[geofft]

This is an excellent point from the comments, from one of the signatories:

> If you as a public university had no power against racism beyond the nobility of your intentions, your mission statement wouldn't matter a damn anyway. The public university's power against racism is the inherently anti-racist power of genuine knowledge.

And I think it actually refutes some of the more simplistic comments by other signatories about e.g. a desire to keep politics out of science or whether a university's goal should be truth or social justice. Such a phrasing implicitly claims that social justice (however one defines it) is a separable goal from truth. It reminds me a little of the "non-overlapping magisteria" non-solution to conflicting claims from science and religion, that either science determines truth and religion determines, I dunno, vibes, or alternatively that religion has real truth and science is limited to some subset of reality - it solves the problem by refusing to take either one or the other seriously.

The claims of politics and social justice are claims within the domain of truth, just as the claims of science are. Either climate change is happening and merits a response, or it isn't. Either diversity brings conflict or it doesn't. Either the implicit association test is good science or it isn't. Either social Darwinism is good science or it isn't.

The goal of the university should be to seek the truth because it helps humanity. This is why the research university publishes its research and the teaching university opens its doors to the public, after all. There are enough places (as we tech folks know!) where you can pursue the truth about many things for private gain.

Those of us who are on the side of "science" and "truth" must say that when the pursuit of truth has brought us somewhere, we need to do something with that conclusion. It might take us a long while and to false places on the way (as with social Darwinism), but once we've landed on the shores we sought, we need to build something there. And those of us who adhere to the cause of "social justice" as widely understood (and I certainly count myself as one) must believe that the claims it makes about the world we live in are in fact true, and that the pursuit of truth will keep us focused on what actually benefits the people or causes we support, and we need to not cede ground to the idea that our pursuit of truth is somehow a different thing from the ordinary pursuit of truth.

[andrewflnr]

Politics and social justice contain claims in the domain of truth, but also contain claims in the domain of norms, i.e. end goals, which are inherently orthogonal to truth (or near enough). Whether a fact is true is different from whether it's good or bad, which is different again from whether you should do something about it. Confusing these leads to dangerous outcomes, I believe some of the "false places" you mentioned.

[akira2501]

> The claims of politics and social justice are claims within the domain of truth, just as the claims of science are. Either climate change is happening and merits a response, or it isn't. Either diversity brings conflict or it doesn't. Either the implicit association test is good science or it isn't. Either social Darwinism is good science or it isn't.

That's a rather black and white way of looking at things, and seems to imply that once "truth" is found, that further action no longer requires any relationship to it.

Why these things are happening and what is the best way to solve them seem to be more pertinent questions, and involve a much deeper search for the truth then merely establishing that they're occurring and something needs to be done.

> Those of us who are on the side of "science" and "truth" must say that when the pursuit of truth has brought us somewhere, we need to do something with that conclusion.

There are those of us who see this as pure hubris. Particularly that you're conflating scientific result with truth and ultimately with conclusivity. It suggests a path where solutions are no longer socially discussed and implemented collectively though compromise, but rather handed down by science and enforced by rote.

[canadaduane]

Physical truth is very different from socially constructed truth. It took me 25 years, great pain, and leaving my original Mormon faith to understand this.

Money, God, and What's Good are socially constructed truths, for example.

You can converge on understanding physical truth without necessarily converging on socially constructed truth.