We can’t let the cynics ruin college

Across the political spectrum, too many Americans have lost faith in college education. Liberals and conservatives have few talking points in common, but they have come to agree on this: Campuses have replaced teaching and learning with indoctrination and political posturing.

That should trouble us all. If higher education comes to be seen first and foremost as a political endeavour America as a whole will suffer.

When education is framed as necessarily partisan, only cynicism triumphs. And cynicism is what we see growing on the left and the right in the United States. In recent years, higher education has become a punching bag for ‘‘knowing cynics’’ – conservative and progressive – who seem to discount the very possibility of rigorous inquiry that proceeds without certainty of how things might come out.

Some on the left are confident they have discovered that education was always political and the promise of social mobility has long been an illusion foisted on the poor to keep them in line. Some on the right are sure they have discovered that education is just a device to indoctrinate the young into the ways of radicalism popular among otherwise unproductive professors.

In both cases, however, these ‘‘discoveries’’ are at heart little more than the adoption of an attitude of cynicism – the price of admission to a desired group.

The cynical pose toward education isn’t based on facts. There is no evidence that recent graduates of colleges and universities are far more radical than those who preceded them, or that they have been indoctrinated into the political beliefs of their professors in significant numbers. The most popular majors at American universities – including computer science, business and communications – show no evidence of such indoctrination. Nor is there evidence that US colleges are mostly turning out selfish, would-be masters of the universe whose creed is greed. On the contrary, volunteerism is robust on college campuses, as is participation in forms of engagement that build a healthier civil society.

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, my parents, who didn’t attend college themselves, little understood what happened at institutions of higher education. But they nonetheless sacrificed a great deal so my brother and I could continue our educations after high school. They had faith that doing so would give us better chances in life. Have we reached an inflection point in this faith – a point at which higher education is no longer seen by most as a source of problem solving and opportunity creation, a vehicle for social mobility and a resource for personal thriving?

That possibility is nothing to be cynical about. The alternative to learning, to experimenting with other points of view and new domains of inquiry, is parochialism, what philosopher Richard Rorty labelled ‘‘selfprotective knowingness about the present’’.

We already see this in very public refusals to listen to people with views different from one’s own, in the rejection of basic science, and in the petty nastiness that comes from the resentment that other people are learning something you don’t know.

The American pragmatists taught that the mission of philosophy was to help people construct a sense of who they are, what matters to them and what they hope to make of their lives. That’s also a central part of the mission of higher education. But this mission, whatever forms it takes, is ultimately not about constructing a partisan position. It’s about developing selfawareness, subtlety of thought and openness to the possibility of learning from others.

The cynical dismissal of that mission, from liberals and conservatives alike, is dangerous at a time when we need adventurous, rigorous inquiry more than ever.

Roth is president of Wesleyan University and author of ‘‘Beyond the University: Why Liberal Education Matters’’.