importance to society. (I am not denying that protests may shape, as Shannon Dea has argued, future citizens in important ways.) Rather, protests have some significance to discovery and transmission of knowledge.

In particular, protests are very informative about what questions are urgently worth asking according to an academic community. (Sometimes protests are about the manner of teaching, and so then it may impact transmission of knowledge.) One can derive this idea from Max Weber’s familiar view on the vocation of an academic, “the capacity to distinguish between empirical knowledge and value-judgments, and the fulfillment of the scientific duty to see the factual truth as well as the practical duty to stand up for our own ideals constitute the program to which we wish to adhere with ever increasing firmness.”

In addition, in so far as there can be knowledge of society, then experiments in living and social protests (which for students are often an education in citizenship) are partially conducive to it. Some social knowledge is itself partially constituted by and the effect of a particular process (think of price formation in markets).* The same can be said of political life. And while as sources of knowledge experiments in living and social protests also have non-trivial epistemic limitations, one need not be a formal decision theorist to agree that more information is better than less. So, rather than treating campus protests as evidence of institutional indifference (or as Marcuse might call it repressive tolerance), one may well understand these as falling under academic freedom and as such even compatible with Levy’s institutional neutrality.

*I thank Nick Cowen and Aris Tranditis for sharing a paper with me pertaining to this idea.

• A revised version of this post has appeared earlier in Digressionsnimpressions. I thank Michael Nafi, Saskia Bonjour, and Alice MacLachan for comments that influenced some of the changes.

My new book is out this week (in the UK at least – but those elsewhere can read it right now online). I very much hope it will stimulate debate and discussion. Something that’s really struck me over recent years is that whereas a really rich literature exists on the global justice dimensions of the climate crisis (the term “climate justice” has pretty wide currency, right?), the same thing is just not true of the biodiversity crisis. But the biodiversity crisis seems to me to be at least in the same ballpark in terms of seriousness, and responses to it (“mitigation policies,” if you like) will, if policymakers (continue to) do a bad job, exacerbate all kinds of existing injustices. Thinking carefully about how we can respond fairly to the crisis seems to me to be one of the best uses we could find for our time. Or so I hope to persuade the potential readers!

As it happens I’ve been working on a paper on that strange inequality in attention between the two crises, with a couple of co-authors. I hope to update you all on that someday – but if anyone wants to speculate right now about why we’ve so badly dropped the ball on the biodiversity crisis, please do so here. For everyone else, a succinct description of the book is on the link above, and hopefully you’ll hear more in podcasts or book reviews in the months to come.

I recently read Cory Doctorow’s new novel, The Bezzle. (FYI his publisher sent me a copy.) It’s the follow-up (and in the story’s own timeline, a prequel) to Cory’s excellent tech-themed thriller, Red Team Blues. The hero of Red Team Blues is Marty Hench, a forensic accountant who loves barbecuing, whiskey, and exposing elaborate financial scams, especially cryptocurrency ones. He’s in his early sixties and gets called in by a vastly wealthy friend to retrieve the crypto-key an international crime family is after. It’s a thrilling ride that got me back into reading the first time covid fried my brain. Red Team Blues is also fascinating on crypto and cyber-security, and its attention to cultural and sociological detail is lovingly rendered, line by snappy line. The Bezzle takes Marty back to the dot com boom. Same guy, very different novel. Utterly worth your time.

First, the title. ‘Bezzle’ was coined by JK Galbraith to describe the blissful and often long moment when an embezzlement has occurred but before it’s been discovered. The embezzler has his money. The victim still thinks he has his. It’s the gravity-defying interval when Wile E. Coyote is running on air and hasn’t begun to fall.

The Bezzle is about three bezzles of wildly increasing severity. The first is when guys like Marty’s younger buddy, Scott Warms, sell their tech firms to Yahoo and still think the product they built will survive. Scott has recently sold his company and become a Yahoo employee, realising too late that Yahoo only acquired his product to kill the competition. Now, Scott’s job is to evaluate other acquisitions for Yahoo. He tries to warn people against selling to Yahoo, but most prefer the money and some wishful thinking. The bezzle is a happy place to be. No one wants to be told they’re in it.

