Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

In the aftermath of the Hamas attacks of October 7, the subsequent congressional hearings with university presidents, and the encampments that followed, academia has once again found itself at the center of the culture wars, from which it rarely strays far. On one side, critics denounce universities for “wokeness,” while on the other side, defenders of universities condemn the anti-woke critics of reactionary politics and bad faith. These battle lines are tediously familiar to anyone who paid attention to the history wars, which had until October 7 formed the principal theater in the academic culture wars. The combatants are occupying the same lines of trenches from which they fought over the 1619 Project, the Florida AP African-American Studies standards, and so on. Behind the coils of rusting barbed wire, the front has scarcely budged. It is striking to me, as a somewhat rare creature — a military historian in civilian academia who has studied the work not only of Clausewitz but also of Foucault — how incomplete and self-serving are the arguments of both sides. But one need not know German military theory to appreciate that the narrow slits of pillboxes offer less than comprehensive views of reality. Nor need one know French critical theory to grasp that the tales people tell about themselves and their opponents do psychological work for them. Analyzing these tales requires attention to what they exclude as well as what they include. In all the hue and cry about the university, there has been virtual silence about the ostensibly unexciting subject of scholarly standards — those quaint things supposed to ensure that academics generate and communicate knowledge more rather than less rigorously. Instead, we have had a great deal of talk about ideology, or rather ideological corruption, by and about both academics and their critics.