IS IT TOO LATE FOR HIGHER EDUCATION TO REDISCOVER ITS PURPOSE?

Matt "Dean Dad" Reed builds a column off a conversation with a reader he met at his older kid's graduation.

I don’t see this blog as primarily political, and I certainly don’t offer electoral endorsements or anything of the kind, but if you read between the lines long enough, you can get a general sense of my perspective. That said, I’m increasingly concerned about the severity of political polarization in the U.S., and the degree to which people seem to retreat to information sources that align with their priors. With mutually exclusive narratives getting reinforced daily, it’s easy for people to talk past each other, or to assume that the “other” side is simply irredeemable and not worth engaging.

As far as I know, community colleges don't require diversity statements the way the personnel committees at the universities with a U. S. News problem do, there's not even a diversity tab at Brookdale's web site the way Northern Illinois rolls.  There's enough epistemic closure in higher education that the sin of reinforcing narratives isn't redeemed in freshman orientation, the general education classes, or the dorm bull sessions.

At the risk of seeming old-fashioned, I like the idea of assuming that it’s worthwhile to engage with people who aren’t starting from the same place. Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom—although my readers are both wise and worldly—and some epistemological humility is in order. It’s out of fashion right now, but all the more important for that.

That doesn’t mean defaulting to the assumption that the truth is always in the middle. It isn’t. (Is the world round or flat? Splitting the difference and calling it cylindrical isn’t helpful.) But it does mean taking the time to spell out the why behind arguments, and assuming that one’s own view of a given issue might be partial at best.

I'm a few years older than Dean Dad, and if he wants to apply for a Curmudgeon Card, I can countersign the application.  Since he's still in the daily grind, I recommend he deliver some curmudgeonly charm to his colleagues writing for that house organ for all wokeness all the time.

The political theorist Wendy Brown, of whom I’m a fan, has a terrific piece in The Chronicle this week encapsulating her latest book. Both the article and the book are worth reading slowly, but for present purposes, I’ll highlight her suggestion that the value of academic inquiry, as opposed to political activism, lies in developing deeper understandings of the contexts in which clusters of ideas hang together. Absent context, positions just become rhetorical battering rams or empty affirmations of belonging. Among other things, that suggests a need to protect the spaces of academic inquiry from being reduced to agents of whichever political party is in power at the time. Politics may be a team sport in certain ways, but inquiry shouldn’t be.

Fine. Send Neal Hutchens and Frank Fernandez the memo.  They start in a good place.

Events in the Sunshine State also reflect an ongoing legal debate over the extent that First Amendment rights apply to public college and university professors in carrying out their teaching, research and service duties.

We contend that the First Amendment should protect professors in public higher education from laws like the Stop WOKE Act, as Florida’s version of anti-CRT legislation is commonly called. Specifically, we argue (in the Journal of College and University Law and Penn State Law Review) that courts should look to the academic freedom policies adopted by public colleges and universities, including those in Florida, in defining the First Amendment rights of faculty in carrying out their professional duties.

I concur. "Congress shall make no Law" applies to state legislatures acting as agents of Congress.  We are where we are, dear reader, because curriculum committees and student affairs types that often don't hold tenure track slots  too often err on the side of academic activism that they call academic inquiry.  Regular readers have heard that rant from me, over and over.

Messrs. Hutchen and Fernandez, however, elide a fundamental point.  "Namely, public higher education institutions should not be able to tout broad commitments to academic freedom in their official policies and mission statements and then, in practice, seek to deny professors academic freedom, including in court proceedings, based on the whims of politicians or other officials."  Shall we expand "other officials" to include deanlets in student affairs or the coordinators of the bias response team?

A state’s Department of Motor Vehicles does not depend on academic freedom protections for the agency to function. But the success of a public college or university is premised on professors serving as independent voices and actors as opposed to institutional mouthpieces. Unlike other state employees, public college and university faculty are hired to function as individual and independent voices in teaching, research and institutional service.

It came to this, dear reader, when the grievance studies types went beyond giving bullpuckey a bad name in their own disciplines, and injected that bullpuckey into student orientation, mathematics and the laboratory sciences, and the colleges of education, who turn out teachers capable of provoking parents while failing to teach children.

Does it come as a surprise that a Glenn Youngkin or Ron DeSantis emerges as a corrective?