The Culture Wars, nursing, and academic freedom 1 | What did nur sing do in the great culture war s? Orthodoxy whether of the right or of the left is the graveyard of creativity.-Chinua Achebe, 'Anthills of the Savannah' (Achebe, 1988, p. 100). An iconic 1915 propaganda poster shows a little girl asking her guiltridden father, who clearly has not enlisted, "Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?". Would today's poster ask every nurse and nursing academic, "What did YOU do in the great Culture Wars?". Culture Wars between social groups for moral and epistemological ascendency pose threats to academia and human progress. In this study we outline some of these threats and their potential impact upon nursing and nurse education. In times of increasing disharmony and division, we seek not to stoke, but to help end the Culture Wars and to reclaim scholarly dialogue. In restating the importance of academic freedom, reason, and evidence, we are acutely aware that the Culture War's trenches show the damage already wrought. The intellectual life of much of the world is a quasi-wasteland, razed by the narcissistic individualism of 'identity politics' that in the late Fisher's (2013) phrase: "is driven by a priest's desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant's desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster's desire to be one of the in-crowd". 2 | D efen ding ac ademic freedom in nur sing Freedom of thought and expression are cornerstones of the academy and central to nursing scholarship. Nurses have a professional responsibility to raise, discuss, and challenge new and existing ideas (UNESCO, 2017): "without constriction by prescribed doctrines", yet creeping restrictions are a growing concern. Academic freedom has never been absolute and clear limitations rightly exist (Joint Committee on Human Rights, 2018). While academic freedom is largely respected and valued, conflicts with popular social attitudes are not merely hypothetical. Nursing has never been 'apolitical' and many agree that the profession should become more visible and prominent in public discourse and affairs. When "facts become secondary to feeling; expertise and vision to ersatz emotional connection" (Smith, 2016), it is even more important that nurses can freely explore tensions between truth and ideology without fear of reprisal. Furthermore, it is unacceptable that 'political nurses' must hold only prescribed beliefs, and that either 'right wing' or 'left wing' nurses
