This introductory chapter considers the place and purpose of higher education in the twenty-first century in light of ethical concerns discussed by Wendell Berry in Home Economics (1987) and other works, and social and political challenges raised by David Goodhart, especially in The Road to Somewhere (2017). The chapter presents a substantial critique against the instrumentalisation of the university for professional or economic purposes, offering empirical evidence that, in some cases, higher education is developing in a direction which is the opposite of a refuge of truth and truthfulness.
Expressions of concern about an increasingly “fact-resistant” public attitude threatening higher education and science often fail to appreciate, or even acknowledge, the complicity of the professoriate in the reputation race that is the distinctive feature of competitive strategies of university management around the globe. In this paper, I argue that 1) behaving as actors in the “knowledge society,” universities undermine the legitimacy of academic knowledge; 2) the various phenomena gathered under the term “post-truth” are expressions of a loss of public confidence, and constitute a fundamental challenge to institutions of higher education, and 3) recognizing that the doubt and distrust are not entirely unwarranted is a first step toward necessary reform. On the basis of a résumé of the structural and material conditions of academic work in the post-truth era, I describe how these conditions constitute a specific sort of academic subjectivity, and propose that the role of universities needs to be reconceived in the spirit of what might be called epistemic modesty.
Fake news, in the sense of lying (the circulation of disinformation) is, of course, nothing new. While it is today typically associated with political propaganda or conspiracy theories such as climate change denial, it is as old as human communication itself, and a seemingly inevitable aspect of public discourse. Falsehoods can be used for numerous ends, from myth to satire to outright deception; the effects of fake news can range from laughter to death (Burkhart JM. Libr Technol Rep 53(8):1–36, 2017, p. 5). One might doubt the utility of a buzzword such as “fake news”, but the phenomena indicated by the term nonetheless constitute a serious challenge to modern notions of the “public sphere” as the space in which commonality is established and maintained. The very idea of the Anthropocene, and the contexts in which it appears, is perhaps one of the best illustrations of the risks involved, as well as of the problematic nature of “fake news” as a concept.
In this paper, we briefly review the literature on fake news in order to locate common themes. One of these in particular stands out as central, namely, the perceived threat to liberal democratic institutions and the viability of the very idea of a public sphere on which they rely. We argue that while empirical studies and categorization of actors, motives, effects, and techniques of dissimulation and distortion are useful for understanding the nature of fake news, they tend not to pay careful attention to what is perhaps the greatest challenge, namely, the expansion and consequent reconstitution of the public sphere as a genuine plurality, with all the risks of disintegration that is entailed. We conclude with a proposal, inspired by Steve Fuller, that we acknowledge the post-truth condition as a kind of “fact” of contemporary life in which the most important function of the public sphere is, as Richard Rorty would say, to keep the conversation going. This means that the notion of “fake news” should not be taken at face value, but seen as itself a trope in that discourse. The article ends with a consideration of the fate of the Anthropocene as a scientific term to exemplify this point.