“Viewpoints” is a place on Chapelboro where local people are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues affecting our community. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work, reporting or approval of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com. If you’d like to contribute a column on an issue you’re concerned about, interesting happenings around town, reflections on local life — or anything else — send a submission to [email protected].
Natural Disruptors: Why We Need Great Universities
A perspective from Andrew Foster and Kathrine Robinson
Recently, the New York Times published a discussion about the current state of higher education in America among three of its opinion writers Frank Bruni, Ross Douthat and Lawrence Summers. Lawrence Summers is also a former President of Harvard University and Frank Bruni is also a Professor of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University. The conversation was titled “Are We Past Peak Harvard” and, at least as I read it, was a fairly uncritical rehashing of what have become standard conservative critiques of higher education in America.
It was disturbing, though not particularly surprising, to have no critical analysis – or even requirement of factual evidence – of these critiques. For example, early in the conversation Douthat asserted “…it’s true that before Trump’s election there was already a retreat from the peak of wokeness, when it was basically impossible to be hired as a faculty member at many elite universities unless you were willing to sign ideological loyalty oaths to a very distinctive flavor of progressive politics.” In response, Bruni says “That’s totally fair, Ross. And what is happening should have happened earlier.”
I have taught at Duke Law School for more than 20 years and never once has a candidate been required to sign a loyalty oath of any kind, much less to a “very distinctive flavor of progressive politics.” Of course, this doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened but I’m skeptical and those who make these charges should be asked to support them with evidence and not just vehemence.
All of this, of course, is just the norm in the broader effort to discredit higher education. What stuck with me from this discussion, however, was one statement by Summers. At the end of the discussion, he said “…[elite universities] need to signal reorientations toward the pursuit of truth and away from pursuits of social justice, toward the veneration of excellence and away from mutual self-esteem and toward diversity of perspective and away from identity politics.”
Undoubtedly it would be worthwhile to engage with this statement on its face: have universities actually oriented themselves toward social justice, mutual self-esteem, and identity politics? If so, how have they done so and to what extent? If so, has this really undermined a commitment to truth, excellence and diversity of thought? Again, in my more than 20 years of teaching at Duke Law School, I have not seen any reorientation away from these core commitments, but I know my experience is just one data point. If there is real evidence of a widespread abandonment of these values, I would like to see it.
More importantly, however, is that something important is missing from this vision of the purposes to which universities should be oriented. Duke University’s former president, Richard Broadhead, described a core purpose of the university as seeking “knowledge in the service of society.” I always appreciated this framing of our purpose because it is both extraordinarily aspirational and concretely grounded.
One definition of knowledge is “the sum of what’s known: the body of truth, information, and principles acquired by humankind.” It is an awesome, inspiring, and worthwhile pursuit to expand the sum of what’s known to humankind. Even more valuable is to make that knowledge accessible and useful in ways that make life better for the broader society.
How do we do this work? Not through loyalty oaths and the imposition of one ideology or another on our campuses, but by identifying important questions and rigorously investigating them to see what we learn. These questions can be organized into at least three categories.
Eternal questions: these are questions that humans have asked throughout our history and with which we continue to wrestle. A few examples: what is the meaning of life? What is art and its meaning in our lives? What is the relationship between freedom and responsibility? It is unlikely that we will ever find answers to these questions that are widely accepted, but the process of constantly engaging them enriches our common understanding of what it means to be human and of our place in the world.
Instrumental questions: these are the kinds of questions that we need to answer to advance our skills, enhance our relationships, improve our health, develop new technologies, or advance society in any number of other ways. A few examples: what method is the most effective for developing reading comprehension? How do spreadsheets work and in what contexts are they most effective for analyzing and presenting information? What treatments are most effective for slowing the growth of colon cancer? These kinds of questions generally have answers but as they are adopted and put into practice, those answers tend to lead to a new set of instrumental questions; thus, driving a virtuous cycle of incremental innovation.
Contested questions: these are the kinds of questions that help inform and shape the debates around difficult political, social, religious, economic or other similar issues that are central to social organization. A few current examples: does the regular use of social media result in increased levels of loneliness in adolescents? To what extent are zoning regulations a primary cause of housing unaffordability? Are members of households in which a gun is present more or less likely to experience gun violence than members of households in which no guns are present? In some cases, whether to ask these questions is itself a point of dispute, but in almost all cases, the answers to these questions will be complicated, uncertain, and may not resolve the core issue. Nonetheless, the knowledge gained through the exploration of contested questions enables us to make reasonable choices and to take informed action in the face of uncertainty.
Though related, there is an important difference between pursuing truth and seeking knowledge. Truth is defined with reference to fact. In other words, if something is factual, then we say it is true. If universities were limited to only pursuing truth, they would stagnate, teaching only what is known and established. Missing would be the search for deeper meaning, for the undiscovered, for what is next.
It is this, the resistance to complacently accepting and uncritically perpetuating only that which is currently known or understood, that makes universities indispensable. The noble purpose of the university is to push for a fuller, more complete and accurate understanding of the true nature of things. This quest to better understand everything from the essential nature of the human condition to the behavior of sub-atomic particles to the most efficient way to cultivate crops relies on a continuous commitment to rigorously questioning the conventional wisdom and having both the freedom and the courage to take that inquiry where it leads.
This process, the search for knowledge and its application in service to society, is frequently disruptive of the current order, including systems of power. For this reason, universities have long been the target of the modern conservative movement. In 1971, Lewis F. Powell, Jr., later a Justice of the United Supreme Court, wrote a memo for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in which he identified American universities as a primary risk to the future of big business and the free enterprise system. His recommendation for pushing back on the calls for regulation, labor rights, progressive taxation and other similar reforms that were actively being considered at the time was for the Chamber and its members to, among other steps, finance a broad-based counter movement of scholars dedicated to advancing free market ideology. But he noted that “[t]his is a long road and not one for the fainthearted.”
The current moment has given those who hold entrenched power a new opportunity to seek to undermine institutions of higher education in an effort to blunt the disruptive and democratizing force that they can have in American society. Certainly, colleges and universities are not above criticism. As Bruni, Douthat, and Summers briefly discuss many are far too exclusive and the costs of higher education have grown absurdly high. Taking on these problems in order to make higher education more affordable and more broadly accessible is urgent and important work.
But these are not the core critiques that institutions of higher education face from their conservative critics. Instead, they face spurious charges of ideological conformity, reverse racism, and antisemitism. While little to no evidence of these claims is presented it is gaining traction because their proponents are relentless and often, as was the case in the discussion distributed by the New York Times, there is little pushback, request for justification, or demand for evidence.
Hopefully, the tide is turning in this debate, and more universities and academics are following Harvard’s lead and standing up for themselves. If we do make this case, then perhaps the long road that Powell saw facing those who wanted to blunt the ability of universities to do their core work will be pushed back another sixty years. For those of us who care about both knowledge, and how it can be used to serve and improve society, that is an outcome worth fighting for.
“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.
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