DEFLECT SOME MORE.

In the house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education, John K. Wilson contends, "Trust Is Not an Academic Value."  Arguably, a healthy skepticism leavened with an attitude of No Final Say in any argument (yes, even in math or physics, there might be a shorter proof of the Fermat theorem or a simpler explanation) might be a better locus of academic values.  Nowhere in his essay, though, do we see even grudging recognition that those values have themselves been tarnished by the hiring committee and in the common room.  "I'd like to see even a little acknowledgement that I, and people who shared some of my objections to business as usual, might have had it partly right."

Not from Mr Wilson.

The Yale committee refuses to come out and speak the truth: The decline in trust of higher education is primarily caused by conservatives being duped by right-wing con artists in a partisan attack on liberal institutions deemed to be the “enemy of the people.” Too many people, especially conservatives, trust the right-wing politicians, activists and commentators who have falsely told them over and over that colleges are cesspools of left-wing indoctrination suppressing conservative ideas.

Did we imagine those Gaza protests or those smug Ivy presidents "contextualizing" their students' misbehavior or the past quarter century of Student Affairs curricula that only became more intrusive during the Summer of Rage?

At best, he notes those complaints en passant.

There are real problems with free speech and viewpoint diversity on campuses, among many other needed reforms. But the problems colleges face and the solutions to them, are never revealed by a public survey about “trust.”

The entire premise behind this report is wrong. Colleges should not make “reforms” based on public opinion. Trust is not an academic value.

Academia should fundamentally oppose the concept of trust. We don’t trust scholars; we scrutinize them. We don’t trust professors; we verify or refute them. We don’t trust academics; we demand evidence and proof. We require footnotes and arguments, not credentials. We don’t trust people who put “Ph.D.” after their names on book covers; we mock them for suggesting that earning an advanced degree should cause someone to trust whatever they say.

I'm not sure about that last sentence addressing "Ph.D." on book covers, or social media signature blocks!  Moreover, those "real problems with free speech and viewpoint diversity" cause a trust problem when argument-ending assertions such as "racist" or "settled science" or "academic consensus" pinch-hit for those footnotes and corollaries.

In that way, dear reader, Mr Wilson's argument undermines itself.

If people refuse to blindly trust higher education, that would be something to celebrate. Everything we should value in higher education—academic freedom, free speech, dissent, viewpoint diversity—depends upon destroying this facile concept of trust. Debate and disagreement are valuable precisely because they undermine a false sense of trust. The greatest lesson colleges can teach to their students and the public is the importance of distrust.

Think that through: an academic enterprise in which all knowledge is contingent and there is no final say to any argument is an enterprise that has earned genuine trust.  There is a genuine sense of distrust of the academic enterprise today precisely because its leading lights have deconstructed and undermined the very foundations for genuine trust.