Tag: academic freedom

Educational Freedom and the Forever War

Jonathan Wilson

I was in high school, preparing for college, when the U.S. government declared a “global war on terror[ism].” President George W. Bush described this as a “war to save civilization itself” from intolerance. Unlike terrorists, he said in November 2001, “we value education” and “the right to speak our minds,” and “we respect people of all faiths and welcome the free practice of religion.”

How has that worked out, from the vantage point of life inside the United States? Has “terror” been eradicated here in the “homeland,” more than twenty years (and $8 trillion) after that war began? Have we saved education, free expression, and the peaceful coexistence of all faiths?

Let’s talk about that from the perspective of American educators and students. Let’s talk about the experience of a generation growing up under the threat of school shootings and similar attacks on other public places, which are the face of terror in their time.

Continue reading “Educational Freedom and the Forever War” →

When Students Change Each Other’s Minds, It’s Called Friendship

Jonathan Wilson

This weekend, the political scientist Yascha Mounk posed a provocative question on Twitter: “What are the top things universities could do to encourage a culture of free debate and inquiry, not just in the classroom but also in dorms and dining halls?”

(Judging by the context, this question may have been prompted in part by a new “campus expression” report from Heterodox Academy. I discussed the problems with a previous report from the same alarmist study in March 2021.)

Here’s the thing: Because my academic work centers on teaching first-year college students, I ponder issues like this a lot, and I believe Mounk is on the wrong trail.

The thing most people asking this question are actually probing for? It’s not debate. It’s friendship.

Setting aside the intellectual shifts that can happen just because of spending time around new kinds of people, when extracurricular life changes minds, it’s typically because students are forming real friendships, in which important conversations happen organically—not because of a “culture of free debate.”

All those people who wistfully remember (or wish they remember) late nights in each other’s dorm rooms, talking excitedly about the problems of the world? The experience they’re describing is friendship.

When a conversation about something you’re reading or discussing in class spills out into the dining hall, the quad, or the apartment? Why, yes, I do believe you’ve been making friends.

The folks you aren’t afraid of offending when you say something unpopular that needs to be said? They’re either strangers you don’t expect to hang around anyway, acquaintances you’ve already given up on, or, crucially, friends who will trust you enough to listen to what you’re saying.

People who will, in the middle of a busy life, actually sit still while you carefully identify your premises and show why you think they lead to a controversial conclusion? They’re almost certainly people who care about you as a person.

And when you keep having the same argument with the same person over and over, not because you love degrading yourself but because you’re subtly shifting each other’s views over time? “As iron sharpens iron,” you’re honing the mind of your—what’s that word the proverb uses?—oh, that’s right—your friend.

The contemporary world is full of free debate and inquiry. We’re drowning in it. Public faith in democracy—and in the value of debate—is dying from it. When we’ve got the entire Internet at our disposal, a culture of free debate and inquiry is the least exceptional thing college can offer.

What intellectually curious people really want from college is friendship. The kind that can change the mind as well as heal the spirit.

This same weekend, the culture critic Touré posed another observation on Twitter that I believe is directly related to the fears our intellectuals express about college students: “After 35 it’s easier to get a new spouse than it is to get a new close friend.”

Now, I’m not sure that’s literally true, but the anguish it expresses is recognizable.

And I suspect—though of course, I can’t prove—that when aging college graduates like Yascha Mounk, my fellow geriatric millennial, bemoan the supposed intolerance of today’s young people, it often has a lot to do with how increasingly elusive that kind of friendship seems to us.

Space for Thinking, Space for Acting

Jonathan Wilson

Campuses are complicated spaces, because they aren’t just one kind of space: There’s the classroom, the dorm, the public space that is the campus. Then there’s what we could call clubs, support centers—identity based or based on social categories or political interests. It’s a terrible mistake to confuse all of these and imagine that the classroom or the public space of the campus is the same as your home. …

Academic freedom needs to be appreciated as a collective right of the faculty to be free of interference in determining what we research and teach. We’re accountable to our disciplines, our peers. We can’t just do anything and have it called quality scholarship or teaching. But the idea of academic freedom is that we are free of external interference. Free speech is different. It’s an individual right for the civic and public sphere. It’s not about research and teaching. It’s not even about the classroom. It’s what you can say in public without infringement by others or the state. ….

[I]f we just focus on this generation’s political style—and we have to remember youth style always aggravates the elders—we ignore their rage at the world they’ve inherited, and their desperation for a more livable and just one, and their critique of our complacency. That is part of what is going on in the streets and on our campuses. But that remains different from educating that rage and helping young people learn not just the deep histories but even the contemporary practices that will make them more powerful thinkers and actors in this world. If they’re right about our complacency, what we still have to offer is knowledge and instruction and some space in a classroom to think.

