Colleges must educate, not indoctrinate
The Spanish-American philosopher George Santayana might have been describing the current turmoil on our college campuses when he famously opined: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
College administrators have forgotten past decades when political turmoil reigned. Consider the decade of the 1960s and the Vietnam War. But it is insufficient to assess that national academic trauma without noting one reason why Vietnam-era campuses were roiling with protests: Faculty members, it was believed (and not without reason) were, to one degree or another, consultants to the Department of Defense. Likewise, faculty members and administrators shuffled back and forth between academic and government positions.
Today, the interactions between town and gown, so to speak, are somewhat different but equally disturbing. Most campuses have moved from political neutrality to “progressivism” — a position on the left of the political spectrum that, dissatisfied with mere liberalism, insists on the attaining of political goals without much concern for process nor much obeisance to the tolerance of dissenting opinions. After all, the vast majority of liberal arts faculties can fairly be described as progressive.
Leading today’s headlines is the turmoil at Columbia University, where the level of violence and threat of violence has caused the administration to move all classes off the campus and online for the balance of the current semester. And elsewhere in the nation campus unrest is bubbling up.
The Achilles Heel of our colleges today is the temptation of these institutions, despite supposedly being home to a wide diversity of opinions, to take political positions. This has been allowed to happen because academic leaders and faculties have been almost uniformly progressive. This has enabled colleges and universities to take institutional positions on some of the controversial political controversies of the day.
Escaping from this destructive philosophy has been the University of Chicago. It long ago instituted a policy of political neutrality known as “The Chicago Principles.” While this policy has been followed since the university’s founding in 1890, it has been reiterated by every administration until the present. It was confirmed in “The Kalven Report” in 1967, when the Vietnam War roiled campuses throughout the nation, and was most recently reiterated in 2014 under the leadership of President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Eric Isaacs.
The bottom line is that universities should educate students, enabling them to analyze facts and principles. It is not the university’s role to attempt to indoctrinate or to pronounce purported truths. One man’s truth, after all, is another’s falsehood.
Harvey Silverglate is a criminal defense and civil liberties lawyer and writer. He is co-author of “The Shadow University: The Betrayal of Liberty on America’s Campuses,” and co-founder and current Board member of The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (www.thefire.org).