Speaking truth to power is an art, but increasingly a lost art. This goes as much for academia as for the rest of the world. Indeed and unfortunately, much of academia reflects the world in which it functions and often makes the challenge of deepening social justice harder rather than smaller. To put it bluntly, much of academia has resorted to instrumental and naïve beliefs in innovation, technology and efficiency (which dominate the natural sciences) or (as in much of the social-economic sciences) increasingly arcane niche debates that too often revolve around virtue-signalling, methodological-theoretical wizardry or apolitical pragmatism. What we seem to have lost to a good degree – though to be sure: it was never a dominant endeavour and at the same time it has never been absent either – is the art of speaking truth to power.
