Academia yearns for freedom

Academia yearns for something. It yearns for freedom.

Imagine a guide, like a psychopomp or Charon if you will, navigating between truth and fiction. This guide takes you from one side to the other without questions while always expecting payment, and it is a one-way journey.

Those seeking truth but allowing for fiction cannot see fiction but only fiction as truth. Those content with fiction run away from truth only to have it painfully forced upon them.

The ferryman will take you from one side to the other side, but never back again.

For a musicologist, this becomes a pressing issue insofar as the realm of the truth only extends to the level of interpretation on one end and historiographical objectivity on the other.

In a time marked by politics, ideological warfare, unsolvable debates, and dissonant worldviews, do truth and fiction matter anymore? Are they essentially the same thing? Is the post-post-modern academic a person who experiments with metafiction and presents it as rigorous?

Discussing academic freedom in an era of lies and majority-ruled interpretations, I reflect upon those beliefs upon which academia is founded. If we overturn them, the whole system will crumble. How can academia be academic if it revolves around self-censorship and non-observational positions?

One article will not solve the struggles of 21st-century academics, but I urge those stifled by silence or forced correctness to speak up. In an age where disagreement is radical, standing firm with rational reasons is crucial.

Charon moves between truth and fiction, but unlike Orpheus, we can choose our path. We can choose what to believe, who to believe, where to find justification, and whether to change our beliefs in light of new information. But as academics, we must not get too comfortable.

Long live the days of argumentation and the pursuit of the true.

The dawn of the metamodern academic age is here, aiming higher than truth and fiction, personal beliefs, or ideological agendas. The metamodern academic is focused on furthering a goal whose end is nowhere in sight and may not even exist, but whose existence strengthens the resolve of its practitioner. We must focus on that which will live on well past our life and that will – in some small way – contribute to lasting positive change, freeing us from limited notions of reality and falsehood.

Academic freedom is not about individuals or binding constraints. It is about pursuing truth without settling for easy answers. Complacency leads to intellectual demise. We must question, not blindly accept, even if agreement seems attractive. What's easily agreed upon needs a second look.

Charon is crossing the river—where will you go? What will you choose?

John David Vandevert,

PhD student at Department of Musicology