Universities are meant to be free markets for inquiry. Throughout history, when politicians get involved, they rarely are writes John McCaa.
Michael Hogue
Few cherished practices repeatedly breathe new life into a republic more than freedom of speech. The right to say what you believe, engage in discourse and defend your perspective in a public forum is fundamental to American identity.
And yet particularly in our libraries, schools, colleges and universities, we lately seem hesitant to extend that right to the educators and scholars who spend years studying the subjects in which they specialize.
In recent months, Texas A&M University and Texas Tech University systems have established new restrictions on what faculty can teach about gender, sexuality and race.
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At Tech, American literature Professor Sara Spurgeon told Texas Public Radio, faculty in the English department can no longer teach texts written by gay authors, “We have even been told to censor novels with gay characters in them.”
In College Station, the same report tells of modification of hundreds of course syllabi. Philosophy professor Martin Peterson claimed, “I was told that I’m not allowed to include reading from Plato in my philosophy course, and the alleged reason is that Plato discusses what the university considers to be gender ideology.”
Other public colleges and universities such as the University of Texas system and the University of North Texas have also announced curricula changes, as have universities in states with Republican-controlled legislatures nationwide.
This is all in response to new state laws giving more control over courses and content to university boards of regents. The new measures follow years of complaints by conservatives that faculties have been indoctrinating students.
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“College professors have increasingly pushed woke agendas,” Gov. Greg Abbott has argued. “They have too much influence over who is hired to educate our kids.”
Abbott may have a point. Plenty of sources, including many within academia, acknowledge that university faculties tend to lean left politically. And they don’t always keep those perspectives to themselves. The watchdog group FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) has documented hundreds of cases of on-campus censorship from all political perspectives.
But if Abbott has accurately identified the germ of a problem, his solution seems to be more infection.
Opponents call it censorship. State law says each university must “preserve institutional independence and to defend its right to manage its own affairs,” without dictates from the capitol.
Likewise, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges or SACSCOC accredits all three major university systems in Texas and the University of North Texas. Its guidelines demand that faculty have primary responsibility for the “content, quality and effectiveness” of the curriculum. While it would appear the new policies violate that standard, the commission so far has not moved to challenge them.
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Speaking to Texas Public Radio, Todd Wolfson, president of the American Association of University Professors, worried the new parameters move education and the production of knowledge in a dangerous direction. “If you can’t be a critical thinker, you can’t critically analyze the statements coming from either the media or your political and elected leaders,” Wolfson said.
Merry Go Round
Truth is, we have been here before … and more than once.
In 1944, clashes between University of Texas regents and the school’s president, Homer Rainey, over academic freedom and allegations of permitting “subversive and perverted” reading material ended in Rainey’s dismissal.
Several years later, a member of Indiana’s State Textbook Commission called for the removal of references to the story of Robin Hood, calling it part of a communist plot. “They want to stress it because he robbed the rich and gave to the poor.”
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That same year in Texas, the Minute Women of the U.S.A. pressured school districts to check libraries and monitor teachers for “anti-American influences.” Member Myrtle Glasscock Hance insisted San Antonio’s public library brand books whose authors were suspected of communist sympathies with a red stamp. She compiled a list of 500 “troubling” books and listed them in a pamphlet entitled “REaD READING.”
And it did not stop there. Someone suggested keeping a record of people who checked out the books and passing the names on to the FBI or publishing them in the local newspaper.
Such worries go in cycles. Now they are back.
Competition of Ideas
While Dwight Eisenhower jokingly defined an intellectual as someone “who takes more words than is necessary to say more than he knows.” He and his presidential successor John Kennedy understood, “The battles of the next few years will probably not be waged with missiles or thermonuclear bombs – our armaments must be ideas, and the battle must be for men’s minds.”
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History has borne them out. And it’s not just the culture war battles between the political left and right that should concern us, but the struggle for freedom, prosperity and democratic ideals worldwide.
To win that competition in the future means pursuing truth no matter where it is claimed and discarding myths or falsehoods no matter where we find them. There is no better arena for that intellectual rivalry than the university classroom led by an accomplished scholar. It is there that critical ideas should be shared, honed and defended, and when proven unworthy, discarded. All while maintaining respect for those with whom we disagree.
All ideas are not equal, and history is full of bad ones: slavery, eugenics and Germany’s national socialism come to mind. But over time, the best ideas tend to win out so long as they compete in a neutral marketplace of ideas without government putting its finger on the scales.
That’s why this newspaper recently endorsed a decision by Southern Methodist University to declare its political neutrality.
“Our differences may lead to disagreement or even offense at times, but they also add to the richness of our intellectual pursuits,” SMU President Jay Hartzell wrote in the announcement. “The opportunity to wrestle with challenging ideas while being confronted with differing, well-reasoned, and supported points of view is part of what makes a top university such a special place to work.”
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His statement came with no announcement about canceling classes or limiting academic freedom.
It’s not just that competition produces the best ideas. It’s the struggle itself that’s important for learning.
James Baldwin once said, “Education demands a certain daring, a certain independence of mind.” Unless it involves engaging students in critical thought about uncomfortable topics, our education system isn’t doing its work.
The late entertainer James Brown may have said it best in 1969, when he sang, “I Don’t Want Nobody to Give Me Nothing (Open Up the Door, I’ll Get It Myself).”
Today, it is in the university classroom where students can practice independence of mind — where we can erase the all too frequent practice of enjoying, “the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”
That attitude is the reason only one country in all human history has put people on the moon and safely returned them to earth, and is about to do it again.
We should want the brightest minds in every other country to wake up every morning, look our way and see that the lights are on in American universities, that our students and their professors are busy conquering new intellectual territory.
We should want those brightest minds to come and study here and, in the heightened competition, motivate our brightest home-grown students to work harder and reach higher.
Take the Blinders Off
A university education should expose each student to a wide variety of viewpoints, even those with which they might disagree. After all, this is college, not church.
Now, as in the past, fear and politics are behind intellectual restrictions imposed on professors and scholars at our public universities and colleges.
Those who object to the study of ancient Greece, Rome, the Renaissance and the Reformation as too distant from our day or who oppose examining the works of the West’s most recognized writers because of their defense of practices such as slavery, the subjugation of women or indigenous people, cut themselves off from determining how were arrived at today.
At the same time, those who prefer limiting or avoiding today’s most hotly contested subjects such gay rights, racism or political ideology, or hope to restrict student exposure to key texts and authors on those subjects, render those students helpless in searching for answers to the world into which they will graduate.
I believe in competition and in no place should it be more intellectually intense and respected than in the university classroom. That cannot happen with professors and academics unable to pursue and share their scholarship as they see fit.
While we prize unity in support of our first principles, we have always had and will always have our differences. It is in how we manage those differences that we measure the strength or weakness of our country.