Scott’s still quite rich, so he and Marty fly to Catalina Island near Los Angeles to blow off some steam. In Catalina’s capital, Avalon, as we’re (just a little repetitively) told, there is no crime. It’s a policing grey area and the full force of the law is only applied to worker bees, not visiting millionaires. Marty and Scott discover and disrupt a Ponzi scheme that’s sucked in many locals, and make a powerful enemy. The victims initially can’t believe their money’s gone. There must be a way out, they plead, but Marty says it’s a negative-sum game. They lost the money the moment they paid in. Once you’re in the bezzle, all you can do is pull down the pyramid, and fast. The longer it goes, the more lives it wrecks. The person running the scheme sets the rules and breaks them, just like in bigger, officially sanctioned, white collar frauds.

In this well-made novel, there’s a third, devastating pyramid scheme which the first two have set us up to read. This time, the criminals at the top are the private equity firms that have rolled up California’s and other US states’ prisons into ownership by a single firm. They’ve loaded it with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt, taken a massive pay-off equivalent to that debt, and begun to squeeze states, employees, prisoners and prisoners’ families dry, just to pay the interest on the debt. The Bezzle tells how the PE-backed privatisers monetise and drain everything that makes a prisoner’s life bearable; sufficient calories, reading material, time outside the cell, phone calls, and family visits. Late in the book Marty says the cruelty isn’t the point; it’s the money. It was always the money.

The state has lost its money as soon as it signs the deal, as PE firms hoover up and run down public assets and services. The taxpayers have lost theirs, though they’re happy with life in the bezzle, assuming that prison is just something that happens to people who deserve it, so the more of it, the better. The prisoners and their families are miserable, but they were never the marks, just the means. Can Marty watch out for his friend and unravel this fraud? Maybe. It’s a novel, not a just-so story.

Recently, a friend told me what he thinks is the Jack Reacher novels’ secret sauce. Yes, they have short sentences, short chapters and lots of cliff-hangers. (And a thoroughly delightful author who’s an interesting reader, supports writing in general and IMHO deserves every bit of his success.) But what keeps people (mostly men who don’t read many other novels) coming back for more is that Reacher is full of information about how things work. Things like locks, rifles, security systems; practical, manly stuff. I was stunned, to be honest. It had never occurred to me that people use novels to get information you can find in a Youtube tutorial. But it makes sense!

I enjoy the how-things-work of Cory’s novels as much as I do the stories and characters. The truth is, they all work together. There’s reason and urgency to his descriptions of financial records cross-referencing, or searching out owners on the supposedly anonymous blockchain, and the characters doing the explaining have a strong point of view. Their specialist knowledge cuts new paths to move through the world. Anyway, anyone who loves historical fiction, crime procedurals, and of course science fiction and fantasy, knows that half the fun is the world-building, which is just another way to say world-explaining.

Quite possibly this is all so obvious it doesn’t need to be said! But I was surprised and quite delighted to remember Jack Reacher this morning when I sat down to try and convey the rich reading pleasure in a novel of the grimmest of topics, the American carceral state. This book is a furious, clear-eyed, accounting of the obfuscated numbers that make the United States the country that’s imprisoned more people than any other regime, ever. And so many of them brown and Black. It’s a novel of issues, presented as they should be, detail by devastating detail. The issues and ideas are this novel’s warp, the specificity and sometimes surprising emotional truths its weft. (Like Marty’s first adventure, this one is grounded in male friendship and thoughtful care. Also book chat! The all-male prison reading-group’s take on The Hobbit is one for the ages.)

While company names are changed, the novel draws deeply on real life horrors like the ‘deputy gangs’ of the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department. These gangs of neo-Nazi police were (are?) made up of men who batter and kill people of colour, openly and with near impunity. The novel’s reach extends to the capture and exploitation of inmates’ reading, with libraries shut, physical books forbidden, and prisoners forced to pay premium rates to temporarily license on their shitty Android devices, books that are long out of copyright. There’s also a surprising but believable overlap of interest between the extraction capitalists and the Nazi cops. One side whittles down and extorts the sustenance prisoners need to survive with some humanity intact, the other ensures a steady supply of mostly brown and Black bodies to imprison.

