LET PROFESSORS BRACE THEMSELVES TO THEIR DUTIES.

Registration week and move-in day approach, and Minding the Campus contributor Samuel J. Abrams reminds his colleagues it is time to make the students uncomfortable with their prejudices.

With colleges and universities reopening in a few short weeks, I want to remind fellow faculty that educating students is one of the most important tasks they are charged with performing. For faculty to provide a responsible college education today, we professors must help our students learn how to find and then embrace the truth even when that runs against biases, priors, and prejudices. Sadly, this task is easier said than done.

Finding truth in higher education is a challenge. As former American Association of University Professors President Cary Nelson noted, “Some academic disciplines are not devoted to the search for the truth. They don’t share that basic principle. They are largely devoted to the imposition of unified political belief.” Beyond academic departments no longer being committed to the truth and corrupted by a leftist and anti-Western ideological ethos, true liberal professors must work to break a real issue affecting so many students and their thinking: the availability heuristic.

The fault for that availability heuristic rests with the faculty.  "Yes, although for many years, professors understood the social contract obligated them to teach the controversies, to be careful about interjecting their own biases into class, to respect the discipline's discourse practices in writing up their thoughts. Thus, for example, could Hayek and Keynes work together to edit Economica."  I had already taken my pension, and therefore could bring the fire.  "Provide a rigorous curriculum, turf out the -studies departments and the lackeys in student affairs and housing, and perhaps the rest will take care of itself.  Or if not, well, I've offered lots of suggestions over the years about how next to proceed."

Professor Abrams offers the proper approach.

The antidote to the availability heuristic is a robust education that presents real viewpoint diversity, responsible teaching of history, and an offering of tools to find the truth. Of course, this may be too much to expect of professors who see their roles as one to be used to advance potent leftist influence and anti-Western sentiment.

Much of his essay calls attention to how what I call the Intersectionality Catechism has reinforced that availability heuristic to the exclusion of learning.

[T]he true believers, who already have read and accepted whatever the class analogues to John 3:16 and Genesis 1 and the like, will get frustrated with the skeptics, and hope that the high priestess will hector and deplorable-shame or otherwise exercise authority, rather than be open to dissenting views, and familiar enough with the controversies so as to be able to produce genuine critical thinking.  That's hard work.  "It's apparently easier to compare the perceived weight of vectors of oppression and throw around accusations of insensitivity or privilege, than it is to quantify them, or demonstrate the existence of intersections, or to characterize equations of motion and basins of attraction."  Confirmation, dear reader, is as close as that abstract.  "Resistance" is a term of art borrowed from psychiatry, referring to the unwillingness of a patient to consider that his troubles are first his responsibility in some way.  It's a bad practitioner, though, who will condemn the patient in such terms.  College students in victim studies courses, though, are apparently as not-yet communicants in catechism, more to be threatened with eternal damnation than won over by logic and content.

The "availability heuristic," frequently a disguised ad popularum fallacy, turns what should be skeptical and serious thinking into get-along-go-along more suitable to the fraternity rush.  "Regrettably, this mental shortcut is poisoning students’ ability to develop strong critical thinking skills."

It is to us, the sentient, to call attention, and to point out the academy's failings.

Yes, if your experts suck, they ought be figures of fun.  And when competence is another social construction, and the intellectual stars have had sixty years or so to contend that constructions are arbitrary, does it come as any surprise that competence gets deconstructed?  "In practice, though, scholarly inquiry builds on previous inquiry, and there is at any time a box to be respected rather than mindlessly thought outside of.

Develop the ability, in a generation of collegians, to ask the right questions, and the marginalization of the poseurs in the academy and elsewhere in public life will take care of itself.