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Wednesday, June 01, 2005
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INTRODUCING DISSONANCE INTO COERCIVE HARMONIZATION In a review of a new book about universities and free speech, Peter Berkowitz considers the depressing and alarming state of the modern American university. Our universities are ailing. Many, including most of our elite universities, have abandoned the notion that a liberal arts education is constituted by a solid core, that is, a basic knowledge of the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences that all educated people should possess. Berkowitz correctly begins by isolating the core core problem, if you will - universities don’t know what universities are anymore. Furthermore, for all their earnest words about the beauty and necessity of multicultural education, university administrators and faculty preside over a curriculum that routinely permits students to graduate without acquiring reading, writing, and speaking fluency in any foreign language, let alone competence in Chinese, the language of the most populous country in the world; Hindi, the most widely spoken language in the world’s largest democracy; or Arabic, the language of Islam, a religion that commands an estimated 1.4 billion adherents worldwide. High tuitions, and the belief that because they’re paying them students are entitled to high grades, is behind this one. Instead of a substantive multicultural knowledge acquisition that can easily be measured, as in the ability to speak, write, and read a foreign language, universities offer easy A courses in self-righteous emotivism about race, class, and gender. Note as well the irony that the demographic trend at the most elite colleges is toward dramatic segregation of the student population from poor people. Incoming classes at Harvard and similar places are getting richer every year. The result is the absurdity of a group of extremely wealthy people (many of whom come from private schools where they never saw poor or middle class people either) studying cultural representations of people they will never see on a campus that boasts of its diverse student population. And perhaps most alarmingly, those who lead our universities have done little to oppose — often they have caved in to — fellow administrators and faculty who would sacrifice free and open inquiry to tender sensibilities and partisan politics. This is the cowardly emotivizing of the university again, about which UD has written a good deal on this blog. What forces have driven universities to clamp down on the free play of ideas and to collaborate in the vilification of moral and political opinions that depart from campus orthodoxies? One factor involves a transformation in the idea of the university. The last 25 years have witnessed the return of what Downs calls the “proprietary university,” which sees its central mission not as the transmission of knowledge and the pursuit of truth but rather as the inculcation of a specific — in this case ostensibly progressive — moral and political agenda. This is how you end up with ed school “dispositional” requirements and university-wide “cultural competency” mandates -- First, you let the reality of what a university is disappear; you then replace that reality with coercive, self-righteous bullshit; you then sit back and watch the university become one of the few institutions in free-speech-loving America which incubates Orwellianism. “Outside our universities free speech sentiment is strong and can serve as a vital resource for those who will continue the struggle in the coming years to teach our disordered universities what our universities should be teaching students and exemplifying for the nation,” writes Berkowitz. Pathetic, isn’t it, that this crucial institution, in principle so dedicated to free thought that it features a form of intellectual protection - tenure - no other American institution features, has itself become one of the least free arenas in the country. Berkowitz reviews some of “the trends in contemporary social and political thought that have informed the progressive repudiation of liberal principles on campus”: …Catharine MacKinnon argue[s] that the oppression of women is itself a product of liberal commitments to fair process (notwithstanding that never in history have women enjoyed the freedom and equality achieved in contemporary liberal democracies). Critical legal theorists maintain the same about the oppression of the poor, and critical race theorists press the claim concerning the oppression of minorities (notwithstanding the reduction in the number and poverty of the poor and the unprecedented inclusion of minorities in public life in liberal democracies). At the same time, many campus theorists drew inspiration from Algerian social critic Frantz Fanon, whose The Wretched of the Earth argued that sympathy with those who suffer is a higher priority than respect for individual rights (even though respect for individual rights has proven over time the most successful means for alleviating suffering). Meanwhile, postmodern critics, believing themselves to be following Nietzsche, argued that individual rights were fictions invented by the strong to control the weak (never mind that Nietzsche decried modern liberalism as an invention of the weak to tyrannize the strong). Berkowitz lists the lessons to be drawn from the ongoing scandal of unfree speech at American universities: First, intolerance of dissent on campus, notwithstanding the language of concern for minorities and women in which it is typically couched, bespeaks a failure of imagination, an inability to appreciate opinions that differ from one’s own. It also reflects a demeaning stereotype according to which minorities and women are not capable of fending for themselves in classroom discussion and wider campus life by responding to utterances they find wrong, irritating, or insulting with better arguments and suppler words. Second, free speech is not one value among many that a university legitimately pursues, but rather is a principle fundamental to the university’s central mission and so must be curtailed only in extraordinary circumstances, such as direct incitement to physical harm or violence. Collegiality and consensus are of course important, but at universities both should form around the principle of free speech for all, and particularly for those with whom one disagrees. Third, the administration’s coercive harmonization of opinion on campus and disregard for the essentials of due process cannot succeed without a compliant and thereby complicit faculty. Fourth, the experience of the past 25 years abundantly demonstrates that universities cannot be trusted to enforce speech codes and administer disciplinary procedures that do away with the essentials of due process. This is not necessarily because administrators and professors are less responsible or virtuous than ordinary citizens but because they plainly are no more responsible or virtuous. The phrase “coercive harmonization” is haunting, with its echoes of the Hate Weeks in 1984 and the parades of socialist youth that Sabena recalls with such loathing in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Since the university’s essential malaise is its lack of self-awareness, its loss of definition, substance, and purpose, every university, Berkowitz rightly maintains, should have a serious core curriculum in place of the trivial distribution requirement system that now dominates: Some works of literature and philosophy are constitutive of Western civilization, and some historical epochs have defined our identities. Some knowledge of economics and political science is crucial to understanding the forces that shape contemporary society. Some knowledge of the natural sciences is necessary to acquire the discipline of the scientific method, to better understand the operation of the remarkable technology with which we have surrounded ourselves, and to appreciate the intricacy of the natural world of which we are a part. But in order for this to happen, presidents and trustees must have “the confidence and clout to shift resources.” If you want to see how far wrong a university lacking that confidence can go, read this comment from an editorial in an Oregon newspaper in response to the University of Oregon’s proposed cultural competency mandate: “The diversity office already costs $1.5 million a year, and the grotesque document it produced this school year would cost millions more to implement. All to turn the U of O into a national laughingstock.” That’s the voice of the world outside the university, the world that knows coercive harmonization when it sees it and is laughing at us. If American universities want to find themselves again, Berkowitz concludes, they must “staunchly refuse to politicize the transmission of knowledge and the pursuit of truth.” |