I compared the first Marty Hench novel, Red Team Blues – about blockchain and the white-collar butler class to global crime – to Dickens’ Bleak House. In both, a single case is the centrifuge. Its effects spin out to show how the privileged classes are so eagerly corrupted. This time round, The Bezzle does for privatised Californian prisons what Little Dorrit did for the Marshalsea. There are people who know what’s up and should do better don’t, or can’t; the California Attorney General’s office is almost as pathologically helpless as Dickens’ “Circumlocution Office”, especially when Trump’s presidency ushers in the US’s ‘golden age of grift’. Similarly to Little Dorrit, The Bezzle puts the most blameless character possible into the maw of for-profit incarceration. Just as sweet young Amy Dorrit was her era’s most attractive innocent, our version is Scott Warms, an agreeable if initially callow young tech bro.

Scott is white, educated, rich and connected; the sort of person least likely to be convicted of any crimes he might commit, and a type whose incarceration is often portrayed at sentencing hearings and in newspaper reporting as unnatural and especially tragic. His was a life considered to be worth something before he ‘threw it all away’. Scott has the book thrown at him because, although he’s rich and white, he’s crossed someone richer and better connected. He also has the misfortune to be sentenced during the US’s baseball-inspired jurisprudence of ‘three strikes, you’re out’, kicked off by California and made into federal law by Bill Clinton. I won’t spoil the ending, but where Scott lands after years in prison is both extraordinary and satisfying. Marty ends the novel somewhat chastened, and on his way to being the more thoughtful person we meet in Red Team Blues.

The Bezzle has surprises, pleasant and otherwise. The textures and observations of the dot com boom are spot on and brought me right back. There’s a ridiculous dot com in the opening pages, and someone has to dial long-distance to their home ISP to download their email. Monied men wear Japanese denim and grumpy old (or middle-aged) farts refer to GW Bush as “Shrub”. I love Cory’s attention to male fashion and how it expresses and maintains status.

This focus is pointed at the physical and mental conditions of prisoners, too, and at their families. One short waiting room scene gives a vignette of the pain of incarceration without rehabilitation, respect or the most basic of care, as it impacts on families and loved ones. Each little group gets half a dozen or a dozen words, and each contains a world of sorrow. At one especially low point in Scott’s incarceration, Marty describes him as a “shattered zombie”. At another, as “a lousy JPEG of himself”. The details matter, to novelists and forensic accountants. They add up.

The Bezzle also made me think about something else almost too obvious to mention, how money and power are concentrated to make some people’s lives frictionless and insolently unaccountable, and to strip other people’s lives of the tiniest of pleasures, the most essential of connections and experiences. By coincidence, I’ve just finished Emily St John Mandel’s novel, The Glass Hotel, about a Bernie Madoff-like fraud. There’s a line, late in the book, that basically says luxury is weakness. Which, of course. The cashmere jumpers so soft on the skin, the memory foam and anticipation of needs, the private chefs and masseuses. It bears saying again, since luxury functions as the spoils in a war-like conflict of ‘survival of the fittest’ that really, is mostly just fraud; the rich aren’t the strongest. They’re just the best protected. What they’re best protected from and fear most of all are consequences. As this novel shows, in any real jeopardy they quickly fold.

It’s inevitable that we compare books we’re reading to other recent reads. Scott reminds me of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi, who’s stripped bone-clean by hardship and becomes another, nobler version of himself. (I’m always reading, or tbh listening to the audiobook of Piranesi. It’s been three years now and I think about him all the time.) Just occasionally, people who are meant to be broken, aren’t. I’m not sure we deserve their stories, but we do seem to need them.

It cannot be said too many times that white-collar criminals largely go free and unmolested, while the people they prey on are so often crushed. Mandel’s Madoff-like character ends his days in humane prison conditions that should be universal but are reserved for rich white men, double-agents and child abusers. He muses about how money is a game with two levels, and he’s always been able to play at the higher one. But while Mandel holds the grit of material suffering at a remove – insulated always by gossamer suggestions that this is just one of infinite possible worlds, anyway – Cory’s Bezzle doesn’t look away. Justice is in short supply, but with Marty Hench involved, there’s always the chance of balancing the books.

The Bezzle is an exciting financial thriller, a deeply grounded, campaigning novel, a bravura display of how SFF world-building can strip America’s real-life self-mythology bare, and above all a heartfelt tale of loyalty and friendship in near-impossible conditions. I strongly recommend it.