THE EPISTEMIC CLOSURE IS STIFLING.

In the wake of Wednesday's stupid and futile gesture in Washington, the brain-brothers of Dean Wormer are all over Inside Higher Education.  We'll start with Southern California's William Tierney, bringing the condescension.

I have never looked to the National Association of Manufacturers for guidance about the structure of democracy. I have never thought the Business Roundtable was particularly amenable to individuals such as President-elect Biden. Nevertheless, their statements were admirable and garnered a good deal of commentary. I do not doubt that the vast majority of us in higher education reacted with horror, shame and disgust at the events that transpired because of Trump’s call for armed insurrection. Change, however, has to begin with a meaningful dialogue about what our role has been in enabling the events that have occurred. The echo chamber of Facebook where our friends like what we write and we like what they write gives us a sense that we are at least voicing our contempt for those who wish to destroy democracy. We must do more.

If you seek an echo chamber, look no further than Inside Higher Education, particularly since they discontinued comments on their posts. What has it been, fifteen years of me documenting the distortion of "meaningful dialogue" into precisely the echo chamber higher education has become. Consider Colleen Flaherty's "A Failure to Educate," in which the failure is right there in her essay.

Early Thursday, the Association of American Colleges and Universities issued a statement saying its pro-liberal education mission took on new urgency following the Capitol attack. “The task of an education allied to democracy is not simply to help students gain knowledge and skills,” the group said. “It is also to assist students in forming the habits of heart and mind that liberate their thinking and equip them for, and dispose them to, the creation of a more just and inclusive society through civic involvement.”

Lynn Pasquerella, AAC&U’s president, later told Inside Higher Ed that if colleges and universities are to develop the “independent and critical thinkers necessary to ensure that democracy is more than a tyranny of numbers,” they must affirm that a liberal education helps students -- citizens -- discern the truth, recognize and digest narratives, and promote “an understanding that the world is a collection of interdependent yet inequitable systems,” among other aims.

Catch the question-begging in both paragraphs. It's standard Student Affairs boilerplate, and yet it's rhetoric that's off-putting to people who might think that the thinking of the Scottish Enlightenment might be more helpful than the rubric of liberating tolerance, and it's guaranteed to antagonize anybody who might be a strong Trump loyalist.  That is, what Mr Tierney hopes for will be invalidated by what higher education does.

Democracy is an idea founded on the belief that through dialogue we will reach understanding and a decision about the way forward. The fundamental purpose of our colleges and universities is to model how to have difficult dialogues and what viable solutions to particular problems might be based on facts.

And yet, the dissident sites, such as Campus Reform or The College Fix or Minding the Campus or College Insurrection never lack for material pointing out precisely how the same people who profess these beliefs do everything they can to suppress dissenting views.  Read John Kroger's essay, dear reader, and ask yourself how much of what he now misses has been deliberately deconstructed over the past fifty years.

The survival of democracy in America depends on the existence of a well-educated electorate: voters who can tell the difference between truth and lies, between honesty and demagoguery. It will require voters who are wise and critically aware consumers of social media. It will require voters schooled in American constitutional and democratic values. It will require voters who understand both the greatness and the failings of American democracy evident in our history. And it will require students who understand the very real and concrete differences between alternative forms of government. I am not sure studying these issues can be optional anymore. Can an understanding of history, politics and rational decision making remain an elective course of study? Is civic virtue something we can leave to other institutions -- families, churches, political parties and television networks -- to teach and encourage? This morning, I think not.

Families, churches, service clubs, the other institutions of civil society, just more hegemonic institutions to deconstruct. May you be damned.  That goes for you, too, Shenandoah University president Tracy Fitzsimmons.

We faculty members and administrators in higher education all have a role in helping our students be critical-thinking activists for democracy. We must ensure that our students hear many different voices on any given topic, and that opportunities for deep dialogue happen not just in the classrooms and residence halls but also in cafeterias, commuter lounges, fraternities and sororities, and online.

We should ensure that students' curricular and co-curricular experiences connect them with the real world -- one in which there is a multiplicity of political voices and preferences. Our students need to know how to participate in society, how to listen and how to present their own ideas when they encounter lots of disagreement. Groupthink does not prepare anyone well for life outside our campuses and classrooms. As faculty and administrators, we should remember that nearly all foundational and disciplinary skills and knowledge that students develop in college can play a key role in supporting democracy -- or in tearing it down.

Finally, we should abandon any pretense that all ideas are equal. They are not. We should demand that ideas are articulated and defended in meaningful ways that are grounded in science, data, knowledge of history and a commitment to bettering humanity.

I doubt that she is calling for a close look at how critical theory has crowded out serious inquiry, and that "commitment to bettering humanity" is more question-begging.  Her consolation is that she's not the most foolish college president weighing in.

Ronald Mason Jr., president of the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C.: “The easy response is that Trump and his enablers played with fire and the Capitol got burned. On a deeper level, poor and working-class white people are pawns in the Trump movement to perpetuate the system of White supremacy in America. It is a system that concentrates wealth in the hands of a privileged few and oppresses people, especially Black people, in order to do so. As a nation, we cannot begin to heal until we admit that we have a problem, and our problem is the system of White supremacy.”

Not much room to evaluate the data or weigh contending understandings of history, is there?

I'm crankier than usual today as Richard Vedder's dissenting "Higher Education Needs to Share the Blame for National Disunity" was removed from Forbes's site.  The editors of Minding the Campus noted,

The National Association of Scholars, the publisher of Minding the Campus, fears that increasing numbers of articles by scholarly public intellectuals will be censored or withdrawn from publication by journals in the future. We extend an immediate and open invitation to all scholarly public intellectuals to republish censored or withdrawn works with us. We have our own editorial standards of course—we will not publish something that does not meet our standards.

What did Professor Vedder write that was so controversial? Was it

Why cannot Americans of different viewpoints, ethnic heritages, and the like get along with one another in a civil way?

How did it all come about? I believe that the universities are complicit, along with a broken system of “lower education,” in allowing this to happen. Universities have been sometimes enthusiastic accomplices in bringing about the fraying of the American fabric.

Tear apart the American fabric in the name of diversity. Deconstruct that.

Might it have been

Much recent anger culminating in the awful behavior exhibited at the U.S. Capitol arises from a feeling by many mostly modestly educated Americans that they are being looked down upon by college-educated cultural elites. While the outward face on the current dominant zeitgeist are personalities in the media, politics, and popular entertainment, they are aided and abetted by universities that arrogantly believe they are the fount of all that is wise and good—and demand high remuneration for their academic toils.

Yes, and as those Inside Higher Ed columns demonstrate, anybody who is at odds with that zeitgeist is somebody to be dialogued into submission.

Our universities are being run by terminally stupid people.  Their own words convict them.