—Wendy Brown, interviewed in “Why Critics of Angry Woke College Kids Are Missing the Point,” New York Times Magazine, May 1, 2022

“Opinions Are Cheap”

Jonathan Wilson
In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education

The Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors just arrived in my mailbox, and in it I find an AAUP manifesto (dated January 2020) called “In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education.”

The AAUP is noteworthy as an academic professional organization that has consistently attempted to keep structural first principles at the top of its agenda. I’m proud to be an AAUP member.

“In Defense of Knowledge,” though, is a complicated document because it attempts to expose and reframe a set of complex misconceptions. I don’t think it’s perfect, by any means. Partly because it’s such a bold and explicit statement, there’s something in it for almost anybody to disagree with.

For me, for example, the statement’s implicit complacency about the U.S. military-industrial-educational state is questionable. “How can we develop a credible foreign policy, ensure effective diplomacy, and prepare our military,” the statement demands, “when area studies and foreign language programs are curtailed, eliminated, or made subject to political intrusion?” I don’t think you need to be a pacifist to wonder, “Prepare our military for what?” And the statement is explicitly nationalistic in other ways that many academics will dissent from far more strongly than I will.

But I applaud the AAUP’s attempt to define what, exactly, colleges and universities are good for, and to show why they deserve broad-based public support. In fact, I think it’s crucial for everyone working in higher education today to make an explicit defense of their work—all their work—as a service to a free and democratic community.

Here are some of the passages that I found especially provocative and potentially useful for future reference:

It is not only research that is affected [by political attacks on academic independence]; teaching is as well. Teaching is, after all, the transmission of knowledge and a means of its production. A narrowing focus on vocational training, combined with attacks on the liberal arts and general education, closes off access to the varieties of knowledge and innovative thinking needed to participate meaningfully in our democracy. …

There are, of course, endless philosophical debates about the meaning of ‘knowledge.’ For our purposes, however, we need define it only as those understandings of the world upon which we rely because they are produced by the best methods at our disposal. The expert knowledge to which we refer is not produced merely by immediate sense impressions. …

These [academic] disciplines cumulatively produce understandings that are continuously tested and revised by communities of trained scholars. Expert knowledge is a process of constant exploration, revision, and adjudication. …

Academic freedom rests on a paradox. There must be freedom of inquiry, but that freedom must always be subject to peer judgment and evaluation. …

Colleges and universities deserve public support to the extent that American society requires expert knowledge. Expert knowledge has fueled American progress. It has checked ideological fantasies and partisan distortions. It has provided a common ground on which those with competing political visions can come together constructively to address common problems. Without expert knowledge, we lose our ability to know the past, to shape the future, and to acknowledge the differences and similarities we share as human beings.

—American Association of University Professors, “In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education,” January 2020

As they say, I recommend reading the whole thing.

Conservatives and Liberals Are Different (and Both Thrive in College)

Jonathan Wilson2 Comments

Like a lot of other Americans, I grew up in a conservative subculture that assumed college would be a hostile environment. Many of my acquaintances took for granted that America’s overwhelmingly liberal or left-wing professors are tempted to discriminate against conservative students.

I have reason to believe this expectation hasn’t gone away. Actually, it seems to be more widely shared by conservative Americans today than it was then. It’s a big part (though only part) of what people are talking about when they debate liberal or left-wing “bias” on campus. But is there evidence for it, beyond anecdotes and rumors?

This spring, a team of researchers led by a self-described “lifelong Republican” released a working paper called “Is Collegiate Political Correctness Fake News?: Relationships between Grades and Ideology.” (A working paper presents research results that have not yet been formally vetted by a peer-reviewed publication.)

Analyzing survey responses from more than seven thousand students who attended U.S. four-year universities from 2009 to 2013, the researchers (Matthew Woessner, Robert Maranto, and Amanda Thompson) looked for relationships among students’ self-reported political views and grade point averages.

What they found was … complicated.

Continue reading “Conservatives and Liberals Are Different (and Both Thrive in College)” →

Religious Beliefs in History: Viewpoints versus Conclusions

Jonathan Wilson

cornwallvillechurch-farmersmuseum

In the wake of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History’s recent annual conference, L.D. Burnett presents historians in the society with a question that relates to teaching as well as research. It’s a question about treating religious ideas with respect:

[S]hould we treat religious thought differently, as a special case, from other kinds of thought? Should we refrain from critiquing arguments as racist, or sexist, or anti-gay, or anti-woman, or anti-intellectual, because they proceed from a position of deep religious conviction?

That was the suggestion offered to me in conversation at USIH. …

These are the kinds of questions I have to think about as the editor of this blog. For, at the conference, someone suggested to me that religiously conservative intellectual historians feel unwelcome in this space.

