Abstract
In this article, I advocate that university education has at its core a mission to enable its communities of scholars (staff and students) to make judgements on what can be trusted, and that they, themselves, should be truth-tellers. It is about society being able to rely upon academic statements, avoiding deliberate falsehoods. This requires trust in oneself to make those judgements; an obligation to do so; and the courage to speak out when such judgements might be unpopular, risky or potentially unsafe. I suggest it should be a duty placed on academics to be truth-tellers and to educate potentially gullible others in what it is to have worthy and reliable self-trust in their own judgements.
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Notes
His opening line of that article is ‘I take education to be a moral business’ (1989: 33).
I focus on teaching as an example but much the same applies in research where an obligation of truth precedes the right for research findings to be taken seriously.
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Gibbs, P. Why academics should have a duty of truth telling in an epoch of post-truth?. High Educ 78, 501–510 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0354-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-018-0354-y