I wasn’t a party to the original conversation and can’t address its particular context or nuances. But the question is important, and I think it comes up a lot in different forms.

For example, this question is part of the subtext of current academic debates over “viewpoint diversity.” (I hate that term, but it’s fairly widely used now.) In my understanding of the term, a viewpoint isn’t the same thing as a scholarly conclusion, so viewpoint diversity is different from what academics usually mean by “academic freedom.” It describes a much greater degree of intellectual openness and tolerance.

Continue reading “Religious Beliefs in History: Viewpoints versus Conclusions” →

Adjunctification Beneath the Numbers: The Rs and the Rest

Jonathan Wilson

The AAUP released a brief analysis yesterday—“Data Snapshot: Contingent Faculty in US Higher Ed”—with the warning that it demonstrates academic freedom is under threat in American colleges. In truth, I think, the analysis points toward a larger structural problem.

A supermajority of U.S. college instructors already have been denied the academic-freedom protections of tenure for many years now. It’s long been a myth that college instructors can speak their minds without any anxiety; that’s a privilege of the few (lately, about one fifth of us at any given time).

The larger problem the AAUP’s analysis may highlight is the vast and probably growing difference between what work means at the largest research universities (the so-called R1 and R2 schools) and every other kind of institution—i.e., the colleges where most American faculty members currently work. This difference distorts the public’s view of higher education, and thus our public debates about its future, at a time of political upheaval, and when 73% of America’s ruling party think academia is “heading in the wrong direction.” It thus places the entire higher-education system at risk.

Continue reading “Adjunctification Beneath the Numbers: The Rs and the Rest” →

The Most Misunderstood Purpose of Higher Ed

Jonathan Wilson

epistemologybooks

Ask undergraduate students about the reasons for college, and you’ll probably get a mix of answers heavy in “to get a good job” and “to learn.” Ask academics and policy makers, and the answers will include “critical thinking skills.” And if you ask what makes a college education unique, critical thinking may top the list.

The truly distinctive goal of higher education, however, rarely gets much discussion.

Continue reading “The Most Misunderstood Purpose of Higher Ed” →

Free Minds at Middlebury

Jonathan Wilson

MiddleburyCollege-

Shawna Shapiro, a professor at Middlebury College—where Charles Murray was shouted down during a talk last year—has supervised an undergraduate research project on Middlebury students’ attitudes toward free speech and ideological differences. What the researchers have found might seem surprising—unless you know many college students.

The project is called “Middlebury Students Engaging Across Difference”:

Students want to engage with ideological difference. As many as 89 percent of all survey participants, including 83 percent of left-leaning students (who made up 71 percent of the sample), said that it was “important” or “very important” to them to have conversations about controversial issues with people who have a viewpoint distinct from their own. …

Many students (58 percent) are having such conversations on at least a weekly basis. We asked those we surveyed to note all of the locations where such interactions tend to occur. They reported that they are more prevalent over a meal (78 percent) or in the residence halls (65 percent) than in classrooms (53 percent) or at public lectures (38 percent).

The majority (almost 80 percent) reported that such conversations, when they do occur, can be difficult to navigate. Many survey participants said the discussion too quickly devolves into a debate where, as one put it, “We’re talking at people instead of with them.” An interviewee said it’s easy to forget to “see the person as a person and not just a clump of ideas.” Students expressed a keen desire for interactions centered on empathy—not just “being right.” Many said they don’t feel heard, but they also admitted that they struggle to listen fully to others as well. …

A further complication is that fear of social marginalization is pervasive, particularly on a small, residential campus like ours. “The fear of ostracization is terrifying … of being the only one and a social outcast,” one interviewee explained. Some students claimed that this fear created a dynamic of “bandwagoning” in which “many people just seem to agree with one another for the sake of having the correct opinion.” One student framed the situation as “rhetorical gymnastics.”

Unsurprisingly, some students decide only to engage in these conversations with close friends, recognizing that probably limits the range of perspectives represented since “friend groups … often have similar ideas and opinions [as] mine.” Others feel differently: “I do not want to create a conflict with friends,” one said, adding, “It is also difficult to be in a relationship with someone when you disagree on most things political.” Students in this latter group expressed a preference for conversations in a more structured environment like the classroom.

I have no idea how representative the sample is, and of course this could capture only how Middlebury students think they think. But eighty survey respondents would be about three percent of the Middlebury student population. In any case, if this description is accurate, the typical respondent sounds … pretty much like everybody else who talks about politics under free conditions in a small community.

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Image: Postcard, “Lower Campus, Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont,” mid-20th century. Tichnor Brothers Postcard Collection, Boston Public Library.